History > 2007 > USA > Pentagon (III)

Pentagon Giving Turkey

Intel on Rebels

October 31, 2007
Filed at 1:05 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The U.S. military has started giving more intelligence -- ''lots of intelligence'' -- to Turkey to help it against rebels staging cross-border attacks from their hiding places in neighboring Iraq, the Pentagon said Wednesday.

The U.S. has in recent days sent U-2 spy planes to the border area to try to collect better information on the militants and regional Iraqi authorities have sent some of their troops there, one official said.

Turkey has complained for months about what it has said is a lack of U.S. support against the rebels from the Kurdistan Workers' Party, known by its Kurdish acronym PKK. And Ankara has threatened a full-scale ground attack into northern Iraq if the U.S. and Iraqi officials don't do something about the rebels.

''We have given them more and more intelligence as a result of the recent concerns,'' said Defense Department Press Secretary Geoff Morrell.

''There has been an increased level of intelligence sharing as a result of this,'' he told Pentagon reporters Wednesday.

He did not say specifically when the increase started or how the intelligence was being gathered.

But the military in the last week or so has sent manned U-2 spy planes to the border region used by rebels, said a second defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about it on the record.

The official also said that the U.S. military saw a battalion of several hundred Peshmerga -- the militia of the Kurdish Iraqi regional authorities -- moving toward the border over the weekend. That could represent a notable change from last week when the top U.S. military commander in the area said he was not aware of any Kurdish attempts to rein in the PKK.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates suggested last week that airstrikes or major ground assaults by U.S., Turkish, or other forces wouldn't help much because not enough is known about where the rebels are at a given time.

Asked during a NATO meeting in Europe about the prospects of U.S. military strikes, Gates said: ''Without good intelligence, just sending large numbers of troops across the border or dropping bombs doesn't seem to make much sense to me.''

The U.S. and Iraqi governments have urged Turkey not to send troops across the border to pursue the separatist Kurds, calling for a diplomatic solution. They fear a large military operation, opening a new front in the Iraq war, would unsettle what is now the most stable part of the country.

A Turkish incursion would also put the United States in an awkward position with key allies: NATO-member Turkey, the Baghdad government and the self-governing Iraqi Kurds in the north.

Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Tuesday that it was ''unavoidable that Turkey will have to go through a more intensive military process'' to counter the rebels. Turkish forces have been shelling rebel positions near the border.

Erdogan also suggested he was not seeking an immediate cross-border offensive against the rebels. He flies to Washington for talks with President Bush next week.

''We expect the Iraqis to step up and make sure that they are doing everything they can to eradicate the PKK,'' White House press secretary Dana Perino said Wednesday.

''Turkey has a right to defend its people, it has a right to look for its soldiers, and we are asking Turkey, as well, to exercise restraint and to limit its exercises to the PKK. And so far that's continuing to work, but it takes a lot of dialogue and discussions,'' she said.

Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon, the top U.S. commander in northern Iraq, said last week that he is planning to do ''absolutely nothing'' to counter PKK activity -- the most blunt assertion to date by an American official that U.S. forces should not be involved in the fight.

Mixon said he has sent no additional troops to the area and has not been ordered to take any action against the rebels.

Top Defense Department and State Department officials have said that Iraq's Kurdish regional government should cut rebel supplies and disrupt rebel movement over the border, adding that Washington is increasingly frustrated by Kurdish inaction.

------

Associated Press writers Deb Riechmann and Lolita Baldor contributed to this report from Washington.

Pentagon Giving Turkey Intel on Rebels, NYT, 31.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-Iraq-Turkey.html

At Army Base,

Officers Are Split Over War

October 13, 2007
The New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

FORT LEAVENWORTH, Kan. — Here in this Western outpost that serves as the intellectual center of the United States Army, two elite officers were deep in debate at lunch on a recent day over who bore more responsibility for mistakes in Iraq — the former defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, or the generals who acquiesced to him.

“The secretary of defense is an easy target,” argued one of the officers, Maj. Kareem P. Montague, 34, a Harvard graduate and a commander in the Third Infantry Division that was the first to reach Baghdad in the 2003 invasion. “It’s easy to pick on the political appointee.”

“But he’s the one that’s responsible,” retorted Maj. Michael J. Zinno, 40, a military planner who worked at the headquarters of the Coalitional Provisional Authority, the former American civilian administration in Iraq.

No, Major Montague shot back, it was more complicated: the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the top commanders were part of the decision to send in a small invasion force and not enough troops for the occupation. Only Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the Army chief of staff who was sidelined after he told Congress that it would take several hundred thousand troops in Iraq, spoke up in public.

“You didn’t hear any of them at the time, other than General Shinseki, screaming, saying that this was untenable,” Major Montague said.

As the war grinds through its fifth year, Fort Leavenworth has become a front line in the military’s tension and soul-searching over Iraq. Here on the bluffs above the Missouri River rising young officers are on a different kind of journey — an outspoken re-examination of their role in Iraq.

Discussions between a New York Times reporter and dozens of young majors in five Leavenworth classrooms over two days — all unusual for their frankness in an Army that has traditionally presented a facade of solidarity to the outside world — showed a divide in opinion. Officers were split over whether Mr. Rumsfeld, the military leaders or both deserved blame for what they said were the major errors in the war: sending in a small invasion force and failing to plan properly for the occupation.

