Sunday, February 27, 2005
Thank you for telling SFC Salie's story Mr. Galloway, Thank you for your continued service of telling the military's stories with honesty, understanding, and grace. I found your story through a blog of a soldier's wife whose husband is still in Iraq. I was not aware that you were still reporting and would like to be able to follow whatever you have to report. Do you have a web site or blog where your stories are centrally linked? I would very much like to add any such site to my own blogroll, and I'm sure that many other military bloggers would, too. If you are without a website and have any interest in starting such a project, I am sure that there are a lot of people who would want to give you assistance for the honor of working with you. I cannot recommend my own web skills because they are so slim. Thank you again for your work, Patrick S Lasswell STG2(SW), USNR Portland, OR UPDATE: Chutzpah is its Own Reward! OK, maybe getting a response from a writer after you ask for help promoting his work is not a cause for celebration. Nevertheless, Joe Galloway is worthy of respect and attention. In an era when it is almost impossible to find reporters who get the real story filed, let alone the details right, this reporter keeps doing the job right. We live free because brave men risk much, and Joe Galloway tells their stories well. Here is what he sent: patrick:
thanks for the kind note. i have about four fulltime jobs at present, to include sr. military correspondent for knight ridder newspapers, my weekly syndicated column thru tribunemedia services, on road doing speeches every weekend, and gen moore and i are starting to work on a sequel to WWSOAY.
my columns and stories can be followed by going to:
www.krwashington.com then click on link ujnder my photo on lower r. side of page. that takes you to my website, and you can capture the URL there.
happy hunting.
joe galloway Have I mentioned how much I think of the man who flew into the Valley of Death because that's where the story was? His link is here.
Friday, February 25, 2005
On Returning to Service In 1987, I joined the active Navy with the belief that our nation needed to be strong to stay free. In 1991, I re-enlisted in the Navy with the expectation that our country would lead the world in building freedom everywhere. In 1995, I left the Navy with the realization that our political leadership would rather be stable than help others be free. In 2001, I was sure that I could never serve again due to my failing health. Last year there was a real chance that our country would abandon its responsibilities abroad. Ten years ago I was exhausted with the endless cycle of "gotcha" military inspections that served primarily to further the careers of the inspectors. This was during a time of reduction and destructive introspection as the political leadership of the country did whatever it could to ignore its responsibilities to act in the world. Initiatives to empower the individual in the service to increase performance had been firmly suppressed and the business of the service had been turned over to the politically ambitious bean-counters. I watched them file the edge off the sword to avoid anybody getting hurt. The bombing of the USS Cole cannot be described as a surprise because the "business as usual" mentality made it so inevitable. Four years ago I was exhausted due to diminished thyroid output slowly killing me. When the thyroid gives out, the body slows down, becomes susceptible to disease, mimics depression with astonishing accuracy, and puts on weight. If my wife Abigail had not been part of my life, I do not know what I would have done. With her support, I had something to live and become well for. I love you very much Abigail, thank you. Perhaps it is my own personal bugaboo, but I was terrified of being caught again with a one-term President's accomplishments being abandoned in the name of stability. One of the things that make all the indignities of the service worthwhile is the chance to accomplish something meaningful. I had the option of holding back my service until I was sure that it would at least have the chance of touching upon lasting significance. It is clear now that the will of the United States is to seek stability through freedom. After the glorious bravery of millions of ink-stained Iraqi heroes, the chances of America abandoning responsibility for the siren call of expedience seem remote. We are tied to the mast and steering clear of the rocks. Today I am rested, well, and can again contribute to my nation as we act responsibly in the world again. This is the last post I will make without censoring myself in the interests of the service. I love my country and I love my wife. I am returning to service with a clear conscience and the determination to do right by both of them. By serving, I am doing my part to make sure that my wife has a better world to live in.
