SUSAN SONNTAG ON ABU GHRAIB
Shock and awe were what our military promised the Iraqis. And shock and the awful are what these photographs announce to the world that the Americans have delivered: a pattern of criminal behavior in open contempt of international humanitarian conventions. Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit, and send off the pictures to their buddies. Secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to be invited on a television show to reveal. What is illustrated by these photographs is as much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality.

Who writes this stuff? Some mornings when I get up and read the news, I have a hard time shaking the feeling that Rumsfeld and his minions aren't real people at all; that this is a bad movie and Rumsfeld is just the Creature from the Black Lagoon in a rubber suit and that his lines are written by Jack Womack in a really nasty bad-Jack mood, happily chuckling over his computer; that Womack's day job as a HarperCollins publicist is just a cover for the lofty Top Secret position of Official Pentagon Scriptwriter. Or perhaps the real reason Terry Bisson moved out of New York to his secret California hideaway was to write military satire!

OK, it's time for a confession. Did Womack write the lines for this guy, Brig Gen Mark Kimmitt, US military spokesman, who when confronted with a new video, showing "before" videos of the wedding party our troops massacred, responded, Bad people have parties, too? If Womack didn't write that, we should ask around. Was it you, Terry Bisson? Thomas Harris? Don Webb? Charlie Stross! Of course!

Observe the clever plotting, an obvious sign of writing craft: A line like this is a sure tip-off that our military establishment has been taken over by something along the lines of the Lovecraftian Elder Gods, and that if we knew the TRUTH we would all descend into a gibbering madness. Think Stross's The Atrocity Archives!

And here's another line in today's Guardian giving further evidence that this is all a parody of an absurd movie, or even a bad dream:

The first Mohammed Munim al-Izmerly's family knew of his death was when his battered corpse turned up at Baghdad's morgue. Attached to the zipped-up black US body bag was a laconic note.

The US military claimed in the note that Dr Izmerly, a distinguished chemistry professor arrested after US tanks encircled his villa, had died of "brainstem compression".

Perhaps this brainstem compression was the result of witnessing his interrogators peeling back their human faces to reveal the monstrous visages underneath -- why else would the Pentagon ban cameraphones, but to keep this hideous secret?!

We should have known ages ago that part of our military had been taken over by a conspiracy of hideous flabby fungous beasts. Rumsfeld dropped sly hints, quite a while ago. Here he clearly refers to the cosmic horrors underlying our everyday reality -- things Man Was Not Meant to Know!

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

Å\Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

But of course, this must be all nonsense. So, out with it: Who's been writing the lines for our military establishment? Real people don't talk like this -- unless ---

The Guardian has a fairly detailed story on the wedding bombing. It's pretty grim:

'US soldiers started to shoot us, one by one': Survivors describe wedding massacre as generals refuse to apologise

The wedding feast was finished and the women had just led the young bride and groom away to their marriage tent for the night when Haleema Shihab heard the first sounds of the fighter jets screeching through the sky above.

It was 10.30pm in the remote village of Mukaradeeb by the Syrian border and the guests hurried back to their homes as the party ended. As sister-in-law of the groom, Mrs Shihab, 30, was to sleep with her husband and children in the house of the wedding party, the Rakat family villa. She was one of the few in the house who survived the night.

"The bombing started at 3am," she said yesterday from her bed in the emergency ward at Ramadi general hospital, 60 miles west of Baghdad. "We went out of the house and the American soldiers started to shoot us. They were shooting low on the ground and targeting us one by one," she said. She ran with her youngest child in her arms and her two young boys, Ali and Hamza, close behind. As she crossed the fields a shell exploded close to her, fracturing her legs and knocking her to the ground.

She lay there and a second round hit her on the right arm. By then her two boys lay dead. "I left them because they were dead," she said. One, she saw, had been decapitated by a shell.

The tale of Mukaradeeb begins to sound like another Mai Lai.

The Guardian has a related editorial:

Lies about crimes

The US military admits that it probably killed 40 people at Mukaradeeb but says that none of them were civilians. So did the "foreign fighters" include the young girl, one of several children whose bodies were shown being buried on television? Or the Iraqi wedding singer and his musician brother, whose funeral in Baghdad was reported yesterday by Reuters?

I've let the Nicholas Berg story wash over me for a while and am now ready to venture a personal opinion on this extremely complex case. Nicholas Berg is another Ben Linder, a nice, altruistic guy who went to a dangerous country to help build infrastructure and got himself killed.

Ben Linder, who was killed by the Contras in 1987, was a friend of mine. According to an investigative journalism piece I read some years ago, the "Contras" that killed him were child soldiers; armed twelve- and fourteen-year old boys. He worked on my student government campaign at the University of Washington when I was running for ASUW Board of Control. I did not know him well, but he organized a parade for my campaign, in which he rode his unicycle while dressed as a clown, just as he appears in the Ben Linder memorial mural.

I don't know what to make of the Nicholas Berg story with all of the complexities. What seems most important to me, upon reflection, is that there are people in this world who will go out and try to create infrastructure in dangerous places. Though I will forever think of Ben as foolish for having gone and gotten himself killed, people who live in places that lack infrastructure are just as deserving of running water, electricity, telephone service, and plubing as the rest of us. It seems to me that Nicholas Berg, like Ben Linder, ought to be more remembered for what he tried to do, not how he got killed.

India had a stock market crash yesterday.

Indian stocks were in virtual free-fall on Monday, wiping out 40 billion dollars in market value, amid frenzied selling on fears a new Congress-led government will slow the pace of reform in Asia's fastest-growing economy.

