Friday, August 24, 2007

Bush's New War Drums for Iran

By Ray McGovern
August 21, 2007 ~~ Consortiumnews.com

It is as though I’m back as an analyst at the CIA, trying to estimate the chances of an attack on Iran. The putative attacker, though, happens to be our own president.

It is precisely the work we analysts used to do. And, while it is still a bit jarring to be turning our analytical tools on the U.S. leadership, it is by no means entirely new. For, of necessity, we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have been doing that for almost six years now—ever since 9/11, when “everything changed.”

Of necessity? Yes, because, with very few exceptions, American journalists lose their jobs if they expose things like fraudulent wars.

The craft of CIA analysis was designed to be an all-source operation, meaning that we analysts were responsible—and held accountable—for assimilating information from all sources and coming to judgments on what it all meant. We used information of all kinds, from the most sophisticated technical collection platforms to spies to open media.

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Iraq War Resisters to Get Boost from Veterans Group


SAINT LOUIS, Aug 20 (OneWorld) - Members of a leading Iraq war veterans' organization voted this weekend to launch a campaign encouraging U.S. troops to refuse to fight.

U.S. Army medic Augustin Aguayo filed for conscientious objector status and refused a second tour of duty in Iraq.
U.S. Army medic Augustin Aguayo filed for conscientious objector status and refused a second tour of duty in Iraq. © aguayodefense.org
The decision was made at the group's annual membership meeting, held this weekend in Saint Louis, Missouri alongside the annual convention of the Veterans for Peace organization.

"Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) decided to make support of war resisters a major part of what we do," said Garrett Rappenhagen, a former U.S. Army sniper who served in Iraq from February 2004 to February 2005.

"There's a misconception that they're cowards," Rappenhagen said. "Most war resisters have already gone on a tour in Iraq. They've seen the war firsthand and have come to the conclusion that it's morally wrong. This is something we all should support. So to break that timidness of how we view war resisters in America, IVAW decided to embrace them."

To underscore that point, the veterans group elected Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia chair of its board of directors. In the winter of 2003, Mejia was the first soldier to refuse to return to fight in Iraq after an initial tour in the war zone.

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The War as We Saw It

Op-Ed Contributors

Baghdad

VIEWED from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)

The claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere. What soldiers call the “battle space” remains the same, with changes only at the margins. It is crowded with actors who do not fit neatly into boxes: Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, criminals and armed tribes. This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army, which have been trained and armed at United States taxpayers’ expense.

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