All In On Hearts And Minds

Um, OK...

The Pentagon is replacing the top American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, less than a year after he took over, marking a major overhaul in military leadership of a war that has presented President Obama with a worsening national security challenge.

Defense officials said that General McKiernan was removed because of what they described as a conventional approach to what has become one of the most complicated military challenges in American history. He is to be replaced by Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, a former commander of the Joint Special Operations Command who recently ran all special operations in Iraq.

The decision reflects a belief that the war in Afghanistan has grown so complex that it needs a commander drawn from the military’s unconventional warfare branch.

In other words, more of the rise of the counterinsurgents.

This is a big deal. McKiernan was running the biggest national security challenge of the young Administration, and Obama might have felt he needed his own man in there. But it really looks like the war effort has been handed over to the counterinsurgents, with David Petraeus in the lead (Stanley McChrystal, the new general, was essentially the right-hand man for Petraeus in Iraq). At this point, it's important to understand the implications of that. A counter-insurgency strategy is designed to break the links between insurgents and the local population by bringing the locals around to the side of the dominant authority. This is nothing new, by the way - they called it "winning hearts and minds" back in Vietnam. And then as now, the dominant authority, behind the US military, was an illusion of a central government. The Diem and Thieu governments in Vietnam were basically kleptocracies, and the public gradually moved away from them. In Afghanistan, public officials facilitate the drug trade and the central government is hopelessly corrupt. Hamid Karzai has no legitimacy, and has recently taken to offering olive branches to warlords to try and restore it. At some point, you must offer people something beyond endless occupation. If they have no faith in the government to provide services, all the counter-insurgency in the world won't counteract a member of the Taliban offering goods. So COIN must have something attractive at its end, and right now I don't see that being the case in Afghanistan.

There's also this fun bit of McChrystal's record:

One spot on his generally sterling military record came in 2007, when a Pentagon investigation into the accidental shooting death in 2004 of Cpl. Pat Tillman by fellow Army Rangers in Afghanistan held General McChrystal accountable for inaccurate information provided by Corporal Tillman’s unit in recommending him for a Silver Star.

The information wrongly suggested that Corporal Tillman, a professional football player whose decision to enlist in the Army after the Sept. 11 attacks drew national attention, had been killed by enemy fire.

McChrystal also sought a "declaration of victory" over Al Qaeda in Iraq back in October 2007. Hopefully the same kind of rose-colored assessment won't take root in Afghanistan.

Is There A Sporting Competition Today?

Before I sit down to another orgy of American football excess, I wanted to note this weird story claiming that the NFL is getting away from using military metaphors to describe the sport.

In a little-discussed shift in recent years, the NFL has moved away from depicting its games in military terms. While the league continues to embrace the military as an entity, inviting Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of Central Command, to make the Super Bowl's opening coin toss and having the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds perform a pregame flyover at Raymond James Stadium, the NFL no longer endorses using military terminology to describe its contests.

It is inappropriate, league officials say, to do so at a time when American forces are fighting two wars halfway around the globe.

"It's a matter of common sense," NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said as he stood outside the stadium the other day.

The same is true at NFL Films, an arm of the league that perpetuated for decades the image of football as controlled warfare by producing movies glorifying the game's violence with phrases like "linebacker search and destroy." In recent years the company's president, Steve Sabol, ordered all allusions to war be removed from its new films.

"I don't think you will ever see those references coming back," he said. "They won't be back in our scripts, certainly not in my lifetime."

Speaking as (in all likelihood) the only person in the political blogosphere who has worked for Steve Sabol and NFL Films, I can say unequivocally that he's full of shit. He never read a script in the time I was there, let alone make changes, and I'm virtually certain that continues today. Plus the script (which Sabol is probably lying about) is immaterial and inescapable; most of the combat-like terminology is embedded into the language of football (offense, defense, blitz, ground game, long bomb, etc.) It's the way in which the games are filmed, in super slo-mo with low angles, that glorifies and mythologizes and provides the lizard brain connections to war.

On a related note, do read Marcy Wheeler's great post about an actual warrior and former Arizona Cardinal, whose death was used by the military as a propaganda tool through deliberate lies. This is Pat Tillman's Super Bowl.