The Bombay Stock Exchange and National Stock Exchange suspended trading after their benchmark indices fell 15.5 percent and 17.5 percent, respectively. Both racked up their biggest point drop ever and sank to their lowest levels since late September.

It did not receive much notice here. This is mentioned in the fifth paragraph of the NYT story Gandhi Stakes Her Claim to Lead a Rattled India.

Although the market rebounded today, CNN International reports that "Monday the Sensex closed down 11 percent at 450 5.16, after plunging almost 16 percent at one point."

The Times of India is reporting that Monday night, Sonia Gandhi refused to become Prime Minister:

Sonia Gandhi reluctant to become PM

NEW DELHI: Congress President Sonia Gandhi has declined to become the Prime Minister despite leading her party to a spectacular comeback in elections, a senior party leader said on Tuesday.

He said she had made known her decision to the party on Monday evening itself.

Sonia, who is being persuaded by senior leaders of her party and the victorious multi-party United Progressive Alliance to change her mind, has apparently recommended Manmohan Singh and Pranab Mukherjee, both senior leaders of her party, for the job.

The argument for privatization in India is pretty much the same as is used here, and presumably has many of he same pitfalls. One of the key events of the election was apparently the sari stampede:

. . . one of the more powerful images of the election campaign is that of scores of impoverished women being crushed and trampled to death in a stampede for cheap, one-dollar saris distributed in Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's constituency of Lucknow.

At least 22 women died in a frenzied rush for the lengths of unstitched cloth, symbolic of womanhood in South Asia, which were being distributed free by Lalji Tandon, top leader of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in northern Uttar Pradesh state, during the election campaign. Lucknow is the state capital.

Just in case we've forgotten that Rumsfeld Should Resign, the new Seymour Hersh piece, The Grey Zone, is up on The New Yorker site. It starts well:

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld's decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of elite combat units, and hurt America's prospects in the war on terror.

There's some fascinating stuff here. Rumsfeld, reacting in frustration to the legalistic hurdles to shooting suspected al Qaida targets whenever they were in our sites, found a workaround:

Rumsfeld reacted in his usual direct fashion: he authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate "high value" targets in the Bush Administration's war on terror. A special-access program, or sap�\subject to the Defense Department's most stringent level of security�\was set up, with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon. The program would recruit operatives and acquire the necessary equipment, including aircraft, and would keep its activities under wraps. America's most successful intelligence operations during the Cold War had been saps, including the Navy's submarine penetration of underwater cables used by the Soviet high command and construction of the Air Force's stealth bomber. All the so-called "black" programs had one element in common: the Secretary of Defense, or his deputy, had to conclude that the normal military classification restraints did not provide enough security.

"Rumsfeld's goal was to get a capability in place to take on a high-value target�\a standup group to hit quickly," a former high-level intelligence official told me. "He got all the agencies together�\the C.I.A. and the N.S.A.�\to get pre-approval in place. Just say the code word and go." The operation had across-the-board approval from Rumsfeld and from Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser. President Bush was informed of the existence of the program, the former intelligence official said.

The people assigned to the program worked by the book, the former intelligence official told me. They created code words, and recruited, after careful screening, highly trained commandos and operatives from America's lite forces�\Navy seals, the Army's Delta Force, and the C.I.A.'s paramilitary experts. They also asked some basic questions: "Do the people working the problem have to use aliases? Yes. Do we need dead drops for the mail? Yes. No traceability and no budget. And some special-access programs are never fully briefed to Congress."

I look at the passage "Do the people working the problem have to use aliases? Yes. and think immediately of the untraceable "John Israel." Hersh quotes a former intelligence official as saying, "The rules are �eGrab whom you must. Do what you want.'"

This goes on for a while, but the CIA objected:

By fall, according to the former intelligence official, the senior leadership of the C.I.A. had had enough. "They said, �eNo way. We signed up for the core program in Afghanistan�\pre-approved for operations against high-value terrorist targets�\and now you want to use it for cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets'"�\the sort of prisoners who populate the Iraqi jails. "The C.I.A.'s legal people objected," and the agency ended its SAP involvement in Abu Ghraib, the former official said.

With the legally cautious out of the way, the Pentagon could do as it pleased. Hersh points to "The Arab Mind," a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai as the "bible" for neocons on how to deal with Arabs:

The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. "The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world," Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, "or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private." The Patai book, an academic told me, was "the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior." In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged�\"one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation."

I won't try to summarize the whole thing. But Hersh has done a remarkable job of outing a covert program run amok, a program that can only be stopped by its public outing since all the normal safeguards have failed.

The Pentagon reacts by calling the article "conspiratorial," a less than substantive response.

ALSO. Lost Pages has a good analysis of how torture practices abroad come home to roost: Forced to Stand:  An Expert Torture by Darius Rejali.

SEE ALSO, Newsweek's The Roots of Torture (via Atrios) and then go recover your sense of humor by reading Fafblog's piece on nation-wrecking.

Fafblog contemplates horror in non-fiction:
Horrorblogging

I mean how many times in this war can you talk about how "atrocities are horrible" or "atrocities are nightmarishly horrible" or "dear god please please stop these atrocities" before words like "atrocities" begin to have about as much rhetorical weight as words like "toaster pastries"?

What are we supposed to say at this point? Let's really, REALLY try to kill the terrorists now? That this latest death-maiming is really the last straw on the death-maiming camel's back? Giblets has become desensitized to reality at this point. Maybe the worst part about this is that reality is starting to desensitize me to fiction. Giblets is more likely to commit fictional violence now that he has seen so much real horror on television.

I've been awaiting the new issue of The Onion to see what their staff could do with recent events. Well, it's out:

What Do You think: Iraqi Prisoner Abuse

Point Counterpoint features a debate, of sorts, on the wisdom of killing wheelchair bound people with missiles.

