An Ugly Coverup Revealed

The Associated Press reported on Friday that the United States Military lied to us (again). But more importantly, they lied to the families of the fallen. It was a blatant lie when the military reported that five Soldiers were killed "defending their positions" in that January 20 raid on the Iraqi provisional government facility in Karbala. Only one soldier died at the scene.

Four were kidnapped and executed, shot in the head, their bodies recovered 25 miles away.

Really, I want to rant and rage about this, but I am just too sickened. I am disgusted by a military culture that has so soon forgotten the lessons of Vietnam and the lies that trashed the Honor Code. I am sickened by the fact that the men who are in the power positions now and who are sanctioning the lying - were the junior officers who were lied to during that war. I am mad as hell that I dedicated 20 years of my life to supporting my husband (and my brother) as they picked up the tattered remnants of the Honor Code and undertook the arduous task of stitching it back together, bit by bit. I am angry that the sacrifices we made are so cynically discounted and dismissed. I am furious that the military it took men and women of honor thirty years to restore has been broken and crassly tossed aside in such short order.

Right now, I feel like a world-class chump.

I will be back ranting soon enough. But for the moment, I am simply too sickened and saddened by the actions of those we have been asked to place our trust in "one last time" that I can't focus the outrage. I just have to weep.

From the story linked:

"The precision of the attack, the equipment used and the possible use of explosives to destroy the military vehicles in the compound suggests that the attack was well rehearsed prior to execution," said Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, spokesman for Multi-National Division-Baghdad."The attackers went straight to where Americans were located in the provincial government facility, bypassing the Iraqi police in the compound," he said. "We are looking at all the evidence to determine who or what was responsible for the breakdown in security at the compound and the perpetration of the assault."

The Karbala raid, as explained by the Iraqi and American officials, began after nightfall on Jan. 20, while American military officers were meeting with their Iraqi counterparts on the main floor of the Provisional Joint Coordination Center in Karbala.

[SNIP]

"The precision of the attack, the equipment used and the possible use of explosives to destroy the military vehicles in the compound suggests that the attack was well rehearsed prior to execution," said Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, spokesman for Multi-National Division-Baghdad.

"The attackers went straight to where Americans were located in the provincial government facility, bypassing the Iraqi police in the compound," he said. "We are looking at all the evidence to determine who or what was responsible for the breakdown in security at the compound and the perpetration of the assault."

The Karbala raid, as explained by the Iraqi and American officials, began after nightfall on Jan. 20, while American military officers were meeting with their Iraqi counterparts on the main floor of the Provisional Joint Coordination Center in Karbala.

[SNIP]

The Defense Department has released the names of troops killed Jan. 20 but clearly identified only one as being killed because of the sneak attack.

Capt. Brian S. Freeman, 31, of Temecula, Calif., "died of wounds suffered when his meeting area came under attack by mortar and small arms fire." Freeman was assigned to the 412th Civil Affairs Battalion, Whitehall, Ohio.

The only other troops killed that day in that region of Iraq were four Army soldiers said to have been "ambushed while conducting dismounted operations" in Karbala.

The four were identified as 1st Lt. Jacob N. Fritz, 25, of Verdon, Neb.; Spc. Johnathan B. Chism, 22, of Prairieville, La.; Pfc. Shawn P. Falter, 25, of Homer, N.Y., and Pvt. Johnathon M. Millican, 20, of Trafford, Ala. All were with the 2nd Battalion, 377th Parachute Field Artillery Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, of Fort Richardson, Alaska

Their memory deserves the truth; but when our government lied to cover up the details of their deaths, they dishonored their service, their sacrifice and their memory.

I have to ask: How in the hell can we be asked to trust them again, with the real lives of real Americans, when they don't trust us with the truth?

The Not-So-Long Gray Line

You know how I'm always going on about the fragility of the Honor Code and the importance of the officer corps? I am in good company. Please take a few moments and read the following op-ed from the June 28, 2005 New York Times. I present it in it's entirety.

