24 April 2006

Deadly Month for U.S. Soldiers in Iraq
AP via NYT, 24 April 2006
Insurgents killed three American soldiers in the Baghdad area Sunday and fired mortars near the Defense Ministry in a spree of violence that killed at least 29 Iraqis as politicians began work on forming a new government.
The largest Sunni Arab party raised new allegations of sectarian killings -- one of the most urgent issues facing the new leadership.
U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said the next government must decommission sectarian militias and integrate them into the national armed forces, warning that the armed groups represent the ''infrastructure for civil war.''
Sunday's deaths raised to eight the number of U.S. troops killed in the past two days.
At least 61 American service members have died in April, putting it on track to pass January -- with 62 -- as the deadliest month this year. It represents a jump over March, which with 31 deaths was the lowest monthly toll for the Americans since February 2004.

A Spy Speaks Out: Administration Hyped Selected Intel to Support Policy
CBS 60 Minutes, 23 April 2006
When no weapons of mass destruction surfaced in Iraq, President Bush insisted that all those WMD claims before the war were the result of faulty intelligence. But a former top CIA official, Tyler Drumheller — a 26-year veteran of the agency — has decided to do something CIA officials at his level almost never do: Speak out.
He tells correspondent Ed Bradley the real failure was not in the intelligence community but in the White House. He says he saw how the Bush administration, time and again, welcomed intelligence that fit the president's determination to go to war and turned a blind eye to intelligence that did not.
"It just sticks in my craw every time I hear them say it’s an intelligence failure. It’s an intelligence failure. This was a policy failure," Drumheller tells Bradley.
Drumheller was the CIA's top man in Europe, the head of covert operations there, until he retired a year ago. He says he saw firsthand how the White House promoted intelligence it liked and ignored intelligence it didn’t:
"The idea of going after Iraq was U.S. policy. It was going to happen one way or the other," says Drumheller.
Drumheller says he doesn't think it mattered very much to the administration what the intelligence community had to say. "I think it mattered it if verified. This basic belief that had taken hold in the U.S. government that now is the time, we had the means, all we needed was the will," he says.
The road to war in Iraq took some strange turns — none stranger than a detour to the West African country of Niger. In late 2001, a month after 9/11, the United States got a report from the Italian intelligence service that Saddam Hussein had bought 500 tons of so-called yellowcake uranium in order to build a nuclear bomb.
..."The American people want to believe the president. I have relatives who I've tried to talk to about this who say, 'Well, no, you can’t tell me the president had this information and just ignored it,'" says Drumheller. "But I think over time, people will look back on this and see this is going to be one of the great, I think, policy mistakes of all time."

Robert's Intel Committee and Robb-Silberman Commission Reports 'Fundamentally Dishonest'
Josh Marshall
Talking Points Memo, 24 April 2006
...But here's an angle I'm not sure we're going to hear much about.
Drumheller's account is pretty probative evidence on the question of whether the White House politicized and cherry-picked the Iraq intelligence.
So why didn't we hear about any of this in the reports of those Iraq intel commissions that have given the White House a clean bill of health on distorting the intel and misleading the country about what we knew about Iraq's alleged WMD programs?
Think about it. It's devastating evidence against their credibility on a slew of levels.
Did you read in any of those reports -- even in a way that would protect sources and methods -- that the CIA had turned a key member of the Iraqi regime, that that guy had said there weren't any active weapons programs, and that the White House lost interest in what he was saying as soon as they realized it didn't help the case for war? What about what he said about the Niger story?
Did the Robb-Silbermann Commission not hear about what Drumheller had to say? What about the Roberts Committee?
I asked Drumheller just those questions when I spoke to him early this evening. He was quite clear. He was interviewed by the Robb-Silbermann Commission. Three times apparently.
Did he tell them everything he revealed on tonight's 60 Minutes segment. Absolutely.
Drumheller was also interviewed twice by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (the Roberts Committee) but apparently only after they released their summer 2004 report.
Now, quite a few of us have been arguing for almost two years now that those reports were fundamentally dishonest in the story they told about why we were so badly misled in the lead up to war. The fact that none of Drumheller's story managed to find its way into those reports, I think, speaks volumes about the agenda that the writers of those reports were pursuing.
"I was stunned," Drumheller told me, when so little of the stuff he had told the commission's and the committee's investigators ended up in their reports. His colleagues, he said, were equally "in shock" that so little of what they related ended up in the reports either.
What Drumheller has to say adds quite a lot to our knowledge of what happened in the lead up to war. But what it shows even more clearly is that none of this stuff has yet been investigated by anyone whose principal goal is not covering for the White House.

