The Early Bird 4/22/07

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LTG Brett Dula USAF ret forwarded:
"The cemeteries are filled with irreplaceable men."
Charles de Gaulle.

Washington Post
April 22, 2007
Pg. 1
Top U.S. Officers See Mixed Results From Iraq 'Surge'
Sectarian Killings Decrease in Capital; Suicide Bombings Across Country Rise
By Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post Staff Writer
BAGHDAD, April 21 -- Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said the ongoing increase of nearly 30,000 U.S. troops in the country has achieved "modest progress" but has also met with setbacks such as a rise in devastating suicide bombings and other problems that leave uncertain whether his counterinsurgency strategy will ultimately succeed.
Assessing the first two months of the U.S. and Iraqi plan to pacify the capital, senior American commanders -- including Petraeus; Adm. William J. Fallon, head of U.S. forces in the Middle East; Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, commander of military operations in Iraq; and top regional commanders -- see mixed results. They said that while an increase in U.S. and Iraqi troops has improved security in Baghdad and Anbar province, attacks have risen sharply elsewhere. Critical now, they said in interviews this week, is for Iraqi leaders to forge the political compromises needed for long-term stability.
The commanders search for signs of success. On Friday night at dusk, Petraeus boarded a helicopter to look for scenes of normalcy and progress from above the maelstrom of the capital.
"On a bad day, I actually fly Baghdad just to reassure myself that life still goes on," he said, leaning back and propping his legs on the seat in front of him.
The aircraft banked right and Petraeus caught sight of a patch of relative calm. "He's actually watering the grass!" Petraeus said with a laugh, peering down at a man tending a soccer field, with children playing nearby.
Seconds later, the aircraft pivoted again, exposing boarded-up shops on a deserted, trash-strewn street. A bit farther, along the Tigris River, a hulking pile of twisted steel came into view -- the remains of the Sarafiya bridge, blown up April 12 amid a series of spectacular and deadly suicide bombings.
"That's a setback," Petraeus said, his voice lower. "That breaks your heart."
And so it went, all across the city. Directing the pilot to "break left" or "roll out," he scanned the landscape for even tiny improvements -- a pile of picked-up trash, an Iraqi police car out on patrol, a short line at one gas station -- as if gathering mental ammunition for the next wave of Baghdad carnage. An amusement park, its rides lit up, merited a full circle.
"We have certainly pulled neighborhoods back from the brink," Petraeus said, comparing the signs of revitalization now to his initial shock at the stark deterioration of parts of the capital upon his arrival in February.
So far, the deployment of additional troops in Baghdad is only 60 percent complete, and incoming units in many parts of the city are still conducting initial, labor-intensive operations to "clear" neighborhoods before setting up patrol bases, a pillar of Petraeus's counterinsurgency plan. Iraq's security forces have contributed the nine battalions pledged for the Baghdad operations, and rotate those forces every 90 days.
The bases -- which so far include 21 combat outposts and 26 joint security stations run together with Iraqi forces -- are a key building block in the effort to increase security for Baghdad residents. Another part of the strategy is to wall off communities along their traditional boundaries to control population access and prevent attacks.
"That's part of the concrete caterpillar," Petraeus said, pointing out a barrier going up in a neighborhood in west Baghdad. "That market was shut completely down when I took command -- now it has 200 shops," he said.
The walls helped divert the multiple car bombs in Baghdad on Wednesday that killed more than 170 people. Three exploded short of their targets, but the fourth and deadliest vehicle bomber was able to enter a market because someone had removed part of the barrier to gain easier access, U.S. officials said.
U.S. commanders say sectarian murders fell from 1,200 in Baghdad in January to fewer than 400 in March. Markets are reopening, and a few thousand families have trickled back to areas they had fled.
But they agreed that among the most troubling trends in Iraq has been the proliferation of suicide bomb attacks, because they risk reigniting sectarian revenge killings and undermining the government. Suicide bombings have increased 30 percent over the six weeks that ended in early April, according to military data.
"When you have these big explosions, there is a very high risk of a major setback because it sends a message of instability and insecurity," said Fallon, head of U.S. Central Command.
It is virtually impossible to eliminate the suicide bombings, the commanders acknowledged. "I don't think you're ever going to get rid of all the car bombs," Petraeus said. "Iraq is going to have to learn -- as did, say, Northern Ireland -- to live with some degree of sensational attacks." A more realistic goal, he said, but one that has eluded U.S. and Iraqi forces, is to prevent the bombers from causing "horrific damage."
Another major concern shared by U.S. military leaders is whether the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is capable of solidifying gains in security as well as making the crucial political compromises needed to achieve peace. "Will the Iraqis generate the capacity in their security forces and in their government to sustain this over time? That's what keeps me up at night," Odierno said.
Iraqi leaders "come from narrow political backgrounds . . . but now there is an expectation they will be able to make decisions well beyond the group they represent. This is struggle for them," Fallon said.
As the Maliki government moves slowly, and patience in the United States wears thin, commanders worry that their window for action is rapidly closing. "We're trying to somehow speed up the Baghdad clock and put time on the Washington clock. That's all we can do at the end of the day," Petraeus said.
U.S. commanders said that at least so far, the bombings of Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad have not incited Shiite militias to launch a new wave of revenge killings. Shiite militias, moreover, including the powerful Mahdi Army of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, have not staged major resistance to U.S. and Iraqi forces. Still, they acknowledge that Sadr's intentions remain unclear.
The increased presence of U.S. and Iraqi soldiers and police in the neighborhoods has helped the forces more easily track down death squads. A death squad leader in the Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City was detained recently, yielding a wealth of intelligence on the militia and its Iranian connections, according to a U.S. military official.
At the joint command headquarters for the Baghdad operation, Iraqi commander Lt. Gen. Abud Qanbar Hashim met Saturday with Fallon and Odierno and discussed which parts of Baghdad needed more troops. "I am very optimistic. I think we will succeed" with the additional forces, Hashim told Fallon.
Despite initial concerns, the existence of two separate command chains for Iraqi and U.S. forces has not caused major problems, the commanders said. Col. Shannon Davis, the U.S. advisory team chief for the Iraqi command, said that initially Iraqi officers lacked good communications, and instead were "handing around Post-it notes and using cellphones." The U.S. headquarters across the hallway is fully automated and able to point out incidents that the Iraqis might miss, Davis said.
The increase of 4,000 more Marines in Anbar province has helped lower violence in what has long been a Sunni insurgent stronghold. "The surge forces gave us the ability to go outside the population centers" to the lowlands where insurgents trained, stored weapons and took refuge, said Maj. Gen. Walter Gaskin, U.S. commander in Anbar.
Flying over Baghdad as the lights of the city came on, Petraeus passed by the city's southern flank, where he led the 101st Airborne Division in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In an earlier interview, he had said he feels a sense of obligation to help Iraqi people, because "General [Colin] Powell was right, it is Pottery [Barn] rules." But on this, his third tour in Iraq, Petraeus returned to a society that is "more fearful, more suspicious, more worried" and therefore more difficult to help.
"I wouldn't be honest if I didn't say that this has an effect on all of us," he said. "And so every now and then we just get on the helicopter. . . . You go see some projects that you know have been built. . . . You see some police stations and you see people just sort of driving on, people getting on with their lives, and it sort of reassures you. 'Hey, these people are survivors.' "
New York Times
April 22, 2007
Pg. 1
After Iraqi Troops Do Dirty Work, 3 Detainees Talk
By Alissa J. Rubin
BAGHDAD, April 21 — Out here in what the soldiers call Baghdad’s wild west, sometimes the choices are all bad.
In one of the new joint American-Iraqi security stations in the capital this month, in the volatile Ghazaliya neighborhood, Capt. Darren Fowler was heaping praise on his Iraqi counterparts for helping capture three insurgent suspects who had provided information he believed would save American lives.
“The detainee gave us names from the highest to the lowest,” Captain Fowler told the Iraqi soldiers. “He showed us their safe houses, where they store weapons and I.E.D.’s and where they keep kidnap victims, how they get weapons, where weapons come from, how they place I.E.D.’s, attack us and go away. Because you detained this guy this is the first intelligence linking everything together. Good job. Very good job.”
The Iraqi officers beamed. What the Americans did not know and what the Iraqis had not told them was that before handing over the detainees to the Americans, the Iraqi soldiers had beaten one of them in front of the other two, the Iraqis said. The stripes on the detainee’s back, which appeared to be the product of a whipping with electrical cables, were later shown briefly to a photographer, who was not allowed to take a picture.
To the Iraqi soldiers, the treatment was normal and necessary. They were proud of their technique and proud to have helped the Americans.
“I prepared him for the Americans and let them take his confession,” Capt. Bassim Hassan said through an interpreter. “We know how to make them talk. We know their back streets. We beat them. I don’t beat them that much, but enough so he feels the pain and it makes him desperate.”
As American and Iraqi troops set up these outposts in dangerous neighborhoods to take on the insurgents block by block, they find themselves continually facing lethal attacks. In practice, the Americans and Iraqis seem to have different answers about what tactics are acceptable in response.
Beatings like this, which are usually hard to verify but appear to be widespread given the fears about the Iraqi security forces frequently expressed by ordinary Iraqis, present the Americans with a largely undiscussed dilemma.
The beaten detainee, according to Captain Fowler, not only led the Americans to safe houses believed to be used by Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia but also confessed to laying and detonating roadside bombs along a section of road heavily traveled by American patrols. Just a month ago, four soldiers from Captain Fowler’s regiment died on that road after the explosion of a large, deeply buried bomb, possibly made in the bomb factory that the Americans were able to dismantle because of the detainee’s information, Captain Fowler said.
But beating is strictly forbidden by the United States Army’s Field Manual, as well as American and Iraqi laws. When the Americans learned about the beating, they were quick to condemn it.
The use of torture by American soldiers and contractors at Abu Ghraib only compounded Iraqi hatred of Americans and further undermined American moral claims in Iraq. It also produced little valuable information. Most experts, including in the military, say they believe that coerced confessions are an unreliable way to learn about enemy operations because people being tortured will often say whatever they think it will take to stop the pain.
