Sunday, November 27, 2005

New Orleans Tells US..."Don't Let Us Die!"....

Times-Picayune' Editor: Don't Let City Die
Jim Amoss


By E&P Staff

Published: November 27, 2005 10:15 AM ET

NEW YORK Exactly one week ago, the Times-Picayune of New Orleans carried an editorial on its front page, asking--rather, demanding--that the rest of the country, and especially the federal government, not abandon the flood-ravaged city now that it was no longer Topic A in the nation.

Today, the editor of the paper, Jim Amoss, took the argument right to the prime target, with an op-ed piece in The Washington Post. Also, today, the Times-Picayune reported that three more bodies had been recovered in the post-Katrina cleanup.

The Times-Picayune editorial last week concluded with this call: "Whether you are back at home or still in exile waiting to return, let Congress know that this metro area must be made safe from future storms. Call and write the leaders who are deciding our fate. Get your family and friends in other states to do the same. Start with members of the Environment and Public Works and Appropriations committees in the Senate, and Transportation and Appropriations in the House. Flood them with mail the way we were flooded by Katrina.

"Remind them that this is a singular American city and that this nation still needs what we can give it."

Here is Amoss's followup today, also available at www.washingtonpost.com.

*
President Bush flew into New Orleans shortly after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city. His staff had to fire up giant generators to bathe St. Louis Cathedral and Jackson Square in floodlights, as a backdrop for his promise that he would "do what it takes" to rebuild New Orleans.

"There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans," he said, "and this great city will rise again."

Then the lights went out, and the president left. Vast swaths of the city have been in darkness ever since.

It would be unprecedented and indefensible for the federal government to leave an American city to fend for itself in recovery. But when we talk of the federal government's role in rebuilding New Orleans, it's important to understand its direct culpability in the destruction.

At the site of the worst urban disaster in American history, we are a city obsessed. Rebuilding New Orleans is our breakfast-table conversation, our lunchtime chatter, our pillow talk. But while we talk, we also wait. For a settlement on our homeowner insurance policy, for our children's schools to reopen, for a sign that our neighbors will come back.

Above all we are waiting for Congress and the federal government to decide that New Orleans deserves strong levees -- stronger than the sorry system, designed and built by the Army Corps of Engineers, that collapsed, wrecking our neighborhoods. We want word from Washington that a great American city will not be left to die.

As our newspaper has documented in recent weeks, the miles of federally built concrete floodwalls that were meant to keep Lake Pontchartrain from flooding the city through its drainage canals during a hurricane appear to have been poorly designed and improperly constructed. The floodwall system is a federal project, designed by the Corps and built under Corps specifications. Evidence suggests that metal sheet piles didn't go deep enough into the ground and that the walls were built on peaty soil that did not provide adequate anchorage. One engineering professor from Louisiana State University called in to investigate the failures said it was the kind of engineering shortfall he'd expect his first-year students to be able to identify.

When several of the federally built floodwall panels gave way on the morning of Katrina, after the worst winds had passed, the storm-swollen lake cascaded into the city. It was a man-made disaster, a federal engineering failure with multibillion-dollar consequences.

Today, when we New Orleanians travel around the country, we are comforted by a tremendous outpouring of sympathy from ordinary Americans. Many have given generously to charities for Katrina victims. We also hear people talk about how things must be getting back to normal.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. New Orleans has become two cities -- an enclave of survivors clustered along the Mississippi River's crescent and a vast and sprawling shadow city where the water stood, devoid of power and people.

The ancient heart -- the French Quarter and Uptown -- is throbbing with commerce and signs of life from the hardiest returnees. But cross Freret Street, and you enter a dim realm. The neighborhoods that extend from there to the lake are comatose. At night, I drive through darkened and abandoned streets, past acres of housing that marinated in polluted floodwater for weeks, past blocks where I know people died, unable to escape the storm, past the homes of poor, middle-class and affluent New Orleanians -- all devastated alike.

When daylight returns, many of those dead blocks come alive with visiting homeowners dragging their soggy belongings to the sidewalk, stopping sometimes to hug and to cry, then going back to work. Our street scene is an endless row of ruined refrigerators, moldy sheetrock, debris and garbage bags.

The vastness of this destruction is almost impossible to fathom. A steady stream of members of Congress have toured the devastation at ground level, and they all have the same impression that a stunned Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island came away with last week: "You have to see it."

Our city and state understand that it is incumbent upon them to come up with a plan, sensible and well thought out, for the rebirth of New Orleans. The problem is so vast that it is difficult to harness, and the first steps have been halting. But we're working on it.

When we're ready, we will be expecting, not unreasonably, a commitment from our government to fund a well-designed system of substantial levees, floodgates and other barriers extending into the Gulf of Mexico; a system that will protect us not only from a Category 3 hurricane like Katrina but from the strongest storm, a Category 5. Such a system would already have been built if anyone had taken into account the billions of dollars the government's failure to protect New Orleans is costing us now.

Can America, having witnessed the loss of well over 1,000 lives to Katrina, not rouse itself? Despite its problems, New Orleans remains one of our greatest cities, beloved of this country and the world. We are at the fulcrum of one-third of the nation's oil and gas and 40 percent of its seafood. We gave birth to much of this country's indigenous culture, and we continue to nourish it. What does it say about our civilization if this unique American metropolis is left to die?

What New Orleans needs is no extravagance. Our city must help itself in rebuilding its neighborhoods and reforming its institutions. What is lacking is political will in Washington and the determination to bring our engineering know-how to bear upon the problem. Without a substantial levee system, homeowners won't muster the confidence to rebuild, and businesses will not see fit to invest.

President Bush was still smarting from the embarrassing federal response to Katrina when he stood in the heart of our city and made his promise to rebuild. It would be a greater embarrassment to an entire nation if that promise went unfulfilled.

E&P Staff


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Joe Conosan....Let's Get Out

An Exit Strategy Bush Can’t Ignore

By: Joe Conason
Date: 11/28/2005
Page: 5

Agitated over their declining credibility, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are answering accusations that they misled the nation into war with characteristic aggressiveness. They’re understandably alarmed by the increasing consensus among Americans that they exaggerated and distorted intelligence to justify invading Iraq.

What alarms everyone else—including many members of the President’s own party—is that that they still can articulate no plausible plan to get our troops out. Rather than distracting themselves with partisan bickering, the President and Vice President ought to seize any opportunity to extricate us honorably from the terrible mess they have made.

Now such a chance has appeared, if only the White House has the wit to recognize it.

The quandary for Americans in Iraq, now that the old rosy scenarios have been discarded, is that both leaving and staying are likely to result in disaster.

If we withdraw, the entire country will be engulfed by civil war, creating a haven for Islamist terror and a threat to regional stability, not to mention a victory for our enemies. If we remain as occupiers, the civil war will continue to expand anyway, attracting support for Islamist terror, draining our resources, and further damaging our army and international prestige. We continue the occupation because of the insurgency, even though the occupation only strengthens the insurgency.

Too often omitted from American discussions of this dismal situation is the widely shared and forcefully expressed desire of the Iraqis themselves—namely that our troops should go home as soon as possible, and that a schedule must be established for their departure.

Last August, the British defense ministry conducted a secret opinion survey in Iraq, whose results have since leaked out. The pollsters found that over three-quarters of the Iraqi public want a timetable for the end of the occupation. Even the Iraqi political parties least hostile to the United States, including those that won the elections last January, want to know precisely when our troops will go.