Secrecy Tightened Within C.I.A.
By SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI
NYT, 24 April 2006
The crackdown on leaks at the Central Intelligence Agency that led to the dismissal of a veteran intelligence officer last week included a highly unusual polygraph examination for the agency's independent watchdog, Inspector General John L. Helgerson, intelligence officials with knowledge of the investigation said Sunday.
The special polygraphs, which have been given to dozens of employees since January, are part of a broader effort by Porter J. Goss, the director of the C.I.A., to re-emphasize a culture of secrecy that has included a marked tightening of the review process for books and articles by former agency employees.
As the inspector general, Mr. Helgerson was the supervisor of Mary O. McCarthy, who was fired Thursday after admitting she had leaked classified information to reporters about secret C.I.A. detention centers and other subjects, agency officials said.
Mr. Goss and the C.I.A.'s deputy director, Vice Adm. Albert M. Calland III, voluntarily submitted to polygraph tests during the leak investigation to show they were willing to experience the same scrutiny they were asking other employees to undergo, agency officials said. Mr. Helgerson likewise submitted to the lie-detector test, they said.
But Mr. Helgerson's status as the independent inspector general — a post to which he was appointed by the president and from which only the president can remove him — makes his submission to a polygraph even more unusual.
L. Britt Snider, who served as inspector general from 1998 to 2001, said in an interview on Sunday night that he had not been given a polygraph in that position, though he said he was given an initial polygraph when he arrived at the agency in 1997 as special counsel to the director.
"I've never heard of it, and it's certainly unusual," Mr. Snider said. He called it "awkward" for the inspector general to be, in effect, investigated by the agency he ordinarily investigates.
...Mr. Helgerson's office, which investigates accusations of lapses in the ethics or performance of agency employees, has investigated some of the most serious controversies of recent years, including cases involving accusations of detainee abuse.
Since a 1989 change following the Iran-contra scandal, the C.I.A.'s internal watchdog has been confirmed by the Senate and has reported to the Congressional intelligence committees as well as to the C.I.A. director, a shift intended to assure the position's independence.
Among the subjects handled by Mr. Helgerson's office was a report completed last year that faulted senior C.I.A. officials for lapses in the failure to prevent the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But Mr. Goss kept the report classified and did not punish any of those named.
Former officials say the inspector general's office has also referred more than half a dozen cases of detainee abuse to the Department of Justice, but officials there have taken no action, except for a pending prosecution of one agency contract employee charged with beating an Afghan prisoner who later died.
The "single-issue" polygraphs, which are distinct from the routine polygraphs given to agency employees at least every five years, have been conducted by the C.I.A. Security Center but with close supervision from Mr. Goss's office, one official said. Like other current and former intelligence officials, he was granted anonymity to discuss classified events at the agency without fear of retribution.
...The renewed emphasis on the culture of secrecy has included a tightening of the review process for books and articles by former agency employees, said Mark S. Zaid, a lawyer who represents many authors who once worked for the C.I.A.
Authors say the agency's Publications Review Board has been removing material that would easily have been approved before. While the board in the past has generally worked with retirees to make manuscripts publishable, it now more often appears to be trying to block publication, the authors say. And reprimands for violations have become more stern, including letters warning of possible Justice Department investigations.
A C.I.A. spokeswoman, Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, denied that the Publications Review Board's standards had changed.
"The only rule is that they are not allowed to have classified information in their manuscripts," Ms. Millerwise Dyck said.
But Mr. Zaid said: "There's been a fundamental shift in practice at the Publications Review Board. There's literally been a reinstitution of the 1950's attitude that what happens at C.I.A. stays at C.I.A."
...Yet another agency retiree, who has in the past received warning letters from the C.I.A. after occasionally publishing articles without seeking approval, said he had recently gotten a far more strongly worded letter. This one informed him that a file had been opened to document his transgressions that could be forwarded to the Justice Department, he said.
Mr. Goss's effort to lower the profile of the agency has apparently been extended to the Web site of its Center for the Study of Intelligence, which for years has carried unclassified articles about the history and practice of spying from the in-house journal Studies in Intelligence.
Max Holland, who has written two articles for the C.I.A. journal, recently reported in The American Spectator that the online posting of unclassified excerpts from an agency review of the failure to assess Iraq's unconventional weapons accurately had been delayed for seven months. The last issue represented on the C.I.A. Web site is from mid-2005.