But the consensus was that not even after Vietnam was the Army’s internal criticism as harsh or the second-guessing so painful, and that airing the arguments on the record, as sanctioned by Leavenworth’s senior commanders, was part of a concerted effort to force change.

“You spend your whole career worrying about the safety of soldiers — let’s do the training right so no one gets injured, let’s make sure no one gets killed, and then you deploy and you’re attending memorial services for 19-year-olds,” said Maj. Niave Knell, 37, who worked in Baghdad to set up an Iraqi highway patrol. “And you have to think about what you did.”

On one level, second-guessing is institutionalized at Leavenworth, home to the Combined Arms Center, a sprawling Army research center that includes the Command and General Staff College for midcareer officers, the School of Advanced Military Studies for the most elite and the Center for Army Lessons Learned, which collects and disseminates battlefield data. (The center publishes a handbook for soldiers with strategies to help keep them alive for their first 100 days in combat, a response to the high percentage who died in their early months in Iraq.)

At Leavenworth, officers study Napoleon’s battle plans and Lt. William Calley’s mistakes in the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. Last year Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the top American commander in Iraq, wrote the Army and Marine Corps’ new Counterinsurgency Field Manual there. The goal at Leavenworth is to adapt the Army to the changing battlefield without repeating the mistakes of the past.

But senior officers say that much of the professional second-guessing has become an emotional exercise for young officers. “Many of them have been affected by people they know who died over there,” said Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the Leavenworth commander and the former top spokesman for the American military in Iraq. Unlike the 1991 Persian Gulf war and the conflicts in the Balkans and even Somalia, General Caldwell said, “we just never experienced the loss of life like we have here. And when that happens, it becomes very personal. You want to believe that there’s no question your cause is just and that it has the potential to succeed.”

Much of the debate at the school has centered on a scathing article, “A Failure in Generalship,” written last May for Armed Forces Journal by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, an Iraq veteran and deputy commander of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment who holds a master’s degree in political science from the University of Chicago. “If the general remains silent while the statesman commits a nation to war with insufficient means, he shares culpability for the results,” Colonel Yingling wrote.

The article has been required class reading at Leavenworth, where young officers debate whether Colonel Yingling was right to question senior commanders who sent junior officers into battle with so few troops.

“Where I was standing on the street corner, at the 14th of July Bridge, yeah, another brigade there would have been great,” said Maj. Jeffrey H. Powell, 37, a company commander who was referring to the bridge in Baghdad he helped secure during the early days of the war.

Major Powell, who was speaking in a class at the School for Advanced Military Studies, has read many of the Iraq books describing the private disagreements over troop levels between Mr. Rumsfeld and the top commanders, who worried that the numbers were too low but went along in the end.

“Sure, I’m a human being, I question the decision-making process,” Major Powell said. Nonetheless, he said, “we don’t get to sit on the top of the turrets of our tanks and complain that nobody planned for this. Our job is to fix it.”

Discussions nonetheless focused on where young officers might draw a “red line,” the point at which they would defy a command from the civilians — the president and the defense secretary — who lead the military.

“We have an obligation that if our civilian leaders give us an order, unless it is illegal, immoral or unethical, then we’re supposed to execute it, and to not do so would be considered insubordinate,” said Major Timothy Jacobsen, another student. “How do you define what is truly illegal, immoral or unethical? At what point do you cross that threshold where this is no longer right, I need to raise my hand or resign or go to the media?”General Caldwell, who was the top military aide from 2002 to 2004 to the deputy defense secretary at the time, Paul Wolfowitz, an architect of the Iraq war, would not talk about the meetings he had with Mr. Wolfowitz about the battle plans at the time. “We did have those discussions, and he would engage me on different things, but I’d feel very uncomfortable talking,” General Caldwell said.

Col. Gregory Fontenot, a Leavenworth instructor, said it was typical of young officers to feel that the senior commanders had not spoken up for their interests, and that he had felt the same way when he was their age. But Colonel Fontenot, who commanded a battalion in the Persian Gulf war and a brigade in Bosnia and has since retired, said he questioned whether Americans really wanted a four-star general to stand up publicly and say no to the president in a nation where civilians control the armed forces.

For the sake of argument, a question from the reporter was posed: If enough four-star generals had done that, would it have stopped the war?

“Yeah, we’d call it a coup d’etat,” Colonel Fontenot said. “Do you want to have a coup d’etat? You kind of have to decide what you want. Do you like the Constitution, or are you so upset about the Iraq war that you’re willing to dismiss the Constitution in just this one instance and hopefully things will be O.K.? I don’t think so.”

Some of the young officers were unimpressed by retired officers who spoke up against Mr. Rumsfeld in April 2006. The retired generals had little to lose, they argued, and their words would have mattered more had they been on active duty. “Why didn’t you do that while you were still in uniform?” Maj. James Hardaway, 36,asked.

On the other hand, Major Hardaway said, General Shinseki had shown there was a great cost, at least under Mr. Rumsfeld. “Evidence shows that when you do do that in uniform, bad things can happen,” he said. “So, it’s sort of a dichotomy of, should I do the right thing, even if I get punished?”