This joint security station in Ghazaliya opened on March 15, about a month after the latest increase in American troops began. The station, inhabited by about 70 soldiers of Company D of the Second Battalion, 12th Cavalry, and their Iraqi counterparts, is named for Specialist Robert Thrasher, a member of the unit killed by sniper fire on Feb. 11 when the company was scouting for a station site.
Thrasher, as the station is known, sits in the southern part of Ghazaliya, one of the roughest areas of western Baghdad. In the northern part, Shiite militias, led by the Mahdi Army, have been driving out Sunni Arabs through raids and assassinations. Sunnis have pushed Shiites out of the southern part.
Sewage pools in the streets. Water and electricity are almost nonexistent, and fewer than half the houses are occupied. The neighborhood graffiti broadcasts the presence of an active insurgency: “Long live Abu Hamza al-Muhajar,” reads one scrawl, referring to a local insurgent leader.
The outpost’s location, along one of the main arms smuggling routes from Falluja, was chosen because it was next to a litter-filled lot that was a dumping ground for bodies. When they first arrived, the American soldiers found 30 bodies there, among them women and children.
Now it is rare to find more than one or two, said Captain Fowler, who keeps photos of every one on his computer as a reminder of how much worse it was before his company took up residence. He can also point to other signs of progress: children have begun to play outside again, and women walk to the market.
But the area remains far from calm. The radio in the joint operations room crackles all day long with reports of bomb explosions or newly sighted explosive devices that must be scouted by the soldiers. The distance to the next security station is barely half a mile, but it is so dangerous that the soldiers cannot walk there and do not like to drive more often than necessary.
Although one tenet of the Baghdad security plan is that soldiers should patrol on foot to get to know local residents, it was on just such a patrol that Specialist Thrasher died. Now, said Sgt. Trevis Good, 34, “foot patrols don’t exist; they are not something we do.” The company’s partner is the Third Battalion, Fourth Brigade, of the Iraqi Army’s 10th Division. The soldiers come from Amara, the largest town in rural Maysan Province in the far south, a mostly peaceful area where in a year of active duty they never had an injury, much less a fatality.
In just three weeks in Ghazaliya, the battalion has lost two officers and a soldier; 16 troops have been wounded. A few hundred Iraqi soldiers live in three attached houses just over a brick wall from the Americans. The houses, beefed up only by sandbags, lie outside the station’s fortified area. Visiting their quarters means crouching down and running behind vehicles until entering one of the houses.
The Iraqi soldiers have their own network of informants, and they picked up the detainee who was later beaten, Mustafa Subhi Jassam, after seeing him loitering around a main patrol route twice in the same day. The other two insurgent suspects were picked up separately.
After interrogating Mr. Jassam, a thin young man wearing a blue and red warm-up outfit, for much of the night, the Americans took him to point out one of the houses where the Qaeda militants made bombs. When the Americans arrived, a half-eaten lunch was on the table next to a couple of detonators and some blasting wire. The insurgents appeared to have been gnawing on chicken and flat bread while making fuses for I.E.D.’s, improvised explosive devices, the military’s term for the roadside bombs found here.
On the table and in bags on the floor were mountains of soap, which can be used in homemade explosives. Blasting wire lay in coils. Buried in the garden were two large antiaircraft guns known as Duskas, three propane tanks, and an oxygen tank that was partly cut in preparation for being turned into a huge bomb, probably similar to the one that killed the four soldiers. On the roof a large pile of homemade explosives was drying in the sun.
The Iraqi soldiers were ecstatic. They had delivered. They snapped photos of each other in front of the cache with the blasting cords in their mouths, grinning. The Americans were nervous. “One spark will blow this place up,” said First Lt. Michael Obal as an Iraqi soldier flicked a lighted cigarette butt within inches of one cache of explosives. “It’s highly unstable TNT.”
Later, the Americans plotted into their computers the location of each of the Qaeda safe houses that Mr. Jassam had pointed out. “He was singing like a songbird,” said First Lt. Sean Henley, 24.
After the prisoner was returned to the Iraqis, Captain Fowler was asked whether the Americans realized that the information was given only after the Iraqis had beaten Mr. Jassam. “They are not supposed to do that,” he said. “What I don’t see, I don’t know, and I can’t stop. The detainees are deathly afraid of being sent to the Iraqi justice system, because this is the kind of thing they do. But this is their culture.”
Later, Captain Fowler said that he thought Mr. Jassam had talked because he hoped to be released. The captain wanted him let go so that he could act as an informant. The Iraqi soldiers vetoed the idea.
Mr. Jassam is now being held in an Iraqi government detention center, widely rumored to be places where suspected insurgents are abused.
Lieutenant Obal, the captain’s deputy, was distraught at the thought that the detainee had been beaten. “I don’t think that’s right,” he said. “We have intelligence teams, they have techniques for getting information, they don’t do things like that. It’s not civilization.”
About 30 yards away, on the other side of the wall, the Iraqi soldiers suggested that the Americans were being naïve. The insurgents are playing for keeps, they say, and force must be answered with force.
“If the Americans used this way, the way we use, nobody would shoot the Americans at all,” Captain Hassan said. “But they are easy with them, and they have made it easy for the terrorists.”
“I didn’t beat them all, I beat Mustafa in front of the others. We tell him we’re going to string him up.” He demonstrated, his arms spread wide. “And, I made the others see him,” he said.
Captain Hassan and his colleagues said they knew the Iraqi Army had rules against beatings, but “they tell us to do what we have to do,” he said.
“For me it’s a matter of conscience, not rules,” he said.
Captain Fowler’s proposal to release Mr. Jassam in the hope he would become an informant struck Captain Hassan as useless and quite possibly dangerous.
“It’s kind of not a good idea,” he said carefully, as if explaining something to a child. “He’ll never become an informant. Al Qaeda will know he’s been captured. He’ll go back to them and say, ‘The Americans wanted me to be an informer, but I will be loyal to you.’ He will be more afraid of Al Qaeda guys than of the Americans.”
But some detainees may have a simpler motivation: survival. The Iraqi soldiers say many of the insurgents are paid for their attacks, and they gain respect and protection from other militants.
Another officer in the Iraqi unit, Major Hussain, who would not give his full name, said the only way to lure such militants out of the insurgent life would be to offer them a comparable standard of living.
“Ziad, over there, wanted to come work with us,” Major Hussain said, indicating one of the insurgent suspects, Ziad Sabah Jasim, who became cooperative after witnessing the beating of Mr. Jassam. “He said, ‘Just let me join you,’ ”
“Most of them don’t believe in this insurgency,” he said. “They are young people. They are having to stay home without employment. They want food. They want money. They want to be able to marry. But there are no jobs. If you offered them jobs, most of them would not be working with Al Qaeda.”
The American soldiers would agree, but they also are clear that the only way to bring jobs is first to make the neighborhood secure. “You need a J.S.S. every kilometer or so,” Captain Fowler said. For now, there are nowhere near that many security stations on Baghdad’s west side.
Ashley Gilbertson contributed reporting.
Washington Post
April 22, 2007
Pg. 1
Troops In Diyala Face A Skilled, Flexible Foe
Sophisticated Insurgent Tactics Raise U.S. Death Toll in Northeast Province
By Joshua Partlow, Washington Post Foreign Service
BAQUBAH, Iraq -- The pale blue light inside the Chinook helicopter cast a faint glow on the young soldiers, shoulder to shoulder, tensed for battle. They crossed themselves and bowed their heads.
The battalion was flying in the middle of the night toward an Iraqi village, one unexplored by American troops and believed to be dominated by Sunni insurgents. The troops had heard the stories -- militant camps hidden in palm groves, underground torture prisons, sniper teams on rooftops -- and were ready for a fight. As a lone soldier had roared on the tarmac amid the thudding rotors: "Battle hard!"
But when the 600 soldiers descended on Buhriz al Barra with machine guns and night-vision lenses early Monday, they found the village largely devoid of men. Soldiers fanned out from the rocky field where they had landed, combing riverbanks, palm groves and hundreds of concrete and cinder-block homes, only to find many abandoned and others inhabited only by nervous women and children.
"The biggest dry hole ever," said 1st Lt. James Brandon Prisock, 28, a platoon leader on the operation, after several hours in the village. "These guys all took off. They knew we were coming."
In Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, the American military is engaged in an intractable guerrilla fight against an elusive and sophisticated enemy more deadly than many battle-hardened soldiers have ever encountered in Iraq. The attacks on U.S. and Iraqi soldiers here have risen sharply in recent months, a problem compounded by an influx of fighters in search of safer havens outside Baghdad. Many of the insurgents are well-trained, highly mobile fighters who refuse to get dragged into open confrontations in which American forces can deploy their overpowering weaponry.
The insurgents "fight in small numbers, they try and hit you through subterfuge, they like using snipers," said Sgt. 1st Class Benjamin Hanner, 35, of Redding, Calif., part of an armored unit of Stryker combat vehicles that took part in the Buhriz al Barra assault. "These guys know what they're doing. They're controlled, their planning is good, their human intel network and early-warning networks are effective."
These techniques have become increasingly devastating to the Americans in this province. Since November, when the 5,000-member 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Cavalry Division deployed to Diyala, at least 46 American soldiers have died in the fighting, officers said. Eleven U.S. soldiers were killed in the province from October 2005 to October 2006, according to a Washington Post database. Diyala was the eighth-deadliest province for Americans in 2006 but has risen to third this year, after Baghdad and Anbar provinces.
The U.S. military is now committing more than 2,000 additional soldiers to Diyala to fend off this growing insurgency.
"There are serious problems here, much bigger than I think anyone wanted to admit," Prisock said.
The soldiers fighting in Diyala have faced insurgents who communicate with radios and sometimes watch the Americans with night-vision goggles. Marksmen bore holes in the parapets of rooftops, stand back a few feet and fire through the openings to disguise the muzzle blast. Some shoot with tracer rounds to guide their bullets. When Americans come under attack, they often find themselves taking fire from several directions.