That broad judgment was ratified again in Cairo last weekend, when Iraqi political leaders met at a “reconciliation conference” under the auspices of the Arab League. Only those who know nothing about public opinion in Iraq were surprised when the Cairo conferees, representing a very broad spectrum of ethnic and religious factions, issued a joint statement that demanded “the withdrawal of foreign forces in accordance with a timetable.” (The communiqué went so far as to acknowledge the legitimacy of “resistance” to foreign occupation, while condemning acts of terror against civilians.)

According to the Egyptian newspaper Al Hayat, sources at the conference suggested that the Iraqi leaders want U.S. and British troops to vacate the country’s major cities by next May. The premise of that hope is “an immediate national program to rebuild the armed forces.”

Opponents of withdrawal argue convincingly that Iraq will not possess the military and police capacity to defend itself from the insurgents within six months. That argument is bolstered by the Bush administration’s history of false predictions and pronouncements about the rapid improvement of the Iraqi armed forces.

How then can our troops get out without plunging Iraq and perhaps the Middle East into bloody chaos?

The best alternative is a negotiated ceasefire leading to an American withdrawal. Working through the Iraqi government, U.S. officials should set forth a clear timetable for the departure of our troops—in exchange for an end to armed attacks by Sunni guerrillas. Spokesmen for the rebels, including leaders of the Association of Muslim Scholars, have often hinted at the possibilities for such a settlement.

Not all of the insurgents would be willing to participate in negotiations with the Iraqi government or the United States, of course. The force that calls itself “Al Qaeda in Iraq,” led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, aims to install an Islamist regime and in any case prefers a prolonged conflict for propaganda purposes. No doubt the Zarqawi group, which is a tiny minority among the insurgents, realizes that any settlement would doom them.

That is another obvious reason for Americans to sit down and talk with the mainstream Sunni and former Baathist rebels. A looming defeat in the “war on terror” could be transformed into a victory over Al Qaeda won by Arabs and Muslims.

At the Cairo conference last Sunday, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said his government would be willing to engage in talks with representatives of the insurgents. Indeed, he sounded eager. The veteran Kurdish leader told reporters, “If those who call themselves the Iraqi resistance want to contact me, I will welcome them.”

Sincere as Mr. Talabani’s invitation may be, however, the insurgents are unlikely to accept it without guarantees that he alone cannot provide. Only the President of the United States can propose the initiation of talks about an orderly withdrawal of U.S. troops and a ceasefire between the insurgency and the Iraqi government—and that is what he should do now.

copyright © 2005 the new york observer, L.P. | all rights reserved

No Skeptics Need Apply: James Risen and the NY Times under Judith Miller

Times Confronted
By Ms. Rice In 2002
But Held Ground

By: Gabriel Sherman
Date: 11/28/2005
Page: 1

In late August of 2002, David Sanger, White House correspondent for The New York Times, found himself in the far west wing of the West Wing: at President George W. Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Tex.

There, in what must have been a fairly routine meeting with then–National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, he was told in no uncertain terms what the White House had thought of much of The Times’ reporting on the President’s Iraq policy that summer. They were not happy.

“I would not discuss any background conversations with any sources in the White House,” Mr. Sanger said, sounding quite a bit like a former co-worker of his. “I remember that several members of the administration were unhappy with our coverage [in the summer of 2002], but that’s not a rare event on many different subjects.”

But two sources—one who was at the Washington bureau and one high-ranking editor back at The Times’ West 43rd Street headquarters at the time of the meeting—remembered the criticism was worrying. Would the Washington bureau be frozen out of the big stories emanating from the White House?

It was the summer the President and his allies were laying the groundwork for military action in Iraq, and the premium on high-level sourcing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was perhaps at its apex. And for The Times’ Washington bureau, the pressure was on to deliver on the biggest story of this still-young administration.

But one senior Washington bureau staffer said that as the Bush administration edged closer to invasion, the editorial climate inside The Times shifted from questioning the rationale for military action to putting the paper on a proper war footing.

“Everyone could see the war coming. The Times wanted to be out front on the biggest story,” the staffer said. “It became the plan of attack.”

Pace Bob Woodward.

On Charlie Rose this month, Mr. Sulzberger pinpointed this as the period in which The Times’ seriously flawed reporting on weapons of mass destruction was produced. Describing the time as the “overheated period that followed 9/11,” he said, “I think it’s fair to say that those stories would not have run in The New York Times today.”

He also declined to blame recently departed reporter Judith Miller for The Times’ faulty reporting on Iraqi W.M.D., saying the problems were “institutional.”

And yet, inside The Times, nobody seems to agree on how that reporting actually made it to the page out of the Washington bureau. Nobody has the same picture of the institution that reported it—the Washington bureau under the leadership of Jill Abramson, now managing editor of the newspaper, and then–executive editor Howell Raines, who seems to be fishing a lot these days. And unlike the period after Jayson Blair’s deceptions, it does not appear to be a major agenda item for the newspaper to find out how it happened. (Ms. Abramson, contacted by The Observer, declined to comment for this story; Mr. Raines did not respond to requests for comment.)

Back to the beginning: What was Ms. Rice so mad about?

In mid-August of 2002, The Times came under fire for back-to-back front-page pieces calling out top Republicans who had broken ranks with the administration over support of an Iraq invasion.

The first piece, which ran on Aug. 16 and was co-written by Patrick Tyler and Todd Purdum, included former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in an influential camp of dissenting Republicans—such as former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft—who were opposing Mr. Bush’s planned military operation in Iraq. The next day, Elisabeth Bumiller attributed anti-war views to Mr. Kissinger in a piece with a Crawford, Tex., dateline.

An item in the Aug. 26 issue of The Weekly Standard lashed into The Times for putting Mr. Kissinger in the category of people who didn’t support the war. The opening line: “There’s nothing subtle about the opposition of the New York Times to President Bush’s plan for military action to depose Saddam Hussein in Iraq.”

The Times took a drubbing from the Wall Street Journal editorial page, columnist Charles Krauthammer and George Will speaking on ABC’s This Week.

Then came Mr. Sanger’s meeting with Ms. Rice.

On Sept. 4, The Times printed an editor’s note clarifying its characterization of Mr. Kissinger’s views in the piece by Ms. Bumiller.

“The second article listed Mr. Kissinger incorrectly among Republicans who were warning outright against a war,” the note read.

The Kissinger flap, the last in a series of critical pieces that had run that summer, was not the only problem.

Then the pressure started coming from the other side—after a Sept. 8 piece which reported that Iraq had at one time sought to obtain aluminum tubes as part of an effort to acquire nuclear arms. The piece, co-authored by Ms. Miller and Michael Gordon, ran on The Times’ front page.

Immediately, questions were raised about the piece. According to David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington and a former U.N. nuclear inspector in Iraq during the mid-1990’s, who has been critical of The Times’ W.M.D. coverage, the Miller-Gordon piece failed to note dissent in the intelligence community on Iraq’s purported efforts to acquire nuclear-weapons components.

“I found the whole reporting very slanted,” Mr. Albright said of the aluminum-tubes piece. “From my point of view, The Times wasn’t independent and couldn’t be trusted. They accepted information from the administration.”

He said he called Ms. Miller after the piece ran and told her that the reporting was flawed. Ms. Miller and Mr. Gordon wrote a piece five days later which acknowledged debate among analysts over the tubes, but said the dominant view was that they were intended for nuclear purposes. It ran on page A13.