Another major said that young officers were engaged in their own revisionist history, and that many had believed the war could be won with Mr. Rumsfeld’s initial invasion force of about 170,000. “Everybody now claims, oh, I knew we were going to be there for five years and it was going to take 400,000 people,” said Maj. Patrick Proctor, 36. “Nobody wants to be the guy who said, ‘Yeah, I thought we could do it.’ But a lot of us did.”

One question that silenced many of the officers was a simple one: Should the war have been fought?

“I honestly don’t know how I feel about that,” Major Powell said in a telephone conversation last week after the discussions at Leavenworth.

“That’s a big, open question,” General Caldwell said after a long pause.

    At Army Base, Officers Are Split Over War, NYT, 13.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/13/us/13cnd-army.html?hp

Rocket Carrying U.S. Satellite Launched

October 11, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 6:44 a.m. ET
The New York Times

CAPE CANAVERAL AIR FORCE STATION, Fla. (AP) -- A rocket carrying a satellite used for communication by the United States Air Force lifted off Wednesday night.

The Atlas V launched at 8:22 p.m. EDT. It is carrying a Wideband Global SATCOM satellite and is the first of at least five satellites scheduled to be placed in orbit by the end of 2008.

The satellite system will replace the current Defense Satellite Communications System that has been used for military communications for the last two decades.

This first satellite will cover the Pacific Zone, which includes Hawaii, Japan and Southeast Asia. Each spacecraft will cost $350 million.

The old system will be used in conjunction with the new Wideband Glogal SATCOM system until it is phased out in the next few years.

Col. David Urich, the Military Satellite Communications Systems Wing vice commander, said the first launch alone ''will provide more capacity than all the current DSCS satellites currently in use.''

The launch was scheduled for Tuesday but was delayed a day as engineers checked data that might have indicated the Atlas V rocket would have fallen short of its intended orbit.

    Rocket Carrying U.S. Satellite Launched, NYT, 11.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Rocket-Launch.html

Gates Says Military Faces More Unconventional Wars

October 11, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID S. CLOUD

WASHINGTON, Oct. 10 — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Wednesday that the Army needed to improve its ability to train foreign militaries and to prepare for other unconventional conflicts that it was likely to face in coming decades.

Speaking to a gathering of current and retired soldiers, Mr. Gates sketched out a vision for making the Army better at conducting wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, which he said would “remain the mainstay of the contemporary battlefield for some time.”

His message was in many ways a blunt challenge to the Army not to treat the current conflicts as anomalies and to retreat into the more familiar task of preparing for conventional combat, as it did after the Vietnam War. Future conflicts, he said, “will be fundamentally political in nature and require the application of all elements of national power.”

“Success will be less a matter of imposing one’s will and more a function of shaping behavior of friends, adversaries, and most importantly, the people in between,” he said.

He noted that a vital capability that the military needed was “standing up and mentoring indigenous armies and police” — a task the Army has struggled to carry out in recent years in both Iraq and Afghanistan. But he offered no specific proposals for improving the Army’s abilities in this area.

He was speaking to the annual convention of the Association of the United States Army here.

Mr. Gates alluded to the desire among some officers to spend billions of dollars on re-equipping the Army and to return to training for what the service called “high intensity” conflict, a euphemism for conventional combat.

While supporting the idea of large outlays in coming years for new equipment and to expand the size of the Army, Mr. Gates said that the Army had to regain its edge in fighting conventional wars while retaining what it had learned about fighting unconventional wars.

The adaptations the Army has already made in Iraq and Afghanistan have been “impressive,” he said.

But in the future, he said: “Army soldiers can expect to be tasked with reviving public services, rebuilding infrastructure and promoting good governance. All these so-called nontraditional capabilities have moved into the mainstream of military thinking, planning and strategy, where they must stay.”

Also on Wednesday, Maj. Gen. Thomas P. Bostick, commander of the Army Recruiting Command, said at a Pentagon news conference that in fiscal year 2007, 18 percent of the military’s recruits had prior criminal records and needed a waiver to join, up from 15 percent the previous year. He said 87 percent of those were for misdemeanors like joy riding or violating curfew.

David Chu, the Defense Department’s under secretary for personnel, defended the waiver policy, saying it took into consideration the whole person and his or her future abilities, not just mistakes the person might have made. Mr. Chu announced that the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines had all met their recruiting targets last year.

    Gates Says Military Faces More Unconventional Wars, NYT, 11.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/washington/11gates.html

War-Crimes Prosecutor

Quits in Pentagon Clash

October 6, 2007
The New York Times
By WILLIAM GLABERSON

In the latest disruption of the Bush administration’s plan to try detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for war crimes, the chief military prosecutor on the project stepped down yesterday after a dispute with a Pentagon official.

It was not clear what effect the departure would have on the problem-plagued effort to charge and try detainees.

The prosecutor, Col. Morris D. Davis of the Air Force, was to leave his position immediately, a Defense Department spokeswoman said. But the spokeswoman, Cynthia O. Smith, said officials were working to minimize interruption in the work of the prosecution office, which includes military lawyers supplemented by civilian federal prosecutors.