****************************************

By LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV
Op-Ed Contributor
Published: June 28, 2005

Los Angeles

JUNE is the month in which West Point celebrates the commissioning of its graduating class and prepares to accept a new group of candidates eager to embrace the arduous strictures of the world's most prestigious military academy. But it can also be a cruel month, because West Pointers five years removed from graduation have fulfilled their obligations and can resign.

My class, that of 1969, set a record with more than 50 percent resigning within a few years of completing the service commitment. (My father's class, 1945, the one that "missed" World War II, was considered to be the previous record-holder, with about 25 percent resigning before they reached the 20 years of service entitling them to full retirement benefits.)

And now, from what I've heard from friends still in the military and during the two years I spent reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan, it seems we may be on the verge of a similar exodus of officers. The annual resignation rate of Army lieutenants and captains rose to 9 percent last year, the highest since before the Sept. 11 attacks. And in May, The Los Angeles Times reported on "an undercurrent of discontent within the Army's young officer corps that the Pentagon's statistics do not yet capture."

I'm not surprised. In 1975, I received a foundation grant to write reports on why such a large percentage of my class had resigned. This money would have been better spent studying the emerging appeal of Scientology, because a single word answered the question: Vietnam.

Yet my classmates were disillusioned with more than being sent to fight an unpopular war. When we became cadets, we were taught that the academy's honor code was what separated West Point from a mere college. This was a little hard to believe at first, because the code seemed so simple; you pledged that you would not lie, cheat or steal, and that you would not tolerate those who did. We were taught that in combat, lies could kill.

But the honor code was not just a way to fight a better war. In the Army, soldiers are given few rights, grave responsibilities, and lots and lots of power. The honor code serves as the Bill of Rights of the Army, protecting soldiers from betraying one another and the rest of us from their terrifying power to destroy. It is all that stands between an army and tyranny.

However, the honor code broke down before our eyes as staff and faculty jobs at West Point began filling with officers returning from Vietnam. Some had covered their uniforms with bogus medals and made their careers with lies - inflating body counts, ignoring drug abuse, turning a blind eye to racial discrimination, and worst of all, telling everyone above them in the chain of command that we were winning a war they knew we were losing. The lies became embedded in the curriculum of the academy, and finally in its moral DNA.

By the time we were seniors, honor court verdicts could be fixed, and there was organized cheating in some units. A few years later, nearly an entire West Point class was implicated in cheating on an engineering exam; the breakdown was complete.

The mistake the Army made then is the same mistake it is making now: how can you educate a group of handpicked students at one of the best universities in the world and then treat them as if they are too stupid to know when they have been told a lie?
I've seen the results firsthand. I have met many lieutenants who have served in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq, practically back to back. While everyone in a combat zone is risking his or her life, these junior officers are the ones leading foot patrols and convoys several times a day. Recruiting enough privates for the endless combat rotations is a problem the Army may gamble its way out of with enough money and a struggling economy. But nothing can compensate for losing the combat-hardened junior officers.

In the fall of 2003 I was embedded with the 101st Airborne Division in northern Iraq, and its West Point lieutenants were among the most gung-ho soldiers I have ever encountered, yet most were already talking about getting out of the Army. I talked late into one night with a muscular first lieutenant with a shaved head and a no-nonsense manner who had stacks of Foreign Affairs, The New Yorker and The Atlantic under his bunk. He had served in Bosnia and Afghanistan, and he was disgusted with what he had seen in Iraq by December 2003.

I feel like politicians have created a difficult situation for us," he told me. "I know I'm going to be coming back here about a year from now. I want to get married. I want to have a life. But I feel like if I get out when my commitment is up, who's going to be coming here in my place? I feel this obligation to see it through, but everybody over here knows we're just targets. Sooner or later, your luck's going to run out."