"I've been all over this country," Hanner said. "This is by far the worst place I've ever been in my life. This is what you think war is going to be."
In March, the day after reinforcements from a Stryker battalion arrived in the provincial capital of Baqubah, the unit encountered what appeared to be 27 roadside bombs, known as IEDs, in a one-mile stretch of road that runs in front of the Buhriz government center, on the southern edge of the city.
"For each real one, they had put three or four false IEDs. They had intentionally put in crushed wires, pressure plates, different IED techniques that we would recognize," said Capt. Ben Richards, a company commander with the Stryker unit. The decoys slowed down the patrols, and provided enough time for insurgents to launch coordinated attacks involving rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and machine-gun fire.
"We found ourselves in three straight days of urban combat with some very skilled insurgents," Richards said. "Militarily, they were very well thought out. This wasn't a group of guys that just wanted to die. They had planned their defenses of the area very well."
These types of coordinated ambushes have become more frequent in Diyala: In March the U.S. military counted 27 complex attacks, in comparison with 14 in April 2006, 17 in July 2006, 26 in October 2006, and 14 in January of this year.
The makeup of the fighters in Diyala defies easy characterization, and Col. David W. Sutherland, the top U.S. military commander in the province, said any guesswork as to their numbers would be impossible.
The U.S. military cites the hard-line Islamic insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq as its primary enemy, but there is also an intricate and ever-changing taxonomy of rival tribes, insurgent organizations, criminal networks, Sunni and Shiite militias, and Islamic fighters from throughout the Middle East who have come to the province to join the fray.
The Baqubah area is home to many loyalists of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party and military and intelligence officers who served in his government, who have supported insurgent groups such as the 1920 Revolution Brigades. Soldiers based near Muqdadiyah, about 60 miles north of Baghdad, say groups of Chechen rebels operate near their city and train insurgents, and many are convinced that al-Qaeda camps are hidden under the dense palm fronds.
"These guys are smart. The Iraqi insurgent as a whole has really adapted well to our tactics and have learned a lot," said 1st Lt. Anthony Von Plinsky, 28, a platoon leader near Muqdadiyah. "They know how to bury things without us seeing them, they know how to trigger it without us knowing."
"Every time we react to a contact, they take that and learn from it. I hate to give credit to somebody who has no rules, but they're pretty good."
Al-Qaeda in Iraq, operating under the banner of an umbrella group called the Islamic State of Iraq, has managed to drive out Shiites from many cities and villages in Diyala. Shiites in Baqubah, who once made up about 45 percent of the population, now account for about 20 percent, said Sutherland. In March, gunmen laid siege to the Shiite village of Towakel, northeast of Muqdadiyah, burning dozens of homes, slaughtering livestock and leaving a smoldering ghost town in their wake. On wall after wall they scrawled graffiti proclaiming the village the domain of the Islamic State of Iraq.
"They just stormed in one night and started on the southwest side and started burning their way all the way up this one road," said Von Plinsky. The Shiite villagers "had defenses built up . . . but they just got overpowered. They got decimated."
In November, al-Qaeda fighters overwhelmed and destroyed an Iraqi police station just south of Baqubah. The next month, the Iraqi army pulled out of the area.
At the same time, rifts have opened among insurgent groups that U.S. and Iraqi forces are hoping to exploit. In early April, U.S. military officers watched footage from surveillance drones of what they believed to be fighters from the 1920 Revolution Brigades -- a group formed in 2003 under a name that refers to Iraq's resistance to British colonialism -- engaged in street battles with al-Qaeda in Iraq fighters in Baqubah.
"They fought it out for like eight days, a knock-down, drag-out fight," Lt. Prisock said. "Towards the end, 1920s started running out of ammunition, [rocket-propelled grenades] and stuff like that."
Since these battles, U.S. troops say they have received more information from Iraqis about the whereabouts of roadside bombs and insurgent hide-outs. On the day of the Buhriz al Barra operation, Col. Sutherland met with the leaders of the Bani Zaid, Al-Karkhiya, Al-Mujama and Shammar tribes to try to broker a peace agreement, using his troop presence in the village as a sign they were serious about fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq.
In parts of Baqubah, something of an unspoken truce has emerged between the 1920 Revolution Brigades and the U.S. military, said Capt. Aaron Tiffany, 26, a platoon leader from St. Louis.
"It's like, 'Hey, we're not going to attack you if you help us get rid of al-Qaeda,' " he said.
But the information provided by insurgent leaders and others on the whereabouts of al-Qaeda in Iraq fighters often does not pan out. In one raid this month led by Tiffany, U.S. and Iraqi troops burst into a house in southern Baqubah, blindfolded and slapped plastic handcuffs on one man, and forced four others to kneel and face the wall with hands behind their heads.
"We don't like al-Qaeda in these parts," Staff Sgt. Justin Little, 26, said to an Iraqi man with a white blindfold over his eyes, as Little pushed him by the back of the neck toward a wall.
After questioning the man, Tiffany issued a warning through his interpreter. "Tell him if he won't give us enough information, we'll give him to the Iraqi army and let them deal with him," he said. "I don't have enough to detain him, but the Iraqi army doesn't need as much information as me."
Eventually, Tiffany released all the men when the original informant began to change his story, saying they might not actually have been involved in crimes.
The tip may have been a trap. A few minutes after leaving the house, the convoy of Strykers was attacked by a stream of AK-47 rifle fire, followed by a thunderous roadside bomb that exploded within feet of the vehicles. After firing back nearly 2,000 rounds, the soldiers made it back to their base unharmed.
On another recent night raid near Muqdadiyah -- based on a tip from the Iraqi police -- U.S. soldiers rolled out in six Humvees expecting to find a half-dozen al-Qaeda in Iraq members in a meeting.
Instead they found a crying mother and her terrified 13-year-old boy.
"Tell him, since he's the oldest one in the house, he's the man of the house, he needs to man-up and stop hiding behind his mother," 1st Lt. Christopher Nogle, 23, of Orlando, instructed his interpreter.
The boy covered his face and sobbed. It was 3 in the morning. He said he didn't know where his father had gone.
"Does he love his father?" Nogle asked. "Does he want to see him again?"
The small barefoot boy shook with fear and said nothing.
"Ask him where his father hides his weapons," Nogle demanded.
"I swear to God I don't know," the boy said.
"He is not a man, he is scared," said his mother, who was also wailing.
"He needs to quit crying. He's responsible for everybody in here right now since his father left; his father abandoned everybody else," Nogle told the boy through his interpreter. "Tell him when his father comes back later tonight or tomorrow that he needs to have a talk with his father, that his father is doing very bad things and it's getting the whole family in trouble."
Before the soldiers left, an Iraqi police officer brandished two large buck knives in front of the boy's face. Nobody was arrested.
During the daylong operation in Buhriz al Barra, American soldiers killed one gunman and detained 12 people, including one man soldiers said was an al-Qaeda emir, Mehdi Salman Kabouri al-Sharafi. They found five small weapons caches, with artillery rounds, hand grenades and machine-gun ammunition. Commanders said the near-total exodus of men was typical.
"We've seen no military-aged males before. It's a trend," Col. Sutherland said.
There were few clues as to where the men of the village went or why they left. The soldiers found one hint written in rusty English on a piece of paper taped to a computer screen.
"We didn't runaway because we are terrorist," the note said. "We run away because we afrad of you."
Staff researcher Robert E. Thomason in Washington contributed to this report.
New York Times
April 22, 2007
Pg. 18
Iraqi City Council Chief Killed
By Kirk Semple
BAGHDAD, April 21 — Gunmen killed the chairman of the Falluja City Council on Saturday, striking a blow to American and Iraqi efforts to develop a functioning representative government in the volatile western province of Anbar.
Sami Naib al-Jumaili, who was slain in a drive-by shooting in front of his house, was at least the third leader of the Falluja City Council killed by insurgents. Another resigned after receiving death threats.
Though police investigators said they did not know who killed Mr. Jumaili, suspicion has fallen most heavily on the extremist insurgent group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which has conducted an intimidation and murder campaign against politicians and tribal leaders in Anbar who have cooperated with the Iraqi and American authorities.
Maj. Jeffrey Pool, a spokesman for the American military command in Falluja, said the assassination was “designed to cause fear and to intimidate the populace to cow them into submission.”
In the northern oil city of Kirkuk, gunmen stormed the house of a Kurdish family on Saturday, killing all four family members, including an 8-year-old girl who was beheaded, according to Brig. Gen. Adel Zain al-Abdeen, the chief of the local police.
Police investigators and neighbors of the victims said they had no idea why the attackers had singled out the family, which included the girl’s parents and her 18-year-old sister.
Killings have been on the rise in Kirkuk in recent months as tensions have escalated between Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen in advance of a referendum, expected to be held before the end of the year, to decide whether the city should join Iraqi Kurdistan.
Also on Saturday, three American soldiers were killed and six were wounded in three separate attacks in and around Baghdad, the American military said. The military also reported that a Polish soldier was killed and four were wounded when their vehicle was struck by a bomb Friday on a roadway in Diwaniya, south of the capital.
In Baghdad, a car bomb exploded in the Shiite enclave of Sadr City on Saturday, killing two and wounding five, an Interior Ministry official said.
A volley of at least six mortar shells exploded in and around the capital’s fortified International Zone on Saturday afternoon, wounding at least two people, the Interior Ministry official said.
An official in Adhamiya, a predominantly Sunni Arab neighborhood in Baghdad, lashed out at the Americans on Saturday for their decision to build a 12-foot wall along the eastern flank of the neighborhood.
Daood Salman al-Adami, acting head of the Adhamiya council, said that the American military had asked him to sign a document assenting to the wall before they began construction last week, but that he refused to do so until he had polled the community.
Ahmad Fadam contributed reporting from Baghdad, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed from Falluja.
Washington Post
April 22, 2007
Pg. 19
Council Head In Fallujah Shot Dead; 3 GIs Killed
By Associated Press
BAGHDAD, April 21 -- The Fallujah City Council chairman, a critic of al-Qaeda who took the job after his three predecessors were assassinated, was killed on Saturday, the latest blow in a violent internal Sunni struggle for control of an insurgent stronghold.
