Iraq

Pentagon to allow photos of soldiers’ coffins when families permit

From the New York Times:

In a reversal of an 18-year-old policy that critics said was hiding the ultimate cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the press will now be allowed to photograph the flag-draped coffins of America’s war dead as their bodies are returned to the United States — but only if their families agree.

American Forces Press Service article.

No word on whether the military will be taking its own photos of the coffins and, if so, whether they’ll release them.

See also: Photos of Military Coffins

(Thanks, Fred.)

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Obama “reviewing” policy on military coffin photos

in 2004, The Memory Hole obtained and posted 288 photos of the war dead coming into Dover. During the Gulf War, the Pentagon banned the release of such photos taken by the military (and the taking of such photos by the civilian press), and it reiterated this ban soon after the invasion of Iraq.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, I requested these photos from Dover AFB, and they passed the request to the Air Force’s main FOIA Office, which denied it in full. I appealed, and – in a move that I never expected – the Air Force completely reversed itself and sent me all the photos on a CD. I posted them, the media swarmed, and the images have become iconic.

The Pentagon was not pleased, calling the release a “mistake.” Later, professor Ralph Begleiter and the National Security Archive successfully sued the Defense Department under FOIA, resulting in the release of more photos.

Obama was recently asked whether his administration will reverse or uphold the censorial policy, and his answer is um, er, well. The AP reports:

President Barack Obama says his administration is reviewing a policy that bans the media from photographing flag-draped coffins of fallen U.S. soldiers.

The president says his advisers are discussing with the Defense Department the prohibition on pictures of coffins returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Beyond that, Obama wouldn’t say whether he would keep the policy in place. He says he wants to understand all the implications involved before deciding how to proceed.

Agence France-Presse reports:

At the prompting of President Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates Tuesday ordered a review of a ban on media coverage of the return of flag-draped coffins of fallen soldiers from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“From a personal standpoint, I think, if the needs of the families can be met, and the privacy concerns can be addressed, the more honor we can accord these fallen heroes, the better,” Gates told reporters.

Gates said he ordered the review after Obama said in a White House press conference Monday night that the White House was in the process of reviewing the ban “in conversations with the Department of Defense.” …

Gates said he had ordered a review of the ban over a year ago.

“The answer that I got back — and partly it was the result of contacts with the families — is that if the news media were at Dover, many of the families would feel compelled to be there for those ceremonies for their fallen hero.

“And for these families this would delay the return of the remains home. For others it would be a financial hardship to get to Dover. And there were some privacy concerns,” he said.

“I think that looking at it again makes all kinds of sense,” he said.

The Huffington Post has more.

Defense Dept docs on Gitmo, Iraq, GWOT

This afternoon the Pentagon posted several new documents released due to Freedom of Information Act requests:

• Detainees: Incident Reports of Detainee on Detainee Assaults at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Release Date: February 2009 (22 MB)  (Posted 11 Feb 09)
• Global War on Terrorism: Memo from USD-P Douglas Feith to Director, DIA, dated Feb 2, 2002, “Request for Support” (7 MB)  (Posted 11 Feb 09)
• Global War on Terrorism: DoD Answers to The New Yorker Magazine (7 MB)  (Posted 11 Feb 09)
  
• Detainees: Sampling of Mass Disturbance Incident Reports from NOV 8, 2005 through DEC 2, 2007. Release Date: January 2009 (7 MB)  (Posted 11 Feb 09)
• Detainees: List of Mass Disturbances at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, from NOV 8, 2005 through DEC 2, 2007. Release Date: January 2009 (10 MB)  (Posted 11 Feb 09)
• Detainees: Documents relating to Australian and British citizens detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Release Date: January 2009 (Posted 11 Feb 09)

“Iraq Reconstruction History Details Waste, Failures”

The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction has issued a major new report, “Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience” (available here).

CNN reports:

The report says the U.S. government “had neither the established structure nor the necessary resources to carry out the reconstruction mission it took on in mid-2003.”

It weaves interviews, facts and vignettes detailing the use of a “sea of taxpayer dollars” from mid-2002 through autumn 2008.

