AG REPORT Tapped
Spencer Ackerman has an article out on recently released documents that give us the military's lawyer's view of U.S. interrogation policy:

The JAGs were commenting on the report of a Pentagon working group, convened in January 2003, to review interrogation policy changes. But a common theme in their memos is the concern that the legal rationales employed by the working group were imported wholesale from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC)--whose writing on the question of torture was memorably described by Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh as "perhaps the most clearly legally erroneous opinion I have ever read." (What the Justice Department lawyers actually gave to the Defense Department remains, inexplicably, classified, despite months of congressional demands.)

Major General Thomas Romig, the Army JAG, essentially concurred. He denounced OLC's central contention--that any law restricting the president's ability to wage war is unconstitutional--writing caustically: "I question whether this theory would ultimately prevail in either the U.S. courts or in any international forum. ... This view runs contrary to the historic position taken by the United States Government concerning such laws and, in our opinion, could adversely impact DOD interests worldwide."

Brigadier General Kevin Sandkuhler, the Marine JAG, was more specific about how adopting OLC's argument would harm the military:

Spencer Ackerman has an article out on recently released documents that give us the military's lawyer's view of U.S. interrogation policy:

The JAGs were commenting on the report of a Pentagon working group, convened in January 2003, to review interrogation policy changes. But a common theme in their memos is the concern that the legal rationales employed by the working group were imported wholesale from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC)--whose writing on the question of torture was memorably described by Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh as "perhaps the most clearly legally erroneous opinion I have ever read." (What the Justice Department lawyers actually gave to the Defense Department remains, inexplicably, classified, despite months of congressional demands.)

Major General Thomas Romig, the Army JAG, essentially concurred. He denounced OLC's central contention--that any law restricting the president's ability to wage war is unconstitutional--writing caustically: "I question whether this theory would ultimately prevail in either the U.S. courts or in any international forum. ... This view runs contrary to the historic position taken by the United States Government concerning such laws and, in our opinion, could adversely impact DOD interests worldwide."

Brigadier General Kevin Sandkuhler, the Marine JAG, was more specific about how adopting OLC's argument would harm the military: "Comprehensive protection is lacking for DOD personnel who may be tried by other nations and/or international bodies for violations of international law."

"U.S. Armed Forces are continuously trained to take the legal and moral 'high road' in the conduct of our military operations regardless of how others may operate," wrote the Air Force's deputy JAG, Major General Jack Rives. "Approving exceptional interrogation techniques may be seen as giving official approval and legal sanction to the application of interrogation techniques that U.S. Armed Forces have heretofore been trained are unlawful." Sandkuhler starkly warned about a breakdown in uniformed "pride, discipline and self-respect."

You can see the memos themselves here and Marty Lederman has further commentary on the subject.

Th "Comprehensive protection is lacking for DOD personnel who may be tried by other nations and/or international bodies for violations of international law."

"U.S. Armed Forces are continuously trained to take the legal and moral 'high road' in the conduct of our military operations regardless of how others may operate," wrote the Air Force's deputy JAG, Major General Jack Rives. "Approving exceptional interrogation techniques may be seen as giving official approval and legal sanction to the application of interrogation techniques that U.S. Armed Forces have heretofore been trained are unlawful." Sandkuhler starkly warned about a breakdown in uniformed "pride, discipline and self-respect."

You can see the memos themselves here and Marty Lederman has further commentary on the subject.

Th. They are written by JAGs from the Air Force, Navy, Army and Marines. As Senator Graham put it on Monday, these folks "are not from the ACLU. These are not from people who are soft on terrorism, who want to coddle foreign terrorists. These are all professional military lawyers who have dedicated their lives, with 20-plus year careers, to serving the men and women in uniform and protecting their Nation. They were giving a warning shot across the bow of the policymakers that there are certain corners you cannot afford to cut because you will wind up meeting yourself."