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Torture, Control, and the Slippery Slope "Well, professional Warriors DO NOT ESTABLISH EXIT STRATEGIES, WE ACHIEVE AN END STATE!" Major General Joseph F. Dunford, Jr., USMC Six years ago I was in the lobby at a literary convention when an editor friend was assaulted from behind by some twit. The twit covered my friend's eyes and played a "Guess Who" game that would be annoying coming from a charming seven-year-old, but was infuriating coming from a snide twenty-something. It turned out that the maturity challenged one was a dinner guest and I needed to put my fury over the incident away. Late that night I was manning the programming desk when the I was called me in some distress to ask for help in defusing one of the worst dinner parties in history. The snide twit had gone out with the Editors and an author friend of mine. My author friend is a great writer and a very hard man, a proven two-percenter. Over the dinner, the twit had acted out his nature, and proceeded to infuriate my friend to the point where he felt it necessary to choke the life out of the manipulative little bastard. Cooler heads prevailed, no assault charges were filed, and in trying to talk the recipient of harsh treatment down, I discovered that he had been abused as a child. Since that rather too exciting evening, I came to the conclusion that the twit had never won any kind of honest fight in his life. His way of controlling situations and people is to manipulate them. It looked and sounded to me like he gets a special thrill in manipulating people to the point where they get angry at him. The ultimate indicator of control for him is when people are infuriated to the point of assaulting him. I think that at some point in his life he saw a slippery slope and dove down it headfirst, trying to drag as many with him as he possibly could. What a loser. What got my goat over this individual and his behavior is not so much that he was immature, manipulative, and selfish but that he claimed that he was justified afterwards. The echoes of that annoying little man I heard in the claims of the Abu Gharib guards left me cold. Something ignored by the selective attention of the media in their portrayal of the disgraceful events of one evening, is that the photographs revealed no softening techniques ever used by military interrogators. The enthusiasm on the faces of those soldiers was not the zeal of dutiful interrogators; that was the sick excitement of control freaks bullying those under their control. That glee is our enemy. If America has any lingering contribution to world history, it is our unique perspective on power and responsibility. The United States of America exists as an expression of individual rights. From George Washington's magnificent retirement to the maintenance of constitutional democracy to the current questioning of the Washington governor's race, our identity as Americans continues to be the opposition to regal power. The concept of "my breath is law" is anathema to American identity, and denouncing it is celebrated as the highest expression of citizenship. Muckrakers breaking the Oil Trusts, Eliot Ness bringing onetime lord of Chicago Al Capone to justice, bloggers bringing down CBS and CNN's leadership all are examples of speaking purifying truth to corrupting regal power with effect instead of affectation. Regardless of need, abusing prisoners is a control method that violates our ideals because it imposes regal power. What distinguishes Tomás de Torquemada is not his viciousness, but his openness. The Spanish Inquisition operated as an open activity, known by all, and they are remembered for it. The faceless villains of Lubyanka who have more blood on their hands more recently are forgotten because the KGB had a functional reign of terrified silence and the complicity of the western press. If the Orange Revolution in Ukraine tells us anything, it is that the days of an invisible Lubyanka are over. In our operational environment, we must face the reality that cell phone text messaging, omnipresent digital cameras, and weblogs have eliminated the possibility of covert behavior staying covert. To make things tougher for torturers hoping to be forgotten is that data storage capacity is growing exponentially. Torture is a control measure antithetical to the ideals of the United States of America. When Americans envision successful conflict, we are the ones stopping torture. In the main, this is an accurate vision. For every actual lapse cited by our detractors, there are dozens of verifiable incidents where Americans are literally leading the charge to save those oppressed, persecuted, and in peril. Regrettably, for every actual lapse our detractors imply and imagine a thousand more. The calculus of torture in the age of the internet has to include the consequence that the act will be remembered forever and distributed everywhere. This matters because the United States is not solely engaged in fighting the battle of Iraq or Afghanistan; we are fighting to win the War on Terror. Any decision to abuse a prisoner must be weighed not just against the operational reality of the immediate situation, but against the lasting impact of the act on our national image. It is not merely our foreign detractors refusing to assist us because of allegations of torture, but the effect on our own national will that must be kept in mind. We have accomplished more in Afghanistan and Iraq than any military of any size at any time in history has, but all of that was put in dire jeopardy due to some idiot prison guards having a birthday party one night and taking pictures of humiliated prisoners to impress somebody's girlfriend. If you find the ticking atomic bomb under Grand Central Station, is the world going to ignore the wounds of the guy who told you about it? Certainly. Anything less than that large and that imminent a threat is going to be questioned severely, and for good reason. Engaging in a pattern of indiscriminate prisoner abuse will be found out and will lose this war and maybe the next one, too. Acts of prisoner abuse must be measured against the requirement to achieve an end state instead of accepting an exit strategy. Hat Tip: All the people who left comments and analyzed my earlier posts.
