Two and a half weeks ago, Mission Essential Personnel, LLC, (MEP) proudly put out this press release:

Mission Essential Personnel, LLC, (MEP) is pleased to announce it has been included again on Inc. magazine’s prestigious Inc. 500 list of the nation’s fastest growing companies based on percentage revenue growth. MEP ranks #162 overall this year, after having hit #52 last year. The company’s revenue has grown from $43 million in 2007 to more than $375 million in 2009.

“It’s great for MEP to be recognized for its continued strong growth,” said MEP CEO Chris Taylor. “Inc.’s recognition highlights our company’s tremendous success expanding its current business while beginning to branch into new areas of work. Our great personnel in the U.S. and across the world deserve credit for their unwavering commitment to our customers and their mission.”

Depends on the definition of “unwavering commitment to our customers”.

According to a whistleblower, that phenomenal growth rate — which represents a trebling of revenues each year — was achieved by the most callous kind of fraud. The kind that costs lives.

More than one quarter of the translators working alongside American soldiers in Afghanistan failed language proficiency exams but were sent onto the battlefield anyway, according to a former employee of the company that holds contracts worth up to $1.4 billion to supply interpreters to the U.S. Army.

“I determined that someone — and I didn’t know [who] at that time — was changing the grades from blanks or zeros to passing grades,” said Paul Funk, who used to oversee the screening of Afghan linguists for the Columbus, Ohio-based contractor, Mission Essential Personnel. “Many who failed were marked as being passed.”

After being asked about the allegations, U.S. Army officials confirmed to ABC News they are investigating the company.

Funk outlined his claims in a whistleblower lawsuit unsealed earlier this year against Mission Essential Personnel, saying the company turned a blind eye to cheating on language exams taken over the phone and hired applicants even though they failed to meet the language standards set by the Army and spelled out in the company’s contract. He alleges that 28 percent of the linguists hired between November 2007 and June 2008 failed to meet the government’s language requirements. The company has contested those claims in court, and this week rejected them as false in an interview with ABC News.

Civilian translators have for nearly a decade been playing a crucial if unsung role in the Afghanistan war, embedding with troops as they have moved through the countryside, helping soldiers gather information from local villagers, and attempting to spread the message of security, moderation and peace that undergirds the U.S. presence there. Some Afghan veterans have rated the value of a skilled interpreter as equal to that of a working weapon or sturdy body armor.

But a former top screener of translators heading to Afghanistan tells ABC News in an exclusive interview that will air tonight on World News with Diane Sawyer and Nightline that he believes many of the translators currently in the field cannot perform their function.

“There are many cases where soldiers have gone out into the field and have spoken to elders [who] handed messages to the interpreter that a possible ambush three miles up the road would occur. The interpreter cannot read the message and they are attacked,” Funk said. “We’re talking about soldiers lives here.”

As Blue Girl points out, the Defense Languages Institute exists to train military personnel as linguists. But the Bush-Rumsfeld war philosophy was always: why go to war with the army you can have, if you can go to war instead with contractors who you can pay really big bucks to royally bugger up things instead?

MEP dismisses Funk’s allegations with an impressive amount of outrage. But ABC News‘s investigation supports Funk’s allegations. For example, there is this casual circumstantial evidence:

In a hearing before a congressional committee in July, CEO Chris Taylor testified that within a year of accepting the Afghan contract, his company “was able to achieve a 97 percent fill rate of the government’s requirement for linguists. Previous contractors never exceeded 43 percent.”

How Mission Essential Personnel was able to find hundreds of willing and translators (sic) from among a tiny pool of qualified Americans — which Peltier put at roughly 3,800 — was initially something of a mystery to Funk. He said the company struggled to find American citizens who spoke the Afghan languages Dari and Pashto. Ultimately, Funk alleged in his lawsuit that the company resorted to fudging their proficiency test results in order to hit staffing targets that entitled them to more money from the Army.

There are the ridiculously poor quality control practices MEP followed (unconscionably poor quality control, if you consider the stakes involved):

Funk told ABC News he wrote emails to the then-CEO of Mission Essential describing how job candidates would cheat on oral exams conducted over the phone.

