Sunday, August 10, 2003
Iraq Body Count: Adding Indifference To Injury
10.08.2003 [12:36]
Aug 09, 2003
Extraction of media-reported civilian injuries from the Iraq Body Count database and archive of war reports provides evidence of at least 20,000 civilian injuries on top of the maximum reported 7798 deaths. 8,000 of these injuries were in the Baghdad area alone, suggesting that the full, countrywide picture, as with deaths, is yet to emerge.
The Iraq Body Count Project has never published a running total of injuries suffered in the war because injuries encompass a scale from the grievous and incapacitating to the light and fully recuperable, and in the absence of information about severity it makes no sense to assign the same unit value to each report of injury. But because injuries are not all comparable does not mean that they can or should be excluded from an accounting of the human costs of the war. On the contrary, the need to investigate and assess them is especially urgent, for many of the injured may still be suffering and their condition may be improved if we act promptly.
The protagonists of the war have repeatedly claimed an inability to provide accurate estimates of civilian deaths. Insofar as some casualties may have been burned beyond recognition, pulverised into dust or buried quickly according to Islamic custom and never officially recorded, there is indeed a possibility that not every death can be accounted for. Injuries are another matter. The injured are alive, perhaps receiving treatment, and the cause, nature and extent of their injuries will appear in medical, official, and informal records.
What follows is Iraq Body Count (IBC)'s attempt to provide an overview of the scale of the problem that needs to be tackled more directly by those who have the means to do so. First we analyse what the IBC data-base can tell us about civilian injuries in Iraq, and include various accounts of injuries suffered during the course of the war to illustrate our general conclusions. We then discuss the potential costs of compensation, and argue that the occupying powers have a moral and humanitarian imperative to meet those costs. It is our hope that they do not entirely lack the will to do so--or if they do, that their citizenry will help them to find it.
Data Are Derived From Over 300 Press Reports
IBC archivist Kay Williams has undertaken a content-analysis of over 300 published reports used to establish the 150 entries in the IBC data-base of civilian deaths to July 6 2003. Every mention of injuries in these reports has been extracted and tabulated. In IBC terminology, each line in the on-line data-base is referred to as an incident, even though some entries cover multiple incidents within a locality.
There is evidence that the "precision" or highly-targeted bombing of Baghdad in the early days of the conflict may have injured far more people than were killed. Conversely, deaths in the ground war, particularly when civilian cars were fired on by heavy machine guns or tanks, may have seen the ratios reversed, with few escaping alive from the blazing wrecks. However, taken across all phases and arenas of the war, injuries were probably about 3 times more numerous than deaths.
Press and media reports for 43 IBC incidents do not mention any injuries. It cannot be inferred from this that no injuries occurred, simply that the journalists or reporters concerned either had no access to information about injuries, or were concentrating simply on deaths.
Civilian injuries were mentioned in the press and media reports for 107 incidents. The total maximum reported injuries across all 107 incidents is 19,733. [1] This takes account of known double counting across different incidents using much the same methodology as has been applied to reports of deaths in the IBC database. This total should NOT however be considered comprehensive, and is most likely an under-estimate because:
Our data-base includes only stories which include reports of civilian deaths. Stories reporting injuries but no deaths are not included in our data-base.
The present calculations include only media and NGO reports published up to July 6, and in particular do not include UNICEF's July 17 report [2] of more than 1,000 children injured since the end of the war by unexploded ordnance;
The injured may, and likely will, have been under-reported during the war, for reasons including their more rapid removal (for treatment) from the scene of incidents.
These limitations should be borne in mind and the present study considered a "first count", not a final or complete accounting, of the war's civilian wounded.
3 Times As Many Injuries As Deaths Have Been Reported
An informative statistic for analysing and evaluating injuries is the RATIO of injuries to deaths for a given incident. This ratio can be calculated by dividing the maximum estimate of injuries by the maximum estimate of deaths. If there are equal numbers of injuries to deaths, then this ratio is 1.0. If there are twice as many injuries as deaths, this ratio is 2.0. If there are twice as many deaths as injuries, this ratio is 0.5.
