A flashback to a dark time in an earlier war: Vietnam, Inc. by Phillip Jones Griffiths. The photo has an unpleasantly familiar aspect.

CAPTURED SUSPECTS. Anyone who was male and between 15 and 50 was automatically assumed to be Vietcong and treated as such. After the traumatic experience of being arrested tnd then 'interrogated,' any person released would quickly want to join the Vietcong.

Link to post in the sidebar when I have a chance: AlterNet: War on Iraq: News Log.

Torture by beatings AND loud western music US troops face new torture claims (guardian.co.uk, 09/14/04). Ick.

The Abu Ghraib prison scandal was harrowing and terrible, showing the corruption of U.S. "liberators" in a horrifically graphic light. Sadly, similar abuses by U.S. forces have also come to light - this time, against Afghan soldiers. U.S. Probing Alleged Abuse of Afghans (latimes.com, 09/21/04, registration required).

Alleged American mistreatment of the detainees included repeated beatings, immersion in cold water, electric shocks, being hung upside down and toenails being torn off, according to Afghan investigators and an internal memorandum prepared by a United Nations delegation that interviewed the surviving soldiers.

Some of the Afghan soldiers were beaten to the point that they could not walk or sit, Afghan doctors and other witnesses said.

One soldier was beaten to death; others were kept in custody until their torture wounds healed sufficiently for the U.S. forces to hand them over to Afghan authorities, who challenged the legality of their custody. When the U.S. was asked to investigate its role, "Pentagon officials said they could find no reports passed up the chain of command as required when a death occurs in U.S. custody, raising questions about possible efforts by American troops in Afghanistan to cover up the incident."

This is disturbing on several levels.

A simple question: how is torturing Afghan soldiers, who support the government the U.S. inserted in Afghanistan, helping support the U.S. anti-terrorist program?

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If only this were a joke: If the U.S. is torturing the forces of its allies, could that explain why there are so few members of the so-called 'Coalition of the Willing?'

Not a pretty picture: Informed Comment : If America were Iraq, What would it be Like? (juancole.com, 09/22/04)

Informed Comment : Violence, Allawi, Sistani and Elections (juancole.com, 09/24/04) offers some interesting information, both on majority Iraqi fears of being sidelined in the elections, on Allawi's inaccurate comments about where violence in Iraq is occurring, and on Rumsfeld's comments about how not all parts of Iraq may enjoy elections in January.

Having your vote left uncounted really is becoming some sort of American tradition, isn't it?

The U.S. military still hasn't figured out what is wrong with this headline: U.S. Planes Strike Sadr City (washingtonpost.com, 09/24/04). Bombing an occupied civilian area tends to lead to bad feelings toward the bombers, and horrific images in the (foreign) press. I haven't yet heard of bombing a neighborhood resulting in improved relations between the surviving inhabitants and the occupying force.

Counting the civilian cost in Iraq (bbc.com, 09/22/04) points out that there is an obligation in the Geneva Conventions for occupiers to track civilian deaths, yet U.S. General Tommy Franks comment, "we don't do body counts" still stands.

I am glad the article includes an observation that the U.S. military seems to often estimate the number of "insurgents" it kills, but never the civilians, which are somehow unknowable.

The article provides links to groups that have been counting (but not to CIVIC).

Dan Froomkin's White House Briefing column is often great, but today's column is especially great. Bush Speech: Resolute or Clueless? (washingtonpost.com) (washingtonpost.com, 09/22/04) is full of interesting comments about war and peace. For example:

"We know that dictators are quick to choose aggression, while free nations strive to resolve differences in peace," Bush said.

Some people see irony there. Others don't.

Oh my. Froomkin's news summary and excerpts also quote from yesterday's post, from a great article I missed by Glenn Kessler, also of the Post::

Kessler writes that Bush "describes almost all issues through the prism of terrorism, giving short shrift to concerns such as world poverty, globalization and a growing divide between rich and poor that were often the focus of other leaders and that some argue are the root causes of terrorism. . . .

It's nice that other leaders are concerning themselves with the root causes of terrorism. It would be nicer if ours was.

Read the entire article: he's got everything from Annan's comments about the illegal war to an update on Kitty Kelly's sources for unflattering information about the Bushes.

No Justice, No Peace: This is more horrific evidence that governments (and societies) must never allow large segments of their population to become hopeless, from The Nation: September 27, 2004 issue, the editorial called "Putin's War":

During the past two years alone, more than 1,000 Russians have been killed in a series of increasingly lethal terrorist acts inside Russia... [since] 1994 more than 100,000 Chechens, most of them civilians, have died, fueling horrifying acts like those in the Beslan school. As a surviving hostage told a Russian newspaper, "The terrorists told us that their own children have been killed by Russians and they have nothing to lose..."