“I told him that it was corrupt. Stand-ins were taking the test. That’s comparable to, if you’re a lawyer, that’s comparable to taking the bar exam over the phone. You need to be face-to-face with that individual. You need to identify them. You need to know who they are and they had stand-ins on the phone taking the test,” Funk said. “They had stand-ins on the phone taking the test because there is no way that these people could possibly pass if they can’t even get through an interview.”

One of the company’s translators working in Afghanistan now confirmed the practice in an interview with ABC News, saying he personally had taken the exam for others who could not have passed it themselves. The employee, who described the practice on the condition he not be identified, called a follow-up written exam “bull.”

ABC News also reports that “American war veterans confirmed… that many of the interpreters are simply unable to perform the delicate work of interpreting conversations between Americans and Afghans.”

There is also the first-person testimony of soldiers who were in a position to judge the language skills of contracted interpreters:

Genevieve Chase served as a Pashto-language-trained US Army Sergeant in Afghanistan in 2006 in Bagram and Lashkargah, Helmand Province. She told ABC News it was not unusual to encounter interpreters who were unable to speak Pashto, or had limited English. At times, she said she believes the failure to communicate has put soldiers lives at risk.

“Somewhere along the line somebody is doing something they’re not supposed to be doing,” Chase said. “It is not difficult to pick out somebody who can’t speak Pashto. In fact, for me it was rather simple to isolate those people.”

Chase said Army units quickly identified interpreters who could not do their jobs. She recalled odd exchanges where Afghan elders would speak at great length and the interpreter would turn to the American soldiers and translate, “He said, ‘Okay.’”

After all this time, Duke president President Richard Brodhead has suddenly apologized to the lacrosse team players and their families.

Maybe Donald Rumsfeld will still apologize for bungling the Iraq war? Or George Bush? Or Prick Cheney, or Paul Wolfowitz, or Douglas Feith, or George Tenet, or Condoleezza Rice, or Stephen Hadley, or Richard Perle, or I. Lewis Libby or William Kristol.

Or if they’re just too shy to stand up in the glare of the public spotlight to issue a mea culpa, how about a collective wea culpa?

Rumsfeld on Fox News (9/14/07):

Rumsfeld responded by claiming it’s impossible to follow events when you’re “on the outside.” He then added that he doesn’t have time to follow what’s going on in Iraq because he’s too busy with administrative tasks:

I’ve been very busy doing a series of things: setting up an office and hiring staff, arranging my papers to give to the Library of Congress, setting up a new foundation…

The Big Lebowski (1998):

YOUNGER COP: And was there anything of value in the car?

DUDE: Huh? Oh. Yeah. Tape deck. Couple of Creedence tapes. And there was a, uh. . . my briefcase.

YOUNGER COP: In the briefcase?

DUDE: Papers. Just papers. You know, my papers. Business papers.

YOUNGER COP: And what do you do, sir?

DUDE: I’m unemployed.

Rumsfeld: Afghanistan a ‘Big Success’ – AP (9/10/07):

In an interview billed as his first since leaving the top Pentagon post, Donald Rumsfeld calls Afghanistan “a big success,” but says U.S. efforts in Iraq are hampered by the failure of Iraq’s government to establish a foundation for democracy.

“In Afghanistan, 28 million people are free. They have their own president, they have their own parliament. Improved a lot on the streets,” Rumsfeld says in the October issue of GQ magazine.

Afghanistan slipping backward, analysts say – Newsday (9/9/07):

Afghanistan has slipped backward into a political “danger zone,” the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies warned in March. In the broadest published evaluation of Afghans’ attitudes, the center said Afghans are facing worsened physical security, greater threats from warlords, criminal gangs and corrupt officials, and more difficulty in supporting their families. Such alarms are ringing from every side: UN agencies, non-government aid organizations, scholars, some U.S. officials and ordinary Afghans.