It is fair to say that these accounts reflected sustained, uniform and passionate opposition to the OLC legal theories that were being foisted upon the military. Indeed, the tone of the memos is one of barely concealed incredulity, and outrage--disbelief--that a young legal academic from DOJ could sweep right in and so quickly overturn decades of carefully wrought military policy, using legal analysis that almost certainly would not withstand scrutiny outside the Administration and around the world. ...

Department of "Huh?" Brad DeLong
The U.S. government doesn't already offer protection to foreign diplomats in Iraq? Why not?
WSJ.com - U.S. May Offer Protection To Foreign Diplomats in Iraqe memos are extraordinary. They are written by JAGs from the Air Force, Navy, Army and Marines. As Senator Graham put it on Monday, these folks "are not from the ACLU. These are not from people who are soft on terrorism, who want to coddle foreign terrorists. These are all professional military lawyers who have dedicated their lives, with 20-plus year careers, to serving the men and women in uniform and protecting their Nation. They were giving a warning shot across the bow of the policymakers that there are certain corners you cannot afford to cut because you will wind up meeting yourself."

It is fair to say that these accounts reflected sustained, uniform and passionate opposition to the OLC legal theories that were being foisted upon the military. Indeed, the tone of the memos is one of barely concealed incredulity, and outrage--disbelief--that a young legal academic from DOJ could sweep right in and so quickly overturn decades of carefully wrought military policy, using legal analysis that almost certainly would not withstand scrutiny outside the Administration and around the world. ...

In perhaps one of the largest turnarounds in modern political history, only six months after winning reelection, Bush has apparently squandered his mandate and now finds himself a lame duck, his powerful political capitol spent. Yes, dear readers, America is finally on to the man and it is doubtful that his presidency will survive the next two years.

So unlikely is his political survival that we here at the RECOVERING LIBERAL feel completely comfortable in beginning what amounts to as a countdown to IMPEACHMENT (Drum Roll Please!).

And what a lovely impeachment it will be, televised and tivo'd, and commented on by AL and Randi at AIR AMERICA while being dutifully dissected by our brothers and sisters in the BLOGGING COMMUNITY Including: BLONDESENSE, AMERICAblog, ,  DAILY KOS, and of course here in the red, white and blue pages of the LIB.

We are confident that in the next twenty-four months Dubya and the gang will be relegated to their rightful place in history as the war criminals, thieves and zealots that they most definitely are.

That they will be taken to task for lying about the WMD'S and for generally disregarding the will of the American people, who mostly believe that war should only be fought only when our nation is at jeopardy and not because war is good business.

We further believe that they will be held to answer for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives squandered as collateral damage in this War for Oil as well as for the senseless loss of our own troops, and for the ongoing pain and suffering of those soldiers, sailors and marines lucky enough to survive their tour of duty in Iraq.

Additionally, it is our sincere hope that they will be charged for their crimes against the environment and for the senseless destruction of the air that we breath, the water that we drink, and the food that we eat in the name of shameless profit.

Lastly, it is our fondest desire they be made to pay dearly for the climate of hate, which they have engendered, endorsed and fueled with their draconian approach to the maters of gay rights, stem cell research and evolution, as well as their support for those who preach hate in God's name.

And these are just some of the things which we would like to see them answer for in this life. God, I'm sure, has a few issues of his own to discuss with them.CROOKS AND LIARS, DAILY KOS, and of course here in the red, white and blue pages of the LIB.

We are confident that in the next twenty-four months Dubya and the gang will be relegated to their rightful place in history as the war criminals, thieves and zealots that they most definitely are.

That they will be taken to task for lying about the WMD'S and for generally disregarding the will of the American people, who mostly believe that war should only be fought only when our nation is at jeopardy and not because war is good business.

We further believe that they will be held to answer for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives squandered as collateral damage in this War for Oil as well as for the senseless loss of our own troops, and for the ongoing pain and suffering of those soldiers, sailors and marines lucky enough to survive their tour of duty in Iraq.