Enjoy the game.

Connect The Dots

Apparently Ron Fournier has been shaking up the AP, trying to get its reporters to put on a rhetorical leather jacket, to pepper their factual stories with cutting language and tell-it-like-it-is panache. Unfortunately, because reporters have been drilled to not have opinions (and most of them don't), they're using this directive to parrot right-wing spin and fuck up wire service stories. I don't want to tar all journalists here, but having worked in newsrooms, there's a lot of laziness, as they've come to rely on their fax blasts and the sweet nothings their sources tell them. When Fournier says "have a mind of your own!" the problem is they don't, so all it does is give them carte blanche to more directly play out their tired, rigid narratives, only now from the perch of news instead of opinion.

As for Fournier, when he exhorted his charges to tell it like it is, he must have meant this:

Karl Rove exchanged e-mails about Pat Tillman with Associated Press reporter Ron Fournier, under the subject line "H-E-R-O." In response to Mr. Fournier's e-mail, Mr. Rove asked, "How does our country continue to produce men and women like this," to which Mr. Fournier replied, "The Lord creates men and women like this all over the world. But only the great and free countries allow them to flourish. Keep up the fight."

Never mind it though, because he's very sorry about it. That's OK, because it gave us all the context we needed.

(Incidentally, that above quote came from a House Oversight Committee report on the Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch cases, which was an object lesson on how the Bush Administration handles controversy - apparently nobody remembers anything about these events, owing to as the executive summary puts it "a universal lack of recall." Another in a long line of convenient memory losses.

The Tillman Hearing

I don't have C-SPAN 3, so I am unable to watch the Rumsfeld/Myers/Abizaid hearing on Pat Tillman's death. The Gavel has an early writeup:

Chairman Waxman: “Much of our focus will be on a ‘Personal For’ message, also known as a ‘P4,’ that Major General Stanley McChrystal sent on April 29, 2004. This P4 alerted his superiors that despite press reports that Corporal Tillman died fighting the enemy, it was ‘highly possible that Corporal Tillman was killed by friendly fire.’ Three officers received this P4 report: Lt. General Kensinger, General Abizaid, and General Brown… The Committee did issue a subpoena to General Kensinger earlier this week, but U.S. Marshals have been unable to locate or serve him.”

What now? A General, the same guy who was officially censured for his role in covering up the facts of Tillman's death, the guy the Army is trying to make the scapegoat, CANNOT BE FOUND? Bizarre. I expect a subpoena to be served.

Meanwhile, Rummy didn't recall.

Former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld defended himself and took no personal responsibility Wednesday for the military's bungled response to Army Ranger Pat Tillman's friendly-fire death in Afghanistan.

Rumsfeld, in his first public appearance on Capitol Hill since President Bush replaced him with Robert Gates late last year, reiterated previous testimony to investigators that he didn't have early knowledge that Tillman was cut down by fellow Rangers, not by enemy militia, as was initially claimed.

He told a House committee hearing that he'd always impressed upon Pentagon underlings the importance of telling the truth.

''Early in my tenure as secretary of defense, I wrote a memo for the men and women of the Department of Defense,'' Rumsfeld told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. ''You will note that principle number one -- the very first -- was: 'Do nothing that could raise questions about the credibility of DOD.' ''

Rumsfeld gave the committee a copy of that memo.

The memo apparently told officers "to tell the truth or give the appearance of telling the truth". Because that's what it's all about. Appearances. By the way, I'm supposed to believe that because a MEMO was sent, everything was OK?

This is a textbook example of the military's tendency to secrecy and propaganda during wartime. Message control is favored well above the truth. And so the integrity of the government is called into question. And Rummy's appearance is doing nothing to improve that image.

Mr. Rumsfeld Goes To Washington

After originally saying he would not testify to the House Oversight Government Reform Committee in the Pat Tillman case, Donald Rumsfeld had a change of heart. This should be a REALLY interesting morning.

In a late breaking development, Secretary Rumsfeld will appear before the Oversight Committee tomorrow, Wednesday, August 1, 2007, at 10:00 a.m. in 2154 Rayburn House Office Building.