In Baghdad, U.S. and Iraqi officials defended plans to build a barrier around a Sunni enclave to protect its inhabitants from surrounding Shiite areas. Residents expressed concern it would isolate the community.
Sami Abdul-Amir al-Jumaili was gunned down by attackers in a passing car outside his home in central Fallujah, 35 miles west of Baghdad, according to police.
His assassination came a month after he agreed to take the job -- the only person willing to do so -- with promises to improve services and work with the Americans to ease traffic-clogging checkpoints in the city of 150,000 to 200,000.
The 65-year-old Sunni sheik was the fourth City Council chairman to be killed in about 14 months as insurgents target fellow Sunnis who are willing to cooperate with the United States and its Iraqi partners. Abdul-Amir's predecessor, Abbas Ali Hussein, was shot dead Feb. 2.
Also Saturday, the U.S. military announced the deaths of three soldiers, killed in separate attacks.
A roadside bomb killed one U.S. soldier and wounded two while they were on a foot patrol southwest of Baghdad. Another died and three were wounded in southwestern Baghdad when their vehicle was struck by a roadside bomb, followed by small-arms fire, the military said. And a combat security patrol in eastern Baghdad was attacked by small-arms fire, killing one soldier and wounding another.
Philadelphia Inquirer
April 22, 2007
Sunnis Denounce Neighborhood Wall
The U.S. military says the barrier in Baghdad is meant for security. Residents call it 'collective punishment.'
By Sinan Salaheddin, Associated Press
BAGHDAD - A wall that U.S. troops are building around a Sunni enclave in Baghdad came under increasing criticism yesterday, with residents calling it "collective punishment" and a local leader saying construction began without the neighborhood council's approval.
The U.S. military says the wall in Baghdad is meant to secure the minority Sunni community of Azamiyah, which "has been trapped in a spiral of sectarian violence and retaliation."
The area, situated on the eastern side of the Tigris River, would be completely gated, with entrances and exits manned by Iraqi soldiers, the U.S. military said earlier this past week.
But some residents of the neighborhood, which is surrounded by Shiite areas, complained they had not been consulted in advance about the barrier.
"This will make the whole district a prison. This is collective punishment on the residents of Azamiyah," said Ahmed al-Dulaimi, 41, an engineer who lives in the area. "They are going to punish all of us because of a few terrorists here and there."
"We are in our fourth year of occupation and we are seeing the number of blasts increasing day after day, suffocating the people more and more," Dulaimi said in an interview.
U.S. and Iraqi forces have long erected concrete barriers around marketplaces and coalition bases and outposts in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, such as Ramadi, in an effort to prevent attacks, including suicide car bombs. But the Azamiyah project appears to be the biggest effort yet to use a lengthy wall in Baghdad to break contact, and violence, between Sunnis and Shiites.
The U.S. strategy for stabilizing Iraq now involves persuading Iraqis to live in peace and support their democratically elected government and launching a security plan in the capital that calls for 28,000 additional American troops and thousands of Iraqi soldiers.
Khalid Ibrahim, 45, said the Americans were working hard to divide Baghdad's neighborhoods - something he said he wasn't sure was a good thing.
"This is good if it is temporary, to help the area with security problems. But if this wall stays for the long term, it will be a catastrophe for the residents and will restrict our movements," said Ibrahim, an Azamiyah resident who works at the Interior Ministry.
The U.S. military says it began building the barrier April 10. AP Television News footage from the site yesterday showed small concrete blocks, piles of dirt and coils of barbed wire on a main street. Eventually, the military said, the wall will be three miles long and include sections as tall as 12 feet.
Community leaders said yesterday that construction began before they had approved an American proposal for the wall.
"A few days ago, we met with the U.S. Army unit in charge of Azamiyah and it asked us, as a local council, to sign a document to build a wall to reduce killing and attacks against Iraqi and U.S. forces," said Dawood al-Azami, the acting head of the Azamiyah council.
"I told the soldiers that I would not sign it unless I could talk to residents first. We told residents at Friday prayers, but our local council hasn't signed onto the project yet, and construction is already under way."
Asked about the Azamiyah wall, Interior Ministry spokesman Brig. Abdul-Karim Khalaf said there would be "some limitations on more than one neighborhood inside Baghdad."
"There will be no isolation of any neighborhood. There will be limitations on the movement of people through specific routes, so that terrorists cannot avoid being searched," he said.
New York Times
April 22, 2007
Military Cites 'Negligence' In Aftermath Of Iraq Killings
By Paul von Zielbauer
A military investigation has found that senior Marine Corps commanders in Iraq showed a routine disregard for the lives of Iraqi civilians that contributed to a “willful” failure to investigate the killing of 24 unarmed Iraqis by marines in 2005, lawyers involved in the case said.
The report, completed last summer but never made public, also found that a Marine Corps general and colonel in Iraq learned of the killings within hours that day, Nov. 19, 2005, in the town of Haditha, but failed to begin a thorough inquiry into how they occurred.
The 130-page report, by Maj. Gen. Eldon A. Bargewell of the Army, did not conclude that the senior officers covered up evidence or committed a crime. But it said the Marine Corps command in Iraq was far too willing to tolerate civilian casualties and dismiss Iraqi claims of abuse by marines as insurgent propaganda, according to lawyers who have read it.
“All levels of command tended to view civilian casualties, even in significant numbers, as routine and as the natural and intended result of insurgent tactics,” General Bargewell wrote in his report, according to two people who have read it. “Statements made by the chain of command during interviews for this investigation, taken as a whole, suggest that Iraqi civilian lives are not as important as U.S. lives, their deaths are just the cost of doing business, and that the Marines need to get the job done no matter what it takes.”
The killings in Haditha, in Anbar Province, began with a roadside bombing that killed one American marine and wounded two. Several marines then began methodically killing civilians in the area, eventually going door to door in the village and killing women and children, some in their beds, according to a Naval criminal investigation.
General Bargewell’s report, completed at the request of Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the day-to-day commander of American forces in Iraq at the time, did not focus on the killings themselves, but rather on commanders’ handling of the aftermath.
The Washington Post published details of the report’s findings on Saturday. Spokesmen for the Marine Corps declined to comment, citing hearings for the three enlisted marines charged with murder in the case and for four officers charged with dereliction of duty for failing to ensure a proper investigation.
General Bargewell’s report was said to have found what it called “inattention and negligence, in certain cases willful negligence,” among Marine officers who reported the civilian deaths immediately up their chain of command in ways that the report said were “untimely, inaccurate and incomplete.”
It is critical of the Marine division commander, Maj. Gen. Richard A. Huck, and the regimental commander, Col. Stephen W. Davis, for fostering a perception that civilian Iraqi lives were not as important as American lives and for failing to investigate the civilian deaths in Haditha, lawyers who read the report said.
Lawyers for the four officers charged with dereliction of duty — a lieutenant colonel, two captains and a first lieutenant — disagreed Saturday with the report’s conclusions about them.
“Colonel Chessani, Colonel Davis and General Huck all viewed this — and still do — as a legitimate combat action,” said Brian J. Rooney, a civilian lawyer for Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani, who was relieved of his command and is the highest-ranking officer known publicly to be punished in the Haditha matter. “That same night and the next morning Colonel Chessani reported up the chain of command what he had learned about the attacks,” including that marines had killed civilians. “I don’t know how that’s untimely, accurate and incomplete.”
The Bargewell report, which was recently declassified, also established that junior officers, including a captain who issued a news release on the episode that blamed a roadside bomb planted by insurgents for most of the deaths, knew from the beginning that marines had killed the civilians, the lawyers said.
The captain, Jeffrey S. Pool, told General Bargewell’s investigators that he was given reports from battalion commanders that accurately described the marines’ killing of civilians, said lawyers who read the report. But Captain Pool said he issued a news release blaming insurgents for the deaths because he believed that the killings were ultimately a direct result of the roadside bombing of the marines, the lawyers said.
“The way I saw it was this,” Captain Pool told two colonels questioning him, according to a lawyer who read the report to a reporter. “A bomb blast went off, or was initiated, that is what started, that is the reason they’re getting this, is a bomb blew up, killed people. We killed people back, and that’s the story.” (Since the investigation, the captain has been promoted to major and is again working as a public affairs officer in Anbar Province.)
Lawyers for the four officers charged with failing to properly investigate the civilian killings blame the inaccurate news release for creating the false perception that the Marine Corps chain of command had covered up the killing of civilians. But one lawyer also said that the captain’s thinking reflected that of his superiors, who believed that civilian casualties, though regrettable, were an inevitable part of war.
“That’s the rubric that the whole division was operating under,” the lawyer said. The report, he said, came to a similar conclusion. “It just was the culture of the Marine Corps,” he said, paraphrasing the report, “to think that the Iraqis’ story was propaganda, and didn’t investigate.”
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
April 21, 2007
Pg. 26
Insurgents Turn Attacks On Al-Qaida, U.S. Says
By Associated Press
MUQDADIYAH, Iraq -- At least two major insurgent groups are battling al-Qaida in provinces outside Baghdad, American military commanders said Friday. The action is an indication of a deepening rift between Sunni guerrilla groups in Iraq.
U.S. officers say a growing number of Sunni tribes are turning against al-Qaida, repelled by the terror group's sheer brutality and austere religious extremism. The tribes are competing with al-Qaida for influence and control over diminishing territory in the face of U.S. assaults, the officers say. The influx of Sunni fighters to areas outside the capital in advance of the security crackdown in Baghdad may have further unsettled the region.
"This is a big turning point," U.S. Maj. David Baker said Friday in the Diyala provincial capital of Baqouba.
Even Sunnis who want to cooperate with the Shiite-led government are becoming more emboldened to speak out against al-Qaida. In Anbar province, more than 200 Sunni sheiks have decided to form a political party to oppose the terror group.
