Mother Jones: What is your view of the camp now?

Erik Saar: It’s not humane and not effective. We have people there and we don’t know what their affiliations with terrorism are. We ourselves cannot verify that they were enemy combatants picked up on the battlefield, as General Miller has repeatedly said to the media. A number of them were turned over to us by foreign governments, and the Northern Alliance, who were paid a bounty for them. There wasn’t this extensive vetting process, as the Pentagon would lead you to believe. What extensive vetting process allows an 88-year-old to end up at Guantanamo Bay? And we are operating outside of the scope of the Geneva Conventions. Some of the things I saw were not only what I would consider unethical, but ineffective. We’re not getting enough of a benefit for the price we’re paying in terms of our reputation in the world. I don’t know how, as country, we can say we’re going to promote democracy and human dignity and justice throughout the Arab and Muslim world and at the same time defy some of those very same principles at Guantanamo Bay.

MJ: Do you think if you were getting more concrete intelligence from these people and they were the worst of the worst that you could justify the conditions at Guantanamo?

ES: Even if we were getting outstanding intelligence that was saving lives, I would have to say the system, as it is set up, is still unacceptable. I can’t accept that, had we given them POW status, followed the Geneva Conventions, and set up some system of justice where they would have an opportunity to defend themselves, had we more readily vetted the people who should not have been there, the same intelligence would not have still been obtained. I’m not willing to concede that this was necessary.

Onnesha Roychoudhuri, motherjones (read more. . .)
Erik Saar: It’s not humane and not effective. We have people there and we don’t know what their affiliations with terrorism are. We ourselves cannot verify that they were enemy combatants picked up on the battlefield, as General Miller has repeatedly said to the media. A number of them were turned over to us by foreign governments, and the Northern Alliance, who were paid a bounty for them. There wasn’t this extensive vetting process, as the Pentagon would lead you to believe. What extensive vetting process allows an 88-year-old to end up at Guantanamo Bay? And we are operating outside of the scope of the Geneva Conventions. Some of the things I saw were not only what I would consider unethical, but ineffective. We’re not getting enough of a benefit for the price we’re paying in terms of our reputation in the world. I don’t know how, as country, we can say we’re going to promote democracy and human dignity and justice throughout the Arab and Muslim world and at the same time defy some of those very same principles at Guantanamo Bay.

MJ: Do you think if you were getting more concrete intelligence from these people and they were the worst of the worst that you could justify the conditions at Guantanamo?

ES: Even if we were getting outstanding intelligence that was saving lives, I would have to say the system, as it is set up, is still unacceptable. I can’t accept that, had we given them POW status, followed the Geneva Conventions, and set up some system of justice where they would have an opportunity to defend themselves, had we more readily vetted the people who should not have been there, the same intelligence would not have still been obtained. I’m not willing to concede that this was necessary.

Back in September 2003 a report by the Congressional Budget Office concluded that the size of the U.S. force in Iraq would have to start shrinking rapidly in the spring of 2004 if the Army wanted to “maintain training and readiness levels, limit family separation and involuntary mobilization, and retain high-quality personnel.”

Let me put that in plainer English: our all-volunteer military is based on an implicit promise that those who serve their country in times of danger will also be able to get on with their lives. Full-time soldiers expect to spend enough time at home base to keep their marriages alive and see their children growing up. Reservists expect to be called up infrequently enough, and for short enough tours of duty, that they can hold on to their civilian jobs.

To keep that promise, the Army has learned that it needs to follow certain rules, such as not deploying more than a third of the full-time forces overseas except during emergencies. The budget office analysis was based on those rules.

But the Bush administration, which was ready neither to look for a way out of Iraq nor to admit that staying there would require a much bigger army, simply threw out the rulebook. Regular soldiers are spending a lot more than a third of their time overseas, and many reservists are finding their civilian lives destroyed by repeated, long-term call-ups.

Paul Krugman, NYTimes (read more. . .)

As George W. Bush has made clear many times, he is incapable of admitting a mistake. The inability to admit a mistake makes rational behavior impossible. In place of thought, the Bush administration relies on coercion and violence.

Nevertheless, Congress does not have to be a doormat for a war criminal. It can put a halt to Bush’s madness.

The solution is not to reduce Iraq to rubble. The US can end the bloodshed by exiting Iraq.

A solution is for Iraq to organize as a republic of three largely autonomous states or provinces-Shi’ite, Sunni, and Kurd– along the lines of the original American republic. The politicians within each province will be too busy fighting one another for power to become militarily involved with those in other provinces.

The problem is that Bush wants “victory,” not a workable solution, and he is prepared to pay any price for victory. The neocons, who are in effect Israeli agents, want to spread their war against Islam to Syria and Iran. For neocons, this is a single-minded pursuit. Their commitment to war is not shaken by reality or rationality.

The Bush administration has proven beyond all doubt that it is duplicitous and has delusions that are immune to reality. America’s reputation is being destroyed. We are becoming the premier war criminal nation of the 21st century. We are all complicit.