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Thank You for Your Links I would like to thank everybody who linked me. The wonders of trackback magic are a mystery to me, mostly because I am far too lazy to learn them. First, I want to thank Captain Van Steenwyk for his inspiration and analysis. He is continuing to follow this subject and I look forward to discussing it with him more. I especially value his experience controlling psychiatric patients, and having served in a National Guard light infantry unit, understand what a great contribution his experience is for a commander. I agree with his conclusion that dead prisoners detract from the mission. I would like to point out that the unit corpsman for the SEAL team did not meet the standards of his unit on other grounds, and that may have contributed to the demise of al-Jamadi. I have served aboard a ship with a messed up doc. Even on units as large as a frigate (company sized) in peacetime operations, when your doc is bad, the ship is hurting. We were lucky in that our baby doc (junior corpsman) HM3 Mike Fiore was stellar, and he stepped up to the plate big time. Mike if you're out there, come to Portland and dinner is on me. Matthew Heidt honored me greatly by taking me seriously. He pointed out several key limitations of my article and gave me a lot to think about. As a SEAL, he knows the stresses I tried to describe better than I want to. He pointed out that experience with stress does not give you x-ray vision for hard men. He also noted that even SEALs are vulnerable to "blindside" stress, the stuff that nobody can prepare you for. One of the things I am trying to address with this potentially endless series of posts on torture is that the nature of deliberate abuse can cause all kinds of "blindside" stress. Which leads me to somebody who called themselves Red River who talked about some serious issues in comments, but felt that he could not leave accurate contact information? If this was a dog-blogging post I might take umbrage, but since this topic is so damn taboo, I have to value the need for discretion. I was about to say something about not having met the kinds of enemy the SEALs are facing, but I went to college with them and worked with Mike Hawash at Intel. My primary concern is not the enemy, but the lingering effects of handling them abusively. Somebody is going to abuse a prisoner for information and they are going to get caught. This war on terror is not going to go away any time soon, and this is going to happen. Regardless of the value of the information extracted, somebody is going to go to a court martial, and eventually we are going to see one of our best people make a mistake and be hung for it. This result is of value to the enemy because it will mess up our operations and get a bunch of people who do not understand up in arms. Deferring this event to 2038 or much later is in the Nation Interest of the United States. Al-Jamadi may well have been working to inflict as much damage as he could to our side once he was captured by getting himself beaten to death. The enemy's actions and intentions are externalities you and I have no control over, all we own is our decisions. Cancerman, thank you for the explaining the book answers. This has a place in the discussion and I should have put something about that down, but the post was too long already. Kit Lange, thank you for keeping one Marine off the streets and out of the pool halls. My mother did that very thing, and it seemed to work for her for more than fifty years. I suggest very strongly that you study stress management as if your life depended on it, because it does. My mother never had the tools to deal with the kinds of things my dad was going through, and although she did magnificently well with what she had, there were some spectacularly rough patches. You have access to a lot of tools, and will get access to more soon. When you get married, I strongly suggest you find the healthiest military wife you can and study her in earnest. Right up until I wrote the above paragraph, I never understood why all the exchanges had such an extended selection of china. It bugged me for a lot of years, because I was always single when I was in the service, and the selection of useful tools for servicemen in the exchange was so damn limited. Now I get it, china is a stress management tool for military wives. Military husbands have a more prosaic term for this tool: ammunition. My lovely wife admonishes me to be careful about this joke…proving my thesis. UPDATE: For those unclear on the concept of the penalties associated with getting caught abusing prisoners, please read my friend Michael Totten's Tech Central Station article. A Syrian friend of mine immigrated to the US two years ago. He and I occasionally have good-natured arguments about foreign policy. Some time ago during one of our conversations I promised him that the US and British troops would be kind to the people of Iraq, that we wanted only the best for them. Then came what Christopher Hitchens rightly called a moral Chernobyl: allegations of abuse and even torture in Abu Ghraib prison with the accompanying photos of smiling sadistic soldiers and guards.