Colleagues Say C.I.A. Analyst Played by the Rules
By DAVID S. CLOUD
NYT, 23 April 2006
In 1998, when President Bill Clinton ordered military strikes against a suspected chemical weapons factory in Sudan, Mary O. McCarthy, a senior intelligence officer assigned to the White House, warned the president that the plan relied on inconclusive intelligence, two former government officials say.
Ms. McCarthy's reservations did not stop the attack on the factory, which was carried out in retaliation for Al Qaeda's bombing of two American embassies in East Africa. But they illustrated her willingness to challenge intelligence data and methods endorsed by her bosses at the Central Intelligence Agency.
On Thursday, the C.I.A. fired Ms. McCarthy, 61, accusing her of leaking information to reporters about overseas prisons operated by the agency in the years since the Sept. 11 attacks. But despite Ms. McCarthy's independent streak, some colleagues who worked with her at the White House and other offices during her intelligence career say they cannot imagine her as a leaker of classified information.
As a senior National Security Council aide for intelligence from 1996 to 2001, she was responsible for guarding some of the nation's most important secrets.
"We're talking about a person with great integrity who played by the book and, as far as I know, never deviated from the rules," said Steven Simon, a security council aide in the Clinton administration who worked closely with Ms. McCarthy.
Others said it was possible that Ms. McCarthy — who made a contribution to Senator John Kerry's presidential campaign in 2004 — had grown increasingly disenchanted with the methods adopted by the Bush administration for handling Qaeda prisoners.
Ms. McCarthy, who began attending law school at night several years ago and was preparing to retire from the C.I.A., may have felt she had no alternative but to go to the press.
If in fact Ms. McCarthy was the leaker, Richard J. Kerr, a former C.I.A. deputy director, said, "I have no idea what her motive was, but there is a lot of dissension within the agency, and it seems to be a rather unhappy place." Mr. Kerr called Ms. McCarthy "quite a good, substantive person on the issues I dealt with her on."
Larry Johnson, a former C.I.A. officer who worked for Ms. McCarthy in the agency's Latin America section, said, "It looks to me like Mary is being used as a sacrificial lamb."