In the battle against the Taliban for Afghans’ hearts and minds, “support for America and for Karzai is becoming less every day,” said Eissa Wahdat, an Afghan government engineer who coordinates small development projects in Nuristan.
[...]
America is investing nowhere near the troops and money needed to confront the Taliban and other insurgents. Nearly six years on, the total of troops and police backing the Afghan government remains less than 10 percent of what leading counter-insurgency analysts say is needed. Iraq has sucked away troops, money and policymakers’ attention, analysts say. And, U.S. officials concede, Washington will be unable to add significant forces here as long as Iraq ties down its current 150,000 U.S. troops.

Kucinich: Did the WH have a press strategy on the Iraq war?

Rumsfeld: If there was, it obviously wasn’t very good.

The amount of mendacity, straight up lying, in a statement that short was previously thought beyond reach, but hey, Rumsfeld has been at this for years. Because the use of the word “lie” has fallen under an absurd new definition here recently, I’m going to spend a lot more time on this than I normally would when Rumsfeld’s statement is so obviously beyond the pale.

Let’s take a look at the the first three words: “If there was…” In a Congressional hearing, probably under oath, Rumsfeld wouldn’t concede the existence of a White House press strategy on Iraq. How do I know, beyond any argument, that these words were specifically chosen to mislead? In September of 2002, White House Chief of Staff said of the coming Iraq war:

“From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”

I could leave it at that, and be satisfied that I made my case, but there’s so much more. Judy Miller didn’t pull her ominous stories of Saddam’s advanced WMD programs out of thin air, and she obviously didn’t come across them by solid reporting, leaving only administration leaks as the source for her “information.” And after her stories appeared, administration officials were only too happy to go on the Sunday shows and point to their leaks, now in story form, as “proof” of the need for war. If that’s not a strategy for war, I don’t know what is.

As it happens, Rumsfeld doesn’t even have to look as far away as Card, not when Victoria Clarke was on his very own staff:

“Torie Clarke is a gifted communicator,” said Secretary Rumsfeld. “During her remarkable two years of service in the Department of Defense, she has developed countless new methods to tell the story of our fighting forces, and bring their courage, dedication, and professionalism into sharp focus for all Americans. She will be sorely missed.”

So, Clarke worked for Rumsfeld, so he knew, beyond any question, that she was part of the press strategy. She did, after all, invent embedding, arguably the most effective tactic in maintaining support for the war long after it was clear that it was lost. Past that, he praised her for her “remarkable service” and said that she would be “sorely missed.” So he knew about the press strategy, and has in the past commented on its quality. But…but…but neither Clarke nor Rumsfeld work at the White House you bleat. Well, not working at the White House isn’t the same thing as not working for the White House:

Pentagon media chief Tori Clarke, who worked with PR firms and political campaigns before bringing a corporate approach and politically oriented spin operation into the Pentagon, admitted that she was running her shop the way she used to run campaigns. This approach was coordinated throughout the Administration with “messages of the day” and orchestrated appearances by the president and members of his cabinet. They were not just selling a message, but “managing the perceptions” of those who received them. In political outage, they used “stagecraft,” a term that once was used to refer to covert operations.

Add to that the long list of awards Clarke won, including those awarded by top military brass:

Her innovative communication strategies and public service have brought her many awards including the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, presented by Secretary Rumsfeld; The Joint Distinguished Civilian Service Award, presented by then General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff…and The 2003 Gill Robb Wilson Award recognizing outstanding contributions in arts and letters, presented by the Air Force Association.

So Rumsfeld knew about the press strategy because he was neck-deep in it; he directly supervised the woman whose job it was to execute said strategy. And when it came to judging the relative value of the strategy, he personally awarded her a medal. He knew, and he thought it was very good. Rumsfeld lied to Congress about his knowledge of this strategy, and he was either lying when he awarded Clarke the medal and praised her service, or he again lied to Congress about his assessment of the strategy.

Taking a step back from the specifics and artificial definitions of words, the Iraq war was one of choice. Whether or not anyone believed (or should have believed) reports of Saddam’s weapons programs, we were not attacked by Iraq. How do you produce support for such a war? By convincing the public that it is necessary. And the largest part of that is through the media. That the Iraq war ever happened is proof that there was a press strategy and it worked flawlessly. Too bad Rumsfeld didn’t place the same premium on a strategy to win the war itself. But then again, that would require some knowledge about military affairs.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, demanded to know whether there was a White House and Defense Department strategy to manage press portrayals of the war and other events.