It wasn't as bad as watching Al Qaeda snuff films or video shot inside Iraqi prisons under Baath Party management. But it was bad. Real bad.
Sunday, February 20, 2005
Torture and the Two Percent MilitaryThis is a long post, but it deals with a complex topic that needs to be addressed. Please bear with me and read the whole thing. I have been considering this matter for some months and consider this to be the an extension of earlier posts. One of the secrets the military doesn't talk about very much is that roughly two percent of the troops are stone cold stress-proof machines. These folks just don't break like regular people do, and when you put them together in groups, they break even less. Don't get me wrong, everybody breaks, but these guys routinely operate in stress environments that destroy other military personnel. I have had the pleasure of knowing a number of these folks, the wisdom of never pretending to be one, and the honor of being accepted as a pleasant nuisance in their company. Possibly the latter is due to my willingness to provide them with drinks and keep my mouth shut...okay, probably. Their company is desirable because they have amazing stories that are frequently true, their heads are out of their asses at (almost) all times, and they establish a sense of comfortable belonging when people are not screaming at them. They are really great to have as friends, largely because they deeply understand loyalty. The toughness that the two percenters have is what most of the elite organizations are trying to select for, and that they mostly accomplish. I say mostly because the prestige of the organizations that select for the two percenters is so high that they attract a god-awful number of wanna-be's, and no selection process is perfect. Too often people with more ambition than wisdom get into positions they have no capacity to deal with. Too often people with a lot of ambition worship form and ignore substance, and regrettably, the military is bad at dealing with this specific problem. War…conflict…tends to sort this problem out, but it frequently tends to do so by killing off or screwing up not just the idiot, but also everybody around him. Currently, SEAL Team Seven [Corrected] is facing this problem, due to a person who couldn't maintain the standards of teamwork essential to SEAL operations, and I will get into this more later. I believe it is true that the will of the United States is to not accept a military that tortures. The US population…more importantly the US electorate…needs to believe that there are no atheists in foxholes and no Americans running torture chambers. This has nothing to do with the capacity of the two percenters to deal with torture in a professional manner. Quite frankly, the capacity hurt people without lingering effect on your own psyche is the ultimate selector for the two percenters. The ones who can deal with the stress of deliberately and with professional malice causing harm on a human being and still be capable of healthy human interaction afterwards are the real two percenters. People like this exist, and some of them are my friends. The Catch-22 of this situation is that while there are people who can responsibly and effectively obtain information through torture, regardless of the beliefs of the electorate, there really is no capacity in the US military to compose a meaningful doctrine on torture. The kinds of stress that is used to select for the two percenters is painful to consider; rational minds shy away from thinking about that much suffering, even though the process is invariably voluntary. Getting a reasoned discussion about imposing physical stress is extremely difficult because the topic starts with nightmares. Getting people to let go of their own horror and talk intelligently is something that just is not happening, and is one real limitation of a free country. Civilian control of the military is essential to lasting freedom, but it interferes with this capacity of the most capable fighting men on the planet. The next absurdity that our military faces is that because torture is forbidden, our capacity to deal with torture resistant enemy fighters is marginalized. Manadel al-Jamadi was captured by elements of SEAL Team 2 in October, 2003 and died in captivity after resisting control. Manadel al-Jamadi was suspected