Kerry...35 Years Later
By BOB HERBERT
NYT, 24 April 2006
Presidents and politicians may worry about losing face, or losing votes, or losing their legacy; it is time to think about young Americans and innocent civilians who are losing their lives.
— John Kerry on Iraq
Boston
Saturday was the 35th anniversary of John Kerry's appearance as a young Vietnam veteran before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. During his testimony, Mr. Kerry called for an end to the war in Vietnam and famously inquired: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
He marked the occasion Saturday with an important and moving speech before an audience crammed into historic Faneuil Hall. The speech took on even more poignancy as it became known over the weekend that at least eight more American G.I.'s had been killed in Iraq.
I've felt all along that Democratic politicians, including Senator Kerry, have hurt themselves with their muddled messages on Iraq. Most elected Democrats have been petrified almost to the point of paralysis by their fear of being seen as soft on national security. So they've acquiesced to one degree or another in a war that in their heads and in their hearts they knew was wrong.
In his speech on Saturday, Senator Kerry, who voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq, gave the impression of a man who had found a voice he'd been seeking through trial and error for a long time, perhaps since that springtime day in Richard Nixon's Washington in 1971.
"I believed then," he said, "just as I believe now, that the best way to support the troops is to oppose a course that squanders their lives, dishonors their sacrifice and disserves our people and our principles."
He repeated his call for a complete withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraq by the end of this year, and offered an uncompromising defense of the right of all Americans — including retired generals — to engage in "untrammeled debate and open dissent" on the war.
"I come here today," he said, "to affirm that it is both a right and an obligation for Americans to disagree with a president who is wrong, a policy that is wrong and a war in Iraq that weakens the nation."
He described the war as "rooted in deceit and justified by continuing deception." And in a comparison with Vietnam, he said it is time now to get past "the blindness and cynicism" of political leaders who would continue to send "brave young Americans to be killed or maimed" in a war that the country had come to realize was a mistake.
By the time he testified in 1971, he said, "it was clear to me that hundreds of thousands of soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen — disproportionately poor and minority Americans — were being sent into the valley of the shadow of death for an illusion privately abandoned by the very men who kept sending them there."

All Right, Not All Right: Profiles in Utter Hypocracy
Juan Cole
Informed Comment
It IS all right for Bush campaign strategist Karl Rove to leak classified intelligence about the identity of Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA operative.
It is NOT all right for CIA employee Mary McCarthy to leak classified information and blow the whistle on secret torture prisons maintained by the US government in Eastern Europe. (There is disagreement on who the criminals are here, however.)

It is NOT all right for Larry Franklin, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz's "go-to" man for Iran at the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia Iran desk to pass classified documents to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which then passed them on to a spy, Naor Gilon, in the Israeli embassy.
It IS all right for Secretary of State Condi Rice to discuss with AIPAC Middle East operative Steve Rosen some of the same things that were in the documents passed to him and Keith Weissman by Larry Franklin, who is in jail for it.
It MAY be all right for AIPAC lobbyists Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman to pass classified US Defense documents to Naor Gilon, a spy in the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC.

It IS all right for AIPAC to seek to continue to secretly employ Rosen under the cover of the Zionist Organization of America , while publicly declaring that it had cut all ties with the indicted spy.
It is NOT all right to be a registered lobbyist for the foreign interest of the Sudan, accused of killing and displacing populations in its rebellious Darfur province.
It IS all right for AIPAC not to register as the agent of a foreign power, while lobbying on behalf of a government that has displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, which continues to steal their land, and which killed 20,000 persons during its 1982 illegal invasion of Lebanon.

Congressional Investigators Are Critical of F.D.A.'s Efforts to Detect Drug Dangers
By GARDINER HARRIS
NYT, 24 April 2006
Disorganization, bureaucratic infighting and an inability to force drug makers to conduct needed safety tests have undercut efforts at the Food and Drug Administration to uncover drug dangers, government auditors say.
When drug safety specialists raise alarms about certain medicines, they sometimes feel that their recommendations fall "into a 'black hole' or 'abyss' " at the agency, according to a report to be released Monday by the Government Accountability Office, the auditing arm of Congress.
Top agency officials sometimes excluded drug safety specialists from presenting findings at public hearings, and tensions between officials who approve drugs and those who ensure that they are safe are common, the report said.
"F.D.A. lacks clear and effective processes for making decisions about, and providing management oversight of" issues involving the safety of popular medicines, the report states.