Additionally, it is our sincere hope that they will be charged for their crimes against the environment and for the senseless destruction of the air that we breath, the water that we drink, and the food that we eat in the name of shameless profit.

Lastly, it is our fondest desire they be made to pay dearly for the climate of hate, which they have engendered, endorsed and fueled with their draconian approach to the maters of gay rights, stem cell research and evolution, as well as their support for those who preach hate in God's name.

And these are just some of the things which we would like to see them answer for in this life. God, I'm sure, has a few issues of his own to discuss with them.

Kevin Sites speaks out!

The journalist who took the video footage of the marine shooting!

"Aside from breathing, I did not observe any movement at all."

Kevin Sites Please read the full text.

This is only an excerpt.

I see an old man in a red kaffiyeh lying against the back wall. Another is face down next to him, his hand on the old man's lap -- as if he were trying to take cover. I squat beside them, inches away and begin to videotape them. Then I notice that the blood coming from the old man's nose is bubbling. A sign he is still breathing. So is the man next to him.

While I continue to tape, a Marine walks up to the other two bodies about fifteen feet away, but also lying against the same back wall.

Then I hear him say this about one of the men:

"He's fucking faking he's dead -- he's faking he's fucking dead."

Through my viewfinder I can see him raise the muzzle of his rifle in the direction of the wounded Iraqi. There are no sudden movements, no reaching or lunging. However, the Marine could legitimately believe the man poses some kind of danger. Maybe he's going to cover him while another Marine searches for weapons.

Instead, he pulls the trigger. There is a small splatter against the back wall and the man's leg slumps down.

"Well he's dead now," says another Marine in the background.

I am still rolling. I feel the deep pit of my stomach. The Marine then abruptly turns away and strides away, right past the fifth wounded insurgent lying next to a column. He is very much alive and peering from his blanket. He is moving, even trying to talk. But for some reason, it seems he did not pose the same apparent "danger" as the other man -- though he may have been more capable of hiding a weapon or explosive beneath his blanket....

But then two other marines in the room raise their weapons as the man tries to talk. For a moment, I'm paralyzed still taping with the old man in the foreground. I get up after a beat and tell the Marines again, what I had told the lieutenant -- that this man -- all of these wounded men -- were the same ones from yesterday. That they had been disarmed treated and left here...

At that point the Marine who fired the shot became aware that I was in the room. He came up to me and said, "I didn't know sir-I didn't know." The anger that seemed present just moments before turned to fear and dread.

In the particular circumstance I was reporting, it bothered me that the Marine didn't seem to consider the other insurgents a threat -- the one very obviously moving under the blanket, or even the two next to me that were still breathing.

I can't know what was in the mind of that Marine. He is the only one who does.

But observing all of this as an experienced war reporter who always bore in mind the dark perils of this conflict, even knowing the possibilities of mitigating circumstances -- it appeared to me very plainly that something was not right. According to Lt. Col Bob Miller, the rules of engagement in Falluja required soldiers or Marines to determine hostile intent before using deadly force. I was not watching from a hundred feet away. I was in the same room. Aside from breathing, I did not observe any movement at all.

Why Oh Why Are We Ruled by These Fools? (Yet Another Bush-in-Iraq Edition)

Bruce Moomaw writes:

Something else, though, that the Marines had expected to see [besides the junk left behind by the insurgents, which does include large amounts of weaponry] was nowhere to be found: the remains of the insurgents that the tanks had been sent in to destroy. "I was hoping that as we searched these houses, we would find dead bodies,' Captain Omohundro said. Where the insurgents ended up is not known.

Under the circumstances, I rather doubt that they were killed and then their corpses were dragged away by their comrades while they left the weapons behind. Phil Carter provides more good reason to think that the estimates we're now seeing of "1000 to 1600 insurgents killed" in Fallujah are pure wishful fairy tales: Slate . And, as Carter and others have pointed out elsewhere, there's lots and lots and lots of replacement weapons for them left lying around Iraq and unguarded by us -- 400,000 tons, to quote the Pentagon itself.