At the same time, reporter James Risen was working for the Washington bureau, as was David Johnston. The two had frequent co-bylines on stories about intelligence matters, terrorism and national security.

Several current and former Times staffers recalled Mr. Risen’s complaints about his time at the Washington bureau. His intelligence sources were telling him that Ms. Miller’s sources were wrong about the presence of W.M.D. in Iraq. One person who was in the bureau at the time recalled that Mr. Risen said that his intelligence sources were saying the administration’s W.M.D. intelligence was “political.”

Two of the sources recalled Mr. Risen saying his efforts to get the bureau to question the paper’s W.M.D. reports were rebuffed. The same two recall Mr. Risen complaining that he was having trouble getting his more skeptical line of reporting onto the page.

One person who spoke to Mr. Risen about this also recalled Mr. Johnston making similar complaints.

No sources recalled any specific pieces by the two reporters that were killed or pulled. When The Observer called to check out the story, Mr. Risen said accounts of his frustrations were “inaccurate” and offered no further comment; Mr. Johnston would not comment for this article.

At any rate, Mr. Risen did write a few pieces skeptical of the administration’s case for war, including an Oct. 21, 2002, piece debunking the alleged meeting in Prague between Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi agent. On March 23, 2003, Mr. Risen wrote a piece on political pressure felt by the C.I.A. to produce intelligence supporting the administration’s case for war. But it was too late. War in Iraq began four days before.

At times, Mr. Risen seemed to be at pains to show how tough his reporting on W.M.D. had been. In its March 25, 2004, issue, The New York Review of Books published a letter he had written answering charges by media critic Michael Massing that the press was giving the Bush administration a pass on its case for the war.

“Your story on the pre-war coverage of Iraq, focusing in part on The New York Times, failed to mention that I wrote several stories before the war critical of the Bush administration’s case, both on the evidence of links between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and on the basis for claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction,” Mr. Risen wrote.

But somehow, no editor was willing to break the tie between Mr. Risen’s perspective on the likelihood that Saddam’s regime had an active weapons program, and Ms. Miller’s accounts, which appeared to demonstrate that it did.

Perhaps that wasn’t wanted. Throughout the run-up to the war, Mr. Raines had been driving the bureau hard. One former senior Times editor recalls Mr. Raines telling subordinates he wanted “A.K.T.” on a topic, his acronym for “all known thought.”

Nobody at The Times said they were asked to advance a particular storyline. “All known thought,” with the benefit of hindsight, now appears to have been boiled down to the thinking of Ms. Miller’s sources, appearing on page 1, and the thinking of everyone else’s, inside the paper.

Of course, we now know that Ms. Miller’s sources were so sensitive that even a special prosecutor had to subpoena her to get their names. How should the Washington bureau have known who they were? What their agendas were? How good their information was?

“I was edited according to the normal editing process,” Ms. Miller told The Observer in a recent phone interview. “Things got a little tricky when I went into the field in Iraq …. Apart from that, the editing was completely normal. The notion my pieces floated onto the front page isn’t true.”

But according to The Times’ own 5,800-word account of the Miller saga, Ms. Miller titled herself “Miss Run Amok”: difficult for editors to manage, operating on her own recognizance.

In May 2004, former executive editor Howell Raines, recently deposed in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, told the Los Angeles Times that his subordinates, including then–Washington bureau chief and now managing editor Jill Abramson, personally edited Ms. Miller’s W.M.D. copy.

But even in normal circumstances, penetrating the path of sensitive stories on major national issues to the front page of The Times is difficult, in part because reporters’ sources—especially sensitive, high-level government sources—require protection; so too does information on what some high-level reporters are working on, in order to protect the paper’s exclusives.

Seen in this light, recollections of current and former senior Times editors who attended the paper’s daily page-one meeting at 4:30 p.m., where editors sell stories to the front page of the paper, are nothing particularly new.

At the 4:30 page-one meeting, the desk for which Ms. Miller was writing would often label her story “Weapons, by Miller” on the line-up, a routine practice used for sensitive stories that were discussed in limited circles of senior editors.

Still, the same editors—who might have discussed less-sensitive stories at length to vet them for the front page—said they were unaware that other reporters were finding evidence that conflicted with the storyline Ms. Miller was establishing with her reporting.

“If anything, people were scared by her stories,” a senior Times editor said. “They were complicated, and they dealt with this material that no one understood. They became controversial fast. The idea they just appeared in the paper is absurd. But maybe they didn’t get edited as well they should have.”

“The idea there was an anomalous procedure by which Judy’s stories merely appeared in the newspaper and circumvented all the editors involved, I never saw it happen,” said deputy editorial-page editor Andrew Rosenthal, who at the time was an assistant managing editor.

“It was very much a collaborative process,” said former investigative editor Stephen Engelberg, who left The Times in early 2002 and is now a managing editor at The Oregonian in Portland, Ore.

“At no point when I was her editor did I feel pressure from anyone else,” Mr. Engelberg said. “I felt like I was working with her. We had a very close editor-reporter relationship.”

copyright © 2005 the new york observer, L.P. | all rights reserved

The Exhilaration of Being Maimed....a Case For Iraq?

From Wounds, Inner Strength
Some Veterans Feel Lives Enlarged by Wartime Suffering

By Michael E. Ruane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 26, 2005; A01

As Hilbert Caesar told his harrowing war story one night recently in the living room of his apartment, he patted the artificial limb sticking from a leg of his business suit. "This, right here," he said, "this is a minor setback."

Eighteen months after Caesar's right leg was mangled by a roadside bomb near Baghdad, and after weeks of coming to terms with what he thought was the end of his life, the former Army staff sergeant believes he has emerged a richer person -- wiser, more compassionate and more appreciative of life.

Asked whether he would endure it all again, he replied: "The guys I served with were awesome guys. . . . I would go through it again -- for the guys that I served with. Yes. Absolutely. I wouldn't change it for the world."

Although the shattering psychological impact of war is well known, experts have become increasingly interested in those who emerge from combat feeling enhanced. Some psychiatrists and psychologists believe that those soldiers have experienced a phenomenon known as "post-traumatic growth," or "adversarial" growth .

Although war left him with a leg of plastic and steel, Caesar, 28, of Silver Spring, appears to be among those who return home with psyche intact and a sense that they are in some mysterious way improved.

"I'm the same person," he said, "but I'm a different person now."

Combat's potential to inflict psychic wounds has been recognized as far back as the ancient Greeks, but so has its ability to exhilarate, intoxicate and instruct those who experience it, experts say.


"If you think about all of the heroes and heroines in cultures across the world . . . all of them, in one sense or another, faced some sort of a dragon," said Matthew J. Friedman, director of the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and a professor of psychiatry at Dartmouth Medical School. "The transformation from that encounter has been celebrated from antiquity."

University of North Carolina psychologists Lawrence G. Calhoun and Richard G. Tedeschi, who have studied post-traumatic growth for 20 years, said they are careful in describing what occurs.

"We're talking about a positive change that comes about as a result of the struggle with something very difficult," Calhoun said. "It's not just some automatic outcome of a bad thing."

Calhoun said their studies suggest that for growth to occur the trauma must be severe. "We tend to use the metaphor of an earthquake."

He said the person first ponders the details of what happened. "And then there's a much more abstract process of finding some higher meaning . . . in what has transpired," he said.

Tedeschi said there can be feelings of spiritual development, improved relationships, a sense of personal strength, a better appreciation of life and new interests and priorities.