A New Rightwing Religious Push Against Gay Unions
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
NYT, 24 April 2006
About 50 prominent religious leaders, including seven Roman Catholic cardinals and about a half-dozen archbishops, have signed a petition in support of a constitutional amendment blocking same-sex marriage.
Organizers of the petition said it was in part an effort to revive the groundswell of opposition to same-sex marriage that helped bring many conservative voters to the polls in some pivotal states in 2004. The signers include many influential evangelical Protestants, a few rabbis and an official of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
But both the organizers and gay rights groups said what was striking about the petition was the direct involvement by high-ranking Roman Catholic officials, including 16 bishops. Although the church has long opposed same-sex unions, and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops had previously endorsed the idea of a constitutional amendment banning such unions, it was evangelical Protestants who generally led the charge when the amendment was debated in 2004.
"The personal involvement of bishops and cardinals is significantly greater this time than in 2004," said Patrick Korten, a spokesman for the Knights of Columbus, a lay Catholic group.
The Catholic bishops and many of the other religious leaders involved have pledged to distribute postcards for their congregants to send to their senators urging support for the amendment. The Knights of Columbus is distributing 10 million postcards to Catholic churches.
The petition drive was organized in part by Prof. Robert P. George of Princeton, a Catholic scholar with close ties to evangelical Protestant groups. Aides to three Republican senators — Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican leader; Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania; and Sam Brownback of Kansas — were also involved, organizers said.

Trade Deficit Understated: It's Worse than You Think
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 24 April 2006
...U.S. companies operating abroad don't, in fact, seem to earn especially high rates of return. Why, then, doesn't the United States seem to be paying a price for all its borrowing? Because according to the official data, foreign companies operating in the United States are remarkably unprofitable, earning an average return of only 2.2 percent a year.
There's something wrong with this picture. As Daniel Gros of the Center for European Policy Studies puts it, it's hard to believe that foreigners would continue investing in the United States "if they were really being constantly taken to the cleaners."
In a new paper, Mr. Gros argues — compellingly, in my view — that what's really happening is that foreign companies are understating the profits of their U.S. subsidiaries, probably to avoid taxes, and that official data are, in particular, failing to pick up foreign profits that are reinvested in U.S. operations.
If Mr. Gros is right, the true position of the U.S. economy isn't as bad as you think — it's worse. The true trade deficit, including unreported profits that accrue to foreign companies, isn't $800 billion — it's more than $900 billion. And America's foreign debt, including the value of foreign-owned businesses, is at least $1 trillion bigger than the official numbers say.
Of course, optimists have a comeback: if things are really that bad, why are so many foreign investors still buying U.S. bonds? And they point out that those predicting problems from the trade deficit have been wrong so far. But I have two words for those who place their faith in the judgment of investors, and believe that a few good years are enough to prove the skeptics wrong: Nasdaq 5,000.
Right now, forensic analysis seems to say that the U.S. trade position is worse, not better, than it looks. And the answer to the question, "Why haven't we paid a price for our trade deficit?" is, just you wait.

22-23 April 2006

U.N. Exec Decries Illegal Iraq Detainees
By ALEXANDER G. HIGGINS
AP via The Guardian, 21 April 2006
Some 15,000 detainees are being held in Iraq by government ministries in violation of Iraqi law, and nearly as many are being held by U.S.-led multinational forces, a senior U.N. official said Friday.
Only the country's justice ministry is permitted to hold detainees for longer than 72 hours, but Gianni Magazzeni, head of the U.N. Human Rights Office in Baghdad, said most Iraqi-held detainees are under the control of other government officials, naming Iraq's interior and defense ministries in particular.
``Those are still in the thousands and would be not in a situation which is in line with Iraqi law,'' he said at the U.N.'s European headquarters in Geneva. Magazzeni, who took over the post in mid-February, was visiting Geneva and said he was on his way back to Baghdad. It was unclear where Magazzeni obtained his figures for detainees held by the Iraqi government.
He said the 14,222 detainees being held by multinational forces in Iraq at the end of February for ``imperative reasons of security'' also is ``way too high.''
``We're working very closely with them (the U.S.-led multinational forces) to try to see that number brought down in a very substantive way.''
The United States said in February it was holding nearly 14,390 detainees at four major prisons including Abu Ghraib. The figure did not include people picked up and held at local jails for investigation.
Magazzeni said those detainees should be brought before an Iraqi judge and be found guilty or be released if they are innocent, Magazzeni said. He also said cases of torture and summary execution ``are happening every day.''
He said his office also was receiving reports of an increasing number of attacks by death squads and militias, which have at least the appearance of being police or official units.