The clashes have erupted over the past two to three months, pitting al-Qaida in Iraq against the nationalist 1920 Revolution Brigades in Diyala and Salahuddin provinces north of Baghdad as well as Anbar to the west, U.S. officers said. In Diyala, another hard-line militant Sunni group, the Ansar al-Sunna Army, is also fighting al-Qaida, they said.
"Our read on it is that the more moderate, if you will, Sunni insurgents, are finding that their goals and al-Qaida's goals are at odds," said Lt. Col. Keith Gogas.
Miami Herald
April 22, 2007
Early Critics Of War Now In Charge
The new managers of the Iraq War are not ideologues and loyalists but skeptics of the White House's early moves in Iraq who have previous experience in war zones.
By Anne Gearan, Associated Press
WASHINGTON -- The White House search for a war czar caps a lengthy reshuffle that has placed pragmatists and critics of the Bush administration's early moves in Iraq in charge of managing a war that the United States feels it can't quit but can't quite win.
Gen. David Petraeus recently took command of U.S. forces in Iraq, Ryan Crocker is the new U.S. ambassador to Iraq and Adm. William J. Fallon recently became commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East. All are skeptics of the previous strategy. The State Department also has a new chief of reconstruction in Iraq who had been a harsh critic of the war's early policies.
The changes came as President Bush has warmed to strategies and ideas he once rejected to turn around the violence and chaos in Iraq -- such as sending thousands more troops to the country in an effort to calm Baghdad.
His new crop of Iraq leaders bypasses ideologues and loyalists in favor of professionals with previous experience in Iraq and war zones.
''None of them are particularly ideological or were associated with the original public push for the war,'' said Kurt Campbell, chief executive officer of the nonpartisan, centrist Center for a New American Security. The new leaders ''are probably quietly appalled that we find ourselves in the situation that we do in Iraq,'' Campbell said.
Last fall's firing of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was meant to carry a powerful message, but the gradual replacement of generals, diplomats and leaders has attracted less attention.
Rumsfeld's replacement, Robert Gates, summed up the administration's awkward position Friday and implicitly acknowledged the political pressure to end the war.
The administration will assess Iraq's political progress when deciding this summer whether to bring home some of the thousands of extra troops Bush has sent this spring, Gates said during a visit to Baghdad.
''Our commitment to Iraq is long-term, but it's not a commitment to having our young men and women patrolling Iraq's streets open-endedly,'' Gates said.
Last week, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley noted several of the other personnel changes and said they give the administration a chance to rethink how it manages the war. The overall war chief Hadley wants to hire would report directly to Bush.
Crocker and Petraeus went to Iraq in the first months of the war and emerged disappointed with some of the administration's choices and the centralized management style of American leaders in Baghdad. Although neither has been a strong critic of the administration, both have suggested that crucial chances were blown at the start.
All share a reputation for shrewdness and pragmatism. Their writings and résumés suggest they will make the best of a five-year-old war that has not gone as planned, with an eye to getting U.S. forces and advisors out as fast as possible.
Crocker is one of the State Department's most experienced Middle East experts and has worked for both Republican and Democratic presidents. He reportedly warned then-Secretary of State Colin Powell before the 2003 invasion that toppling Saddam Hussein would lift the lid on sectarian violence in Iraq.
Crocker went back to Baghdad last month to replace the talented Zalmay Khalilzad, an energetic Afghan-born U.S. diplomat with a Republican pedigree. Khalilzad made inroads with Sunni leaders and developed a reputation as a dealmaker, but Crocker may carry greater credibility across sectarian lines and among other Arab governments.
Petraeus brings experience and perspective to the top U.S. military job in Baghdad, having commanded the 101st Airborne Division during the initial invasion in 2003. He then returned to build a viable program for training the Iraqi security forces.
Petraeus disliked how fellow military leaders tried to rout the incipient insurgency in 2003, suggesting that heavy-handed tactics would cause more problems than they might solve. He agreed with critics of the decision to disband the Iraqi army.
Petraeus is also an author of the Army's new doctrine on how to fight a counterinsurgency, developed during his stint last year as head of the Combined Arms Center and the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.
Petraeus' revamped strategy is designed to win back public support along with turf.
Colorado Springs Gazette
April 22, 2007
Pace Pushes Polling Iraqis To Count Gains
By Hearst Newspapers
WASHINGTON -- The top U.S. military officer wants to use Iraqi public opinion polls this summer to determine whether the troop “surge” into Baghdad has succeeded.
Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said polling Iraqis is a good way yardstick to measure security and stability in Iraq.
“I’d recommend a very simple but straightforward metric that is a two-part question” to Iraqis, Pace said. The two questions are:
*“Do they feel more comfortable the day you ask the question, more secure, than they did the day before?
*“And do they believe that the next day and the days beyond they’ll be even more secure than they are today?”
If the answers to both questions is “yes,” Pace said, “then all the other things you’re doing are, in my mind, having the impact you want them to have.”
The goal of improving security is what led President Bush in January to order an escalation of U.S. forces, including 17,500 additional Army troops into Baghdad and about 4,000 additional Marines into Anbar province, a violent focus of the Sunni Muslim insurgency and al-Qaida attacks. The last of those additional forces will arrive in Iraq by June.
There are now some 145,000 U.S. combat and support forces in Iraq.
The U.S. currently uses a range of means to track stability in Iraq after the four-year U.S. occupation, including measuring:
*Changes in Iraq’s gross domestic product, oil production and electricity production and distribution and unemployment.
*The number of insurgent attacks province-by-province.
*The number of Iraqi military units that are trained and equipped to fight insurgents.
*The number of sectarian murders.
Pace said those stability measurements “may be of interest but aren’t as compelling” as a public opinion poll.
Pace said the polling helps “simplify what is an enormous amount of information into something that I think is a reasonable question to ask.”
Los Angeles Times
April 22, 2007
Maliki's Political Survival Tied To Security Effort
A resurgence of violence in Baghdad shakes Iraqis' confidence in his government.
By Edmund Sanders, Times Staff Writer
BAGHDAD — Iraq's first constitutionally elected government may rise or fall with the success of an ongoing U.S.-Iraqi security crackdown in Baghdad, Iraqi politicians and analysts said Saturday.
Amid growing signs that the government of national unity is beginning to fracture, experts say Prime Minister Nouri Maliki has increasingly gambled his political survival on the ambitious, 2-month-old security campaign. After a promising start, which led to a noticeable decline in certain types of sectarian attacks, violence is once more increasing.
On Wednesday, at least 172 people died in five car bombings in and around Baghdad, making it one of the deadliest days in the capital. Six days earlier, a suicide attacker infiltrated the fortified Green Zone and detonated a bomb in the Iraqi parliament cafeteria, killing a lawmaker. The daily count of victims killed execution-style is rising again, and residents are expressing outrage at some U.S. tactics, such as constructing concrete walls to separate Sunni and Shiite Muslim neighborhoods.
Such complaints could spell trouble for Maliki, critics say.
"The current government has attached itself to this security plan," said Kathim Turky Jameel, a political officer with the Iraqi National Accord, the political movement led by former interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. "But what has it accomplished so far other than more explosions? The Iraqi people have run out of patience."
Allawi, who has made no secret of his desire to win back the prime minister's job, and other political rivals are moving quickly to take advantage of Maliki's troubles. Back-room jockeying and secret negotiations among major political players to realign themselves have led analysts to predict a major shakeout.
Maliki "is getting much weaker," said Wamid Nadhmi, political science professor at Baghdad University. "Because of his politics, it's hard to see how he will be allowed to remain in such a position."
On Saturday, Allawi's party said it was continuing to cobble together a rival coalition in parliament that could eventually replace Maliki.
Every week new rumors pop up about shifting alliances, internal party disputes and unlikely partnerships, including speculation that Allawi's secular bloc might join forces with the ultra-religious followers of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr. The two sides clashed bitterly in Najaf and Sadr City in 2004.
Over the last month, Maliki's coalition has suffered two major defections. First Al Fadila al Islamiya, or the Islamic Virtue Party, pulled its 15 members from the leading Shiite political bloc, the United Iraqi Alliance.
Then Sadr, once a major supporter of Maliki, withdrew six Cabinet ministers from the government to protest the prime minister's refusal to set a deadline for U.S. troops to leave Iraq.
Both departing parties complained about Maliki's inaction, which they blamed on the distribution of ministries based largely on sect and ethnicity, rather than political qualification or experience. A de facto quota system dividing key government jobs among Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds was used to break a deadlock in early 2006 that was preventing the newly elected government from taking office.
Maliki supporters predicted the recent defections would enable him to implement his programs. He has been promising a major Cabinet reshuffle to improve his administration's performance.
"This is only going to help him fortify his position," said Sahar Ata, a member of parliament from Maliki's Islamic Dawa Party. "Now he can put the right people in the right position."
Ata dismissed speculation that Maliki's future was in question. "We support him 100%," he said.
But Sabah Saidi, a leader of Al Fadila, predicted that other government partners would begin to reevaluate their support and perhaps join his group in defecting.
"Now many people are thinking about taking similar steps," he said. "Most of the blocs are having internal problems."
On the streets of Baghdad, support for the government is waning. Most residents back the goals of the security crackdown, but after last week's massive car bombings, victims and witnesses criticized Maliki for failing to stem the violence.
"I don't think the current government is doing its job properly," said Amin, 19, a T-shirt vendor in Baghdad who did not want to give his last name.
He and others said the unity government was foundering because sectarian-based factions do not share a vision. "Each faction has its own agenda, and each one is pulling in a different direction," Amin said.
U.S. officials have sent mixed messages about their support for Maliki. Military leaders hope a successful security program will help speed up the eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops, but they are also insisting that the prime minister demonstrate progress in coming months. Specifically, the Bush administration wants Maliki to push through an agreement on sharing oil revenue and reach out to Sunnis by relaxing restrictions preventing former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party from working in the government.
"The clock is ticking," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Friday in Baghdad.
Analysts say a shake-up might reflect a healthy maturing among Iraq's political parties, particularly if they realign based upon ideas and agendas, rather than ethnicity and religion.
"In that way," said professor Nadhmi, "it might be a positive sign in this very chaotic situation."