MEANWHILE, for a change of pace, CNN is reporting on UFOs: Mexican Air Force pilots film unidentified objects. I am tempted to find a way to weave this story into recent discussions of mercenaries and the activities of private military firms. But I won't because I'm sure some of you might not realize that I was kidding.

FURTHER TO THE SUBJECT OF HUMOR, about.com has a collection of Donald Rumsfeld jokes compiled by Daniel Kurtzman from latenight TV shows (which I never see because I go to bed early). My favorite is this one:

President Bush said he will not punish Donald Rumsfeld. Which is good, because no one wants to see pictures of a naked, old man." —Craig Kilborn

The new New Yorker piece is up:
CHAIN OF COMMAND by SEYMOUR M. HERSH How the Department of Defense mishandled the disaster at Abu Ghraib.

I read some of it last night. Here's a choice bit:

One lingering mystery is how Ryder could have conducted his review last fall, in the midst of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, without managing to catch it. (Ryder told a Pentagon press briefing last week that his trip to Iraq Ågwas not an inspection or an investigation. . . . It was an assessment.Åh) .. .

Ryder may have protected himself, but Taguba did not. ÅgHeÅfs not regarded as a hero in some circles in the Pentagon,Åh a retired Army major general said of Taguba. ÅgHeÅfs the guy who blew the whistle, and the Army will pay the price for his integrity. The leadership does not like to have people make bad news public.Åh

We have a subscription to The New Yorker, but last week's issue with Hersh's first story came only as an empty wrapper. (Got to call the subscription office today.) I'd read it online, but I wanted to look at the hardcopy, as that is a better medium for deeper contemplation.

Kicking around the living room, I noticed the Feb. 16 & 23rd issue (a special anniversary double issue) which has in it a fascinating piece by David Grann, "The Brand: the Most Violent Prison Gang in America." It concerns the prison gang the Aryan Brotherhood, also known as The Brand, and it is in its way as eye-opening as Hersh's recent pieces and I think sheds some light on an American crisis that underpins the current prison scandal. It appeared only in the print edition of The New Yorker (so you'll just have to get ahold of a copy of the magazine to read it) but there is an online interview with Grann about the piece available on The New Yorker's web site. There's a lot of other information available online about the Aryan Brotherhood, for example, FBI files. But I've already decided that this is not an area in which I want to develop an expertise.

However, here is the general upshot of the Grann article:

Authorities had once dismissed the Aryan Brotherhood as a fringe white-supremacist gang; now however, they concluded that what prisoners had claimed for decades was true -- namely that the gang's hundred or so members, all convicted felons, had gradually taken control of large parts of the nation's maximum security prisons, ruling over thousands of inmates and transforming themselves into a powerful criminal organization.

The Brand, authorities say, established drug-trafficking, prostitution, and extortion racket in prisons throughout the country. Its leaders, often working out of barren cells in solitary confinement, allegedly ordered scores of stabbings and murders. They killed rival gang members; they killed blacks and homosexuals and child molesters; they killed snitches; they killed people who stole their drugs, or owed them a few hundred dollars; they killed prison guards; they killed for hire and for free; they killed, most of all, to impose a culture of terror that would solidify their power. And because the Brotherhood is far more cloistered than other gangs, it was able to operate largely with impunity for decades -- and remains all but invisible to the outside world.

What he describes is a prison system in which the internal workings are increasingly under control of the most violent inmates who gain and retain control by the most brutal methods and are able to do so because the legal system takes little interest in prosecuting "N.H.I." crimes (No Humans Involved), "because the victims are considered to be as unsympathetic as the preps." Once members of the Brotherhood started getting paroled, thus expanding the organizations criminal reach out into our world, law enforcement became more concerned. Apparently, things had gotten as far as the Brotherhood planning bombings:

. . . a longtime reputed A.B. member confided to authorities that he had been approached at the supermax [an ultra-maximum security prison] in Colorado by the gang and asked for technical help in making bombs. The gang, he was informed, was planning terrorist attacks on federal facilities across the United States. "It's becoming irrational," he told authorities after declining to help. "They're talking about car bombs, truck bombs, and mail bombs."

Just when the Brotherhood seemed poised to take a particularly violent turn, Jessner unleashed the United States Marshals. Nearly four decades after the gang was born, it found itself under seige.

Discussion of where things went wrong in Abu Ghraib has focused largely on the inexperience of those running the place, on the disintegration of the chain of command, of where things are wrong elsewhere in military prisons or in prisons holding terrorists. And there is also an occasional chorus in the background, saying that this is what all American prisons are like; that The Man behaves like this everywhere. There is something to these positions.

However, what I get out of Grann's article is that the American civilian prison system is facing a crisis of a type that teaches prison guards and those running prisons that the legally sanctioned methods of controlling inmates don't work; teaches them that their charges are subhuman savages not deserving of the legal protections they enjoy. From my reading of Grann's article, it seems to me that the rise of the Aryan Brotherhood could have been prevented if the legal system had been willing to investigate and prosecute "N. H. I." crimes; that this tale of American prisons illustrates Samuel Johnson's maxim An injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere. And the contagion of cruelty from civilian prisons to military prisons illustrated Martin Luther King's transmutation of Johnson's maxim, Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

While human rights abuses perpetrated by jailers occur in American prisons, and such problems do have relevance to Abu Ghraib, it seems to me that the crisis Grann describes, and its effects on the penal system have at least as much to do with what happened to produce the current scandal in Iraq.

MEANWHILE, The Wall Street Journal has the Red Cross Report. And here's the WSJ story that goes with it.

