The Early Bird 4/9/07

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Los Angeles Times
April 9, 2007
Pg. 1
10 U.S. Soldiers Killed In Iraq
The attacks take place outside Baghdad. Radical cleric Sadr plans an anti-American demonstration.
By Ned Parker, Times Staff Writer
BAGHDAD — Ten U.S. soldiers were killed over the weekend as armed groups avoiding Baghdad's security dragnet attacked with bombs and other weapons in cities and towns just outside the capital.
The violence came as radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr called on Iraqi soldiers and police to unite with his Al Mahdi militia to oppose the American presence in Iraq. Thousands of his supporters plan to hold a protest today in the shrine city of Najaf against what Sadr considers to be the United States' four-year occupation of Iraq.
In the city of Mahmoudiya, just south of Baghdad, a car bombing Sunday killed 17 Iraqis and wounded 26.
In Washington, meanwhile, debate between Democrats and Republicans continued over whether funding for the U.S. war effort should be tied to a deadline for the withdrawal of American forces.
The U.S. military has acknowledged that the security crackdown in Baghdad might increase attacks outside the capital.
"You have the enemy trying to show it is still strong and able to move and stir fear in the population," U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Christopher Garver said Sunday. "We anticipated a movement of enemy forces and violence to the north, south, east and west of Baghdad."
Three of the U.S. soldiers died Sunday and one was wounded when a bomb ripped through their vehicle south of Baghdad, the military said in a statement. A mortar or rocket strike claimed the life of a soldier and wounded three others in a separate attack in that region.
The military also reported Sunday that four U.S. soldiers died and one was wounded Saturday in an explosion in Diyala, a restive province just north and east of the capital. Two other soldiers died of combat injuries; one of them had been wounded in Salahuddin province north of Baghdad. The military provided no details about the attacks.
The deaths brought to at least 3,282 the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq since March 2003, according to the website icasualties.org, which tracks casualties in the campaign.
U.S. and Iraqi forces began a crackdown on insurgent and sectarian violence in the capital in mid-February.
Since then, death squad killings have been reduced in Baghdad, but car bombings in the city have continued and violence has surged in the regions just outside the capital.
The U.S. Army is in the process of inserting an additional combat brigade from its 3rd Infantry Division south of the capital in a bid to rein in insurgents fleeing Baghdad and prevent Sunni Arab rebels from bringing car bombs and other weapons into the capital.
The military also has moved a battalion of Stryker armored vehicles into Diyala in an effort to assert control. Violence recently has increased sharply in the province, which is a microcosm of Iraq, with its mixed population of Shiite and Sunni Muslims and ethnic Kurds.
Amid Sunday's attacks, Sadr, whose social and political movement commands deep-rooted popular support, issued a statement urging Iraqi forces not to obey the Americans and to unite with his Al Mahdi militia to end the U.S. presence in Iraq.
He stopped short of calling for an open revolt against the American troops and instead counseled his followers to be patient.
Sadr has ordered his followers to respect the security crackdown in Baghdad, though his forces have been involved in clashes elsewhere. His statement Sunday came after three days of fighting that pitted his militia against Iraqi and U.S.-led foreign troops in the south-central city of Diwaniya.
"We see what is happening in … Diwaniya of preplanned troubles to drag brothers into fighting and struggle and even killing," Sadr wrote. "My brothers at the Imam Al Mahdi army, my brothers in the security forces, enough fighting among you. This is giving success to our enemy's plans."
In response to his statement, his fighters silenced their guns in Diwaniya, said a member of the area's government council, who belongs to the Sadr movement.
The head of his bloc in parliament, Nassar Rubaie, insisted that the movement was committed to nonviolent resistance.
"We are now at the stage of political action," Rubaie said Sunday. "Peaceful means is the right way and has proved to be correct."
Sadr called the Najaf demonstration for today in part to mark the fourth anniversary of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime by U.S.-led forces. His followers in Baghdad hung Iraqi national flags from their homes, street signs and cars in response to their leader's demand to put a nationalist face on the coming protest.
"The Americans call the 9th of April the liberation of Baghdad," said one man who identified himself as Alaa, "but it was just an invasion, and liberated the city from Saddam for them, not for us."
The cities of Baghdad and Najaf have declared bans on vehicle traffic today in an attempt to stave off any attacks on the anniversary.
Sunday's car bombing came in an area south of Baghdad that has served as a base for armed groups trying to strike the capital. U.S. and Iraqi troops have been trying to subdue the area.
The vehicle, packed with about 700 pounds of TNT, hit a strip of apartment buildings with auto mechanics' shops on the ground floor, said Baghdad provincial council member Sheik Basim Banzi, who lives in Mahmoudiya.
The victims were both Shiites and Sunnis.
The U.S. military also said Sunday that it had captured a senior Al Qaeda in Iraq leader, described as a gatekeeper for the group's Baghdad chief, during a raid Sunday morning in the city. Two other people, one of them said to be a car bomb specialist, also were detained.
Seventeen bodies were found dumped around Baghdad. In Baqubah, the capital of Diyala province, five corpses were found. An additional 10 Iraqis were killed during the day in various acts of violence.
In the southern city of Basra, the British military handed over the Shatt al Arab Hotel to the Iraqi army in the countdown to its anticipated transfer of security responsibility for the port city to the Iraqis this year.
On the diplomatic front, Iran said its refusal Saturday to allow Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's plane to fly through Iranian airspace on its way to Japan was only a technical issue.
Times staff writers Raheem Salman, Zeena Kareem and Saif Hameed contributed to this report.
New York Times
April 9, 2007
Pg. 1
Patterns Of War Shift Amid U.S. Force Buildup
By Alissa J. Rubin and Edward Wong
BAGHDAD, April 8 — Nearly two months into the new security push in Baghdad, there has been some success in reducing the number of death squad victims found crumpled in the streets each day.
And while the overall death rates for all of Iraq have not dropped significantly, largely because of devastating suicide bombings, a few parts of the capital have become calmer as some death squads have decided to lie low.
But there is little sign that the Baghdad push is accomplishing its main purpose: to create an island of stability in which Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs and Kurds can try to figure out how to run the country together. There has been no visible move toward compromise on the main dividing issues, like regional autonomy and more power sharing between Shiites and Sunnis.
For American troops, Baghdad has become a deadlier battleground as they have poured into the capital to confront Sunni and Shiite militias on their home streets. The rate of American deaths in the city over the first seven weeks of the security plan has nearly doubled from the previous period, though it has stayed roughly the same over all, decreasing in other parts of the country as troops have focused on the capital.
American commanders say it will be months before they can draw conclusions about the campaign to secure Baghdad, and just more than half of the so-called surge of nearly 30,000 additional troops into the country have arrived. But at the same time, political pressure in the United States for quick results and a firm troop pullout date has become more intense than ever.
This snapshot of the early weeks of the operation, which officially began on Feb. 14, is drawn from American and Iraqi casualty data and interviews with military commanders and government officials.
Already in that time, the military and political reality has shifted from what American planners faced when they prepared the Baghdad operation, continuing a pattern of rapid change that has become painfully familiar since the 2003 invasion.
In the northern and western provinces where they hold sway, and even in parts of Baghdad, Sunni Arab insurgents have sharpened their tactics, using more suicide car and vest bombs and carrying out successive chlorine gas attacks.
Even as officials have sought to dampen the insurgency by trying to deal with Sunni Arab factions, those groups have become increasingly fractured. There are now at least a dozen major Sunni insurgent groups — many fighting other Sunnis as well as the Americans and the Shiite-led government. A deal made with any one or two would be unlikely to be acceptable to the others.
While Shiite militias appear to have quieted in Baghdad so far, elements of them have been fighting pitched battles outside the city, sometimes against one another, sometimes against Sunni Arabs. They are pushing Sunnis out of their homes and attacking their mosques.
And in a new tactic, both Shiite and Sunni militants have been burning down homes and shops in the provinces in recent months.
One American private in the First Battalion, Fifth Cavalry, who was working the overnight shift at a new garrison in western Baghdad, described the Americans’ fight this way: “The insurgents, they see what we’re doing and we see what they’re doing. Then we get ahead, then they figure out what we’ve done and they get ahead.
“It’s like a game of cat and mouse. It’s just a really, really smart mouse.”
A Shift in Deaths
The incoming five brigades as part of the new security plan will bring the total number of American troops in Iraq to about 173,000 when it is complete, more than at any time since the war began.
Many of the new troops are joining long-term garrisons along with Iraqi forces in particularly violent neighborhoods of Baghdad, keeping up frequent patrols and trying to strengthen relations with Iraqis by meeting with local leaders and residents.
That has put the Americans in the middle of sectarian battlegrounds, and their death rate in the city has nearly doubled. The number of Americans killed in combat or other violence rose to 53 in Baghdad in the first seven weeks of the push, from Feb. 14 to April 2. That is up from 29 in the seven weeks before then.
Diyala Province, just northeast of Baghdad, has also been a trouble spot, bitterly contested by Sunni and Shiite militants. The United States military added a battalion in the province, and the fighting has been fierce, with 15 Americans killed there in the seven weeks starting on Feb. 14. The total from the seven weeks before then was 10.
At the same time, though, the rate of American deaths throughout the country has stayed about the same, with 116 killed in hostile incidents, up from 113 in the prior seven weeks.
As the focus has intensified on Baghdad, deaths have fallen in some outlying areas — even in Anbar Province, the heart of the Sunni rebellion where American marines have long faced intense violence. In the seven weeks after the start of the Baghdad operation, 31 Americans were killed in Anbar, down from 46 in the seven weeks beforehand.
While it is difficult to point to any one reason, in recent months Anbar has been at the center of a fissure in the insurgency between tribes who support the terrorist group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and tribes who reject it because it is seen as inviting foreign fighters.
Roadside bombs were by far the most common means of killing Americans. Deaths in Baghdad and Diyala from such explosions more than doubled. In Baghdad, 83 percent of troop deaths since the plan began have been caused by roadside bombs. In Diyala, all but one of the 15 soldiers who died in the seven-week period were killed by roadside bombs. Just four were killed by the bombs in the preceding seven weeks there.