Iraq: A Litany of Errors
David Corn
DavidCorn.com, 21 April 2006
...[Anthony Cordesman, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies] Cordesman a few days ago put out a report entitled, "American Strategic, Tactical, and Other Mistakes in Iraq: A Litany of Errors." The paper includes a long list of Bush administration blunders. There's nothing on it that you didn't already know. But the compilation is stunning--and depressing. Here are the bullet points:

* Inaccurate threat estimates that created a false rationale for war.

* Not giving ORHA a meaningful mandate for conflict termination, stability operations, and nationbuilding effort.

He adds:

It is true that foresight is more difficult than "20-20 hindsight." Many, if not most, of the factors that led to these failures were, however, brought to the attention of the President, National Security Council, State Department, Department of Defense, and intelligence community in the summer and fall of 2002. No one accurately prophesized all of the future, but many inside and outside government warned what it might be.
The problem was not that the interagency system did not work in providing many key elements of an accurate assessment. The problem was the most senior political and military decision makers ignored what they felt was negative advice.
Forget about Rumsfeld. As the above--long but still partial--list shows, the whole lot of the Bush warriors (Cheney, Rice, Tenet, Wolfowitz, Feith, Powell, Libby, Bremer) screwed up royally. And the fellow at the top--George W. Bush--deserves the ultimate blame. It's some list. If you can stand to have your blood pressure raised, read the full report here.

Old States, New Threats
You know these bad guys. But there is a whole other world of tyrants, dictators and despots.
By Robert D. Kaplan
Washington Post, 23 April 2006
...Borders may be eroding and stateless terrorist groups like al-Qaeda proliferating, but don't be fooled: The traditional state remains the most dangerous force on the international scene. Perhaps the greatest security threat we face today is from a paranoid and resentful state leader, armed with biological or nuclear weapons and willing to make strategic use of stateless terrorists.
These old-fashioned bad guys often have uncertain popular support, but that does not make them easy to dislodge. We don't live in a democratic world so much as in a world in the throes of a very messy democratic transition, so national elections combined with weak, easily politicized institutions produce a lethal mix -- dictators armed with pseudo-democratic legitimacy. And they come in many shapes and forms.

Iraq's PM - Designate Maliki Faces Major Test
Reuters via NYT, 23 April 2006
Jawad al-Maliki's appointment as prime minister-designate was applauded by Iraqi leaders and President Bush, but he now has the daunting task of forming a coalition able to avert any slide into civil war.
The Shi'ite politician's image as a tough talker seems to fit well in a country where many say only a strong man can lead them.
But many Iraqis living beyond the fortified government complex in Baghdad were already saying before his appointment on Saturday they doubted any of Iraq's present leaders could deliver quick relief from guerrilla and sectarian violence.
Underlining the dangers, at least five people died in a mortar attack near the Defense Ministry in Baghdad on Sunday. Three rockets were also fired near a soccer stadium, but no one was hurt.
Amid the bloodshed, the disillusionment of ordinary Iraqis has deepened during four months of political paralysis that had held up the formation of a new government. It was also exacerbated by promises in December elections of fast action to tackle Iraq's woes.
``We are going to form a family that will not be based on sectarian or ethnic backgrounds,'' Maliki told reporters, seeking to shed a hardline Shi'ite image and present himself as a prime minister able to unite Shi'ite Muslims, Sunni Arabs and Kurds.
But in his first policy speech, Maliki called for Iraq's powerful militias to be merged with U.S.-trained security forces -- an explosive issue in the country because militias are tied to political parties and operate along religious lines.
``Arms should be in the hands of the government. There is a law that calls for the merging of militias with the armed forces,'' said Maliki, nominated by the ruling Shi'ite Alliance, the largest bloc in parliament.
The United States has called in the past for militias to be disarmed, and U.S ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has said militiamen are killing more people than insurgents.
Washington hopes a national unity government will foster stability and enable it to start bringing home its more than 130,000 troops.