Both men stressed that growth is not necessarily a goal, nor is trauma "good." Calhoun said: "Post-traumatic growth occurs in the context of . . . suffering. We hope everybody who goes to Iraq comes back safe and sound and doesn't have any traumas to grow from."

Although scientists continue to worry about war's impact on mental health, experts say research now shows that most people exposed to combat and other traumatic events do not develop chronic mental health problems.

"It used to be thought that virtually everybody who experienced these kinds of catastrophic events would go on to develop" PTSD symptoms, said Lt. Col. Charles C. Engel Jr., a psychiatrist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. "That was kind of a post-Vietnam War assumption. What we've learned over time is that probably, on average, really about two-thirds to three-fourths don't develop PTSD."

Friedman, of Dartmouth, said that research on the issue has not been that extensive and that the "deleterious" effects of trauma have received the most attention.

But that is changing. "The whole field, in the last four years, has shifted to a certain extent [to focus on] resilience, on human potential," he said.

Friedman said studies of World War II veterans often showed that they valued the experience, even though they had serious post-combat stress: "Yes, I've suffered," he said men would report, "but I wouldn't have given up this experience for anything in the world. . . . The things I experienced have made me a better man today."

Studies of Vietnam War POWs have shown similar sentiments. One study, in 1980, found that 61 percent of American POWS in North Vietnam believed their experience was ultimately beneficial.

Tom McNish, a former Air Force pilot who was a prisoner in North Vietnam for six years, said: "There is no question in my mind that the experience I had in Vietnam has had an overall very positive effect on my life. But I don't recommend it for anybody else. And I don't want to have to do it again."

Wounded veterans of the Iraq war say similar things. Adam Replogle, 25, of Wellington, Colo., a former Army sergeant and tank gunner who lost his left hand and the vision in his left eye in a battle in Karbala in 2004, said that he still has ups and downs but that after his experience in Iraq, not much worries him.

"Sometimes it takes people a lifetime to realize what it's all about and what's important and what's not," he said. "And you go through something like this and it grows you up a little bit and makes you realize that stuff a lot earlier in life."

Caesar, a native of Guyana who grew up in New York City, was a six-year Army veteran and a section chief in a field artillery unit in Iraq. He was in charge of a long-range, self-propelled 155mm howitzer -- a huge vehicle with treads that resembles a tank.

He was out on patrol in the self-propelled gun when the explosion occurred April 18, 2004. When the black smoke cleared, he looked down at his leg. It was flipped backward and "just dangling by the skin," he said. "It was severed at three different places in the knee. . . . The bone was splintered in different places. I knew there was no way they could put that back together."

He tried to hand his machine gun to a comrade but realized it was bent. He could hear gunfire and yelled for the hatches to be closed. He thought: "Oh, man. This is it. My life is over."

But it wasn't. The insurgents who staged the ambush melted away. He was medevaced to safety, and six days after the attack, he arrived at Walter Reed.

There, he was all right, except when he was alone. Then he would worry about the pain -- and the future. He was an athlete but realized that he might never run again. He wondered how women would react to a man with an amputated leg. It was depressing. Again, he said he would think, "My life is over."

A few days after he reached Walter Reed, he got more bad news: Eight men from his platoon had been killed by a car bomb in Baghdad. They were men he knew. One, in particular, had been a role model. "I was really devastated," he said.

Not all mental health experts believe in post-traumatic growth. Some think such positive attitudes simply stem from individual resilience or a natural course of psychological recovery.

George Bonnano, a psychologist at Teachers College, Columbia University, is skeptical of the growth theory. He said such reactions to trauma are better explained by personal resilience.

"I'm saying most people are able to maintain equilibrium pretty well after a traumatic event," he said. In addition, "it's fine to just recover," he said. "Bad things happen, and we get over them. We get better, and we put it behind us, and we move on."

In the weeks after his arrival at Walter Reed, Caesar met other severely injured soldiers and heard stories about their recoveries. "You start to build your confidence up," he said. "You start to shift focus.

"I'm a positive person," he said. "I try to look for the best. It could be worse. I lost a few friends out there. I made it back with just one missing limb, and I'm grateful for that. I'm thankful for just being here. Period."

At the same time, he said, he believes that he has changed. "It makes me appreciate life a whole lot more. . . . I'm looking forward to settling down, having a family."

Caesar said he has a friend who lost both arms in the war. Caesar said his friend once told him: "I would give anything to lose a leg. I would give both of my legs to have one of my arms" to be able to hold a child someday, should he ever become a father.

"Things like that make you think," Caesar said. "I can't complain. I haven't lost enough to complain."

Since being wounded, Caesar became a U.S. citizen last year, participated in three marathons using a racing wheelchair that he pedals with his hands, left the Army in January and landed a job with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

His leg still bothers him, and he walks with a pronounced limp.

At times, the opaque plastic socket of his artificial limb, which fits over his stump, lacerates his skin. The stump hurts when the thigh bone pokes against the skin. And he still gets down when he thinks about his dead buddies.

"It was a long journey back," he said. "I'm still not fully there. I'm still not 100 percent. I'm never going to be 100 percent. But at the same time, I can get as close to it as possible."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Progressive Christianity

About the Progressive Religious Tradition

Observing America in the late 19th century, British writer G.K. Chesterton called the United States "a nation with the soul of a church." At that time, the Protestant church began tackling social reform in what has become known as "social Christianity," or sometimes "Christian socialism," which was later adapted into the more moderate "Social Gospel."

The movement was a response to the rapid urbanization, industrialization, and mass immigration of the late 1800s. Protestant clergymen became interested in securing social justice for the poor, partly as an attempt to expand the appeal of the Protestant church in cities, where the Roman Catholic church was especially popular among the large immigrant population. Traditionally, the Social Gospel has focused on issues as varied as poverty, unemployment, civil rights, pollution, drug addiction, political corruption, and gun control.

The READER'S COMPANION TO AMERICAN HISTORY mentions three leaders of the Social Gospel movement: Washington Gladden, who "sympathized with workers and urged them to seek unity in Christianity," William Dwight Porter Bliss, who worked with the Knights of Labor and Socialist party, and Walter Rauschenbusch, a New York City Baptist minister who "called for a democratic cooperative society to be achieved by nonviolent means."

In his book CHRISTIANITY AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS, Rauschenbusch wrote of the Social Gospel:

Will the twentieth century mark for the future historian the real adolescence of humanity, the great emancipation from barbarism and from the paralysis of injustice, and the beginning of a progress in the intellectual, social, and moral life of mankind to which all past history has no parallel?

It will depend almost wholly on the moral forces which the Christian nations can bring to the fighting line against wrong, and the fighting energy of those moral forces will again depend on the degree to which they are inspired by religious faith and enthusiasm.

The Social Gospel rejected the conservative individualistic social ethic, instead developing a distinctively optimistic rationale as a result of "the theological liberalism that emerged out of attempts to reconcile the Christian faith with evolutionary thought, historical-critical analysis of the Bible, philosophical idealism, and the study of other world religions."

The core of Christian progressivism was "work in this world to establish a Kingdom of God with social justice for all." The results of the movement were mixed. Although it helped liberalize organized religion and inspired many political and social reformers to look at reform in moral terms, the Social Gospel failed to win over many urban immigrants, and offered few long-term solutions to urban problems.