PS: Here's a good joke from Dohiyi Mir:

Q: What do you call it when the "best SecDef ever" is fired?
A: A very good start.

AND DON'T MISS Michael Brub on Joe Lieberman:

For Abu Ghraib presents us with a real moral crisis, and by "real" I mean "as opposed to the moral crisis posed by oral sex in the Oval Office." (Which, by the way, was sleazy and colossally stupid, though not quite unconstitutional. For the record, I oppose oral sex in the Oval Office, and I promise to work to stop it whenever it occurs. But I mention this only because Lieberman's denunciation of Clinton from the Senate floor is what got him a spot on the Gore ticket and a shot at national prominence in the first place.) To put this another way: this is the worst military and geopolitical scandal in a generation, and anyone who doesn't realize it just isn't worth taking seriously-- about this or anything else.

(Via Atrios.)

AND ALSO, go read Fafblog's Conscience: the next greatest threat in the war on terror. This satire captures the distilled essence of some of the more loathesome arguments I've seen out there on the web in places I won't link to:

Were the atrocities committed in Abu Ghraib horrifying? Indeed. But more horrifying still would be a military unable or unequipped to deal with the Forces of Terror. Americans have seen the torture and the raping, certainly, but they haven't seen the intelligence gleaned from said torture and raping - and the lives saved, pipelines constructed, and schools built because of that intelligence. Can the West really afford to have an Iraqi insurgent's pride in his unexposed genitalia - his unexposed, terrorist genitalia - come between US troops and a shipment of arms bound for a Baathist cell? Can American children sleep safely if a prisoner's unelectrocuted testicles - unelectrocuted Islamist testicles - prevent him from confessing the location of a suicide bomber, or his participation in late night Black Sabbaths to summon Beelzebub amongst a coven of witches?

There is no truth to the rumor that the big "C" on the new Iraqi flag stands for "Chalabi."

Why is the Kerry campaign spending precious political capital fighting this stupid battle over medals? Yes, sure the Bush campaign is trying to smear him, but they do that. They're going to do that until the election.

It just seems to me that many really important things are coming out about the situation in Iraq and that we have a whole lot more information on the nature of the problems and their depth, so Kerry should be rising to the task of defining how things need to be done differently. I keep going back to the Kerry campaign web site hopling for a rewritten position on how to solve the problem of Iraq, and it doesn't seem to have changed much recently. I find that disappointing.

And while taxes certainly are an issue in this election, I'm not sure why Kerry's pushing that just now, except maybe because people just filed their tax returns.

I'm hoping to see the Kerry campaign re-engage soon. Right now it seems to me that more of the spontaneous effort is being devoted to dealing with Bush smears.

Richard Clarke is good in a NYT editorial today:

One lesson is that even though we are the world's only remaining superpower Å\ as we were before Sept. 11, 2001 Å\ we are seriously threatened by an ideological war within Islam. It is a civil war in which a radical Islamist faction is striking out at the West and at moderate Muslims. Once we recognize that the struggle within Islam Å\ not a "clash of civilizations" between East and West Å\ is the phenomenon with which we must grapple, we can begin to develop a strategy and tactics for doing so. It is a battle not only of bombs and bullets, but chiefly of ideas. It is a war that we are losing, as more and more of the Islamic world develops antipathy toward the United States and some even develop a respect for the jihadist movement.

MEANWHILE, I thought wryly about blogging this item with the headline US Not Cooperating with UN Weapons Inspectors.

I've been watching with some consternation at some of my good friends calling for religious tolerance among liberals and then getting their feelings hurt for their trouble. I've put in my two cents worth over at Electrolite (the blog in question) and also at Kevin Drumm's new home. But it was an awfully terse two cents worth, because over the course of my life I have felt myself to be much more on the receiving end of religious intolerance than on the giving end. I have been asked to tolerate a wide variety of religious impositions. And other than a few stern grillings given fundamentalists [Leviticus provides rich material for this] who asked me if I'd been saved when I was a teenager, I can't recall instances of the tide going the other direction. Thus, atrios's post of this morning on the subject had me muttering YES! YES!

My earliest clear memory of religious imposition was when I was in the fourth grade: we lived in Munich that year and religious instruction was part of the formal school curriculum. On my school registration form at Herkomerplatz Kinderschule, in the blank for "Religion" my father had filled in "keine." As far as I could tell, the school system had never encountered a family that declined to identify a religion, so I was assigned to the Catholic class where I spent the school year coloring in the back despite the instructor's best efforts to involve me in the class. As far as he was concerned, if I was in his class I was Catholic. As far as I was concerned, "keine" on the form meant I didn't have to do anything. Our compromise took the form of him trying to get me to draw pictures of what God looked like, as best as I can recall.

I have many other examples. But really, they're not that important except in that by the time I was a teenager, much to my mother's dismay, I was a subscriber to American Atheists and had solidified in my cultural identity as an atheist. People would frequently try to talk me into the idea that I was an agnostic, and I was well armed with arguments to the contrary. What is most important about this is that my identity as an atheist (and I suspect this it true for many others as well) was reactive, formed by imposition and lack of consideration by others. Religious tolerance, it seemed, was for those who had a religion to tolerate, not those of us without.

I am 42 year old now and am no longer in need of the defences that kept my teenage psyche safe. I am that most paradoxical of creatures, an atheist who goes to church. Theologically, I am most closely aligned with the Unitarians, but the Unitarian church is all the way up in Mt. Kisco and the Congregational Church in Chappaqua is much closer and has a better children's program. I am still made uncomfortable with sermons in which the minister talks as though one can actually know what exactly Jesus said or figure out why he said it or what he meant by it. And really, I'm no less an atheist than I was at seventeen. So what am I doing in a church?