Times staff writer Said Rifai in Baghdad contributed to this report.
New York Times
April 22, 2007
The Riddle
Say It Loud. Improvise. Keep ’Em Guessing.
By Edward Wong
BAGHDAD -- Moktada al-Sadr’s power is felt from Baghdad to the Beltway even when he has vanished from sight.
For the last month, from a secret location, the young Shiite cleric has fanned the flames of Iraqi nationalism and anti-American sentiment, a sure path to popularity in his frightened, frustrated land.
He organized a protest that drew tens of thousands of people to the Shiite holy city of Najaf to demand an end to the American military presence. They burned American flags and chanted, “Death to America!” Then, last week, he withdrew his six cabinet ministers from the government, complaining that it was not doing enough to rid the country of the Americans.
But press his aides for concrete details of a timetable to present to the Americans, and the picture becomes murkier. They say they want the Americans out. But not just yet.
“In order to drive out the occupation, we need to build up the security forces; then we can have a timetable,” said Abdul Mehdi Mutairi, one of Mr. Sadr’s top political officials, as he smoked at his desk inside the main Sadr office in Baghdad, his television tuned to an Iranian-financed satellite network. He was referring to the Iraqi government’s largely Shiite army and police, which by all accounts could not yet control Iraqi violence on their own.
The gap between Mr. Sadr’s public oratory and his actions shows that he, as much as any American or Iraqi official, is captive to the fact that there is no easy path to securing Iraq’s future. He does have a starkly plain vision — a centralized Islamist Iraq ruled by nationalist Shiites who are distanced from, if not openly hostile to, the United States. But he also has a problem all too familiar to the Bush administration: he does not know exactly how to realize his vision, given the complexities of the conflict.
He has become a great improviser, the Miles Davis of the war.
He publicly courts anti-American Sunni nationalists while his Mahdi Army militia kills Sunni Arabs. He denounces Shiite groups backed by Iran while he is said to be hiding in Iran and taking instructions from clerics there. He promotes Shiite unity while Mahdi fighters battle other Shiite groups in cities across the south, as they did this month in Diwaniya.
There is even widespread talk that he has ordered an elite wing of the Mahdi Army, known as the Thahabiya, or Golden Unit, to assassinate rogue militiamen from his own organization.
Last week, as his allies quit the cabinet, he said he could no longer work with the government. But he left his 30 legislators in the Parliament.
A secular senior Iraqi official said Mr. Sadr’s thinking was in constant evolution, groping for a workable strategy for the war.
“The Sadrists, I’ve said all along, operate on a Hezbollah model,” the official said, referring to the nationalist Lebanese Shiite group that has successfully fought Israel. “But Hassan Nasrallah is much more sophisticated than Moktada al-Sadr. Mookie is a reflection of the rough world of Iraqi Shia, and Hassan Nasrallah is a reflection of the sophisticated world of Lebanese Shia.”
Perhaps nothing is more surprising than the fact that Mr. Sadr’s attitude toward the Americans actually reflects a degree of ambivalence.
Anti-Americanism is the basis of his unflagging popularity. More than any other Iraqi politician, he is willing to recognize, validate and capitalize on the refusal of large segments of the Shiite population, especially the poor and dispossessed, to buy into any government that has the support of the Americans. It is one of the most vexing problems for the Americans, since President Bush’s whole strategy rests on the premise that formerly oppressed Shiites will work with the Americans.
“How can we accept the fact that our country is taken over or occupied, especially since we’ve seen nothing from the occupier but destruction for four years, and they’ve succeeded only in planting sectarian strife?” Mr. Mutairi said.
“Our priority is to drive the occupation from the country,” he said.
But there is an unacknowledged dependence by Mr. Sadr on the Americans themselves.
While Mr. Sadr’s aides criticized Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki last week for refusing to set a timetable for American withdrawal, Mr. Sadr himself has not come forward with deadlines. (The Democrats in Congress have taken a stronger stand.)
One leading Sadr legislator, Bahaa al-Aaraji, said the Americans should stay no longer than two more years. But like Mr. Mutairi, he insisted that the Iraqi security forces had to be well-trained before the Americans left.
In other words, beneath all his fiery talk, Mr. Sadr seems to understand that the Shiite-dominated security forces — which include many recruits from his militia — still need training and equipment from the Americans to take on the relentless Sunni militants in the widening civil war. The horrific bombings in mostly Shiite areas of Baghdad on Thursday, which killed at least 171 people, underscored the fears of some Shiites that they are perhaps farther than ever from defeating the Sunni-led insurgency.
That might help explain why Mr. Sadr, despite his chest-beating, has also pulled his punches on President Bush’s new Baghdad security plan, and in the process has drawn some less-than-enthusiastic comments from members of his fractious militia.
When President Bush said this winter that he was sending nearly 30,000 more troops to Iraq, Mr. Sadr said through his aides that he would comply with the plan. He ordered his militia to lie low. There has since been a drop in death squad killings, and American military commanders attribute some of it to Mr. Sadr’s orders. Meanwhile, the Americans have continued to arrest militiamen and raid safehouses.
Some Mahdi Army commanders are all too aware of the awkward situation.
“Take for example something that happened in the Orfeli area of Sadr City,” said Abu Tiba, who leads 30 to 40 men in the Sadr City slum. “The Americans recently tried to arrest a Mahdi Army commander named Abu Ali. The Americans couldn’t find the commander, so they arrested two civilians instead. We were very angry, but we didn’t do anything because we have orders to be quiet, not to attack.”
“We’re never afraid,” he said. “We have all our weapons. We’re ready, we’re just awaiting orders.”
The endless stream of Sunni-built car bombs, and the inability of the Americans to stop them, has also tested the patience of Sadr officials. “It’s on its way to failure,” Mr. Mutairi said of the security plan.
One of the biggest threats to the plan is the possibility that as the bombings continue, Shiite militiamen will step up their killings of Sunni Arabs, plunging the capital back into a cycle of sectarian revenge.
Should that happen, it would expose once again another glaring contradiction in Mr. Sadr’s policies — his attempts to ally with anti-American Sunni Arabs even as his militiamen slaughter them.
During the mass protest in Najaf on April 9, Sadr officials brought in a few conservative Sunni Arabs in a show of cross-sectarian unity. But the violence on the ground, especially in Baghdad, where Shiite militias have driven Sunni Arabs from entire neighborhoods, suggests that Mr. Sadr is just paying lip service to Sunni-Shiite harmony.
Just as complicated is Mr. Sadr’s relationship with Iran. Like many prominent Shiite leaders, Mr. Sadr has kept close ties to Iran, and the Americans have said he has been in hiding there during the current troop buildup. Yet, Mr. Sadr’s main distinction from his greatest Shiite rival, Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, is that his father, a powerful cleric, stayed inside Iraq to oppose Saddam Hussein while Mr. Hakim’s family fled to Iran and founded the Supreme Council there.
Because of that, Mr. Sadr has a much greater popular base here than Mr. Hakim or any other Shiite politician. Mr. Sadr’s rivalry with Mr. Hakim has been the greatest threat to Shiite unity. It has often exploded in violence, as it did in the clashes in Diwaniya this month, and is fueled by widely-held suspicions that Mr. Hakim is Iran’s favorite among the various Shiite leaders.
Mr. Mutairi said that an alliance with Iran had limited appeal for Mr. Sadr.
“Speaking on a religious level, it’s possible,” he said. “But the Sadrists are a nationalist movement. We reject the interference of any country. We don’t want Iran’s problems to be settled on our land.”
A few minutes later, a suicide car bomb exploded on a crowded boulevard nearby, killing at least 13 people and rattling the windows in Mr. Mutairi’s office.
Someone was settling their problems in Mr. Sadr’s backyard. Whoever it was, he, like everyone else, had issues with Mr. Sadr’s vision for Iraq.
Hosham Hussein contributed reporting for this article.
Beaufort (SC) Gazette
April 22, 2007
Pg. 1
Blue Angels Pilot Killed In Crash During Air Show
Witnesses say jet made a sudden plunge
From staff reports
A Blue Angels pilot was killed Saturday afternoon after crashing during an air show at Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort.
Witnesses said the F/A-18 Hornet appeared to be in control before it plummeted below the treeline at about 4 p.m., crashing near a heavily populated area off Laurel Bay Road near Shanklin and Pine Grove roads. Parts of the plane hit several houses, according to witnesses.
Witnesses said it was Blue Angel No. 6 that crashed. The No. 6 plane was piloted by Lt. Cmdr. Kevin Davis of Pittsfield, Mass. Authorities wouldn't release the pilot's identity, but a friend of the Davis family confirmed the Massachusetts native had died, according to The Berkshire (Mass.) Eagle.
"I said a quick prayer, hoping that it wasn't Kevin," Tom McGill told the western Massachusetts paper. "When I got home, I got a call from a friend saying that it was. (This is) devastating."
Marine officials said they would release the pilot's name today.
Davis was joining the "Delta formation" for the final maneuver of the aerial demonstration when the crash occurred, according to a release from the Navy.
This year was Davis' second on the team and his first year as a demonstration pilot, the release states.
"It would be inappropriate to speculate what might have caused this incident," said Lt. Cmdr. Anthony Walley, the squadron's right wing who flew in the No. 2 jet in the show.
None of the other jets was involved, he said.
"Our thoughts and prayers are with his family, who were at the air show today," Walley said.
Eight people on the ground were reported injured in the crash, said William Winn, director of Beaufort County Emergency Management Department. However, he wouldn't say whether the injuries were life-threatening.
Winn confirmed that several houses were damaged by debris, but to his knowledge, none of the houses was "destroyed," he said. A mile perimeter was established at the intersection of Shanklin and Pine Grove roads after the wreck, and no one besides residents of the immediate area will be allowed in or out until military and law enforcement officials complete their investigation.
"We're asking people to please leave the debris alone," Winn said.
Saturday's show was at the beginning of the team's flight season, which began last month, and more than 120,000 people were expected to attend the Beaufort air show.