Violence Against Civilians
The Iraqi government and the American military refuse to release overall civilian casualty numbers; both give numbers only for a few categories of deaths, making it difficult to get an overall picture. One of the last official reports on civilian casualties came in January from the United Nations, which, citing morgue and hospital statistics, said at least 34,452 Iraqis were killed last year, or an average of nearly 100 per day.
Over the past seven weeks, American commanders say that the security push has had some success so far in cutting down the number of sectarian execution-style killings — tracked by counting the number of bodies found with gunshot or knife wounds. Military officials say that such killings have dropped 26 percent nationwide and even more in Baghdad.
But other kinds of attacks, like car bombings, have kept the overall civilian death rate high, and in recent days there are anecdotal reports that sectarian executions may be on the rise again.
“We’ve not seen the overall same significant amount of decline in the overall number of casualties” as in execution killings, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, spokesman for the American military command, said in a news conference last week.
The American military believes that much of the drop in executions has come because of decreased activity by Shiite militias and death squads, especially the powerful Mahdi Army militia that claims allegiance to the cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
Many militia leaders have been detained in raids by the American military, according to the Iraqi government, and despite some major car bomb attacks on Shiite areas, the militias appear to have decided to refrain from carrying out revenge killings.
“The cycle of violence is not as predictable,” a senior American military official said. “Iraqi people are showing restraint, and the ability of death squads to retaliate is being circumscribed.”
However, it appears that not all Shiite cells, Mahdi Army or otherwise, are so patient. American soldiers in sections of western Baghdad, as well as Sunni Arabs living there and in Sunni enclaves south of Baghdad in Babil Province, are reporting that sectarian killings and threats against Sunni Arab families have begun to rise again, after a brief hiatus at the start of the security plan.
“There’s been spray paint on walls: ‘Get out or you’ll pay with your blood,’ ” said Capt. Benjamin Morales, 28, commander of a company of the 82nd Airborne that oversees a Shiite-dominated section of western Baghdad. There were eight Sunni households in the area at the start of March; three had left by its end.
The Iraqi government has been encouraging displaced families to return to their abandoned homes and offering $200 as an incentive. The government said that 2,000 families had returned by mid-March, but there is no way to verify the numbers.
In Fadhil, a Sunni enclave in eastern Baghdad surrounded by Shiite neighborhoods, residents say Shiite militias have been attacking with mortar shells and sniper fire. They accuse the Shiite-dominated Iraqi security forces of taking part, which Iraqi military officials deny.
“The situation was quiet when the militias left the country, but when they came back, the tension returned,” said Wamid Salah Hameed, a community leader in Fadhil. “The military is attacking us and firing at the neighborhood randomly. There is a sectarian feeling among the soldiers in the army.”
Meanwhile, Shiite militias have burned shops in a Sunni enclave of Babil Province, and Sunni militias burned Sunni and Shiite homes in Diyala last month.
Sunni militias have been active in Baghdad, too. The number of bodies of their presumed victims that turn up, tortured and shot, appears to have declined, but not halted, in recent weeks. In the past three weeks in some mostly Sunni neighborhoods of western Baghdad, Shiites bringing supplies to displaced families — even displaced Sunni families — have been kidnapped and killed, their bodies left in corner lots.
“We used to see sometimes eight bodies a day,” said Sgt. Michael Brosch, of the First Battalion, Fifth Cavalry. “Sometimes they were all beheaded. Then right at the beginning of the security plan, we didn’t see any. Now we’re seeing them again.”
At the same time, deaths and injuries nationwide from vehicle bombs, which are typically associated with Sunni insurgents, particularly Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, have continued at a rapid pace.
January and February were particularly bad months for car bombing deaths; nearly 1,100 were killed in February alone. That number dropped to 783 in March, still high compared with months earlier in the war, according to an American military official. But the overall number of bombings actually increased: there were 108 car bombs that either detonated or were disarmed in March, a record for the war.
Outside of Baghdad, several huge bombings have been responsible for many of the deaths. The worst, last month in Tal Afar, killed 152.
In Anbar, at least six bombings involved a terrifying new weapon: truck bombs that spread chlorine gas, burning victims’ lungs and skin. The deadliest of those attacks, in Ramadi on Friday, killed at least 30 people.
A Fractured Government
Most American and Iraqi officials say that the key to Iraq’s security is a political agreement that gives Sunni Arabs more power in the government. But the near-term prognosis for that looks grim, as the calm necessary to negotiate such a deal remains elusive.
Some Shiite leaders have publicly said they are prepared to reconcile with the minority Sunnis, who generally prospered under Saddam Hussein’s Baathist government. But the Shiites are still loath to give Sunnis any additional power and risk returning to the oppressed status they held for centuries.
Meanwhile, the Kurds in the north are pushing policies that will maximize the powers of their autonomous region, including trying to get control of the ethnically mixed oil-rich city of Kirkuk.
The Sunni Arabs seek several changes in the government’s structure. They want Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a conservative Shiite, to make good on his promise to replace ineffective or corrupt ministers. Mr. Maliki promised the shake-up months ago, but the proposal now appears moribund.
The Sunni Arabs also want the Constitution amended to bring power back to Baghdad and reduce the chance that areas in the oil-rich, Shiite-dominated south will follow the model of Kurdistan and create an autonomous state.
In addition, the Sunni Arabs continue to push for a rollback of purges of Sunni Arabs from government that began after the Shiites came to power in national elections.
But to stop the violence, the ruling Shiites must deal with Sunnis outside the government, in the factionalized insurgency, who can offer few guarantees on any promises to stop bombings against Shiites.
“We talk to people who say they represent the insurgents and they all say the same thing: ‘We oppose the occupation, but we don’t believe in killing civilians, in killing women and children,’ ” a senior adviser to Mr. Maliki said. “But our people are dying in bombs every day. Who is killing them?”
Reporting was contributed by Kirk Semple, Hosham Hussein and Khalid al-Ansary in Baghdad, and Andrew W. Lehren and Archie Tse in New York.
USA Today
April 9, 2007
Pg. 1
Abduction Shatters A Family In Baghdad
Typical Case Illustrates The Ever-Present Fear As Thousands Vanish — Then Turn Up At morgue
By Rick Jervis, USA Today
BAGHDAD — The nightmare for Adnan Mahmoud Shukur and his family began with a crude, handwritten note slipped under their garage door.
Shukur never thought he would be targeted by the sectarian death squads sweeping Baghdad. He was a Sunni Muslim but was happily married to a Shiite. He had six kids. He helped his neighbors, regardless of their religious affiliation, buy kerosene to heat their homes. He disdained politics.
So when the anonymous note came, ordering his family to move out of their home immediately, Shukur simply tore it to pieces. "He was very stubborn," said Shukur's nephew, Mohammed Noural-Din Mahmoud. "And very brave."
Several weeks later, on Feb. 4, gunmen forced Shukur into the trunk of a BMW while he stood near a gas station, Mahmoud said. Shukur's 13-year-old son watched as the car sped away, then rushed home to tell his family.
Two days later, they learned Shukur had been killed.
Thousands of Iraqis have suffered similar ordeals. A U.S.-led plan to secure Baghdad, launched shortly after Shukur was abducted, has focused on halting such violence between Sunnis and Shiites.
"The first step for success is to do something about the sectarian violence in Baghdad so (Iraqis) can have breathing space in order to do the political work necessary … to achieve reconciliation," President Bush said in February as the crackdown got underway.
Bush added that if Iraqi politicians could work out their differences, "it would hasten the day" that U.S. troops could leave Iraq.
The U.S. force in Baghdad is to increase by more than 17,000 troops by early summer to allow for increased patrols and checkpoints.
The stepped-up U.S. presence has helped reduce the daily body count at the overcrowded Baghdad morgue, according to statistics compiled by the Associated Press. But roughly 20 bullet-ridden corpses still turn up each day.
Lost in the statistics are stories such as Shukur's that show how each kidnapping shatters a family and deepens hatred between Sunnis and Shiites. When someone disappears, his or her loved ones begin an agonizing odyssey of their own, searching morgues and hospitals and waiting by the phone.
Sometimes, there is a ransom note. On rare occasions, a victim will miraculously reappear. Often, the entire family is in danger.
Shukur's wife, Sadia al-Jelawi, still isn't sure why her husband was targeted. "He loved working, and he loved his family," al-Jelawi said. "He was very open with people. He was popular with them."
In retrospect, Shukur's popularity may have cost him his life. A robust, jocular man with a thick black mustache and an affinity for jokes, he was the type who attracted attention — both good and bad.
Shukur and al-Jelawi met when they were engineering students at Baghdad University. Like thousands of Iraqis, they married despite belonging to different Muslim sects. They settled in the capital's Saidiyah neighborhood, where Sunnis and Shiites lived together in relative harmony.
Under Saddam Hussein, Sunnis held most government jobs and enjoyed special privileges. But Shukur didn't see the world in sectarian terms, his wife said.
"He wasn't interested in politics," she said. "His children, his family, his neighbors — those were his priorities. He just wanted to help people."
Shukur landed a good job as an engineer with Iraqi Airways. He used his comfortable salary to purchase several homes around Baghdad and rent them to Sunnis and Shiites alike — anyone who could pay the rent, al-Jelawi said.
A religious man, he also bought an orange grove in Baqouba, north of Baghdad, and built a Sunni mosque on the property, she said.
After the fall of Baghdad in 2003, Shukur joined the local government council to help neighbors overcome shortages of kerosene and electricity, al-Jelawi said.
Then, last November, the note arrived under the garage door.
Whoever wrote it said that they knew Shukur worked at Baghdad's airport, and the note gave his tribal name, al-Mashadani, a well-known Sunni clan. Tribal names are the most common way for Iraqis to determine whether an individual is Shiite or Sunni.
Soon thereafter, Shukur started behaving as if he knew his life was in danger. One afternoon, Shukur gave his wife two lists: one of people who owed him money, and the other of people he owed money to.