How much more evil will we tolerate?

Paul Craig Roberts, CounterPunch (read more. . .)

This is a faith-based war, with all the irrationality of the medieval Crusades, or the wars of religion that accompanied the Reformation. The fundamentalists are big on the Reformation of course, but downright hostile to the Enlightenment that succeeded it. Not just hostile to Diderot and Voltaire and Kant but to Thomas Jefferson who heretically declared, “Question even the existence of God, for if there be one, He will more likely pay homage to Reason than to blind faith.”

Hostile too to the norms of international relations prevailing in recent centuries. One can look at the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) as the midpoint between the wars of religion launched by the Reformation, and the dawn of reason in the Enlightenment. That treaty posited the sovereign state as the basic unit in world politics and promoted non-intervention in order to maintain peace.

All very rational. But the Christian right, some of whose members want to chuck the constitution and impose their holy “dominion” over your life, are happy to chuck hundreds of years of international law to irrationally assault the world. All in the name of God! Their hero George Bush specifically said of his illegal invasion in 2003, “God told me to smite [Saddam Hussein], and I smote him.”

Gary Leupp, counterpunch (read more. . .)

One of the first battles fought in this historic neocon conquest of the U.S. government occurred largely behind the walls of the CIA, beginning in 1976 (under George H.W. Bush’s directorship) with the so-called “Team B” assault on the CIA’s fabled Kremlinologists. In the 1980s, this attack on the professional objectivity of the CIA’s analytical division intensified under the watchful eye of CIA Director William J. Casey and his deputy, Robert Gates.

Through bureaucratic bullying and purges, the neoconservatives eventually silenced CIA analysts who were reporting evidence of Soviet decline. Instead, a “politicized” CIA analytical division adopted worst-case scenarios about Soviet capabilities and intentions, estimates that supported the Reagan administration’s costly arms buildup and covert wars in the Third World.

The neocon strategy was so successful that the battered CIA analytical division largely blinded itself to the growing evidence of the coming Soviet collapse. Then, ironically, when the Soviet Union fell apart in 1990, the neoconservatives were hailed as heroes for achieving the seemingly impossible — the supposedly sudden collapse of the Soviet Union — while the CIA’s analytical division was ridiculed for “missing” the Soviet demise.

Robert Parry, Consortium News (read more. . .)

Today, though the Cold War is over, the riddle of the relationship between nuclear and conventional force still vexes official minds. Once again, the United States has assigned itself global ambitions. (Then it was containing Communism, now it is stopping “terrorism” and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.) Once again, the United States is fighting a limited war — the war in Iraq — and other limited wars are under discussion (against Iran, North Korea, Syria, etc.). And once again, nuclear arms appear to offer an all too tempting alternative. Arkin comments that a prime virtue of the global strike option in the eyes of the Pentagon is that it requires no “boots on the ground.” And Everett Dolman, a professor at the Air Force School at Maxwell Air Force Base, recently commented to the San Francisco Chronicle that without space weaponry, “we’d face a Vietnam-style buildup if we wanted to remain a force in the world.”

For just as in the 1950s, the boots on the ground are running low. The global New Rome turns out to have exhausted its conventional power holding down just one country, Iraq. But the 2000s are not the 1950s. Eisenhower’s overall goal was mainly defensive. He wanted no war, nuclear or conventional, and never came close to ordering a nuclear strike. By contrast, Bush’s policy of preventive war is inherently activist and aggressive: The global strike option is not only for deterrence; it is for use.

A clash between the triumphal rhetoric of global domination and the sordid reality of failure in practice lies ahead. The Senate, on the brink of its metaphorical Armageddon, backed down. Would the President, facing defeat of his policies somewhere in the world, do likewise? Or might he actually reach for his nuclear option?

Jonathan Schell, TomDispatch.com (read more. . .)

Warfare, when absolutely unavoidable, is one thing. But it’s a little difficult to understand how these kinds of profoundly dehumanizing practices - not to mention the physical torture we’ve heard so much about - could be enthusiastically embraced by a government headed by men who think all life is sacred. Either I’m missing something, or President Bush, Tom DeLay and their ilk are fashioning whole new zones of hypocrisy for Americans to inhabit.

There’s nothing benign about psychological torture. The personality of the victim can disintegrate entirely. Common effects include memory impairment, nightmares, hallucinations, acute stress disorder and severe depression with vegetative symptoms. The damage can last for many years.

Torturing prisoners, rather than making the U.S. safer, puts us all in greater danger. The abuses of detainees at places like Guantánamo and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq have come to define the United States in the minds of many Muslims and others around the world. And the world has caught on that large percentages of the people swept up and incarcerated as terrorists by the U.S. were in fact innocent of wrongdoing and had no connection to terrorism at all.

Bitterness against the U.S. has increased exponentially since the initial disclosures about the abuse of detainees. What’s the upside of policies that demean the U.S. in the eyes of the world while at the same time making us less rather than more secure?

Bob Herbert, NYTimes (read more. . .)