However, the work of the progressive social reformers was not in vain. Organized social concern and many of the reforms it inspired have remained intact through the twentieth century and continue today, evident both in current social welfare programs. The spirit and mission of the Riverside Church can be linked to the tradition of the Social Gospel, often said to be one of the most powerful religious movements in American history.

Critics of the Social Gospel, such as Frederick Nymeyer, publisher and principal author of PROGRESSIVE CALVINISM, point to the fact that it has never yet been successful at effecting social change. Writing in 1971, Nymeyer expressed his opinion in SOCIAL ACTION, HUNDRED NINETEEN:

The Social Gospel may be the most crucial of all problems besetting Christian churches at this time, for when a Christian's ethical certitudes are revealed to be defective, as it always turns out to be in the Social Gospel, then he ends up abandoning confidence in valid, Biblical faith. In practice what happens is that when Social Gospel action fails to produce valid results, the person promoting such programs does not abandon the Social Gospel and return to the true Gospel, but plunges deeper into further Social Gospel actions with progressively more frustrating results.

Despite unfavorable evaluation, the movement by religious organizations and churches toward social reform has not diminished. In fact, in the past few decades, powerful groups have sprung up expressly for the purpose of influencing public policy. Read about some of the political groups on both sides of the political spectrum. Also on NOW's site, learn more about the line between church and state.

Sources: Frederick Nymeyer's SOCIAL ACTION, HUNDRED NINETEEN; Modern History Sourcebook; The Oxford Companion to United States History; U-S-History.com

Ethics in Iraq? One Soldier's Story

THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ
A Journey That Ended in Anguish
Col. Ted Westhusing, a military ethicist who volunteered to go to Iraq, was upset by what he saw. His apparent suicide raises questions.
By T. Christian Miller
Times Staff Writer

November 27, 2005

"War is the hardest place to make moral judgments."

Col. Ted Westhusing, Journal of Military Ethics

*

WASHINGTON — One hot, dusty day in June, Col. Ted Westhusing was found dead in a trailer at a military base near the Baghdad airport, a single gunshot wound to the head.

The Army would conclude that he committed suicide with his service pistol. At the time, he was the highest-ranking officer to die in Iraq.

The Army closed its case. But the questions surrounding Westhusing's death continue.

Westhusing, 44, was no ordinary officer. He was one of the Army's leading scholars of military ethics, a full professor at West Point who volunteered to serve in Iraq to be able to better teach his students. He had a doctorate in philosophy; his dissertation was an extended meditation on the meaning of honor.

So it was only natural that Westhusing acted when he learned of possible corruption by U.S. contractors in Iraq. A few weeks before he died, Westhusing received an anonymous complaint that a private security company he oversaw had cheated the U.S. government and committed human rights violations. Westhusing confronted the contractor and reported the concerns to superiors, who launched an investigation.

In e-mails to his family, Westhusing seemed especially upset by one conclusion he had reached: that traditional military values such as duty, honor and country had been replaced by profit motives in Iraq, where the U.S. had come to rely heavily on contractors for jobs once done by the military.

His death stunned all who knew him. Colleagues and commanders wondered whether they had missed signs of depression. He had been losing weight and not sleeping well. But only a day before his death, Westhusing won praise from a senior officer for his progress in training Iraqi police.

His friends and family struggle with the idea that Westhusing could have killed himself. He was a loving father and husband and a devout Catholic. He was an extraordinary intellect and had mastered ancient Greek and Italian. He had less than a month before his return home. It seemed impossible that anything could crush the spirit of a man with such a powerful sense of right and wrong.

On the Internet and in conversations with one another, Westhusing's family and friends have questioned the military investigation.

A note found in his trailer seemed to offer clues. Written in what the Army determined was his handwriting, the colonel appeared to be struggling with a final question.

How is honor possible in a war like the one in Iraq?

Even at Jenks High School in suburban Tulsa, one of the biggest in Oklahoma, Westhusing stood out. He was starting point guard for the Trojans, a team that made a strong run for the state basketball championship his senior year. He was a National Merit Scholarship finalist. He was an officer in a fellowship of Christian athletes.

Joe Holladay, who coached Westhusing before going on to become assistant coach of the University of North Carolina Tarheels, recalled Westhusing showing up at the gym at 7 a.m. to get in 100 extra practice shots.

"There was never a question of how hard he played or how much effort he put into something," Holladay said. "Whatever he did, he did well. He was the cream of the crop."

When Westhusing entered West Point in 1979, the tradition-bound institution was just emerging from a cheating scandal that had shamed the Army. Restoring honor to the nation's preeminent incubator for Army leadership was the focus of the day.

Cadets are taught to value duty, honor and country, and are drilled in West Point's strict moral code: A cadet will not lie, cheat or steal — or tolerate those who do.

Westhusing embraced it. He was selected as honor captain for the entire academy his senior year. Col. Tim Trainor, a classmate and currently a West Point professor, said Westhusing was strict but sympathetic to cadets' problems. He remembered him as "introspective."

Westhusing graduated third in his class in 1983 and became an infantry platoon leader. He received special forces training, served in Italy, South Korea and Honduras, and eventually became division operations officer for the 82nd Airborne, based at Ft. Bragg, N.C.

He loved commanding soldiers. But he remained drawn to intellectual pursuits.

In 2000, Westhusing enrolled in Emory University's doctoral philosophy program. The idea was to return to West Point to teach future leaders.

He immediately stood out on the leafy Atlanta campus. Married with children, he was surrounded by young, single students. He was a deeply faithful Christian in a graduate program of professional skeptics.

Plunged into academia, Westhusing held fast to his military ties. Students and professors recalled him jogging up steep hills in combat boots and camouflage, his rucksack full, to stay in shape. He wrote a paper challenging an essay that questioned the morality of patriotism.

"He was as straight an arrow as you would possibly find," said Aaron Fichtelberg, a fellow student and now a professor at the University of Delaware. "He seemed unshakable."

In his 352-page dissertation, Westhusing discussed the ethics of war, focusing on examples of military honor from Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee to the Israeli army. It is a dense, searching and sometimes personal effort to define what, exactly, constitutes virtuous conduct in the context of the modern U.S. military.

"Born to be a warrior, I desire these answers not just for philosophical reasons, but for self-knowledge," he wrote in the opening pages.

As planned, Westhusing returned to teach philosophy and English at West Point as a full professor with a guaranteed lifetime assignment. He settled into life on campus with his wife, Michelle, and their three young children.

But amid the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he told friends that he felt experience in Iraq would help him in teaching cadets. In the fall of 2004, he volunteered for duty.

"He wanted to serve, he wanted to use his skills, maybe he wanted some glory," recalled Nick Fotion, his advisor at Emory. "He wanted to go."

In January, Westhusing began work on what the Pentagon considered the most important mission in Iraq: training Iraqi forces to take over security duties from U.S. troops.

Westhusing's task was to oversee a private security company, Virginia-based USIS, which had contracts worth $79 million to train a corps of Iraqi police to conduct special operations.

In March, Gen. David Petraeus, commanding officer of the Iraqi training mission, praised Westhusing's performance, saying he had exceeded "lofty expectations."

"Thanks much, sir, but we can do much better and will," Westhusing wrote back, according to a copy of the Army investigation of his death that was obtained by The Times.

In April, his mood seemed to have darkened. He worried over delays in training one of the police battalions.

Then, in May, Westhusing received an anonymous four-page letter that contained detailed allegations of wrongdoing by USIS.

