Psyche, Science, and Society

Jason Isbell/Drive-By Truckers: Dress Blues

[H/t CounterPunch.]

Add comment February 27th, 2008

Fort Hood soldiers protest the war

Those of us who lived through and participated in the 1960’s and early ’70’s antiwar movement know that one of the most important aspects of those movements was the growth of the antiwar movement among active duty GIs. Most demonstrations were led by active duty soldiers, every base had its antiwar coffee house and newspaper. “Fuck the Army!” was all over the place. And discipline fell to the point where the brass knew that it was get out or get out of the way.

A friend stationed in Nam aroung 1971 described being assigned to pick up litter on the base. As he’s walking around, he smokd and three down a cigarette butt. His ergeant yelled “Pick that up!” As he tells it, he just looked at the Srage and said “F***You!” the Sergeant glowered back in rage, but kept his mouth shut, knowing that to say anything, much less discipline the soldier for insubordination, was to risk danger. an army in that shape cannot be kept in an unpopular war indefinitely.

While nowhere to that degree, there are indications that a movement of active duty soldiers is growing. A TV station in Austin Texas reports on the growth of Iraq Veterans Against the War on the base. As it quotes soldiers on base:

“The honest truth is that if the American people knew what was going on over there everyday, they would be raising their voices too. They would be saying, ‘Hey, bring those guys home,” Sgt. Selena Coppa said.

Coppa blames lawmakers in Washington for filtering the facts on the war in Iraq. She said there’s no real end in sight.

“There is a cost to this war. This war is being paid in American blood, in my soldier’s blood. And that is not okay,” Coppa said.

“We lost really good friends, really good leaders who died in Iraq. From my perspective, it didn’t make any sense, we didn’t ccomplish anything, and I talked to a lot of other soldiers who feel the same way,” Fort Hood soldier Casey Porter said.

Ronn Cantu is between Iraq deployments. He feel a need to use the opportunity to speak out:

“I honestly thought I might not live through my second tour, so I
thought, you know if I’m going to die anyway, I need to say the
things I need to say,” Cantu said.

Watch the story:

IVAW Fort Hood posts a banner — “IVAW is pro-soldier, but antiwar.”:

IVAW can be reached at ivaw.org

Add comment February 22nd, 2008

US Iraq Rules of Engagement leaked; Raises question about Rumsfeld authorizing war crimes

Wikileaks has obtained the long kept secret Rules of Engagement (ROE) for U.S. troops in Iraq. This document sets out the rules guiding authorized U.S. troop actions in that occupation. While the Wikileaks document dates from 2005, as these ROEs generally change slowly the rules for today are likely similar, though we can’t be sure, of course, to what extent more recent ROE’s differ.

Among several interesting nuggets in the ROE, it provides indications that U.S. attacks likely to result in civilian deaths required authorization at the top of the Pentagon, by the SECDEF (Secretary of Defense). Thus, the ROE states repeatedly; “If the target is in a HIGH CD [collateral damage] area, SECDEF approval is required.” And what is the definition of a High Collateral Damage area? The ROE contains a set of explicit definitions of its terms. There we find High Collateral Damage Targets defined as:

“Those targets that, if struck, have a ten percent probability of causing collateral damage through blast debris and fragmentation and are estimated to result in significant collateral effects on noncombatant persons and structures, including: (A) Non-combatant casualties estimated at 30 or greater; (B) Significant effects on Category I No Strike protected sites in accordance with Ref D; (C) In the case of dual-use facilities, effects that significantly impact the non-combatant population, including significant effects on the environment/facilities/infrastructure not related to an adversary’s war making ability; or (D) Targets in close proximity to known human shields.”

Thus, all attacks, except those in self-defense or active pursuit, with a reasonable possibility of harming 30 or more civilians needed approval from Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. Presumably such approval would need to be in writing. The ROE thus suggest that there may exist an extensive documentary record of requests, and possibly Rumsfeld’s approval or rejection, for attacks with the potential for resulting in significant civilian casualties. Congress should demand access to these documents to determine the extent to which attacks resulting in civilian casualties were authorized, potentially providing insight into who was responsible for possible war crimes committed in the course of the occupation.

While much of the rest of the ROE appears rather unsurprising, there are a couple of other interesting aspects to the document. One is that the main “hostile forces,” from the U.S. perspective are the Baath remnants, such as the Special Republican Guard and the Baath Party Militia. There is no mention of Iraqi al-Qaida or its predecessors. These predecessors, led by al-Zarqawi, had identified with and pledged allegiance to al-Qaida as early as October, 2004, yet they receive no mention in the ROE. The ROE rather refers to Baath forces that “have transitioned from overt conventional resistance to insurgent methods of resistance.”

While the Sunni al-Qaida predecessors do not make the list of hostile forces, the Shia-based Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr does make the list of “Declared Hostile Forces,” However, as of the ROE’s writing, this status was “suspended and such individuals will not be engaged except in self-defense.”

Another interesting feature of the ROE is a complete ignoring of the language barriers separating U.S. troops from the Iraqi populace. Thus, in a section on graduated force, the first stage is “shout verbal warnings to halt.” There is not even a mention of the fact that most Iraqis cannot understand warnings shouted in English. In general, the ROE is notable for lacking any recognition that, in an “insurgency,” there are at best blurry boundaries between combatants and noncombatants. Thus, there is no emphasis of the need to take extraordinary measures to protect the civilian population. Rather, it provides a rationale for virtually any attacks:

“US Forces may always use force, up to and including deadly force, to neutralize and/or detain individuals who commit hostile acts or exhibit hostile intent against US Forces or Coalition Forces.”

As we have seen repeatedly, from the numerous roadblock killings of civilians to the Haditha massacre, this ROE authorization to use force can be used to provide cover for virtually any civilian killings. The ROE suggests that preventing such deaths was low on the priority list of those officials writing the rules of engagement for the occupation. Even so, a military study found that less than half of US occupation soldiers would report a unit member for violating an ROE. Thus, even the limited protections provided civilians in the ROE were often not present on the ground.

Add comment February 4th, 2008

Blast trauma may act at a distance

The new Science contains an important article on current thinking on traumatic brain injury (TBI) from bomb blasts:

Shell Shock Revisited: Solving the Puzzle of Blast Trauma

Even at a distance, explosions may cause lasting damage to the brain. Such findings could have big implications for arming and compensating troops

by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

Working at the Military Hospital in Belgrade during the brutal Balkan war of the 1990s, neurologist Ibolja Cernak encountered a medical enigma. She saw soldier after soldier with memory deficits, dizziness, speech problems, and difficulties with decision-making–but no obvious injury. Cernak recalls one 19-year-old who went to a grocery store and began to weep after he couldn’t remember how to get back home. When his mother brought him to the hospital a few days later, Cernak learned what later emerged as a common element in all these cases: The soldier had survived an explosion on the battlefield.

The strange thing was that most of these patients had not suffered a direct injury to the head. And yet, in computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging scans, Cernak saw signs of internal damage. In some cases, the brain’s ventricles–channels that carry cerebrospinal fluid– had become enlarged; and in some, there was evidence of minor bleeding.

But when Cernak dug into the medical literature for an explanation, she came up empty. According to the available research, shock waves from an explosion injure mainly air-filled organs such as the lung and the bowel, not the brain.

With a small band of collaborators in Belgrade, China, and Sweden, Cernak undertook animal studies that eventually confirmed that blast waves can cause neuronal damage. The work drew little attention until 2 years ago when hundreds of U.S. and British soldiers began returning from Iraq with symptoms similar to those of Cernak’s patients. As roadside explosions became more common, military doctors suspected that these symptoms were the likely result of mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) sustained in blasts. Seeing her observations borne out was as if “a myth had become reality,” says Cernak, who is now a researcher at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

How blasts affect the brain has since become an urgent question in military medicine. Last summer, the U.S. Congress gave $150 million to the Department of Defense (DOD) for the first year of research on TBI– both severe injuries that damage the skull and milder ones suspected of causing neurological deficits. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has already launched a $9 million research program aimed specifically at understanding trauma caused by shock waves, heat, and electromagnetic radiation emanating from blasts. Another $14 million a year is going to the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center (DVBIC), a DOD-funded agency headquartered in Washington, D.C., for research and outreach on TBI.

This flurry of interest has focused a spotlight on Cernak’s research. There is growing consensus that blasts can produce subtle injuries in the brain as suggested by Cernak several years ago. In fact, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) proposed a new rule this month acknowledging blast-related TBI as a special neurological condition whose symptoms may have gone undetected in the past. The proposed rule, published in the Federal Register on 3 January, would allow for greater disability compensation to victims than is granted currently.

