A senior U.S. general compared Iraq on Thursday to a "work of art" in progress, saying it was too soon to judge the outcome and playing down violence and friction with Iraqi leaders as "speed bumps" on the road.
"A lump of clay can become a sculpture, blobs of paint become paintings which inspire," Major General William Caldwell, chief military spokesman, told his weekly Baghdad news briefing…
…"Every great work of art goes through messy phases while it is in transition," Caldwell said.
Hmmm. I guess that’s true…
And here’s what we’re doing to make sure Iraq ends up like a Bosch painting:
A military dog handler convicted for his role in the prisoner abuse scandal has been ordered back to help train the country’s police.
As if the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal weren’t bad enough for America’s image in the Middle East, now it may appear to much of the world that one of the men implicated in the scandal is returning to the scene of the crime.
The U.S. military tells TIME that one of the soldiers convicted for his role in Abu Ghraib, having served his sentence, has just been sent back to serve in Iraq.
Sgt. Santos Cardona, 32, a military policeman from Fullerton, Calif., served in 2003 and 2004 at Abu Ghraib as a military dog handler.
So, that’s what happened to soldiers convicted of prisoners abuse at Abu Gharib — they get sent back to train Iraqis. [UPDATE: Hmmm. Looks like the Army changed its mind.]
Compare that story to this tragic one about an American soldier who resisted commiting abuses against Iraqi prisoners:
A Flagstaff soldier who died in Iraq committed suicide after she refused to participate in interrogation techniques being practiced by her U.S. Army intelligence unit, according to a report about an Army investigation aired by a Flagstaff radio station.
U.S. Army Spc. Alyssa R. Peterson, 27, died Sept. 15, 2003, in Tel Afar, an Iraqi city of about 350,000 residents in the northern part of the country.
At the time, the U.S. Department of Defense listed her cause of death as a “noncombat weapons discharge.”
Spc. Peterson’s mother, Bobbi Peterson, reached at her home in northern Arizona, said she became aware of the KNAU report Wednesday. Neither she nor her husband Richard has received any official documents that contained information outlined in the KNAU report.
Until she and Richard have had an opportunity to read the documents, she said she is unable to comment.
Spc. Peterson had been assigned to C Company, 311th Military Intelligence Battalion, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), which is based in Fort Campbell, Ky. She was in Iraq as part of Operation Iraqi Freedon, functioning as an Arabic-speaking intelligence specialist.
On Tuesday, a KNAU Public Radio reporter, who had filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the reports of the criminal investigation into Peterson’s death, aired a report that Peterson had committed suicide.
According to KNAU, an Army investigation found that Peterson had objected to interrogation techniques that were being used on prisoners.
“She refused to participate after only two nights working in the unit known as the cage,” stated the KNAU report.
She was subsequently assigned to monitoring Iraqi guards at the base gate and was sent to suicide prevention training, stated the KNAU report. And on Sept. 15, Army investigators concluded she shot and killed herself with her service rifle, according to KNAU.
The KNAU report also stated that Army spokespeople for Peterson’s unit refused to describe the interrogation techniques and that all records of the techniques have been destroyed.
TODAY’S NEWS: Well, October saw the deaths of 105 U.S. soldiers. Here we are barely into November’s tally, and there were seven new deaths yesterday. That makes this month’s toll eleven. [UPDATE: Make that eight deaths yesterday.]
AND MORE OUTRAGE: Just a few days ago, I pointed to an undertold story about how we "lost" 14,000 weapons in Iraq in bureaucratic red tape. The reason we know that is because Bush, under some political pressure, set up an Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, who specifically audits such things.
Guess what happens to people who do good work like that? They get axed:
Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq have sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies like Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces.
And tucked away in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ago is what some of Mr. Bowen’s supporters believe is his reward for repeatedly embarrassing the administration: a pink slip.
The order comes in the form of an obscure provision that terminates his federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, on Oct. 1, 2007. The clause was inserted by the Republican side of the House Armed Services Committee over the objections of Democratic counterparts during a closed-door conference, and it has generated surprise and some outrage among lawmakers who say they had no idea it was in the final legislation.
Americablog comments:
The guy who was fired was only focused on one piece of the war in Iraq: how the reconstruction money was being spent. You’d think the GOP would be concerned about those billions and billions of U.S. taxpayers dollars, too. But you’d be wrong.