Good morning.
This is an experiment: today my subject matter will simply be the first headline to attract my eyes in each of the six papers I daily follow, in the order I espy them. So let’s see what we’ve got here:
The New York Times:
Graft in U.S. Army Contracts Spread From Kuwait Base
By GINGER THOMPSON and ERIC SCHMITT
Maj. John Lee Cockerham was considered an unlikely success story in his hometown, but now he faces corruption charges related to contracts in Iraq.
His name may ring a bell for you, but we didn’t know until this lede story that John Lee Cockerham is one of 18 siblings who grew up without electricity or running water in northwest Louisiana, or that
[t]he congregation at New Friendship Baptist Church [of Castor, LA, pop. 200] celebrated his last promotion with a parade. At his sons’ baptism, he told fellow worshipers that he hoped to instill in his children the values he had wrested from hardship.
Less than 24 hours later Major Cockerham was behind bars, accused of orchestrating the largest single bribery scheme against the military since the start of the Iraq war. According to the authorities, the 41-year-old officer, with his wife and a sister, used an elaborate network of offshore bank accounts and safe deposit boxes to hide nearly $10 million in bribes from companies seeking military contracts.
The rest is equally astounding. From a childhood of grits breakfasts and cornbread suppers, John Lee Cockerham went into the Army, to college and graduate business school, and finally to Kuwait — where he is “tied to a crisis of corruption inside the behemoth bureaucracy that sustains America’s troops” that led to “charges against at least 29 civilians and soldiers, more than 75 other criminal investigations and the suicides of at least two officers.” (NYT names only one, a “Maj. Gloria D. Davis of Missouri,” here reported to have shot herself a day after admitting that she’d taken $225,000 in bribes, but I wonder whether the other reference is to Col. Ted Westhusing.)
NYT’s parting view of the Cockerhams comes via a letter he recently sent to an old dear in Castor, saying that “his wife was busy with a new singing ministry for the other women in the prison and that he had preached two sermons to the men.”
He thanked Mrs. Egans for reading the names of his sons when they were baptized, just as she had done at his own baptism more than 30 years earlier. He offered no explanation of the charges against him, nor did he express any sadness.
"We are at such peace, with such zeal for the Lord, " Major Cockerham wrote, "that we know this is exactly where we are supposed to be for this short time. "
How nice for the Cockerhams. If only their peace could spread to . . .
The Washington Post:
U.S. Aims to Lure Insurgents With ‘Bait’
Pentagon group has urged U.S. military snipers to scatter explosives, ammunition and kill Iraqis who pick them up, military court documents show.
Josh White and Joshua Partlow
“Well, my God” is my immediate reaction to the facts and allegations reported here. They involve a classified program described in “investigative documents related to recently filed murder charges against three snipers who are accused of planting evidence on Iraqis they killed,” write White and Partlow, who say they received the documents from family members of the accused. Only a dozen or so members of a sniper platoon (called “the painted demons” for their tiger-stripe face paint) knew of the program, which may or may not extend to the rest of the Iraq theatre. But news of it appalls military-law expert Eugene Fidell:
“In a country that is awash in armaments and magazines and implements of war, if every time somebody picked up something that was potentially useful as a weapon, you might as well ask every Iraqi to walk around with a target on his back,” Fidell said.
One of the platoon’s victims was an Iraqi man “dropped” while cutting grass with a rusty scythe then, according to the documents, posthumously supplied with “a spool of wire, often used by insurgents to detonate roadside bombs, into the man’s pocket in an attempt to make the case for the kill ironclad.” Two weeks later, another Iraqi, named Genei Nesir Khudair, happened to walk in the direction of a spot on the Euphrates River where platoon members were in a “hide.” They radioed their lieutenant for permission to drop him too, received it (“I told him that as the ground forces commander, I would authorize that if it was necessary”), and a few minutes later . . .
The U.S. military alleges that Vela, on Hensley’s order, shot the Iraqi man twice in the head with a 9mm pistol after he had been taken into custody. It was Vela’s first kill, and he was visibly shaken. “He looked weird,” Sgt. Robert Redfern testified. “Just messed up from it. How would you feel if you had to shoot someone?” …
Vela and Hensley told investigators that the man had an AK-47 with him and that he posed a threat, but other soldiers have alleged that the AK-47 was planted next to Khudair after he was shot.
To White and Partlow, Vela’s lawyer describes his client and the other defendants as “battle-fatigued pawns in a newfangled concept of ‘baiting’ warfare that, like an onion, perhaps looked good on the surface, but started stinking to high hell the minute the layers were pulled back and scrutinized.” Vela’s father agrees: “It’s an injustice that is being done to them,” he tells WaPo.
“I feel like you can’t prosecute our soldiers for acts of war and threaten them with years and years of confinement when this program, if it comes to the light of day, was clearly coming from higher levels. . . . All those people who said ‘go use this stuff’ just disappeared, like they never sanctioned it.”