But many researchers are skeptical of Cernak’s ideas about how these injuries might occur. Cernak postulates that blast waves ripple through the victim’s torso up into the brain through the major blood vessels, leading to neurological effects that can be slow to appear. Although she has evidence from animal experiments to back up that hypothesis, she admits that more research is needed. If the mechanism is confirmed by future studies, Cernak says, it would mean that helmets do not protect the brain against blast injury.

Besides raising questions about the protection of troops currently in combat, Cernak’s suggestion that simply being exposed to an explosion might lead to long-lasting brain damage has opened a Pandora’s box, particularly for veterans. It implies that some could be suffering from neurological deficits that went undiagnosed or were mistakenly attributed to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Indeed, since the government began putting out information about blast-related TBI, veterans have been trickling in to seek treatment for mental problems that some have lived with for decades. “It may well be that blast injuries follow the pattern of Agent Orange and Gulf War syndrome,” says former VA psychiatrist David Trudeau, referring to ill-defined health problems that have lingered for years after battle.

Hidden trauma

If Cernak had been a doctor during World War I, she says, she might well have recognized mild TBI among the thousands of soldiers who suffered from what was simply called “shell shock.” But during World War I, many doctors and military commanders viewed shell shock as a transient psychological phenomenon that affected soldiers who, in their opinion, were mentally weak.

Cernak discovered something very different: that soldiers’ mental problems seemed to be driven by enduring physical changes in the brain. To test her hypothesis, she conducted a study of 1300 patients who had suffered penetrating wounds to the lower body but not the head. More than half had suffered injuries in a blast; the rest had been wounded by projectiles. Many of the blast victims complained of symptoms such as insomnia, vertigo, and memory deficits, and more than 36% in this group showed irregular patterns of electrical activity in the brain–as measured by electroencephalograms taken within 3 days of the injury– compared to only 12% in the other group. A year later, 30% of blast- injured patients still showed abnormal brain activity compared to 4% of the rest. Cernak says the findings, published in the Journal of Trauma in 1999, suggested that the mental problems of blast victims had a biological basis.

Her study wasn’t the first to make that point. A year earlier, VA researchers had found that among veterans with PTSD, individuals with a history of blast exposure were much more likely than others to have abnormal brain activity as well as cognitive and behavioral problems.

“Our evidence pointed to the possibility that blast injury was a long- lasting injury in combat veterans,” says Trudeau, who retired in 2000. He says he was disappointed by the lack of follow-up to the study, published in the August 1998 Journal of Neuropsychiatry. “The reception we got was pretty lukewarm,” he says.

For decades, Army researchers had been studying the effects of blast waves but with a different focus. They concentrated on how to protect the lungs and bowel because the pressure from an explosion is most likely to shear at the interface of these tissues, where densities differ. DOD was so confident that advanced body armor was protecting troops against lung and bowel injuries that it closed down this research program in 2003. “We thought, why spend more money on this when we’ve fixed the problem?” says Geoffrey Ling, a neurologist and a program manager at DARPA.

Then the bad news arrived. As blast survivors from Iraq were air-lifted to hospitals, U.S. Army doctors, including Ling, who was deployed in Iraq in late 2004, began to see patients whose brains had swelled markedly within hours of being close to a blast. Some had clear head injuries but many did not. Even in cases involving visible wounds, the extent of swelling was often much greater than expected, leading neurosurgeons to wonder whether blast waves had played a role in addition to penetrating shrapnel. Ling says the patterns of vascular enlargement seen across a range of patients showed a continuum of brain injury, suggesting that there could be milder versions that were less obvious.

That suspicion has grown stronger with hundreds of soldiers returning from the war zone complaining of a common cluster of cognitive and behavioral problems. Army doctors say they have encountered many patients who are unable to perform simple addition and subtraction, read more than one sentence at a stretch, or recall simple things like what they had for lunch. “The majority are individuals who lost consciousness or were dazed after a blast but did not sustain overt head injuries,” says Ronald Riechers, a neurologist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. “Within a short time frame, they develop headaches and notice that their reaction time and concentration are not the same as before.” Based on these evaluations, DVBIC estimates that 10% to 20% of all soldiers on duty in Iraq and Afghanistan have suffered some type of TBI.

Ling says the TBI numbers prompted DOD to restart its research on blast injury, this time with a focus on the brain. DARPA is funding two main projects as part of the first basic science effort on the topic. One will study the mechanical and cellular effects of blast waves in an animal model. Another will look at the consequences of repeated exposures to low-intensity explosions among military breachers, whose job is to blast holes into buildings using shoulder-launched weapons. “Once you know for certain what in a blast is really hurting the brain and how, you can use that to develop therapies and prevention strategies,” says Ling.

A tsunami in the brain

Although it is becoming accepted that blast waves can cause TBI, Cernak’s theory about how the damage occurs is controversial, and it has implications for how best to protect troops. She hypothesizes that when blast waves strike the body, they transfer kinetic energy and cause pressure in the main blood vessels to oscillate rapidly. A pulse travels up through the neck into the brain, damaging axonal fibers and neurons in the hippocampus, brainstem, and other structures close to cerebral vessels. The shock can also injure cells farther out in the cortical regions.

That mechanism is entirely different from the more widely studied effects of acceleration or deceleration in a car crash. Researchers know that a crash impact can shake the brain so violently that axonal fibers are torn. Some say victims of explosions could be experiencing a similar whiplashing, in contrast to Cernak’s view–which would mean that helmets designed to dampen that effect could help. “I am very skeptical that kinetic energy could be transferred through the vascular system,” says J. Clay Goodman, a neuropathologist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. “It is much more reasonable to consider the blast effects directly on the cranial vault and the brain.”

Cernak says her findings show the vascular route to be more plausible. In experiments that exposed rats and rabbits to a simulated blast wave in a shock tube–a cylinder through which an air pulse is transmitted at high velocity–Cernak and her colleagues found that immobilizing the animal’s head with steel plates to prevent whiplash effects did not protect against hippocampal cell damage, as they reported in the Journal of Trauma in 2001. Cernak says the vascular-transmission theory could explain the unique combination of symptoms in blast-induced TBI, as well as why neurological symptoms are seen in soldiers wearing helmets. For example, memory deficits hint at damage to the hippocampus, whereas problems in orientation reflect injuries to the cerebellum. “What’s happening in blast injury is that these inner structures are being affected,” Cernak says, in contrast to TBIs in traffic accidents and contact sports, where the cortex bears most of the brunt.

Cernak presented unpublished results last month at the Blast Injury Conference in Tampa, Florida, showing that exposure to blast waves can trigger neurodegeneration in rat brains, fragmenting the walls of neurons in the hippocampus and other regions. Similar findings have been published by Annette Saljo, a researcher at the University of Goteborg in Sweden and a collaborator of Cernak’s. Saljo and her colleagues reported in the Journal of Neurotrauma in August 2000 that rats exposed to blasts showed a buildup of neurofilament proteins in the cortex and the hippocampus during the week following the injury. This suggests that the damage can worsen over time, like a “slow cooking under the surface,” says Cernak: “One could think of it as a horribly accelerated aging of the brain.”

If blast waves indeed cause injury by vascular transmission, new types of body armor may be needed. “We would need to develop materials that completely absorb or reflect the full range of blast-wave frequencies generated by an explosion,” says Cernak, adding that current body armor only shields against some of a blast’s kinetic energy.

Cernak has done pioneering work, says John Povlishock, a neuroanatomist at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, adding that she may be right that a “rapid rise and fall in venous pressure” is what stamps the blast’s signature on the brain. But more studies are needed to validate her ideas and translate the animal results into humans: “This is a topic with great economic, military, and social implications,” he says, “and as of now, the literature is extremely limited.”

Needed: A gold standard

As blast casualties from Iraq have mounted, the U.S. military has stepped up efforts to detect TBI among troops. In July 2006, the Army Surgeon General asked all unit commanders in Iraq to request TBI screening for soldiers displaying “poor marksmanship, delayed reaction times, decreased ability to concentrate, and inappropriate behavior.”
Troops who have been in a blast are evaluated by field medics using a short questionnaire that asks, among other things, if the person lost consciousness and had trouble remembering things from just before the explosion. Depending on the severity of the symptoms, they are asked to take a day off or see a neuropsychologist.

Some veterans groups believe a more aggressive screening policy is needed, especially because the symptoms of blast injury might not show up until later and because subtle injuries might not show up in standard brain scans. The ideal option, some say, would be to use a biomarker:

“We’d like to be able to do a blood test to determine the injury,” says Colonel Robert Labutta, a neurologist at the health affairs office at DOD. But until the science of blast injury is established, officials say, it does not make sense to bring home every soldier who has been in the vicinity of an explosion.