The writer accused USIS of deliberately shorting the government on the number of trainers to increase its profit margin. More seriously, the writer detailed two incidents in which USIS contractors allegedly had witnessed or participated in the killing of Iraqis.

A USIS contractor accompanied Iraqi police trainees during the assault on Fallouja last November and later boasted about the number of insurgents he had killed, the letter says. Private security contractors are not allowed to conduct offensive operations.

In a second incident, the letter says, a USIS employee saw Iraqi police trainees kill two innocent Iraqi civilians, then covered it up. A USIS manager "did not want it reported because he thought it would put his contract at risk."

Westhusing reported the allegations to his superiors but told one of them, Gen. Joseph Fil, that he believed USIS was complying with the terms of its contract.

U.S. officials investigated and found "no contractual violations," an Army spokesman said. Bill Winter, a USIS spokesman, said the investigation "found these allegations to be unfounded."

However, several U.S. officials said inquiries on USIS were ongoing. One U.S. military official, who, like others, requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case, said the inquiries had turned up problems, but nothing to support the more serious charges of human rights violations.

"As is typical, there may be a wisp of truth in each of the allegations," the official said.

The letter shook Westhusing, who felt personally implicated by accusations that he was too friendly with USIS management, according to an e-mail in the report.

"This is a mess … dunno what I will do with this," he wrote home to his family May 18.

The colonel began to complain to colleagues about "his dislike of the contractors," who, he said, "were paid too much money by the government," according to one captain.

"The meetings [with contractors] were never easy and always contentious. The contracts were in dispute and always under discussion," an Army Corps of Engineers official told investigators.

By June, some of Westhusing's colleagues had begun to worry about his health. They later told investigators that he had lost weight and begun fidgeting, sometimes staring off into space. He seemed withdrawn, they said.

His family was also becoming worried. He described feeling alone and abandoned. He sent home brief, cryptic e-mails, including one that said, "[I] didn't think I'd make it last night." He talked of resigning his command.

Westhusing brushed aside entreaties for details, writing that he would say more when he returned home. The family responded with an outpouring of e-mails expressing love and support.

His wife recalled a phone conversation that chilled her two weeks before his death.

"I heard something in his voice," she told investigators, according to a transcript of the interview. "In Ted's voice, there was fear. He did not like the nighttime and being alone."

Westhusing's father, Keith, said the family did not want to comment for this article.

On June 4, Westhusing left his office in the U.S.-controlled Green Zone of Baghdad to view a demonstration of Iraqi police preparedness at Camp Dublin, the USIS headquarters at the airport. He gave a briefing that impressed Petraeus and a visiting scholar. He stayed overnight at the USIS camp.

That night in his office, a USIS secretary would later tell investigators, she watched Westhusing take out his 9-millimeter pistol and "play" with it, repeatedly unholstering the weapon.

At a meeting the next morning to discuss construction delays, he seemed agitated. He stewed over demands for tighter vetting of police candidates, worried that it would slow the mission. He seemed upset over funding shortfalls.

Uncharacteristically, he lashed out at the contractors in attendance, according to the Army Corps official. In three months, the official had never seen Westhusing upset.

"He was sick of money-grubbing contractors," the official recounted. Westhusing said that "he had not come over to Iraq for this."

The meeting broke up shortly before lunch. About 1 p.m., a USIS manager went looking for Westhusing because he was scheduled for a ride back to the Green Zone. After getting no answer, the manager returned about 15 minutes later. Another USIS employee peeked through a window. He saw Westhusing lying on the floor in a pool of blood.

The manager rushed into the trailer and tried to revive Westhusing. The manager told investigators that he picked up the pistol at Westhusing's feet and tossed it onto the bed.

"I knew people would show up," that manager said later in attempting to explain why he had handled the weapon. "With 30 years from military and law enforcement training, I did not want the weapon to get bumped and go off."

After a three-month inquiry, investigators declared Westhusing's death a suicide. A test showed gunpowder residue on his hands. A shell casing in the room bore markings indicating it had been fired from his service revolver.

Then there was the note.

Investigators found it lying on Westhusing's bed. The handwriting matched his.

The first part of the four-page letter lashes out at Petraeus and Fil. Both men later told investigators that they had not criticized Westhusing or heard negative comments from him. An Army review undertaken after Westhusing's death was complimentary of the command climate under the two men, a U.S. military official said.

Most of the letter is a wrenching account of a struggle for honor in a strange land.

"I cannot support a msn [mission] that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars. I am sullied," it says. "I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored.

"Death before being dishonored any more."

A psychologist reviewed Westhusing's e-mails and interviewed colleagues. She concluded that the anonymous letter had been the "most difficult and probably most painful stressor."

She said that Westhusing had placed too much pressure on himself to succeed and that he was unusually rigid in his thinking. Westhusing struggled with the idea that monetary values could outweigh moral ones in war. This, she said, was a flaw.

"Despite his intelligence, his ability to grasp the idea that profit is an important goal for people working in the private sector was surprisingly limited," wrote Lt. Col. Lisa Breitenbach. "He could not shift his mind-set from the military notion of completing a mission irrespective of cost, nor could he change his belief that doing the right thing because it was the right thing to do should be the sole motivator for businesses."

One military officer said he felt Westhusing had trouble reconciling his ideals with Iraq's reality. Iraq "isn't a black-and-white place," the officer said. "There's a lot of gray."

Fil and Petraeus, Westhusing's commanding officers, declined to comment on the investigation, but they praised him. He was "an extremely bright, highly competent, completely professional and exceedingly hard-working officer. His death was truly tragic and was a tremendous blow," Petraeus said.

Westhusing's family and friends are troubled that he died at Camp Dublin, where he was without a bodyguard, surrounded by the same contractors he suspected of wrongdoing. They wonder why the manager who discovered Westhusing's body and picked up his weapon was not tested for gunpowder residue.

Mostly, they wonder how Col. Ted Westhusing — father, husband, son and expert on doing right — could have found himself in a place so dark that he saw no light.

"He's the last person who would commit suicide," said Fichtelberg, his graduate school colleague. "He couldn't have done it. He's just too damn stubborn."

Westhusing's body was flown back to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Waiting to receive it were his family and a close friend from West Point, a lieutenant colonel.

In the military report, the unidentified colonel told investigators that he had turned to Michelle, Westhusing's wife, and asked what happened.

She answered:

"Iraq."


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and a comment:

unday, November 27, 2005
When Honor Is No Longer Possible: A Nation Beyond Forgiveness
Some stories are almost impossible to contemplate. This is one of them.

In June, Col. Ted Westhusing was found dead near the Baghdad airport. His death was most likely a suicide, a single gunshot wound to the head. His wife, who probably understood her husband better than anyone else, had no trouble identifying the cause:

In the military report, the unidentified colonel told investigators that he had turned to Michelle, Westhusing's wife, and asked what happened.

She answered:

"Iraq."

Iraq killed Col. Westhusing -- but it was much more and much worse than that. One key fact you should keep in mind is that Col. Westhusing was an expert in military ethics. That is crucial for many reasons.

The Los Angeles Times tells the story in some detail. Col. Westhusing was a man of unusual and notable accomplishment:


Westhusing, 44, was no ordinary officer. He was one of the Army's leading scholars of military ethics, a full professor at West Point who volunteered to serve in Iraq to be able to better teach his students. He had a doctorate in philosophy; his dissertation was an extended meditation on the meaning of honor.