“The department is taking measures to ensure a prompt and orderly transition to another chief prosecutor without interrupting the key mission of prosecuting war crimes via military commissions,” Ms. Smith said.

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Colonel Davis would resign.

The Pentagon’s system of prosecuting suspects has been beset by practical problems and legal disputes that have reached the Supreme Court. As a result, more than five years after the first terror suspects arrived at Guantánamo Bay, only one detainee’s war-crimes case has been completed, and that was through a plea agreement.

Prosecutors have said they might eventually file charges against as many as 80 of the 330 detainees being held at Guantánamo. Those include so-called high value detainees, 14 men the administration has said include dangerous terrorists who had previously been held in secret C.I.A. prisons.

Officials have said the prosecutors are working on charges against some of those men, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who has said he was the mastermind of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Colonel Davis, a career military lawyer, had been in a bitter dispute with Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, who was appointed this summer to a top post in the Pentagon Office of Military Commissions, which supervises the war crimes trial system.

General Hartmann, an Air Force reserve officer who worked as a corporate lawyer until recently, was appointed this summer as the legal adviser to Susan J. Crawford, a former military appeals judge who is the convening authority, a military official who has extensive powers under the military commission law passed by Congress in 2006.

Among other powers, under the law, the convening authority can approve or reject war-crimes charges, make plea deals with detainees and reduce sentences.

People involved in the prosecutions, who spoke on condition of anonymity, have said that General Hartmann challenged Colonel Davis’s authority in August and pressed the prosecutors who worked for Colonel Davis to produce new charges against detainees quickly.

They said he also pushed the prosecutors to frame cases with bold terrorism accusations that would draw public attention to the military commission process, which has been one of the central legal strategies of the Bush administration. In some cases the prosecutors are expected to seek the death penalty.

Through a spokeswoman, General Hartmann declined comment yesterday.

Colonel Davis filed a complaint against General Hartmann with Pentagon officials this fall saying that the general had exceeded his authority and created a conflict of interest by asserting control over the prosecutor’s office. Colonel Davis said it would be improper for General Hartmann to assess the adequacy of cases filed by prosecutors if the general had been involved in the decision to file those cases.

In a statement last week, Colonel Davis said the issue posed a threat to the integrity of the war-crimes process. “For the greater good, Brigadier General Hartmann and I should both resign and walk away or higher authority should relieve us of our duties,” the statement said.

A military official said yesterday that Pentagon officials had sided with General Hartmann in the dispute.

Yesterday, Colonel Davis said he could not discuss the developments. “I’m under direct orders,” he said, “not to comment with the media about the reasons for my resignation or military commissions.”

Gregory S. McNeal, an assistant professor at the Dickinson School of Law at Pennsylvania State University, said the effort to begin war-crimes trials would probably continue. But Mr. McNeal, who has been a consultant to the military prosecutors, said the questions Colonel Davis raised would be exploited by defense lawyers.

“The last thing the prosecution needs is officials influencing the prosecutions,” he said.

Critics of the administration have argued that the effort to design a military commission system for foreign terror suspects is intended to circumvent the legal protections that detainees would receive if they were charged in civilian courts. Some of those critics said yesterday that the dispute underscored their concerns.

“This is further evidence that the military commission process is completely unraveling,” said J. Wells Dixon, a detainees’ lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York.

“That is endemic,” Mr. Dixon added, “to any system that is made up as you go along.”

    War-Crimes Prosecutor Quits in Pentagon Clash, NYT, 6.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/06/us/nationalspecial3/06gitmo.html

More Women Than Ever Enter West Point

October 4, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:47 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WEST POINT, N.Y. (AP) -- Cadet Karyn Powell falls in with the guys at midday formation. Same gray uniform. Same straight-ahead stare. Same dressing down from the platoon sergeant for the plebes' imperfectly kept rooms -- except for the bit about long hairs in the sink.

''I understand your guys hair falls off,'' he tells Powell and her roommate. ''Clean it up.''

Powell is among 225 young women who joined the Long Gray Line this year for the Class of 2011. That is the highest number of female cadets in a single class since women first came to the U.S. Military Academy in 1976 and the highest proportion for any class: 17 percent.

West Point administrators are greeting this milestone with little more than a shrug of their epauletted shoulders. The increase is slight, they say, and women have lugged the same heavy rucksacks as the men and chowed down next to them at West Point's Harry Potter-Gothic mess hall for three decades. Expectations are the same for every cadet.

But in this history-drenched institution on the Hudson River that has produced generals such as Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Douglas MacArthur and Norman Schwarzkopf, some female cadets say they still feel the need to prove they measure up.

''You don't want to give the reputation to girls that 'Oh, she can't do it because she's a girl.' And you don't want to appear like you get special treatment because you're a girl,'' said Karina Quezada, a 19-year-old plebe from Las Vegas.

''And don't whine!'' added Diane Leimbach, a plebe from Quincy, Ill.

Quezada and Leimbach roomed together this summer for ''beast barracks,'' West Point's six-week shakedown of in-your-face orders and long marches for incoming cadets. No leeway is given if you are, like Quezada and Leimbach, petite.

''I didn't want to quit because I didn't want to be 'that girl' and I didn't want to appear weak in the eyes of my squad leader, my squad mates,'' Leimbach said.