The costs of treating TBI victims from Iraq and Afghanistan could be astronomical. At last count, nearly 25,000 soldiers had been diagnosed with TBI. One estimate of the financial burden, calculated by Harvard researchers, puts the number at $14 billion over the next 20 years. But officials seem determined not to miss any cases among troops coming
home: In April, VA mandated TBI screening for all Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who come to VA hospitals for any services, even if it’s a dental exam.

The spotlight on mild TBI has drawn the attention of older combat veterans who were exposed to blasts but were never treated for neurological symptoms. Many were diagnosed with PTSD; some of the symptoms–such as depression, irritability, and attention deficit– overlap with those of mild TBI. These cases, some reaching back to the Vietnam War, could have significant legal and financial implications, says Edward Kim, a psychiatrist with Bristol-Myers Squibb in Plainsboro, New Jersey, and author of a recent report from the American Neuropsychiatric Association on the mental health effects of TBI. “I question whether DOD and the VA really want to open this can of worms,”
he says. For example, a veteran with Alzheimer’s disease could make a claim pointing to research showing that TBI increases the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

Cernak says she has been receiving e-mails and phone calls from veterans thanking her for her research and seeking more information. Last month, she got a call from a 47-year-old woman who had served in the first Gulf War. The woman had been a teacher before she went to the combat zone, where she was exposed to repeated blasts. After she returned home, she had to stop teaching because she could not remember any facts. The story reminded Cernak why she had begun studying this obscure field 2 decades ago. “Soldiers anywhere are one of the most vulnerable populations in the world,” she says. “It is a moral obligation to help them.”

2 comments January 25th, 2008

Liptak reviews Taxi to the Dark Side

Adam Liptak, in the New York Times, reviews Alex Gibney’s new documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side:

The Power of Authority: A Dark Tale

by Adam Liptak

FRANK GIBNEY was old and sick and a little more than a month away from dying. But he was filled with righteous anger, and he had some things to say. He told his son, the documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney, to unplug a noisy oxygen machine and to grab a video camera.

The older Mr. Gibney, a journalist and scholar who died in April, had served as a naval interrogator in World War II. In a moving statement that serves as a sort of coda to “Taxi to the Dark Side,” a new documentary about the Bush administration’s interrogation policies in the post-9/11 world, he said it had never occurred to him to use brutal techniques on the Japanese prisoners in his custody.

“We had the sense that we were on the side of the good guys,” Frank Gibney said, seething. “People would get decent treatment. And there was the rule of law.”

There would seem to be an enormous distance between the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, where the central events in “Taxi to the Dark Side” take place, and Enron’s headquarters in Houston, where the machinations of white-collar criminals brought down the giant energy company and became the backdrop for Mr. Gibney’s entertaining 2005 documentary, “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.” But Mr. Gibney said the two projects have common themes.

“The subject of corruption unites my films,” he said. “‘Enron’ was about economic corruption, and ‘Taxi’ is about the corruption of the rule of law.”

In person Mr. Gibney, 54, is simultaneously casual and intense. He wears jeans, cool glasses and a goatee, and he juggles several projects at a time from an office overlooking the rail yards on the west side of Manhattan. On the wall is a poster for “The Trials of Henry Kissinger,” a 2002 documentary that he wrote. He is finishing up a documentary on the writer Hunter S. Thompson and is working on another about the lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

He said he has returned repeatedly to one concern: the power of authority to warp morality. At bottom, Mr. Gibney said, people do what they are told. “Everything in life,” he said, “goes back to the Milgram experiment.”

In the early 1960s Dr. Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale, showed that many people were willing to deliver what they understood to be painful electric shocks to other human beings simply because they were told by a scientist that it was necessary.

At Enron as at Bagram, Mr. Gibney said, “a process had occurred, like Milgram, where they had crossed little personal lines, bit by bit.”

“Until,” he added, “they looked back and realized they were way over the line.”

Mr. Gibney persuaded a half-dozen guards and interrogators to appear in his documentary. They are candid, reflective, troubled and sometimes broken, and their testimony is the beating heart of the film.

Many of the traders at Enron were decent men too, Mr. Gibney said.

“One of the most interesting things for me was to discover that most of these guys, off the job, were really nice guys,” Mr. Gibney said. “I mean, pillars of their community. They gave to charity, set up orphanages. But on the job they were killers.”

“Taxi to the Dark Side” is an artful film, starting with cinematic vistas in Afghanistan and presenting soldiers in tight shots against dark backgrounds while former officials and journalists talk in grand settings filled with light.

Sometimes his filmmaking techniques stray from the journalistic straight-and-narrow. In an otherwise positive review of the Enron documentary, for instance, David Ansen of Newsweek objected to an impressionistic recreation of an executive’s suicide and whispering voices on the soundtrack, calling them “cheesy fictional techniques.”

Mr. Gibney said he is often asked why he does not give it to audiences straight.

His answer: “It’s because I didn’t want to give it to you straight. I wanted to have some fun.”

“Werner Herzog calls it the difference between an accountant’s truth and ecstatic truth,” Mr. Gibney continued. “It’s the idea that sometimes you can take a roundabout way to truth that’s more effective.”

In the new film he uses a re-creation to depict the interrogation of Mohamed al-Kahtani, a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

“It took us a long time to get that sequence right, where we juxtaposed words, music, re-creations and then also testimony in some of the Senate hearings,” Mr. Gibney said. By mixing these, “you get some sense of the absurdity, of how the interrogators themselves were becoming unhinged,” he said. “By visualizing it you feel its power in a way you don’t if you just have someone describe it.”

Mr. Gibney became fascinated by film at Yale in the 1970s, haunting the film societies that showed classics for a dollar, and then attended film school at the University of California, Los Angeles. “My favorite filmmakers, generally speaking, are not documentary filmmakers,” he said. One is Luis Buñuel, and he keeps a framed letter from Mr. Buñuel on a wall of his office. “The way he shoots everything is so matter of fact,” Mr. Gibney said. “It’s kind of documentary. But he’s got such a wicked sense of humor. He’s always bringing something to the party, but in ways that you don’t really realize.”

Mr. Gibney worked for years on television series, including “The Fifties” and “The Blues,” bringing lessons from those sprawling projects to his feature films.

“You have to have characters that breathe inside a narrative,” he said, naming one lesson. “That’s what makes it work, and unless that happens none of the big ideas really matter.”

There has been no shortage of films about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and about the Bush administration’s approach to national security and civil liberties. The fictional ones — like “Lions for Lambs,” “Rendition,” “Redacted” and “In the Valley of Elah” — have landed at the box office with a thud. But there seems to be an appetite for accessible and sometimes argumentative documentaries about American power and values presented with nerve and verve, even from the earliest days of the war in Iraq, like “Gunner Palace.”

“Taxi to the Dark Side,” which opens in New York and Los Angeles on Jan. 18, is a sort of companion piece to “No End in Sight,” Charles Ferguson’s recent documentary about the occupation of Iraq. (Mr. Gibney was an executive producer.) The next month, Errol Morris’s documentary about the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, “S.O.P.: Standard Operating Procedure,” will have its premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival.

The narrative thread of “Taxi to the Dark Side” recounts the story of an Afghan taxi driver known only as Dilawar, who was taken to Bagram and beaten to death. His family, interviewed in the film, described Dilawar as simple and shy, and he left behind a wife and a 2-year-old daughter.

His legs, a coroner’s report found, had been struck over and over again until they “had basically been pulpified.” “Even if he had survived,” an Army report found, “both legs would have had to be amputated.”

Mr. Dilawar’s story was first reported in The New York Times and was the subject of a series of investigative reports in the paper. Two reporters for The Times, Carlotta Gall and Tim Golden, appear in the documentary.

In 2005 a military jury convicted Willie V. Brand, who had been a guard at Bagram, of assault, maltreatment and maiming. But his only punishment was a reduction in rank. He received an honorable discharge.

Mr. Brand and the other guards and interrogators who appear in “Taxi to the Dark Side” make the case that they were untrained, unmoored from morality and only did what they thought their commanders wanted.

A week after the Sept. 11 attacks, for instance, Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on “Meet the Press” and sketched out his thinking.

“We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will,” he said, in a clip Mr. Gibney includes in his film. “We’ve got to spend time in the shadows of the intelligence world.”

Statements like those generated the abuses at Bagram and Abu Ghraib, Mr. Gibney maintains. “It’s the opposite of the bad apple theory,” he said. “The bad apple theory is that there are a few bad people who occasionally do bad things, and everything’s fine. Mostly they’re good kids who, like all of us, can over to the dark side if people like Dick Cheney say it’s O.K.”

David B. Rivkin, a lawyer in the administrations of President RonaldReagan and the first President Bush, said the abuses in Afghanistan and Iraq were exceptions and unfortunate byproducts of war. “It’s pretty clear that it’s not policy,” he said, “and it’s pretty clear that these things are prosecuted.”