of being instrumental in the bombing of International Committee of the Red Cross headquarters. The SEALs who captured him have been accused of deliberately beating the al-Jamadi to death. This accusation comes from a corpsman assigned to the team who was caught stealing from his teammates. I learned in my First Responder course that the human body can be incredibly fragile, and that you can kill somebody through improper handling of a patient. I have no difficulty believing that someone with the sick will to blow up a Red Cross HQ would also have the will to resist being subdued so strongly that death was more likely than unconsciousness. It is also important to remember that our opponents in the current war have no freedom imposed limitations on respecting humanity, and in fact have extensive experience both in torture and resisting torture. This is one skill that the terrorists value highly and they have shown great determination and success in relating it to their disciples. Manadel al-Jamadi would laugh louder than the flames of hell right now to see the confusion his death has caused his enemies by successfully resisting control. Partly this is due to the philosophical underpinnings of the Islamist movement that values resistance very highly. It is also due to the large number of the sick bastards who follow Islamism having spent time in some of the worst prisons in the world. Another consideration in this mess is that while the US military has a strong commitment to remaining drug free, our enemies suffer no such limitations. Any detainee captured in the field can be higher than a kite on hashish and amphetamine cocktails to help him resist interrogation. Subduing through chemical means is not an option for detainees who are on unknown dosages of unknown drugs. Administering enough opiates to calm a detainee at the peak of a methamphetamine high is also administering enough opiates to kill him when the speed wears off. Enough pepper spray to burn through a hashish buzz is also enough pepper spray to cause anaphylactic shock. The quickest doctrinal solution to this intractable problem is to load SEAL teams and others with more junk to assist in the physical restraint of resisting prisoners. This is a monumentally bad idea because it violates two working principles of current US doctrine; KISS and speed of action. "Keep It Simple, Stupid" is the principle that the less you have to forget, the less you will forget. Extra gear, beyond what experience has shown to be necessary is just something else to get in the way of the mission. Additionally, our troops are already carrying body armor to keep them alive, enough ammunition to fight their way out of the inevitable ambush, water to keep them effective and medical supplies to deal with the inevitable IED wounds. Adding more gear slows down our troops and makes them more vulnerable because they take longer to accomplish their mission and return. Wire ties and sandbags may not be the highest expression of prisoner control, but they are light, available, and work. Every other refinement or addition to current doctrine has to face the real world scrutiny in the field. Sometimes these changes work well, like using heavy armor in urban warfare worked in Second Fallujah. Sometimes these changes get our people killed. Regrettably, journalists have shown themselves incredibly poorly equipped to lead a discussion on this or any other military topic. Academics have done their best to show journalists as respectable by way of being utterly irresponsible and untouchable behind walls of tenure, so their contributions cannot be expected to add to any discussion on the boundaries of torture. Where does this leave the two percent military? The old adage, "cheat but don't get caught" has shown its frailty possibly due to the expansion of Special Forces operations and personnel. This is a serious problem, and I don't have a ready answer. I suspect that the decision to handle the death of Manadel al-Jamadi as a Non-Judicial Punishment (NJP) matter instead of a Court Martial is probably wise. While Court Martial's make better headlines, NJP makes better changes in an operational military. A deeply grateful Hat Tip to Jason Van Steenwyk for a post let me finish this.
Wednesday, February 09, 2005
If Rebecca Threw the Race, Who Could Blame Her?