Well, yes, if there’s a leitmotif of 2003-2007, it’s surely All those people who said ‘go use this stuff’ just disappeared, like they never sanctioned it. Thus . . .
The Los Angeles Times:
‘Bush Lied’ shirts enlist the dead
By Nicholas Riccardi
The small type lists U.S. troops killed in Iraq. Families say the names aren’t for sale.
This story concerns the brainstorm of struggling lefty entrepreneur Dan Frazier of Flagstaff, Arizona: to make T-shirts with the phrase “Bush Lied” superimposed over the names of Americans killed in Iraq. He’s been doing it since 2003, when he transferred the text of the bumper-strips he’d been selling online to T-shirts, adding the then-500 names and “They Died.”
Reporter Riccardi explains what ensued when some parents asked Frazier to stop using their deceased children’s names, he refused, and they went to their state legislatures for help:
Arizona, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma and Florida — have since passed laws requiring permission from members of the military or their next of kin before their names can be used commercially. A version of the law has been introduced in each chamber of Congress.
Frazier claims it’s a matter of free speech, but for the parents, according to Riccardi, it’s a matter of respect:
Margy Bons argued furiously with her son Michael Marzano about the war. He was so gung-ho to go to Iraq that he hunted for and joined a Reserve unit that was scheduled to quickly deploy. Marzano, a sergeant in the Marines, was killed in 2005 — by a suicide bomber in northern Iraq — just weeks after writing to his mother in Phoenix that he remained convinced he was “doing the right thing.”
“Do you believe anyone who wrote that would want his name on this T-shirt?” Bons asked. “Do I believe in this war? No. But my son did. And that’s whose name I have to protect.” …
“He’s doing nothing more than what the president is doing,” [Lila Lipscomb of Flint, Michigan, who appeared in Fahrenheit 911] said. Her son, Army Sgt. Michael Pedersen, was killed when his Black Hawk helicopter was shot down in 2003. “Bush didn’t have the soldiers’ permission to send them to war. This guy didn’t have permission to sell my son’s name.”
Me, I call Frazier wrongheaded and think he needs to find another, better way to get along. It doesn’t have to be noble, just some matter of everyday decency. Lots of people are struggling for that these days . . .
The Times of London:
"The gunfire rather mars the pleasure’
During the past month Martin Fletcher kept a diary as he encountered death, romance, a cricket match and dogged resilience in Iraq
A few entries:
Sunday August 26 Sheikh Sittar, a 36-year-old tribal leader, led the uprising. A convoy of Humvees had delivered us to his heavily fortified compound near the Baghdad-Amman highway. He is a sheikh from central casting … urbane, mysterious and dressed in pristine white robes. We sat outside and drank chai as his young son hovered near by. He joked about his grandfather fighting the British after the First World War. He talked about a planned trip to America. He is al-Qaeda’s top target, but said he did not fear death … "Allah gives you your first day on this Earth, and your last. "
But the strain was obvious from the way he chain-smoked, fiddled with prayer beads and fretted that Richard’s long lenses were a disguised weapon. He invited us to dinner but our Humvees awaited. As we left he gave me his beads. I told Richard to guard his pictures well because one day we would hear that Sittar had been killed.
(Of course “Sittar”‘s surname was al-Risha, and that “one day” turned out to be Thursday, September 13.)
Thursday September 6 We are embedded at a US combat support hospital. We watch a catalogue of horrors arrive by Humvee and helicopter, including a soldier with all four limbs blown off and an Iraqi with his eyes gouged out and tongue cut off. The medics treat everyone … Americans, Iraqis, insurgents … with the same skill and black humour. They tell extraordinary stories of, for example, finding a suicide bomber’s thumb embedded in a victim’s chest. Major William White, the nurse manager, gives me a T-shirt emblazoned "Good Medicine in a Bad Place ". At lunch I meet Captain Diana Jenkins, 28, a nurse from Spokane [Washington State], who has just got engaged to a colleague. What a place for love to blossom.
Why is Martin so surprised?
Monday September 17 Gertrude Bell was the British diplomat who caused much of Iraq’s present misery by forcing Shias, Sunnis and Kurds into a single artificial state after the First World War. I want to visit her grave in the old British cemetery in east Baghdad. Our security advisers say we can stay 15 minutes maximum. I had expected the cemetery to be as rundown as the rest of Baghdad, but it has been lovingly tended by an old caretaker and his wife. Outside its walls the country Miss Bell created tears itself apart. Inside she rests in peace beneath the date palms.
It pleases me very much that my birthday seems to have been Martin’s best in Iraq this trip, including an Antonov hop to visit the Ziggurat of Ur (“seriously defiled by Saddam, who destroyed its authenticity by almost entirely rebuilding its walls”), a “hilarious” cricket match between a bunch of Brits, which “American and Romanian soldiers, Skylink’s Russian pilots and an Italian reconstruction team watch bemused,” and finally — because it’s too late to reach Baghdad before dark –
The Antonov simply flies us to Arbil in the relatively peaceful Kurdish north. It is another world. People out at night, new buildings, pavement cafés, working street lights. We dine off weiner schnitzel and Bavarian beer in the garden of a German restaurant, then sleep at a Skylink house.