''As a female, you have to win the respect of the males sometimes ... And I did.''

President Ford signed legislation in 1975 opening the nation's service academies to women applicants, leading to 119 women studying at West Point the next year. The proportion of women at the academy hovered in the 10-12 percent range until around 1989, when it jumped to 14 to 16 percent, where it has stayed since then, said Col. Deborah McDonald, associate director of admissions.

That's in line with the proportion of women in active military duty.

The challenge now is recruiting at a time when troops are deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. While McDonald said the academy has been able to meet recruiting goals for women, many parents now are ''tentatively holding back.''

''There's a lot of concern for the sons and daughters out there,'' McDonald said, ''but especially for daughters.''

West Point has made accommodations to women over the years. They can wear stud earrings and makeup. McDonald, Class of '85, thinks the best idea was to let female cadets wear long hair, providing it's kept above the collar. Hair buns do the trick. Often, the most obvious gender clue among the gray-clad cadets walking around the maze of granite buildings here is the knot of hair poking from under some caps.

''All the guys are kind of like your brothers,'' said Powell, 18, of West Harrison, Ind. ''You kind of help take care of them and they help take care of you. I don't really think there's any difference between being a guy and a girl here.''

West Point has been spared the sort of high-profile sex scandal that hit the Air Force Academy earlier this decade. But a Pentagon task force in 2005 found that inappropriate treatment of women -- including offensive comments, repeated and unwelcome propositions and offers to trade academic favors for sexual acts -- persisted at West Point and the Naval Academy.

West Point officials say they have made a number of changes since then, including the institution of a confidential reporting system and annually bringing in women who were raped to speak to cadets. New cadets said they were made to memorize reporting procedures.

''Our awareness of the situation has grown in the last two years,'' said Col. Jeanette McMahon, special assistant to the superintendent on human relations and a member of the Class of '83

McDonald said it is better for women at West Point compared to the early '80s when she and McMahon were cadets. She notes that today's female cadets regularly meet women who have had successful military careers, like McDonald and herself.

Quezada, the daughter of Vietnam veteran, can look for inspiration from the 61 military women at the faculty. And if she needs a boost of confidence, she can think of her sister, who graduated West Point in May.

Though a dozen female plebes had dropped out by late September, Quezada is confident she'll make it.

''I'm not going to be 'that girl' falling out,'' she said.

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On the Net:

West Point: www.usma.edu

    More Women Than Ever Enter West Point, NYT, 4.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-West-Point-Women.html

Senate Approves Military Spending

October 4, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 (AP) — The Senate on Wednesday approved $459 billion in spending for the Pentagon, after adding $3 billion for security at the Mexican border.

The bill, passed by voice vote, does not include President Bush’s request for almost $190 billion for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The bill would increase other Pentagon spending $43 billion, up more than 10 percent from the last budget.

Much of the new money would be devoted to procuring new weapons, including the V-22 tilt rotor aircraft, unmanned drone aircraft, the next generation of Joint Strike Fighters and the F-22 Raptor fighter jet.

The border security money had been in a spending bill for the Homeland Security Department that Mr. Bush has promised to veto because it exceeds his budget request by $2 billion.

By shifting the money to the Pentagon bill, Republican leaders hoped to preserve the financing without embarrassing the president by overriding his veto.

The military bill includes more money for National Guard equipment and military health care and a 3.5 percent pay increase for military personnel.

    Senate Approves Military Spending, NYT, 4.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/washington/04spend.html

Report Says Veterans' Care Woes Remain

September 26, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:08 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Months after pledging to improve veterans care, the Bush administration has yet to find clear answers to some of the worst problems afflicting wounded warriors, such as delays in disability payments and providing personalized care, investigators say.

A report by the Government Accountability Office, released Wednesday, offers the first preliminary assessment of improvement efforts initiated by the Pentagon and Veterans Affairs Department after revelations in February of shoddy outpatient treatment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

The report found that even though the Army has touted creation of more personalized medical care units so that wounded veterans don't slip through the cracks, nearly half -- or 46 percent -- of returning service members who were eligible did not get the service due to staffing shortages.

The report said after 10 years of review, the Pentagon and VA still remain far away from having a comprehensive system for sharing medical records as injured veterans move from facility to facility.

And despite months of review by no less than eight congressional committees, a presidential task force, a presidential commission and the Pentagon and VA itself, the government has no apparent solution for reducing severe delays of 177 days, on average, in providing disability payments.

''Many challenges remain, and critical questions remain unanswered,'' GAO investigators John H. Pendleton and Daniel Bertoni wrote in calling for urgent action. ''Success will ultimately depend on sustained attention, systematic oversight by DoD and VA, and sufficient resources.''

Army spokesman Paul Boyce said Wednesday that officials were working diligently to provide ''high-quality medical and mental health care for America's soldiers and veterans.'' The Army has said it hopes to have full staffing of its medical care units by January 2008. The VA has said it was hiring 1,100 new processors to reduce backlogs.

Responding to delays in sharing medical records, Patrick Dunne, VA's assistant secretary for policy and planning, said the VA and Pentagon had recently completed electronic sharing of veterans data involving allergies, outpatient medications, lab results and radiology. The two departments are using a contractor to study the feasibility and scope of sharing full inpatient records electronically, he said.