Yes, they were lying about al Qaqaa

Just three days too late for it to do any good, the Los Angeles Times breaks the definitive story on al Qaeda. Not only did the theft of the high explosive go on after the invasion, the looting went on while we had troops at the site. There were just too many looters, and too few troops. They asked for backup but didn't get any.

Of course there's no way this information wasn't available to the Defense Department, and the White House, three weeks ago. The story isn't just based on soldiers in the field. Mark Mazzetti reports:

"That site was just abandoned by the 101st Airborne, and there was never a physical handoff by the 101st to the Marines. They just left," said a senior officer who worked in the top Marine command post in Iraq at the time. "We knew these sites were being looted, but there was nothing we could do about it."

No, the White House and the DoD civilians covered it up, telling various lies on the way (which their journalistic and blogospheric allies duly relayed to the public) just long enough to get the Beloved Leader past the election. And now they expect, almost certainly correctly, that everyone will now treat it as old news. The warbloggers will ignore it if they can't figure out some cockamamie way to convince themselves they've discredited it, while patting themselves on the back about how much more responsible and fair-minded they are than the mainstream media.

In the end, this one cover-up almost certainly didn't make the difference. But of course this wasn't the only cover-up. The cover-up of how Ken Lay and his friends got to write Administration energy policy worked. The Valerie Plame cover-up worked. And the result was that the Administration went back before the voters looking much cleaner and much more competent than it was or is.

Just remember, if their lips are moving, they're lying.

As I'm reading about the Marine-led NATO offensive in Afghanistan, I'm wondering if this represents the "new" counterinsurgency warfare, or is this just the basic combined arms "search and destroy" conventional approach that we saw in Iraq? From the NY Times:

The first large skirmish began at 9:30 a.m., as Second Platoon, the company headquarters and most of the Afghan platoon stopped at the edge of a small village and prepared to clear it. The Taliban opened up with automatic rifle fire from a few hundred yards away, shooting from concealed positions protected by open ground.

Marines and Afghan soldiers rushed to mud walls and returned fire. The Taliban’s fighters could be seen at times running between fighting positions and irrigation ditches. A few were struck by the Marines’ fire, and fell. Others kept up their fire. Bullets buzzed past the Marines.

------

Often, small groups of Taliban opened up from a different direction after the Marines had faced several minutes of fire. It was clear that the Taliban had ringed the company, and was probing and picking at the Marines as much of Company K moved toward a road and bridge that Captain Biggers intended to seize.

As the company spread out, the fighting moved with it. At times, two or three gun battles raged at once, including at the outposts where the Marines had left their equipment. The Taliban harassed and attacked these positions several times during the day.

-------

More than a half-hour later, after the fighting had subsided again, the Himars rocket barrage struck a nearby house, but not the one from which highly accurate fire had been holding the Marines against the wall.

Several Marines cursed. The wrong building had been hit. The company commander saw the children stream outside, ordered a cease-fire, and sent a patrol to go help.

Certainly there's the time and place to use conventional warfighting tactics to take on a large concentration of insurgents. Pretty sure that's in the COIN manual. But I feel like we're still fighting at the tactical/operational level, looking for short-term gains with no feasible long-term strategy to win and get out. It is encouraging that there are more Afghans involved in this joint operation than ever before, and word is that "development aid" is set up to follow into the province. But the "proof is in the tasting of the pudding," so they say. We'll watch and see what happens next.

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Gossip Boy -- which has been all over the case of onetime "Oath Keepers" figure Charles Dyer, arrested for the rape of a 7-year-old girl -- is reporting that the leader of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, is running away from Dyer as fast as he can.

Rhodes, as you can see in the video from his Oct. 21 appearance on MSNBC's Hardball, tries to project a straight-shooter image, even though the underlying beliefs of the Oath Keepers' "oath" is a swamp of bizarre conspiracies.