If anything should happen to him, Shukur instructed his wife, she should immediately put the family's finances in order. Two days later, he disappeared.
Shukur's neighborhood was regularly patrolled by members of the Mahdi Army, said Mahmoud, Shukur's nephew. The Shiite militia had set up checkpoints nearby, and a few Sunni neighbors had vanished under mysterious circumstances before Shukur's kidnapping, Mahmoud said.
The U.S. military blames the Mahdi Army, which is controlled by the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, for much of the sectarian violence plaguing Baghdad. Through intimidation and murder, the militia has sought to clear many Baghdad neighborhoods of Sunnis, the military says.
Sunni insurgents often strike back with car bombs in Shiite-dominated neighborhoods. The cycle of violence has killed thousands of Iraqis during the past four years.
The U.S. strategy is to clear neighborhoods of militants, then establish a greater U.S. and Iraqi security presence in those areas to keep them from returning. That fosters trust among neighbors and emboldens them to point out troublemakers, said Army Brig. Gen. John Campbell, deputy commander of U.S. troops in Baghdad.
"People feel better about it. They interact with you more," he said. "And it changes the whole dynamics."
For Shukur, help came too late.
On the morning of Feb. 4, he planned to go to a gas station in the neighboring district of Baya'a to collect several hundred liters of kerosene and bring it back to his neighborhood.
Shiite neighbors urged Shukur not to go, saying Mahdi Army men had been asking about him. Shukur waved off the threats and picked up his son, Mahmoud, from school.
While Shukur was at the station waiting for a tanker to fill with kerosene, a car with four men pulled up outside, al-Jelawi said, recalling her son's account of the incident. They wore traditional Arab headdresses and brandished assault rifles and pistols.
Two of them blocked the street while the others aimed their weapons at Shukur and forced him into the trunk of their car. They sped off.
Shukur's son flagged a taxi and returned home to tell his mother what had happened.
Al-Jelawi felt her life come unhinged. She broke into shuddering wails.
"The father is like a tent. It covers and protects the whole family," she said. "If we lose him, we're like a ship drifting in the sea."
The police arrived quickly. They took Shukur's son back to the gas station and questioned some witnesses. But they said there was nothing else they could do.
Hoping her husband had been kidnapped for money, al-Jelawi waited two days for a ransom call. None came.
On Feb. 6, al-Jelawi went to the Baya'a police station. The officer on duty sat her at a computer and asked her to look at photos of recently recovered bodies.
The first image was of a man who looked vaguely familiar. His face was swollen, yellowish-pale, she said. His eyes were sunken. Brain matter clumped from a wound behind his head. Two small exit wounds were on his cheeks.
Then she saw his familiar gray shirt and realized: This was a photo of her husband.
"At first I didn't believe it," she said. "I said, 'No way that's my husband. It can't be him.' I'm his wife, and I couldn't recognize him."
Police told her Shukur's body had been brought in two days earlier, the day he disappeared. His body was now at the morgue.
Al-Jelawi wanted to go directly there, but Shukur's brothers and relatives were Sunnis like him and refused to go. The morgue was guarded by Mahdi Army militants. It was too dangerous, they said.
A Shiite neighbor finally volunteered to take her. Thus began a new phase of al-Jelawi's nightmare — one in which her own life would be in danger.
The Baghdad morgue is a squat, one-story building next to the Health Ministry in central Baghdad. It has overflowed with victims of sectarian violence over the past year, said Bob Lamburne, director of forensics at the British Embassy in Baghdad, who is helping to modernize the facility.
At the height of the sectarian killings last year, so many bodies arrived that they were crammed into refrigerated units, stacked in offices and laid out in the yard outside, Lamburne said.
In December, Lamburne gave the morgue $2,000 from his own budget to buy disinfectant. The drains inside had clogged and workers were splashing through a 2-inch slush of blood and body fluids.
"It was dreadful," Lamburne said.
The daily body count has since dropped, but the facility is still overburdened, Lamburne said.
Polaroid shots of the victims' faces are tacked to a wall outside so people can scan them for missing relatives. About one in four corpses are never identified, he said.
Mahdi Army gunmen patrol the premises and intimidate Sunnis, Lamburne said. "Sunni people don't go there," he said. "They feel if they go, they'll end up (dead) there as well."
Al-Jelawi is a Shiite, but she feared she might never recover her husband's body if they found out he was Sunni. And what would the Mahdi Army think of their mixed marriage?
Holding her breath, she pushed through the swinging doors into the morgue.
She had received strict instructions from her family. Her Shiite neighbor, Saad Mahmoud, was to do all the talking. She was not to show any emotion when she found the body.
One of the guards pulled Mahmoud aside and asked him a series of questions: Who were they looking for? What tribe was he from? Where would they bury him? These were all questions to determine Shukur's sect, al-Jelawi said. When Mahmoud answered all of them correctly — that is, as a Shiite would — the guard pointed to a stack of bodies outside.
Saad Mahmoud found Shukur's body there, wrapped in a stained wool blanket. Al-Jelawi swallowed her sobs.
The two laid the body in a coffin, strapped it to the roof of their car and quietly drove away.
They took Shukur's body first to a mosque, where it was cleaned and wrapped in a traditional white shroud.
There, the family saw his wounds. Shukur had been shot twice in the back of the head and once in the left shoulder.
The body was then driven back to their home in Saidiyah, where it was walked through each of the rooms. Muslims do this to allow the deceased to visit his home a final time, she said.
Finally, Shukur was buried next to Abu Hanifa Mosque in Adhamiyah, alongside thousands of fellow Sunnis.
"We still don't know why he was killed," said Mohammed Mahmoud, Shukur's nephew.
"Maybe someone didn't like him. But probably because he was just a well-known Sunni."
Al-Jelawi never returned home. After the funeral, she and the children, ages 12 to 23, moved to another house in a nearby, religiously mixed district.
The Saidiyah house was too dangerous and held too many memories, she said.
She says she is now waiting on a $300-a-month pension from Shukur's company, Iraqi Airways.
Meanwhile, she has been going through Shukur's list of creditors and debtors and fulfilling her husband's final wish.
She still hopes that Iraqis will get through this difficult period and that Shiites and Sunnis will continue to meet and marry and make lives together.
"For centuries, we've lived in peace together," she said. "God willing, we will live in peace again."
New York Times
April 9, 2007
Pg. 8
Radical Shiite Cleric Calls On Iraqi Forces To Unite Against The U.S. Military
By Edward Wong
BAGHDAD, April 8 — Moktada al-Sadr, the rebellious Shiite cleric and power broker, exhorted Iraqi security forces on Sunday to unite with his militiamen against the American military in Diwaniya, an embattled southern city in Iraq where fighting has raged for three days.
Mr. Sadr’s statement did not explicitly call for armed struggle against the Americans, but it still represented his most forceful condemnation of the American-led occupation since he went underground after the start of an intensified Baghdad security crackdown nearly two months ago. It also came as his followers streamed out of Baghdad and other cities to join a mass protest in southern Iraq organized by Mr. Sadr’s aides to denounce the American occupation of Iraq on Monday, the fourth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad. The arteries winding to Najaf, the holy city where Mr. Sadr has his headquarters, were clogged with vehicles carrying protesters.
Mr. Sadr’s call for resistance came as the American military announced the deaths of 10 soldiers in five attacks over the weekend, the highest two-day total for American fatalities since the new security plan began Feb. 14. Five soldiers were wounded. Violence against Iraqis continued unabated on Sunday, with at least 43 people killed or found dead. Seventeen were killed and 26 wounded in a car bombing near a hospital and mosque in the insurgent enclave of Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad.
Mr. Sadr’s statement on Sunday indicated he might be ready to resume steering his militia, the Mahdi Army, toward more open confrontation with the American military.
The Mahdi Army has generally been lying low during the Baghdad security plan, but intense fighting broke out in Diwaniya on Friday between militiamen and American-led forces. The battles erupted when American and Iraqi soldiers isolated neighborhoods in Diwaniya to search for militiamen. Fighter jets hit militia positions on Saturday, and one police official said at least seven Iraqis had been killed and 15 wounded in the fighting. Residents reported American soldiers scampering across rooftops on Saturday evening.
The battles in Diwaniya have been the most violent in months between the Mahdi Army and the Americans, and could portend violence in other strongholds of the Sadr militia. Mahdi Army fighters began moving to Diwaniya and other southern cities when the Baghdad crackdown began.
“The strife that is taking place in Diwaniya was planned by the occupier to drag down the brothers and make them quarrel, fight and even kill each other,” Mr. Sadr said in a written statement. “Oh my brothers in the Mahdi Army and my brothers in the security forces, stop fighting and killing because that is what our enemy and your enemy and even God’s enemy hope for.”
Mr. Sadr added: “God ordered you to be patient and to unite your efforts against the enemy and not against the sons of Iraq. They want to drag you into a war that ends Shiitism and Islam, but they cannot.”
Mr. Sadr’s influence over the security forces in Diwaniya is unclear. Many Iraqi Army commanders and police officials there take orders from the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a powerful Shiite party that is the main rival to Mr. Sadr’s organization.
The American military said Sunday that at least 39 people suspected of being militiamen had been detained during the weekend fighting, and soldiers had uncovered caches of particularly deadly explosives that American officials contended came from Iran.
Mr. Sadr led two rebellions against the Americans in 2004 and emerged more powerful from each, even though thousands of his fighters were killed. He entered mainstream politics, and his followers now hold at least 30 seats in Parliament and critical cabinet postings. He also has a powerful protector in Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a conservative Shiite who gained the top job because of Mr. Sadr’s support.
Although Mr. Sadr has a home in Najaf, his current whereabouts are a mystery. American military officials say he is in Iran, but supporters insist he is still in Iraq. There have been explosions of violence involving the Mahdi Army before the fighting at Diwaniya. On March 30, a battle erupted in a Baghdad neighborhood between Mahdi Army fighters and Kurdish soldiers brought in from the north as part of the security plan.