Mr. Rivkin said the military’s performance by historical standards has been quite good in the recent conflicts. “In all the good wars,” he said, “we have had some pretty bad records.”

That is not how Frank Gibney saw it.

After the Second World War Frank Gibney would occasionally meet the men he had interrogated for dinner or drinks in Tokyo, and his son would sometimes tag along. The soldiers had a respectful rapport, a camaraderie.

“It’s hard to imagine that happening 10 years from now,” Alex Gibney said.

Add comment December 30th, 2007

Fallujah, the Information War, and U.S. Propaganda: The U.S. Army’s Intelligence Analysis of the April 2004 Fallujah Attack

Now receded into distant memory for many, the battle for the Iraqi city of Fallujah, accompanied by the al Sadr uprising in the south, was a decisive turning point in the Iraq occupation. These battles demonstrated to much of the world that the occupation was deeply unpopular among many Iraqis, who were willing and able to fight the occupation to a stalemate. These battles both ended in standoffs, as the U.S. forces felt constrained from unleashing their full military capabilities to crush the resistance. New insights into the thinking of the U.S. military are available from a U.S. army intelligence analysis – by the Army’s National Ground Intelligence Center – of the first Fallujah battle entitled Complex Environments: Battle of Fallujah I, April 2004 that was leaked this week on the Wikileaks web site.

The first battle for Fallujah (the second, in November 2004, resulted in the city’s capture by occupation forces) began when images circulated of four contractors being lynched from a bridge in the city. This new document confirms that the attack on Fallujah was designed to crush a symbol of resistance to the U.S. occupation of Iraq:

“On 31 March 2004, four American Blackwater contractors were killed and images of their bodies being burned and mutilated were broadcast on television around the world. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, CENTCOM Commander GEN Abizaid, and Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) Ambassador Bremer decided a military response was needed immediately. Fallujah had become a symbol of resistance that dominated international headlines.”

Media War

As befits a symbolic battle, the analysis makes clear that the information war was primary. The failure of the Marines’ attack to retake Fallujah was caused, the authors claim, by resistance (”insurgents” in their lingo) forces’ success in getting their message out to the world.

“Insurgents demonstrated a keen understanding of the value of information operations. IO was one of the insurgents’ most effective levers to raise political pressure for a cease-fire. They fed disinformation [sic] to television networks, posted propaganda on the Internet to recruit volunteers and solicit financial donations, and spread rumors through the street.”

The report echo’s the concern of American leaders about the influence of Al Jazeera and other Arab media at conveying the rebel’s side of the story:

“Arab satellite news channels were crucial to building political pressure to halt military operations. For example, CPA documented 34 stories on Al Jazeera that misreported or distorted battlefield events between 6 and 13 April. Between 14 and 20 April, Al Jazeera used the “excessive force” theme 11 times and allowed various anti-Coalition factions to claim that U.S. forces were using cluster bombs against urban areas and kidnapping and torturing Iraqi children. Six negative reports by al-Arabiyah focused almost exclusively on the excessive force theme. Overall, the qualitative content of negative reports increasingly was shrill in tone, and both TV stations appeared willing to take even the most baseless claims as fact.

“During the first week of April, insurgents invited a reporter from Al Jazeera, Ahmed Mansour, and his film crew into Fallujah where they filmed scenes of dead babies from the hospital, presumably killed by Coalition air strikes. Comparisons were made to the Palestinian Intifada. Children were shown bespattered with blood; mothers were shown screaming and mourning.”

The report also makes clear that, in the military’s opinion, the Western press is part of the U.S.’s propaganda operation. This process was facilitated by the embedding of Western reporters in U.S. military units. The U.S. failure in this battle was largely attributable, the authors claim, to the absence of embedded reporters to convey the military’s story.

“The absence of Western media in Fallujah allowed the insurgents greater control of information coming out of Fallujah. Because Western reporters were at risk of capture and beheading, they stayed out and were forced to pool video shot by Arab cameramen and played on Al Jazeera. This led to further reinforcement of anti-Coalition propaganda. For example, false allegations of up to 600 dead and 1000 wounded civilians could not be countered by Western reporters because they did not have access to the battlefield.

“Western reporters were also not embedded in Marine units fighting in Fallujah. In the absence of countervailing visual evidence presented by military authorities, Al Jazeera shaped the world’s understanding of Fallujah.”

This account, however, is false. There were at least two “Western reporters,” as well as other Western civilians, inside Fallujah giving detailed information on the effects of the fighting on civilians. While briefly detained by rebels, they were quickly released, rather than beheaded. The report ignores these reporters as they were independents, neither embedded with the U.S. military nor bound by the implicit rules of the mainstream media to give special consideration to U.S. military claims and perspectives. Further, the accounts of these reporters and observers contradicted American military claims.

Civilian Casualties

Dahr Jamail, at that time a reporter for the now defunct New Standard, felt obligated to go into the besieged city.

“As I was there, an endless stream of women and children who’d been sniped by the Americans were being raced into the dirty clinic, the cars speeding over the curb out front as their wailing family members carried them in.

“One woman and small child had been shot through the neck — the woman was making breathy gurgling noises as the doctors frantically worked on her amongst her muffled moaning.

“The small child, his eyes glazed and staring into space, continually vomited as the doctors raced to save his life.

“After 30 minutes, it appeared as though neither of them would survive.”

Contrary to the army report’s claim that no cluster bombs were used in the attack, Jamail saw wounds suspiciously like those from that weapon:

“There had been reports of this, as two of the last victims that arrived at the clinic were reported by the locals to have been hit by cluster bombs — they were horribly burned and their bodies shredded.”

Another of these nonexistent Western reporters was Rahul Mahajan, who wrote for various alternative news sites, as well as his Empire Notes blog. He reported from Fallujah on April 11, 2003. Since Mahajan was in the same group with Jamail, it is perhaps not surprising that he also reported extensive civilian casualties:

“During the course of the roughly four hours we were at that small clinic, we saw perhaps a dozen wounded brought in. Among them was a young woman, 18 years old, shot in the head. She was having a seizure and foaming at the mouth when they brought here in; doctors did not expect her to survive the night. Another likely terminal case was a young boy with massive internal bleeding. I also saw a man with extensive burns on his upper body and wounds in his thighs that might have been from a cluster bomb; there was no way to verify in the madhouse scene of wailing relatives, shouts of ‘Allahu Akbar’ (God is great), and anger at the Americans.”

The intelligence report claims that “Red Crescent ambulances transported fighters” yet does not discus how this alleged situation was dealt with by the U.S. troops. Mahajan, like other Westerners in the city, provides elucidation of this gap by reporting that the Americans were firing on ambulances, including ones containing civilians:

“I had heard these claims at third-hand before coming into Fallujah, but was skeptical. It’s very difficult to find the real story here. But this I saw for myself. An ambulance with two neat, precise bullet-holes in the windshield on the driver’s side, pointing down at an angle that indicated they would have hit the driver’s chest (the snipers were on rooftops, and are trained to aim for the chest). Another ambulance again with a single, neat bullet-hole in the windshield. There’s no way this was due to panicked spraying of fire. These were deliberate shots to kill people driving the ambulances.

“The ambulances go around with red, blue, or green lights flashing and sirens blaring; in the pitch-dark of a blacked-out city there is no way they can be missed or mistaken for something else). An ambulance that some of our compatriots were going around in, trading on their whiteness to get the snipers to let them through to pick up the wounded was also shot at while we were there.”

Jo Wilding, a British observer also among the Westerners in Fallujah, was in one of the ambulances fired upon, on a trip to pick up a pregnant woman and transport her to the hospital. She and the ambulance staff hoped that the presence of Westerners would help protect from American attack. They were wrong:

“Azzam is driving, Ahmed in the middle directing him and me by the window, the visible foreigner, the passport. Something scatters across my hand, simultaneous with the crashing of a bullet through the ambulance, some plastic part dislodged, flying through the window.

“We stop, turn off the siren, keep the blue light flashing, wait, eyes on the silhouettes of men in US marine uniforms on the corners of the buildings. Several shots come. We duck, get as low as possible and I can see tiny red lights whipping past the window, past my head. Some, it’s hard to tell, are hitting the ambulance I start singing. What else do you do when someone’s shooting at you? A tyre bursts with an enormous noise and a jerk of the vehicle.

“I’m outraged. We’re trying to get to a woman who’s giving birth without any medical attention, without electricity, in a city under siege, in a clearly marked ambulance, and you’re shooting at us. How dare you?”