“Hard Lessons” also looks to the future. It stresses the importance of developing “an agreed-upon doctrine and structure” for reconstruction “so that the United States is ready when it next must intervene in a failed or failing state.”

“The overuse of cost-plus contracts, high contractor overhead expenses, excessive contractor award fees, and unacceptable program and project delays all contributed to a significant waste of taxpayers’ dollars,” the report said.

Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel Belatedly Releasing Some Opinions

A friend of The Memory Hole sends along the following, pasted in below. Not only is the Justice Dept’s Office of Legal Counsel – which gives legal advice to the President (and the rest of the Exec branch) – surprisingly releasing some of its zealously guarded opinions, some of these opinions have to do with the conduct of the Bush administration regarding Iraq and the “war on terrorism.” (For background on the reluctance of the Office of Legal Counsel to even acknowledge its opinions – never mind actually release them – see “Current, Future Justice Officials Clash Over OLC Proposal” at Secrecy News.)

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It is fairly surprising how the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel is suddenly plopping out a series of its legal opinions at the eleventh hour after claiming for months and years that these opinions — and even the titles of these opinions — were inexorably and entirely classified and restricted.  Some opinions outlined matters of presidential authority and jurisdiction.  In the past eight years, the OLC has released almost none of its opinions until fairly recently when it became a matter of Congressional concern.  This is in extraordinarily stark contrast to prior administrations that published a substantial fraction of its formal legal opinions.

The opinions below were just added to the DOJ OLC website. [All links are to PDF files.]

* LEGALITY OF THE USE OF MILITARY COMMISSIONS TO TRY TERRORISTS (November 6, 2001) (added 1/08/09)

* WHETHER FALSE STATEMENTS OR OMISSIONS IN IRAQ’S WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION DECLARATION WOULD CONSTITUTE A “FURTHER MATERIAL BREACH” UNDER U.N. SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTION 1441 (December 7, 2002) (added 1/08/09)

* EFFECT OF A RECENT UNITED NATIONS SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTION ON THE AUTHORITY OF THE PRESIDENT UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW TO USE MILITARY FORCE AGAINST IRAQ (November 8, 2002) (added 1/08/09)

* AUTHORITY OF THE PRESIDENT UNDER DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL LAW TO USE MILITARY FORCE AGAINST IRAQ (October 23, 2002) (added 1/08/09)

* STATUS OF TALIBAN FORCES UNDER ARTICLE 4 OF THE THIRD GENEVA CONVENTION OF 1949 (February 7, 2002)  (added 1/08/09)

* “PROTECTED PERSON” STATUS IN OCCUPIED IRAQ UNDER THE FOURTH GENEVA CONVENTION (March 18, 2004) (added 1/08/09)

* ASSERTION OF EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGE OVER COMMUNICATIONS REGARDING EPA’S OZONE AIR QUALITY STANDARDS AND CALIFORNIA’S GREENHOUSE GAS WAIVER REQUEST (June 19, 2008) (added 1/08/09)

And this one added a week earlier:

* ASSERTION OF EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGE CONCERNING THE SPECIAL COUNSEL’S INTERVIEWS OF THE VICE PRESIDENT AND SENIOR WHITE HOUSE STAFF (July 15, 2008)  (added December 29, 2008)

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Psyops: Proposed Leaflets for Iraq

On January 14, 2009, the US Defense Department released 247 pages of documents on the Iraq war, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. It’s labeled “Document Grouping 3 (released JAN 2009) (12 MB)” and is currently the last link on this page at the Pentagon’s FOIA site. Here’s the direct link to the PDF file. There are numerous interesting pre-war documents – many classified as Secret and Top Secret – concerning how the military proposed handling the invasion and occupation.

Pages 51 through 67 of that file reproduce leaflets, displayed below, that were proposed for dropping on Iraq as part of psychological operations. (They’re in English – had they been approved, they obviously would’ve been translated into Arabic.) Page 50 is a memo introducing these leaflets. It was written by the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, and was sent to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. The memo bears two handwritten notes – one saying, “These look very interesting,” the other noting, “We have been sort of underwhelmed by the quality of the leaflets dropped over Iraq.”

