Det danske Fredsakademi
Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 28. januar 2005 / Time Line January 28, 2005
Version 3.527. Januar 2005, 29. Januar 2005
01/28/2005
For første gang er der et vælgerflertal imod
VK-regeringens Irak-politik, skriver Information.
01/28/2005
The Military is Nowhere; the Press is Nowhere; the Congress is
Nowhere ...
We've Been Taken Over By a Cult
By Seymour Hersh
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/26/1450204
Editors' Note: This is a transcript of remarks by Seymour Hersh at
the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York.
About what's going on in terms of the President is that as virtuous
as I feel, you know, at The New Yorker, writing an alternative
history more or less of what's been going on in the last three
years, George Bush feels just as virtuous in what he is doing. He
is absolutely committed -- I don't know whether he thinks he's
doing God's will or what his father didn't do, or whether it's some
mandate from -- you know, I just don't know, but George Bush thinks
this is the right thing.
He is going to continue doing what he has been doing in Iraq. He's
going to expand it, I think, if he can. I think that the number of
body bags that come back will make no difference to him. The body
bags are rolling in. It makes no difference to him, because he will
see it as a price he has to pay to put America where he thinks it
should be. So, he's inured in a very strange way to people like me,
and to the politicians ... most of them who are too cowardly anyway
to do much. So, the day-to-day anxiety that all of us have ... and
believe me, though he got 58 million votes, many of the people who
voted for him weren't voting for continued warfare, but I think
that's what we're going to have.
It's hard to predict the future. And it's sort of silly to, but the
question is: How do you go to him? How do you get at him? What can
you do to maybe move him off the course that he sees as virtuous,
and he sees as absolutely appropriate? All of us -- you have to --
I can't begin to exaggerate how frightening the position is --
we're in right now, because most of you don't understand, because
the press has not done a very good job. The Senate Intelligence
Committee, the new bill that was just passed, provoked by the 9/11
committee actually, is a little bit of a kabuki dance, I guess is
what I want to say, in that what it really does is it consolidates
an awful lot of power in the Pentagon -- by statute now. It gives
Rumsfeld the right to do an awful lot of things he has been wanting
to do, and that is basically manhunting and killing them before
they kill us, as Peter said. "They did it to us. We've got to do it
to them." That is the attitude that -- at the very top of our
government -- exists. And so, I'll just tell you a couple of things
that drive me nuts.
We can -- you know, there's not much more to go on with. I think
there's a way out of it, maybe. I can tell you one thing. Let's all
forget this word 'insurgency'. It's one of the most misleading
words of all. Insurgency assumes that we had gone to Iraq and won
the war, and a group of disgruntled people began to operate against
us, and we then had to do counter-action against them. That would
be an insurgency.
We are fighting the people we started the war against. We are
fighting the Ba'athists, plus nationalists. We are fighting the
very people that started -- they only choose to fight in different
time spans than we want them to, in different places.
We took Baghdad easily. It wasn't because we won. We took Baghdad
because they pulled back and let us take it and decided to fight a
war that had been pre-planned ... that they're very actively
fighting.
The frightening thing about it is, we have no intelligence. Maybe
it's -- it's -- it is frightening, we have no intelligence about
what they're doing. A year-and-a-half ago, we're up against two and
three-man teams. We estimated the cells operating against us were
two and three people, that we could not penetrate. As of now, we
still don't know what's coming next. There are 10, 15-man groups.
They have terrific communications.
Somebody told me ... it's somebody in the system, an officer -- and
by the way, the good part of it is, more and more people are
available to somebody like me. There's a lot of anxiety inside the
-- you know -- our professional military and our intelligence
people. Many of them respect the Constitution and the Bill of
Rights as much as anybody here, and individual freedom. So, they do
-- there's a tremendous sense of fear.
These are punitive people. One of the ways, one of the things that
you could say is -- the amazing thing is -- we have been taken
over, basically, by a cult ... eight or nine neo-conservatives have
somehow grabbed the government. Just how and why, and how they did
it so efficiently, will have to wait for much later historians and
better documentation than we have now, but they managed to overcome
the bureaucracy and the Congress, and the press, with the greatest
of ease.
It does say something about how fragile our Democracy is. You do
have to wonder what a Democracy is, when it comes down to a few men
in the Pentagon and a few men in the White House having their way.
What they have done is neutralize the C.I.A. because there were
people there inside -- the real goal of what Goss has done was not
attack the operational people, but the intelligence people. There
were people -- serious senior analysts who disagreed with the White
House -- with Cheney, basically ... that's what I mean by White
House -- and Rumsfeld, on a lot of issues. As somebody said, the
goal in the last month has been to separate the apostates from the
true believers. That's what's happening. The real target has been
"diminish the Agency." I'm writing about all of this soon, so I
don't want to overdo it, but there's been a tremendous sea change
in the government. A concentration of power.