Even back in Baghdad, Mahajan and Jamail were the only Western reporters who attended a press conference of the Iraqi Minister of Health, who confirmed that the Americans had fired upon ambulances in Fallujah (and also in Sadr City in Baghdad):

“During the questions, when asked about shooting at ambulances, Abbas confirmed that U.S. forces shot at ambulances, not only in Fallujah and the approaches to Fallujah, but also in Sadr City. He agreed that the acts were criminal and said he has asked the IGC ([Interim] Governing Council) and Bremer [U.S. governor of occupied Iraq] for an explanation.”

While in Fallujah, Jo Wilding also saw civilians fired upon by U.S. troops, illustrating the “Coalition’s concern for collateral damage” that the intelligence analysis refers to:

“There’s a man, face down, in a white dishdasha, a small round red stain on his back. We run to him. Again the flies [h]ave got there first. Dave is at his shoulders, I’m by his knees and as we reach to roll him onto the stretcher Dave’s hand goes through his chest, through the cavity left by the bullet that entered so neatly through his back and blew his heart out.

“There’s no weapon in his hand. Only when we arrive, his sons come out, crying, shouting. He was unarmed, they scream. He was unarmed. He just went out the gate and they shot him. None of them have dared come out since. No one had dared come to get his body, horrified, terrified, forced to violate the traditions of treating the body immediately. They couldn’t have known we were coming so it’s inconceivable tat anyone came out and retrieved a weapon but left the body.

“He was unarmed, 55 years old, shot in the back.”

Also relevant to the issue of “collateral damage” is the way in which the U.S. forces divided civilians into potential “insurgents” – all males considered to be of “military age” – and all others. The others were allowed to leave the city or areas of active combat (”Throughout the fight Coalition forces allowed nonmilitary-age men, women, and children to exit through the cordon”), but males considered to be of fighting age – many tens of thousands in a city of perhaps 250,000 population – were not allowed to leave and were thus subject to being shot, as was the man described above by Wilding, upon the least suspicion. Wilding describes the implementation of this policy as a group of volunteers attempted to evacuate civilians before a planned American attack:

“‘We’re going to be going through soon clearing the houses,’ the senior one says.

“’What does that mean, clearing the houses?’

“’Going into every one searching for weapons.’ He’s checking his watch, can’t tell me what will start when, of course, but there’s going to be air strikes in support. ‘If you’re going to do t[h]is [evacuate] you gotta do it soon….’

“The people seem to pour out of the houses now in the hope we can escort them safely out of the line of fire, kids, women, men, anxiously asking us whether they can all go, or only the women and children. We go to ask. The young marine tells us that men of fighting age can’t leave. What’s fighting age, I want to know. He contemplates. Anything under forty five. No lower limit.”

Any military forcing tens of thousands of mostly noncombatant civilians to stay in a war zone under siege is obviously not putting the reduction of civilian casualties (reduction of “collateral damage”) high on its list of priorities. Not surprisingly, an analysis by Iraq Body Count concluded that almost 600 (”between 572 and 616 of the approximately 800 reported deaths”) civilians were among the dead in Fallujah.

The intelligence report also contains chilling phrases that, while subject to multiple interpretations, suggest both the difficulties of fighting a guerilla resistance in a city and the possibility of horrifying actions. Thus, in describing the structure of homes in Falluja, the report calmly states:

“The houses also are all made of brick with a thick covering of mortar overtop. In almost every house a fragmentation grenade can be used without fragments coming through the walls. Each room can be fragged individually.”

Absences in Report

It is striking that, for all its emphasis on claims that U.S. troops followed the “Laws of War” in the battle, avoiding, they claim, extensive “collateral damage” (i.e., civilian casualties) there is no discussion of any strategies designed to accomplish this in the “complex environment” of a city with tens to hundreds of thousands of residents in place. Of course, the accounts of Jamail, Mahajan, and Wilding suggest that the claim that collateral damage was largely avoided is exaggerated at best.

While providing useful analyses of the nature of the Fallujah fighting, and of the information war, this intelligence report demonstrates yet again the difficulties that U.S. occupation forces, including intelligence analysts, have in coming to terms with the nature of nationalist opposition to occupation. While it contains interesting discussions of the organization of the Fallujah resistance, including their decentralized command and control structures which were hard to destroy, the authors cannot resist repeating the Marine attackers description of the resistance fighters as ” an “evil Rotary club” rather than a military organization.”

The report also illustrates American blinders in analyzing the political context of the Fallujah battle. The report does refer to the growing opposition to the assault among the Iraqi Governing Council, a group of Iraqi officials hand-picked by the United States:

“The Iraqi Governing Council began to unravel. Three members quit and 5 others threatened to quit…. The Sunni politicians considered the operation ‘collective punishment.’”

The intelligence analysis, however, doesn’t mention the extreme unpopularity, at the time of the Fallujah battle, of the occupation among many Iraqis as part of the context that hampered the U.S. in its assault. For example, a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup poll of Iraqis taken in late March and early April 2004 found:

“Only a third of the Iraqi people now believe that the American-led occupation of their country is doing more good than harm, and a solid majority support an immediate military pullout even though they fear that could put them in greater danger…

“Asked whether they view the U.S.-led coalition as ‘liberators’ or ‘occupiers,’ 71% of all respondents say ‘occupiers.’

“That figure reaches 81% if the separatist, pro-U.S. Kurdish minority in northern Iraq is not included….

“53% say they would feel less secure without the coalition in Iraq, but 57% say the foreign troops should leave anyway. Those answers were given before the current showdowns in Fallujah and Najaf between U.S. troops and guerrilla fighters.”

In failing to come to terms with the unpopularity of the occupation, the report continues the American blindness to the difficulties of sustaining an occupation as opposition mounts. The report thus pays insufficient attention to the extent to which the Fallujah population supported the resistance fighters. Perhaps, however, the absence of any discussion of “winning hearts and minds” is an implicit recognition that this was an impossible goal, and one irrelevant to the U.S. desire to crush Fallujah as a symbol of organized opposition to occupation.

In the end, the most surprising aspect of this leaked report is the absence of any information or analysis in the classified document that was not readily available in the public domain. Its failure to deal with the real situation the U.S. faced in Iraq during the Fallujah assault raises the question as to why, even in a classified intelligence analysis, the military, and perhaps the entire U.S. government, did not analyze reality, rather than relay propaganda. Many possible explanations can be contemplated: a fear of the document being leaked, military leaders and even intelligence analysts being infected with the same propaganda being fed to the press and the public, or systems for relaying information that reward those who support the prevailing ideology. Most likely is some combination of these factors. But the result, this report illustrates, is that, as with prewar intelligence, the intelligence during the Iraq occupation has in many cases reinforced existing beliefs rather than provide new insights designed to allow the U.S. forces to adapt to the real conditions they faced.

Preparing for November Attack

The report does provides several glimpses into the tactics used to prepare for the later November 2004 attack in which Fallujah was captured by the Americans at the cost of thousands of damaged buildings, many tens of thousands of refugees, and an unknown number of both rebel and civilian casualties. In preparing for the November attack, U.S. forces had more time for pre-attack “shaping operations”:

“Shaping operations that clear civilians from the battlefield offers [sic] many positive second-order effects. In Fallujah in April 2004, IMEF [I Marine Expeditionary Force] only had a few days to shape the environment before engaging in decisive combat operations. The remaining noncombatants provided cover for insurgents, restrained CJTF-7’s[Coalition Joint Task Force 7] employment of combat power, and provided emotional fodder for Arab media to exploit.”

In preparing for the November attack, the U.S. engaged in months of massive bombing and artillery strikes, perhaps in order to terrorize into leaving many of the population who were not of military age and hence allowed to leave. As the Guardian reported October 31, 2004:

“US warplanes and artillery pounded targets in the city amid prolonged clashes with insurgents. A marine at a nearby US base described the strikes as the heaviest artillery bombardment he had heard in two months. At least a dozen airstrikes hit a southeastern district of the Sunni Muslim city during the afternoon, witnesses said.”

These “shaping operations” largely worked, as Reuters reported on October 26, 2004:

“‘Three-quarters of the people have fled to other towns to avoid the American air strikes, especially the women and children,’ said Abdel Aziz Ibrahim, a teacher.

“Bank employee Mohammed al-Alwani said: ‘Whoever looks around Falluja now can only feel saddness. The damage is so heavy the suburbs look like they were hit by an earthquake.’”

Having failed to destroy Fallujah as a symbol of resistance to occupation in April, the U.S. designed the November attack to accomplish this goal once and for all, as the Christian Science Monitor explained on the eve of the attack:

“‘One thought going around now is: “Why doesn’t Iraq look like [post-World War II] Germany or Japan, which knew they had been defeated?”’ says John Pike, a military analyst who heads Globalsecurity.org in Alexandria, Va. ‘One of the challenges we are facing now is these people don’t know they have been defeated,’ he says. ‘Fallujah will be an opportunity for them to be crushed decisively and for them to taste defeat.’”