For a gallery of leaflets that were dropped on Iraq, check out the Psywarrior website. None of the proposed leaflets are there, so perhaps they were never greenlighted.

All of this was original designated For Official Use Only.

More leaflets after the jump…..

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Pentagon Censors Former Torturer’s Book

Defense Department cuts 93 sections, including unclassified, publicly available material.

On Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman says:

Writing under the pseudonym Matthew Alexander, a former special intelligence operations officer, who led an interrogations team in Iraq two years ago, has written a stunning op-ed in the Washington Post called “I’m Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq.” In it, he details his direct experience with torture practices put into effect in Iraq in 2006. He conducted more than 300 interrogations and supervised more than a thousand and was awarded a Bronze Star for his achievements in Iraq.

In his op-ed, he writes:

It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in [Iraq] have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me — unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.

Alexander has also written a book, How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq.

In his interview with Goodman, he reveals Pentagon censorship at work:

AG: Why was it so hard to get your book out of the Pentagon? I mean, you’ve got the book. You have to hand it in to be vetted, but they wouldn’t release it.

MA: Yeah, you know, I turned it in in the middle of July, and they’re supposed to do the review within 30 days, and they didn’t do that. I missed the first printing date. When they finally did come back with a review of the book after two months, they had extracted an extraordinary amount of material. There was 93 redactions made. I sued — you know, I sued the Department of Defense first to review the book and then to argue the redactions, because they had redacted obvious unclassified material, things that I had taken straight out of the unclassified field manual and also some items that were directly off the Army’s own Web site. So, eventually they acquiesced on 80 of the 93 redactions. And if you — when you read the book, you’ll see that the redactions within — some of the redactions are still in the book, because we had to go to print before we had the results of the appeal.

Pentagon documents on embedded media

On a subpage of their Freedom of Info Act website, the Defense Department today has posted 127 pages of documents concerning embedded media. The file may be downloaded here:

DOD FOIA Reading Room [PDF | 3.3 meg | 127 pp]

Memory Hole mirror

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[exclusive] “Prisoner Boxes” in Iraq

First Published Photographs of Wooden Imprisonment Crates

>>> In Iraq, some prisoners/detainees are kept in wooden crates known as “prisoner boxes,” so I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the US Central Command asking for the following:

“Vanity Fair (Feb 2005 issue) has reported the existence of wood “prisoner boxes” being used by the US military in facilities in and around Baghdad. They are used to hold individual prisoners and detainees.

“I hereby request all photographs of these boxes, including empty boxes as well as boxes holding prisoners and detainees.”

Around nine and a half months later, CentCom responded by sending the three photographs on this page.

You are seeing the photos exactly as they were sent to me – as black and white printouts on standard printer paper, with creases from being folded into thirds. Two of the photos are extremely blurry and pixelated.

Considering that the average summer temperature in Baghdad is 111 F, and that temps can easily go above 120 F [source], it’s hard to imagine what it’s like to be inside these boxes.

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Technical note: These photographs were released as black and white print-outs by the US Central Command on 10 Nov 2005 in fulfillment of FOIA request #2005-085, filed by Russ Kick on 27 Jan 2005.

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Zip file containing high-resolution scans of all three photo print-outs [12 meg]

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Pentagon docs: expenditures in Iraq & elsewhere

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Today in its Freedom of Information Act reading room, the Pentagon has posted 202 pages of documents related to its Iraqi Freedom Fund transfers/expenditures from 2002 to 2006:

DOD reading room [PDF | 9 megs]

Memory Hole mirror

The Government Accountability Office explains the Iraqi Freedom Fund:

“The Iraqi Freedom Fund is a special account providing funds for additional expenses for ongoing military operations in Iraq, and those operations authorized by P.L. 107-40 (Sept. 13,2001), Authorization for Use of Military Force, and other operations and related activities in support of the global war on terrorism.”

Some sample pages from the Pentagon’s FOIA release:

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