“Well, if there was, it wasn’t very good,” Rumsfeld remarked.

“Well, you know, maybe it was very good,” Kucinich objected loudly. “Because you actually covered up the Tillman case for a while, you covered up the Jessica Lynch case, you covered up Abu Ghraib, so something was working for you. Was there a strategy to do it, Mr. Rumsfeld?”

Unfortunately, Kucinich doesn’t seem to have planned a proper follow-up after Rumsfeld’s response. That’s unpardonable, really. Because he had to anticipate that Rumsfeld would come back with his standard arrogant, cocky, dismissive garbage (which is exactly what he did, of course). There wasn’t much point asking that question, unless he planned to follow-up with a killer counter to Rumsfeld’s response.

Rumsfeld went:

Congressman, the implication that ‘you covered up’ – that’s just false, you have nothing to base that on, you have not a scrap of evidence or a piece of paper or a witness that would attest to that … I have not been involved in any cover-up whatsoever.’

And here’s what I would have loved to hear Kucinich say, in response:

Mr. Rumsfeld, I’ll tell you what I have. I have some intelligence, and I have some common sense.

Mr. Rumsfeld, there are only two possibilities here: that you’re hopelessly incompetent, or that you covered up then and you’re lying now. I think there are far too many people in this room right now who don’t believe for a moment that you’re incompetent. I think there are far too many people in America who don’t think you’re incompetent at all.

The American people have a lot of questions, Mr. Rumsfeld, about things that happened on your watch. And the American people deserve some answers.

Just because you come in here, and you say self-serving things strongly and forcefully and angrily, that doesn’t make them true. And the American people deserve the truth from you Mr. Rumsfeld. You took their money, for years and years and years. You owe them the truth.

Talk is cheap. Would you, Mr. Rumsfeld, be willing to submit to a lie detector test on the subject of Pat Tillman’s death?

Maybe that’s not quite the double bind I think it is. But I would still like to see Rumsfeld responding to it. Make him work a little, at least.

(2)
I would also very much like to know whether Rumsfeld has been talking to Buttercheeks.

You see, there is the amazing coincidence of how Rumsfeld remembers absolutely zilch. As AP put it:

During four hours of questioning by a House committee, Rumsfeld and former generals expressed regret at the Pentagon’s five-week delay in telling the truth about how Tillman died.
[...]
Yet none of the witnesses, among the very highest-ranking military officers at the time, said they could or should have done anything differently to prevent the mistakes that kept the truth from Tillman’s family and the public.

Several of the officials could barely recall how they themselves came to learn the circumstances of Tillman’s death, which attracted worldwide attention because he had walked away from a huge contract with the National Football League’s Arizona Cardinals to enlist in the Army after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“I don’t recall when I was told and I don’t recall who told me,” said Rumsfeld…

These, of course, are the guys who were running our wars — Afghanistan and/or Iraq. No wonder things got so thoroughly buggered up.

But let’s not get distracted here from the main theme. Pat Tillman died. Pat Tillman’s death was falsified and trumpeted as a heroic story of valorous action. All of that “attracted worldwide attention”. Then these leaders of the U.S. military learned the truth about Pat Tillman’s death.

And now every one of these motherfuckers is prepared to look the American public in the face, is prepared to make eye contact with Pat Tillman’s mom, and say they cannot bloody remember how and when they heard the truth about Pat Tillman’s death?

The whole bloody lot should be court-martialed. Except for Rumsfeld, who should be waterboarded till he’s ready to confess to absolutely anything. For instance, how he personally masterminded the 9/11 attacks.

Especially when his output smells like this:

When (Taguba) briefed Rumsfeld the day before a May 7, 2004 congressional hearing, he said that Rumsfeld had complained then about not having a copy of his report. But Taguba said he had submitted copies to superiors two months earlier.

Lawrence Di Rita, a former top aide to Rumsfeld, said Rumsfeld had not viewed the photographs because he had been advised by his lawyers that doing so “could possibly materially affect the ongoing criminal investigation.”