Or, as explained by another Western analyst in the same article:

“‘The logic is: You flatten Fallujah, hold up the head of Fallujah, and say “Do our bidding, or you’re next,”‘ says Toby Dodge, an Iraq analyst at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London.”

The U.S. also learned from its perceived failure in the information war during the April attack, which led, in the view of the intelligence report, to calling off the attack before victory. In November they got many reporters, including even Iraqi reporters, to embed with U.S. troops, so that they could act, in the words of the intelligence report, as the propaganda arm of U.S. forces.

The greater success in manipulating the information war in November was offset, however, by the U.S.’s inability to hide from reporters and thus, from the world the country’s descent into full-scale civil war. It remains to be seen if the relative lull in civil war currently occurring as the various factions reevaluate the situation will allow the U.S. greater success in the information war, if not in the real war of occupation.

1 comment December 28th, 2007

Iraqis blame US occupation for discord, military study finds

Surprise! Iraqis of all stripes think the US occupation is the primary cause of discord, a focus-group study for the US military concludes. Here is the Washington Post article:

All Iraqi Groups Blame U.S. Invasion for Discord, Study Shows

By Karen DeYoung

Wednesday, December 19, 2007; A14

Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the U.S. military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of “occupying forces” as the key to national reconciliation, according to focus groups conducted for the U.S. military last month.

That is good news, according to a military analysis of the results. At the very least, analysts optimistically concluded, the findings indicate that Iraqis hold some “shared beliefs” that may eventually allow them to surmount the divisions that have led to a civil war.

Conducting the focus groups, in 19 separate sessions organized by outside contractors in five cities, is among the ways in which Multi-National Force-Iraq assesses conditions in the country beyond counting insurgent attacks, casualties and weapons caches. The command, led by Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, devotes more time and resources than any other government or independent entity to measuring various matters, including electricity, satisfaction with trash collection and what Iraqis think it will take for them to get along.

The results are analyzed and presented to Petraeus as part of the daily Battle Update Assessment or BUA (pronounced boo-ah). Some of the news has been unarguably good, including the sharply reduced number of roadside bombings and attacks on civilians. But bad news is often presented with a bright side, such as the focus-group results and a November poll, which found that 25 percent of Baghdad residents were satisfied with their local government and that 15 percent said they had enough fuel for heating and cooking.

The good news? Those numbers were higher than the figures of the previous month (18 percent and 9 percent, respectively).

And Iraqi complaints about matters other than security are seen as progress. Early this year, Maj. Fred Garcia, an MNF-I analyst, said that “a very large percentage of people would answer questions about security by saying ‘I don’t know.’ Now, we get more griping because people feel freer.”

Iraqi political reconciliation, quality-of-life issues and the economy are largely the responsibility of the State Department. But the military, to the occasional consternation of U.S. diplomats who feel vastly outnumbered, has its own “mirror agencies” in many areas. Officers in charge of civil-military operations, said senior Petraeus adviser Army Col. William E. Rapp, “can tell you how many markets are open in Baghdad, how many shops, how many banks are open. . . . We have a lot more people” on the ground.

On Iraqi politics, “we have four to six slides almost every morning on ‘Where does the Iraqi government stand on de-Baathification legislation?’ All these things are embassy things,” Rapp said. But Petraeus is interested in “his ‘feel’ for a situation, and he gets that from a bunch of different data points,” he added.

Even though members of the military “understand the limitations” of polling data, Rapp said, “subjective measures” are an important part of the mix. In July, the military signed a contract with Gallup for four public opinion polls a month in Iraq: three nationwide and one in Baghdad. Lincoln Group, which has conducted surveys for the military since shortly after the invasion, received a year-long contract in January to conduct focus groups.

Outside of the military, some of the most widespread polling in Iraq has been done by D3 Systems, a Virginia-based company that maintains offices in each of Iraq’s 18 provinces. Its most recent publicly released surveys, conducted in September for several news media organizations, showed the same widespread Iraqi belief voiced by the military’s focus groups: that a U.S. departure will make things better. A State Department poll in September 2006 reported a similar finding.

Matthew Warshaw, a senior research manager at D3, said that despite security improvements, polling in Iraq remains difficult. “While violence has gone down, one of the ways it has been achieved is by effectively separating people. That means mobility is limited, with roadblocks by the U.S. and Iraqi military or local militias,” Warshaw said in an interview.

Most of the recent survey results he has seen about political reconciliation, Warshaw said, are “more about [Iraqis] reconciling with the United States within their own particular territory, like in Anbar. . . . But it doesn’t say anything about how Sunni groups feel about Shiite groups in Baghdad.”

Warshaw added: “In Iraq, I just don’t hear statements that come from any of the Sunni, Shiite or Kurdish groups that say ‘We recognize that we need to share power with the others, that we can’t truly dominate.’ ”

According to a summary report of the focus-group findings obtained by The Washington Post, Iraqis have a number of “shared beliefs” about the current situation that cut across sectarian lines. Participants, in separate groups of men and women, were interviewed in Ramadi, Najaf, Irbil, Abu Ghraib and in Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad. The report does not mention how the participants were selected.

Dated December 2007, the report notes that “the Iraqi government has still made no significant progress toward its fundamental goal of national reconciliation.” Asked to describe “the current situation in Iraq to a foreign visitor,” some groups focused on positive aspects of the recent security improvements. But “most would describe the negative elements of life in Iraq beginning with the ‘U.S. occupation’ in March 2003,” the report says.

Some participants also blamed Iranian meddling for Iraq’s problems. While the United States was said to want to control Iraq’s oil, Iran was seen as seeking to extend its political and religious agendas.

Few mentioned Saddam Hussein as a cause of their problems, which the report described as an important finding implying that “the current strife in Iraq seems to have totally eclipsed any agonies or grievances many Iraqis would have incurred from the past regime, which lasted for nearly four decades — as opposed to the current conflict, which has lasted for five years.”

Overall, the report said that “these findings may be expected to conclude that national reconciliation is neither anticipated nor possible. In reality, this survey provides very strong evidence that the opposite is true.” A sense of “optimistic possibility permeated all focus groups . . . and far more commonalities than differences are found among these seemingly diverse groups of Iraqis.”

Add comment December 19th, 2007

Politicize military lawyers, administration proposes

In order to better pursue their pro-torture policies, the administration wants military lawyers to become subject to political hacks. Charlie Savage in the Boston Globe reports that the administration has proposed that all JAG [Judge Advocate General, the military's lawyers] promotions be “coordinated” with political appointees. The particular appointee they have in mind is the Pentagon’s general counsel, William Haynes, one of the architects of the administration’s torture policy.

The proposal does not spell out what coordination means. But both JAGs and outside legal specialists say that it is common bureaucratic parlance for requiring both sides to sign off before a decision gets made - meaning that political appointees would have the power to block any candidate’s career path.

“It only makes sense to put this in if you want [general counsels to exercise the power to give] thumbs up or thumbs down, in order to intimidate JAGs,” said retired Colonel Gordon Wilder, who was the Air Force’s top JAG specialist in administrative law until last January.

See Scott Horton’s comment: Bush Assails the JAG Corps

Add comment December 17th, 2007

Army in denial about PT-drug abuse link?

Phillip Leveque, M.D., takes on the army’s denial or deceipt about the extent of PTSD-realted drug abuse in an article in the Salem-News:

PTSD and Psychosis Among Army Psychiatrists

Dr. Phillip Leveque Salem-News.com
Phillip Leveque has spent his life as a Combat Infantryman, Physician, Toxicologist and Pharmacologist.

(MOLALLA, Ore.) - I was a combat infantryman for about 18 months in WWII where things were really crazy with various levels of officers demanding of their underlings (anyone of lower rank) that such and such a military objective be taken even if it killed every attacking soldier.

If that isn’t psychosis, what is?

I was also stationed in General Eisenhower’s headquarters for about six months. Of about 15,000 personnel, half officers, half enlisted, they acted like there wasn’t a war.

If such a psychic denial isn’t psychosis, what is?

The current seeming denial of PTSD and drug use on the highest army medical levels MUST BE a further example of psychosis.

I was absolutely flabbergasted that on ABC News 20/20 Col. Elspeth Ritchie, the psychiatry consultant to the U.S. Army Surgeon General, implied that there is no battle-induced PTSD causing drug use by soldiers, but like all other people using drugs, there were other “reasons”.

I was reminded that in WWI the Army swept it under the rug too, naming PTSD as “homesickness” or saying that the soldiers “missed their mothers”. What comes to my mind is SNAFU, FUBAR and even JANFU.

The VA’s own information says up to half of all PTSD patients treated also have a substance abuse problem.