So it was only natural that Westhusing acted when he learned of possible corruption by U.S. contractors in Iraq. A few weeks before he died, Westhusing received an anonymous complaint that a private security company he oversaw had cheated the U.S. government and committed human rights violations. Westhusing confronted the contractor and reported the concerns to superiors, who launched an investigation.

In e-mails to his family, Westhusing seemed especially upset by one conclusion he had reached: that traditional military values such as duty, honor and country had been replaced by profit motives in Iraq, where the U.S. had come to rely heavily on contractors for jobs once done by the military.

His death stunned all who knew him. Colleagues and commanders wondered whether they had missed signs of depression. He had been losing weight and not sleeping well. But only a day before his death, Westhusing won praise from a senior officer for his progress in training Iraqi police.

As we always see in such tragedies, almost no one wants to accept that he could have killed himself. We refuse to acknowledge that sometimes the horror is too much -- that unusually good men, men who care passionately about doing what is right and who suffer more deeply than most of us can imagine when terrible wrong is committed, sometimes simply cannot bear any more. We look for reassurance, and for a way out -- any way to avoid seeing the full truth, which we cannot bear to contemplate.

So we look for other explanations:

His friends and family struggle with the idea that Westhusing could have killed himself. He was a loving father and husband and a devout Catholic. He was an extraordinary intellect, having mastered ancient Greek and Italian. He had less than a month before his return home. It seemed impossible that anything could crush the spirit of a man with such a powerful sense of right and wrong.

On the Internet and in conversations with one another, Westhusing's family and friends have questioned the military investigation.

...

[T]hey wonder how Col. Ted Westhusing — father, husband, son and expert on doing right — could have found himself in a place so dark that he saw no light.

"He's the last person who would commit suicide," said Fichtelberg, his graduate school colleague. "He couldn't have done it. He's just too damn stubborn."

We demand that others be able to withstand the horrors that we will not see. If a man like Col. Westhusing kills himself, we say that his "spirit" was "crushed." We will not consider the possibility that he was left with no other way to make his protest known. No one would listen when he was alive -- and we still won't listen now that he is dead.

But Col. Westhusing himself made his reasons perfectly plain:

A note found in his trailer seemed to offer clues. Written in what the Army determined was his handwriting, the colonel appeared to be struggling with a final question.

How is honor possible in a war like the one in Iraq?

...

Most of the letter is a wrenching account of a struggle for honor in a strange land.

"I cannot support a msn [mission] that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars. I am sullied," it says. "I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored.

"Death before being dishonored any more."

The story tells us why Col. Westhusing was finally compelled to this ultimate conclusion:

In January, Westhusing began work on what the Pentagon considered the most important mission in Iraq: training Iraqi forces to take over security duties from U.S. troops.

Westhusing's task was to oversee a private security company, Virginia-based USIS, which had contracts worth $79 million to train a corps of Iraqi police to conduct special operations.

...

In April, his mood seemed to have darkened. He worried over delays in training one of the police battalions.

Then, in May, Westhusing received an anonymous four-page letter that contained detailed allegations of wrongdoing by USIS.

The writer accused USIS of deliberately shorting the government on the number of trainers to increase its profit margin. More seriously, the writer detailed two incidents in which USIS contractors allegedly had witnessed or participated in the killing of Iraqis.

A USIS contractor accompanied Iraqi police trainees during the assault on Fallouja last November and later boasted about the number of insurgents he had killed, the letter says. Private security contractors are not allowed to conduct offensive operations.

In a second incident, the letter says, a USIS employee saw Iraqi police trainees kill two innocent Iraqi civilians, then covered it up. A USIS manager "did not want it reported because he thought it would put his contract at risk."

And then there was this:

On June 4, Westhusing left his office in the U.S.-controlled Green Zone of Baghdad to view a demonstration of Iraqi police preparedness at Camp Dublin, the USIS headquarters at the airport. He gave a briefing that impressed Petraeus and a visiting scholar. He stayed overnight at the USIS camp.

That night in his office, a USIS secretary would later tell investigators, she watched Westhusing take out his 9-millimeter pistol and "play" with it, repeatedly unholstering the weapon.

At a meeting the next morning to discuss construction delays, he seemed agitated. He stewed over demands for tighter vetting of police candidates, worried that it would slow the mission. He seemed upset over funding shortfalls.

Uncharacteristically, he lashed out at the contractors in attendance, according to the Army Corps official. In three months, the official had never seen Westhusing upset.

"He was sick of money-grubbing contractors," the official recounted. Westhusing said that "he had not come over to Iraq for this."

And here, a psychologist identifies the nature of the problem, but refuses to acknowledge its ultimate source or meaning. She unforgivably finds fault with Westhusing -- because placing the blame where it properly belongs is unthinkable to her:

A psychologist reviewed Westhusing's e-mails and interviewed colleagues. She concluded that the anonymous letter had been the "most difficult and probably most painful stressor."

She said that Westhusing had placed too much pressure on himself to succeed and that he was unusually rigid in his thinking. Westhusing struggled with the idea that monetary values could outweigh moral ones in war. This, she said, was a flaw.

"Despite his intelligence, his ability to grasp the idea that profit is an important goal for people working in the private sector was surprisingly limited," wrote Lt. Col. Lisa Breitenbach. "He could not shift his mind-set from the military notion of completing a mission irrespective of cost, nor could he change his belief that doing the right thing because it was the right thing to do should be the sole motivator for businesses."

If you wanted a final, unanswerable reason as to why war should not be "privatized," there it is -- if you're willing to see it. I think Col. Westhusing understood perfectly well that "profit is an important goal for people working in the private sector." But he didn't think that war should be viewed as just another business, or as any sort of "business" at all. This psychologist, and the entire apparatus of our government and military today, find no problem with this approach. They embrace it enthusiastically. Today, it is "a flaw" to think that "monetary values" should not "outweigh moral ones in a war." This is where we are now.

Life and death, torture, suffering, unendurable loss and agony -- it's all a matter of profit and loss. Anything that improves the bottom line is permitted -- even the slaughter of innocents. We are a nation of mercenaries -- and we have lost our soul, perhaps for good. Col. Westhusing finally concluded that honor was no longer possible, and he saw no way to stop the horror. Do you wonder at what he did? We created a situation where he felt he no longer had any meaningful choices -- but he refused to give up his conviction that you do "the right thing because it was the right thing to do."

And yet, we insist on finding fault with him. How did we reach such a dark and terrible place?

So I must respectfully disagree with Col. Westhusing's wife in one respect. Iraq didn't kill her husband.

Bush and all those who support this unnecessary, illegitimate and immoral war killed him. It is a war that can only be fought by immoral means, since it is completely sundered from any moral foundation.

And if you supported and still support this war, you helped to kill him.

How much longer are we going to permit this to go on? A year? Two years? Five years? How many more people have to die? How many more people will lose their sight, or their legs, or their minds? Why aren't we marching in the streets to end this madness?

I despair for my country. We tolerate all these horrors, and we barely protest. I think we are beyond forgiveness now. Forgiveness is not possible for what we have let ourselves become.

posted by Arthur Silber at 12:48 AM


All stories teach, whether the storyteller intends them to or not. They teach the world we create. They teach the morality we live by. They teach it much more effectively than moral precepts and instructions. ...