What an AASO! This will surely go down in the annals of something, maybe The Annals of Pseudo-Scientific Gobbledygook Legalese. Because it is, of course, an Uncertainty Principle to rival Heisenberg’s: “the very act of viewing the evidence corrupts the evidence”. Or maybe there’s also an Immaculate Misconception involved: “the very act of viewing the evidence corrupts the investigation”.

Recall that Rumsfeld claimed not to have seen the infamous photographs till just before his May 7 congressional appearances. Taguba had told Seymour Hersh: “The photographs were available to him—if he wanted to see them.”

For some reason, Di Rita decided to address the photographs, but let’s note that he stayed away from offering any explanation for why Rumsfeld — the famously anally hands-on control-freak manager, the guy who always had to know eveything — studiously avoided reading Taguba’s report.

Also, Di Rita obviously never learned to quit when he’s not too far behind. He went on to helpfully add this gem:

He said Rumsfeld finally looked at the pictures the day before his congressional testimony, the same day he was briefed by Taguba.

Rita, honey: So, on the day before his congressional testimony, the lawyers suddenly discovered that it was okay, after all, to view the photographs? Now (because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics?) it wouldn’t materially affect the ongoing criminal investigation?

Seems to have worked just like Taguba said. The photographs were available to him. When he wanted to see them, he did.

In high school geometry, at this point we were taught to insert a Q.E.D.

It’s a good thing the following people are not Japanese: Rumsfeld, “Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (J.C.S.); and General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff” along with “Lieutenant General Bantz J. Craddock, who was Rumsfeld’s senior military assistant”.

If they were, Monday’s newspapers would be reporting the death by ritual suicide of every last one of these traitors to their uniform and/or their country.

Since they’re not, they will continue to lie, cheat and weasel their way through life, some more in the public eye and some less. They may even be shameless enough to continue to look people in the eye. But there’s no way that every single time they do, they will not ask themselves: I wonder if she too knows the truth about me? About who I am, and what I did.

No matter what our faith and religious beliefs, charity becomes us all. So do these guys a favor. If you ever meet one of them, and he looks you in the eye, please put him out of his misery. Eliminate all doubt. Spit in his face, or introduce your knee sharply to his soft body parts. And remember that forgiveness is a fine thing too. So, if you can find it in your heart, go ahead and tell him: “Now I forgive you.”

Backing up, here’s how Hersh starts his article:

On the afternoon of May 6, 2004, Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba was summoned to meet, for the first time, with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in his Pentagon conference room. Rumsfeld and his senior staff were to testify the next day, in televised hearings before the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees, about abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq. The previous week, revelations about Abu Ghraib, including photographs showing prisoners stripped, abused, and sexually humiliated, had appeared on CBS and in The New Yorker. In response, Administration officials had insisted that only a few low-ranking soldiers were involved and that America did not torture prisoners. They emphasized that the Army itself had uncovered the scandal.

If there was a redeeming aspect to the affair, it was in the thoroughness and the passion of the Army’s initial investigation. The inquiry had begun in January, and was led by General Taguba, who was stationed in Kuwait at the time. Taguba filed his report in March. In it he found:
Numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees . . . systemic and illegal abuse.

Taguba was met at the door of the conference room by an old friend, Lieutenant General Bantz J. Craddock, who was Rumsfeld’s senior military assistant. Craddock’s daughter had been a babysitter for Taguba’s two children when the officers served together years earlier at Fort Stewart, Georgia. But that afternoon, Taguba recalled, “Craddock just said, very coldly, ‘Wait here.’ ” In a series of interviews early this year, the first he has given, Taguba told me that he understood when he began the inquiry that it could damage his career; early on, a senior general in Iraq had pointed out to him that the abused detainees were “only Iraqis.” Even so, he was not prepared for the greeting he received when he was finally ushered in.

“Here . . . comes . . . that famous General Taguba—of the Taguba report!” Rumsfeld declared, in a mocking voice. The meeting was attended by Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (J.C.S.); and General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, along with Craddock and other officials. Taguba, describing the moment nearly three years later, said, sadly, “I thought they wanted to know. I assumed they wanted to know. I was ignorant of the setting.”