The Iraqi government said Sunday that it would ban all traffic in Baghdad on Monday as an extra security precaution on the anniversary of the fall of the capital to the Americans.
Security officials in Najaf said they had prepared for the Sadr rally by blocking any arriving vehicle not locally registered. Residents said they feared bombings by Sunni insurgents. “The thing that worries me about the demonstration are possible attacks by takfiris,” said Salam Hussein, a 35-year-old teacher, using a Shiite term for Sunni militants. “Some people might try to make security problems. Other than that, the protest is a good sign of freedom.”
An Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Najaf.
Washington Post
April 9, 2007
Pg. 8
Sadr Blames 'Evil' U.S. For Violence
By Sudarsan Raghavan, Washington Post Foreign Service
BAGHDAD, April 8 -- Calling the United States the "great evil," radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr on Sunday accused U.S. forces of dividing Iraq by stoking violence. He also urged his Mahdi Army militiamen and Iraqi security forces to stop fighting each other in Diwaniyah, a southern city where clashes erupted late last week.
The influential cleric's verbal assault came as the U.S. military announced that 10 American soldiers were killed over the weekend, including six who died Sunday in attacks north and south of Baghdad. At least 69 Iraqis were also killed or found dead across Iraq.
Sadr, a fierce nationalist who has long called for a U.S. withdrawal, stopped short of telling his fighters to rise up against the American troops, a move that would severely complicate an ongoing security offensive underway in Iraq. Instead, he ordered his followers to remain united and to "demonstrate" to "end the occupation."
"My brothers in the Mahdi Army, and my brothers in the security services: enough fighting and rivalry, because that is only a success for our, and your, enemy," Sadr said in a statement brimming with emotion and passages from the Koran. "Infighting between brothers is not right, nor is it right to follow the dirty American sedition, or to defend . . . the occupier."
Sadr said the "enemy" wants "to draw you into a war to end Shiism, or rather Islam," and he urged Iraq's army and police to remain independent of U.S. forces and to avoid being "drawn after the occupier, because he is your stark enemy."
The message came as thousands of Iraqis flowed to the southern holy city of Najaf, heeding Sadr's call to stage a massive anti-U.S. protest on Monday, the fourth anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Hundreds of buses and cars clogged the road to Najaf on Sunday, as thousands of his supporters waved Iraqi flags and shouted religious and anti-American slogans.
"No, no, no, to America . . . Moqtada, yes, yes, yes," they chanted, as Iraqi televisions crews followed.
Abdul Razaq al-Nadawi, a Sadr spokesman in Najaf, said clashes erupted south of Baghdad between Mahdi Army militiamen and the police, who were apparently trying to stop them from heading to Najaf. He said that five militiamen were killed after protesters attacked the police with bricks and stones. The report could not be independently verified.
"The situation is tense now," Nadawi said.
The tensions followed two days of fierce battles pitting U.S. and Iraqi forces against Mahdi Army militiamen in Diwaniyah. As U.S. combat aircraft launched airstrikes, house-to-house clashes erupted. A curfew was still being enforced Sunday in the city and U.S. forces patrolled the streets, said Hamid Jiati, a Diwaniyah health official.
Sadr is engaged in an uneasy cooperation with U.S. and Iraqi forces in Baghdad, particularly in his stronghold of Sadr City. He has ordered his fighters to stand down as U.S. troops patrol and conduct security sweeps and to avoid being provoked into battle.
It is unclear whether Sadr ordered the Diwaniyah clashes, rogue elements of the Mahdi Army rose up or individual militiamen were simply defending their homes. But the clashes and Sadr's acerbic comments underscored the fragility of his cooperation with the new security offensive.
"Up until now, we have not made any decision to clash against the American or the Iraqi forces," Salah al-Ubaidi, a Sadr aide, said in a telephone interview from Najaf.
Sadr's aides say the cleric is in Iraq, and Ubaidi added that "there is a 65 percent possibility that Moqtada al-Sadr will come to the demonstration." U.S. military officials have said Sadr is in Iran.
Among the six U.S. casualties Sunday, three soldiers were killed in a roadside bomb attack during a patrol south of Baghdad, one was killed in a separate attack south of the capital and two died of wounds from combat operations in Diyala province and Salahuddin province, the military said. An explosion near a military vehicle Saturday in Diyala killed four soldiers, the military said.
A car bomb killed 17 people and wounded 28 in an industrial area of Mahmudiyah, a town south of Baghdad, police officials said, the latest in a series of attacks in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq since the security plan took effect in mid-February.
In a second attack in Mahmudiyah, rockets pounded a three-story building, killing 15 people and injuring 30, said Capt. Muthana Ahmad of Babil province police.
In southwestern Baghdad, a suicide car bombing at a market killed five people and wounded 25. A 24-hour ban on all vehicles was imposed in the capital from 5 a.m. Monday, the Associated Press reported.
Across the city, police found 10 unidentified bodies, blindfolded and showing signs of torture -- trademark killings of sectarian death squads, officials said.
West of the town of Baqubah, police uncovered nine corpses, and in the southern town of Karbala, police found the bodies of six shepherds. They had been blindfolded and shot, and their bodies showed signs of torture, police said.
Special correspondents Saad Sarhan in Najaf, and Naseer Nouri, Saad al-Izzi and K.I. Ibrahim in Baghdad contributed to this report.
Washington Examiner
April 9, 2007
Iraqi Police Force Continues To Lag Behind Army, Special Forces
By Rowan Scarborough, National Security Correspondent
WASHINGTON - The Iraqi police force remains riddled with corruption and incompetence, a year after the Bush administration declared the “year of the police” in a campaign to make the cop on the beat a trusted law enforcement officer.
“There remains a significant shortfall in the abilities of the Iraqi police forces in the area of leadership, personnel, training and equipment in my area,” Army Col. Paul Funk, a brigade commander in Iraq, told reporters at the Pentagon.
Such Pentagon teleconferences, featuring American commanders from Iraq, tend to be upbeat. Funk’s blunt appraisal last week underscored the fact that among components of the 328,000-strong Iraqi Security Forces, its 135,000-police officer force lags behind the army, border patrol and special forces in overall performance.
Recent reports add credence to what Funk said. Iraqis see the force as more loyal to warring Sunni or Shiite insurgents than to the public.
The Pentagon’s quarterly Iraq stability report in March said U.S.-trained police “often disregarded” prisoner release orders signed by judges. Police “also remain prone to intimidation by or collusion with militias and criminal gangs, thereby decreasing the confidence among ordinary Iraqis in their legitimate security force,” it said.
Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who conducted a fact-finding tour of Iraq last month, filed a trip report that said, “The police force is feared as a Shia militia in uniform which is responsible for thousands of extra-judicial killings.”
The Defense Department’s stability report found that local provincial governments hired police who had no training, rather than accepting the latest graduates from the country’s 12 police academies.
The off-the-street hiring is a perfect opportunity for insurgents, such as the Shiite Mahdi Army, to infect the police with its operatives, said Robert Maginnis, a retired Army officer and military analyst.
“Police are more infiltrated with bad guys because they have to live in the communities they police,” he said. In contrast, army soldiers live and train within a somewhat insular organization to achieve unit cohesion.
Funk, the brigade commander, oversees a 900-square-mile area around northern Baghdad and 1,000 Iraqi policemen. The Ministry of Interior continues to struggle on basic functions such as paying and equipping its officers,” he said, causing many to quit in response.
In a bright spot, tribal sheikhs in Sunni-dominated Anbar Province, west of Baghdad, have put out the call for members to join the police, in defiance of al-Qaida in Iraq. The ranks of Anbar police shot up, from 1,300 a year ago to 13,200 today.
Arizona Daily Star (Tucson)
April 9, 2007
Home Of Key Sunni Yields Huge Arms Stash
By Qassim Abdul-Zahra, Associated Press
BAGHDAD — U.S. and Iraqi troops found a huge stash of weapons in a raid on the home of a Sunni lawmaker and detained at least a dozen men for questioning, officials said Sunday.
Brig. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi, spokesman for the Baghdad security plan, said the raid targeted a house of legislator Khalaf al-Ilyan — one of three leaders of the Iraqi Accordance Front, which holds 44 seats in parliament.
"During the search, we discovered many weapons and explosive materials," al-Moussawi said at a news conference.
Among the weapons found in the house were 33 Kalashnikov rifles, three pistols, one hand grenade, 4.4 pounds of TNT and 13 82-mm mortar rounds, al-Moussawi said.
The U.S. military said eight 57-mm rockets and 5,000 rounds of ammunition were also seized, along with photos of burning British soldiers and American flag-draped coffins.
Al-Ilyan was believed to be in Jordan at the time of the raid, and was unreachable.
Al-Moussawi said troops detained 12 people for questioning. A U.S. military statement put the number of detainees at 14, and said they were al-Ilyan's bodyguards.
As a parliament member, al-Ilyan has immunity from prosecution. But al-Moussawi said "no one is immune when it comes to the law, and if anyone is convicted the person will be detained by security forces."
Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, a U.S. military spokes-man, suggested U.S. officials would not back away from prosecuting a parliament member.
Baltimore Sun
April 9, 2007
Iraqi Details U.S. Missteps In New Book
Author had served in new government
By Associated Press
NEW YORK--In a rueful reflection on what might have been, an Iraqi government insider details in 500 pages the U.S. occupation's "shocking" mismanagement of his country - a performance so bad, he writes, that by this year Iraqis had "turned their backs on their would-be liberators."
"The corroded and corrupt state of Saddam was replaced by the corroded, inefficient, incompetent and corrupt state of the new order," Ali A. Allawi concludes in The Occupation of Iraq, recently published by Yale University Press.
Allawi writes with authority as a member of that "new order," having served as Iraq's trade, defense and finance minister at various times since 2003. As a former academic, at Oxford University before the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq, he also writes with unusual detachment.
The U.S.- and British-educated engineer and financier is the first senior Iraqi official to look back at book length on his country's four-year ordeal. It's an unsparing look at failures American and Iraqi, an account in which the word "ignorance" crops up repeatedly.