18 of the 107 incidents had a injury-to-death ratio of less than 1.0, and 7 incidents had a ratio of exactly 1.0. The remaining 82 incidents had an injury-to-death ratio of greater than 1, with a maximum ratio of 69. This maximum ratio was provided by 207 reported injuries and 3 reported deaths during massive aerial bombardment of Baghdad on the night of 21-22 March (IBC incident x009). Although the reports of injuries were provided by Iraqi government sources, independent estimates from the Red Cross confirmed at least 100 injuries, which still represents a massive injury-death ratio of 33. This lends some support to the claims that parts of the air-war (particularly in and around Baghdad) were conducted using precision-guided munitions, where there were few deaths but many injuries from falling and flying masonry, shrapnel etc. Most of the larger ratios were indeed the result of aerial bombardment, relatively early in the campaign. The smaller ratios typically come from the later ground war and "post-war" conflict.
If one wished to answer the question "what is a typical, or average" ratio of injuries to deaths, there are two statistical averaging procedures which might be used. One is the mean ratio (the mean is the sum of all ratios divided by the number of incidents from which ratios could be calculated). The mean injury-death ratio is 5.0 (in other words, 5 injuries per death).
A second averaging procedure is the median ratio. This is found by setting out all 107 ratios in ascending order, and picking the ratio which occurs at the 54th position (i.e. in the middle of the series). The median injury-death ratio is 2.85 (in other words, around three injuries per death).
Often the mean and the median of a set of scores are quite close to one another. The mean tends to differ from the median when the distribution is statistically skewed. The distribution of injury-death ratios in the IBC data base is indeed skewed, with a small number of incidents having very high injury-death ratios, which are not typical of the larger number of incidents. Only 23 of the incidents have an injury-death ratio of greater than 6, with the majority of these being below 10. However the "top" 10 incidents have injury-death ratios, in ascending order, of 10.2, 13.1, 13.9, 16.2 16.6, 17.8, 20, 24, 45, and 69. These few incidents skew the mean upwards.
In our view, the more "typical" estimate is given by the median. This would suggest that, on average, in a typical incident in this war, there were about 3 injuries for every death. Multiplying the 7711 maximum reported deaths (up to July 7th, 2003) by the median of 2.85 provides a figure of 21,976, which might be considered a more accurate estimate of injuries that takes into account the 43 database entries for which injuries were not reported and other data absent from the IBC database, as noted earlier.
Many of the reports of injuries are simply anonymous numbers. But Western journalists were sometimes able to get close to the field of battle and report their encounters with the wounded.
Heartbreaking Details
Some of the most horrific scenes followed coalition air raids in and around Hillah, where, in the first days of April, the Red Cross reported dozens of civilians killed and more than 450 wounded by aerial bombardment, including by suspected cluster bombs. [3]
Robert Fisk was among the Western journalists to visit the local hospital and report on the aftermath:
"Heartbreaking is the only word to describe 10-year-old Maryam Nasr and her five-year-old sister Hoda. Maryam has a patch over her right eye where a piece of bomblet embedded itself. She also had wounds to the stomach and thighs. I didn't realise that Hoda, standing by her sister's bed, was wounded until her mother carefully lifted the little girl's scarf and long hair to show a deep puncture in the right side of her head, just above her ear, congealed blood sticking to her hair but the wound still gently bleeding. Their mother described how she had been inside her home and heard an explosion and found her daughters lying in their own blood near the door. The little girls alternately smiled and hid when I took their pictures. In other wards, the hideously wounded would try to laugh, to show their bravery. It was a humbling experience." [4]
Futher injuries are, of course, being sustained after the cessation of bombing, by unexploded munitions, many fired by US or UK forces:
"Karbala is typical. At al-Hussein hospital, 35 bodies have been brought in since the city fell April 6, many dismembered by a cluster-bomblet blast, according to chief surgeon Ali Iziz Ali. An additional 50 have been treated for fractures and deep, narrow puncture wounds, typical of the weapons. Karbala civil-defense chief Abdul Kareem Mussan says his men are harvesting about 1,000 cluster bombs a day in places Myers said were not targets." [5]