At the time, he was commanding three vehicle convoys a day down a treacherous road to pick up hot food for his troops from the civilian contractors who never left their company's "dining facility" about five miles away. He walked daily patrols through the old city of Mosul, a hotbed of insurgent activity that erupted in violence after the 101st left it last year. The Army will need this lieutenant 20 years from now when he could be a colonel, or 30 years from now when he could have four stars on his collar. But I doubt he will be in uniform long enough to make captain.

One cold night a week later, I sat on a stack of sandbags 50 feet from the Syrian border with another West Point lieutenant; he, too, was planning to leave the Army. "I love going out on the border and chasing down the bad guys," he told me as he dragged on a cigarette. "We've got a guy making runs across the border from Syria in a white Toyota pickup who we've been trying to catch for two months; we call him the jackrabbit.

"He gets away from us every time, and I really admire the guy. But when we catch him, there'll be somebody else right behind him. What's the use? Guys are dying, for what?"

A couple of weeks ago, I got an e-mail message from another West Point lieutenant; he was writing from a laptop in a bunker somewhere in Iraq. "I'm getting out as soon as I can," he wrote. "Everyone I know plans on getting out, with a few exceptions. What have you got to look forward to? If you come back from a tour of getting the job done in war, it's to a battalion commander who cares more about the shine on your boots and how your trucks are parked in the motor pool than about the fitness of your unit for war."

There was a time when the Army did not have a problem retaining young leaders - men like Dwight Eisenhower, George Patton, George Marshall, Omar Bradley and my grandfather, Lucian K. Truscott Jr. Having endured the horrors of World War I trenches, these men did not run headlong out of the Army in the 1920's and 30's when nobody wanted to think of the military, much less pay for it. They had made a pact with each other and with their country, and all sides were going to keep it.

When members of the West Point class of 1969 and other young officers resigned nearly en masse in the mid-1970's because of Vietnam, Washington had a fix. Way too late, and with no enthusiasm, the politicians pulled out of Vietnam, ended the draft and instituted the "all volunteer" military, offering large increases in pay and benefits. Now, however, the Pentagon has run out of fixes; the only choices appear to be going back to the draft or scaling back our military ambitions.

The problem the Army created in Vietnam has never really been solved. If you keep faith with soldiers and tell them the truth even when it threatens their beliefs, you run the risk of losing them. But if you peddle cleverly manipulated talking points to people who trust you not to lie, you won't merely lose them, you'll break their hearts.

The New Militarism - part one in a continuing series

On another blog, on an active discussion thread, I was asked about the rising militarism that seems to have the nation in a fever-grip. And it isn't just the general population; it is infecting the junior ranks, both enlisted and officer. The "Hoo-Ah!!!" culture is frightening to people like me, who associate service more with a quiet dignity than swaggering macho. This new military is hardly recognizable to me, and I am totally a product of the DoD. I was born on a Navy base and lived the military life until my husband retired in 2001. I still shop on base. I even played Army a bit myself, in ROTC and the Reserves for a few minutes. I have nibbled at the edges of the topic, but I haven't actually bitten into the cookie. Until now. The first thing I realized was that the topic is too complex to sum up in a single post, so this is the first in a series. (And it's all Keith G's fault.)

I am a hell of a person to come out against the emergence of a professional warrior class. Given my backstory, you would think I would take just the opposite position. But that's the thing. When you have a certain segment of your population heavily armed and trained to kill, what do you want? Troops with composure, cool-headedness and quiet dignity; or swaggering macho?

Every military at every moment of it's existence is mere steps away from tyranny over the populace it was raised to protect from outside enemies. The only thing that stands between a military and tyranny over the populace is the Honor Code.

The issue of rising militarism is not only frightening, it is extremely complex. Where to even start...

Let's start with the fact that rising militarism is one of the 14 hallmarks of fascism as put forth by Professor Laurence Britt.

Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

This is coming to pass, and it has the officers who have recently retired and those whose careers are winding down uneasy. Aplomb and composure have been pushed aside by chest-thumping bravado.

About a month ago, I was in an Officers Club drinking with my cousin and a couple of my husbands friends when I said something along the lines that when the members of the current administration read 1984 they didn't read a warning of encroaching authoritarianism, they read it as an ops manual.

One of my husbands friends said it was worse than that, the butter-bars just out of OCS were reading Starship Troopers and at least whalf of them weren't getting the irony. He told of junior officers who disdain anyone who hasn't served and think that limiting citizenship and the vote to veterans is just a splendid notion, an idea whose time has come. I have been reading some things that indicate an emergence of this sentiment when I pop in over at the most excellent Intel-Dump web site, and the vets and active duty personnel who inhabit that forum don't like it any more than I do. Our nephew is a 1 Lt. in the USAF (following in his favorite uncles footsteps) and he is uncomfortable too. He thinks the wrong people are staying in and the "right" ones are getting out. Our nephew has planned on a USAF career since he was 6 and came to visit us at Davis-Monthan and fell in love with A-10's. He left the academy after one year because of the evangelical bent it has taken on, and now will probably leave the service after five because of the turn the military is taking.

I can feel the Honor Code crumbling beneath my feet, and it scares the holy hell out of me. At the same time the service is being glamorized by a bunch of civilians who think it's swell, as long as they ain't the ones in uniform; the quality of the forces is being eroded with waivered troops. Fully 17% of the troops recruited to fulfill the FY 2006 goals were accepted on waivers. This is a frightening fact. Troops who would not have merited fifteen minutes of the recruiters time even five years ago are being recruited actively and accepted for service, even when recruiters have to cheat, and lie to both the recruits and the Army. Lets do the math, shall we? 80,000 troops X 17% is 13,500 soldiers. Roughly a division. An entire division of iffy troops, many of them with criminal records and mental health issues.

But it gets even better. The officer corp is hemmorhaging seasoned officers at an alarming rate. Every branch has vacancies in the officer corps, but the Army is especially hard hit. The regular Army is short 3500 officers throughout the ranks, and the Army Reserves are short nearly 11,000 officers in the Lieutenant and Captain ranks alone.

So we essentially have an entire division of heavily armed hinky troops who have been trained to kill, and there is no one to lead them. Did these mother fuckers not read the end of Lord of the Flies?

Scared much now?

The military doesn't want to be a police force. They are the military and this is not Singapore. There are stark differences between the two, and the military officers in my circle don't want to blur the lines between them. I learned from a very pissed off active-duty JAG officer about the changes to the Insurrection Acts and Posse Comitatus provisions that were buried in the Defense Authorization Act several days before Leahy made it an issue and I got around to writing about it.

A final thought before I close this post and open it up to discussion...I cringe when I hear my Dad and his fellow WWII vets refered to as the greatest generation. They were the ones present and draftable when history called on them, and in that circumstance, any generation would have similarly stepped up.

What makes them pretty special, however, is how they conducted themselves afterward. They put away their uniforms, picked up their lunchboxes and bought ranch houses and Fords and life insurance; for the most part they did a decent job of raising four million kids and building an economy that had been practically third-world at the start of the war.

My life, spanning 4 decades of active duty, is highly unusual. Only about 2% serve period, and the percentage of those who stay in until retirement like my father, husband and brother all chose to do is not that high. But it gives me a different perspective of the world and our place in it. I'm not an expert on the military or foreign policy by anyone's measure, I just aim to offer a glimpse through a different lens.

Military Times Publishing Group to call for Rumsfeld's ouster

On Monday, all four publications of the Military Times group will call for the ouster of Donald Rumsfeld. Details are sketchy at this point, but this is significant and could sway conservative voters.

As for me, I am feeling very positive about the military that has been part of my life since the moment I was born, on a Navy base.