There is a vision of hell: people whose children were killed by your government coming to kill your children. It's hellish, because you know what you would want to do in their shoes, and NEVER want to be in their shoes.

Those of us in the peace movement have an obvious answer: stop allowing your government to kill other people and/or their children.

For reasons which are never apparent to me, this exotic tactic of not killing other people's children has not caught on, not even with my own government.

A new angle in Still Divided Three Years Later (washingtonpost.com, 09/14/04): the idea that the rest of the world may be safer as a result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, but Iraqis are not.

This would be more compelling if any of Iraq's neighbors had been worried prior to the U.S. invasion, when even Kuwait was unenthusiastic...

CBS' "mistake" publicized, facts not (updated). My partner, S, said that the media climate in this country is such that newsmakers don't need to actually disprove anything negative said about them: all that is needed is a whiff of doubt, and if the doubt is for the right side, the doubt itself becomes the news. No one looks further.

When CBS broke a story of copies of memoranda urging sugar-coated reports of Bush's guard service, conservative news services didn't insist that Bush had served, but rather that the documents must be fake. The doubt has spread: CBS apologizes, concedes it can't vouch for authenticity of documents on Bush Guard duty (sfgate.com, 09/20/04).

Rather this weekend interviewed Bill Burkett, a retired Texas National Guard official who has been mentioned as a possible source for the documents.... CBS said Burkett acknowledged he provided the documents and said he deliberately misled a CBS producer, giving her a false account of their origin to protect a promise of confidentiality to a source.

This article is dated September 20th, and is just about the authenticity of documents -- but not the facts. But back on September 16th, FAIR published "The Mysterious Case of the CBS Memos", which notes the following:

The secretary of George W. Bush's National Guard commander, coming forward to describe memos supposedly written by her boss as "correct" but "not real" (Dallas Morning News, 9/14/04), has deepened the mystery about the disputed documents.

Marian Carr Knox is a compelling witness... she debunked several of the specific reasons other news outlets had given for questioning the memos that were featured in that report....

But while Knox greatly undermines the documentation of the CBS reporting, it is important for critics to recognize that she corroborates the substance of that reporting. "The information in them is correct," she told the New York Times (9/15/04). "It looks like someone may have read the originals and put that together."

(bold emphasis mine). Bill Burkett, mentioned above in the SFGate article, "has charged that Bush's Guard records were culled in 1997 to eliminate 'anything there that will embarrass the [then] governor' (Dallas Morning News, 2/11/04), which would mean that many of the originals were destroyed. And now there are two witnesses - Burkett and Knox - who believe in the information revealed.

I bet you haven't read that in many places, have you?

Images from Iraq at SFGate.com: 'the face of collateral damage (a young girl injured in US airstrikes), and a combat boot memorial to fallen U.S. soldiers.

U.S. Intelligence Offers Gloomy Outlook for Iraq (nytimes.com, 09/16/04). Also, U.S. Intelligence Shows Pessimism on Iraq's Future (nytimes, 09/16/04).

The estimate outlines three possibilities for Iraq through the end of 2005, with the worst case being developments that could lead to civil war, the officials said. The most favorable outcome described is an Iraq whose stability would remain tenuous in political, economic and security terms....

[yet]

"You know, every step of the way in Iraq there have been pessimists and hand-wringers who said it can't be done," Mr. McClellan [White House spokesperson] said at a news briefing. "And every step of the way, the Iraqi leadership and the Iraqi people have proven them wrong because they are determined to have a free and peaceful future."

One wonders whether the spokesperson remains so upbeat because he knows he will never need to visit Iraq?

Weapons Inspectors: Iraq Study Finds Desire for Arms, but Not Capacity (nytimes.com, 09/17/04). After an exhaustive study, we still went to war over bad intentions. Or, more specifically, intentions to have the same sort of weaponry that the U.S. maintains, and that the U.S. sells or provides to its allies.

Usually, there are less harsh punishments for wanting to be like the U.S....

I know that both of the U.S. presidential candidates believe that Iraq's problems have a military solution, but the news on what that approach has brought is isn't currently compelling. Baghdad Violence Leaves at Least 52 Dead (news.yahoo.com, 09/17/04). The U.S. military death toll is already at 1,027; the "unrest" (such understatement) is resulting in more terrible attacks. And the "air strike" approach to killing militants is causing great damage.

West of Baghdad, hundreds of men dug mass graves to bury the dead from a wave of American airstrikes that started late Thursday and stretched into Friday in and around Fallujah. Health Ministry official Saad al-Amili said at least 44 people were killed and 27 wounded in the Fallujah strikes.