UNICEF has recently reported that more than 1,000 children have been injured by unexploded ordnance since the end of the war, including by cluster bombs (and now unguarded) Iraqi munitions, and emphasized that "the coalition forces have a clear obligation under humanitarian law to remove these dangers from communities." [2]
Despite "major hostilities" having been declared over, Iraqi civilians are still regularly being shot and injured by American and British troops. This incident in Majar-al-Kabir is just one of literally scores of similar incidents all over Iraq, notable only in that this time British troops were involved:
"Most agree that a local man, possibly a former Ba'ath party official, started shooting with a handgun. The British then opened fire. 'It was about 10.15 and the market was very crowded,' said Mr Younis. 'I threw myself on the ground and shouted to everybody to run away or get down. The shooting lasted for about five minutes but there were bullets going everywhere. They were firing on automatic.' .At least 17 people were hit. They included a 13-year-old girl caught by a ricochet in the shoulder and a nine-year-old boy. Several other casualties have spinal injuries and multiple fractures. In all, five men died from their wounds. As the wounded lay in the bazaar the British soldiers drove away." [6]
And sometimes, like these descriptive on-the-scene reports, even anonymous statistics provide shocking glimpses of the war's toll of pain, horror and long-term suffering:
The Red Cross reported from Baghdad that during its heaviest fighting the city's hospitals were so overwhelmed by admissions that no one could any longer keep an accurate count, but that one major hospital alone had been admitting the war-wounded at a rate of about 100 patients an hour. [7] And in one of the most heart-rending of statistics, another aid organization reported just a month into the war that a hospital, situated in one of the poorest parts of Baghdad, "had amputated more than 100 limbs of children in that one month." [8]
When Will The Injured See Justice?
A sizeable if as yet unknown proportion of Iraqi families will contain a relative whose life was ended or put on hold by the US or British forces. Even if only in self-interest, the US and UK administrations should be putting the needs of the injured at the very heart of its strategy to "win hearts and minds". Instead, along with deaths, the maimed civilians of Iraq have been brushed under the carpet, with the exception of a few recipients of "high-profile" rescues (such as the air-lifting to Kuwait of Ali Abbas who lost all his family and both of his arms, recorded in IBC incident x025--Baghdad, March 30).
MASH units, too, provided immediate help to some Iraqi civilians wounded in the fighting, although it would appear that this was dependent upon the goodwill and resources of commanding officers--and likely to be withdrawn when it conflicted with their primary function. [9,10] Iraq's own hospitals, run-down and neglected for years under the sanctions regime, have suffered looting, vandalism, loss of electrical power, the deaths of staff and even (in at least three of them [11]) direct bombardment, all attributable to the war. But however heroic the efforts of their staff, there is no denying that the country's health system is now in a desperate state.
To our knowledge, no US or UK government-directed programme is specifically targeted towards the injured civilians of Iraq: the men, women, children and old people maimed and traumatised by the brutality of military intervention, and no government-directed report is available on the progress, if any, that has been made to assess and address the serious humanitarian and health issues arising from war injuries. It has been left to a few charities and aid-agencies, which have struggled against US obstruction to gain a foothold for their work with the sick and injured. The United Nations has remained ineffectual, firmly kept in the background by US diktat.
It is the most basic of principles that those who cause damage, harm and injury are responsible for repairing these and making amends if they have the power to do so. "But U.S officials," the Washington Post reported in late May, "have made clear to Iraqis that they do not intend to conduct a complete accounting of war damages, nor compensate those who say the occupying army owes them." [12]
Dina Sarhan, 21, who lost a leg to US shrapnel, sought no more than a prosthetic leg from the occupying power, only to be repeatedly turned down because it was "up to a higher authority." One of "thousands who incarnate the collateral damage of [the] war," she is unable to climb the stairs in her house and is "learning to make do" by sleeping in the dining room. She says she has forgiven the anonymous soldiers who injured her, but recognizes all too clearly the gap between the rhetoric and reality of modern warfare: "Mr. Bush said this would be a clean war. Is this a clean war?"
