IRAQ IIO

This article is going to cause more than a few veins in the foreheads of the right-wing bloggers and media, the neocons, and the warhawks to throb in triple-time.

As if ‘only’ the 40,000 or 50,000 or 60,000 lives snuffed out which they are bound to cite is just hunky-dory.

A team of American and Iraqi public health researchers has estimated that 600,000 civilians have died in violence across Iraq since the 2003 American invasion, the highest estimate ever for the toll of the war here.

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But it is an estimate and not a precise count, and researchers acknowledged a margin of error that ranged from 426,369 to 793,663 deaths.

It is the second study by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. It uses samples of casualties from Iraqi households to extrapolate an overall figure of 601,027 Iraqis dead from violence between March 2003 and July 2006.

The findings of the previous study, published in The Lancet, a British medical journal, in 2004, had been criticized as high, in part because of its relatively narrow sampling of about 1,000 families, and because it carried a large margin of error.

The new study is more representative, its researchers said, and the sampling is broader: it surveyed 1,849 Iraqi families in 47 different neighborhoods across Iraq. The selection of geographical areas in 18 regions across Iraq was based on population size, not on the level of violence, they said.

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The mortality rate before the American invasion was about 5.5 people per 1,000 per year, the study found. That rate rose to 19.8 deaths per 1,000 people in the year ending in June.

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As far as skepticism about the death count, he said that counts made by journalists and others focused disproportionately on Baghdad, and that
death rates were higher elsewhere.

“We found deaths all over the country,” he said. Baghdad was an area of medium violence in the country, he said. The provinces of Diyala and
Salahuddin, north of Baghdad, and Anbar to the west, all had higher death rates than the capital.

Statistics experts in the United States who were able to review the study said the methods used by the interviewers looked legitimate.

Robert Blendon, director of the Harvard Program on Public Opinion and Health and Social Policy, said interviewing urban dwellers chosen at random was “the best of what you can expect in a war zone.”

But he said the number of deaths in the families interviewed — 547 in the post-invasion period versus 82 in a similar period before the invasion — was too few to extrapolate up to more than 600,000 deaths across the country. Article

AFGHANISTAN

From Canada, a story highlighting the heartlessness of bureaucracy.

His body torn apart by shrapnel, on painkillers and facing months of rehabilitation, Trooper Jeffrey Hunter had been in a German hospital just hours when he was given the news — he was losing his danger pay.

“They just went in and told him he’s not getting it because he’s not in theatre anymore,” said his father, Bill Hunter, in a Toronto Star report from Ottawa.

“This is a kid that may not walk again, we don’t know. He could wind up losing one of the legs from infection . . . and they go in and tell him he’s not going to get his danger pay.

“When does the danger end for him? I don’t understand this,” he said.

His 23-year-old son, who arrived in Afghanistan in August, was left badly wounded in Tuesday’s attack west of Kandahar that killed two of his fellow soldiers.

He was airlifted to Landstuhl, Germany, for advanced medical care. To add to his already long list of worries, military officials added another Thursday — they confirmed he was no longer entitled to his “operational allowances.”

Those allowances — totalling $2,111 a month for soldiers serving in Afghanistan — are meant to compensate for the hardships and risks of the mission.

But under military rules, if a soldier is injured and removed from Afghanistan, that soldier will lose the right to collect these financial perks, which can boost monthly pay by more than 30 per cent.

As well, the salary soldiers earn in Afghanistan is tax-free and that perk disappears, too.

But the tough message delivered to the wounded soldier angered his father and left him questioning the military’s support for its injured troops.

“He hadn’t been there six hours,” Hunter, of Aurora, Ont., said Thursday.

“He’s in a lot of pain and I’ve got someone from the military going in and telling him they’re not going to give him his danger pay. . . . This is not right.

“He’s going to have a long-time therapy, a lot longer than the six months he was sent away for in Afghanistan,” Hunter said. “Why aren’t these kids getting danger pay?”

So far, more than 150 Canadian soldiers have been injured in Afghanistan, compared with the 39 killed.

On Friday, after Hunter’s story received wide publicity, top officials promised change.

In Ottawa, Defence Minister Gordon O’Connor said he ordered top staff to look at providing better pay to wounded soldiers. O’Connor says it doesn’t seem fair that injured soldiers don’t get some sort of replacement for so-called “danger pay.”

“I’ve asked the senior military staff and department staff to look how we treat wounded soldiers from a compensation point of view and they’re moving quickly to look at that challenge,” O’Connor said.

Gen. Rick Hillier, the chief of defence staff, said the military is going to “look after” those soldiers.

Hillier said the restrictions on the danger pay won’t be changed, but that people in Ottawa are trying to find a replacement for the pay.
Military officials told the Star the Defence Department has the discretion to continue to pay the military allowance for an extra 25 days — and usually does — but there was no indication yet that Hunter would receive it.

The Hunter family’s concerns offers a glimpse into a largely unseen side of Canada’s war in Afghanistan — the trauma and turmoil of the wounded soldiers and their distraught families. Article

PAPER PALISADES

The woebegone G. Walker administration: bellow, bluster and bravado, but sorely lacking in process, acknowledgement of the necessity of multilateral international relations and workable implementation and tangible results.