... Mahmoud Sheil, 50, a tribal sheik in the area, likened the killings from U.S. airstrikes in Fallujah to the slaughter of civilians under Saddam Hussein's ousted dictatorship.

'They (the Americans) say that Saddam is the man of mass graves, but they are the ones responsible for these mass graves,' he said.

This approach is still not winning hearts and minds for the U.S.

On the deaths on Haifa Street, captured on video

Salam Pax is again providing an incredible service to the outside world with his new blog. His entry shut up you fat whiner!: "he got injured" (justzipit.blogspot.com, 09/14/04) provides several things. It provides a link to his injured journalist friend (Ghaith), including a photo.

It provides a link to all the 'editorial' (news) photos his friend filed, including some very sad and very gory ones which will never be seen in the U.S. press, (editorial.gettyimages.com). Intrepid researchers can look at these images prior to commercial media filtration.

And then there are the comments upon this entry from Pax's readers. (Which Pax is very brave to allow, considering the boneheaded remarks he often receives.)

Most useful: link to Motive for Haifa Street Helicopter Massacre Remains a Mystery, by Brian Dominick (iraq-war.ru, 09/15/04). Relevant excerpts:

he US military has offered at least two distinct explanations for killing thirteen people and wounding at least sixty others, including children, early Monday morning on Haifa Street in a residential area of central Baghdad.... Abundant eyewitness testimony backed up by television footage indicates the helicopters fired directly at the crowd, at least most of whose members were clearly unarmed.....

On the Al-Arabiya video, there is no sign of fire coming from the ground, and no fire from above precedes the explosions that killed and wounded noncombatants far from the disemboweled Bradley.

But footage taken by an Al-Arabiya crew at the scene clearly shows explosions among a crowd of noncombatants some distance from the burning Bradley fighting vehicle, an armored troop transporter that resembles a tank. In fact, even though the Bradley is shown in the distant background as Palestinian TV producer Mazen Al-Tumeizi set up for a live interview at the scene, one of the missiles fired from US aircraft hit close enough to kill Al-Tameizi and wound the camera operator, Seif Fouad.

The article continues with a report from Pax's injured friend, which another blog comment entry provides a link for: 'He's just sleeping, I kept telling myself' (guardian.co.uk, 09/14/04 -- warning, pictures of dead people).

Once I knew what to look for, I was also a able to find a related story at the BBC: Media spotlight on Baghdad deaths (bbc.com, 09/13/04). This article emphasizes the fact that this attack on civilians was recorded, notes the discrepancies and differing accounts offered by the U.S. military, and discusses deaths of journalists at the hands of U.S. forces, and recounts past incidents. (It features stills of the al-Arabiya reporter's video before and after he was fatally injured.) Plus, it has this comment:

In a phone call from Baghdad on Monday, the US military was unable to clarify why none of the TV footage or press pictures showed armed people at the scene or recorded any gunfire.

(See also, ABC news: "Reuters TV footage of the incident showed no evidence any of the Iraqis around the Bradley vehicle were armed or had opened fire." (09/13/04))

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So, by providing a personal connection, and a forum for people to share additional information on this horrific incident, Pax is really letting us know what it's like to be a civilian in Iraq.

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Yes, Pax has historically supported a U.S. presence until order can be restored. No, that doesn't make this any easier for him to cope with.

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Least useful reader comment, but very interesting in a strange way: a U.S. soldier writing to Pax: "As a soldier we don't want to kill, we kill because it is our job." As if getting a paycheck for killing makes it acceptable. As if killing for money rather than ideology makes dead civilians less dead.

Iraq security picture (bbc.com, 09/13/04) provides a list of cities and areas which are no longer under US or US-allied-Iraqi control around the country.

It's a long list.

Am I surprised that the US wants to divert money from water, sewage, and electrical service for the Iraqi people to security activities? No. Iraq: Signs of desperation (bbc.com, 09/14/04). The article provides excerpts from the report of a think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which states:

Two months after the United States transferred sovereignty to an Iraqi interim government... Iraq remains embroiled in an insurgency, with security problems overshadowing other efforts to rebuild Iraq's fragile society in the areas of governance and participation, economic opportunity, services and well-being.

Kofi Annan, ever diplomatic, has had wrested from him a more direct statement than he has yet given about Iraq. In the BBC article, "Choice of words matters," Annan says the US invasion of Iraq was illegal. (bbc.com, 09/16/04).

Of course, "US says Iraq invasion was legal" (bbc.com, 09/16/04), but it has to say that. The argument that Iraq HAD to be invaded because of the imminent threat of weapons of mass destruction is still in force in this article -- parties supportive of the invasion still insist that the United Nations wasn't acting, so the U.S. HAD TO -- because. Just because. Even though, in retrospect, the UN was right. Ooops. Darn those pesky facts.