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30.6.2008

R: U.S. President George W. Bush

Iraqi Army Seeks Out

Insurgents and Arms in Diyala,

Backed by U.S. Forces

July 30, 2008
The New York Times
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

BAQUBA, Iraq — The Iraqi Army began a major operation on Tuesday to root out insurgents from Diyala Province, where suicide attacks and roadside bombings are still common in the area’s untamed corners, despite an overall drop in violence around Iraq.

Before dawn, the Iraqi Army and police forces, backed by the American military, fanned out across the province, north and east of Baghdad, searching for weapons caches and arresting suspected insurgents in villages, farms and violence-ravaged cities.

The drive is the fifth in recent months aimed at further reducing violence and extending the reach of both the Iraqi Army and the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. While American troops and aircraft took part, Iraqi soldiers were in the lead as part of the drive for the nation to defend itself and, eventually, to allow American troops to withdraw.

But as with the other operations — in Basra, Sadr City, Mosul and Amara — people in the area were well aware that the campaign was coming. That may have accounted for the largely uneventful first day.

Military officers, both Iraqi and American, said that insurgents had probably fled the area after news media reports that the sweep was to begin soon, though officials had been saying publicly that it would be likely to begin in early August.

To achieve some degree of surprise, orders to begin the operation came late Monday, catching even some military personnel off guard.

On Tuesday morning, a three-hour patrol of an Iraqi battalion along dusty country roads in the southwestern part of the province turned up a small cache of explosive devices and resulted in some friendly conversations at checkpoints, but little else.

While the Iraqi Army’s operation in Diyala is formally called Augurs of Prosperity, it is commonly referred to by military officers as the Diyala surge. It includes the participation of brigades from the First Division of the Iraqi Army, a mobile force that took part in previous operations in Basra and Sadr City. According to the Diyala Operations Command, 35,000 Iraqi soldiers and police officers are involved.

American-led forces are contributing four combat squadrons, as well as artillery and air support, but American officers insist that this is an Iraqi Army effort.

“They’re very much in the lead,” said Col. Jeffrey Holt, the chief of the American military transition team embedded with the Iraqi Army’s Fifth Division. “The U.S. is a support piece.”

Diyala is not as bloody as it was a year ago, when it was the nerve center of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown Sunni insurgent group that American intelligence experts say has foreign leaders. The group is known for suicide attacks and kidnappings.

A series of American-led operations in Diyala since the spring of 2007 began pushing the group out of Baquba. While remnants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia are still active in some parts of the province — and deadly attacks remain common — the area has calmed. Shiite militias, including those loyal to the anti-American cleric Moktaka al-Sadr, have also been active in the province.

Much of the decrease in violence is a result of the Awakening Councils, groups that were formed largely by Sunni tribal sheiks and are on the payroll of the American-led forces. Though they include many former insurgents, the councils have been an effective force against extremists.

Leaders of the councils have been targets of attacks by Sunni insurgents, including a suicide bombing in Baquba last week that killed eight people.

But one major unsettled issue is whether, in exchange for their loyalty, Mr. Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government will make good on promises to integrate Awakening Council members into the security services or to secure them other government jobs. Before this operation, Lt. Gen. Ali Ghaidan Majid, commander of the ground forces in Iraq, met with Awakening Council leaders to assure them that long-term jobs were forthcoming.

“We have a plan to recruit the C.L.C.’s to merge them with the Iraqi police as soon as possible,” General Ali said, using an abbreviation of the American term for the councils, Concerned Local Citizens. Around a fifth of the council members should fit the requirements to become Iraqi police officers, General Ali said, and “the rest will be provided with job opportunities.”

While the Diyala operation, which is expected to last two months or more, may proceed quietly, it is still a test for the Iraqi security forces. The army plans to move its patrols to the countryside, gradually leaving the cities to the less experienced — and less extensively American-trained — police forces. These security forces will have to make the effects of the new drive last after the operation itself has ended.

“After we move away, the forces here have to work hard to hold on to the power,” said Brig. Gen. Adil Abbas of the First Iraqi Army Division. Otherwise, he said, “after 60 days the terrorists will only come back.”
 

Riyadh Muhammad contributed reporting from Baghdad, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Diyala Province.

    Iraqi Army Seeks Out Insurgents and Arms in Diyala, Backed by U.S. Forces, NYT, 30.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/world/middleeast/30iraq.html

U.S. combat deaths in Iraq

plunge in July to new low

Wed Jul 30, 2008
6:59am EDT
Reuters
By Mohammed Abbas

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The number of U.S. soldiers killed in combat in Iraq has dropped sharply this month, putting July on track to have the lowest casualties for the military since the U.S.-led invasion of the country in 2003.

Five U.S. soldiers have been killed in combat in Iraq so far in July compared to 66 in the same month last year, according to the independent Web site icasualties.org, which keeps records of U.S. military casualties in the conflict.

The drop underscores the dramatic fall in violence in Iraq to lows not seen since early 2004.

Deployment of additional U.S. troops to Iraq last year, a decision by Sunni Arab tribal leaders to turn against al Qaeda and a ceasefire imposed by Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr on his Mehdi Army are all factors credited with the reduced violence.

The U.S. combat death toll in July is down from 23 in June and 15 in May, the icasualties.org data showed.

Overall in July, nine U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq. The other four were from non-hostile incidents such as accidents.

Total U.S. military deaths were 29 in June and 19 in May, also taking into account non-hostile events.

The numbers contrast with the conflict in Afghanistan, where more U.S. soldiers were killed in May and June compared to Iraq. There are 144,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and 36,000 in Afghanistan.

Around 4,120 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq since the invasion. The number in Afghanistan stands at 561 since the Taliban government was toppled in 2001.

The Iraq and Afghanistan wars are key issues in the U.S. presidential election campaign.

Democratic candidate Barack Obama wants to shift the focus of U.S. military efforts from Iraq to Afghanistan.

He has pledged to withdraw U.S. combat troops from Iraq in 16 months from taking office in January if he is elected.

That would free up resources for Afghanistan, where the Taliban and al Qaeda are resurgent.

His Republican rival John McCain also says more soldiers need to be sent to Afghanistan. The Bush administration has agreed to send an undisclosed number of extra troops next year.

Despite the overall plunge in violence in Iraq, four suicide bombers killed almost 60 people on Monday, underscoring the fragility of security gains.

(Editing by Dean Yates)

    U.S. combat deaths in Iraq plunge in July to new low, R, 30.7.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSL061733420080730

Petraeus:

Level of violence in Iraq

tapers toward 'normal'

28 July 2008
USA Today
By Jim Michaels

U.S. combat deaths in Iraq appear headed to the lowest monthly total since the start of the war as the top U.S. general there said overall violence is declining toward "normal" levels.

Gen. David Petraeus cautioned, however, that the progress still could be reversed. Suicide attacks Monday in Iraq killed more than 50 Iraqis.

"If you could reduce these sensational attacks further, I think you are almost approaching a level of normal or latent violence," Petraeus said in a phone interview Monday from Iraq.

"The fact that the levels of violence have come down so significantly and stayed down now for some two-and-a-half months … indicates there is a degree of durability," Petraeus said.

There have been six U.S. combat deaths so far in July, according to a USA TODAY database. The lowest monthly number was eight in May 2003, slightly more than a month after the invasion. Iraqi civilian deaths also have dropped.

Although suicide attacks along with other violence has been declining, al-Qaeda retains the ability to bomb civilian targets and wreak havoc. Monday's attack was the deadliest in more than a month.

"Al-Qaeda, although significantly degraded … still can strap a suicide vest on an individual and push him or her into a crowd of Iraqis," Petraeus said.

The ability of U.S. and Iraqi forces to sustain low levels of violence is considered a key condition for allowing a further drawdown in American forces.

The last of five extra brigades sent to Iraq in 2007 left that country this month, bringing U.S. troop levels to about 140,000. Petraeus is expected to make a recommendation in late August or early September about future troop levels.

Violence levels have continued to drop as the extra brigades have departed. The lower levels have been maintained for more than two months.

Daily attacks during the past two months have averaged about 25 to 30, down from about 160 to 170 a little more than a year ago, Petraeus said.

"What we've got to do, of course, is figure out how to keep it there while, over time, further reducing our forces and … trying to further degrade the networks that carry out the sensational attacks," Petraeus said.

Iraqi security forces have been growing in numbers and effectiveness as threats from al-Qaeda and Shiite militias have decreased, Petraeus said.

About 70% of Iraq's combat battalions are leading operations in their areas.

"There is a degree of momentum across the board," he said. "Certainly there have been very tough days and tough reversals."

The progress in Iraq comes as there is increasing pressure to shift U.S. troops to Afghanistan, where violence is growing.

    Petraeus: Level of violence in Iraq tapers toward 'normal', UT, 28.7.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2008-07-28-Petraeus_N.htm

U.S. Military Says

Soldiers Fired on Civilians

July 28, 2008
The New York Times
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

BAGHDAD — The American military admitted Sunday night that a platoon of soldiers raked a car of innocent Iraqi civilians with hundreds of rounds of gunfire and that the military then issued a news release larded with misstatements, asserting that the victims were criminals who had fired on the troops.

The attack on June 25 killed three people, a man and two women, as they drove to work at a bank at Baghdad’s airport. The attack infuriated Iraqi officials and even prompted the Iraqi armed forces general command to call the shooting cold-blooded murder.

It also bolstered calls from Iraqi politicians to pressure the American military to leave Iraq after this year, when a United Nations mandate expires, unless the United States agrees to permit its soldiers to be subject to criminal prosecution under Iraqi law for attacks on civilians.

In a statement issued late Sunday, the American military said that “a thorough investigation determined that the driver and passengers were law-abiding citizens of Iraq.” It added that the soldiers were not at fault for the killings because they had fired warning shots and exercised proper “escalation of force” measures before they opened fire on the people in the car.

But the findings called into question the way the military handled the aftermath of the shootings.

For example, a key assertion of the news release issued by the military on the day of the killings was that “a weapon was recovered from the wreckage.” But the military said Sunday that no one claimed to have found a weapon in the car or had seen a weapon taken from it.

Instead, one of the soldiers at the scene reported seeing an Iraqi police officer pull something from the burned car and then place it in the front seat of an ambulance, according to Lt. Col. Steve Stover, a spokesman for the Fourth Infantry Division, which patrols Baghdad.

The soldier never said the item pulled from the car was a weapon, he said. But the soldier’s account nevertheless formed the basis for a statement in an initial internal military assessment of the attack, which said that a weapon had been pulled from the car.

“We don’t believe there was any cover-up,” Colonel Stover said.

The investigation also revealed that the car had already passed through a major checkpoint leading into the airport, which required the occupants to submit to a thorough search for weapons and other dangerous objects. As they had many times before, the bank employees then drove down the main civilian road to the airport.

But this time they encountered a four-vehicle military convoy that was not supposed to be there. The convoy had taken the wrong road and failed to turn into a military checkpoint. Instead, the military vehicles had traveled down a road that serves as the main entry for thousands of Iraqis who drive to the Baghdad airport.

The convoy had stopped on the side of the road to try to fix a problem with a vehicle when the car with the bank employees approached. A soldier guarding the rear of the convoy fired several warning shots, according to Colonel Stover. When the car did not stop, 9 of the 18 soldiers in the platoon opened fire.

In its initial news release about the killings, the military said that the car then crashed and “exploded.” But that, too, was false, Colonel Stover said. After the shootings, the car’s engine compartment ignited, he said, and the fire then “spread throughout the car.”

Soldiers also fired warning shots near at least two other vehicles, causing them to stop and turn around. Some of the soldiers involved in the shooting had previously been involved in what the military calls “escalation of force” episodes involving civilians, he added.

The soldiers “thought they were in danger, they really did,” Colonel Stover said, adding that the soldiers said they had thought they saw gunfire. “We now know there were no weapons in the car, and there were not any shell casings.” The military’s investigating officer filed his report on the attack on July 7, and the soldiers involved returned to duty on July 15.

“This was an extremely unfortunate and tragic incident,” Col. Allen Batschelet, chief of staff for the Fourth Infantry Division, said in the statement issued Sunday night. He said the military would take “several corrective measures to amend and eliminate the possibility of such situations happening in the future.”

According to Colonel Stover, those measures include ensuring that troops do not accidentally travel down the civilian road to the airport as well as reviewing escalation of force procedures “to see if they are meeting needs of the current environment.”

    U.S. Military Says Soldiers Fired on Civilians, NYT, 28.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/28/world/middleeast/28iraq.html?hp

4,000 U.S. Combat Deaths,

and Just a Handful of Images

July 26, 2008
The New York Times
By MICHAEL KAMBER and TIM ARANGO

BAGHDAD — The case of a freelance photographer in Iraq who was barred from covering the Marines after he posted photos on the Internet of several of them dead has underscored what some journalists say is a growing effort by the American military to control graphic images from the war.

Zoriah Miller, the photographer who took images of marines killed in a June 26 suicide attack and posted them on his Web site, was subsequently forbidden to work in Marine Corps-controlled areas of the country. Maj. Gen. John Kelly, the Marine commander in Iraq, is now seeking to have Mr. Miller barred from all United States military facilities throughout the world. Mr. Miller has since left Iraq.

If the conflict in Vietnam was notable for open access given to journalists — too much, many critics said, as the war played out nightly in bloody newscasts — the Iraq war may mark an opposite extreme: after five years and more than 4,000 American combat deaths, searches and interviews turned up fewer than a half-dozen graphic photographs of dead American soldiers.

It is a complex issue, with competing claims often difficult to weigh in an age of instant communication around the globe via the Internet, in which such images can add to the immediate grief of families and the anger of comrades still in the field.

While the Bush administration faced criticism for overt political manipulation in not permitting photos of flag-draped coffins, the issue is more emotional on the battlefield: local military commanders worry about security in publishing images of the American dead as well as an affront to the dignity of fallen comrades. Most newspapers refuse to publish such pictures as a matter of policy.

But opponents of the war, civil liberties advocates and journalists argue that the public portrayal of the war is being sanitized and that Americans who choose to do so have the right to see — in whatever medium — the human cost of a war that polls consistently show is unpopular with Americans.

Journalists say it is now harder, or harder than in the earlier years, to accompany troops in Iraq on combat missions. Even memorial services for killed soldiers, once routinely open, are increasingly off limits. Detainees were widely photographed in the early years of the war, but the Department of Defense, citing prisoners’ rights, has recently stopped that practice as well.

And while publishing photos of American dead is not barred under the “embed” rules in which journalists travel with military units, the Miller case underscores what is apparently one reality of the Iraq war: that doing so, even under the rules, can result in expulsion from covering the war with the military.

“It is absolutely censorship,” Mr. Miller said. “I took pictures of something they didn’t like, and they removed me. Deciding what I can and cannot document, I don’t see a clearer definition of censorship.”

The Marine Corps denied it was trying to place limits on the news media and said Mr. Miller broke embed regulations. Security is the issue, officials said.

“Specifically, Mr. Miller provided our enemy with an after-action report on the effectiveness of their attack and on the response procedures of U.S. and Iraqi forces,” said Lt. Col. Chris Hughes, a Marine spokesman.

News organizations say that such restrictions are one factor in declining coverage of the war, along with the danger, the high cost to financially ailing media outlets and diminished interest among Americans in following the war. By a recent count, only half a dozen Western photographers were covering a war in which 150,000 American troops are engaged.

In Mr. Miller’s case, a senior military official in Baghdad said that while his photographs were still under review, a preliminary assessment showed he had not violated ground rules established by the multinational force command. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing, emphasized that Mr. Miller was still credentialed to work in Iraq, though several military officials acknowledged that no military unit would accept him.

Robert H. Reid, the Baghdad bureau chief for The Associated Press, said one major problem was a disconnection between the officials in Washington who created the embed program before the war and the soldiers who must accommodate journalists — and be responsible for their reports afterward.

“I don’t think the uniformed military has really bought into the whole embed program,” Mr. Reid said.

“During the invasion it got a lot of ‘Whoopee, we’re kicking their butts’-type of TV coverage,” he said.

Now, he said the situation is nuanced and unpredictable. Generally, he said, the access reporters get “very much depends on the local commander.” More specifically, he said, “They’ve always been freaky about bodies.”

The facts of the Miller case are not in dispute, only their interpretation.

On the morning of June 26, Mr. Miller, 32, was embedded with Company E of the Second Battalion, Third Marine Regiment in Garma, in Anbar Province. The photographer declined a Marine request to attend a city council meeting, and instead accompanied a unit on foot patrol nearby.