In the meeting, the officials professed ignorance about Abu Ghraib. “Could you tell us what happened?” Wolfowitz asked. Someone else asked, “Is it abuse or torture?” At that point, Taguba recalled, “I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, ‘That’s not abuse. That’s torture.’ There was quiet.”

Rumsfeld was particularly concerned about how the classified report had become public. “General,” he asked, “who do you think leaked the report?” Taguba responded that perhaps a senior military leader who knew about the investigation had done so. “It was just my speculation,” he recalled. “Rumsfeld didn’t say anything.” (I did not meet Taguba until mid-2006 and obtained his report elsewhere.) Rumsfeld also complained about not being given the information he needed. “Here I am,” Taguba recalled Rumsfeld saying, “just a Secretary of Defense, and we have not seen a copy of your report. I have not seen the photographs, and I have to testify to Congress tomorrow and talk about this.” As Rumsfeld spoke, Taguba said, “He’s looking at me. It was a statement.”

At best, Taguba said, “Rumsfeld was in denial.” Taguba had submitted more than a dozen copies of his report through several channels at the Pentagon and to the Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, which ran the war in Iraq. By the time he walked into Rumsfeld’s conference room, he had spent weeks briefing senior military leaders on the report, but he received no indication that any of them, with the exception of General Schoomaker, had actually read it. (Schoomaker later sent Taguba a note praising his honesty and leadership.) When Taguba urged one lieutenant general to look at the photographs, he rebuffed him, saying, “I don’t want to get involved by looking, because what do you do with that information, once you know what they show?”

Please read every last word of Hersh’s story. It gets a lot worse. Highlights include:
• Rumsfeld flat out lied to the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees on May 7, 2004
• Rumsfeld was accompanied both times by senior military officers who concurred with his lies.
• “A few weeks after his report became public”, Taguba was told by General John Abizaid: “You and your report will be investigated.” … “I wasn’t angry about what he said but disappointed that he would say that to me,” Taguba said. “I’d been in the Army thirty-two years by then, and it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia.”
• Rumsfeld comes across as a practiced consummate liar, with the ability to summon up Oscar-winning lying performances at will.

Please read the entire story. By the end, you’ll be so sick, you’ll be able to take the rest of the day off.

The last word goes to Gen. Taguba. He’s certainly earned it:

…the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.

(That would include that entire honor roll of people who are, fortunately for them, not Japanese.)

The Pentagon called them “among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth,” sweeping them up after Sept. 11 and hauling them in chains to a U.S. military prison in southeastern Cuba. Since then, hundreds of the men have been transferred from Guantanamo Bay to other countries, many of them for “continued detention.” And then set free.
[…]
The United States does not systematically track what happens to detainees once they leave Guantanamo, the U.S. State Department says. …

When the Pentagon announces a detainee has been moved from Guantanamo, it gives his nationality but not his name, making it difficult to track the roughly 360 men released since the detention center opened in January 2002. The Pentagon says detainees have been sent to 26 countries.

But through interviews with justice and police officials, detainees and their families, and using reports from human rights groups and local media, The Associated Press was able to track 245 of those formerly held at Guantanamo. The investigation, which spanned 17 countries, found:
· Once the detainees arrived in other countries, 205 of the 245 were either freed without being charged or were cleared of charges related to their detention at Guantanamo. Forty either stand charged with crimes or continue to be detained.
· Only a tiny fraction of transferred detainees have been put on trial. The AP identified 14 trials, in which eight men were acquitted and six are awaiting verdicts. Two of the cases involving acquittals — one in Kuwait, one in Spain — initially resulted in convictions that were overturned on appeal.
· The Afghan government has freed every one of the more than 83 Afghans sent home. Lawmaker Sibghatullah Mujaddedi, the head of Afghanistan’s reconciliation commission, said many were innocent and wound up at Guantanamo because of tribal or personal rivalries.
· At least 67 of 70 repatriated Pakistanis are free after spending a year in Adiala Jail. A senior Pakistani Interior Ministry official said investigators determined that most had been “sold” for bounties to U.S. forces by Afghan warlords who invented links between the men and al-Qaida. “We consider them innocent,” said the official, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.
· All 29 detainees who were repatriated to Britain, Spain, Germany, Russia, Australia, Turkey, Denmark, Bahrain and the Maldives were freed, some within hours after being sent home for “continued detention.”
[…]
The United States insists that the fact that so many of the former detainees have been freed by other countries doesn’t mean they weren’t dangerous.