Colonel Ritchie would only say that PTSD is a “risk factor” for the abuse of drugs and alcohol, but that the Army has not been able to quantify how strongly the two are linked. She said she was unaware of cases of soldiers turning to drugs to cope with the trauma of their experiences in Iraq.

She said, “That has not been my experience. My psychiatrists and social workers who see soldiers report to me of their experiences with soldiers all the time, and none of them are seeing that particular explanation.”

The Army actually goes so far to say there has been NO increase in the rate of illegal drug use among soldiers since the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Who do they think they’re fooling?

I presume Dr. Ritchie got her MD from a real medical school, but I have heard that the Armed Forces has its own medical school. I was embarrassed as a physician at her comments.

Was she lying to maintain her quest for one star, or was she really ignorant about PTSD? It’s hard to believe she got to where she is today without intelligence, so that leaves: CHOICE. She is choosing her future star over the welfare of our troops.

Even other army spokespersons and the VA people say to expect about 20% of battle veterans to have PTSD. Paul Sullivan, Gulf War veteran, a former project manager at VA who monitored the disability claim activity of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, and now is the executive director of Veterans for Common Sense (VCS), said PTSD was a big problem. His reaction to the Army psychiatrist? “Shame on her!”

Some of the most pitiful comments were given by a woman described as the director of substance abuse programs, apparently with the U.S. Army. She spoke about their success. The 20/20 program didn’t indicate her rank, or even if she was a physician, but she obviously didn’t understand that a battle-scarred PTSD veteran will use anything he can get his hands on to remove the PTSD devils from his soul and mind, even if it is heroin, booze, or at the very least, cannabis.

Ten times the number of soldiers are using drugs now compared to when the Iraq war began. That’s the military’s number, a complete contradiction to what Col Richie said.

Hundreds of veterans have told me that cannabis works better than any prescription drug. It’s about time for a serious trial of cannabis for PTSD.

Some soldiers are breaking the rules and turning to drugs to give them relief from the consequences of trauma in war. We can help them seek the best treatment by not living in the psychosis of denial.

I have also heard that many VA psychologists are trying “fake battle sounds” as treatment. God preserve us.

We PTSD guys are trying to stay as far from that as possible.

5 comments December 16th, 2007

Military prosecutes female soldier for suicide attempt

Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and Anne Hull, who broke the story on the horrors returning soldiers faced at Walter Reed Medical Center, continue their series with a truly chilling account of a model female soldier who volunteered for Iraq and broke under the strain of work and discrimination. She attempted suicide. As she was recovering she was charged in a Court Martial for her suicide attempt.

The story is too complicated to summarize, so I’ll post it below. It constitutes another piece of evidence that segments of the military cannot tolerate the concept that military conditions could lead to a mental breakdown. Any breakdown must be due to moral weakness and character flaws that need to be suppressed or punished, leading to a secondary traumatization of the already traumatized.

Here is the Post article:

‘A Soldier’s Officer’

By Dana Priest and Anne Hull

In a nondescript conference room at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, 1st Lt. Elizabeth Whiteside listened last week as an Army prosecutor outlined the criminal case against her in a preliminary hearing. The charges: attempting suicide and endangering the life of another soldier while serving in Iraq.

Her hands trembled as Maj. Stefan Wolfe, the prosecutor, argued that Whiteside, now a psychiatric outpatient at Walter Reed, should be court-martialed. After seven years of exemplary service, the 25-year-old Army reservist faces the possibility of life in prison if she is tried and convicted.

Military psychiatrists at Walter Reed who examined Whiteside after she recovered from her self-inflicted gunshot wound diagnosed her with a severe mental disorder, possibly triggered by the stresses of a war zone. But Whiteside’s superiors considered her mental illness “an excuse” for criminal conduct, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

At the hearing, Wolfe, who had already warned Whiteside’s lawyer of the risk of using a “psychobabble” defense, pressed a senior psychiatrist at Walter Reed to justify his diagnosis.

“I’m not here to play legal games,” Col. George Brandt responded angrily, according to a recording of the hearing. “I am here out of the genuine concern for a human being that’s breaking and that is broken. She has a severe and significant illness. Let’s treat her as a human being, for Christ’s sake!”

In recent months, prodded by outrage over poor conditions at Walter Reed, the Army has made a highly publicized effort to improve treatment of Iraq veterans and change a culture that stigmatizes mental illness. The Pentagon has allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to new research and to care for soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder, and on Friday it announced that it had opened a new center for psychological health in Rosslyn.

But outside the Pentagon, the military still largely deals with mental health issues in an ad hoc way, often relying on the judgment of combat-hardened commanders whose understanding of mental illness is vague or misinformed. The stigma around psychological wounds can still be seen in the smallest of Army policies. While family members of soldiers recovering at Walter Reed from physical injuries are provided free lodging and a per diem to care for their loved ones, families of psychiatric outpatients usually have to pay their own way.

“It’s a disgrace,” said Tom Whiteside, a former Marine and retired federal law enforcement officer who lost his free housing after his daughter’s physical wounds had healed enough that she could be moved to the psychiatric ward. A charity organization, the Yellow Ribbon Fund, provides him with an apartment near Walter Reed so he can be near his daughter.

Under military law, soldiers who attempt suicide can be prosecuted under the theory that it affects the order and discipline of a unit and brings discredit to the armed forces. In reality, criminal charges are extremely rare unless there is evidence that the attempt was an effort to avoid service or that it endangered others.

At one point, Elizabeth Whiteside almost accepted the Army’s offer to resign in lieu of court-martial. But it meant she would have to explain for the rest of her life why she was not given an honorable discharge. Her attorney also believed that she would have been left without the medical care and benefits she needed.

No decision has yet been made on whether Whiteside’s case will proceed to court-martial. The commander of the U.S. Army Military District of Washington, Maj. Gen. Richard J. Rowe Jr., who has jurisdiction over the case, “must determine whether there is sufficient evidence to support the charges against Lieutenant Whiteside and recommend how to dispose of the charges,” said his spokesman.
‘A Soldier’s Officer’

A valedictorian at James Madison High School in Vienna, a wrestler and varsity soccer player, Whiteside followed in her father’s footsteps by joining the military. She enlisted in the Army Reserve in 2001 and later joined ROTC while studying economics at the University of Virginia. During her time in college, Whiteside said, she experienced periods of depression, but she graduated and was commissioned an officer in the Army Reserve.

In 2005, she received her first assignment as an officer — at Walter Reed. As an executive officer of a support company, she supervised 150 soldiers and officers, and her evaluations from that time presaged the high marks she would receive most of her career.

“This superior officer is in the top 10 percent of Officers I have worked with in my 16 years of military service,” wrote her rater, Capt. Joel Grant. She “must be promoted immediately, ahead of all peers.”

Maj. Sandra Hersh, her senior rater, added: “She’s a Soldier’s Officer. . . . She is able to get the best from Soldiers and make it look easy.”

Seeing so many casualties at Walter Reed made Whiteside feel she was not bearing her full responsibility, she said, so she volunteered for Iraq. When she left in the fall of 2006, she carried with her a gift from her father — the double-bladed buck knife he had used in Vietnam.

Whiteside was assigned as a platoon leader in the 329th Medical Company (Ground Ambulance) at the Camp Cropper detainee prison near Baghdad International Airport. The hot light from the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal still charged the atmosphere at Cropper, which housed 4,000 detainees and included high-security prisoners such as Saddam Hussein and Ali Hassan Majeed, known as “Chemical Ali,” as well as suspected terrorists and insurgents.

Whiteside, given the radio handle “Trauma Mama,” supervised nine medics who worked the night shift at the prison. She was in charge of dispatching drivers, medics and support staff to transport sick and wounded Iraqis and U.S. troops around the prison and to a small hospital inside.

“I loved our mission,” Whiteside said, “because it represented the best of America: taking care of the enemy, regardless of what they are doing to us.”

The hours were brutal. Whiteside ate one meal a day, slept in two four-hour shifts and worked seven days a week. Her superiors credited her with her unit’s success. “She has produced outstanding results in one of the most demanding and challenging Combat Zones,” her commander, Lt. Col. Darlene McCurdy, wrote in her evaluation.

But the dynamics outside her unit were rockier. From the beginning, Whiteside and some of her female soldiers had conflicts with one of the company’s male officers. They believed he hindered female promotions and undercut Whiteside’s authority with her soldiers, according to Army investigative documents.

As the tensions with the officer increased, Whiteside said, she began suffering panic attacks. She stopped sleeping, she said, and started self-medicating with NyQuil and Benadryl, but decided against seeking help from the mental health clinic because she feared that the Army would send her home, as it had recently done with a colonel.