When a suicide bomber detonated his vest inside the council meeting, killing 20 people, including 3 marines, Mr. Miller was one of the first to arrive. His photos show a scene of horror, with body parts littering the ground and heaps of eviscerated corpses. Mr. Miller was able to photograph for less than 10 minutes, he said, before being escorted from the scene.

Mr. Miller said he spent three days on a remote Marine base editing his photos, which he then showed to the Company E marines. When they said they could not identify the dead marines, he believed he was within embed rules, which forbid showing identifiable soldiers killed in action before their families have been notified. According to records Mr. Miller provided, he posted his photos on his Web site the night of June 30, three days after the families had been notified.

The next morning, high-ranking Marine public affairs officers demanded that Mr. Miller remove the photos. When he refused, his embed was terminated. Worry that marines might hurt him was high enough that guards were posted to protect him.

On July 3, Mr. Miller was given a letter signed by General Kelly barring him from Marine installations. The letter said that the journalist violated sections 14 (h) and (o) of the embed rules, which state that no information can be published without approval, including material about “any tactics, techniques and procedures witnessed during operations,” or that “provides information on the effectiveness of enemy techniques.”

“In disembedding Mr. Miller, the Marines are using a catch-all phrase which could be applied to just about anything a journalist does,” said Joel Campagna, Middle East program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists.

New embed rules were adopted in the spring of 2007 that required written permission from wounded soldiers before their image could be used, a near impossibility in the case of badly wounded soldiers, journalists say. While embed restrictions do permit photographs of dead soldiers to be published once family members have been notified, in practice, photographers say, the military has exacted retribution on the rare occasions that such images have appeared. In four out of five cases that The New York Times was able to document, the photographer was immediately kicked out of his or her embed following publication of such photos.

In the first of such incidents, Stefan Zaklin, formerly of the European Pressphoto Agency, was barred from working with an Army unit after he published a photo of a dead Army captain lying in a pool of blood in Falluja in 2004.

Two New York Times journalists were disembedded in January 2007 after the paper published a photo of a mortally wounded soldier. Though the soldier was shot through the head and died hours after the photo was taken, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno argued that The Times had broken embed rules by not getting written permission from the soldier.

Chris Hondros, of Getty Images, was with an army unit in Tal Afar on Jan. 18, 2005, when soldiers killed the parents of an unarmed Iraqi family. After his photos of their screaming blood-spattered daughter were published around the world, Mr. Hondros was kicked out of his embed (though Mr. Hondros points out that he soon found an embed with a unit in another city).

Increasingly, photographers say the military allows them to embed but keeps them away from combat. Franco Pagetti of the VII Photo Agency said he had been repeatedly thwarted by the military when he tried to get to the front lines.

In April 2008, Mr. Pagetti tried to cover heavy fighting in Baghdad’s Sadr City. “The commander there refused to let me in,” Mr. Pagetti said. “He said it was unsafe. I know it’s unsafe, there’s a war going on. It was unsafe when I got to Iraq in 2003, but the military did not stop us from working. Now, they are stopping us from working.”

James Lee, a former marine who returned to Iraq as a photographer, was embedded with marines in the spring of 2008 as they headed into battle in the southern port city of Basra in support of Iraqi forces.

“We were within hours of Basra when they told me I had to go back. I was told that General Kelly did not want any Western eyes down there,” he said, referring to the same Marine general who barred Mr. Miller.

Military officials stressed that the embed regulations provided only a framework. “There is leeway for commanders to make judgment calls, which is part of what commanders do,” said Col. Steve Boylan, the public affairs officer for Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq. For many in the military, a legal or philosophical debate over press freedom misses the point. Capt. Esteban T. Vickers of the First Regimental Combat Team, who knew two of the marines killed at Garma, said photos of his dead comrades, displayed on the Internet for all to see, desecrated their memory and their sacrifice.

“Mr. Miller’s complete lack of respect to these marines, their friends, and families is shameful,” Captain Vickers said. “How do we explain to their children or families these disturbing pictures just days after it happened?”

Mr. Miller, who returned to the United States on July 9, expressed surprise that his images had ignited such an uproar.

“The fact that the images I took of the suicide bombing — which are just photographs of something that happens every day all across the country — the fact that these photos have been so incredibly shocking to people, says that whatever they are doing to limit this type of photo getting out, it is working,” he said.
 

Michael Kamber reported from Baghdad, and Tim Arango from New York.

    4,000 U.S. Combat Deaths, and Just a Handful of Images, NYT, 26.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/26/world/middleeast/26censor.html

U.S. military says

Iraq troop "surge" has ended

Tue Jul 22, 2008
5:34am EDT
Reuters
By Tim Cocks

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The U.S. troop "surge" in Iraq that President George W. Bush ordered last year has ended after the last of five additional combat brigades left the country, a U.S. military spokesman said on Tuesday.

The remaining troops from that brigade departed over the weekend, leaving just under 147,000 American soldiers in Iraq, the spokesman said.

"The final elements of the surge brigade have now left, getting out a few days ahead of schedule," he said.

The U.S. military had 20 combat brigades in Iraq at its peak in 2007, with troop levels around 160,000-170,000.

The current number is well above the 130,000 troops in Iraq when Bush ordered the deployment in January 2007. The Pentagon said last February it expected 140,000 troops to be in Iraq once the five brigade drawdown had finished.

The military spokesman said troop numbers fluctuate in general, with replacements in Iraq at the same time as forces they were relieving.

"You don't necessarily get a one-for-one swap when a new brigade relieves one that is leaving -- in some instances, some of the arriving brigades have been considerably larger than the brigades they replaced," he said.

Bush sent 30,000 extra soldiers to Iraq last year to quell sectarian violence between majority Shi'ites and minority Sunni Arabs that threatened to tip the country into all-out civil war.

U.S. officials say the buildup helped cut violence in Iraq to four-year lows. Other factors were a decision by Sunni Arab tribal leaders to turn against al Qaeda and a ceasefire by anti-American Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose Mehdi Army militia was accused of carrying out sectarian killings.

In late May, the U.S. commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, said he expected to recommend resuming withdrawals after a 45-day freeze to take stock of security conditions once the last reinforcement brigade had left.

U.S. troop levels are a key battleground in November's U.S. presidential election.

Democratic contender Barack Obama, who is visiting Iraq, has pledged to remove U.S. troops within 16 months of taking office should he win the election.

Republican candidate John McCain on Monday appeared to leave the door open to a large-scale drawdown of U.S. troops in the next two years if conditions on the ground were suitable, saying success had made it possible for troops to return home.

McCain has long argued against setting a timetable for a U.S. troop withdrawal.

(Additional reporting by Dean Yates, Editing by Samia Nakhoul)

    U.S. military says Iraq troop "surge" has ended, R, 22.7.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSL2249013120080722

Bush, in Shift,

Accepts Idea of Iraq Timeline

July 19, 2008
The New YorkTimes
By STEVEN LEE MYERS

HOUSTON — President Bush agreed to “a general time horizon” for withdrawing American troops in Iraq, the White House announced Friday, in a concession that reflected both progress in stabilizing Iraq and the depth of political opposition to an open-ended military presence in Iraq and at home.

Mr. Bush, who has long derided timetables for troop withdrawals as dangerous, agreed to at least a notional one as part of the administration’s efforts to negotiate the terms for an American military presence in Iraq after a United Nations mandate expires at the end of the year.

The agreement, announced in coordinated statements released Friday by the White House and Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government, reflected a significant shift in the war in Iraq. More than five years after the conflict began with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the American military presence now depends significantly, if not completely, on Iraqi acquiescence.

The White House offered no specifics about how far off any “time horizon” would be, with officials saying details remained to be negotiated. Any dates cited in an agreement would be cast as goals for handing responsibility to Iraqis, and not specifically for reducing American troops, said a White House spokesman, Gordon D. Johndroe.

But the White House statement said that the two leaders “agreed that improving conditions should allow for the agreements now under negotiation to include a general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals such as the resumption of Iraqi security control in their cities and provinces and the further reduction of U.S. combat forces from Iraq.”

The announcement could alter the American political debate over the war in Iraq and how best to end it now that even Mr. Bush is willing to speak of an end to the American presence. It came on the eve of a trip to Iraq and Afghanistan by the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Senator Barack Obama, who has vowed to pursue a strict phased timetable for withdrawing most combat troops from Iraq over 16 months beginning next year. He has cited Iraq’s eagerness for a timetable as support for his strategy.

A spokesman for Mr. Obama, Bill Burton, called the announcement “a step in the right direction,” but derided what he called the vagueness of the White House commitment. Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, praised the agreement as evidence that Mr. Bush’s strategy of sending additional forces last year had worked and he sought to use it as a cudgel against Mr. Obama.

“An artificial timetable based on political expediency would have led to disaster and could still turn success into defeat,” Mr. McCain said.

Mr. Bush and his aides, traveling in Tucson and Houston to attend Republican fund-raisers, insisted again that the administration was not accepting any timetable for withdrawing American forces, which now total roughly 140,000. But the administration has faced increasing resistance from a newly confident Iraq, where some officials have said publicly that Iraq can take charge of much of its security by 2009, and be able to operate without American help by 2012.

Under pressure from political parties wanting a diminishing American role, Mr. Maliki began demanding something in the agreement that would make it clear that American troops were on the way out. Iraq’s statement on Friday, reflecting those internal sensitivities, referred more specifically than the American version to “a time frame for the complete transfer of the security responsibilities to the hands of the Iraqi security as preface to decrease the number of the American forces and withdraw them later from Iraq.”

In Baghdad, a member of Mr. Maliki’s Dawa Party, Ali al-Adeeb, said the withdrawal of American and other foreign forces was fundamental to an accord. “The Iraqi government considers the determination of a specific date for the withdrawal of foreign forces an important issue to deal with,” he said. “I don’t know what the American side thinks, but we consider it the core of the subject.”

Mr. Adeeb suggested that a final agreement was not imminent, but White House aides said they were confident one would be reached by the end of the month. “We’re converging on an agreement,” an administration official said, noting that negotiators continued to hammer out provisions involving security matters. Those include command of military operations, legal immunities for civilian contractors and the authority to detain prisoners.

On the prospect of dates for American withdrawals, Mr. Johndroe, the White House spokesman, said that the agreement would not prescribe American troop levels over time, but rather reflect a transition to Iraqi command. “The agreement will look at goal dates for transition of responsibilities and missions,” Mr. Johndroe said in an e-mail message. “The focus is on the Iraqi assumption of missions, not on what troop levels will be.”

The agreement that American and Iraqi negotiators are now completing is more modest than the long-term strategic pact that Mr. Bush and Mr. Maliki pledged last November to negotiate to replace the United Nations mandate at the end of this year.

The administration dropped a promise in that initial agreement to provide long-term security for Iraq, something that would require a treaty and Congressional approval. It has also backed off other demands for sweeping powers to continue military operations there indefinitely.

The negotiations have been bogged down by issues involving the laws governing American troops, diplomats and civilian contractors, as well as details like customs duties and drivers’ licenses for American soldiers.

Administration officials now say that they are negotiating an agreement that would establish the legal authority for American commanders to conduct combat operations, control airspace and detain Iraqi prisoners, while deferring the more complicated details of a “status of forces agreement” to the next administration. The United States has such agreements that govern its military presence in Germany, South Korea and some other nations. Some Bush administration officials had envisioned concluding a similar accord with Iraq before Mr. Bush left office.

Friday’s statements noted the gradual handover of security to Iraqi forces, now complete in 10 of Iraq’s 18 provinces, though not in the most volatile ones, where American and Iraqi troops continue to wage war with insurgents. The statements suggested that the final agreement could link the complete transition of control in the remaining provinces to the withdrawal of American forces — a timetable, though, without specific dates.

The statements also referred to the withdrawal this month of the last of five additional combat brigades that Mr. Bush ordered to Iraq last year. The American commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, is now reviewing the possibility of withdrawing more beginning in September.

On Wednesday, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, said that he hoped that more brigades could come out; some administration and military officials have previously indicated that as many as 3 of the remaining 15 brigades could begin to withdraw by next year.

In Congress, even a more modest agreement with the Iraqis over the American military presence still faces opposition.

Representative Bill Delahunt, a Democrat from Massachusetts who has held hearings on the legality of the agreement the administration is seeking, said that “a timetable with specific dates is critical,” calling the White House’s time horizon “very vague and nebulous.”

He welcomed the pending agreement as “far less grandiose than what was initially articulated,” but said he remained concerned about the legal authority allowing American military operations in Iraq once the United Nations mandate expired on Dec. 31 of this year.

Richard A. Oppel Jr., Tareq Maher, Mohammed Hussein and Ali Hameed contributed reporting from Baghdad, Larry Rohter from Warren, Mich., and Thom Shanker from Washington.

    Bush, in Shift, Accepts Idea of Iraq Timeline, NYT, 19.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/19/world/middleeast/19iraq.html

Bush Emphasizes His Opposition

to Timetable for Iraq Withdrawal

July 16, 2008
The New York Times
By STEVEN LEE MYERS

WASHINGTON — President Bush said Tuesday that Iraq wanted to include an “aspirational goal” for the departure of most foreign troops there in any agreement authorizing future American operations, but he reiterated his opposition to what he called “an artificial timetable for withdrawal.”

His remarks reflected the growing doubt within the administration that the United States could negotiate the sweeping long-term agreement that would clear the way for American troops to operate in Iraq for many years to come. Mr. Bush and Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, had pledged to reach such an agreement last year.

Mr. Bush instead referred to a seemingly more modest “understanding” with Iraq on the legal status of American and other foreign troops once the current United Nations mandate expires at the end of the year.

“The Iraqis have, you know, have invited us to be there,” Mr. Bush said at a White House news conference. “But they share a goal with us, which is to get our combat troops out as conditions permit. Matter of fact, that’s what we’re doing.”

An administration official said later in the day that an agreement that would cover American operations — from combat missions to detaining Iraqis — could still be reached by the end of this month, but only by leaving specific legal details governing military forces, known as a Status of Forces Agreement, to future talks.

Although the 52-minute news conference was dominated by economic concerns, Mr. Bush faced a series of questions on foreign policy concerns, including Iraq and the unruly border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

He also addressed the uncertainty over the status of terrorist suspects held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, after the Supreme Court ruled that prisoners there could challenge their detention.

Mr. Bush also sought to rebut criticism from Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, who on Tuesday accused the administration of having a “single-minded and open-ended focus” on Iraq.

Mr. Bush disputed that the war in Iraq had distracted the administration from the resurgence of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. At the same time, he acknowledged the worsening violence in Afghanistan, which he called “a tough fight” against a “tough enemy.”

“You know, I understand exhaustion; I understand people are getting tired,” he said, turning the question about Mr. Obama’s criticism into a broad defense of his conduct of the war against Al Qaeda and other terrorists.

“But I would hope that whoever follows me understands that we’re at war,” Mr. Bush said, “and now’s not the time to give up in the struggle against this enemy.”

There has been resistance in both countries to the Bush administration’s efforts to negotiate an agreement with Iraq that would outline broad diplomatic and economic relations between the countries, while also providing a legal basis for continuing to conduct military operations.

Mr. Maliki, facing opposition from Iraqi political parties wary of American intentions, told Arab leaders last week that he was prepared to negotiate only a shorter-term agreement. He said he would insist on a timetable for withdrawal.

Mr. Bush has repeatedly said that he will respect the wishes of the Iraqis. That has made it difficult for the president to dismiss Mr. Maliki’s appeals, even if, as many administration official argue, Iraq is unlikely to demand a precipitous withdrawal of American troops that could risk the security gains achieved in recent months.

Mr. Bush acknowledged Iraq’s desire to reduce American forces to the point where they would mainly provide training and logistical support for Iraq’s armed forces, while carrying out limited counterterrorism operations. The American military commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, has defined this role as “overwatch.”

But neither General Petraeus nor administration officials have indicated an approximate date for that to happen. Nor have officials indicated publicly what dates, if any, would be written into any agreement.

The administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said any agreement needed to signal to the Iraqis that “they’re getting their country back.” But the official emphasized that it was still possible to reach an agreement that would cover American forces, if not in the shape initially envisioned.

On Afghanistan, Mr. Bush said the United States was prepared to investigate President Hamid Karzai’s accusation that Pakistan’s intelligence services were behind terrorist attacks inside Afghanistan.

Mr. Bush also warned that the flow of militants based in Pakistan’s tribal areas into Afghanistan could pose a threat to Pakistan’s government as well, because they could return home “with a skill level that could be used against the government.”

“And that’s troubling to us, it’s troubling to Afghanistan, and it should be troubling to Pakistan,” he said. “We share a common enemy. That would be extremists who either disrupt democracy or prevent democracy from taking hold.”