I have been concerned about the state of health of the Honor Code for some time, as anyone who has read this blog knows. Now I'm breathing easier. The officers of our military will not allow a Tiannanmen Square to happen here.

Worst. SecDef. Ever.

I get to hear some pretty good rants, especially when my brother is in town and he and my husband get together. Take them to a bar and give them a couple of beers and a pool table, and sit back and listen. Hoo boy. Did they tear Rummy a new asshole last weekend.

Quick - how many previous SecDefs' can you recall? I can come up with a couple that I recall because they were horrible - Robert MacNamara and Louis Johnson - and two from the Clinton administration - Les Aspen, because he passed away soon after leaving the post, and William Cohen because Bill Clinton tapped a Republican. There was another one, but without using Google, his name escapes me. The success of a Secretary of Defense is measured by how quickly he passes from memory and into the footnotes of history.

But who among us can honestly say that we will ever forget Rumsfeld? He has long since surpassed MacNamara in every area - he is more craven and more vitriolic and a bigger technocrat than MacNamara ever though about being. He has less thought for our troops and the mission he has asked them to complete.

I said it. Rummy is the worst SecDef in our history. Now I will back it up.

Rumsfeld has removed every bit of counterbalance in his way. Remember General Shinseki? The man who saw this Iraq fiasco coming, and was fired for saying so? The Pentagon climate is fetid, the atmosphere of command has been poisoned. He is great at bureaucratic knife-fights, but he is lousy at running Defense. His management style is authoritarian and rigid and those who come into his office to tell him news he does not want to hear learn quickly not to make that mistake again. Accountability is non-existant. Watch a press conference. He will answer the easy questions, usually with an insult or two. But ask him a tough question, and he shoves a uniformed officer in front of the mike and steps aside for a moment.

The Secretary of Defense is the civilian authority over evey man and woman in uniform, from the lowliest grunt to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the SecDef answers only to the president.

Leadership is supposed to mean that the leader has penultimate authority and uses it judiciously; for everything, good and bad, rests on the shoulders of the leader, the man in charge. This man in charge has some strange notions about how the military works. Instead of sober analysis, he decides on a course that will be taken and then those beneath him are charged with first justifying his decision, then executing it. Instead of listing to those professional soldiers at his avail, he surrounds himself with yes-men who know better yet disgrace their uniforms by backing his plays.

He wants to run the Department of Defense like a business. Except it is not a business. It is a branch of government. Rumsfeld stubbornly clings to failed hypotheses of war-fighting, even in the face of staggering evidence to the contrary. He cuts the brass out of the decision-making loop, and totally disses them. He doesn't just undermine, he accuses, abuses and belittles the professional military advice, but relentlessly keeps them out of the decision-making process.

Everything that goes right is due to him, everything that goes wrong is the fault of the troops or the officers who command them. That's no way to run a meritocracy, and that is exactly what the military is.

Rumsfeld is so keen on his new ideas to *make everything better* that he has frivolously ignored the tried-and-true, to our nations peril, to our indicidual peril and to the peril of the troops in uniform. This tunnelvision has caused him to lash out At any and all who dare offer another point of view.

Rumsfeld, like his boss, flatly refuses to accept this reality that they have created. And they do not intend to. Bush has told us that this will be the responsibility of the next administration and the next SecDef to find a way out of this clusterfuck.

Morality you say? What is that all about? Morality is an outdated concept and it has no place in a Rumsfeld DoD. All of these offenses add up to a shredding of the Honor Code, and that is the most important principle of a free country. The Honor Code is why a free country can remain free, without falling under the tyranny of it's military. The Honor Code is the most important construct of all, and should it fail, it could set off a chain of events that might easily destroy our nation.

For these reasons, and oh so many more, Rumsfeld is the worst Secretary of Defense this nation has ever seen.

No one will ever forget the name Donald Rumsfeld.