Many of the people in the streams of cars pouring out of air station gates even two hours after the crash had no idea a crash happened until they heard the news on the radio.
"We left right at the end of the show and were walking out" when the crash happened, said Joe Maund, who heard the news on the radio. "When they landed, it ended abruptly."
Eric Chaffins, a soldier stationed at Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah, said he knew something was wrong but no announcements were made at the air station.
"They all came together for their final thing, and they split up, and there was black smoke," he said. "They announced all were coming in, but there were only five of them. … We didn't really know what's going on."
Chaffins said he drove his wife and two young children to Beaufort just for the show.
"It's kind of depressing," he said. "We came up for a family day out, and somebody got hurt."
Tywila Walker left the air show early with her family so she could make it to work on time, but when they pulled up to her home on Shanklin Road, she found smoke billowing from behind her house and a hysterical next-door neighbor.
"It was right behind our house," Walker said. "We were concerned it was our house."
Her neighbor said she witnessed the crash.
"She said a big ball of fire went over the house and debris was falling all over the yard," Walker said. "It all broke in shreds. … It was just breaking apart. Something had to happen in the air."
Walker then ran behind the wooded area in the backyard of her home to a little pond about 100 yards from her house, where all she could see was smoke. There, she also saw Marines and firefighters searching for the pilot.
Fred Yelinek was working at a home across the street from the initial impact.
"I was not looking that way at the time but was in the yard. The plane hit the top of a tree and clipped it off. The sound of that turned me around," he said. "The plane had already passed through that yard and into Shanklin Road. It exploded on impact with a giant fireball, and of course it shook the earth."
Jason Keith, of Yemassee, said he was driving west on Laurel Bay Road when he saw the plane crash behind the Food Lion grocery store, which is south of the road.
"Something caught my eye, and all of a sudden I saw a huge black explosion," he said. "The plane went down, and we watched it for a while and I didn't see any parachute or anything. If he had been 400 yards to his right he would have plowed into the road. The other guys were just flying along."
Keith said he saw a home catch fire.
Tim Stamps, 18, said he was walking down the road, coming back from Food Lion on Laurel Bay Road, when he saw the plane circling in the air and smoking.
He also saw the left side of a house covered in debris and the windows were broken.
Former County Councilman Mark Generales was in his boat on the Beaufort River at the time of the accident.
Generales said the planes came around Lady's Island and Beaufort, then swung out toward the air station.
"They looked to be doing an approach," he said. "They had appeared from the distance to be just above the tree line, and everything appeared to be going fine. All of the sudden, one plane seemed to slow down, and it fell straight out of the air."
Generales said he didn't see any smoke and didn't see an ejection.
It appeared the plane "just lost power," he said.
"The plane just disappeared," Generales said. "And a couple of seconds later, I saw the smoke."
Robert Bowden also was in the Beaufort River at the time of the crash.
"The angle went wrong on it. He dipped below the trees," he said. "When he dipped out of my eyesight, it was clear he went down and the rest of the formation wasn't aware of it."
Bowden said he didn't see the jet hit anything.
Dave Perkins, lives on Pine Grove Road and saw some of the wreckage from the crash site. He said parts of the jet were everywhere and said there was a hole in the mobile home across the street about 10 feet long and 2 feet wide.
"There was a fire on the telephone pole on Shanklin and Pine Grove, and it was ablaze and parts all along Shanklin, across the street," Perkins said. "The canopy of the plane was across the street from me on fire."
He said the incident was "like nothing like I've ever felt before."
Joe Farrell, who had a plane on display at Saturday's air show, said the jet largely appeared in control.
"It looked like it was in absolute control all the way into the ground," he said. "We watched the guys try to reform. He made the turn and slid right into the ground."
Former Blue Angels pilot and Pensacola City Mayor John Fogg called the Saturday afternoon crash of a U.S. Navy Blue Angels jet a "tragedy," according to the Pensacola (Fla.) News Journal.
"The whole nation is impacted by something like this," said Fogg, who flew the No. 3 slot and No. 4 slot in 1973 and 1974 for the Navy's precision flying team, according to The Journal.
The elite team, which is based at Pensacola Naval Air Station, recently celebrated its 60th anniversary.
Navy squadron has performed for millions
Including Saturday's crash, 24 Blue Angels Navy flight squadron pilots have been killed during air shows or training since the group was formed in 1946.
Sixteen officers voluntarily serve with the Blue Angels.
Active-duty Navy and Marine Corps jet pilots with aircraft carrier qualifications and a minimum of 1,250 tactical jet flight-hours are eligible for positions flying jets No. 2 through No. 7.
The No. 7 plane is the media plane and is responsible for orientation flights given to members of the local media at each show site.
The Blue Angels commanding officer must have at least 3,000 tactical jet flight-hours and have commanded a tactical jet squadron.The commanding officer flies the No. 1 jet. The average age of a Blue Angel pilot is 32.
Including this year, the Blue Angels have had 232 demonstration pilots and 32 flight leaders-commanding officers.
The highest altitude maneuver is the "vertical roll," up to 15,000 feet. The lowest altitude maneuver is the "sneak pass," about 50 feet.
The fastest speed during an air show is about 700 mph, and the slowest speed is about 120 mph.
Beaufort marked one of 66 performances scheduled for the group this year, the Blue Angels' 21st year of flying the F/A-18 Hornet.
Last season, more than 15 million spectators watched the Blue Angels perform. Since its inception in 1946, the Blue Angels squadron has performed for more than 427 million fans.
The squadron was created at the end of World War II to keep the public interested in naval aviation. The Blue Angels' first show was at Craig Field in Jacksonville, Fla., on June 15, 1946.
The squadron is stationed at Forrest Sherman Field, Naval Air Station Pensacola, Fla., during the show season, which is the middle of March through November.
The squadron spends January through March training pilots and new team members at Naval Air Facility El Centro, Calif.
Gazette reporters Sandra Walsh, Lori Yount and Brandon Honig contributed to this report.
Newport News Daily Press
April 22, 2007
North Carolina's Grandly Welcomed
The newest U.S. submarine is officially named. About 2,500 guests were at the Northrop Grumman yard.
By Peter Dujardin
NEWPORT NEWS -- When it came time for Linda Bowman to crack a bottle of sparkling wine against the hull of the new North Carolina submarine Saturday, she didn't hold anything back.
She swung with gusto, sending fizzy spray everywhere, including her blue dress, and threw both hands triumphantly into the air.
"I thought, 'I've got one chance at this, and I'm going to break it,' " Bowman explained after the event at Northrop Grumman Newport News. "I'm going to break this bottle."
And though Bowman is no golfer, some avid golfers on the ceremony's platform - Navy admirals and politicians - told her that, given her smooth stroke, she needed to leave the ceremony at once, go to the course, and try her hand at a few holes.
The christening is a key milestone in the life of the $2.3 billion North Carolina, which will be delivered to the Navy in late December.
The event marks the official naming and blessing of the new sub and is closely timed to the vessel's first floating in water.
Bowman, the honorary sponsor for the celebration, is a dental hygienist and the wife of the former head of the Navy's nuclear reactor program, Adm. Frank L. "Skip" Bowman, who retired recently after 38 years in the Navy.
Built jointly by the Newport News yard and its partner in the sub business, General Dynamics Electric Boat, of Groton, Conn., the boat is the fourth in the Virginia-class of nuclear-powered attack vessels, which are replacing the aging Los Angeles boats.
Saturday's event took place behind the shipyard's nine-story submarine outfitting facility with about 2,500 people in attendance. More than 3,000 yard employees have worked on the vessel since 2002, with the boat now about 88 percent finished.
It used to be that submarines would slide dramatically into the water during the christening event itself, just after the smashing of the bottle of sparkling wine.
But times have changed. With changes in ship construction in recent years, that no longer happens. The North Carolina will instead be rolled into a dry dock and quietly floated May 5 as the dock is filled with water from the James River.
The weather was far better for this christening event than the yard's last one for the George H.W. Bush aircraft carrier last fall.
There was nary a cloud in the blue sky for this late morning affair, with a slight breeze off the James River and an occasional bird flying above. "How can we miss with a Carolina blue sky overhead?" Bowman said.
The nose of the 377-foot, 7,800-ton sub was decked out with the colors of the state of North Carolina and a large American flag to one side. Some nearby work cranes had hanging circular flags on them, too.
Many of the sub's 115-member crew, all wearing their white dress Navy uniforms, stood at ease but in formation to one side - not moving for virtually the entire event.
"It was rough on the knees, but you get used to it in the military," said Andrew Hertel, the North Carolina's executive officer, who's been in the Navy for 13 years. "We were in the shade and everyone got water, so that helped."
References to the Tar Heel state abounded throughout the hour-long event.
Several North Carolina politicians - from congressmen to town officials - were on hand. So, too, was a submarine veterans group from North Carolina and other veterans who served aboard the North Carolina battleship, now a museum in Wilmington, N.C.
The event's keynote speaker, Vice Adm. John Donnelly, commander of the nation's submarine force, added that the new sub's sailors have spent lots of time in community service in North Carolina.
And, he added, the crew has befriended Chelsea Cooley, the 2005 Miss North Carolina and winner of the Miss USA title that year. "As you can see," he quipped, "these sailors are indeed remarkable men."
Donnelly raved about the new technology on board the new sub. "The USS North Carolina will be powerful, graceful and quiet," he said. "At her top speed" - more than 25 knots - "she will make less noise than most of our submarines make at five knots."
Steve Eaton, 45, a shipyard sheet metal worker who commutes two hours round trip every day from his home in Gates, N.C., attended the event with his wife, Ruth, and 13-year-old daughter, Shanese.
He's one of hundreds of workers at the shipyard who make the daily commute across the state line.
It was the first christening for 13-week-old Alejandro Maximus Giovanni Palo Branstrom, sitting in the laps of his parents, Jeff and Melissa Branstom.
"He's already enjoying it," said Jeff Branstrom, who works in quality assurance at the shipyard, before the event got under way.
Alejandro was riveted to the colorfully decorated sub and, his dad said, seemed to like the tunes coming from the nearby Navy Band.