    Bush Emphasizes His Opposition to Timetable for Iraq Withdrawal, NYT, 16.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/16/washington/16prexy.html

Bodies of 2 Missing U.S. Soldiers Found

July 11, 2008
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:27 a.m. ET
The New York Times

DETROIT (AP) -- The bodies of two U.S. soldiers missing in Iraq for more than a year have been found, their families said Thursday night. The military would not immediately confirm the report.

The father of Army Sgt. Alex Jimenez, of Lawrence, Mass., said the remains of his son and another soldier, Pvt. Byron W. Fouty, of Waterford, Mich., had been identified in Iraq.

Jimenez, 25, and Fouty, 19, were kidnapped along with a third member of the 2nd Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division during an ambush in May 2007 in the volatile area south of Baghdad known as the ''triangle of death.'' The body of the third seized soldier, Pfc. Joseph Anzack Jr. of Torrance, Calif., was found in the Euphrates River a year later.

Jimenez's father, Ramon ''Andy'' Jimenez, said uniformed military officials came to his home in Lawrence on Thursday to tell him that his son's body and some of his son's personal effects had been discovered. Fouty's stepfather, Gordon Dibler, said military officials came to his Oxford home to break the news.

The Pentagon generally waits 24 hours after notifying the next of kin before making a release public.

Andy Jimenez told The Associated Press through a translator that the news ''shattered all hope'' the family had to ''see Alex walk home on his own.''

''Every day that he's been missing has been a day of `what could have been' ... but after hearing the news today ... I'm still in shock,'' Dibler said.

He said he spent much of Thursday on the phone talking with family and friends, including Andy Jimenez. The soldiers' families had become friends over the past year, and Dibler said he always considered the two missing soldiers ''our nation's sons.''

''Byron went to Iraq to help people who couldn't help themselves,'' he said, adding that conditions there have since improved. ''I know their sacrifice was not for nothing. It was not in vain.''

Lawrence Veterans Services Director Francisco Urena, who was at the Jimenez home Thursday and translated for the soldier's father, said the family was given no details on the discovery of the bodies or the nature of the soldiers' deaths. Dibler said Fouty's body was found in the Iraqi village of Jurf as Sakhr.

Fouty was identified using dental records, Dibler said, adding that the bodies of both soldiers were taken to Dover, Del., where military officials are expected to perform further tests to positively identify both men and determine a cause of death.

''It's a very sad relief,'' he said. ''But I know I have to go forward, not just for our family, but for the other men and women who are still doing their job over there.''

Urena said the Jimenez family expected to receive Alex Jimenez's body in five days.

''He's very thankful for everybody from the community in Lawrence and throughout the U.S. who have provided him support during the difficult time the family has been through during the past 14 months,'' Urena said of Andy Jimenez.

Massachusetts state Rep. William Lantigua of Lawrence, who also was with Jimenez on Thursday evening, said the family had held out hope for a happy ending.

''That does not take away from the fact that he was doing what he wanted to do,'' Lantigua said of Alex Jimenez. ''We'll just remember his life, and what a gentleman he was. The community will continue to support his family any way we can.''

The three soldiers, from the Fort Drum, N.Y.-based 10th Mountain Division, disappeared May 12, 2007, after insurgents ambushed their combat team 20 miles outside Baghdad. An Iraqi soldier and four other Americans from the same unit were killed in the attack.

The soldiers were from Company D, 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment -- nicknamed the ''Polar Bears.''

Jim Waring of the family support group New England Care for Our Military said he spoke to Jimenez' and Fouty's families Thursday night.

''It's going to be tough on them,'' he said. ''They really had hoped they were alive.''

Waring said his group had a banner for the missing soldiers: ''Together they serve our nation and together they will come home.''

''They did come home together, just not the way we wanted,'' Waring said.

------

Associated Press writer Sylvia Wingfield in Boston contributed to this report.

    Bodies of 2 Missing U.S. Soldiers Found, NYT, 11.7.2008.

After the Battle,

Fighting the Bottle at Home

July 8, 2008
The New York Times
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ

Most nights when Anthony Klecker, a former marine, finally slept, he found himself back on the battlefields of Iraq. He would awake in a panic, and struggle futilely to return to sleep.

Days were scarcely better. Car alarms shattered his nerves. Flashbacks came unexpectedly, at the whiff of certain cleaning chemicals. Bar fights seemed unavoidable; he nearly attacked a man for not washing his hands in the bathroom.

Desperate for sleep and relief, Mr. Klecker, 30, drank heavily. One morning, his parents found him in the driveway slumped over the wheel of his car, the door wide open, wipers scraping back and forth. Another time, they found him curled in a fetal position in his closet.

Yet only after his drunken driving caused the death of a 16-year-old cheerleader did Mr. Klecker acknowledge the depth of his problem: His eight months at war had profoundly damaged his psyche.

“I was trying to be the tough marine I was trained to be — not to talk about problems, not to cry,” said Mr. Klecker, who has since been diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder. “I imprisoned myself in my own mind.”

Mr. Klecker’s case is part of a growing body of evidence that alcohol abuse is rising among veterans of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, many of them trying to deaden the repercussions of war and disorientation of home. While the numbers remain relatively small, experts say and studies indicate that the problem is particularly prevalent among those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, as it was after Vietnam. Studies indicate that illegal drug use, much less common than heavy drinking in the military, is up slightly, too.

Increasingly, these troubled veterans are spilling into the criminal justice system. A small fraction wind up in prison for homicides or other major crimes. Far more, though, are involved in drunken bar fights, reckless driving and alcohol-fueled domestic violence. Whatever the particulars, their stories often spool out in unwitting victims, ruptured families, lost jobs and crushing debt.

With the rising awareness of the problem has come mounting concern about the access to treatment and whether enough combat veterans are receiving the help that is available to them.

Having cut way back in the 1990s as the population of veterans declined, the Veterans Health Administration says it is expanding its alcohol- and drug-abuse services. But advocacy groups and independent experts — including members of a Pentagon mental-health task force that issued its report last year — are concerned that much more needs to be done. In May, the House and Senate passed bills that would require the veterans agency to expand substance-abuse screening and treatment for all veterans.

“The war is now and the problems are now,” said Richard A. McCormick, a senior scholar for public health at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland who served on the Pentagon task force. “Every day there is a cohort of men and women being discharged who need services not one or two or five years from now. They need them now.”

For active-duty service members, the military faces a shortage of substance-abuse providers on bases across the country, while its health insurance plan, Tricare, makes it difficult for many reservists and their families to get treatment.

In the breach, a few states, including California, Connecticut and Minnesota, have passed laws or begun programs to encourage alternative sentences, often including treatment, for veterans with substance-abuse and mental-health problems.

In recent years, the military has worked to transform a culture that once indulged heavy drinking as part of its warrior ethos into one that discourages it and encourages service members to seek help.

“The Army takes alcohol and drug abuse very seriously and has tried for decades to deglamorize its use,” said Lt. Col. George Wright, an Army spokesman. “With the urgency of this war, we continue to tackle the problem with education, prevention and treatment.”

That is a tricky mission in time of war.

“The problem in today’s military is soldiers have to be warriors, killers, do war, but we don’t allow them any releases like we used to,” said Bryan Lane, a former special forces sergeant who sustained a traumatic brain injury in Iraq and has post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. “You can’t go out and drink, you can’t get into a fight. It’s completely unrealistic.”

The military, he said, is trying to create a contradiction: “a perfect warrior, and then a perfect gentleman.”

Warning Signs Grow

Fort Drum, in the North Country of New York just outside Watertown, is home to the Army’s most-deployed brigade — the Second Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division. Late last year, several thousand soldiers returned after 15 months in Iraq. Some had served three, even four, tours, and they quickly overwhelmed the base’s mental health system. A study by an advocacy group, Veterans for America, found the demand for psychological help was so great, and the system so overburdened, that soldiers often waited a month to be seen.

Many also did what generations of homecoming soldiers have done: they salved their wounds in local bars. With drinking off-limits in Iraq, at least openly, they were that much more likely to binge, that much less able to tolerate it.

The base’s commander, Maj. Gen. Michael L. Oates, says that since his arrival in early 2007, misconduct related to substance abuse has reached “unacceptable” levels, despite a toughened regimen of education, designated-driver programs and penalties.

“The rate of illegal drug use is slightly up; the rate of alcohol is more than slightly up,” General Oates said. “I’m not a teetotaler. I’m not against people drinking. I’m against misconduct.”

By last March, he had seen enough. He ordered the base’s newspaper, The Fort Drum Blizzard, to publish the names and photographs of all soldiers charged with drunken driving. To date, at least 116 have appeared. Half were combat veterans who had returned in the last year, the general said, though others may have deployed earlier.

Most returning soldiers readjust after a few months. But the general estimated that at least 20 percent turned to heavy drinking or drugs — typically “the first signal that there is something wrong.”

Across the military, the precise dimensions of the problem are elusive, especially since the different branches largely keep their own statistics. Many studies do not distinguish between service members who have seen battle and those who have not. What is more, behavior becomes far harder to track when service members leave the military.

Even so, a variety of surveys, as well as anecdotal evidence and rising alarm in many military communities, indicate growing substance abuse among recent combat veterans. Of particular concern are members of the National Guard and reserves, as well as recently discharged service members, who can lose their bearings outside the camaraderie and structure of the military.

In the Army, which has the bulk of the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon’s most recent survey of health-related behavior, conducted in 2005 but released last year, found that for the first time in more than 20 years, roughly a quarter of soldiers surveyed considered themselves regular heavy drinkers — defined as having five or more drinks at least once a week. The report called the increase — to 24.5 percent in 2005, from 17.2 percent in 1998 — “an issue of concern.”

Perhaps the best monitor of recent combat veterans’ mental health is the Pentagon’s postdeployment survey. Reflecting concern about heavy drinking, the latest report, published last November, introduced a question about drinking habits. Of the 88,235 soldiers surveyed in 2005 and 2006, three to six months after returning from war, 12 percent of active-duty troops and 15 percent of reservists acknowledged having problems with alcohol.

While drug use decreased substantially after 1980, when the military cracked down, it has increased slightly in the Army and the Marines since 2002, the behavioral survey said. Experts say that, in some cases, troubled combat veterans are more prone to use drugs after leaving the military.

In general, studies find that drinking is more prevalent in the military than in the civilian population; the behavioral survey reported that heavy drinking among 18- to 25-year-old men in the Army and the Marines was almost twice as common as among their civilian counterparts.

Heavy drinking or drug use frequently figures in what law enforcement officials and commanders at military bases across the country say is a rising number of crimes and other examples of misconduct involving soldiers, marines and recent veterans.

“Alcohol and drug use starts a cascade of worse problems,” said Dr. McCormick, the task force member, who recently retired as director of mental health for the state veterans affairs system in Ohio. “It’s like throwing gasoline on fire.”

Most cases involve low-level misconduct. From 2005 to 2006, for example, “alcohol-related incidents” — mostly drunken or reckless driving and disorderly conduct — more than tripled at Fort Hood, Tex., according to information released to the Pentagon task force. Other statistics showed a similar pattern throughout the Army, a task force member said.

The Marines, filled with young men drawn by the corps’ hard-charging image, have traditionally had the military’s highest drinking rates. While the behavior survey showed a slight decrease in heavy drinking after 2002, it showed an increase in binge drinking. The Marines also reported a rise in alcohol-related incidents.

Sometimes, though, substance abuse becomes a factor in major crimes. This year, a New York Times examination of killings in this country by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan found that drinking or drug use was frequently involved in the crimes. Last month, a soldier at Fort Bliss, outside El Paso, was charged with killing a woman in a drunken-driving accident — the third intoxicated soldier there accused of killing a civilian in six months, said the commander, Maj. Gen. Harold B. Bromberg.

Substance abuse frequently figures in suicides, which reached a high in the Army last year; alcohol or drugs were cited in 30 percent of those 115 cases, the Pentagon reported.

Running through many of these soldiers’ lives is combat trauma or other mental scars of war.

Research has shown that the likelihood of mental health problems rises with the intensity of combat exposure. (In a recent RAND Corporation study, one in five veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan reported symptoms of combat stress or major depression.) In turn, service members with such problems more often report heavy drinking or illicit drug use.

In part, this dynamic is rooted in the warrior code. Trained to be tough and ignore their fear, many combat veterans are reluctant to acknowledge psychic wounds. Or they worry that getting help will damage their careers. And so, like Mr. Klecker, they treat themselves with the liquor bottle or illegal drugs.

Raising Awareness

In the last decade, the military has rolled out a number of programs to deal with excessive drinking. Soldiers carry call-a-cab cards. One base hands out portable breathalyzers. A new online campaign pokes fun at “That Guy,” a military man who drinks too much and ends up embarrassing himself and in trouble.

Yet many experts and veterans advocates, as well as some military and government officials, agree that treatment continues to lag behind awareness — in terms of access, but also in the willingness to use what is there. Studies showing the prevalence of alcohol problems also consistently show how few of those problem drinkers receive treatment.

In the Pentagon’s postdeployment survey, for example, fewer than a 10th of those reporting alcohol problems had been referred for treatment; only a small fraction received treatment within 90 days. Similarly, in the Pentagon task force data from Fort Hood, only 41 percent of those involved in alcohol-related incidents were referred to the alcohol program.

Mental health experts call these results unsurprising. Just as many combat veterans self-medicate by drinking to quiet their mental storms, so they are loathe to acknowledge their drinking problems and seek treatment.

Military policy can also hold them back. Service members are increasingly encouraged to seek treatment, without fear of punishment. Even so, signing up automatically alerts a commander. That certainty can stir fears of reprisal and discourage others, like chaplains or marital counselors, from referring troops for treatment.

The Pentagon task force recommended changing this policy for soldiers who seek help early, before the drinking or drug use crosses into addiction.

“It is a very difficult problem,” said Shelley M. MacDermid, a co-chairwoman of the panel and director of the Center for Families at Purdue University. “The likely result is that there are folks who want and need treatment who are not getting it, about whom commanders know nothing.”

For users of hard drugs, treatment within the military is rare. The military generally discharges them, arguing that they can no longer do their jobs, and refers them to veterans clinics. However, some experts argue that the military should treat some who started using drugs after fighting in war. At Fort Drum, General Oates says he sometimes gives second chances to some soldiers who test positive.

The Army has increased its substance-abuse budget from $38 million in 2004 to $51 million this year. The Marine Corps says its budget is rising, too. Still, recruiting treatment professionals “continues to be a challenge,” said Col. Elspeth C. Ritchie, a psychiatric consultant to the Army surgeon general. Colonel Ritchie said the Army was recruiting overseas and at home for 330 jobs, and had filled slightly more than half.

In the veterans health system, the cutbacks of the 1990s left only a small network of programs for the most extreme addicts. Today, veterans service organizations say, the system still needs more modern programs offering intense outpatient treatment, detoxification and stabilization services. Some smaller clinics offer bare-bones treatment or none at all, they say, and veterans in rural areas are hard-pressed to find help near home.

At the veterans agency, officials say they share Congress’s goal of expanding programs.

Dr. Antonette Zeiss, the deputy chief consultant for mental health, said the agency had “rebuilt” its programs in the last three years, adding that it had hired 510 counselors and has programs in 90 to 100 of its larger facilities, with 28 more to be added soon. It is also trying to address what many experts say is a growing need: programs for both substance abuse and combat stress.

That need was underscored by a New Jersey study of 292 National Guard members who had returned from Iraq in the last year. The researchers found that 37 percent had experienced “problem drinking”; for those with post-traumatic stress disorder, the figure rose to 55 percent. Yet among those reporting both, 41 percent received mental health treatment but only 9 percent received help for substance abuse.

Substance abuse, though, must often be treated first, experts say, since it is hard to treat someone for combat stress who is drinking or using drugs. Getting help can be difficult for many combat veterans who rely on the military’s Tricare health plan — reservists and National Guard members living far from veterans clinics or military bases, along with some retirees — the Pentagon task force found. Finding treatment programs that accept Tricare often ends in frustration, and few residential rehabilitation programs have the accreditation required by the plan.

A small but growing number of state and local authorities are trying to bridge the gaps.

Last January, a city court judge in Buffalo, Robert T. Russell, noticed a surge of recent veterans with substance-abuse and mental-health problems in the city’s courtrooms. He created the nation’s first Veterans Court, where, instead of jail, veterans arrested for low-level crimes, mostly tied to alcohol or drugs, are enrolled in treatment.

Among them is Garry Pettengill.