Unfortunately the "higher authorities" have their minds on other matters. "While sympathetic to individual hardships suffered as a result of war, U.S. officials say they are wary of beginning a legal process that could entail millions of claims against them" (when material damages as well as physical injuries are included); they also fret over "the endemic fraud that would creep into this."
But those, surely, are risks the US brought upon itself.
And instead of facing up to its responsibilities, the Pentagon is already ducking them--by restraining those of its more enlightened on-the-ground commanders who have acted in recognition of the strength of war of victims' claims. In a recent briefing US military leaders explicitly ruled out any compensation for injuries (or deaths) sustained during the combat period prior to May 1st. Families will only be eligible for compensation if they can "prove clear-cut negligence or wrongdoing by soldiers" in the "post-combat" phase of the occupation. This ruling will exclude the vast majority of injuries from potential compensation. For example, claims are ineligible in the case of soldiers mistaking civilians for combatants. However, some military commanders have been making ad-hoc discretionary payments to the victims or their families. When this was pointed out, a US official said he would investigate these payments and, if necessary, tell the commanders concerned to stop making them. [13]
So much for the "sympathetic" Pentagon--but exactly how justifiable is the USA's fear of "millions" of claims against it?
Given that most Iraqis who are asking for damages "seek a few thousand dollars to get their lives running again", it is possible to make an estimate of the cost of such reasonable compensation and then compare it to other expenditures in this war. Assuming the Pentagon's "millions" of claims were a credible prediction, then perhaps two million Iraqis (including those seeking only compensation for financial losses) could be awarded $10,000 each. That would amount to $20 billion, or the cost of occupying the country for 5 months, which Sec. of State Rumsfeld has pegged at $4 billion a month. [14]
This is a large sum, to be sure, but not one that the US isn't already countenancing in its open-ended occupation of Iraq. And arguably, the US occupation could be cut short by as many months and its soldiers sent home wreathed in roses if the US were to distribute its money in this way.
If however we restrict our calculations to more realistic scenarios and 20,000 injury claims at $10,000 each, the total amount awarded would be $200 million--less than the US spends every two days on the occupation. (And approximately the amount the UK spends monthly in its role.[15])
What excuse can the US possibly have for declining this opportunity to do some good for those who desperately need it (and for whose hurt it is responsible), and in the process, win back some of that "goodwill" it has lost in Iraq and much of the world? Even if the number of claims or of average awards is ultimately twice or ten times higher than this, it will still be trivial compared to the overall cost of the war and occupation.
Hamit Dardagan, John Sloboda and Kay Williams run the invaluable Iraq Body Count project. They can be reached at: hamit@iraqbodycount.org
Notes:
1. As at July 7th 2003. The Minimum total count of injuries in the IBC database is 16,439. However, given the more limited reporting of injuries by the media and IBC's data-gathering methodology which focuses on reports of deaths, we feel that in this instance the Maximum count (of 19,733) is likely to be a closer approximation to the true number of wounded--and as discussed in the body of this report, may itself be an under-estimate.