The understanding I came to in adulthood is that in the grand scheme of the history of world religions, I am a Christian; and my lack of belief in an all-powerful God is a mere theological quibble that takes on exaggerated importance in this cultural moment. It no more divorces me from Christianity than choosing the wrong side in the question of whether the Earth goes 'round the sun or vice versa.

If you view religions as cultural groupings rather than as defined by specific articles of belief, the source of sectarians' underlying anger at the "religious" becomes clearer: large segments of the population are in effect excommunicated from the larger cultural life of their religion. The terms of engagement have been defined by those who would reject categorically that an atheist like me could possibly be a Christian.

The religious tolerance recently demanded of sectarian liberals must be based on a recognition that the "religious" cannot exclude us from the spiritual life of the country and the world; that those who lay claim to the world's religions do not own them; that this isn't, and never was, a battle between those with religion and those without. We're all in this together.

UPDATE: Patrick Nielsen Hayden, in a further thoughtful post on religion and the left, directs our attention to a good post at everything's ruined on this topic.

The first conviction under the child-sex tourism provision of the Protect Act (from the Christian Science Monitor):

The push for the travel industry to do its part to curb the demand aspect of the global sex trade comes a year after President Bush passed the Protect Act, legislation making it illegal for US citizens to travel abroad and engage in sex with a minor.

In his September 2003 UN address, President Bush asked that all countries pass laws against their citizens traveling abroad to engage in the "underground of brutality" of sex trafficking and warn tourists of this "humanitarian crisis. In the US, conviction under the Protect Act could lead to a 30-year prison sentence.

Because of the veiled nature of sex tourism, it's impossible to calculate the number of participants. But a survey by ECPAT reports that Americans make up 25 percent of the world's global sex industry, which involves about 2 million children. Americans represent about 80 percent of the sex tourists in Costa Rica, and about 38 percent in Cambodia.

Michael Lewis Clark was the first American convicted under the child-sex tourism provision of the Protect Act. He recently pleaded guilty in a Seattle federal district court to two counts of engaging in sex with a minor. Clark was arrested in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, after authorities there learned he was paying young boys as little as $2 for sex. Clark may have molested as many as 50 children during several years of traveling back and fourth to Cambodia, according to the investigation conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an arm of the Department of Homeland Security. Four other Americans have also been charged under the act.

This AP article provides some interesting background on the changes in Cambodian law enforcement that made the arrest and conviction possible.

In the past week, a doctor returning from Russia was arrested under the same law.

While we're thinking about private military firms, it's important to remember that their clients are not always on our side.

I've been lying in bed reading Singer, and came across a discussion of private military firms training terrorists (Corporate Warriors, p. 181). The first firm I looked up, Sakina Security, seems to have vanished from the web, but the Freepers noticed them in 2001 and snarfed a bit of the site:

THE ULTIMATE JIHAD CHALLENGE

THE ULTIMATE JIHAD CHALLENGE IS A TWO-WEEK COURSE IN OUR 1,000-ACRE STATE OF THE ART SHOOTING RANGE IN THE UNITED STATES. DUE TO THE FIREARMS LAW OF THE UK ALL SERIOUS FIREARMS TRAINING MUST BE DONE OVERSEAS.

THE COURSE EMPHASIS IS ON PRACTICAL LIVE FIRE TRAINING. YOU WILL FIRE BETWEEN 2,000 TO 3,000 ROUNDS OF MIXED CALIBER AMMUNITION. CLASS THEORY IS KEPT TO A MINIMUM. YOU WILL BE TAUGHT THE FOLLOWING SKILLS: -

There was also a bit of involvement from a company called Trans-Global Security International.

One would-be security contractor raises a legitimate point:

ÅgWe use U.S.A. because whenever we go to Afghanistan, U.S.A. labels us terrorist,Åh the Syrian-born Bakri Mohammed was quoted as saying, ÅgOK, so let us go to America. You call us tourists.Åh

Indeed, why train in Afghanistan when you can train in Alabama?

There's a virus going around our house, and none of us are well. I would otherwise devote more discussion to this public radio series, Spoils of War, on corruption in occupied Iraq:

Who's watching the money as it streams through Baghdad? Just about no one, and bribes and black marketeering are rampant, witnesses say. A leading anti-corruption group claims as much as 90 percent of U.S. money spent in Iraq is being lost to corruption. From Halliburton subsidiaries charging double for gas, Iraqi officials and Arabic translators unrestrained from pocketing millions of dollars, or even members of the interim governing Council accusing each other of taking tens of millions in bribes.

(Via Atrios. See also Peace, order and good government, eh?.)

UPDATE: Body & Soul has a good post on the corruption issue.

Recall that yesterday the NYT reported that Erinsys now employs 14,000 Iraqi security guards. This article by Knut Royce from New York Newsday (2/15/04) raises the possibility that Erinsys's 14,000 Iraqi security guards are, in effect, Ahmed Chalabi's US bank-rolled private army:

Start-Up Company With Connections

U.S. authorities in Iraq have awarded more than $400 million in contracts to a start-up company that has extensive family and, according to court documents, business ties to Ahmed Chalabi, the Pentagon favorite on the Iraqi Governing Council. The most recent contract, for $327 million to supply equipment for the Iraqi Armed Forces, was awarded last month and drew an immediate challenge from a losing contester, who said the winning bid was so low that it questions the "credibility" of that bid.