When Mr. Pettengill, 25, was medically discharged from the Army in 2006, he had been drinking heavily to cope with a back injury and insomnia. Back home with his wife and three children, he came further unglued. He could not keep a job. While his drinking abated, he said, he started smoking marijuana every day and then began selling it. Last February, he was arrested; out on bail, he fantasized about jumping out windows or hanging himself. A call to a suicide hot line sent him to a veterans hospital for nine days.

Then he landed in Veterans Court. He has been clean for five months.

“I get punished, obviously,” he said, “but they want to make sure I do get a job and don’t sell drugs and get the substance-abuse treatment I need.”

A Troubled Return Home

Anthony Klecker experienced the brutality of war early, enduring ambushes and firefights as one of the first marines to fight from Kuwait to Baghdad and on to Tikrit. What torments him most, though, is the uncertainty.

As the gunner on the rear Humvee in a First Marine Division convoy, Corporal Klecker was charged with making sure that nothing — no cars, no Iraqis — came too close. In the distance, he saw a man in farmer’s robes running toward his convoy and fired a warning. Suddenly, a white civilian van came hurtling up the road. Mr. Klecker fired another warning, then let loose several bursts of machine-gun fire at the van and the man. The van stopped.

Mr. Klecker said he did not know if he had killed them — though he assumed he did — or if they were innocent Iraqis. Still, he says: “I was proud. I had a lot of adrenaline. I did my job.”

Later, though, the incident no longer seemed so clear-cut. “I started to feel a sense of shame,” he said, “shame about if I did the right thing or didn’t.”

Before joining the Marines, Mr. Klecker drank and smoked marijuana, but not heavily, said his lawyer, Brockton Hunter. He was once stopped for drinking and driving, but the charge was downgraded to careless driving because his blood-alcohol level was just over the limit.

After Iraq, he shipped out to Okinawa and did what many marines do there: he drank — a lot. But it was not until he left the Marines and returned home to suburban St. Paul that his panic attacks, nightmares and insomnia worsened. So did his drinking. He rarely spoke about the war, and only to other veterans.

Soon he racked up arrests for drinking and fighting, and Mr. Hunter persuaded him to go to the Veterans Affairs center for help. As often happens, the experience did not take. Mr. Klecker says he was shuttled from one counselor to another. Trying to talk about Iraq threw him into a panic.

He hit bottom on Oct. 28, 2006, when he drunkenly drove into a highway divider. It dislodged, trapping another driver, Deanna Casey, 16, of Minneapolis, who was killed when a tractor-trailer rammed her small car.

“If I could switch my life with Deanna’s, I would in a heartbeat,” Mr. Klecker said. “I didn’t ask for help, and I should have.”

Afterward, Mr. Klecker received a full veterans disability rating for combat stress. At Mr. Klecker’s trial for vehicular manslaughter, the judge recognized the war’s role in his disintegration and accepted his lawyer’s request for a special deal: After a year in jail, Mr. Klecker moved into an intensive inpatient program at the St. Cloud veterans facility to deal first with his drinking and then his combat stress.

Deanna’s mother, Catherine Casey, a Minneapolis police officer, did not welcome the sentence. “There are a lot of young men and women who saw horrible things and have done terrible things and have to live with that,” she remembered thinking. “I thought, ‘Suck it up, Mr. Klecker.’ ”

In time, though, she came to see him as “a good kid” who made “bad choices.” In prison, she said, he would get worse.

Counselors say Mr. Klecker was a model patient. But he hit a rough patch during the four-week lull — a result of scheduling conflicts — between alcohol treatment and therapy for combat stress.

Last November, still untreated for combat trauma, Mr. Klecker grew agitated and pulled a pocket knife on a fellow patient after an argument.

He was forced to leave the inpatient program and wait for an outpatient slot. In February, the judge ruled that Mr. Klecker could not serve his sentence at home and returned him to prison for 19 months.

    After the Battle, Fighting the Bottle at Home, NYT, 8.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/08/us/08vets.html

Soldier whose photo touched many

dies in N.C.

8 July 2008
USA Today
By Kelly Kennedy, Army Times

During the first week of the war in Iraq in 2003, a Military Times photographer captured the image of Army Pfc. Joseph Patrick Dwyer as he raced through a battle zone clutching a tiny Iraqi boy named Ali.

"Doc" Dwyer's concerned face appeared on the pages of newspapers across the country. Dwyer, 31, died June 28 in Pinehurst, N.C., after years of struggling with mental disorders. During that time, he spiraled into substance abuse and depression, and he found himself in trouble with the law.

"Of course he was looked on as a hero here," said Capt. Floyd Thomas of the Pinehurst Police. Still, "we've been dealing with him for over a year."

The day he died, Dwyer called a taxi company for a ride to the hospital, Thomas said. When the driver arrived, "they had a conversation through the door (of Dwyer's home)," Thomas said, but Dwyer would not let the driver in. The driver asked Dwyer if he should call the police. Dwyer said yes. When the police arrived, they asked him if they should break down the door. He again said yes. Thomas told The Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer that bottles of prescription medicine were found near Dwyer.

Dwyer served with the 3rd Squadron, 7th Cavalry Regiment as the unit headed into Baghdad at the beginning of the war. Only four of the 21 days in which the regiment pushed forward lacked gunfire, he later told Newsday. The day before Warren Zinn snapped his photo for Military Times, Dwyer's Humvee had been hit by a rocket.

About 500 Iraqis were killed during those days, and Dwyer watched as Ali's family near the village of Al Faysaliyah was caught in the crossfire. He grabbed the 4-year-old from his father and sprinted with him to safety. Zinn captured the moment on his camera. The image went across the United States, and Dwyer found himself hailed as a hero.

He did not see it that way.

"Really, I was just one of a group of guys," he later told Military Times. "I wasn't standing out more than anyone else."

According to Dwyer, he was just one of many who wanted to help after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He'd grown up in New York, and after the World Trade Center towers came crashing down, he went to see a recruiter.

"I knew I had to do something," he said.

Just before he left for Iraq, he got married. When he returned after three months in Iraq, he exhibited the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Like many other combat vets, he didn't seek help.

In restaurants, he sat with his back to the wall. He avoided crowds. He stayed away from friends. He abused inhalants, he told Newsday. In 2005, he and his family talked with Newsday to try to help other servicemembers who might need help. He talked with the paper from a psychiatric ward at Fort Bliss in El Paso, where he was committed after his first run-in with the police.

In October 2005, he thought there were Iraqis outside his window in El Paso. When he heard a noise, he started shooting. Three hours later, police enticed him to come out, and no one was injured.

Dwyer promised to go to counseling.

A year ago — June 26, 2007 — Dwyer had again been committed to a psychiatric ward. Thomas said police received a 911 call that Dwyer was "having mental problems relating to PTSD."

"We responded and took him in," Thomas said. "He's been in and out."

Military Times could not reach Dwyer's family, but his wife, Matina, told The (Pinehurst, N.C.) Pilot, "He was a very good and caring person. He was just never the same when he came back because of all the things he saw."

In 2003, Dwyer was still hopeful about the future and about his place in the war.

"I know that people are going to be better for it," he told Military Times.

Army Times is owned by the Gannett Co., which also owns USA TODAY.

    Soldier whose photo touched many dies in N.C., UT, 8.7.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2008-07-08-iraq_N.htm

Bush signs $162 billion war spending bill

30 June 2008
USA Today
From staff and wire reports

WASHINGTON — President Bush on Monday signed a $162 billion war funding bill that includes doubling college benefits for troops and veterans and provides a 13-week extension of unemployment benefits.

The spending plan also provides $2.7 billion "to help ensure that any state facing a disaster like the recent flooding and tornadoes in the Midwest has access to needed resources."

"With this legislation we send a clear message to all who are serving on the front lines that the nation continues its support," Bush said of troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The legislation allocates money for the wars until mid-2009, when the next president will be in office. It also ends a battle with Bush and Democrats who wanted to delay war funding with demands for a timetable for troop withdrawals.

Bush, who ended up getting the money he wanted, praised Republicans and Democrats for coming together on the bill and "providing these vital funds."

"This bill shows the American people that even in an election year, Republicans and Democrats can come together to support our troops and their families," Bush said in an Oval Office ceremony.

The spending bill will bring to more than $650 billion the amount Congress has provided for the Iraq war since it started more than five years ago.

For operations in Afghanistan, the total is nearly $200 billion, according to congressional officials.

The legislation which is an expansion of the GI bill "will make it easier for our troops to transfer unused education benefits to their spouses and children," Bush said. "It will help us to recruit and reward the best military on the face of the Earth."

The bill also includes $465 million for the Merida Initiative — a partnership with Mexico and nations in Central America to crack down on violent drug trafficking gangs.

Contributing: Associated Press

    Bush signs $162 billion war spending bill, UT, 30.6.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2008-06-30-bush-war_N.htm

3 U.S. Marines and More than 30 Iraqis Die in 2 Bomb Attacks

June 27, 2008
The New York Times
By ALISSA J. RUBIN

BAGHDAD — Two insurgent bomb blasts struck Thursday at pro-American Iraqi targets in Anbar Province just west of Baghdad and in the northern city of Mosul. The police said more than 30 Iraqis were killed and 80 wounded.

An American military spokesman and Iraqi police officials said that three American marines were killed in the Anbar attack and that two interpreters were also among the dead. The American military command was preparing to hand control of the province, once considered the hotbed of the insurgency, to Iraqi forces.

The bombings extended a pattern of multiple-casualty attacks in recent days that are clearly intended to kill local Iraqi leaders, in particular those who are believed to have collaborated with American forces against insurgents. Thursday’s attacks were among a string of deadly episodes in the past week that broke the previous several weeks’ lull in violence.

Most of the episodes have occurred in Sunni or mixed Sunni-Shiite areas where there has been mounting frustration over the lack of a political deal giving power to all of Iraq’s factions. Some were in small neighborhoods like Abu Dshir on the southern edge of Baghdad, and Madaen, which lies just to its southeast. There was also an attack on Tuesday on the Sadr City neighborhood council which killed six Iraqis, four Americans and an Iraqi-Italian interpreter.

Both of Thursday’s attacks raised questions about assertions by the United States military that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and other Sunni extremist groups had been largely vanquished. Sheiks who survived the Anbar attack, a suicide bombing, accused Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown Sunni extremist group, of responsibility. In Mosul, bodyguards for the governor, the bomb’s likely target, said the same thing.

The marines and two interpreters killed in the suicide bombing had been attending the weekly meeting of the Awakening Council in the city of Garma, according to the American military and an Iraqi police officer. The Awakening groups are pro-American tribal alliances.

In Baghdad and in Anbar Province, there have been substantial American and Iraqi military campaigns to root out the insurgency. In those areas and in Diyala Province, where there was a suicide bombing a week ago, the Shiite-led government in Baghdad has frustrated the efforts of Sunni leaders to find government security jobs for Sunni tribal figures and former insurgents.

Although many of these people joined the Awakening movement and were paid by the Americans to help fight Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, few have been put on the government’s payroll.

“The government didn’t support the Awakening Councils enough,” said Omar Abdul Sattar, a member of Parliament from Ramadi who belongs to the Iraqi Islamic Party, a leading Sunni group.

“The Awakening lacks information, political advisers, arms and security advisers,” said Adnan al-Dulaimi, a leader of Tawafiq, the largest Sunni bloc in Parliament.

There are also allegations that the initial vetting process for the Awakening was flawed and that some people who still backed Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia disguised their views and became part of the security forces or the Awakening groups.

Sheiks in Anbar, who asked not to be quoted by name, said that they knew the man responsible for the Garma bombing. They said he had been a policeman and previously a member of the Anbar Awakening.

The American pacification of Anbar — considered Iraq’s most dangerous province a few years ago — has been seen as so successful that American forces have been preparing to hand control back to the Iraqi government early next month.

However, Garma was the one of the last places in Anbar to reject the insurgency.

The attack there Thursday was clearly aimed at the Awakening Council meeting, the Iraq police said. Fifty people were there, including tribal sheiks, local dignitaries and members of the local Awakening Council.

“As usual we entered the tent at 9 a.m.,” said Hilal Abdullah Ali, a senior sheik from the Albu Alwan tribe. “At around 10:30 there was a big explosion. I heard the person sitting next to me say, ‘He exploded himself on us.’ ”

Initial reports from the police were that the bomb killed 12 people and wounded 27, but by late Thursday, they said the death toll had reached 20.

The other bombing, in Mosul, was aimed at the provincial governor, Duraid Kashmola, but he was not among the 18 killed and 61 wounded, according to local security forces. The attack, in a busy central area, was the second large bombing in the city in two days. One on Tuesday evening killed two and wounded 73.

The attack came on the heels of an announcement by the American military that its forces had killed Abu Khalaf, the leader in Mosul of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Mr. Khalaf was a former associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian exile who led the group until he was killed by the Americans in 2006.

“In order to kill one person, they killed all these people,” said Abdullah al-Hasan, 37. He blamed “the politicians and the struggle for power” for the act of carnage.

Athir Dawud, who had fled Baghdad to escape Shiite militias and earned $4 a day in a slaughterhouse, lost his wife, and his 2-year-old and 7-year-old daughters.

“We have escaped from Shiites, but Sunnis killed my family,” he said, distraught. “Where shall I go? Tell me, my God!”

    3 U.S. Marines and More than 30 Iraqis Die in 2 Bomb Attacks, NYT, 27.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/world/middleeast/27iraq.html

3 U.S. Soldiers Killed by Bomb in Iraq

June 26, 2008
The New York Times
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

BAGHDAD — Three U.S. soldiers and an interpreter were killed by a roadside bomb in Ninewa Province on Tuesday night in the second large explosion to strike the Mosul region in a day and further evidence that Sunni Arab guerrillas remain very active in the northern city despite recent Iraqi military operations.

Few details of the attack were released by the American military, which said that an improvised explosive device killed the soldiers and interpreter about 10:45 p.m. At least 25 American service members have been killed in Iraq this month, compared to 19 in May, according to Icasualties.org, a Web site that tracks deaths.

Iraqi troops have fanned out in force in Mosul to try to quell the insurgency there led by Baathist fighters and Sunni extremist guerrillas. Violence has dropped in the city in recent months, but according to officials knowledgeable about the fighting, many of Mosul’s most fearsome guerrillas have been pursued by U.S. special operations forces operating in secret rather than Iraqi troops. It remains to be seen whether the Iraqi forces can keep the Mosul insurgency in check, or whether the guerrillas will reassert their presence, as they have in the past.

The attack on the soldiers Tuesday night followed a bomb that exploded at a Mosul police station earlier in the day, killing a police officer and a boy.

On Wednesday morning, the American military command released a statement upgrading the casualty list from the police station bombing, saying that 90 people had been wounded in the blast, instead of the 70 initially reported by Iraqi security officials.

The statement said the blast had been caused by a car bomb and carried out by Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the largely homegrown Sunni insurgent group. The statement offered no explanation of why the military believed Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia had been responsible for the attack, and not any of the other Sunni extremist and pro-Saddam groups that still operate in the city.

    3 U.S. Soldiers Killed by Bomb in Iraq, NYT, 26.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/world/middleeast/26baghdad.html?hp

Baghdad Blast Kills Four Americans

June 25, 2008
The New York Times
By ALISSA J. RUBIN and MUDHAFER AL-HUSAINI

BAGHDAD — American soldiers and civilians had a surprise for the Sadr City District Council on Tuesday, and gathered in the office of its acting chairman to make the presentation just before the weekly meeting.

As one of the soldiers unfurled photographs of the council members, an explosion ripped through the room, knocking one member, Qasim Abdul Zahra, to the floor. As he looked up, he could just make out the forms of bloodied Americans through the smoke, he said. Unwittingly, they had become human shields, he said.

“The explosion happened just outside the room, near the Americans,” who were standing by the door, he said. “They were the ones that received the most shrapnel, and that’s why we are still alive,” he said of himself and the three other council members who were present.

While the four Iraqi council members in the room survived, four Americans, an Italian interpreter and six Iraqis, who were outside the room, were killed.

Two of the dead Americans were soldiers. The other two were a civilian contract worker for the Defense Department and a State Department employee who worked for Sadr City’s provincial reconstruction team. The interpreter, who was born in Iraq, was working under a Defense Department contract.

“This is a tragic loss and one we all mourn,” Ryan C. Crocker, the United States ambassador, said in a statement. “We and all who believe in a brighter future for Iraq condemn this heinous attack in the strongest possible terms.”

The State Department worker, Steven L. Farley, a native of Guthrie, Okla., served for several years in the Navy Reserve and volunteered to join the State Department in April 2007, according to a statement by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He was at least the fourth State Department employee to die in Iraq.

Tuesday was the second consecutive day that Americans who met with local leaders in Iraq were killed. In Madaen, southeast of Baghdad, two American soldiers died shortly after leaving a meeting at the local council building on Monday.