On the other hand, the facts -- there are some facts. We can't win
this war.
We can do what he's doing. We can bomb them into the stone ages.
Here's the other horrifying -- sort of spectacular -- fact that we
don't really appreciate. Since we installed our puppet government,
this man, Allawi -- who was a member of the Mukabarat, the secret
police of Saddam, long before he became a critic, and is basically
Saddam-lite -- before we installed him, since we have installed
him, in June 28, July, August, September, October, November, every
month, one thing happened: the number of sorties -- bombing raids
by one plane -- and the number of tonnage dropped has grown
exponentially each month. We are systematically bombing that
country...
01/28/2005
Britain set to fill in for Dutch in Iraq
The Associated Press
Friday, January 28, 2005
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/01/27/news/troops.html
LONDON Britain is to send an extra 220 troops to Iraq to assume the
duties of Dutch forces that are being pulled out of the country,
the Ministry of Defense said Thursday.
About 1,400 Dutch troops will leave Iraq by March 15, despite
requests from London and Washington to extend their mandate.
01/28/2005
CONTRACTS from the United States Department of Defense
Electric Boat Corp., Groton, Conn., is being awarded a $149,982,200
cost reimbursement modification to previously awarded contract
(N00024-02-C-2901) for the conversion of USS Michigan from Ohio
Class ballistic missile submarine SSBN 727 to Ohio Class guided
missile submarine SSGN 727. The conversion will be conducted
concurrently with the ship's engineered refueling overhaul being
performed at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. Work will be performed in
Puget, Wash. (67 percent); Quonset Point, R.I. (23 percent); and
Groton, Conn. (10 percent) and is expected to complete by December
2006. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current
fiscal year. The Naval Sea Systems Command, Washington, D.C., is
the contracting activity.
01/28/2005
Iraq War Vets To Get Follow-Up Mental Evaluations
Troops will be assessed for lasting psychological trauma months
after returning from combat
By Esther Schrader, Times Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times
January 28, 2005
WASHINGTON Grappling with a growing mental health crisis
among troops who have fought in Iraq, the Pentagon is planning to
require service members, for the first time, to undergo
psychological assessments months after they return home.
The policy is designed to tackle the burgeoning incidence of
post-traumatic stress disorder among troops who have seen combat in
the longest and deadliest war the U.S. has been involved in since
Vietnam. While troops already are required to fill out a three-page
health questionnaire within days of leaving Iraq and to see a
doctor, nurse or nurse practitioner to answer questions that
assessment includes only a few questions on mental health. The
assessment is taken before troops have had time to readjust to home
life, and, for many, before signs of mental anguish appear.
Even if a service member is experiencing mental trauma, most are so
eager to return to their homes and families that they may avoid
frank answers about their toughest problems, military health
officials believe. The new assessments will focus on the mental
health and readjustment issues that troops face after they have had
time to reenter their home lives, said Dr. William Winkenwerder
Jr., assistant secretary of Defense for health affairs.
Among soldiers who have returned from Iraq, 3% have indicated on
the post-deployment questionnaires that they have a mental health
problem or concern, Winkenwerder said. But among soldiers
questioned three to four months afterward, that number jumped to
13% to 17%, he said.
Mental health experts with the Army and the Department of Veterans
Affairs have said in recent months that there is reason to believe
the war's ultimate psychological fallout will be much worse...
01/28/2005
Pentagon Says Veterans' Benefits "Hurtful" to National
Security
By Joel Wendland
Political Affairs
During a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal (1-25-05),
Pentagon official David Chu, in a mockery of the contribution of
veterans, defended a new round of cuts by ironically describing
funding for programs like veterans' education and job training,
health care, pensions, Veterans Administration (VA) housing and the
like as "hurtful" to national security.
Despite Republican pretense that spending increases for the VA
budget under the Bush administration have been large, new spending
has neither matched inflation over the same period, nor does it
keep pace with growing need.
For example, as private sector health care costs skyrocket,
veterans are turning more and more to the military's health
insurance program, Tricare. Retired service members account for
half of the people covered by Tricare, whereas just five years ago
they accounted for only 40 percent. The Bush administration wants
to find ways to stem this tide - none of which have anything to do
with keeping private sector insurance affordable.
The slow rate of VA spending growth enforced by Bush and the
congressional Republicans over the last four years won't cover
growing deferred benefits, such as education, housing, retirement,
health care and so on, promised to current service members or that
are supposed to be available for new enlistees.
Slow spending growth isn't even the biggest immediate problem for
vets. In the last two years, Bush ordered the closing of several VA
hospitals in different parts of the country, pushing waiting lists
for medical services for veterans as high as six months for about
230,000 vets. These closings followed in the wake of the
congressional Republican's concerted drive in 2003 to cut $15
billion from VA spending over the next ten years...
 |
 |