The Committee is holding a hearing entitled "The Tillman Fratricide: What the Leadership of the Defense Department Knew." The hearing will examine what senior Defense Department officials knew about U.S. Army Corporal Patrick Tillman's death by fratricide.

The following witnesses will testify:

The Honorable Donald Rumsfeld
Former Secretary of Defense

Gen. Richard B. Myers (Retired)
Former Chair, Joint Chiefs of Staff

Gen. John P. Abizaid (Retired)
Former Commander, U.S. Central Command

Gen. Bryan Douglas Brown (Retired)
Former Commander, U.S. Special Operations Command

Lt. Gen. Philip R. Kensinger, Jr. (Retired)*
(supboena issued/not confirmed)
Former Commander, U.S. Army Special Operations Command

I may experiment with liveblogging this one. Sure, Rummy will just go off on known knowns and unknown unknowns and "I don't recalls," but there's a lot of information he'll have to deny, and Henry Waxman is cagey as hell. He made mincemeat of Paul Bremer and I would expect nothing less here.

Your Liberal Media

We've just come through a week where the Attorney General outright lied to Congress, where Senate leaders called for a special prosecutor to investigate him on charges of perjury, where even the New York Times has called for Abu G's impeachment if the Solicitor General fails to appoint a special prosecutor, where two members of the executive branch have been found in contempt of Congress, where Iraq appears to be slipping into a deep political crisis and a potential fracturing, to the extent that Nouri al-Maliki may be ready to demand Gen. Petraeus' ouster, where new evidence shows that Pat Tillman may have been killed for his political views, where this morning's paper brings us news of massive data mining on a scale that has yet to be disclosed:

To put this into perspective, remember that the White House has been willing to go to the public and make a positive argument for certain surveillance procedures (notably evasion of the FISA Court strictures) which appear to be illegal on their face. This must be much more serious and apparently something all but the most ravenous Bush authoritarians would never accept. It is supposedly no longer even happening and hasn't been for a few years. So disclosing it could not jeopardize a program. The only reason that suggests itself is that the political and legal consequences of disclosure are too grave to allow.

...with all of this stuff going on, Meet the Press had on this panel of the punditocracy...

NBC's "Meet the Press'' - Dan Balz and Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post, Andrea Mitchell and Chuck Todd of NBC News, Ron Brownstein of The Los Angeles Times and John Harwood of CNBC.

...and spent at least the first half-hour on the Hillary/Obama spat. Now, I've written about that too, but clearly it's not the only thing that's happened this week. Tim Russert opened the report with "what a week this has been!!!" and he looked almost ready to fall off his chair, hyperventilating at the prospect of getting to talk about Hillary for the next 18 months.

These are the least serious people in America, who are passing themselves off as the most serious people.

UPDATE: I also saw this Cokie Roberts/David Gergen exchange where Cokie, the ultimate concern troll, warns against Democrats moving leftward because "that is going to be a biiiiig problem for them 'just like it was in Vietnam.'" This is typical bias from the Washington Elites, who live in a total bubble and have no idea what the mood in the nation is like. Fareed Zakaria, who must get out more, first of all corrected that "way to the left" is not where any of the likely 2008 Democratic nominees are, and furthermore, distance from Mr. 28% Bush is unbelievably popular in the country. Digby says it best:

Roberts and Gergen are exalted Village elders. Roberts is supposedly a representative of "Democratic centrists" and Gergen a representative of "Republican centrists" but they are both really representatives of the establishment that represents the interests and prejudices of The Village. "The people" are abstract concepts they use in various ways to bolster their central argument that power is best left in the hands of "sensible" elders like themselves. When the people "speak" they are either "Real Americans" asserting their desire that sensible elders lead us out of the wilderness or dirty hippies who want to take the country into perdition.