The military blamed “special groups,” the term used to describe militias backed and trained by Iran or its surrogates. “Special groups are afraid of progress and afraid of empowering the people,” said Lt. Col. John Digiambatista, an operations officer with the Third Brigade Combat Team, Fourth Infantry Division.

This “will only harden the determination of this council, the citizens of Sadr City, the Iraqi Army and coalition forces,” he said.

Despite a six-week truce in Sadr City, power struggles have emerged over who will represent its two million to three million mostly impoverished residents in elections in November. Many factions are involved, some allied with the rebel Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr and some with his opponents.

Disputes are also occurring about whether to allow the American-financed neighborhood guards, known elsewhere as Awakening Councils, to assume responsibility for security in some parts of Sadr City. The District Council where the bombing occurred opposed the Awakening Councils.

Mr. Sadr has said he continues to support attacks on American forces, but he has asked his followers to refrain from attacking other Iraqis.

It was unclear if the attack on Tuesday was intended to kill the Americans, the Iraqis on the District Council or the acting council chairman.

“The American forces don’t attend regularly every Tuesday, and that’s why we were surprised this morning because they paid an unexpected visit to the council at 9 a.m.,” Ahmed Hasan, a council spokesman, said.

The bomb exploded 20 minutes later. Windows shattered, and smoke and dust poured from the large building. Its facade bears a huge picture of the turban-covered head of Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, the father of Moktada al-Sadr.

Council members blamed the Iraqi security forces, the Facility Protection Services and American soldiers, some of whom were nearby at the time, for allowing a bomb to be smuggled into the building. But others said it was an inside job aimed at killing council members.

“There’s infiltration inside the local council,” said Mr. Zahra, whose legs were broken in the bombing. “I don’t want to accuse anyone, but this was a conspiracy. We put good security inside the local council. I don’t know how a bomb hidden in a bag could get inside.”

American military officials said that they had caught a suspect near the site of the bombing who had tested positive for explosive residue.

On the southern outskirts of Baghdad, the leader of the security committee of Abu Dshir, a majority Shiite district, confirmed that the chairman of the local council was killed Monday.

“Unknown gunmen knocked on the door of Mahdi Atwan, the chairman of the local council in Abu Dshir,” said Sayyid Malik Hussein, the leader of the security committee.

“The gunmen shot him dead with nine bullets in his chest as soon as he opened the door,” Mr. Hussein said. “The local councils are being targeted these days because they are working very well and they represent the government.”

Mohamed Hussein contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Baghdad and Mosul.

    Baghdad Blast Kills Four Americans, NYT, 25.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/25/world/middleeast/25iraq.html?ref=middleeast

Leaving Home Behind to Escape a Nightmare

June 22, 2008
The New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Murtaja Kamal Aldeen, a 26-year-old Iraqi refugee, no longer recites the opening verse of the Koran, the Fatiha, as he exits his modest garden apartment here.

Everyone in his family recited the Fatiha each time they left their house in Baghdad, he said, ensuring that if they died amid that city’s bloody mayhem, the traditional prayer for their dead body had already been said.

But these days, Mr. Aldeen, a trim, serious man of medium height, says he no longer needs the comforting verse.

He is settling into his new American homeland. He has a Social Security number and a driver’s license; he watches a lot of “Oprah” and “Seinfeld”; he has figured out how to navigate the online help-wanted advertisements and has landed a minimum-wage job at a local electronics chain.

Living in a spare room in an elderly uncle’s house, Mr. Aldeen, like many refugees, rides an emotional roller coaster. Sometimes he lives the euphoria of escaping a nightmare, and sometimes he plunges into the sadness of having left his family, and all that is familiar, behind.

“I feel lonely,” he said over a chicken dinner recently. “I need friends; I need American friends. Maybe after 10 years or even 5, I will have the life I always dreamed about — living safe, living well, living with all my family in a healthy environment.”

Mr. Aldeen is one of just 4,742 refugees from Iraq that the Bush administration has allowed into the United States since October 2007 — eligible because he worked for an American organization and his life was considered to be in danger. Several of the company’s employees were kidnapped.

The administration has reserved 12,000 slots for Iraqi refugees for this year. But it has been slow to fill them. Critics call the program miserly, particularly since the United States ignited the chaos that pushed an estimated 1.5 million Iraqis to flee, mostly to Syria or Jordan, where they often struggle to make ends meet.

The United States government has a reputation for being tight-fisted with refugees compared with, say, Sweden, which grants newcomers benefits for life. By contrast, Mr. Aldeen is entitled to about $400 a month for four months, plus $100 in food stamps. He turns over $375 a month to his aunt and uncle for room and board. Moving out is not affordable, he said.

In fact, very little is affordable. A dentist offered to let Mr. Aldeen observe in his San Francisco clinic, but after spending $15 on train tickets from San Jose two days in a row, he decided it would deplete his meager cash.

Mr. Aldeen landed in San Jose near midnight on Feb. 25, from Amman, Jordan, where he had been living for two years. All the clothes he owned fit into two large suitcases, marked with bright orange tags that read “heavy.” They included four suits, three overcoats and lots of sweaters. He laughs about it now; he has barely worn any of them in San Jose’s gentle climate. But he had formed a mental image of the United States buried in snow all winter, compounded by a documentary he once saw on Arab satellite television that said chilly fog shrouded nearby San Francisco year-round.

Mr. Aldeen said he felt instantly at home when he arrived at Kennedy International Airport in New York. The immigration officials smiled at him, he marveled. J.F.K. reminded him of Baghdad — before the war, that is.

Years ago, Mr. Aldeen’s dreams did not include emigrating to America. He had a good life in Iraq and anticipated a bright future, graduating from Baghdad University’s college of dentistry in 2005. But the new reality sank in as one professor after another was assassinated and Mr. Aldeen faced mounting threats.

He was a Shiite Muslim living in a predominantly Sunni area, and he worked part time coordinating events for the Iraqi-American Chamber of Commerce. To the Sunni gang dominating his neighborhood, the first made him an infidel; the second, a traitor. A threatening letter was stuck to his family’s front door, then his father was badly beaten and left with a broken leg. Then a bullet was left on their stoop.

“We lost everything; we can’t ever go back to Iraq,” he said, blaming his fellow Iraqis for the magnitude of his changed circumstances. “Secular people have nothing to go back to.”

The International Rescue Committee, one of some 10 nongovernmental organizations that help refugees assimilate nationwide, agreed to oversee his settling in San Jose because he had distant relatives here.

He lives with Dr. Hameed Tajeldin and his wife, Leyla, who left Iraq in 1982. They are happy to help, although Mr. Aldeen’s living in their spare bedroom means their own children stay less often. Most visitors are other Iraqis. When a reporter arrived, an Iraqi woman turned to Mrs. Tajeldin in surprise and asked in Arabic, “What brings an American here?”

He misses his family badly, and on each visit to the I.R.C. pressed his case officer to speed their arrival. Last week, he was ecstatic when he learned they had been granted permission to come, most likely before the end of the summer. He has a sweetheart in Amman, too, a Jordanian English literature major named Rana, and he speaks to them all every two days free over the Internet. “I need to hear their voices,” he said, a rare painful look clouding his face. “When I hear their voices, I feel that everything is going to be O.K.”

Their discussions range from talk about the lives of various cousins back in Baghdad to what kind of house they might afford if they all make it to San Jose. After they speak is the only time he spreads a prayer rug on the floor and bows toward Mecca. He fears his parents do not have many years left, and every passing day feels like precious time wasted that should have been spent together.

He finds the pace of life here too fast, but attributes that to the fact that time moved so slowly in Baghdad. Sometimes he wishes time would swirl away even faster, actually, so his family would come and he could work as a dentist again.

He has about $100 left of the $500 he brought with him. He has spent $61 on a monthly bus pass, and $50 on a cellphone that costs an additional $40 per month. He bought three white shirts for his salesman’s job, for $39, and shoes with gel soles, for $45, because he is on his feet all day selling computer accessories. Commuting by bus requires an hour and several transfers for a trip that takes less than 10 minutes by car. Mr. Aldeen dreams of buying his own car, but despairs of saving the sum needed.

Cars are a little bit of a sore subject. His family sold their 1998 Volkswagen for $3,000 — half of its value — as well as a Peugeot left behind in Baghdad to defray the cost of heavy medical expenses in Amman.

Mr. Aldeen tries not to spend anything. He counts every dollar toward the day when he hopes to help his family settle here. They include his father, 67; his mother, 63; a younger brother still in high school; and two older brothers with their own families.

About a month after he arrived, the I.R.C. enrolled him in weekly training sessions to prepare him for job interviews. His English is so good that he skipped the usual first grueling language lessons, although occasionally he catches an unfamiliar word on the news. “What’s a mortgage?” he asked.

A good chunk of the training was cultural. You should shake hands with a woman. Do not wear heavy gold chains, excessive cologne or white socks. Show up clean-shaven. He worries about that last point — shaving three times a week was fine in Baghdad, and daily shaving gives him a rash.

But the rescue committee’s lessons proved useful, forcing him to think about unfamiliar interview questions like “What’s your main fault?” He has been coached to turn that into a positive, saying he worked too much when he ran his own computer business in Baghdad.

Mr. Aldeen said his first weeks here were like walking through fog. “When I was first here and didn’t know what to do, I was a little depressed,” he said, “but that went away as I gained confidence.” Globalization and technology mean that life is not so completely foreign as it was for earlier immigrants. Amman had a Safeway rather like the one here; after work, Mr. Aldeen watches an Egyptian television series via satellite. Still, some differences proved disorienting, like the lack of people walking on the streets.

Rachel Lau, the resettlement coordinator here for the rescue committee, believes that Mr. Aldeen is likely to do well because he has realistic expectations — or as he put it, “I am not a dreamy man.” He accepts taking a simple job while studying American dentistry. Some refugees believe they can completely reinvent themselves from Day 1, Ms. Lau noted.

Most immigrants spend their first six months happy — buoyed by having made it to the land of their new dreams, she said. After that, the expenses and other difficulties of daily life often bring despair.

Mr. Aldeen is braced for it. “I know I am going to have a hard time; it will come,” he said. His first shock was seeing $50 deducted for taxes from his weekly $250 paycheck. But the idea of Social Security convinced him it was all right.

He would have liked to have found work as a dental technician, or even a receptionist, during the two or three years it should take to get the certificate needed to practice here. But most dentists want someone who speaks Spanish.

“Nobody is looking for an Arabic speaker!” he lamented, then laughed.

Few people ask him about Iraq. He suddenly started pronouncing it the American way, “eye-RACK” instead of “ee-ROCK,” and laughed when the change was pointed out.

Over all, he feels that worrying about how to earn a living is a vast improvement over worrying about staying alive. “This is an open society,” he said. “I don’t feel different from anyone. If you stick to the rules you are fine. Nobody will come knock on your door in the middle of the night and take you out and kill you.”

    Leaving Home Behind to Escape a Nightmare, NYT, 22.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/us/22resettle.html

Editorial

Iraq Oil Rush

June 22, 2008
The New York Times

So great is the demand for oil today — and so great the concern over rising prices — that it would be tempting to uncritically embrace plans by major Western oil companies to return to Iraq.

Unfortunately, the evolving deals could well rekindle understandable suspicions in the Arab world about oil being America’s real reason for invading Iraq and fan even more distrust and resentment among Iraq’s competing religious and ethnic factions.

As reported by Andrew Kramer in The Times, Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — are in the final stages of discussions that will let them formally re-enter Iraq’s oil market, which expelled them 36 years ago. The contracts also include Chevron.

Iraq can certainly use the modern technology and skills these oil giants offer. Although Iraq’s oil reserves are among the world’s largest, years of United Nations sanctions and war have badly eroded the industry. Government officials say they aim to increase production from 2.5 million barrels of oil a day to 3 million barrels. That is a minor increase in global terms, but with oil at $140 a barrel, it is good news for Iraqis, who need the money to rebuild their war-torn country.

We cannot blame Baghdad for wanting to get on with exploiting the country’s lucrative oil deposits, especially when Kurds in northern Iraq are rapidly signing contracts to develop oil fields in their own semiautonomous region. Still, the negotiating process pursued by Baghdad is flawed and troubling.

The contracts are being let without competitive bidding to companies that since the American invasion have been quietly advising Iraq’s oil ministry how to increase production. While the contracts are limited to refurbishing equipment and technical support and last only two years, they would give these companies an inside track on vastly more lucrative long-term deals.

Given that corruption is an acknowledged problem in Iraq’s government, the contracts would have more legitimacy if the bidding were open to all and the process more transparent. Iraqis must apply that standard when they let contracts for long-term oil field development.

Also troubling is that the deals were made even though Iraq’s parliament has failed to adopt oil and revenue sharing laws — critical political benchmarks set by the Bush administration. That is evidence of continued deep divisions in Iraq over whether oil should be controlled by central or regional government, whether international oil companies should be involved in development and how the profits should be distributed.

The United States and the oil companies must encourage Iraqi officials to make the political compromises needed to establish in law the rules for managing Iraq’s abundant natural resources with as much transparency as possible. Otherwise, oil will just become one more centripetal force pulling the country apart.

    Iraq Oil Rush, NYT, 22.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/opinion/22sun1.html

At Least 51 Are Killed in Blast at Busy Market in Baghdad

June 18, 2008
The New York Times
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and ALI HAMID

BAGHDAD — A car bomb set to explode during the busiest time of day killed at least 51 people and wounded 75 Tuesday evening as shoppers were strolling through a Shiite neighborhood market in Baghdad. It was the deadliest attack in the Iraqi capital in more than three months.

The blast struck a crowded bus terminal near a market in Huriya, a northwest Baghdad district that once had a large population of Sunnis but after the American-led invasion saw horrific ethnic cleansing by Shiite militias and death squads, who killed or drove thousands of Sunnis out.

Survivors and relatives of the victims in the Tuesday blast were enraged and on edge. One man lost 11 relatives, including five female cousins. At a courtyard in front of the Kadhimiya Hospital morgue, people screamed, wept and shrieked. Some cursed the government for allowing the blast to happen while others called on God for revenge.

People fleeing the blast site who were interviewed by a New York Times reporter at a cordon set up around the scene of the attack said there had been two bombs, not the single explosion that Iraqi officials described. Iraqi forces sealed off the area and allowed in only ambulances and police vehicles. One worker at the morgue of nearby Kadhimiya Hospital said that 35 to 40 bodies had been brought to the hospital within the first two hours.

The bomber struck as Iraqi and American troops were attending a neighborhood meeting nearby, according to one Iraqi police officer interviewed at the scene. After the blasts, the police officer said, some people angrily surrounded Humvees and started throwing rocks and other objects. A rumor swept the crowd of frantic survivors that there was still one car bomb left that had yet to be detonated.

According to an official at the Interior Ministry, the casualty toll was the worst for any attack in Baghdad since early March, when a two-stage bomb blast in the Karada shopping district killed at least 54 people and wounded 123.

Riyadh Mohammed contributed reporting.

    At Least 51 Are Killed in Blast at Busy Market in Baghdad, NYT, 18.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/world/middleeast/18iraq.html?hp

Editorial

The Truth About the War

June 6, 2008
The New York Times

It took just a few months after the United States’ invasion of Iraq for the world to find out that Saddam Hussein had long abandoned his nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs. He was not training terrorists or colluding with Al Qaeda. The only real threat he posed was to his own countrymen.

It has taken five years to finally come to a reckoning over how much the Bush administration knowingly twisted and hyped intelligence to justify that invasion. On Thursday — after years of Republican stonewalling — a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee gave us as good a set of answers as we’re likely to get.

The report shows clearly that President Bush should have known that important claims he made about Iraq did not conform with intelligence reports. In other cases, he could have learned the truth if he had asked better questions or encouraged more honest answers.

The report confirms one serious intelligence failure: President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other administration officials were told that Iraq still had chemical and biological weapons and did not learn that these reports were wrong until after the invasion. But Mr. Bush and his team made even that intelligence seem more solid, more recent and more dangerous than it was.

The report shows that there was no intelligence to support the two most frightening claims Mr. Bush and his vice president used to sell the war: that Iraq was actively developing nuclear weapons and had longstanding ties to terrorist groups. It seems clear that the president and his team knew that that was not true, or should have known it — if they had not ignored dissenting views and telegraphed what answers they were looking for.

Over all, the report makes it clear that top officials, especially Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, knew they were not giving a full and honest account of their justifications for going to war.