Rep. John Tierney, D-Mass., chairman of the House Oversight subcommittee on national security, said he was troubled by the lingering problems. ''Taking care of our wounded heroes is too important to not demand that we strive for the highest levels of care and respect,'' he said.

Following the disclosures of patient neglect at Walter Reed, three high-level Pentagon officials stepped down. The Army quickly pledged to improve care by hiring more mental health counselors and creating new ''warrior transition units'' -- comprising a doctor, nurse case manager and squad leader -- who could help coordinate care.

The VA, which operates separate facilities for 5.8 million veterans, also said it would boost efforts, with VA Secretary Jim Nicholson vowing to work to improve data-sharing of medical records and to reduce backlogs. Nicholson later announced in July he was resigning and will step down Oct. 1.

On separate fronts, Congress approved additional money for veterans care, while the presidential commission headed by former Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., and former Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala recommended changes that would increase benefits for family members, create a Web site for medical records and revamp the way disability pay is awarded.

On Wednesday, the GAO praised these initial steps. But it cautioned that long-standing problems were far from being resolved as the various groups negotiated their various proposals and as the Pentagon and VA faced challenges in hiring needed staff.

As of mid-September, 17 of the 32 warrior transition units had less than 50 percent of the critical staff in place. And in many cases, the Army had filled slots by borrowing staff from other positions, thus providing only a temporary solution as thousands of veterans return from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Regarding disability benefits, the GAO said the government was currently in limbo amid competing proposals to fix the disability ratings system. The Dole-Shalala commission, for example, urged that only the VA -- and not the Pentagon -- provide disability payments, while other proposals gave the Pentagon a limited role.

But in all the proposals, no consideration was given as to how the additional duties would affect the VA, which is straining to reduce backlogs for disability benefits, the report said. Nicholson in recent days has acknowledged that the VA was nowhere close to reducing monthslong delays and cited that as a top challenge for his successor.

''Delayed decisions, confusing policies and the perception that DoD and VA disability ratings result in inequitable outcomes have eroded the credibility of the system,'' the GAO investigators said. ''It is imperative that DoD and VA take prompt steps to address fundamental system weaknesses.''

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On the Net:

Pentagon: http://www.defenselink.mil/

Department of Veterans Affairs: http://www.va.gov/

    Report Says Veterans' Care Woes Remain, NYT, 26.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Veterans-Care.html

Pentagon Seeks $190 Billion for Wars

September 26, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:56 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Defense Secretary Robert Gates will ask Congress Wednesday to approve nearly $190 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2008, increasing initial projections by more than a third.

In remarks prepared for a Senate hearing, Gates says the extra money is necessary to buy vehicles that can protect troops against roadside bombs, refurbish equipment worn down by combat and consolidate U.S. bases in Iraq. A copy of the remarks was obtained by The Associated Press.

In that prepared testimony, Gates said, ''I know that Iraq and other difficult choices America faces in the war on terror will continue to be a source of friction within the Congress, between the Congress and the president and in the wider public debate.''

''Considering this, I would like to close with a word about something I know we can all agree on -- the honor, courage and great sense of duty we have witnessed in our troops since September 11th,'' his testimony said.

In February, Bush requested $141.7 billion for the wars; officials said at the time the figure was only a rough estimate and could climb. In July, the Defense Department asked Congress for another $5.3 billion to buy 1,500 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles.

Gates says another $42 billion is needed to cover additional requirements. The extra money includes:

-- $11 billion to field another 7,000 MRAP vehicles in addition to the 8,000 already planned;

-- $9 billion to reconstitute equipment and technology;

-- $6 billion for training and equipment of troops;

-- $1 billion to improve U.S. facilities in the region and consolidate bases in Iraq; and

-- $1 billion to train and equip Iraqi security forces.

    Pentagon Seeks $190 Billion for Wars, NYT, 26.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-Iraq.html

$50 Billion for Military

Is Added to Budget

September 23, 2007
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON, Sept. 22 — The Bush administration plans to increase its 2008 financing request for military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere by almost $50 billion, with about a quarter of the additional money going toward armored trucks built to withstand roadside bombs, Pentagon officials said Saturday.

The increase would bring the amount the administration is seeking to finance the war effort through 2008 to almost $200 billion. Much of that money will go to refurbishment of military equipment and to the purchase of new protective equipment for troops, officials said, an indication of the toll that years of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan have taken on military vehicles, aircraft, weapons and other items.

Defense officials said earlier this year that the Pentagon would need a war budget of $141 billion in the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1. The additional request for nearly $50 billion, which was first reported in The Los Angeles Times on Saturday, will be presented by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Wednesday, the Pentagon said. Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte and senior military officials are also expected to attend the hearing.

Mr. Gates is to testify two weeks after Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, went before Congress to warn against a rapid reduction of troops in Iraq, and a week after a Democratic effort to limit troop rotations stumbled in the Senate. The financing request may serve to further sharpen partisan divisions over the Iraq war in general, and its soaring cost in particular.