2. http://www.un.org/
3. Pepe Escobar, Asia Times Online, April 4 2003 http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/ED04Ak07.html
4. Robert Fisk, Independent, April 3 2003 (IBC incident x030) http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/
5. Michael Weisskopf, Time Magazine, May 3 2003 (IBC incident x072) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/
6. Jason Burke, Guardian, June 26 2003 (IBC incident x100) http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,985237,00.html
7. http://www.icrc.org/
8. "But due to the lack of time and sutures, the limbs after being amputated were sewn up very basically and bandaged. 'They are re-opening the bandages and trying to stitch the wounds up properly.'"--Dr Jemilah Mahmood of Mercy Malaysia, who brought much-needed supplies to the hospital and suffered a bullet wound in the process. Reported in The Star Online, April 18 2003
9. "Medical staff here [at 86th Combat Support Hospital at Tallil Airfield] have admitted more than 500 people since the war began--most of them Iraqi men, women and children. Many more have been treated for ailments that didn't require hospitalization."--Associated Press, April 26 2003. http://www.etaiwannews.com/
10. After the ordeal of seeing their three other children killed when a US tank machine-gunned their car in Nasiriyah, Daham and Gufran Ibed Kassim and their wounded five-year-old daughter Mawra were taken for treatment at a US Army field hospital:
"For two nights, the remains of the family slept in a bed. It appears that the story is reaching an end. 'Wait!' insists Kassim, his tears preparing themselves for what is to come, as if his trials could get any worse. 'Don't ask me questions. I will tell you what happened.' On the third night, that of 27 March, 'there were some Americans wounded that night, in the fighting. Maybe they needed the beds. So they told us we had to go outside. I heard the order--"put them out"--and they carried us like dogs, out into the cold, without shelter, or a blanket. It was the days of the sandstorms and freezing at night. And I heard Zainab crying: "Papa, Papa, I am cold, I am cold." Then she went silent. Completely silent.' Kassim breaks off in anguish. His wife continues the story of the night. 'What could we do? She kept saying she was cold. My arms were broken, I could not lift or hold her. If they had given us even a blanket, we might have put it over her. We had to sit there, and listen to her die.'Ed Vuillamy, The Observer, July 6, 2003 http://observer.guardian.co.uk/
11. 1. Al-Rutbah children's hospital (on March 19) http://www.fortwayne.com/ 2. Al-Yarmouk, Baghdad (on April 7) http://www.28news.com/stories 3. General Surgical Hospital, Nasiriyah (on March 24) http://observer.guardian.co.uk/
12. Scott Wilson, Washington Post, May 31 2003 http://www.washingtonpost.com/
13. "U.S. Limits Payments to Kin of Slain Iraqi Civilians"--Robyn Dixon, LA Times, August 4, 2003 http://www.latimes.com/
14. "The Cost Of Occupation"--Dorothy Pomerantz, Forbes.com, July 15 2003 http://forbesbest.com/2003/07/15/cz_dp_0715conflict.html (It has been widely mooted--including by officials in Dick Cheney's office--that the occupation's costs could be borne directly by Iraqis through the sale of their oil.)
15. "Cost of occupation: ?5m a day--human cost extra"--Richard Norton-Taylor and Larry Elliott, Guardian July 17 2003 http://politics.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4714030,00.html
http://www.jihadunspun.com/intheatre_internal.php?article=71148&list=/home.php&
10.08.2003 [12:36]
Aug 09, 2003
Extraction of media-reported civilian injuries from the Iraq Body Count database and archive of war reports provides evidence of at least 20,000 civilian injuries on top of the maximum reported 7798 deaths. 8,000 of these injuries were in the Baghdad area alone, suggesting that the full, countrywide picture, as with deaths, is yet to emerge.
The Iraq Body Count Project has never published a running total of injuries suffered in the war because injuries encompass a scale from the grievous and incapacitating to the light and fully recuperable, and in the absence of information about severity it makes no sense to assign the same unit value to each report of injury. But because injuries are not all comparable does not mean that they can or should be excluded from an accounting of the human costs of the war. On the contrary, the need to investigate and assess them is especially urgent, for many of the injured may still be suffering and their condition may be improved if we act promptly.
The protagonists of the war have repeatedly claimed an inability to provide accurate estimates of civilian deaths. Insofar as some casualties may have been burned beyond recognition, pulverised into dust or buried quickly according to Islamic custom and never officially recorded, there is indeed a possibility that not every death can be accounted for. Injuries are another matter. The injured are alive, perhaps receiving treatment, and the cause, nature and extent of their injuries will appear in medical, official, and informal records.