First came the "monumental ignorance" of those in Washington pushing for war in 2002 without "the faintest idea" of Iraq's realities. "More perceptive people knew instinctively that the invasion of Iraq would open up the great fissures in Iraqi society," he writes.
What followed was the "rank amateurism and swaggering arrogance" of the occupation, under L. Paul Bremer III's Coalition Provisional Authority, which took big steps with little consultation with Iraqis, steps Allawi and many others see as blunders:
*The Americans disbanded Iraq's army, which Allawi said could have helped quell a rising insurgency in 2003. Instead, hundreds of thousands of demobilized, angry men became a recruiting pool for the resistance.
*Purging tens of thousands of members of toppled President Saddam Hussein's Baath party - from government, school faculties and elsewhere - left Iraq short on experienced hands at a crucial time.
*An order consolidating decentralized bank accounts at the Finance Ministry bogged down operations of Iraq's many state-owned enterprises.
*The CPA's focus on private enterprise enabled the "commercial gangs" of Hussein's day to monopolize business.
*Its free-trade policy allowed looted Iraqi capital equipment to be spirited away across borders.
*The CPA perpetuated Hussein's fuel subsidies, selling gasoline at giveaway prices and draining the budget.
Bremer, who wrote his own account of his time in Baghdad, contended that his authority was undermined by "micromanagement" from Washington, where he thought officials in the administration tried "to set me up as a fall guy" for problems in Iraq.
Washington Times
April 9, 2007
Pg. 13
Cooperation With Iraq Said To Be In Peril
TEHRAN -- Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki warned yesterday that cooperation with Iraq could deteriorate if five Iranians detained by U.S. troops in Iraq are not set free.
Mr. Mottaki said Iranian officials were seriously pursuing the fate of the detained men, whom Iran describes as diplomats. "If their efforts do not yield results, it will undermine Iran's aid to Iraq," he said.
The United States detained the five -- whom it describes as Revolutionary Guard Corps members -- in the Iraqi city of Irbil in January and refused to release them or allow Iranian officials to visit them.
Bloomberg.com
April 8, 2007
Gates Wins Trust, For Now, Of Congress, Military In Iraq Debate
By Ken Fireman and Tony Capaccio
Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who cruised into the Pentagon on a wave of bipartisan support in December, is enjoying a Washington rarity: an extended political honeymoon in a job that often produces more enemies than friends.
Gates has won allies from the ranks of the U.S. military to the halls of Congress, while managing to persuade both of the camps in the furious debate over Iraq that he is one of them.
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, who opposes the current expansion of U.S. forces, calls Gates "a voice of practicality and pragmatism" who will urge a fresh course if the plan fails. At the same time, retired Army General Jack Keane, who advised President George W. Bush on the buildup, says Gates backs it and will approve any request for more time or troops.
"I know for a fact that he is listening to the commanders in the field" such as Army General David Petraeus, who heads U.S. forces in Iraq, Keane says. "Everything General Petraeus is going to tee up, he'll get."
At some point, events in Iraq will likely force Gates to prove one side right and one wrong about where his sympathies are. And that may be the moment when he is sucked into the brutal Washington power scrum that he has thus far floated above.
For now, Gates has avoided committing himself in the debate that has raged throughout the Bush administration about how and when U.S. power should be used. In a March 27 speech, he positioned himself as a pragmatist who rejects the poles of "realism versus idealism, stability versus freedom and interests versus values" that have defined the debate.
"In the real world, I believe American foreign policy must be a blend of all these approaches, with different emphases in different places and at different times," he told a Washington conference on U.S.-Turkish relations.
This self-definition dovetails with a management style that eschews ideology in favor of problem-solving, respects differing views and deals with trouble quickly, according to people familiar with his approach.
They point to Gates's handling of the disclosure that soldiers and Marines recovering from battlefield wounds at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington were living in decrepit out-patient housing and faced formidable obstacles in getting follow-up care.
On Feb. 20, two days after the Washington Post exposed the scandal, Gates walked into his morning staff meeting and said, ``I think we have a serious problem here,'' he recalled in a March 13 interview with the Pentagon's television channel. Within three days, he publicly condemned the situation as ``unacceptable,'' praised the Post for revealing it and set up a panel to investigate. By March 12, three senior officials connected with Walter Reed had lost their jobs.
``His decisions have been crisp and have had an impact in terms of producing and promoting accountability,'' says Levin, a Michigan Democrat.
``That's what you call leadership,'' Representative John Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat and former Marine, says of Gates's response.
Gates, 63, has had his setbacks, as when he failed to persuade Bush to close the U.S. prison for terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He has yet to leave his imprint on the Pentagon by reshaping Iraq policy, changing its senior management team or making a major weapons-procurement or budget decision.
``Gates is more of a manager than a strategic thinker,'' says Andrew Bacevich, a former Army colonel who now teaches history at Boston University. ``The manager is going to fix some of these relationships. But we need some creative thinking. I haven't seen it. I'll continue to look for it.''
Still, Bacevich and other Gates-watchers say, his actions so far indicate a willingness to face unpleasant facts, listen to a range of viewpoints and air disagreements in a civil manner. That is a contrast with Gates's predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, they say.
In particular, Gates has taken steps to repair relations with two important constituencies that Rumsfeld repeatedly alienated: the lawmakers who must fund the military's operations and the officers who must carry them out.
``He is more respectful of the career military and civilians, rather than just trying to overrule them,'' says Lawrence Korb, who served as an assistant defense secretary under President Ronald Reagan. ``It always amazed me that Don Rumsfeld, who had been a congressman, did not understand the role that Congress plays in formulating policy.''
Rumsfeld, 74, declined a request for comment, and Gates also declined to be interviewed for this story.
Gates has fostered stability by retaining Rumsfeld's inner circle, including Deputy Secretary Gordon England, Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs Robert Wilkie and Special Assistant Robert Rangel, says Charles A. Stevenson, a professor at Johns Hopkins University's international-studies school in Washington who has written a history of U.S. defense secretaries.
Stevenson and Korb say Gates has necessarily decided to focus on Iraq, letting others handle such issues as the declining state of combat readiness in many Army units and the growing cost of weapons systems.
``He's delegated a lot of management to England,'' Stevenson says. ``He had to do that because Iraq is his big challenge.''
Stevenson likens Gates to a predecessor, Melvin Laird, who served from 1969 to 1973. Both men were brought in for the single purpose of managing an unpopular and inconclusive war, he says. Unlike Laird, who persuaded President Richard Nixon to begin turning over the Vietnam conflict to South Vietnamese forces, Gates has yet to have an impact on war policy, Stevenson says.
Even as he delegates, Gates, a former director of central intelligence, has said he is looking for information beyond the inner circle. He eats lunch with senior enlisted personnel and meets frequently with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top rung of uniformed leaders, in their secure Pentagon meeting area known as ``the tank.''
Still, Gates has acknowledged he will be judged largely on Iraq. He took office amid the review that ended in Bush's decision to add 21,500 combat troops and wage the new offensive. During his Senate confirmation hearing in December, Gates's skeptical comments about the conflict raised hopes among war critics that he might persuade Bush to begin a withdrawal, but this didn't happen.
Levin says Gates's moment of maximum influence will arrive when it becomes clear whether the buildup has pacified Iraq, a point the secretary says should come by late summer. Levin says he hears in Gates's comments strong signals that he will advocate a reversal of course if the campaign hasn't succeeded.
For now, Gates can hold the military ``accountable for what they're doing'' in Iraq, Korb says. ``And if the surge --which he did not develop, which was developed before he came --doesn't work, let the American people, the Congress and the president know it's not working.''
U.S. News & World Report
April 16, 2007
Rumsfeld's Unfinished Plans
He talked about 'transforming' the military, but it didn't turn out that way
By Anna Mulrine
A year ago, President Bush hosted a meeting with then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in the Oval Office. The president had some questions about how, exactly, they were faring with efforts to revolutionize the military's way of planning and fighting--known in military parlance as transformation.
This far-reaching change toward a smaller, more high-tech force was to be a cornerstone of Rumsfeld's legacy, and he had a vested interest in the answer. But it wasn't a good one. Before Rumsfeld had a chance to respond, Pace gave the president his score card: an 8 (out of 10) for shifting the military's culture and thinking, but only a 4 for actually making the changes happen. Startled, Rumsfeld asked Pace to write a memo explaining what he meant, according to defense officials--and he asked his own senior civilian team to do the same. But Pace's answer was hardly news to many within the Pentagon, who privately confessed that they considered Pace's score to be, if anything, overly charitable. Today, new Defense Secretary Robert Gates has yet to say much about transformation. It's been largely pushed to the background by the immediate needs to, if anything, expand the military--a move consistently resisted by Rumsfeld.
Those needs were brought into sharp relief last week when, amid the political byplay over the defense budget, the Pentagon announced that the 4th Infantry Division would return to Iraq just 7 1/2 months after its previous yearlong tour in Iraq-and another division now in Iraq would be extended for at least 40 days. The move highlighted the growing concern about whether the military is being stretched to the breaking point--facing enemies on two fronts whose guerrilla tactics and simple explosives present daunting challenges to U.S. forces.
Back in 1999, these were just the sort of problems that presidential candidate Bush promised to fix in an address at the Citadel that is widely considered to be the road map for his military-transformation plans. He lauded "men and women who love their country more than their comfort" but lamented a military in which "even the highest morale is eventually undermined by back-to-back deployments ... shortages of spare parts and equipment, and rapidly declining readiness." He took a swipe at the military missions of the Clinton years. "We will not be permanent peacekeepers, dividing warring parties," he said. "This is not our strength or our calling."
As president, he turned to Rumsfeld to press transformation changes on the Pentagon bureaucracy. Though Rumsfeld had long served on commissions involving space and missile defense, "he came to the job being not much engaged in this transformation debate," says Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments President Andrew Krepinevich, who served in a key Pentagon planning office in the 1990s. The Pentagon struggled to define what, for instance, transforming the military meant--no small feat. Rumsfeld often asked, "Well, what does it mean to you?" recalls Krepinevich. "I got the impression he was groping on this issue."