About a quarter of the new money would go to build additional mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles, or MRAPs, Pentagon officials said. “We’d put in an original request for 7,000 MRAPS, but we’re going to double that number,” said a senior Defense Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly on the issue.

Members of Congress have criticized the Defense Department, saying it has been too slow to buy enough of the vehicles for troops in Iraq.

The vehicles, which cost around $1 million each, have a raised chassis and V-shaped underside that deflects explosions better than the flat underbelly on Humvees, which are used by most combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Bush administration originally sought $2.6 billion for fiscal 2007 to buy additional MRAPs, but Congress increased the total by $1.2 billion. Acquiring MRAPs has become one of the Pentagon’s biggest budget priorities.

Senator Joesph R. Biden Jr., of Delaware, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, reintroduced legislation last week to increase financing for the mine-resistant vehicles by $23.6 billion.

“We have no higher obligation than to protect those we send to the front lines,” Mr. Biden said in a statement on Wednesday. “So when our commanders in the field tell us that MRAPs will reduce casualties by 67 to 80 percent, it is our responsibility to provide them.”

Defense officials, conceding that increasing production of MRAPs so steeply could lead to bottlenecks, have said the Defense Department’s leadership now agrees that the risk is acceptable in order to provide vehicles that can better withstand roadside attacks.

Before the Pentagon decided several months ago to buy as many MRAPs as could be made, the vehicles were provided primarily for units with such high-risk missions as clearing roads of bombs, officials said.

Mr. Gates ordered an acceleration in production in May after news reports said Marine units using the vehicles in Anbar Province had experienced a sharp decline in casualties from roadside bombs.

    $50 Billion for Military Is Added to Budget, NYT, 23.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/washington/23spend.html

$6 Billion in Contracts Reviewed,

Pentagon Says

September 21, 2007
The New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT and GINGER THOMPSON

WASHINGTON, Sept. 20 — Military officials said Thursday that contracts worth $6 billion to provide essential supplies to American troops in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan — including food, water and shelter — were under review by criminal investigators, double the amount the Pentagon had previously disclosed.

In addition, $88 billion in contracts and programs, including those for body armor for American soldiers and matériel for Iraqi and Afghan security forces, are being audited for financial irregularities, the officials said.

Taken together, the figures, provided by the Pentagon in a hearing before the House Armed Services Committee, represent the fullest public accounting of the magnitude of a widening government investigation into bid-rigging, bribery and kickbacks by members of the military and civilians linked to the Pentagon’s purchasing system.

Until the hearing on Thursday, the Army’s most detailed public disclosure about the scale of the problem was that contracts worth $3 billion awarded by the Kuwait office were under review.

At the hearing, a panel of high-ranking Defense Department officials described a war-zone procurement system in disarray. They said that the Pentagon failed to provide adequate training for contracting officers for their assignments, offered insufficient oversight of contracting officers’ activities and had not put in place early warning systems to catch officers who violated the law.

“In a combat environment, we didn’t have the checks and balances we should have in place,” said Shay D. Assad, director of defense procurement and acquisition policy. “So people who don’t have ethics and integrity are going to be able to get away with things.”

Representatives from both parties pummeled the panel with angry questions and comments, assailing the Pentagon for having failed to overhaul the procurement system more than two years after Congress had identified serious problems in defense contracting and passed legislation aimed at helping the Pentagon correct them.

The lawmakers also challenged assertions by the Pentagon officials that the corruption being uncovered was the work of a few isolated individuals. Several committee members suggested that the abuses were far more systemic.

“The problems were so severe that I fear they could represent a culture of corruption,” said Representative Ike Skelton, Democrat of Missouri, the chairman of the committee. “I am extremely disappointed to learn that so many individuals violated their integrity and undermined the oaths they made to this country.”

Representative John Kline, a Minnesota Republican and retired Marine colonel, said he was “doubly, triply, quadruply appalled” at the “clear breakdown in leadership” that allowed some Army contracting officers to corrupt the procurement system. He said it was inexcusable that it took so long for the Army to put adequate checks in place.

Pentagon officials did not dispute the seriousness of the problems. However, they took issue with lawmakers’ characterizations of their scope. “I think it’s isolated incidents,” said Thomas F. Gimble, the principal deputy Pentagon inspector general. “The real issue is a lack of control, a lack of integrity and lots of opportunity and lots of money.”

Mr. Gimble and the other Pentagon officials said they were working aggressively to identify officers and civilians responsible for crimes and turn them over for prosecution, increasing the numbers of contracting officers and lawyers in Kuwait and improving the contracts and ethics training they provide to their specialists.

The Pentagon officials said that they would turn the largest contracts in Kuwait over to more seasoned military procurement specialists in the United States and that they had set up a more rigorous set of contract review procedures. And the Pentagon inspector general has been sent to Iraq to investigate the department’s contracting procedures.

“I don’t think it was a widespread conspiracy or cultural issue,” said Lt. Gen. N. Ross Thompson 3rd of the Army, a senior procurement official who is co-leader of an Army review of contracting procedures in Kuwait and Iraq. “We’ve got a number of individual cases. All the ones we know about are being actively investigated. We’ve got internal controls to make sure there aren’t new problems in different areas.”