The report was supported by only two of the seven Republicans on the 15-member Senate panel. The five dissenting Republicans first tried to kill it, and then to delete most of its conclusions. They finally settled for appending objections. The bulk of their criticisms were sophistry transparently intended to protect Mr. Bush and deny the public a full accounting of how he took America into a disastrous war.

The report documents how time and again Mr. Bush and his team took vague and dubious intelligence reports on Iraq’s weapons programs and made them sound like hard and incontrovertible fact.

“They continue to pursue the nuclear program they began so many years ago,” Mr. Cheney said on Aug. 26, 2002, adding that “we now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.”

On Oct. 7, 2002, Mr. Bush told an audience in Cincinnati that Iraq “is seeking nuclear weapons” and that “the evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.” Saddam Hussein, he said, “is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon.”

Later, both men talked about Iraq trying to buy uranium in Africa and about the purchase of aluminum tubes that they said could only be used for a nuclear weapons program. They talked about Iraq having such a weapon in five years, then in three years, then in one.

If they had wanted to give an honest accounting of the intelligence on Iraq’s nuclear weapons, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney would have said it indicated that Mr. Hussein’s nuclear weapons program had been destroyed years earlier by American military strikes.

As for Iraq’s supposed efforts to “reconstitute” that program, they would have had to say that reports about the uranium shopping and the aluminum tubes were the extent of the evidence — and those claims were already in serious doubt when Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney told the public about them. That would not have been nearly as persuasive, of course, as Mr. Bush’s infamous “mushroom cloud” warning.

The report said Mr. Bush was justified in saying that intelligence analysts believed Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. But even then, he and his aides glossed over inconvenient facts — that the only new data on biological weapons came from a dubious source code-named Curveball and proved to be false.

Yet Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney persisted in talking as if there were ironclad proof of Iraq’s weapons and plans for global mayhem.

“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use them against our friends, against our allies and against us,” Mr. Cheney said on Aug. 29, 2002.

Actually, there was plenty of doubt — at the time — about that second point. According to the Senate report, there was no evidence that Mr. Hussein intended to use weapons of mass destruction against anyone, and the intelligence community never said there was.

The committee’s dissenting Republicans attempted to have this entire section of the report deleted — along with a conclusion that the administration misrepresented the intelligence when it warned of a risk that Mr. Hussein could give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups. They said Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney never used the word “intent” and were merely trying to suggest that Iraq “could” do those terrible things.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone drew that distinction after hearing Mr. Bush declare that “Saddam Hussein would like nothing more than to use a terrorist network to attack and to kill and leave no fingerprints behind.” Or when he said: “Each passing day could be the one on which the Iraqi regime gives anthrax or VX nerve gas or someday a nuclear weapon to a terrorist ally.”

The Senate report shows that the intelligence Mr. Bush had did not support those statements — or Mr. Rumsfeld’s that “every month that goes by, his W.M.D. programs are progressing, and he moves closer to his goal of possessing the capability to strike our population, and our allies, and hold them hostage to blackmail.”

Claims by Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld that Iraq had longstanding ties to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups also were false, and the Senate committee’s report shows that the two men knew it, or should have.

We cannot say with certainty whether Mr. Bush lied about Iraq. But when the president withholds vital information from the public — or leads them to believe things that he knows are not true — to justify the invasion of another country, that is bad enough.

    The Truth About the War, NYT, 6.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/06/opinion/06fri1.html

Bush Overstated Iraq Evidence, Senators Report

June 6, 2008
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI and SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — A long-delayed Senate committee report endorsed by Democrats and some Republicans concluded that President Bush and his aides built the public case for war against Iraq by exaggerating available intelligence and by ignoring disagreements among spy agencies about Iraq’s weapons programs and Saddam Hussein’s links to Al Qaeda.

The report was released Thursday after years of partisan squabbling, and it represented the close of five years of investigations by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence into the use, abuse and faulty assessments of intelligence leading to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

That some Bush administration claims about the Iraqi threat turned out to be false is hardly new. But the report, based on a detailed review of public statements by Mr. Bush and other officials, was the most comprehensive effort to date to assess whether policy makers systematically painted a more dire picture about Iraq than was justified by the available intelligence.

The 170-page report accuses Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials of repeatedly overstating the Iraqi threat in the emotional aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Its findings were endorsed by all eight committee Democrats and two Republicans, Senators Olympia J. Snowe of Maine and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.

In a statement accompanying the report, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is chairman of the intelligence panel, said, “The president and his advisers undertook a relentless public campaign in the aftermath of the attacks to use the war against Al Qaeda as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein.”

Dana Perino, the White House spokeswoman, on Thursday called the report a “selective view” and said that the Bush administration’s public statements were based on the same faulty intelligence given to Congress and endorsed by foreign intelligence services. Senator Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, the committee’s top Republican, called the report a “waste of committee time and resources.”

The presidential campaigns of Senators John McCain and Barack Obama had not responded by Thursday night to requests for comment on the Senate report.

The report on the prewar statements found that on some important issues, most notably on what was believed to be Iraq’s nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, the public statements from Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and other senior officials were generally “substantiated” by the best estimates at the time from American intelligence agencies. But it found that the administration officials’ statements usually did not reflect the intelligence agencies’ uncertainties about the evidence or the disputes among them.

In a separate report released Wednesday, the intelligence committee provided new details about a series of clandestine meetings in Rome and Paris between Pentagon officials and Iranian dissidents in 2001 and 2003. The meetings included discussions about possible covert actions to destabilize the government in Tehran, and were used by the Pentagon officials to glean information about rivalries in Iran and what was thought to be an Iranian “hit” team intending to attack American troops in Afghanistan, the report said.

The report concluded that Stephen J. Hadley, now the national security adviser, and Paul D. Wolfowitz, who was then the deputy defense secretary, “acted within their authorities” to send the Pentagon officials to Rome. But the report criticized the meetings as ill advised, and accused Mr. Hadley and Mr. Wolfowitz of keeping the State Department and intelligence agencies in the dark about the meetings, which the report portrayed as part of a rogue intelligence operation.

The two reports were the final parts of the committee’s so-called Phase 2 investigation of prewar intelligence on Iraq and related issues. The first phase of the inquiry, begun in the summer of 2003 and completed in July 2004, identified grave faults in the C.I.A.’s analysis of the threat posed by Mr. Hussein.

The report on Iraq on Thursday was especially critical of statements by the president and vice president linking Iraq to Al Qaeda and raising the possibility that Mr. Hussein might supply the terrorist group with unconventional weapons. “Representing to the American people that the two had an operational partnership and posed a single, indistinguishable threat was fundamentally misleading and led the nation to war on false premises,” Mr. Rockefeller wrote.

Mr. Bond and four other Republicans on the committee sharply dissented from the report’s findings and suggested that the investigation was a partisan smoke screen to obscure the real story: that the C.I.A. failed the Bush administration by delivering intelligence assessments to policy makers that have since been discredited.

In a detailed minority report, four of those Republicans accused Democrats of hypocrisy and of cherry picking, namely by refusing to include misleading public statements by top Democrats like Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mr. Rockefeller.

As an example, they pointed to an October 2002 speech by Mr. Rockefeller, who declared to his Senate colleagues that he had arrived at the “inescapable conclusion that the threat posed to America by Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction is so serious that despite the risks, and we should not minimize the risks, we must authorize the president to take the necessary steps to deal with the threat.”

The report about the Bush administration’s public statements offers some new details about the intelligence information that was available to policy makers as they built a case for war. For instance, in September 2002 Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “the Iraq problem cannot be solved by airstrikes alone,” because Iraqi chemical and biological weapons were so deeply buried that they could not be penetrated by American bombs.

Two months later, however, the National Intelligence Council wrote an assessment for Mr. Rumsfeld concluding that the Iraqi underground weapons facilities identified by the intelligence agencies “are vulnerable to conventional, precision-guided, penetrating munitions because they are not deeply buried.”

On Thursday, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a Democratic member of the intelligence committee, said that Congress had never been told about the National Intelligence Council’s assessment.

    Bush Overstated Iraq Evidence, Senators Report, NYT, 6.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/06/world/middleeast/06intel.html?ref=opinion

Marine acquitted in Haditha deaths

Thu Jun 5, 2008
12:41am EDT
Reuters
By Dan Whitcomb

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A U.S. Marine officer was acquitted by a military jury on Wednesday on charges he tried to cover up the shooting deaths of two dozen unarmed Iraqi men, women and children at Haditha in 2005.

In the first court-martial verdict from the high-profile case, Lt. Andrew Grayson was cleared at Camp Pendleton, California, after a five-day trial and less than half a day of deliberations by the jury.

Grayson, an intelligence officer, was not present when the 24 Iraqi civilians were shot to death near the scene of a roadside bombing at Haditha on November 19, 2005.

He was accused of ordering another Marine to delete photographs of the bodies from a computer and digital camera and lying to investigators.

The presiding judge, Maj. Brian Kasprzyk, dismissed an obstruction of justice charge against the 27-year-old native of Springboro, Ohio. Defense attorneys said in closing arguments that prosecutors bungled the investigation under intense media scrutiny.

Grayson, who served two tours of duty in Iraq, could have faced up to two decades in prison if convicted on all of the charges.

Two other Marines, including accused ringleader Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, still face courts-martial over the events at Haditha, which brought international condemnation.

Iraqi witnesses said angry Marines massacred unarmed civilians after a popular comrade, Lance Cpl. Miguel "TJ" Terrazas, was killed by a roadside bomb.

Defense attorneys said the civilians were killed during a pitched battle with insurgents in and around Haditha that followed the death of Terrazas.

Of the eight Marines originally charged by military authorities in December 2006, five have seen their cases dropped.

Wuterich's trial has been postponed until later this year pending an appeal of a discovery ruling. Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani is also awaiting trial.

(Editing by John O'Callaghan)

    Marine acquitted in Haditha deaths, R, 5.6.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN0426498320080605

U.S. Remakes Jails in Iraq, but Gains Are at Risk

June 2, 2008
The New York Times
By ALISSA J. RUBIN

BAGHDAD — Once a byword for torture and disgrace, the American-run detention system in Iraq has improved, even its critics say, as the military has incorporated it into a larger counterinsurgency strategy that seeks to avoid mistreatment that could create new enemies.

But these gains may soon be at risk. Thousands of detainees are to be turned over to the Iraqi government, some perhaps as early as the end of the year, a further step toward Iraqi sovereignty. Yet however tarnished America’s reputation may be for its treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, the reputation of many Iraqi prisons is worse.

“The Americans are better than Ministry of Interior prisons,” said Mahmoud Abu Dumour, a former detainee from Falluja, the Sunni stronghold west of Baghdad. “They will torture you. Maybe you will die. With the Americans, if you enter Abu Ghraib, they will only wage psychological war on you.”

Already, Human Rights Watch has criticized the military for transferring some convicted juveniles to Iraqi custody, where they are kept in what the group said are abusive conditions.

Criticism also remains high that the American military detains too many people, deprives them of due process and holds them too long, even if innocent. Many are taken in only because they were near an insurgent attack.

While nearly all of the more than 21,000 detainees in Iraq are in American custody, Maj. Gen. Douglas M. Stone, who runs detainee operations countrywide, is proceeding with a broad experiment to restructure it. His goal is to use the system of detention centers as another front in the counterinsurgency war, trying to reduce the likelihood that they become a recruiting ground for militants.

“The extremists owned the battlefield of the mind,” said General Stone, a Marine Reserve counterinsurgency expert who took responsibility for the detention system last spring. Before he arrived, moderate and extremist detainees were usually mixed, turning the American-run detention facilities into what he called a “jihadi university.”

General Stone’s goal now is to isolate those he believes are extremists, who are a minority of detainees, and persuade the other detainees that they will have better lives if they keep away from those who preach jihad. It is part of the effort to bring detention policy here in line with American military strategy that seeks to separate insurgents from civilians, mentally and physically.

General Stone’s goal is to move detainees, particularly more moderate ones, through the system faster by instituting review boards to hear each detainee’s case. So far, these boards have released at least 8,400 people. He has also pushed to expand paid work programs, like carpentry shops, brick factories and laundries, as well as educational programs, especially for juvenile detainees and the many illiterate adults.

It is difficult to assess this drive toward improvement. Outsiders are forbidden to interview detainees. The International Committee of the Red Cross has regular access to the facilities, but the United Nations and human rights groups say they have not been permitted to enter.

Still, a reporter’s visits to Camp Cropper and Camp Bucca, the two main American detention facilities; interviews with American military officers in charge of the facilities; and conversations with former detainees and human rights advocates make clear that the system has been changed in several important ways.

These changes were seen as vital after the images of prisoner humiliation and abuse at Abu Ghraib created fury throughout the Arab world. Recidivism is down: since General Stone’s arrival last year, just 28 of those released have been jailed again. That number, less than 1 percent of the total released, reflects considerably fewer repeat detentions than before the administrative hearings and other reforms, when recapture rates ran at 5 to 10 percent, according to military lawyers.

Riots, which once regularly traumatized Camp Bucca, have tailed off. The last was in September. Violence among detainees, including beatings and killings, is down as well. The last escape attempt was in November 2007, when military police officers found an 80-foot-long tunnel with an exit outside the compound.

In interviews, former detainees praised the new hearing system, which they said allowed them for the first time to tell their side of the story.

“I would consider this committee a fair and beautiful committee,” said Sheik Riyadh, who was released in early April from Camp Bucca, near Iraq’s southern border with Kuwait, after three and a half years in detention. “If only they had formed it when I was first detained. Then the detainee was not sent to any committee. But this committee works to release people.”

But the innovations have not erased memories of the Abu Ghraib scandals, nor have they mollified the many Iraqis who continue to be arrested and who maintain their innocence.

“I had not done anything,” said Mahmoud Abu Dumour, who was detained in Falluja in November 2004 and released without explanation in July 2007, before General Stone’s administrative hearing system was in place.

“It was very nice that my daughter recognized me,” he added, his arms around his 3-year-old girl. “She was 10 days old when the Americans took me.”

Human rights advocates familiar with the new system say they believe conditions have improved considerably since Abu Ghraib. But they contend that those gains do not change the underlying legal problems with the detentions themselves and the lack of legal rights afforded to detainees.

Suspects are often brought in, with little or no physical evidence, because they were near an attack on American or Iraqi troops or based on statements by informants, who often have their own reasons for lying. Detainees have no right to a lawyer nor can they challenge the grounds for their detention.

Of the total detainee population, which peaked at 25,600 last October and which was reported on Sunday to be at 21,680, only 10 to 15 percent will ever stand trial, military lawyers said. The average detainee is interned for 333 days, and as of March, about 1,500, or 5 percent, had been in detention for more than three years, said Lt. Col. Rodney Faulk, of the 300th Military Police Brigade, who runs Camp Bucca day to day.

No one knows how many of those detained are innocent of any crime, but General Stone said he believed that only about 8,000 detainees as of March were extremists who posed a continuing security risk. “One-third are genuinely continuing and imperative security risks,” General Stone said then. “But that means two-thirds are not, or at least remain a question mark.”

Although the American military has the legal right to detain suspects in Iraq under a United Nations resolution, human rights advocates say the Americans have interpreted the resolution far more broadly than was ever intended.

“Security detention is an emergency measure, and emergency measures you should try to use temporarily,” said John Sifton, executive director of One World Research, a human rights organization based in Los Angeles.

“These things have a way of becoming addictive,” he said. “It’s great the U.S. is trying to improve things. But remember, insurgency is a crime, and you should prosecute it.”

The Detention Centers

Eager to erase the stain of the Abu Ghraib scandal, the United States emptied that complex, which had a notorious reputation under Saddam Hussein, too, and turned it over to the Iraqi government in 2006.

Of the two major American-run facilities, Camp Bucca, the larger, holds 18,580 detainees. Camp Cropper has 3,100, and that includes all the juveniles in the system as well as so-called high-value detainees — Mr. Hussein was kept there before his execution in 2006 — and about 15 women, according to figures released on Sunday. About 80 percent are Sunni and 20 percent are Shiite. Just 221 of the detainees in Bucca and Cropper combined are from outside Iraq, a tiny percentage of the total number that the military views as extremists.

Recent visits to both detention centers, along with interviews of former detainees, depicted a system whose conditions increasingly resemble those of the American civilian model, in general treatment if not in rights.

On a late winter day at Camp Bucca, the detainees whom a reporter could see appeared to be in good health and at ease. Some played volleyball or table tennis. Others sat in the sun reading the Koran. One man tended a bottle of milk that he was fermenting into homemade yogurt.

Former inmates at Bucca, however, have complained in interviews about the food there, which they described as scant and sometimes nauseating.