But it is an $80-million contract, awarded by the Coalition Provisional Authority last summer to provide security for Iraq's vital oil infrastructure, that has become a controversial lightning rod within the Iraqi Provisional Government and the security industry. Soon after this security contract was issued, the company started recruiting many of its guards from the ranks of Chalabi's former militia, the Iraqi Free Forces, raising allegations from other Iraqi officials that he was creating a private army.

Chalabi, 59, scion of one of Iraq's most politically powerful and wealthy families until the monarchy was toppled in 1958, had been living in exile in London when the U.S. invaded Iraq. The chief architect of the umbrella organization for the resistance, the Iraqi National Congress, Chalabi is viewed by many Iraqis as America's hand-picked choice to rule Iraq.

A key beneficiary of both the oil security contract and last week's Iraq army procurement contract is Nour USA Ltd., which was incorporated in the United States last May. The security contract technically was awarded to Erinys Iraq, a security company also newly formed after the invasion, but bankrolled at its inception by Nour. A Nour's founder was a Chalabi friend and business associate, Abul Huda Farouki. Within days of the award last August, Nour became a joint venture partner with Erinys and the contract was amended to include Nour.

. . . Erinys guards are being recruited from the ranks of the Iraqi Free Congress, the militia loyal to Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, Daghistani acknowledged to Britain's Financial Times in December.

Whiskey Bar and Polytropos both had a good posts on the Chalabi connection last February.

As I understand it, Erinsys's 14,000 Iraqis are not counted in the 20,000 figure for privately employed security contractors now widely cited. So if I understand correctly, IN ADDITION TO the 20,000 "civilian contractors" running around Iraq with guns, there are another 14,000 Iraqis at Chalabi's disposal, paid for by U.S. taxpayers. (Yes, they're guarding the oil, but for whom are they guarding it?)

MEANWHILE, I find on a U.S. State Department page, Security Companies Doing Business in Iraq, this ominous statement: The U.S. government assumes no responsibility for the professional ability or integrity of the persons or firms whose names appear on the list. If I'd said this myself, some people would think I was being hyperbolic and inflammatory.

UPDATE: Deena Larsen bring to our attention this article from March 2003 and wonders what bearing it might have on the current situation in Falluja: The strange case of Falluja 2: Confidential files reveal Tory ministers' roles in approval of gas-producing facility and plans to hide it from US . So, is there still a chemical plant in Falluja? Could this have anything to do with what the Blackwater guys were doing there?

ALSO, Christopher Laughlin of WindWizard, a Masters student in International Law at the University for Peace in Cost Rica, has written a good summary article on mercenaries and Iraq from a Peace Studies perspective.

AND FINALLY, WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO WITH THESE GUYS WHEN THEY GET HOME? Have a look at this chilling article on snipers in Iraq originally from the L.A. Times.

The corporal hopes to get back home by late fall in time to take his girlfriend to a college football game and go deer hunting with his father.

"When I go hunting for whitetail, it's for food and sport," he said. "Here, when I go hunting, it's personal, very personal."

(Via Proof through the Night.)

AND HERE'S ONE I MEANT TO BLOG LAST WEEK from Defensetech: GLIMPSE OF STATELESS WAR IN IRAQ, which I find most notable for its dystopian vision of the future of warfare.

(Via Noah Shachtman.)

UPDATE 5/20/04: Ahmed Chalabi's house has just been raided. See my new post.

In this country, we think of al Qaeda operatives as religious fanatics willing to give their lives for religious convictions, but I have suspected for a while that military outsourcing was not a one-way street in this global conflict. This news story from ITAR-TASS sheds some light on that dimension of al Qaeda:

Chechnya verifies reports about liquidation of Al-Qaeda emissary

The Chechen Interior Ministry has been verifying media reports to the effect that Abu al-Valid, a successor to notorious terrorist Khattab, has been liquidated in the south of Chechnya. Chief of the Chechen Interior Ministry Alu Alkhanov said that they did not have exact information yet, but a special group was created for verification of this information. . . .

After Khattab died Abu al-Valid became his successor and headed the so-called military wing of Arab mercenaries in Chechnya and was believed to have links with Al-Qaeda.

There are arab mercenaries in Chechnya; there are arab mercenaries in Afghanistan; surely, there are arab mercenaries in Iraq, and not just on our side; perhaps even some with al Qaeda. I would like to know more.

Once again, I would like to point out that military privatization should not be a left vs. right issue, but rather is a matter of national security and national sovereignty. Here's another fine anecdote from P. W. Singer's Must-Read, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry:

An episode from recent Canadian military experience illustrates how unexpected problems can arise whenever control is given over to private agents. In July 2000, the GTS Katie, a contracted military transport ship, was carrying back from Bosnia a unit of Canadian Army soldiers, more than 550 vehicles, including tanks and personnel carriers, and 350 containers of ammunition and other sensitive gear. However, due to a financial dispute between two subcontracting agents, the ship began sailing in circles outside Canadian waters. Until the matter was resolved, the ship refused to make delivery, essentially holding about one third of the entire Canadian army's equipment and soldiers hostage. The standoff lasted for almost two weeks, during which time a sizable chunk of the Canadian military's inventory was unavailable, solely because its leadership had privatized transportation to save a minimal amount. (p. 160)

In the end, the Canadian Navy had to go out and seize the ship to end the stand-off.

I don't remember hearing anything about this in the US Press. I called a few Canadians and was told that while it was front page news, the Canadians are used to being humiliated about their lack of military preparedness. It is my understanding that the incident was blamed on the Liberal government for under-funding the military and thus forcing it to rely upon private contractors. For more details about the incident, see:

The web site of the Canadian Navy: HMCS Athabaskan Carries Out Boarding of GTS Katie

CBC: GTS Katie putts into Quebec and Canada seized U.S. ship despite deal, owner says

Singer has more anecdotes privatization of gone wrong and his research suggests that the more use of private contractors is monitored, the fewer saving from privatization can be realized. And without hard figures, there is no special reason to believe that a privately provided service will be cheaper in any case.