Watching The Amazing Race last night, I was struck by how poised, intelligent, and considerate Rebecca was. Looking over the season, it is utterly clear how much she valued love and how little her partner was capable of giving. It looks to me that after the fight at the train station in Sri Lanka, she continued to race, but stopped trying to win. The other couples in the race at that point loved each other, and I honestly think that she decided to give it to one of them. The point where she showed her hand? When she unlocked the lock moments after Hayden and Aaron gave up. That was not a coincidence.
The only reason I am publishing this speculation at all is that the other half of her team cannot say that she sabotaged the team any worse than he did. At almost every significant event where teamwork was called for, Adam invested substantial amounts of time and energy dumping on his team. The mental cruelty routinely inflicted by Adam on Rebecca is in no way indicative of a person engaged in the process of winning a contest involving teamwork.
Rebecca, if you made that choice, I support you in it. I have told my wife that if we are fortunate enough to get on the race, my relationship with her is worth more to me than the prize offered. I can certainly understand that Rebecca could value love enough to make the same choice, inverted. All of the final five couples were in love with each other, save hers. Rebecca is a deeply spiritual person who made a spiritual choice to support love in the world. It is a damned shame that she could not do that with the person who she was teamed with.
I really hope Rebecca finds a love worthy of her and that she gets a chance to live as well as she deserves.
Tuesday, February 08, 2005
Earlier Notes on Protest
I have discussed my father and protest earlier. This is my eulogy to dad.
The Sweet Sting of Significance!
I was on the rooftop looking down at the protesters in 2001 with Michael as his friends pointed out idiots they personally knew in the crowd of May Day wanna-be's. Growing up in the anti-war movement, I had the chance to learn what kind of protest accomplished change and what accomplished noise. It seems like all the effective, ethical protest organizers have gone away.
My dad burned out from fighting all the good fights, and somewhere along the way lost his faith not just in the movement, but in God Himself. This was not a healthy development for the Reverend Tom Lasswell, and it took him a long time to come to grips with that failure. On the plus side, I was raised with a much healthier theological basis and understood the alchemy of addiction on an instinctive level. Watching dad wean himself from cigarettes, alcohol, and the siren call of protest was an education. The character it took for him to shelter his kids from the ravages of his addictions was a blessing.
My brother and sister are older and had a more sophisticated view of the handful of years between dad quitting smoking, quitting drinking, and his quitting protest. To me it was much simpler; you quit smoking, drinking, and protest when you realize it is destroying you. Quitting an unhealthy addiction is hard, recognizing the addiction as unhealthy is harder. Kate and Michael still cherish their addiction to leftist causes, because they don't see them as addictive derangements.
Two days ago I had an argument with my brother about the failures of the deregulation of the power industry. My brother blamed it on Ronald Reagan in a manner reminiscent of chasing someone through streets of Paris over the theft of a loaf of bread. For reference, the significant legislation on power deregulation occurred in 1978 (PURPA) and 1992 (EPACT). Can you attach a Reagan presidency to either of those dates? My brother surely can, and insists that he can find proof. For my brother, the failure to fully fund AIDS research is the most catastrophic failure of policy of any president in the twentieth century. Don't even get me started on my sister's political reasoning.
I have talked to people who attend these protests, and I am sure that they love the smell of pepper spray exactly the same way I loved the smell of the smoke from my father's Salem's. It comforts them and makes the feel included. I remember asking my father to smoke just so I could smell the scent of him relaxing. I am sure that there are protesters who violently confront the police just so they can feel the sweet sting of significance and bask in the glow of remembered accomplishment. I am sure that they are confident in the justification of their actions because sensory input tells them it is right. They substitute endorphins for accomplishment and go seeking their next hit.
Update:
Thanks to Michael and Final Historian for their links. As usual, Michael wants me to get traffic analysis tool, and as usual I dismiss the notion as insufficiently zen. On the other hand, Michael gets to have drinks with Christopher Hitchens...
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