When detainees arrive at Bucca, they are quickly profiled to separate those identified as moderates from those thought to be extremists. The procedure, which was under way before General Stone arrived, has been expanded so the military obtains a rough psychological assessment of each detainee. Former detainees say the change has made them feel safer.

“When the prisoner entered, he was terrified, and he found takferis surrounded him and taught him takferi ways,” said Abu Yahya, a former detainee who now lives on Falluja’s outskirts, using the Arabic word for Sunni Muslim fanatics. He said he spent more than three years in detention and was beaten several times by extremist detainees. “If anyone objected, he would be beaten and attacked, and sometimes he would die.”

A more recent innovation, popular with families living far away, is videoconferencing. Now, families who cannot travel from Baghdad to Bucca to see an interned relative can go to Camp Cropper and be linked by video.

The Release Boards

Detainees say the most important change has been the creation of administrative boards to determine whether an individual remains an “imperative security risk” — the legal term used in the United Nations approval for American forces to detain Iraqis. If a detainee is no longer deemed to be a risk, he can be released.

Detainees appear before a three-person panel, with no lawyer. In almost all the hearings, the detainees deny any wrongdoing, military lawyers say. They often change their accounts to try to say the right thing to obtain release.

It took months, the lawyers said, for the Americans to conclude that the Iraqi denials were a reflexive survival strategy inculcated under Mr. Hussein, not simply an effort to obfuscate. During Mr. Hussein’s rule, people were often tortured until they confessed; then the confession was used against them. So there is a deep reluctance to admit any shade of guilt, even if the cost is an inconsistency in the detainee’s testimony that can trouble American hearing officers.

Now, roughly 45 to 50 percent of those who have hearings are recommended for release.

Although the goal is for each detention to be reviewed every four to six months, interviews with detainees suggest the process is more haphazard.

Sadiq Jaber Hashim, 43, a Shiite merchant in Baghdad, was recommended for release after his first appearance before a hearing panel. A speaker of English and Turkish and a paramedic by training, Mr. Hashim tried to persuade his captors from the moment of detention that he had done nothing wrong. But only at his first hearing — eight months later — did anyone listen.

“The accusation was not that I was a terrorist, but that I knew some terrorists,” Mr. Hashim said. Because he was Shiite, he said, he was thought to have ties to the Mahdi Army militia of the cleric Moktada al-Sadr.

“I said, ‘I hate the Mahdi Army; they tried to kidnap me in 2006.’ But they did not listen,” he said.

While the hearings have succeeded in reducing the detainee population, to a visiting journalist they were difficult to follow, and the detainees often seemed to have little understanding of the process. The reasons for detention are frequently a jumble of allegations by soldiers and informers contained in documents available only to the hearing board.

The complications of the process were on display at a hearing in March, when a detainee in Bucca who had been accused of taking part in displacing families and planting bombs in the troubled Dora district of Baghdad, made his case.

“You were captured as a suspected Al Qaeda member,” said Maj. Charles Leonard, chairman of the administrative board and an acquisition officer from Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts.

“I am innocent,” the detainee said.

“We have evidence that you were a target because of information we gathered.”

“No, no, I was in my house.”

“We have evidence that you were involved in displacing and killing Sunnis and Christians in your local area.”

“I was an employee in the Ministry of Education.”

“Did you serve as a guard?”

“Yes.”

“What will you do if you get released?”

“I’ll go back to the same job, and I have a shop with my brother.”

The detainee left, and Major Leonard sighed as he looked down at the file. “This is one of the tougher ones,” he said. “There are two allegations against him, but no physical evidence. There’s been no problems with him whatsoever in detention.”

His fellow hearing officers nodded. All three voted for release.

Evaluating the System

Looming on the horizon is the end of the United Nations authorization of the American involvement in Iraq, including the detention system. The authorization expires Dec. 31 and the United Nations is not expected to take up the issue again, leaving it to negotiations between the United States and Iraq. But the outlook for such a deal, which involves sweeping issues of troop withdrawal, as well as detention and other aspects of an American presence in Iraq, is in doubt.

On Sunday, for instance, the Iraqi government said it would not accept an American draft proposal on the issues.

The detention issues at play cover difficult legal and ethical ground, so much so that no American official interviewed for this article was willing to speak on the record about the discussions.

At the heart of the problem are all the so-called security detainees, who make up an overwhelming majority of the 21,000 people in American custody. They are the people who have been arrested because, in the judgment of the United States military, they could present some threat, even if they are not accused of extremist activity.

It is expected that Iraqi officials, who are now completing new prisons, will seek to take more control of detention operations, including taking custody of at least some of the current Iraqi detainees. That prompts the question characterized by one American military lawyer as “What do we do with the red population?” or those detainees the Americans consider to be extremists — the 8,000 detainees that General Stone referred to as a continuing threat.

Even as the Americans try to overcome their reputation for past mistreatment, serious allegations of torture and substandard conditions in some Iraqi prisons persist. Iraq’s Interior Ministry detention centers, which hold the largest numbers of pretrial detainees, have been run primarily by Shiites and have a record of overcrowding and abuse against the predominantly Sunni detainee population.

There have also been many allegations of torture. In cases in 2005 and 2006, it was American and British soldiers who rescued beaten and starved prisoners.

“If the coalition is going to turn over detainees, there are real Convention Against Torture issues,” said Kevin Lanigan, a former Army Reserve judge advocate in Iraq who is director of the law and security program at Human Rights First, a rights organization.

He was referring to the international Convention Against Torture, which among other things prohibits nations that have signed it from turning detainees over to countries where there are “substantial grounds” to believe that they would be tortured. Iraq has also signed the convention.

In the end, there is some speculation that a compromise will be reached that allows the American military to continue to detain and hold at least some of the people it deems security risks. In the meantime, the American military is pushing to review as many detention cases as possible with an eye toward quickly shrinking the overall detainee population.

Whatever the result, it is unlikely to meet American standards of justice or satisfy human rights groups.

Sheik Riyadh, for example, was released because of the new hearing panel at Camp Bucca. Still, he found little justice in the three and a half years he spent in detention.

“I like the idea of democracy in America,” he said. “But I have not touched it yet.”

Thom Shanker contributed reporting from Washington.

    U.S. Remakes Jails in Iraq, but Gains Are at Risk, NYT, 2.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/02/world/middleeast/02detain.html?hp

Iraqis say Marines

handed out Christian coins

30 May 2008
USA Today

BAGHDAD (AP) — A U.S. Marine handed out coins promoting Christianity to Muslims in the former insurgent stronghold of Fallujah, outraged Sunni officials said Friday. The U.S. military responded quickly, removing a trooper from duty pending an investigation.

Tens of thousands of Shiites, meanwhile, took to the streets in Baghdad and other cities to protest plans for a long-term security agreement with the United States.

The rallies after Friday prayer services were the first to follow a call by anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr for weekly protests against the deal, which could lead to a long-term American troop presence.

The outcry could sharply heighten tensions over the proposal. The deal is supposed to be finished by July and replace the current U.N. mandate overseeing U.S.-led troops in Iraq.

Demonstrators in Baghdad's Sadr City district chanted "No to America! No to the occupation!" A statement from al-Sadr's office has called the negotiations "a project of humiliation for the Iraqi people."

Smaller protests also were held in the Baghdad neighborhoods of Kazimiyah, Abu Dshir and the Shiite holy city of Kufa.

"We denounce the government's intentions to sign a long-term agreement with the occupying forces," Sadrist Sheik Asaad al-Nassiri said during a sermon in Kufa. "Our army will be under their control in this agreement and this will lead to them having permanent bases in Iraq."

U.S. officials have insisted they are not seeking permanent bases in Iraq, although they have declined to comment on specific proposals until the negotiations are complete.

The distribution of the coins was the second perceived insult to Islam by American service members this month. A U.S. sniper was sent out of the country after using a Quran, Islam's holy book, for target practice.

Photographs of the coins, which were inscribed with phrases in Arabic, were widely distributed via cellphones in Fallujah and were seen by an Associated Press employee.

One side asked: "Where will you spend eternity?"

The other contained a verse from the New Testament: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. John 3:16."

Such actions by American service members threaten to alienate Sunni Arabs who have become key allies in the fight against insurgents, a movement that started in Anbar province, which includes Fallujah.

Distribution of the coins in Fallujah was particularly sensitive because the city, 40 miles west of Baghdad, is known for its large number of mosques. It was the center of the Sunni-led insurgency before a massive U.S. offensive in November 2004.

Sheik Abdul-Rahman al-Zubaie, an influential tribal leader in the city, spoke of his outrage over perceived proselytizing by American forces and warned patience was running thin.

"This event did not happen by chance, but it was planned and done intentionally," al-Zubaie said. "The Sunni population cannot accept and endure such a thing. I might not be able to control people's reactions if such incidents keep happening."

Sunni officials and residents said a Marine distributed about 10 coins at a checkpoint controlling access to the city, the scene of one of the fiercest battles of the war.

Al-Zubaie said a man brought one of the coins to a mosque on Wednesday to show it to him and other Sunni leaders.

He accused the Marines of trying to do missionary work in Fallujah and said Sunni leaders had met with U.S. military officials and demanded "the harshest punishment" for those responsible to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Mohammed Hassan Abdullah said he witnessed the coins being handed out on Tuesday as he was waiting at the Halabsa checkpoint, although he didn't receive one himself.

The U.S. military — still smarting from the Quran shooting — said a Marine was removed from duty Friday "amid concerns from Fallujah's citizens regarding reports of inappropriate conduct."

A statement said the reports about the coin distribution was being investigated and promised "appropriate action" if the allegations are confirmed.

Lt. Col. Chris Hughes, a spokesman for U.S. forces in western Iraq, said it didn't appear to be a widespread problem, stressing that the military forbids "proselytizing any religion, faith or practices."

"Indications are this was an isolated incident — an individual Marine acting on his own accord passing out coins," Hughes said in an e-mailed statement.

Col. James L. Welsh, chief of staff for American forces in western Iraq, also said the matter has their "full attention."

Al-Zubaie said U.S. military officials met with tribal leaders on Thursday and expressed "astonishment about (the) behavior of this Marine, saying that they have already settled the matter of the violation of the Quran and suddenly a new problem has emerged."

Dr. Muhsin al-Jumaili, a professor of law and religious studies in Fallujah, said the act was especially provocative in Fallujah and risked alienating residents who recently have joined forces with the Americans against al-Qaeda in Iraq.

"As Muslims, we cannot accept this," he told The Associated Press. "The Americans should concentrate on maintaining security and not doing missionary work."

"Such deeds will not make Muslims trust American troops any more and might create a feeling of hatred among Muslims and Christians" at a time when they're finally living in peace, he added.

The revelation that an American sniper had used a Quran for target practice earlier this month prompted similar outrage and drew apologies from President Bush and senior U.S. commanders.

The alliances between Sunni tribes and U.S. forces have been key to a steep decline in violence over the past year. But tensions have risen over a series of incidents, including the accidental killings of U.S.-allied fighters, that have raised concerns about the fragility of the support for the American forces.

U.S. troops also have struggled to overcome the perception that they are insensitive to Islamic traditions after several missteps in the early stages of the war in Iraq.

    Iraqis say Marines handed out Christian coins, UT, 30.5.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2008-05-30-marine-coin_N.htm

U.S. troop deaths in May near lowest level of war

29 May 2008
USA Today
By Charles Levinson

BAGHDAD — This May has been one of the least violent months of the Iraq war. The relative calm follows a cease-fire agreement by Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his militia in the face of steady pressure from U.S. and Iraqi forces.

Eighteen U.S. servicemembers have been identified as having died in Iraq so far in May, according to the Pentagon. To date, the least deadly month of the five-year war was February 2004, when 21 U.S. troops were killed in a 29-day period. The number of wounded also has fallen.

Overall, militant attacks in Iraq have dropped to levels not seen since spring 2004, U.S. military spokesman Rear Adm. Patrick Driscoll said this week. Attacks are down 70% since President Bush ordered a U.S. troop increase, or "surge," early last year.

Al-Sadr agreed to a truce earlier this month after two months of clashes with U.S.-backed Iraqi security forces. The fighting followed a decision by the Iraqi government to rein in al-Sadr's Mahdi Army and other Shiite militant groups. Iraqi forces have also intensified their offensive against Sunni militants, including al-Qaeda, in the northern city of Mosul.

"We're seeing progress because we're getting more capability out of the Iraqi security forces," said Lt. Gen. Lloyd Austin III, the number two U.S. commander in Iraq.

The deal with al-Sadr could unravel at any time. His followers have issued statements on an almost daily basis threatening to resume fighting as they accuse the government of breaking promises.

Al-Qaeda militants have proven difficult to drive out of Mosul, their biggest remaining urban stronghold. A suicide bomber in Sinjar, 75 miles west of Mosul, killed 16 Iraqis crowded around a police recruiting station Thursday, the Associated Press reported.

The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, who has been guarded in making proclamations of success, said last week that al-Qaeda in Iraq has "never been closer to defeat than they are now."

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani also has sounded a surprisingly upbeat tone. Talabani criticized Iraqi Army Chief of Staff Babakir Zebari for saying his forces would not be ready to handle security on their own for four years. Instead, Talabani predicted last week that Iraqi forces would be able to maintain control of the country by year's end.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told a United Nations conference in Sweden on Thursday that "Iraq has achieved major success in the battle against terrorism."

The U.S. death toll so far in May marks a dramatic decline from 126 deaths in May 2007, when U.S. forces were battling for control of Baghdad in one of the deadliest months of the war.

Injuries among U.S. troops also are at their lowest level this year. Just 31 Americans were hurt in combat last week, with half returning to duty within three days, the Pentagon said. That's down from a recent peak of 130 in a single week in March, at the height of the fighting with Shiite militants.

Iraqi police, soldiers and civilians are benefiting from the lull in violence. Seventy-eight people died in bombings across Iraq in April, the lowest level since November 2004, when 75 died, according to the Brookings Institution, a Washington think-tank that tracks the data.

After five grim years, however, Iraqis are cautiously optimistic.

"The situation is better now, but we still have fears," Ayad Chathem Hanid, 33, a bank teller, said while shopping with his wife Thursday on Baghdad's Palestine Street. "We don't know if the situation is going to blow up again or not."
 

Contributing: Paul Overberg in McLean, Va.

    U.S. troop deaths in May near lowest level of war, NYT, 29.5.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2008-05-29-iraq_N.htm

Army suicides reported at 2-decade high

30 May 2008
USA Today
AP

WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of Army suicides increased again last year, amid the most violent year yet in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Two defense officials said Thursday that 108 troops committed suicide in 2007, six more than the previous year. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the full report on the deaths wasn't being released until later Thursday.

About a quarter of the deaths occurred in Iraq.

The overall toll was the highest in many years, and it was unclear when, if ever, it was previously that high. Immediately available Army records go back only to 1990 and the figure then was lower — at 102 — for that year as well as 1991.

The 108 confirmed deaths in 2007 among active duty soldiers and National Guard and Reserve troops that had been activated was lower than previously feared. Preliminary figures released in January showed as many as 121 troops might have killed themselves, but a number of the deaths were still being investigated then and have since been attributed to other causes, the officials said.

Suicides have been rising during the five-year-old war in Iraq and nearly seven years of war in Afghanistan.

The 108 deaths last year followed 102 in 2006, 85 in 2005 and 67 in 2004.

More U.S. troops also died overall in hostilities in 2007 than in any of the previous years in Iraq and Afghanistan. Overall violence increased in Afghanistan with a Taliban resurgence and overall deaths increased in Iraq, even as violence there declined in the second half of the year.

Increasing the strain on the force last year was the extension of deployments to 15 months from 12 months, a practice ending this year.

The increases in suicides come despite a host of efforts to improve the mental health of a force stressed by the long and repeated tours of duty.

The efforts include more training and education programs, such as suicide prevention programs and a program last year that taught all troops how to recognize mental health problems in themselves and their buddies. Officials also approved the hiring of more than 300 additional psychiatrists, psychologists and other mental health professionals and have so far hired 180 of them. They also have added more screening to measure the mental health of troops.

Earlier this year, Lt. Gen. Michael Rochelle, the deputy chief of staff for personnel, directed a complete review of the Army's suicide prevention program, according to the Army's website. He called for a campaign that would make use of the best available science, and would raise awareness of the problem.

"Since the beginning of the global war on terror, the Army has lost over 580 soldiers to suicide, an equivalent of an entire infantry battalion task force," the Army said in a suicide prevention guide to installations and units that was posted in mid-March on the site.

"This ranks as the fourth leading manner of death for soldiers, exceeded only by hostile fire, accidents and illnesses," it said. "Even more startling is that during this same period, 10 to 20 times as many soldiers have thought to harm themselves or attempted suicide."