REGARDING THE MATTER AT HAND, private military firms operating in Iraq, the NYT reports today that:

There is no central oversight of the companies, no uniform rules of engagement, no consistent standards for vetting or training new hires. Some security guards complain bitterly of being thrust into combat without adequate firepower, training or equipment. There are stories of inadequate communication links with military commanders and of security guards stranded and under attack without reinforcements.

Only now are authority officials working to draft rules for private security companies. The rules would require all the companies to register and be vetted by Iraq's Ministry of Interior. They would also give them the right to detain civilians and to use deadly force in defense of themselves or their clients. "Fire only aimed shots," reads one proposed rule, according to a draft obtained by The New York Times.

Fire only aimed shots? I suppose they alo have to spell out that this is real life and not a movie.

The same piece also mentions Erinys: Erinys, a company barely known in the security industry before the war, now employs about 14,000 Iraqis. Corpwatch has this to say about Erinys:

Erinys' yearlong $39.5 million contract to protect 140 Iraqi oil installations, for which it beat out larger and more established competitors, will start this October. The Johannesburg-based company will be also offering its protection services to contractors Bechtel and Halliburton's subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root.

According to Erinys' own publicity, the company is currently the exclusive providers of "guarding and protective services, secure warehousing, security escorts, visit logistics and protective escorts, transportation and logistics for land access from neighbouring countries."

Handmaidens of Occupation

But the coalition's relationship with Erinys is not exactly transparent. The coalition apparently contracted the company through an "oil security" solicitation issued on July 17, but the details of this solicitation, and the subsequent award to Erinys, are unavailable from the Coalition Provisional Authority (the entity created by the United States government to oversee the occupation of the country).

In Greek mythology, the Erinys were three goddesses, attendants of Hades and Persephone, who guarded the Underworld. Here on modern earth, the company has main offices in Johannesburg and Dubai, and opened a field office in Baghdad in May. A South African news report said Erinys is already providing security and risk management services to "two large multinational companies" operating in Iraq.

While the company does not appear in international business directories and is only a year old, its website names five managers and directors, but does not identify its ownership structure: most of whom have been affiliated with Armor Holdings, a Florida-based security company and Defence Systems Limited, a British company which merged with Armor in 1997.

A former British Special Air Services (SAS) officer, director Alastair Morrison was co-founder and CEO of Defence Systems from 1981 to 1999. Morrison is currently affiliated with Armor Holdings, in which he holds $2.1 million worth of stock. Fraser Brown, who directs Erinys' security operations, has worked for DSL/Armor since 1999. Jonathan Garratt, Erinys' managing director, has worked for DSL and Armor since 1992. The two other Erinys officials named on the website have no apparent ties to either company: Sean Cleary is a South African risk management expert while Bill Elder previously worked as Bechtel's corporate security manager.

Private Security and Oil Protection

Erinys' website touts "management experience" in providing security services for dozens of transnational corporations, such as Ashanti Gold and BP-Amoco. These companies' past security actions hint at what awaits Iraq.

Last month, for example, the Ghanaian NGO, Wassa Association of Communities Affected by Mining (WACAM), released a report detailing alleged human rights abuses at an Ashanti gold mine. It relays eyewitness accounts of Ashanti Gold security personnel torturing, beating, and killing local small-scale miners between 1994 and 2002. WACAM further alleges that corporate security used guard dogs to feed on trespassers.

Here's another bit from the NYT article:

Early on in the war, private security contractors came mostly from elite Special Operations forces. It is a small enough world that checking credentials was easy. But as demand has grown, so has the difficulty of finding and vetting qualified people.

. . . and another:

Many security guards are hired as "independent contractors" by companies that, in turn, are sub-contractors of larger security companies, which are themselves subcontractors of a prime contractor, which may have been hired by a United States agency.

In practical terms, these convoluted relationships often mean that the governmental authorities have no real oversight of security companies on the public payroll.

(Thanks to Gary Farber & David Hartwell for nudging me in the direction of this long, meaty article.)

This New Zealand Green Party press release calls my attention to a good piece of legislation currently in progress, the Mercenary Activities (Prohibition) Bill

Iraq-bound NZers could be mercenaries under law

Iraq-bound NZers could be mercenaries under new law.

Green MP Keith Locke today warned New Zealanders contemplating 'security' work in Iraq that active involvement in the conflict for money will soon be a criminal offence under the mercenary bill returned to Parliament yesterday.

The Mercenary Activities (Prohibition) Bill, which aims to bring New Zealand into line with the International Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries, returned from the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Select Committee, of which Mr Locke is a member. It is aimed at a relatively narrow definition of "true" mercenaries - unaffiliated individuals who fight wars, overthrow governments or commit terrorism for money.

"This Bill should make New Zealanders think twice about chasing $1000-a-day jobs in Iraq; as should their local recruiting agents who could qualify to up to 14 years imprisonment," said Mr Locke, the Green Party Spokesperson on Defence.

"If someone is carrying out a role usually associated with security guards or police, like the New Zealander who has been accompanying a BBC TV crew, they have no worries under this legislation. "However, the Bill now uses the term 'take part in hostilities', rather than 'fighting', which means that if a New Zealander is effectively supporting the US occupation by, say, guarding military facilities or convoys, they could be deemed to be a mercenary and be prosecuted upon their return. This is an appropriate distinction, as the privatisation of military operations in Iraq is setting a worrying precedent.