Shipyard president Mike Petters began the event by asking for a moment of silence for the victims of the Virginia Tech shooting and everyone affected by it.
"Northrop Grumman Newport News has a very close relationship with Virginia Tech," Petters told the crowd.
"We have nearly 400 alumni working here, and countless members of our extended shipyard family attend Virginia Tech.
"It's a place where future shipbuilders are grown - some of the very best shipbuilders in the world."
At the end of the event, 10 girls from the Virginia Children's Choir sang, "Let there be Peace on Earth," one of Linda Bowman's favorite songs.
Los Angeles Times
April 22, 2007
Pg. 1
Review Ordered Into Vulnerability Of U.S. Satellites
China's destruction of one of its spacecraft raises Pentagon concern about the vulnerability of orbiting U.S. probes.
By Peter Spiegel, Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON — The Air Force's top general has ordered a wide-ranging review of the vulnerabilities of U.S. military satellites — one that could lead to the lifting of restrictions on using force against another country's space capabilities — because of continuing alarm over a successful Chinese missile test.
The review, ordered last month by Gen. T. Michael "Buzz" Moseley, the Air Force chief of staff, comes amid concern over the Chinese government's failure to explain why it destroyed one of its own weather satellites in January. That test created a large debris field that continues to expand in low-Earth orbit.
China's secrecy has led to concerns that Beijing is attempting to perfect a wide array of anti-satellite weapons, including jammers for navigation and communications satellites, and possibly the deployment of small "space mines" that could disable U.S. military satellites in the event of a conflict.
The U.S. and Russia have demonstrated the ability to knock down satellites, but neither has done so since tests they conducted during the Cold War.
Although there are treaties that govern weapons in space, many standards about harming another country's satellites are based on international norms rather than law.
As part of the review, Moseley has asked senior Air Force Space Command officials to recommend whether new arms programs — known as "offensive counter-space" systems — that could disable enemy space systems are needed.
The review is unlikely to recommend arms in space. But experts said that it could suggest weapons — either on the ground or aboard aircraft — that are based on current missile defense technologies.
"What I'm looking for is just a better way to think through the challenge, now that other people have a capability to kill a satellite," Moseley said. "It is a contested domain now. I've asked a bit of an open-ended question." He wants the review's preliminary results by June.
The renewed intensity of the debate over military space policy is a reflection of growing Pentagon concern about Beijing's steps to build up and modernize its military.
Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, questioned Chinese officials during a visit there last month, but said he received no explanation about why they conducted the test that destroyed the weather satellite.
"I don't know what their policy is…. So I am still, as are others, confused about what their intent is," Pace said.
Moseley was concerned about the vulnerability of U.S. satellites even before China's test. Besides more than 100 military and intelligence satellites, there are hundreds of commercial satellites vital to communications and commerce around the globe.
Still, the subject of militarizing space remains highly controversial. Moseley insisted that he was not proposing space-based weaponry. But he acknowledged his concern that current U.S. policy restricted the Pentagon's ability to attack an adversary's space capabilities if commanders detected a threat. Moseley said he may present the review to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to spur policy debates.
"If you asked: What are your notions of … offensively dealing with objects in space, I would tell you that that's not an engineering problem; that's a policy discussion," Moseley said.
Preliminary findings could be presented at the next gathering of all Air Force four-star generals, scheduled for June.
Air Force Space Command officials remain wary about escalating military tensions in space, noting that the U.S. is more reliant on satellites than almost any other country. The Pentagon's ability to operate globally depends on keeping space free of weapons and debris that would hamper its communications and reconnaissance satellites.
Instead of offensive weaponry, Gen. Kevin P. Chilton, who as head of the Space Command will lead the review Moseley has called for, has been pushing for additional systems that would allow the Pentagon to better track and identify all objects launched into space.
Currently, the U.S. must rely on about half a dozen ground-based radars and electronic telescopes to monitor launches. But since 1996, the Air Force has been operating a test satellite, the MS-X, that has been perfecting ways to track orbital objects from space.
Chilton, a former space shuttle astronaut, said he hoped to launch next year new satellites that would provide a more complete picture of space. He argues that military commanders need the same data on potential threats in space that they have for land and sea.
"If something goes wrong with one of our satellites tomorrow, we have to be able to answer to the president: Was it a systems malfunction, was it because of a solar flare on the sun, or was this a nefarious act by an adversary?" Chilton said in an interview.
Moseley appears intent on spurring a debate within the Pentagon and Bush administration about how aggressive the U.S. should be in dealing with threats to space assets.
Moseley compared the shoot-down of the Chinese satellite to the first downing of a military airplane in 1914. Like today's military satellites, Moseley said, World War I-era airplanes were used largely for uncontested reconnaissance missions — until both sides began arming their flying machines.
"You have a choice: You can either defend the machines or you build something that flies higher and faster," he said.
Loren Thompson, a military analyst with the Lexington Institute think tank who has consulted for the Air Force on satellite issues, said he doubted that Moseley would push for weaponry in space.
But, Thompson added, certain technologies being developed for the Pentagon's missile defense system, particularly a high-energy laser to be used from a converted 747 to shoot down missiles as they were launched, could be turned into effective anti-satellite weapons.
"The U.S. has maintained a public stance that space should be open to everybody and therefore we will not threaten the space assets of another nation," Thompson said. "The reality is that some programs that we are developing, such as the airborne laser, have intrinsic anti-satellite capability."
Many of the military's intelligence-gathering satellites operate in low-Earth orbit, just a few hundred miles up, where they are the most vulnerable to an anti-satellite attack.
Military officials declined to discuss which systems operate in such low orbits. But Thompson said many belong to the National Reconnaissance Office, the intelligence agency responsible for operating the spy satellites that take high-resolution photos of sites on Earth.
Low-Earth orbit is also where military satellites responsible for eavesdropping on communications of adversaries are believed to operate.
Most of the large commercial satellites used in broadcasting and telecommunications orbit in deep space about 22,000 miles above Earth in order to remain in geosynchronous orbit. But there are as many as 175 commercial satellites in low orbit, including civilian research spacecraft and smaller communications systems.
U.S. officials have said little about the intelligence gathered on Chinese anti-satellite capabilities. In Capitol Hill testimony last month, Marine Gen. James E. Cartwright, head of the U.S. Strategic Command, said China launched three missiles as part of the anti-satellite test in January, hitting the target on the third try.
"What was impressive was that in three attempts, they made significant changes each time," Cartwright said.
The Pentagon has made some efforts to protect U.S. satellites. Cold War-era satellite systems are equipped with "hardening" technologies — such as reinforced circuitry and sensors — as well as limited abilities to move to different orbits to avoid threats. But those technologies are mainly aimed at protecting the satellites from radiation in space.
In order to deal with the potential destruction of satellites, some Air Force officers favor the use of satellites that could be quickly deployed as replacements for lost capabilities.
Air Force Brig. Gen. C. Donald Alston, a senior member of Chilton's staff, said that a demonstrated ability to quickly send up new satellites may in itself deter adversaries, because anti-satellite missiles are expensive and difficult to operate.
The Air Force also has explored making satellites more maneuverable in order to dodge threats. But most military satellites are so large — many are the size of a bus — that they would be unable to "outrun" a fast-moving missile.
Many military officials believe the best way to deal with potential threats to satellites is to knock out anti-satellite weapons before they reach space.
"Space is a bad place to fight," Alston said. "I want to solve this problem someplace else."
Satellite sources
There are nearly 850 active satellites in orbit. Here's a breakdown of who has them:
U.S.: 447
Rest of the world: 274
Russia: 89
China: 38
Source: Union of Concerned Scientists
Los Angeles Times
April 22, 2007
Guard Troops Get Help Battling Stress
Civilian mental health providers are training at state armories to counsel National Guard soldiers.
By Rone Tempest, Times Staff Writer
OAKDALE, CALIF. — Lt. Col. Dirk Levy, commander of a California National Guard battalion that took heavy casualties in Iraq, said he can't get used to civilians slogging through training exercises alongside his uniformed troops.
"I keep thinking, 'Who are these people?' " Levy said.
The outsiders are psychologists, social workers and marriage counselors who have recently been embedded in some California units in an experimental program to identify National Guard troops suffering from severe stress after overseas combat. Hired as contractors, the civilian specialists have been attending weekend training at local armories.
Some even take part in physical training — such as 54-year-old psychological counselor Roger Duke, assigned to a battle-scarred infantry company in this San Joaquin Valley farm town.
"On one level or another I've had contact with every soldier," said Duke, a sinewy ex-Marine officer, who drops down to do push-ups and engages in hand-to-hand combat drills. "Hanging out with them. Listening to them. Sleeping out in the rain."
TriWest Healthcare Alliance, the Phoenix-based military healthcare contractor for the western United States, approached the California National Guard with the pilot program last year after it became clear that many National Guard troops did not have the same access to mental and family counseling as regular military members.
After decades of being called up for short-term state emergency duties such as fires, floods and prison riots, these part-time "citizen soldiers" now are coming home from their first extended overseas tours with serious combat-related issues. In fact, the Iraq war marks the first time since the Korean War more than 50 years ago that the National Guard, including more than 10,000 troops from California, has been used in combat at all.
The regular military service members return to permanent bases with medical clinics, surrounded by other soldiers and soldiers' families. Guardsmen, who face the same hazards overseas, just go home to a world in which most people have little understanding of what they have been through. Their armories are scattered across the state, many several hours' drive from military or veterans healthcare facilities.
"These soldiers come home with the same problems as everyone else, but they weren't clustered around military installations the way the active duty are," said Marge Crowl, director of behavioral health for TriWest. "They weren't coming to us. We thought putting someone with them made a lot of sense."
If successful, TriWest envisions taking the program nationwide to reach the nearly 200,000 National Guard troops who have served in Iraq.
Typical issues among the returning troops include uncontrolled anger, alcohol and drug abuse, fear of crowds, and serious marital and family problems.
Sgt. Lyn Rhodes, a 39-year-old father of four from Oakhurst near Yosemite National Park, thought he was doing all right when