Young Officers Join the Debate Over Rumsfeld
By THOM SHANKER and ERIC SCHMITT
NYT, 23 April 2006
The revolt by retired generals who publicly criticized Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has opened an extraordinary debate among younger officers, in military academies, in the armed services' staff colleges and even in command posts and mess halls in Iraq.
Junior and midlevel officers are discussing whether the war plans for Iraq reflected unvarnished military advice, whether the retired generals should have spoken out, whether active-duty generals will feel free to state their views in private sessions with the civilian leaders and, most divisive of all, whether Mr. Rumsfeld should resign.
In recent weeks, military correspondents of The Times discussed those issues with dozens of younger officers and cadets in classrooms and with combat units in the field, as well as in informal conversations at the Pentagon and in e-mail exchanges and telephone calls.
To protect their careers, the officers were granted anonymity so they could speak frankly about the debates they have had and have heard. The stances that emerged are anything but uniform, although all seem colored by deep concern over the quality of civil-military relations, and the way ahead in Iraq.
The discussions often flare with anger, particularly among many midlevel officers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan and face the prospect of additional tours of duty.
"This is about the moral bankruptcy of general officers who lived through the Vietnam era yet refused to advise our civilian leadership properly," said one Army major in the Special Forces who has served two combat tours. "I can only hope that my generation does better someday."
An Army major who is an intelligence specialist said: "The history I will take away from this is that the current crop of generals failed to stand up and say, 'We cannot do this mission.' They confused the cultural can-do attitude with their responsibilities as leaders to delay the start of the war until we had an adequate force. I think the backlash against the general officers will be seen in the resignation of officers" who might otherwise have stayed in uniform.

With Ethics in Question, GOP Seeks Answers
By Shailagh Murray and Chris Cillizza
Washinton Post, 23 April 2006
The ethical furnace keeps getting hotter for House Republicans. Even Rep. Tom Reynolds, who heads the GOP reelection effort, is feeling some heat.
The four-term New Yorker is being targeted by a liberal watchdog group, New Yorkers for a Cleaner Congress, for taking "more lobbyist-funded luxury trips outside of western New York in the last three years than he has returned home to western New York." The group singles out jaunts to Pebble Beach, Calif., by Reynolds that have totaled $205,185 over five years.
Reynolds's office dismissed the criticism as politically motivated. "Just like the national Democratic Party, Jack Davis and his friends can't put forth any positive ideas, so instead they have to run negative ads and spread misinformation," said L.D. Platt, spokesman for Reynolds, referring to his boss's Democratic opponent.
Republicans are increasingly nervous about their ability to hold the House in November, and not only because of the sour national mood over the war in Iraq and rising gas prices. Increasingly, local media and political opponents are putting the ethics of GOP House candidates under a microscope.
A Youngstown newspaper found that Charles Blasdel, the GOP front-runner in an open-seat race in Ohio and a financial adviser by profession, has about $50,000 in delinquent business taxes. Rick O'Donnell, who is seeking an open seat in Colorado, has drawn fire from Denver newspapers for including Environmental Protection Agency administrator Stephen L. Johnson's title on a fundraising invitation -- a violation of the Hatch Act. The event drew oil and gas officials with business before the EPA.
Ten-term Pennsylvania Rep. Curt Weldon's close ties to lobbyists are getting a close look, while Rep. John Sweeney of New York has drawn flak for taking a ski trip to Utah with lobbyists.
Carl Forti, spokesman for the National Republican Campaign Committee, which Reynolds leads, said the Duke Cunningham corruption case appears to have stirred a hornet's nest. "Anytime a member of Congress is going to jail, it's news," Forti said.