Rumsfeld's conception of the answer was becoming clear by January 2002, when he gave a speech at National Defense University on the topic of transformation. He was clearly taken with the image of the light and agile Special Forces sent into Afghanistan. "They sported beards and traditional scarves," he said. They rode "horses that had been trained to run into machine-gun fire, atop saddles that had been fashioned from wood." And they used pack mules to carry high-tech equipment and small global positioning devices to help direct precision-guided bombs.
But while Rumsfeld saw the war in Afghanistan as vindication of transformation's viability, there is a growing body of evidence that those lessons turned out to be not only wrong for Iraq but oversold for Afghanistan as well, says Frederick Kagan, a leading neoconservative advocate for the "surge" in Iraq and author of Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy. "You can destroy the enemy's ability to fight and not set the preconditions for political success-and that has been a key failure of transformation policy."
If, for example, eliminating al Qaeda was the aim in Afghanistan, there should have been more U.S. troops there initially, says Kagan. "If we could have one do-over, I would have liked to see a couple of brigades or Marine regiments on the ground," he adds. "Osama bin Laden did us the favor of actually deploying his terrorists as conventional ground force units. I believe we would have killed a lot more al Qaeda and been in a better position to control how the government was formed."
Indeed, there is some consensus that one of the chief shortcomings of transformation has been the failure to think through the on-the-ground implications of military action. Retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, former commanding general of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, tasked with honing the corps's fighting abilities, believes that some of the current problems in Iraq were foreshadowed in 2002, during a large-scale war games exercise. He had been invited to head up the enemy, or red team, forces to help test key transformation concepts with futuristic names like net-centric warfare and effects-based operations. The problem was that the veteran war gamer quickly overwhelmed America's high-tech blue team forces, using, for example, motorcycles and mosques to send messages so transmissions couldn't be intercepted by the other side's communications systems.
War games. As blue team forces continued to take a beating, Van Riper was told that he had to play by rules--and that those rules did not include insurgency tactics. He promptly resigned from the game. "There were lessons that we could have used," he tells U.S. News. "In every case when the blue team seemed to be winning, we went to an insurgency. That's the default move when you see that you're going to lose in a high-tech fight." That lesson "was just passed over," he says. "Except for this claim that effects-based operations were the wave of the future, very little came out of that game--just unsupported assertions." And that has long been a glaring gap in transformation, adds Kagan. "The whole problem is when you start to see war as a technical exercise and you stop seeing it as a fundamentally political activity, you lose sight of the obstacles that you're going to face."
One of the big obstacles throughout Rumsfeld's tenure would remain the legendary Pentagon bureaucracy. Despite Rumsfeld's reputation as a hard-charging CEO bound to rein in spending on pricey (and politically popular) Cold War-era weapons and programs, "no big programs got canceled during his tenure," says Krepinevich. "He could be acerbic and brutal, but in terms of translating that into action, that didn't happen." Andrew Hoehn, deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy under Rumsfeld, says that "concepts, rather than things" were what he was most interested in. "So if you're looking for, did he kill one of the major aircraft programs, well, his notion of transformation wasn't about the big systems. He was very keen on changing thinking and culture."
To that end, Rumsfeld streamlined notoriously slow systems within Pentagon for getting new equipment out into the field. He sought, too, to move bases out of "old" Europe and revamp a command structure and imbue it with "more creative tension," adds Hoehn. Though many systems he championed, like national missile defense, were inherited, Rumsfeld made great strides expanding budgets for research and development, as well as pushing for more easily deployable systems like the Stryker brigades for the Army and agile combat ships for the Navy, says Brookings Institution analyst Michael O'Hanlon. Special operations forces grew substantially under his tenure, as did the ability to destroy targets with the deployment of thousands of global positioning system-guided all-weather bombs.
But his legacy will be Iraq, a war that has derailed his transformation plans even as it continues to shatter many of the assumptions upon which its programs were built. "He had meant his legacy to be transformation of the military and preparation for future combat," says Kagan. "His assumption was that Iraq was going to be a brief excursion and not the defining struggle of our time. It's not at all what he wanted or intended to be judged by," he adds. "But it is what he will be judged by in the end."
New York Times
April 9, 2007
Pg. 12
Guantanamo Detainees Stage Hunger Strike
By Tim Golden
A long-term hunger strike has broken out at the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, with more than a dozen prisoners subjecting themselves to daily force-feeding to protest their treatment, military officials and lawyers for the detainees say.
Lawyers for several hunger strikers said their clients’ actions were driven by harsh conditions in a new maximum security complex. About 160 of the roughly 385 Guantánamo detainees have been moved to the complex since December.
Thirteen detainees are now on hunger strikes, the largest number to endure the force-feeding regimen on an extended basis since early 2006, when the military broke a long-running strike with a new policy of strapping prisoners into restraint chairs while they are fed by plastic tubes inserted through their nostrils.
The hunger strikers are now monitored so closely that they have virtually no chance to starve themselves. Yet their persistence underscores how the struggle between detainees and guards at Guantánamo has continued even as the military has tightened its control in the past year.
“We don’t have any rights here, even after your Supreme Court said we had rights,” one hunger striker, Majid al-Joudi, told a military doctor, according to medical records released recently under a federal court order. “If the policy does not change, you will see a big increase in fasting.”
A military spokesman at Guantánamo, Cmdr. Robert Durand of the Navy, played down the significance of the current strike, calling the prisoners’ complaints “propaganda.”
But the protests come as criticism of Guantánamo continues to rise in the United States and abroad. Last week, after the Supreme Court denied a new appeal on behalf of the detainees, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross delivered a rare public reprimand to the Bush administration, saying the prisoners’ ability to contest their detention was inadequate.
Newly released Pentagon documents show that during earlier hunger strikes, before the use of the restraint chairs, some detainees lost more than 30 pounds in a matter of weeks. By comparison, the current hunger strike — in which 12 of the 13 detainees were being force-fed as of Friday — seems almost symbolic.
For instance, the medical records for Mr. Joudi, a 36-year-old Saudi, showed that when he was hospitalized on Feb. 10, he had been fasting for 31 days and had lost more than 15 percent of his body weight.
By the time he was transferred a few days later to a “feeding block” where more serious hunger strikers are segregated from other prisoners, his condition had stabilized and his weight was nearly back to an ideal level for a man his size. (His exact weight gain was not recorded.) Mr. Joudi was subsequently flown home and turned over to the Saudi authorities, his lawyer said.
Lawyers for several detainees held in the new maximum security complex, known as Camp 6, compared it to “supermax” prisons in the United States. The major differences, they said, are that the detainees have limited reading material and no television, and only 10 of the Guantánamo prisoners have been charged.
The Camp 6 inmates are generally locked in their 8-foot-by-10-foot cells for at least 22 hours a day, emerging only to exercise in small wire cages and to shower. Besides those times, they can talk with other prisoners only by shouting through food slots in the steel doors of their cells.
“My wish is to die,” one reported hunger striker in the camp, Adnan Farhan Abdullatif, a 27-year old Yemeni, told his lawyer on Feb. 27, according to recently declassified notes of the meeting. “We are living in a dying situation.”
Commander Durand, the Guantánamo spokesman, dismissed such accounts as part of an effort by the prisoners and their lawyers to discredit the detention mission. He described the new unit as much more comfortable than the detainees’ previous quarters, and denied that they suffered any greater sense of isolation in the new cell blocks.
“This was designed to improve living conditions,” Commander Durand said, “and we think it has.”
Camp 6 was originally designed as a modern, medium-security prison complex for up to 200 inmates, with common areas where they could gather for meals and a large fenced athletic field where they could jog or play soccer outside the high concrete walls.
But after a riot last May and the suicides of three prisoners in June, the unit was retrofitted before opening to limit the detainees’ freedom and reduce the risk that they might hurt themselves or attack guards, military officials said.
As Camp 6 was opening, senior officials expressed concern about how prisoners would react to its greater isolation. Most had been held in makeshift blocks of wire-mesh cells that — while often hot, noisy and lacking privacy — allowed them to communicate easily, pray together and even pass written messages.
Guantánamo’s other maximum-security unit, Camp 5, has cells that face each other across a short hallway, allowing the roughly 100 detainees there to converse fairly easily. In Camp 6, the prisoners can see one another from their cells only when one of them is being moved. At other times, they look out on the stainless-steel picnic tables in the common areas they are not allowed to use.
Lawyers for several Camp 6 detainees said their clients were despondent about the move even though, as military officials note, the new cells are 27 square feet larger than the old ones and have air-conditioning, nicer toilets and sinks, and a small desk anchored to the wall.
“They’re just sitting on a powder keg down there,” said one lawyer, Sabin Willett, who, like others, described growing desperation among the prisoners. “You’re going to have an insane asylum.”
Lawyers who visited Guantánamo recently said the detainees reported a higher number of hunger strikers than had the military — perhaps 40 or more. Military officials said there were sometimes “stealth hunger strikers,” who pretend to eat or surreptitiously vomit after eating, but they dismissed the detainees’ estimates as exaggerations.
Because reporters are prevented from speaking with detainees or visiting most of their cell blocks, it is difficult to verify the conflicting accounts.
Hunger strikes have been part of life at Guantánamo almost since the detention center opened in January 2002.
They reached a peak in September 2005, when more than 130 detainees were classified as hunger strikers, having refused at least nine consecutive meals, military records show. As the strikes went on, some detainees being force-fed continued to lose weight by vomiting or siphoning their stomachs with the feeding tubes. But by early February 2006, shortly after the military began using restraint chairs during the forced feedings, the number of hunger strikers plunged to three.
The number rose again sharply but briefly last May, reaching 86 after three detainees attempted suicide and a riot broke out as the guards searched for contraband. Yet even then, no more than seven strikers were forced into the restraint chair regimen.