If we do nothing else, we should ensure that the Democratic candidates pay no attention to these gasbags. That's not to say they shouldn't pay attention to the actual press narratives and the stereotypes that will inevitably emerge. But the punditocrisy should be shunned and ignored. They are promoting their own interests and those interests are always hostile to Democrats, who by dint of their more diverse coalition of Americans, are simply not as willing to bow down to the establishment. They are effectively agents of the Republican party simply because that is the party of authoritarian followers who will put their trust in the elite village elders. Democrats will never win by catering to them. Indeed, it is in our best interest to treat them as the hostile force they are --- it certainly didn't help to try to appease them with "centrism" as the last 20 years have proven in spades. Look at what they and the Republicans have done.

3 Bullets To The Head

This is unbelievable stuff (via):

Army medical examiners were suspicious about the close proximity of the three bullet holes in Pat Tillman’s forehead and tried without success to get authorities to investigate whether the former NFL player’s death amounted to a crime, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

“The medical evidence did not match up with the, with the scenario as described,” a doctor who examined Tillman’s body after he was killed on the battlefield in Afghanistan in 2004 told investigators.

The doctors - whose names were blacked out - said that the bullet holes were so close together that it appeared the Army Ranger was cut down by an M-16 fired from a mere 10 yards or so away.

This is not dead solid evidence that Tillman was murdered, but it certainly casts some doubt on the "friendly fire" cover story, which was in itself the second story after a "he was attacking Taliban troops" cover story. And there's more to contemplate:

_ In his last words moments before he was killed, Tillman snapped at a panicky comrade under fire to shut up and stop “sniveling.”

_ Army attorneys sent each other congratulatory e-mails for keeping criminal investigators at bay as the Army conducted an internal friendly-fire investigation that resulted in administrative, or non-criminal, punishments.

_ The three-star general who kept the truth about Tillman’s death from his family and the public told investigators some 70 times that he had a bad memory and couldn’t recall details of his actions.

_ No evidence at all of enemy fire was found at the scene - no one was hit by enemy fire, nor was any government equipment struck.

That three-star general is likely to be demoted. But Tillman's death became a nationwide rallying cry for the Army, at the highest levels, including the White House. They're not saying much about what they knew at the time about Tillman's death, citing... wait for it... executive privilege.

This isn't definitive evidence that Tillman was silenced because he was turning against the war. And there's nothing to suggest that any premeditation existed at levels above that of his platoon, though they may have capitalized off of the death.

But the doubt this raises, especially because the first story was proven wrong and the Army has proven themselves willing of a cover-up in the case, is striking. I didn't think I could be shocked anymore.

Just Add It Onto The Lie Pile

I'm watching this Pat Tillman/Jessica Lynch hearing and it's disgusting. The Gavel has some clips from Tillman's brother, Lynch, and Henry Waxman.

The military used both of these deaths as public relations opportunities, in Tillman's case hiding the evidence that the incident was friendly fire, and in Lynch's case holding up her rescue a day until video services could be arranged so they could tape the whole thing.

There was no need to lie about fratricide; nobody would have thought any less of Tillman. But the military wanted a clean hero story they could sell to the public and keep them on the side of war, so they lied, including to Tillman's own family (his brother was powerful today). A specialist and eyewitness to the fratricide is testifying right now that he was essentially threatened that there would be consequences if he ever told the family that it was a friendly fire death.

Hiding the evidence is the modus operandi of a military at war.

UPDATE: It's important to mention just what Kevin Tillman asserted:

Pat Tillman's brother accused the military Tuesday of "intentional falsehoods" and "deliberate and careful misrepresentations" in initially portraying the football star's death in Afghanistan as the result of heroic engagement with the enemy instead of friendly fire.

"We believe this narrative was intended to deceive the family but more importantly the American public," Kevin Tillman told a hearing of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee that was also looking at how the military portrayed the rescue of Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch.

"Revealing that Pat's death was a (friendly fire) fratricide would have been yet another political disaster in a month of political disasters ... so the truth needed to be suppressed," said Tillman, who was in a convoy behind his brother when the incident happened three years ago but didn't see it.