And no encounters with Blackwater . . .
The Guardian:
Maliki insists Blackwater must pay for shootings
Ewen MacAskill in Washington
The Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, showed an unexpected streak of stubbornness yesterday in his stand-off with the US over the Blackwater shootings, insisting that action had to be taken against the private security firm.
The least interesting of my six finds, this story records the dissonance between Nouri al-Maliki’s statements in New York and those of a government spokesman, Tahseen al-Sheikhly, back in Baghdad.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Mr Maliki, who is in New York for the United Nations general assembly, said Blackwater posed “a serious challenge to the sovereignty of Iraq and cannot be accepted”.
His comments were at odds with a briefing of journalists by an Iraqi official in Baghdad who said the expulsion of Blackwater, which has 1,000 staff in the country and provides protection for the US ambassador and other US diplomats, would leave a security vacuum. …
“If we drive out or expel this company immediately there will be a security vacuum that will demand pulling some troops that work in the field so that we can protect these institutes,” he said. “This will create a security imbalance.”
Create one, did Mr. Sheikhly say? Pretty obvious that he doesn’t get out-and-about much anymore . . .
The Independent:
How Iraq’s war has turned friendship between families into sectarian hatred
By Kim Sengupta in Baghdad
They are two Iraqi families, one Shia, the other Sunni, who once lived in what were called “mixed” neighbourhoods. Now they are among the 2 million internal refugees in the country, a vast and desperate pool of the dispossessed whose numbers have risen massively along with US troop “surge” operations.
Among those two million are the Sunni al-Rawis, formerly of the Jihad district, and the Shiite al-Amirys, who lived in Ghazaliya, and who tell Sengupta stories no less awful for having become common. After the widowed (in 2004) Mrs. al-Rawi sent her son to Syrian exile, she and her two daughters escaped to “a dark and dingy house in Khadra, a Sunni neighbourhood.”
“I asked Samir to stay at a friend’s house in Mansour, he is the only man left in the family and we could not afford to lose him,” said Mrs al-Rawi, 69. “It was very fortunate that he left, otherwise he would have been killed. The Mehdi Army were shouting that all Sunnis were terrorists and deserved to die. They killed one of our neighbours, Abu Bakr. They shot him in cold blood in front of his home. He had refused to leave his house. We were also told that he was killed because of his son’s name.” …
Mrs al-Rawi said their former neighbour told them that since their departure, “the militia had broken the locks of our house and four Shia families are living there now. I feel very angry with the Shias, I cannot forgive them. The house was built by my father and now we have lost everything. Here we have just a few pieces of furniture and are prisoners in this neighbourhood.”
For the al-Amirys (41-year-old dad, 39-year-old mom, 10-year-old daughter, 5-year-old son), it worked the other way: flight from “mixed” to a “Shiite” enclave in Baghdad.
“We had al-Qa’ida attacking our district all the time,” Mr al-Amiry said. “They began killing Shias, calling us kafirs, saying we were unclean and they will dispose of us. The government did nothing to protect us. Some of my neighbours left, others were killed, but I refused to go, it was my home. Then one morning my daughter found an envelope on the doorstep with an AK-47 bullet and a note telling us that we had 48 hours to get out, or we would all be killed.”
The story ends with 10-year-old Hadeel asking, “What is Shia? What is Sunni? I do not understand. I used to play with my friends and we used to go to school together. I miss them and I think they must miss me.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
How long this post of “found objects” has grown … a massive crime apparently perpetrated by a fellow born po’ in Louisiana, victimization of the innocent by uniformed Americans, exploitation of the honored dead by a chump in Arizona, a string of blood-soaked days in Iraq, a government talking out of two sides of its mouth, and two families who’ve lost all but each other.
And why? Because George W. Bush wanted it this way. Bad.
lotus
UPDATE: NYT has now joined WaPo on the “baiting” story, with what I take as a strong suggestion that the “program” is indeed Iraq-wide: it was “developed by the Pentagon’s Asymmetrical Warfare Group, which met with and gave equipment to Ranger sniper teams in Iraq in January,” according to reporter Paul von Zielbauer. Note the plural “teams.”
After visiting the sniper unit in Iraq, members of the Asymmetrical Warfare Group gave soldiers ammunition boxes containing so-called "drop items " like bullets, plastic explosives and bomb detonation chords [sic] to use to target Iraqis involved in insurgent activity, according to Capt. Matthew P. Didier, a sniper platoon leader who gave sworn testimony in the accused soldiers’ court hearings.
Good news for the three soldiers’ defense attorneys, probably, but mighty bad news for anyone who worries about innocently-curious Iraqis . . .