Three detainees who had been hunger strikers hung themselves on June 10. After July, no more than three detainees subjected themselves to extended forced feeding.
That number began to grow again as detainees were moved into Camp 6 in December. By mid-March, the number of hunger strikers reached 17. For the first time, as many as 15 detainees continued with the strikes despite being force-fed in the restraint chairs.
Military officials have described the restraint chair regimen as unpleasant but necessary. They originally said prisoners needed to be restrained while digesting, so they could not purge what they were fed.
Now, the rationale has changed. The restraints are generally applied “for safety of the detainee and medical staff,” records show, and they are kept on for as little as 15 minutes at a time, rather than the two hours commonly used before. Afterward, the prisoners are moved to a “dry cell” and monitored to make sure they do not vomit.
Even so, some detainees describe the experience as painful, even gruesome.
One Sudanese detainee, Sami al-Hajj, a 38-year-old former cameraman for Al Jazeera, described feeling at one point that he could not bear the tube for another instant. “I said I would begin to scream unless they took it out,” he wrote in a recent diary entry given to his lawyer. “They finally did.”
Stephen H. Oleskey, who represents Saber Lahmar, an Algerian religious scholar whom military officials accused of propagating a religious legal ruling that was linked to the suicides, said of his client: “The man has been in segregation — virtual isolation — for over nine months. Physically and emotionally, he’s collapsing. We think this punishment does exceed what the law allows, and that he won’t survive.”
Military officials said Mr. Lahmar and other detainees had received adequate medical attention.
Margot Williams and William Glaberson contributed reporting.
USA Today
April 9, 2007
Pg. 1
Katrina Claims Stagger Corps
La., New Orleans Want $277 Billion
By Brad Heath, USA Today
New Orleans and Louisiana, swamped when the city's storm protections failed during Hurricane Katrina, demand the federal government pay a damage bill that is more than double the entire cost of the massive Gulf Coast rebuilding effort.
So many claims have been filed against the Army Corps of Engineers that the agency needs at least another month even to tally the floor-to-ceiling stacks, spokesman Vic Harris says. Among the more than 70,000 damage claims filed is one for $200 billion by Louisiana's attorney general and another by New Orleans for $77 billion.
Those two alone are more than double the $110 billion Congress approved for Florida and the Gulf Coast after Katrina and two other hurricanes struck in 2005. The amount is more than half of what the military has spent fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Homeowners could seek damages of an additional $200 billion or more, says Jerrold Parker, a lawyer whose firm is trying to organize a class-action suit against the corps.
"Just looking at the place, it's clear that there's tremendous damage," he says. "The fact is, everyone knew the protections were inadequate."
The damage claims allege the corps is to blame for much of the devastation New Orleans suffered when Katrina overwhelmed the levees and flood walls. The water destroyed thousands of houses and emptied whole neighborhoods, some of which are only now beginning to rebuild.
People and governments that want to collect from the corps for that damage are first required to file a two-page claim form.
New Orleans and Louisiana seek broad requests for costs after Katrina but don't list specific damages.
Louisiana's claim contends that the corps built New Orleans' levees improperly and kept open a controversial shipping channel that allowed the hurricane's storm surge to hit the city more directly, says Kris Wartelle, a spokeswoman for the attorney general. Several studies since the storm have concluded storm protections were inadequate. One, prepared for the state this year, found that the corps underestimated the threat from hurricanes and even miscalculated sea level.
Harris says it's unclear whether the government will have to pay. The corps contends that the levees were not solely its responsibility and that the shipping channel it designed did not worsen Katrina's punch. The corps has not paid any claims.
Sorting out the claims almost certainly will take years, though Harris says officials can reject some immediately, either because the applicant filled out the form incompletely — in a few cases not at all — or because they didn't live in areas that flooded.
"There's a laundry list of things where it's easy to figure out they're not eligible for any money," he says.
The corps must either pay or reject each of the claims. Those whose claims are rejected can take the agency to court. Parker says his firm represents more than 3,000 people who want to sue.
Washington Post
April 9, 2007
Pg. 5
Bush Remembers Troops In Easter Prayers At Army Post
FORT HOOD, Tex. -- President Bush, worshiping at an Army post, prayed for peace Sunday in an Easter service about avoiding the forces of sin and doing what is right.
"I had a chance to reflect on the great sacrifice that our military and their families are making," Bush said outside the chapel at Fort Hood after the service. "I prayed for their safety, I prayed for their strength and comfort, and I pray for peace."
Bush took no questions from reporters in his first public appearance since his spring break in Texas began Wednesday. He was joined by first lady Laura Bush, her mother and his parents.
For the fourth time in five years, Bush flew 50 miles southwest from his ranch in Crawford to spend Easter morning at this sprawling Army post, which has sent thousands of soldiers to Iraq.
New York Times
April 9, 2007
Pg. 10
Army Is Cracking Down On Deserters
By Paul von Zielbauer
Army prosecutions of desertion and other unauthorized absences have risen sharply in the last four years, resulting in thousands more negative discharges and prison time for both junior soldiers and combat-tested veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Army records show.
The increased prosecutions are meant to serve as a deterrent to a growing number of soldiers who are ambivalent about heading — or heading back — to Iraq and may be looking for a way out, several Army lawyers said in interviews. Using courts-martial for these violations, which before 2002 were treated mostly as unpunished nuisances, is a sign that active-duty forces are being stretched to their limits, military lawyers and mental health experts said.
“They are scraping to get people to go back, and people are worn out,” said Dr. Thomas Grieger, a senior Navy psychiatrist. Though there are no current studies to show how combat stress affects desertion rates, Dr. Grieger cited several examples of soldiers absconding or refusing to return to Iraq because of psychiatric reasons brought on by wartime deployments.
At an Army base in Alaska last year, for example, “there was one guy who literally chopped off his trigger finger with an axe to prevent his deployment,” Dr. Grieger said in an interview.
The Army prosecuted desertion far less often in the late 1990s, when desertions were more frequent, than it does now, when there are comparatively fewer.
From 2002 through 2006, the average annual rate of Army prosecutions of desertion tripled compared with the five-year period from 1997 to 2001, to roughly 6 percent of deserters, from 2 percent, Army data shows.
Between these two five-year spans — one prewar and one during wartime — prosecutions for similar crimes, like absence without leave or failing to appear for unit missions, have more than doubled, to an average of 390 per year from an average of 180 per year, Army data shows.
In total, the Army since 2002 has court-martialed twice as many soldiers for desertion and other unauthorized absences as it did on average each year between 1997 and 2001. Deserters are soldiers who leave a post or fail to show up for an assignment with the intent to stay away. Soldiers considered absent without leave, or AWOL, which presumes they plan to return, are classified as deserters and dropped from a unit’s rolls after 30 days.
Most soldiers who return from unauthorized absences are punished and discharged. Few return to regular duty.
Officers said the crackdown reflected an awareness by top Army and Defense Department officials that desertions, which occurred among more than 1 percent of the active-duty force in 2000 for the first time since the post-Vietnam era, were in a sustained upswing again after ebbing in 2003, the first year of the Iraq war.
At the same time, the increase highlights a cycle long known to Army researchers: as the demand for soldiers increases during a war, desertions rise and the Army tends to lower enlistment standards, recruiting more people with questionable backgrounds who are far more likely to become deserters.
In the 2006 fiscal year, 3,196 soldiers deserted, the Army said, a figure that has been climbing since the 2004 fiscal year, when 2,357 soldiers absconded. In the first quarter of the current fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, 871 soldiers deserted, a rate that, if it stays on pace, would produce 3,484 desertions for the fiscal year, an 8 percent increase over 2006.
The Army said the desertion rate was within historical norms, and that the surge in prosecutions, which are at the discretion of unit commanders, was not a surprise given the impact that absent soldiers can have during wartime.
“The nation is at war, and the Army treats the offense of desertion more seriously,” Maj. Anne D. Edgecomb, an Army spokeswoman, said. “The Army’s leadership will take whatever measures they believe are appropriate if they see a continued upward trend in desertion, in order to maintain the health of the force.”
Army studies and interviews also suggest a link between the rising rate of desertions and the expanding use of moral waivers to recruit people with poor academic records and low-level criminal convictions. At least 1 in 10 deserters surveyed after returning to the Army from 2002 to mid-2004 required a waiver to enter the service, a report by the Army Research Institute found.
“We’re enlisting more dropouts, people with more law violations, lower test scores, more moral issues,” said a senior noncommissioned officer involved in Army personnel and recruiting. “We’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to get people to join.” (Army officials agreed to discuss the issue on the condition that they not be quoted by name.)
The officer said the Army National Guard last week authorized 34 states and Guam to enlist the lowest-ranking group of eligible recruits, those who scored between 16 and 30 on the armed services aptitude test. Federal law bars recruits who scored lower than 16 from enlisting.
Desertions, while a chronic problem for the Army, are nowhere near as common as they were at the height of the Vietnam War. From 1968 to 1971, for instance, about 5 percent of enlisted men deserted.
But the rate of desertion today, after four years of fighting two ground wars, is “being taken much more seriously because we were losing so many soldiers out of the Army that there was a recognized need to attack the problem from a different way,” said an Army criminal defense lawyer.
In interviews, the lawyer and two other Army lawyers each traced the spike in prosecutions to a policy change at the beginning of 2002 that required commanders to welcome back soldiers who deserted or went AWOL.
Before that, most deserters, who are often young, undistinguished soldiers who have fallen out of favor with their sergeants, were given administrative separations and sent home with other-than-honorable discharges.
The new policy, ordered by the secretary of the army, effectively eliminated the incentive among squad sergeants to urge returning AWOL soldiers to stay away for at least 30 days, when they would be classified as deserters under the old rules and dropped from the roll.
But some unit commanders, wary of scrutiny from their superiors, go out of their way to improperly keep deserted soldiers on their rosters, and on the Army’s payroll, two officers said in interviews. To counter that, the Army adopted a new policy in January 2005 requiring commanders to formally report absent soldiers within 48 hours.