Subpoena Power

Democrats in the House and Senate have requested additional documents about the US Attorney activities. Did I say requested? I mean demanded. Not only do they want redacted and withheld documents related to the purge, but they want to hear more about the strange case in Wisconsin, where an aide to Gov. Jim Doyle was jailed by the US Attorney in the region right before the 2006 Election, and subsequently hastily dismissed on the basis of "very thin" evidence. Here's part of Leahy and Schumer's letter:

We are concerned whether or not politics may have played a role in a case brought by Stephen Biskupic, the United States attorney based in Milwaukee, against Georgia Thompson, formerly an official in the administration of Wisconsin's Democratic governor. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals was reportedly so troubled by the insufficiency of the evidence against Ms. Thompson that it made the unusual decision to issue an order reversing Ms. Thompson's conviction and releasing her from custody immediately after oral arguments in her appeal.

They also go into the fact that Wisconsin voter fraud cases suddenly shot up right after the counselor to the President claimed that Bush himself complained about a lack of voter fraud cases in the state. The whole myth of voter fraud is well-documented; it's a phantom that allows Republicans to push political cases (by the way, the wheels of this are greased by those fatalists on the Left who believe that every election is doomed because Karl Rove can flip a switch and change the voting outcomes from a master command center. What suffers is electoral confidence, which allows Republicans to make these bullshit claims which have little or no evidentiary basis).

I find it interesting that the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee are already looking into the Biskupic situation. It shows that they understand how the real scandal in this case may be the US Attorneys who have NOT been fired, rather than the ones who have (although they shouldn't be neglected either). Indeed, do you know who Alberto Gonzales picked just today to be his new chief of staff? The US Attorney for Connecticut.

It appears that the Justice Department is going to fight the release of these documents. I don't know who'll be doing the fighting, as Gonzales is deeply immersed in "Cover-Yer-Ass-Lie-Telling School" somewhere in a Washington gym, where he's hitting the heavy bag with a picture of Patrick Leahy taped up to the mirror. But you knew that, at some point, the White House would have to stonewall. Something out there is too incriminating. They've been skewering federal law enforcement for years. It's only catching up with them now because of an excess of "D's" on Capitol Hill.

Meanwhile, Henry Waxman's going to hold hearings on the disinformation campaigns by the miltary over Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch.

Isn't the majority just DIFFERENT?

The Lies of George W. Bush

Bush defenders usually explain away his truthfulness by saying he is very careful NOT to lie, which in many ways is more damning. But I'd like to see them spin their way out of this:

The Bush administration has been trying to force Congress to abandon its support for an Iraq withdrawal time line by claiming that a “clean” Iraq spending bill must be signed by mid-April or U.S. troops will suffer. The Hill reported, the Pentagon and the White House have been “sounding alarms and sketching worst-case scenarios if Congress does not pass the 2007 supplemental by April 15.” [...]

Meanwhile, Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) and others have been arguing that Bush is wrong, and that funds won’t dry up until June, giving plenty of time for negotiations [...]

Now we know who’s right. A new report from the Congressional Research Service makes clear that Bush’s deadline is completely fabricated:

In a memo to the Senate Budget Committee dated Wednesday, the congressional analysts said the Army has enough money in its existing budget to fund operations and maintenance through the end of May — about $52.6 billion. If additional transfer authority is tapped, subject to Congress approving a reprogramming request, the Army would have enough funds to make it through nearly two additional months, or toward the end of July. Using all of its transfer authority, the Army could have as much as $60.1 billion available.

That was such obvious bullshit, that a department with the largest share of the federal budget wouldn't be able to scrounge up the funding to get the troops bullets. Bush can justify his fearmongering by saying he was specifically talking about non-transferable funds or something, but the implication is there.

Then there's this, which is more about the lies of the military brass, with Bush as the cherry on top:

Just seven days after Pat Tillman's death, a top general warned there were strong indications that it was friendly fire and President Bush might embarrass himself if he said the NFL star-turned-soldier died in an ambush, according to a memo obtained by The Associated Press.

It was not until a month afterward that the Pentagon told the public and grieving family members the truth — that Tillman was mistakenly killed in Afghanistan by his comrades.

The memo reinforces suspicions that the Pentagon was more concerned with sparing officials from embarrassment than with leveling with Tillman's family.

Bush never quite made mention of how Tillman died, but he didn't exactly neglect to invite the implication either. It's one of those "technically true, operationally false" statements on which this whole Presidency hangs.