As of Sept. 12, the Army reported that it had 78 cases of fraud and corruption under investigation, had obtained 20 criminal indictments, and had uncovered over $15 million in bribes.

Lawmakers scolded the Pentagon for just recently ordering the creation of a special contracting corps of experienced procurement specialists — authorized in the legislation two years ago — to bolster purchasing teams in the most active combat zones, and to report directly to a regional military commander.

“That it’s taken two years to do this is an indication of a system that’s quite slow,” said Representative Duncan Hunter of California, the senior Republican on the committee. “That’s half the time it took to win World War II.”

    $6 Billion in Contracts Reviewed, Pentagon Says, NYT, 21.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/21/washington/21contract.html

Gates Says US Defeat

Would Be a Disaster

September 14, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:54 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Friday that a U.S. defeat in Iraq would be ''disastrous'' and President Bush's strategy deserves bipartisan support in Congress.

''The consequences of American failure in Iraq at this point would, I believe, be disastrous not just for Iraq but for the region, for the United States and for the world,'' Gates told a Pentagon news conference.

''No discussion of where and how we go from here can avoid this stark reality,'' he added.

Gates asserted that all senior military leaders fully agreed with the recommendations Gen. David Petraeus presented to Bush and to Congress, including his proposal to begin a modest troop withdrawal this year.

Seated beside Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the soon-to-retire chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gates said he deliberately kept quiet in public about his own opinions regarding a way forward in Iraq.

In his first public remarks since Bush's announcement of troop reductions in Iraq starting this month, Gates said he saw little likelihood that he would recommend that Bush accelerate the drawdown, as many in Congress have recommended.

Gates described the president's decision, announced Thursday evening, as representing ''the beginning of a transition of mission, beginning in December.''

It was Gates' first Pentagon press conference since mid-July.

    Gates Says US Defeat Would Be a Disaster, NYT, 14.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Gates.html

Pentagon Censors 9 / 11 Suspect's Tape

September 13, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:05 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Pentagon has censored an audio tape of the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks speaking at a military hearing -- cutting out Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's explanation for why Islamic militants waged jihad against the United States.

After months of debate by several federal agencies, the Defense Department released the tape Thursday. Cut from it were 10 minutes of the more than 40-minute closed court session at Guantanamo Bay to determine whether Mohammed should be declared an ''enemy combatant.''

Since the March hearing, he has been assigned ''enemy combatant'' status, a classification the Bush administration says allows it to hold him indefinitely and prosecute him at a military tribunal.

Officials from the CIA, FBI, State Department and others listened to the tape and feared it could be copied and edited by other militants for use as propaganda, officials said.

''It was determined that the release of this portion of the spoken words of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would enable enemies of the United States to use it in a way to recruit or encourage future terrorists or terrorist activities,'' said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman. ''This could ultimately endanger the lives and physical safety of American citizens and those of our allies.''

Calling Mohammed a ''notorious figure,'' Whitman added, ''I think we all recognize that there is an obvious difference between the potential impacts of the written versus the spoken word.''

Some of the statements deleted from the tape have already been widely reported because the Pentagon released a 26-page written transcript of the hearing several days after it was held. Others statements were cut both from the audio and the transcript because of security and privacy concerns, officials said.

Mohammed was the first of 14 so-called ''high-value'' detainees who were held in secret CIA prisons before being transferred to the Pentagon facility at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

At the hearing, he portrayed himself as al-Qaida's most active operational planner, confessing to the beheading of American journalist Daniel Pearl and to playing a central role in 30 other attacks and plots in the U.S. and worldwide that killed thousands.

The gruesome attacks range from the suicide hijackings of Sept. 11, 2001 -- which killed nearly 3,000 -- to a 2002 shooting on an island off Kuwait that killed a U.S. Marine.

Among statements that appeared in the transcript, but were cut from the audio, was Mohammed saying he felt some sorrow over Sept. 11.

''I'm not happy that 3,000 been killed in America,'' the transcript quoted him as saying in broken English. ''I feel sorry even. I don't like to kill children and the kids.''

But he says there are exceptions in war.

''The language of the war is victims,'' Mohammed said in a part of the transcript that was cut from the audio. He compared al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden to George Washington, saying Americans view Washington as a hero for his role in the Revolutionary War and many Muslims view bin Laden in the same light.

''He is doing same thing. He is just fighting. He needs his independence,'' Mohammed said.

During much of Mohammed's hearing, he spoke in English. The audio released by the Pentagon includes Mohammed responding to questions.

Audio tapes of other high-value detainees have been released by the Pentagon. Whitman said he did not know if any of those have been used as propaganda by extremist groups on the Internet.

The audio tape also includes a number of other redactions that reflect portions of the written transcript that were deleted, because of security and privacy concerns, when it was first released.

One of the sections initially held back by the Pentagon, but later released, was Mohammed's confession to the beheading of Pearl. ''I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan,'' Mohammed said in a written statement read by his U.S.-appointed representative for the hearing.

Officials at first held back the section to allow time for his family to be notified, Whitman said at the time.

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AP Washington reporter Lolita Baldor contributed to this report.

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On the Net:

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Combatant--Tribunals.html

Pentagon Censors 9 / 11 Suspect's Tape, NYT, 13.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Sept-11-Confession-Audio.html