So now Rhodes has scrubbed any mention of Dyer from the Oath Keepers site, and is claiming to have had no association whatsoever with him:

“Charles Dyer never became an actual member of Oath Keepers. I met him when he attended our April 19, 2009 gathering at Lexington, and back then I considered him for a position as our liaison to the Marine Corps, but I decided against that when he made it clear he intended to train and help organize private militias across the country when he got out of the Marines. I considered such plans to be incompatible with the Oath Keepers mission and goals, and certainly incompatible with any leadership position within this org. He understood and agreed with my decision to not have him become officially involved with Oath Keepers. All of that was long before we even offered official memberships. So, he was never a member, and never in any leadership position.”

One little problem with this explanation, as Gossip Boy explains, is the evidence from our friends at Google cache:

Yep, that's the same Stewart Rhodes announcing that Dyer would be representing the Oath Keepers at the July 4 Tea Party in Broken Arrow.

Indeed, the reality is that Dyer has been a significant figure for the Oath Keepers all along. His first video, released in March, in fact put the Oath Keepers on the map Internet-wise by going viral.

As we noted, at least Dyer's friends at American Resistance are standing behind him. You can't blame Stewart Rhodes for wanting to cut and run, but he's not exactly helping his cause by being the opposite of forthcoming about it all.

Talk about double-dipping! I wonder if it would be too much to ask that media outlets ask about such conflicts before they offer them outlets as "objective" analysts:

WASHINGTON — After retiring from the Marine Corps in December 2003, Emil "Buck" Bedard headed back to work — for both the Pentagon and defense contractors.

Two months after leaving the service as a lieutenant general, Bedard became an adviser for the Pentagon's Joint Forces Command, a job that this year paid him about $1,600 per day to help run war games and mentor high-level commanders on how to lead troops in battle. Bedard also signed on with seven defense contractors as a corporate director or consultant.

For one of those firms, Bedard marketed a video surveillance system to the Marines during the time he was getting paid by the Pentagon for mentoring, even after a general concluded that the technology "did not work as advertised," a USA TODAY investigation found.

Bedard's activities present a case study of the kinds of situations that arise when retired senior officers become paid Pentagon advisers even as they market products to the military as consultants for defense contractors. USA TODAY reported last month that roughly 130 retired generals and admirals have held taxpayer-funded military jobs as "senior mentors" while also working for defense contractors.

Bedard's case goes beyond getting paid to advise the government and industry at the same time. E-mails and interviews show that Bedard pushed for his former service branch to buy the video system, including sending e-mails while on mentoring assignments.

"In the corporate world, this ... would not be tolerated," said Kirk Hanson, director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University in California.

"It is not uncommon for someone to consult with their former employer, but it is a major concern if they are simultaneously representing groups that sell to or try to influence their former employer."

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This Week with George Stephanopoulos marks the passing of actor/comedian Bernie Mac, Nobel Laureate author Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, talent agent/producer Bernie Brillstein, GOP foreign affairs consultant and Kissinger protege Peter Rodman, as well as 16 soldiers and Marines killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

According to icasualties.org, the allied deaths in Iraq now total 4,451. During this same period, Iraq Body Count numbers 147 Iraqi civilian deaths.

VetVoice:

The Pentagon has provided $30 billion in contracts to KBR during the Iraq War. Apparently that's just the Basic Troop Support Package, however, because it's not enough money to keep the contractor from electrocuting a dozen troops in showers and elsewhere throughout Iraq and Afghanistan. [..]

The New York Times piece goes on to explain:

The Army has provided little detailed information about the electrocutions, other than to say late Friday that 10 soldiers had been electrocuted in Iraq. A House committee has also reported that two marines died similarly.

One former KBR electrician was quite frank about what's going on:

And Mr. Bliss, who saw a soldier standing next to him in Qalat, Afghanistan, receive a severe shock from an electrical box that was not supposed to be charged, said his KBR bosses mocked him for raising safety issues. They were "not giving the Army what it needed," he said, "and not giving the soldiers what they deserved."