“Combating” WMD has become a gigantic black hole.

For all of the public talk of going on the offensive and not letting ambiguous smoking guns of today turn into mushroom clouds of tomorrow, the actual Bush capability that has been built over the last five years is barely an improvement over what existed under the previous administration. In fact, combating WMD and “counter-proliferation” has become so complicated and lost in management and reorganization, the U.S. military capacity to stop a country from going nuclear, short of going to war, is zero.

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The Washington Post reported in December 2002 that the directive named Iran, Syria, North Korea and Libya among the countries that were to be the focus of the new U.S. strategy. A senior administration official briefing reporters on the new strategy told reporters that the options even included the use of U.S. nuclear weapons — even preemptively — to stop the use of WMD against the United States, its forces abroad, its friends and allies.

n a January 6, 2005, memo from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) officially was designated the “lead command” for combating WMD. Rumsfeld had already approved a top-secret “Interim Global Strike Alert Order” in the summer of 2004 directing the military to assume and maintain readiness to attack hostile countries that are developing weapons of mass destruction, specifically Iran and North Korea. The interim capability was implemented because of the gravity of the problem. Last year, military commanders bragged that they were ready to go within 30 minutes of a presidential order, should for instance, there be warning of an impending nuclear test, movement or strike.

The Omaha-based STRATCOM, according to the January 2005 directive, was given the responsibility for “interdicting and eliminating WMD and related materials,” integrating all U.S. capabilities “to dissuade, deter and prevent the acquisition, development, transfer or use of WMD, their delivery systems and associated technology and materials.”

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What does it all mean? I’ve been reading and deciphering national security directives for decades, and one thing is clear from the presidential directive: It is all management, all coordination, all endless reorganization. STRATCOM may on paper be the “lead” and the goal of preemption may be the policy, but there is no silver bullet, no real “red line,” in fact, no actual differences in policy.

A classified August briefing from STRATCOM on its new Center for Combating WMD show the bankruptcy of the “mission area spectrum” from peacetime to post-nuclear.

The briefing unambiguously lays out the same old “basket” of capabilities that have always existed. If all else fails, STRATCOM says, fear not: Part of the “new” capacity to “combat” weapons of mass destruction includes “consequence management,” that is, cleaning up the mess after the enemy attacks. Article

WHAT HAVE WE BECOME

Feel safer? Had enough?

Strangely absent is any mention of, y’know, teaching languages to personnel already on staff. Schizophrenic government at work. Remember the military translators of Arabic fired for being openly gay (see here and also here and here)?

Five years after Arab terrorists attacked the United States, only 33 FBI agents have even a limited proficiency in Arabic, and none of them work in the sections of the bureau that coordinate investigations of international terrorism, according to new FBI statistics.

Counting agents who know only a handful of Arabic words — including those who scored zero on a standard proficiency test — just 1 percent of the FBI’s 12,000 agents have any familiarity with the language, the statistics show.

The numbers reflect the FBI’s continued struggle to attract employees who speak Arabic, Urdu, Farsi and other languages of the Middle East and South Asia, even as the bureau leads a fight against terrorist groups primarily centered in those parts of the world. The same challenge is facing the CIA and other agencies as the government competes with the private sector for a limited number of applicants with foreign-language proficiency, according to U.S. officials and experts.

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n a recent deposition filed in an employee lawsuit, a senior FBI official testified that the bureau’s two International Terrorism Operations Sections (ITOS) do not require any agents to know Arabic, even though the sections coordinate all foreign terrorism investigations. Only four agents in ITOS have any familiarity with Arabic, and none of them are ranked above elementary proficiency, documents show.

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More than 1,400 agents have at least a limited working proficiency in a foreign language, including nearly 900 who speak Spanish. Other languages include Russian, Farsi, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin and Cantonese, the FBI said.

Gulotta and other officials said several factors limit the number of foreign speakers who can become agents at the FBI. Special agents, for example, must be U.S. citizens. They also must undergo background checks that are much more difficult to pass if the candidate has relatives or friends overseas.

“It is easier to get a security clearance if you don’t have any interaction with foreigners, which is not what you want if you want better interaction with foreigners,” Byman said.

Some of the new information about language abilities at the FBI has emerged in connection with a lawsuit by one of the FBI’s highest-ranking Arabic speakers, Special Agent Bassem Youssef, who sued the Justice Department and the bureau alleging retaliation after he complained that he was cut out of terrorism cases after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Youssef, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in Egypt, is one of only six FBI agents who scored a 4 for “advanced professional proficiency” in Arabic on standardized speaking tests administered by the Interagency Language Roundtable for federal agencies.

Youssef’s attorney, Stephen M. Kohn, said the statistics indicate that most FBI agents have no way to gauge the accuracy of translated materials and must rely on linguists or other third parties for their information.

“How do you fight a war with that kind of disadvantage?” Kohn asked. Article