“They were part of Taliban, al-Qaida, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners,” said Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman.

But Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, a lawyer representing several detainees, says the fact that hundreds of men have been released into freedom belies their characterization by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as “among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth.”

“After all, it would simply be incredible to suggest that the United States has voluntarily released such ‘vicious killers’ or that such men had been miraculously reformed at Guantanamo,” Colangelo-Bryan said.

CT: With what you know now, what might you have done differently in Iraq?

DR: I don’t think I would have called it the war on terror. I don’t mean to be critical of those who have. Certainly, I have used the phrase frequently. Why do I say that? Because the word ‘war’ conjures up World War II more than it does the Cold War. It creates a level of expectation of victory and an ending within 30 or 60 minutes of a soap opera. It isn’t going to happen that way. Furthermore, it is not a ‘war on terror.’ Terror is a weapon of choice for extremists who are trying to destabilize regimes and (through) a small group of clerics, impose their dark vision on all the people they can control. So ‘war on terror’ is a problem for me.

Forget the grotesqueness of the analogy for a minute. More than half a million killed (not just dead, but killed; in our name; by this turd and his co-conspirators). Killed absolutely needlessly, in a pointless war of choice. And the only thing he regrets, the only thing he would like to change is one piece of rhetoric? Isn’t that a war crime in and of itself?

And now let’s jolly well come back to the grotesque analogy. I think Rumsfeld’s remark encapsulates perfectly — and in so many different ways — why things in iraq went so horribly wrong. There is no doubt that, over and above everything else, the Iraq war was a bloody marketing exercise. It was conceived as such, and managed as such. And this is the audience they were targeting, this is the audience they were catering to—people perceived as demanding “an ending within 30 or 60 minutes of a soap opera”. That was the driving force behind Rumsfeld’s major miscalculations: going light (nowhere near enough troops) and going short (short-sightedly refusing to plan for anything other than the fantasy of a quick victory, followed by flowers and candy, followed by happily ever after). Because they were staging the war for an audience that would accept nothing else (or so they believed), the script allowed for nothing else.

Another light-shedding gem from the interview:

We have, without question, the finest military on the face of the Earth and, indeed, in the history of the world. We can’t lose a battle. And we haven’t, and we won’t.

Rumsfeld (and Bush, and everyone else involved in perpetrating this war) has always behaved as if this was just a war of rhetoric. As if all we needed to do was to keep proclaiming our superiority, moral and otherwise, and victory would inevitably be ours. The basic approach was: we don’t need to give the troops body armor, just tell them that we’re the best-equipped army in the world, that should be enough.

And how about:

CT: You’ve read the Iraq Study Group Report.

DR: I haven’t. I’ve read reports of it and gone through the executive summary.

Nobody bears more responsibility than this man for the way we have run the war on Iraq, and he hasn’t even bothered to read the ISG report? That speaks for itself, and just about takes the cake. It is precisely this combination of enormous arrogance and contempt for the opinions of others, this total lack of any sense of responsibility for the carnage we unleashed on the Iraqi people, this adamant refusal to recognize that any real changes are called for in our Iraq policy at all, all this is precisely what got us where we are today (in quicksand up to our chins), and precisely what allows so little hope of extricating ourselves and the Iraqi people from the mess anytime soon.

Because the most alarming aspect of the situation we are in now is that this arrogance and contempt, this lack of responsibility, this refusal to change policy is not just what characterized Rumsfeld’s approach to the war. It is what continues to characterize Bush’s approach. Rumsfeld will soon be gone, but this attitude is still in charge of our Iraq policy. That will continue to be the tragedy of Iraq.