We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou Shalt Not is soon forgotten, but Once Upon A Time lasts forever. -- Philip Pullman


Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts. -- Salman Rushdie


Stories are the single most powerful weapon in a leader's arsenal. -- Howard Gardner


History is nothing but a series of stories, whether it be world history or family history. -- Bill Mooney and David Holt, The Storyteller's Guide

Write me:
arthur4801 at yahoo dot com


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Frank Rich...Rewriting History, Bush's Way

Dishonest, Reprehensible, Corrupt ...
By Frank Rich
The New York Times

Sunday 27 November 2005

George W. Bush is so desperate for allies that his hapless Asian tour took him to Ulan Bator, a first for an American president, so he could mingle with the yaks and give personal thanks for Mongolia's contribution of some 160 soldiers to "the coalition of the willing." Dick Cheney, whose honest-and-ethical poll number hit 29 percent in Newsweek's latest survey, is so radioactive that he vanished into his bunker for weeks at a time during the storms Katrina and Scootergate.

The whole world can see that both men are on the run. Just how much so became clear in the brace of nasty broadsides each delivered this month about Iraq. Neither man engaged the national debate ignited by John Murtha about how our troops might be best redeployed in a recalibrated battle against Islamic radicalism. Neither offered a plan for "victory." Instead, both impugned their critics' patriotism and retreated into the past to defend the origins of the war. In a seasonally appropriate impersonation of the misanthropic Mr. Potter from "It's a Wonderful Life," the vice president went so far as to label critics of the administration's prewar smoke screen both "dishonest and reprehensible" and "corrupt and shameless." He sounded but one epithet away from a defibrillator.

The Washington line has it that the motivation for the Bush-Cheney rage is the need to push back against opponents who have bloodied the White House in the polls. But, Mr. Murtha notwithstanding, the Democrats are too feeble to merit that strong a response. There is more going on here than politics.

Much more: each day brings slam-dunk evidence that the doomsday threats marshaled by the administration to sell the war weren't, in Cheney-speak, just dishonest and reprehensible but also corrupt and shameless. The more the president and vice president tell us that their mistakes were merely innocent byproducts of the same bad intelligence seen by everyone else in the world, the more we learn that this was not so. The web of half-truths and falsehoods used to sell the war did not happen by accident; it was woven by design and then foisted on the public by a P.R. operation built expressly for that purpose in the White House. The real point of the Bush-Cheney verbal fisticuffs this month, like the earlier campaign to take down Joseph Wilson, is less to smite Democrats than to cover up wrongdoing in the executive branch between 9/11 and shock and awe.

The cover-up is failing, however. No matter how much the president and vice president raise their decibel levels, the truth keeps roaring out. A nearly 7,000-word investigation in last Sunday's Los Angeles Times found that Mr. Bush and his aides had "issued increasingly dire warnings" about Iraq's mobile biological weapons labs long after U.S. intelligence authorities were told by Germany's Federal Intelligence Service that the principal source for these warnings, an Iraqi defector in German custody code-named Curveball, "never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so." The five senior German intelligence officials who spoke to The Times said they were aghast that such long-discredited misinformation from a suspected fabricator turned up in Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations and in the president's 2003 State of the Union address (where it shared billing with the equally bogus 16 words about Saddam's fictitious African uranium).

Right after the L.A. Times scoop, Murray Waas filled in another piece of the prewar propaganda puzzle. He reported in the nonpartisan National Journal that 10 days after 9/11, "President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda."

The information was delivered in the President's Daily Brief, a C.I.A. assessment also given to the vice president and other top administration officials. Nonetheless Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney repeatedly pounded in an implicit (and at times specific) link between Saddam and Al Qaeda until Americans even started to believe that the 9/11 attacks had been carried out by Iraqis. More damning still, Mr. Waas finds that the "few credible reports" of Iraq-Al Qaeda contacts actually involved efforts by Saddam to monitor or infiltrate Islamic terrorist groups, which he regarded as adversaries of his secular regime. Thus Saddam's antipathy to Islamic radicals was the same in 2001 as it had been in 1983, when Donald Rumsfeld, then a Reagan administration emissary, embraced the dictator as a secular fascist ally in the American struggle against the theocratic fascist rulers in Iran.

What these revelations also tell us is that Mr. Bush was wrong when he said in his Veterans Day speech that more than 100 Congressional Democrats who voted for the Iraqi war resolution "had access to the same intelligence" he did. They didn't have access to the President's Daily Brief that Mr. Waas uncovered. They didn't have access to the information that German intelligence officials spoke about to The Los Angeles Times. Nor did they have access to material from a Defense Intelligence Agency report, released by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan this month, which as early as February 2002 demolished the reliability of another major source that the administration had persistently used for its false claims about Iraqi-Al Qaeda collaboration.

The more we learn about the road to Iraq, the more we realize that it's a losing game to ask what lies the White House told along the way. A simpler question might be: What was not a lie? The situation recalls Mary McCarthy's explanation to Dick Cavett about why she thought Lillian Hellman was a dishonest writer: "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.' "

If Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney believe they were truthful in the run-up to the war, it's easy for them to make their case. Instead of falsely claiming that they've been exonerated by two commissions that looked into prewar intelligence - neither of which addressed possible White House misuse and mischaracterization of that intelligence - they should just release the rest of the President's Daily Briefs and other prewar documents that are now trickling out. Instead, incriminatingly enough, they are fighting the release of any such information, including unclassified documents found in post-invasion Iraq requested from the Pentagon by the pro-war, neocon Weekly Standard. As Scott Shane reported in The New York Times last month, Vietnam documents are now off limits, too: the National Security Agency won't make public a 2001 historical report on how American officials distorted intelligence in 1964 about the Gulf of Tonkin incident for fear it might "prompt uncomfortable comparisons" between the games White Houses played then and now to gin up wars.

Sooner or later - probably sooner, given the accelerating pace of recent revelations - this embarrassing information will leak out anyway. But the administration's deliberate efforts to suppress or ignore intelligence that contradicted its Iraq crusade are only part of the prewar story. There were other shadowy stations on the disinformation assembly line. Among them were the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, a two-man Pentagon operation specifically created to cherry-pick intelligence for Mr. Cheney's apocalyptic Iraqi scenarios, and the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), in which Karl Rove, Karen Hughes and the Cheney hands Lewis Libby and Mary Matalin, among others, plotted to mainline this propaganda into the veins of the press and public. These murky aspects of the narrative - like the role played by a private P.R. contractor, the Rendon Group, examined by James Bamford in the current Rolling Stone - have yet to be recounted in full.

No debate about the past, of course, can undo the mess that the administration made in Iraq. But the past remains important because it is a road map to both the present and the future. Leaders who dissembled then are still doing so. Indeed, they do so even in the same speeches in which they vehemently deny having misled us then - witness Mr. Bush's false claims about what prewar intelligence was seen by Congress and Mr. Cheney's effort last Monday to again conflate the terrorists of 9/11 with those "making a stand in Iraq." (Maj. Gen. Douglas Lute, director of operations for Centcom, says the Iraqi insurgency is 90 percent homegrown.) These days Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney routinely exaggerate the readiness of Iraqi troops, much as they once inflated Saddam's W.M.D.'s.

"We're not going to sit by and let them rewrite history," the vice president said of his critics. "We're going to continue throwing their own words back at them." But according to a Harris poll released by The Wall Street Journal last Wednesday, 64 percent of Americans now believe that the Bush administration "generally misleads the American public on current issues to achieve its own ends." That's why it's Mr. Cheney's and the president's own words that are being thrown back now - not to rewrite history but to reveal it for the first time to an angry country that has learned the hard way that it can no longer afford to be without the truth.