Such problems are costly. From October 2000 to February 2002, the Army improperly paid more than $6.6 million to 7,544 soldiers who had deserted or were otherwise absent, according to a July 2006 report by the Government Accountability Office.
Most deserters list dissatisfaction with Army life or family problems as primary reasons for their absence, and most go AWOL in the United States. But since 2003, 109 soldiers have been convicted of going AWOL or deserting war zones in Iraq or Afghanistan, usually during their scheduled two-week leaves in the United States, Army officials said.
With the Iraq war in its fifth year, a new subset of deserter is emerging, military doctors and lawyers said: accomplished soldiers who abscond reluctantly, as a result of severe emotional trauma from their battle experiences.
James, a 26-year-old paratrooper twice deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, went AWOL in July after being reassigned to Fort Bliss, Tex., an Army post in the mountainous high-desert region near El Paso.
“The places I was in in Iraq and Afghanistan look exactly like Fort Bliss,” said James, who agreed to talk about his case on the condition that his last name not be printed. “It starts messing with your head — ‘I’m really back there.’ ”
In December, he and another deserter, Ronnie, 28, who also asked that his last name not be used, tried to surrender to the authorities at Fort Bliss. A staff sergeant told them not to bother, James said.
James and Ronnie, who both have five years of service, suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and abuse alcohol to self-medicate, said Dr. David M. Walker, a former Air Force psychiatrist who has examined both men.
With help from lawyers, James and Ronnie returned to Fort Bliss on Tuesday. They were charged with desertion and face courts-martial and possibly a few months in a military brig.
“If I could stay in the military, get help, that’s what I want,” said Ronnie, who completed an 18-month combat tour in Kirkuk, Iraq, with the 25th Infantry Division in 2004.
The Army said combat-related stress had not caused many soldiers to desert.
Major Edgecomb, the spokeswoman, said more than 80 percent of the past year’s deserters had been soldiers for less than three years, and could not have been deployed more than once.
Morten G. Ender, a sociologist at the United States Military Academy at West Point, said soldiers’ decisions to go AWOL or desert might come in response to a family crisis — a threat by a spouse to leave if they deploy again, for instance, or a child-custody battle.
“It’s not just that they don’t want to be in a war zone anymore,” Dr. Ender said. “We saw that a lot during Vietnam, and we see that a lot in the military now.”
New York Times
April 9, 2007
Pg. 10
Ranchers And Army Are At Odds In Old West
By Dan Frosch
DENVER, April 6 — Mack Louden worries that his 30,000-acre ranch sits in the cross hairs of the Army’s plans to expand its Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site at Fort Carson, and he, along with other Colorado ranchers, are increasingly upset about the idea.
“Where we live, how we live, it’s all going to die a slow death if the Army gets our land,” said Mr. Louden, a fourth-generation rancher from Las Animas County, along the southern edge of the state.
He and other ranchers are to testify on Monday before a committee of state lawmakers in support of a bill that seeks to keep the Army from acquiring nearly a half-million acres it says it needs to train soldiers in the nuances of modern warfare.
Colorado law grants the federal government permission to condemn land for some purposes, like building courthouses and post offices. And the Defense Department lifted a moratorium this year on land acquisitions to allow the Piñon Canyon expansion.
But State Representative Wes McKinley, a Democrat from Walsh, has sponsored a bill that would try to keep the Army from invoking eminent domain in this case. The Colorado House of Representatives has passed the bill, which is now winding its way through the Senate. The legislation may not affect the expansion, however, as it is unclear if the Army would be bound by state law.
Like many cowboys and ranchers from the region, Mr. McKinley’s family settled in southeastern Colorado’s shortgrass prairie lands as part of the Federal Homestead Act of 1862. The act allowed settlers to live on public land for five years, with the promise that the land would become theirs if it was farmed sufficiently.
Now, Mr. McKinley worries that his traditional rural way of life, and that of his neighbors, will wither in the path of American military might.
“People will have their livelihoods, their heritage, their homes taken away,” he said. “Their lives will be destroyed. There’s not much demand for a 65-year-old cowboy.”
It is not only cowboys and ranchers who are concerned. Bruce Schumacher, a paleontologist with the Forest Service in La Junta, said the land the Army wanted encompassed Picketwire Canyonlands, where hundreds of dinosaur tracks are preserved, and a large part of the Comanche National Grasslands, which is managed by the Forest Service.
Mr. Schumacher said he was frustrated because the Army had not spoken with Forest Service officials about the expansion. “It’s awkward because we have members of the public asking what we think about it, and we’ve received no information directly from the Army,” he said.
The Army says that the expansion is still in the initial planning stages and that an environmental impact study will take nearly two years to complete, leaving plenty of time for public comment and collaboration with other federal agencies.
“We understand that there are some concerns and that there are some residents and landowners that have a vested interest in the land and their culture and their livelihood,” said Lt. Col. David G. Johnson, a spokesman for Fort Carson. “That’s not something we take lightly.”
But Colonel Johnson also said the Army expected Fort Carson to grow by at least 8,000 soldiers in the coming years and that the intricacies of the post-Sept. 11 battlefield warranted more sophisticated training.
“It is our intention to purchase land from willing sellers,” he said. “But the Army will not give up its legal right to use eminent domain via condemnation to acquire much-needed land to train soldiers.”
In the early 1980s, when the Army created the Piñon Canyon site, it acquired about half of the 235,000 acres by condemning the land of owners unwilling to sell and the rest from willing sellers, Colonel Johnson said.
Lon Robertson, a rancher and president of the Piñon Canyon Expansion Opposition Coalition, a group of 1,100 opponents of the plan, said he feared the process was bound to repeat itself. Mr. Robertson speaks wistfully of this close-knit, conservative community, one of the last vestiges of the old American West.
“You have the military fighting for the freedom of other people overseas, and we’re losing our own back home,” he said. “It makes no sense.”
Miami Herald
April 9, 2007
After 3 Years, GI Still Missing
The parents of a missing soldier keep the faith as they face the three-year anniversary of his capture in Iraq today.
By Terry Kinney, Associated Press
Yellow ribbons across Sgt. Matt Maupin's hometown are constant reminders. Fundraising events in his honor draw overflow crowds. Soldiers back home relay details of the ongoing search for him in Iraq.
These are the signs of support and hope that keep Maupin's parents going three years after he was captured in an insurgent attack on his Army convoy.
Keith Maupin said he took comfort hearing from the father of a military interrogator in Iraq who said detainees are asked if they know anything about his missing son.
'Stay focused'
'He said, `These guys are not going to give up on Matt. Their mission is to stay focused on finding Matt and get all the information they can out of these detainees,' '' Keith Maupin said. ``That made me feel good.''
The Army won't confirm that detainees are questioned about Maupin.
''We don't talk about what we are or aren't doing,'' Lt. Col. Bob Tallman said. ``We don't want to alert the enemy, who may do something to the individual or move him.''
Sgt. Keith Matthew Maupin was always called Matt by his parents, since his father was named Keith. He was a 20-year-old private first class when he was captured April 9, 2004, when his fuel convoy, part of the 724th Transportation Company, was ambushed west of Baghdad.
A week later, the Arab television network Al-Jazeera aired a videotape showing Maupin sitting on the floor surrounded by five masked men holding automatic rifles.
That June, Al-Jazeera aired another tape purporting to show a U.S. soldier being shot. But the dark and grainy tape showed only the back of the victim's head and not the actual shooting.
The Maupins refuse to believe it was their son, and the Army continues to list him as missing/captured, Tallman said.
More than 1,000 people are expected at a banquet fundraiser today, the third anniversary of Maupin's capture. Some 700 bikers are expected Saturday for a motorcycle ride sponsored by Rolling Thunder, a POW-MIA awareness group. A youth baseball tournament in May drew more entries than it could handle.
All are raising money for the Matt Maupin Scholarship Fund, seed money for scholarships given by the high schools attended by Cincinnati-area soldiers who died in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Keith Maupin has lost track of the number of briefings he and his former wife, Carolyn, have received from the Pentagon. They've been persistent and he thinks the Army is doing its best to find his son.
It doesn't hurt that the Maupins have met with President Bush and that White House Budget Director Rob Portman used to represent the Maupins' district in Congress.
''When you can get on the phone and call a three-star general, and he can call Iraq to find out what's going on, I don't know how much more they can do for me,'' Keith Maupin said.
Army's looking
Portman's successor, Republican Rep. Jean Schmidt, said she's been assured that the Army is still aggressively looking for Matt.
''There is as much evidence to point toward him being alive as otherwise,'' she said.
As long as the Maupins keep Matt's name alive, he is alive, they reason.
There's a yellow ribbon on every parking meter in Batavia, a close-knit, county-seat community east of Cincinnati.
''We won't let people forget,'' Clermont County Commissioner Bob Proud said. Keith Maupin now works fulltime with the Yellow Ribbon Support Center, which Carolyn founded before their son was captured. Carolyn and Keith Maupin, though divorced, have united in their effort to be a touchstone for families who have lost loved ones in the war.
''A lot of people come in here and a lot of people call, and they just want to talk,'' Keith Maupin said. ``That's OK by me; that's what we're here for.''
The center has sent thousands of packages of snacks, toiletries, sun block, bug spray, games and other things to soldiers in Iraq, putting photos of Matt Maupin in every box. The center helped troops obtain donated computers to send and receive e-mail.
Keith Maupin finds some solace at the Yellow Ribbon Support Center, where he is surrounded by photos, paintings and posters of his son.
''I look at him all the time,'' he said.
``This is about as close as I can get.''
USA Today
April 9, 2007
Pg. 4
Marine In Historic War Photo Identified
4 Years Later: Sergeant On Second Tour In Iraq
By Beth Zimmerman, Marine Corps Times
On April 9, 2003, as a tow chain pulled down the larger-than-life statue of Saddam Hussein in downtown Baghdad, news photographers captured one of the most iconic moments of the Iraq war.
Two similar versions of the same photo — taken by photographers from Reuters and the Associated Press — were plastered on the front page of newspap