The numbers kept by the Army only show part of the picture because they don't include guard and reserve troops who have finished their active duty and returned home to their civilian jobs.

The Department of Veterans Affairs tracks the number of suicides among those who have left the military. It says there have been 144 suicides among the nearly 500,000 service members who left the military from 2002-2005 after fighting in at least one of the wars.

The true incidence of suicide among veterans is not known, according to a recent Congressional Research Service report. Based on numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the VA estimates that 18 veterans a day — or 6,500 a year — take their own lives, but that number includes vets from all wars.

    Army suicides reported at 2-decade high, UT, 30.5.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2008-05-29-army-suicides_N.htm

This Land

Veteran Tries to Get Back to Who He Was

May 26, 2008
By DAN BARRY
The New York Times

HOLLIDAYSBURG, Pa.

Down halls where cigarette smoke perfumes the air and shuffling slippers give the floors an extra buff, there resounds an intercom announcement: Head to the dining room for the American Idol program! Come support your friends!

Those who answer the call find the dining room transformed, with a night-blue curtain concealing the buffet table, the coffee canisters and the sign saying, “Remember Your Napkin.” No trace of the shepherd’s pie served for lunch two hours before, or of the resident who accidentally dropped his food tray and walked out red-faced, the tap, tap, tap of his cane marking a slow exit he so clearly wished was quicker.

“From Hollywood, California,” calls out the master of ceremonies, encouraging the few dozen in the audience to imagine they are someplace not here, the Hollidaysburg Veterans Home, in the undulating Allegheny Mountains. They applaud the thought, the old and the not-so-old, the formerly homeless and the never homeless, the heavily medicated, the struggling, veterans all.

One of the first contestants, Richard, who normally melts into the brickwork behind notices about veterans’ benefits and rides to the Wal-Mart, now stands out, with his crisp white shirt offsetting the black microphone in his hand. Planted before the karaoke monitor with eyes trained on the scrolling lyrics, he talks more than sings familiar words by the Eagles:

“I got a peaceful, easy feeling/and I know you won’t let me down/’cause I’m already standing/on the ground.”

Great, say the staff members posing as Randy and Paula. Terrible, says Simon.

Richard’s fellow residents clap for him. There’s Henry in his wheelchair, and Joe in his wheelchair, and a man with an oxygen tank, and many others. But a Marine veteran named Tony Uhouse is not there; he has other things to do.

The Hollidaysburg Veterans Home, the largest in Pennsylvania, has 467 residents, including 136 World War II veterans, 69 Korean War veterans, 168 Vietnam War veterans and a couple of gulf war veterans. Then there is Mr. Uhouse, the home’s only veteran of the Iraq war, and, at 41, its youngest occupant.

He still wears Marine T-shirts and the Marine desert boots issued to him in 1991. He still keeps his hair cropped short and his compact, 5-foot-8 frame erect. He does not say it’s 9:30 at night; he says it’s 21:30. He does not say, “O.K.”; he says, “Roger that.” If he misspeaks, he says aloud to himself, “As you were.”

This is all second nature now, after having spent 16 years, 9 months and 25 days in the Marines — not that anyone’s counting, he likes to say. But he is no longer a marine; hasn’t been for two years. Instead, he is slightly damaged ex-military goods, trying to navigate a world in which people do not exchange hard-snap salutes as a matter of course.

One example. Small photographs of the residents hang in frames outside their respective rooms. His photo is distinct in that it shows him at attention, in his dress blues. Not long ago someone drew a moustache on the image of his face. Not cool; not Marine-like.

Another example. Now and then he snaps at those around him, until one of the vets finally says, “Hey, we’re not your troops.”

Mr. Uhouse gives thanks for the home; he loves the food and appreciates the dedication of the staff, from the building’s administrator, Martin Kupchella, to the housekeepers. But he senses a disconnection between himself and the other residents that he can’t quite articulate.

“I’m the youngest guy here,” he says. “It’s an uneasy feeling.”

He joined the Marines in 1989 and thought he would never look back. He loved the discipline, the camaraderie, the pride. He became an aviation technician, making sure that the birds were good to go, and rose to become a staff sergeant in his home state of California. Re-enlistments were a given.

When the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003, he was on an “aviation maintenance logistics” ship in waters around Iraq and Kuwait, helping to repair planes before and after battle. During his few months overseas he occasionally came ashore — to Al Asad Airfield in Iraq, for example — to provide specialized technical support, but he emphasizes that he was nowhere near the heat of battle.

Still, Mr. Uhouse says he came back changed: quieter; angrier; thirstier. “I was rattled in Iraq, that’s for sure,” he says, adding, “It scared the hell out of me because people were dying because of what you did.”

Diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Transferred against his wishes to a cushy instructor’s job in Florida that he didn’t want because members of his unit were still in Iraq. Punished for a seizure after it was determined to be related to alcohol withdrawal. “Other things I’m not telling,” he says.

With voice tightening, he says that he was then told to see The Old Man, who explained that it was best for the corps that Staff Sgt. Anthony E. Uhouse not re-enlist. In early 2006, he was given an honorable discharge — or, as he puts it, “Detached from the corps.”

Civilian life did not take. Within two years, he says, he had moved into an apartment in Pennsylvania with a woman he had met online; spent his savings; gotten ditched; been convicted of harassing another woman with e-mail; violated the terms of his probation by drinking alcohol; sent to county jail. Then, through the help of a counselor and with the blessing of the court, he landed here, on sprawling grounds once occupied by the Blair County Hospital for Mental Diseases.

It has been two months now, in a place where some televisions are never quiet, and the guy next to you might be hoarding cold cuts, and trays of food occasionally clatter to the dining-room floor. Mr. Uhouse shares a room with three men. He eats at 0730, 1200 and 1730 hours, and at 2100 he takes sleeping pills to smooth out the bad dreams.

He can leave at any time now, and is determined to do so one day, as soon as he feels ready. Until then, he takes walks. He talks to counselors when he feels the need. He spends the $150 a month given him by Pennsylvania on phone cards, Internet fees and cigarettes. And he chooses among the many activities designed to kill time: pool tournament, yes; American Idol contest, no.

Perhaps he knew something. Perhaps he knew that as one veteran after another got up to sing in a contest with no winners or losers, as “Over the Rainbow” blended into “Yesterday,” which blended into “God Bless America,” a person with a military background might hear echoes of what his superiors used to say: As you were.

    Veteran Tries to Get Back to Who He Was, NYT, 26.5.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/26/us/26land.html?hp

U.S. Airstrike Kills 8 Civilians in Iraq

May 23, 2008
The New York Times
By STEPHEN FARRELL

BAGHDAD — Iraqi officials said an American helicopter strike on Thursday killed eight civilians including two children and an elderly man during an assault near the northern Iraqi town of Baiji.

American officials confirmed that two children had died in an American assault on Sunni insurgent suspects in the area and expressed regret. Iraqi officials, however, said the incident was likely to stoke anti-American resentment.

An Iraqi police official in Salahuddin Province said the American forces were carrying out an air assault in al-Mazraa village, near Baiji. He cited police officials in the village who said that the people were shot from the air while running away.

The American military said the dead civilians were two children traveling in a car used by suspected insurgents who showed “hostile intent.”

In a statement the military said it has begun an investigation, but said the targets of the operation were “known terrorists” and accused them of hiding behind civilians, “thereby endangering others around them.”

It said the deaths happened during a raid on fighters belonging to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the Sunni insurgent group in Iraq that American intelligence officials have said is led by foreigners.

The American military statement said that the suspects targeted had been operating a weapons storage facility and were believed to be associated with a suicide bombing network, and a senior Qaeda “facilitator” who helped foreign fighters in Iraq.

“Unfortunately, two children were killed when the other occupants of the vehicle in which they were riding exhibited hostile intent,” said the American statement, which was released in Baghdad.

Col. Mudhir al-Qaysi, of the Baiji police, said: “Baiji policemen went to the scene and found the killed family unarmed, and the bodies were burned and torn apart.”

Colonel Qaysi said the actions would reinforce the negative image of American forces locally. “The scene of the bodies is ugly and these acts are unacceptable,” he said. “We were hoping that the American army would seek to improve its image after many crimes carried out by its soldiers in Iraq.”

The deaths came only days after widespread anger in Iraq over the admission that an American sniper used a Koran as target practice near Baghdad.

American military officials say the sniper was disciplined and removed from Iraq but the Iraqi cabinet called for him to be prosecuted.

President Bush made a personal apology to Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

After the Baiji incident Col. Jerry O’Hara, an American military spokesman, said that the American-led coalition “sincerely regrets when any innocent civilians are injured that result from terrorist locating themselves in and around them. We take every precaution to protect innocent civilians and engage only hostile threats.”

The deaths follow a similar incident south of Mosul on May 10 in which American-led forces, targeting aides of what the Americans called a Qaeda foreign facilitator, opened fire on a suspect’s vehicle.

American officials said their soldiers fired three warning shots then opened fire when the driver refused to stop and they saw one man making “threatening movements.”

The shots killed a woman and child, as well as two armed men inside the vehicle. On that occasion the American military also expressed regret for the death of innocent civilians “during our operations to rid Iraq of terrorists.”

    U.S. Airstrike Kills 8 Civilians in Iraq, NYT, 23.5.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/23/world/middleeast/23iraq.html?hp

Pentagon:

25,000 troops

to be deployed to Iraq

19 May 2008
USA Today

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon says about 25,000 U.S. soldiers will be deployed to Iraq beginning in the fall, replacing troops scheduled to come home by the end of the year.

Among the seven Army combat brigades and one division headquarters units that would be sent to Iraq later this year the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, from Fort Wainwright, Alaska.

The deployments announced Monday would maintain a level of 15 brigades in Iraq, or roughly 140,000 troops — the number that military leaders expect will remain on the warfront at the end of July, once the currently planned withdrawals are finished.

Under the new Pentagon policy effective in August, those Army units will serve for 12 months, rather than the 15-month tours that units in Iraq now are serving.

    Pentagon: 25,000 troops to be deployed to Iraq, UT, 19.5.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2008-05-19-troop-deployments_N.htm

Iraq Contractor in Shooting Case Makes Comeback

May 10, 2008
The New York Times
By JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON — Last fall, Blackwater Worldwide was in deep peril.

Guards for the security company were involved in a shooting in September that left at least 17 Iraqis dead at a Baghdad intersection. Outrage over the killings prompted the Iraqi government to demand Blackwater’s ouster from the country, and led to a criminal investigation by the F.B.I., a series of internal investigations by the State Department and the Pentagon, and high-profile Congressional hearings.

But after an intense public and private lobbying campaign, Blackwater appears to be back to business as usual.

The State Department has just renewed its contract to provide security for American diplomats in Iraq for at least another year. Threats by the Iraqi government to strip Western contractors of their immunity from Iraqi law have gone nowhere. No charges have been brought in the United States against any Blackwater guard in the September shooting, either, and the F.B.I. agents in Baghdad charged with investigating whether Blackwater guards have committed any crimes under United States law are sometimes protected as they travel through Baghdad by Blackwater guards.

The chief reason for the company’s survival? State Department officials said Friday that they did not believe they had any alternative to Blackwater, which supplies about 800 guards to the department to provide security for diplomats in Baghdad. Officials say only three companies in the world meet their requirements for protective services in Iraq, and the other two do not have the capability to take on Blackwater’s role in Baghdad. After the shooting in September, the State Department did not even open talks with the other two companies, DynCorp International and Triple Canopy, to see if they could take over from Blackwater, which is based in North Carolina.

“We cannot operate without private security firms in Iraq,” said Patrick F. Kennedy, the under secretary of state for management. “If the contractors were removed, we would have to leave Iraq.”

Still, serious risks remain for Blackwater and at least some of its current and former personnel. A federal grand jury continues to consider evidence in the Baghdad shooting. Although the company is not likely to face any criminal charges, people involved in the case say that some Blackwater guards involved in the shooting are cooperating with the F.B.I. as it pursues evidence against other guards.

Separately, a former Blackwater guard is under criminal investigation for the December 2006 shooting death of an Iraqi guard for an Iraqi vice president, and may soon face federal charges. In a third case, two former Blackwater workers pleaded guilty to weapons-related charges, but both received sentences that included no jail time in return for their cooperation with federal prosecutors in a broader investigation.

A House committee has also asked the Internal Revenue Service to begin an inquiry into whether Blackwater has designated its guards as independent contractors rather than employees to in order to avoid paying and withholding federal taxes. The State Department renewed the security contract for only one year — just long enough to take the company into the start of the next administration. And Blackwater’s political connections to the Bush administration may not serve it well if the Democrats win the White House in November.

Given the furor that surrounded Blackwater after the September shooting in Baghdad, critics say the decision to renew the company’s contract in Iraq is a sign of the Bush administration’s inability to curb its reliance on outside contractors in the war.

“The shooting incident was like a hammer blow, but where are the consequences?” said Peter W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institute and author of “Corporate Warriors,” a book about contractors in Iraq. “I think it points to the fact that the dependence on contractors is like a drug addiction. They just can’t help themselves.”

Representative Henry Waxman, California Democrat who is chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which has been investigating Blackwater on several fronts, said, “I can’t understand why Blackwater’s contract was renewed. It seems to me the administration should have looked for others who could do the job, including the U.S. military.”

In the past administration officials have dismissed the notion of using military personnel to guard diplomats.

Founded in 1997 by Erik Prince, a former member of the Navy Seals and heir to a family fortune made in the auto parts industry, Blackwater began to generate controversy in Iraq long before last September’s shooting. Blackwater had developed a reputation among both Iraqis and American military personnel as a company that flaunted a quick-draw image that led its security personnel to take overly aggressive actions to protect the people they were paid to guard.

Last year the State Department acknowledged that Blackwater had been involved in significantly more shootings per convoy mission than DynCorp and Triple Canopy, which provide security for the State Department outside Baghdad.

The shooting death of the bodyguard for the Iraqi vice president in 2006 rankled the Iraqi government well before last September’s shooting. An off-duty Blackwater guard who American and Iraqi officials said had been drinking heavily was the sole suspect. The off-duty Blackwater guard, Andrew J. Moonen, who no longer works for the company and who is a former Army paratrooper, is now under criminal investigation by federal prosecutors in Seattle. Although Mr. Moonen has not been charged, his lawyer, Stewart Riley of Seattle, said that he had recently been in contact about the case with prosecutors from the United States Attorney’s Office in Seattle.

People familiar with the case said they believed that the Justice Department had recently concluded that it had found a way to skirt some of the jurisdictional problems that in the past made it difficult to bring charges in American courts for crimes committed by contractors in Iraq.

“I think they may come to a decision on what to do with this case in the next three or four months,” said one person familiar with the matter. Mr. Riley says that Mr. Moonen maintains his innocence in the shooting.

In addition, a wrongful death lawsuit against Blackwater filed by the families of four Blackwater guards killed in Falluja, Iraq, in 2004 — an event that prompted the first major battle in Falluja between the American military and insurgents that year — is also still pending.

A federal appeals court is expected to rule this year on whether the families can proceed with their lawsuit or be forced into arbitration with Blackwater, an outcome the company prefers, according to the families’ lawyer, Daniel Callahan of California.

Donna Zovko of Cleveland, the mother of Jerko Gerald Zovko, one of the Blackwater guards, says Blackwater has stonewalled the families.

“It is 1,501 days since he was killed, and I don’t know one-tenth of what happened to him, and no one seems to care," Mrs. Zovko said in an interview.

Given so many headlines about his company, Mr. Prince until recently seemed eager to tell his side of the story, and there were reports that he planned to write a book. But on Friday, Anne Tyrrell, a Blackwater spokeswoman, said Mr. Prince’s book project had been put on hold.

    Iraq Contractor in Shooting Case Makes Comeback, NYT, 10.5.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/10/world/middleeast/10blackwater.html?hp

3,500 Troops Will Leave Iraq in Coming Weeks

May 6, 2008
Filed at 4:40 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- The U.S. military says 3,500 soldiers sent to Iraq last summer as part of the so-called surge will soon be leaving.

A military statement released late Monday says the soldiers will redeploy to the U.S. in the coming weeks.

The increase in troops -- along with the rise of Sunni fighters who turned against al-Qaida and a truce called by Shiite militias -- has been credited with helping dramatically cut violence across Iraq in the last 10 months.

All of the troops sent in as part of the surge were expected to leave Iraq by this July, but U.S. commanders are asking for a ''pause'' in redeployments so they can assess the security situation as soldiers leave.

3,500 Troops Will Leave Iraq in Coming Weeks, NYT, 6.5.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq-Troops-Leaving.html