On Dec. 30, U.S. military officials took Hussein from his cell at Camp Cropper for execution. The next day, the prison erupted. Thousands of inmates rioted, and military police used rubber bullets, flash-bang grenades and tear gas to restore order.

Whiteside took charge in the chaos, according to written statements by troops in her unit. She dispatched a pair of medics to each compound to begin triage, handed out gas masks and organized her unit to smuggle the prison’s doctors out in an ambulance.

The next day, weary from the riots, Whiteside ran into the problem officer. They had another argument.

Army investigative documents describe what happened next.

At 6:20 p.m. a soldier frantically approached Maj. Ana Luisa Ramirez, a mental health nurse at the prison, and said Whiteside was “freaking out” and wanted to see Ramirez. The nurse found Whiteside sitting on her bed, mumbling and visibly upset. Ramirez left to get some medication.

Later, she spotted Whiteside in the darkened hallway with her sweatshirt hood pulled over her head and her hands in her pockets. Ramirez asked Whiteside to come into her room and noticed what appeared to be dried blood on her neck and hands. When she tried to take a closer look, Ramirez said, Whiteside pointed her sidearm, an M9 pistol, at her and “told me to move away and she locked the door,” according to a statement Ramirez gave to the Army.

Ramirez tried to take Whiteside’s gun, but Whiteside pushed her away and expressed her hatred of the officer she thought was sabotaging her. She grew more agitated and twice fired into the ceiling.

Nurses in the hallway began yelling, and Whiteside shouted that she wanted to kill them, the report said. She opened the door and saw armed soldiers in battle gear coming her way. Slamming the door, she discharged the weapon once into her stomach.

Whiteside says she has little recollection of the events of that night. “I remember bits and pieces,” she said. She declined to comment on whether she was trying to kill herself.

The medics who responded to the shooting scene were Whiteside’s own crew.
Recovering at Walter Reed

Whiteside was still unconscious when she arrived at Walter Reed a few days later. The bullet had ripped through one of her lungs, her liver, her spleen and several other organs. Her parents and siblings kept a round-the-clock bedside vigil, and her condition gradually improved. Within two weeks an Army criminal investigator showed up in her hospital room, but a doctor shooed him away.

After a month, Whiteside was moved to Ward 54, the hospital’s lockdown psychiatric unit, where she was diagnosed with a severe major depressive disorder and a personality disorder. According to a statement by an Army psychiatrist, she was suffering from a disassociation with reality.

Tom Whiteside visited his daughter every afternoon, bringing pizza or Chinese takeout. He often noticed from the sign-in sheet that he was the only visitor on the ward. The psych patients formed a close bond and shared an overriding fear: that the Army would drum them out with no benefits.

One soldier Whiteside befriended was a 20-year-old private named Sammantha Owen-Ewing. Intelligent and funny, Owen-Ewing was training to be a nurse when she suffered mental problems and was admitted to Ward 54. She was still receiving psychiatric care at Walter Reed when the Army abruptly discharged her. According to her husband, she was dropped off at a nearby hotel with a plane ticket.

While on Ward 54, Whiteside received a package from her crew in Iraq. Inside was a silver charm, inscribed with the crew members’ names and the message: “Know that you are always loved by us. Never be forgotten and dearly missed. Your Trauma Team.” The crew also wore “Trauma Mama” bracelets in solidarity.

After being released from Ward 54, Whiteside joined the outpatient ranks just as the Army was scrambling to overhaul its system for treating wounded soldiers and President Bush ordered a commission to study military care for Iraq veterans.

At Walter Reed, the Army brought in combat-experienced officers to replace the recovering patients whom it had asked to manage the lives of the 700 outpatients on post. The new Warrior Transition Brigade and its more experienced leaders were supposed to manage more adeptly the tension between soldiering and patient recovery.

It was Whiteside’s commanders in this unit, a captain and a colonel, who drew up criminal charges against her in April. The accusations included assault on a superior commissioned officer, aggravated assault, kidnapping, reckless endangerment, wrongful discharge of a firearm, communication of a threat and two attempts of intentional self-injury without intent to avoid service.

The Army ordered Whiteside to undergo a sanity board evaluation to determine her state of mind at the time of the shooting.

Tom Whiteside said the criminal charges threatened to unglue his daughter’s already tenuous grip on recovery. “If they are doing this to her, what are they doing to those young PFCs without parents by their side?” he asked.

By early August, Elizabeth Whiteside sought an alternative to court-martial. She requested permission to resign, a measure the military often accepts.

Rowe, commander of the U.S. Army Military District of Washington, which has jurisdiction over her case, would decide whether to grant her request.

He reviewed recommendations from Whiteside’s two commanders at Walter Reed and the facility’s commander, Maj. Gen. Eric B. Schoomaker, a physician. Whiteside’s immediate commander at the hospital, a captain, recommended that she be given an “other than honorable” discharge, according to a document obtained by The Post. The captain wrote that her “defense that she suffers from a mental disease excusing her actions is just that . . . an excuse; an excuse to distract from choices and decisions made by 1LT Whiteside.”

Col. Terrence J. McKenrick, commander of the Warrior Transition Brigade, agreed: “Although the sanity board determined that at the time of the misconduct she had a severe mental disease or defect, she knowingly assaulted and threatened others and injured herself.”

Schoomaker, now the Army’s surgeon general, dissented. “This officer has a demonstrably severe depression which manifested itself . . . as a psychotic, self-destructive episode. . . . Resignation in lieu of court-martial eliminates all of the benefits of medical support this officer deserves after 7 years of credible and honorable service.”

Rowe overruled Schoomaker. He agreed to accept Whiteside’s resignation with a “general under honorable conditions” discharge that would still deprive her of most benefits, according to her pro bono civilian attorney, Matthew J. MacLean.

But then, from her battalion commander in Iraq, Whiteside learned that an investigation there had concluded that there was “insufficient evidence for any criminal action to be taken against” her. Furthermore, it had found a hostile command climate and recommended that the officer who had been her nemesis be removed from his position and “given a letter of reprimand for gender bias in assignments and use of intimidation, manipulation and hostility towards soldiers.”

With this news, Whiteside asked that her letter of resignation be withdrawn. She would fight the charges.

In an e-mail exchange, the prosecutor, Wolfe, told MacLean that even if Whiteside won in court she would probably end up stigmatized and in a mental institution, just like John Hinckley, the man who shot President Ronald Reagan.

Wolfe suggested that the military court might not buy the mental illness defense. “Who doesn’t find psycho-babble unclear . . . how many people out there believe that insanity should never be a defense, that it is just, as he said, an ‘excuse.’ ”
Awaiting a Decision

Whiteside lived with other outpatient soldiers in a building on the grounds of Walter Reed. She kept her quarters neat and orderly. As her preliminary hearing approached, she often went to bed at 8 p.m. to sleep away her impending reality. She attended morning formation and medical appointments. On weekends she hung out with her clique from Ward 54, “my little posse of crazy soldiers,” as Whiteside called them.

She still had the innate ability to motivate soldiers. To pass time one recent Sunday, Whiteside drove a small group of outpatients to go bowling at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda. “You can do better,” she told a young private who was a terrible bowler. “We’ll pool our energy together and get a strike.”

Whiteside also offered encouragement over the phone to her friend Sammantha Owen-Ewing, the soldier she befriended on Ward 54 who had been abruptly dismissed from the Army. Sammantha was waiting to see if she could receive her care from the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Whiteside feared the same fate.

At the hearing, the testimony focused on Whiteside’s state of mind at the time of her shooting. The hearing officer would have seven days to make a recommendation on whether to dismiss the charges, offer a lesser punishment or go to court-martial. The final decision will be Rowe’s.

A psychiatrist who performed Whiteside’s sanity board evaluation testified that he found the lieutenant insane at the time of the shooting. One of the doctors said that Whiteside had a “severe mental disease or affect” and that she “did not appreciate the nature and quality of her actions.” Brandt, chief of Behavioral Health Services in Walter Reed’s Department of Psychiatry, testified that Whiteside was “grappling with holding on to her sanity,” adding: “She was right on the edge, and she fell off.”

Wolfe made his argument for a court-martial. “These are very serious charges,” he said. “The more serious the crime, the higher level it must be disposed of. . . . The government’s position is it should be a court-martial.”

When the hearing ended, Whiteside walked outside into the cold. Her phone buzzed with a text message from the husband of her friend Sammantha, asking Whiteside to call right away.

Sammantha had hung herself the night before.

On Friday, Whiteside and her father flew to Utah for the funeral. Yesterday, after a service at a small Mormon church, Sammantha Owen-Ewing was buried.

Grief-stricken by the death of her friend and bitter at the Army, Whiteside awaits the Army’s decision this week.

“I can fight them,” she said, “because I’m alive.”

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