Here's a good link for the nosy neighbor in you, provided you live in the kind of neighborhood where people make big political contributions:

Fundrace 2004 Neighbor Search

Use the location search (on your home address) to find those who live near you that have made presidential campaign contributions. You can also search for friends or celebrities by name.

Much to my surprise I discovered that someone who lives two houses away whom I had taken for a straight-laced financial services type gave a thousand bucks to Howard Dean! It warms my heart.

(Via The Heart of Wood.)

Here's a couple of odd pieces from the BBC on happenings in Saudi Arabia. As the US government issues a travel warning advising US citizens to leave Saudi Arabia, Saudia Arabia cracks down on liberal intellectuals and advocates of women's rights under the guise of cracking down on terrorism:

Saudis 'arrest five reformists': Saudi authorities have arrested five of the country's best-known reformist intellectuals, sources told the BBC.

Those arrested are both liberal and Islamist figures who have put their names to petitions calling for wide-ranging political and economic reform.

They include publisher Mohammed Said Tayib - one of the prime movers organising petitions calling on the House of Saud to accelerate reform.
. . .
Saudi analysts say the arrests may be a warning-shot designed to deter the liberals at a time when the ruling princes find themselves under an unprecedented degree of pressure.

More than 800 liberal reformers signed a petition only last month calling for an elected parliament and a bigger role for women.

(See also Saudis arrest religious reformist.)

9/11 commissioner: 'I've received threats'

Jamie Gorelick, a member of the commission investigating the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, said Saturday that she received death threats this week after a number of conservatives alleged that her former work in the Justice Department may have contributed to failures leading to the attacks.

Someone threatening a former U.S. deputy attorney general has got to be awfully stupid. It's probably some jerk in his underwear at his home computer, thinking he can threaten anonymously, raging at the machine.

Gorelick responds to the conservatives' allegations in the Wahington Post.

The New York Times discusses inflation:

The inflation rate, barely noticeable for years, is picking up again in the United States. And even if many American families have yet to curtail their spending, they are certainly annoyed.

And toward the end of the article there is a discussion of some price increases on food staples:

A gallon jug of milk purchased at Pathmark on Thursday for $3.89 cost $3.49 a week or two ago, she said, and her son goes through two to three gallons a week. He also likes butter on his bread - eight ounces were $2.50 this week versus $1.25 a couple of months ago - and he is a big eater of eggs, at $2.19 a dozen versus $1.59 a couple of months ago, Ms. Simpson said.

These are some pretty big price jumps. Are these the effects of agibusiness cleaning up its act? I suspect not. Do this increases reflect high gasoline prices? Somehow I doubt that the farmers themselves are getting richer.

The Italian Foreign Office has posted an interesting interview, relating to the death of the Italian hostage Fabrizio Quattrocchi, with Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini on its web site:

Q. Minister Frattini, you have ruled out negotiations, but not dialogue. What do you mean by that?"

R. "That was our strategy during the revolt in Nassirya: not negotiations to grant their requests but an immediate table for dialogue. And it worked. But in Nassirya there was a chain of command and that, unfortunately, is not the case here".

Q. What is the Italian government willing to put on the table for dialogue?

R. "We are willing to say that in the province of Nassirya our action will focus even more strongly on the protection of the population, on security, services and the necessities of everyday life. And we are also prepared to say that we will do everything possible to ensure that this line of action comes to be adopted even in those provinces not under our command. We are offering to act as interpreters to convey to the Americans the need for a more receptive attitude to the needs of the Iraqi people and a greater willingness to engage in dialogue and avoid Iraqi civilian deaths".

Q. Do you mean that you will try to "put the brakes on" the Americans in the field?

R. "As soon as we receive some signal on the hostages, we are ready to tell the Americans that the right way forward is dialogue with all the Iraqi civil and religious authorities, and that we must all undertake avoid any action that goes further than being a defence from attacks, and to take every possible step to avoid Iraqi civilian deaths. Our commitment is to speak seriously with the Americans: we are not asking to discuss the withdrawal of troops or a recognition of terrorism. We must not negotiate with terrorist movements. We will try to carry out this task of persuasion".

I also came across this terse item which I'm not sure what to make of, suggesting that the Italian Foreign Office is concerned that it does not know which of its citizens are privately employed as civilian contractors in Iraq.

A new report from Robert Fisk:
Deaths of scores of mercenaries not reported

At least 80 foreign mercenaries - security guards recruited from the United States, Europe and South Africa and working for American companies - have been killed in the past eight days in Iraq.

Lieutenant-General Mark Kimmitt admitted on Tuesday that "about 70" American and other Western troops had died during the Iraqi insurgency since April 1 but he made no mention of the mercenaries, apparently fearful that the full total of Western dead would have serious political fallout.

He did not give a figure for Iraqi dead, which, across the country may be as high as 900.

(Via email from Andrea Eastman.)

Gary Farber has also sent me a few good links while I've been occupied with other things:

Phil Carter: The problems with private military corporations, and Phil Carter again, this time in Slate: Hired Guns. In the second piece, Carter raises an issue I've been wondering about for a while: how the civilian commando-types square up to the label "unlawful combatant," used for those held in Guantanamo Bay.

ALSO, thanks to the many friends who've sent me kind notes regarding Peter's health. Kids bounce back fast. He was discharged from the hospital late Saturday and was well enough to go to school on Monday. Today he even had the stamina to go to Tai Kwan Do. There are some lingering medical issues that will probably involve extensive testing. But retrospectively, he seems to see the experience as an extended opportunity to watch TV.

(And for those of you who notice a few recent entries missing, I got sick of looking at them. The original pages are still there. Fighting and invective is not what this blog is about.)