What follows is Iraq Body Count (IBC)'s attempt to provide an overview of the scale of the problem that needs to be tackled more directly by those who have the means to do so. First we analyse what the IBC data-base can tell us about civilian injuries in Iraq, and include various accounts of injuries suffered during the course of the war to illustrate our general conclusions. We then discuss the potential costs of compensation, and argue that the occupying powers have a moral and humanitarian imperative to meet those costs. It is our hope that they do not entirely lack the will to do so--or if they do, that their citizenry will help them to find it.
Data Are Derived From Over 300 Press Reports
IBC archivist Kay Williams has undertaken a content-analysis of over 300 published reports used to establish the 150 entries in the IBC data-base of civilian deaths to July 6 2003. Every mention of injuries in these reports has been extracted and tabulated. In IBC terminology, each line in the on-line data-base is referred to as an incident, even though some entries cover multiple incidents within a locality.
There is evidence that the "precision" or highly-targeted bombing of Baghdad in the early days of the conflict may have injured far more people than were killed. Conversely, deaths in the ground war, particularly when civilian cars were fired on by heavy machine guns or tanks, may have seen the ratios reversed, with few escaping alive from the blazing wrecks. However, taken across all phases and arenas of the war, injuries were probably about 3 times more numerous than deaths.
Press and media reports for 43 IBC incidents do not mention any injuries. It cannot be inferred from this that no injuries occurred, simply that the journalists or reporters concerned either had no access to information about injuries, or were concentrating simply on deaths.
Civilian injuries were mentioned in the press and media reports for 107 incidents. The total maximum reported injuries across all 107 incidents is 19,733. [1] This takes account of known double counting across different incidents using much the same methodology as has been applied to reports of deaths in the IBC database. This total should NOT however be considered comprehensive, and is most likely an under-estimate because:
Our data-base includes only stories which include reports of civilian deaths. Stories reporting injuries but no deaths are not included in our data-base.
The present calculations include only media and NGO reports published up to July 6, and in particular do not include UNICEF's July 17 report [2] of more than 1,000 children injured since the end of the war by unexploded ordnance;
The injured may, and likely will, have been under-reported during the war, for reasons including their more rapid removal (for treatment) from the scene of incidents.
These limitations should be borne in mind and the present study considered a "first count", not a final or complete accounting, of the war's civilian wounded.
3 Times As Many Injuries As Deaths Have Been Reported
An informative statistic for analysing and evaluating injuries is the RATIO of injuries to deaths for a given incident. This ratio can be calculated by dividing the maximum estimate of injuries by the maximum estimate of deaths. If there are equal numbers of injuries to deaths, then this ratio is 1.0. If there are twice as many injuries as deaths, this ratio is 2.0. If there are twice as many deaths as injuries, this ratio is 0.5.
18 of the 107 incidents had a injury-to-death ratio of less than 1.0, and 7 incidents had a ratio of exactly 1.0. The remaining 82 incidents had an injury-to-death ratio of greater than 1, with a maximum ratio of 69. This maximum ratio was provided by 207 reported injuries and 3 reported deaths during massive aerial bombardment of Baghdad on the night of 21-22 March (IBC incident x009). Although the reports of injuries were provided by Iraqi government sources, independent estimates from the Red Cross confirmed at least 100 injuries, which still represents a massive injury-death ratio of 33. This lends some support to the claims that parts of the air-war (particularly in and around Baghdad) were conducted using precision-guided munitions, where there were few deaths but many injuries from falling and flying masonry, shrapnel etc. Most of the larger ratios were indeed the result of aerial bombardment, relatively early in the campaign. The smaller ratios typically come from the later ground war and "post-war" conflict.
If one wished to answer the question "what is a typical, or average" ratio of injuries to deaths, there are two statistical averaging procedures which might be used. One is the mean ratio (the mean is the sum of all ratios divided by the number of incidents from which ratios could be calculated). The mean injury-death ratio is 5.0 (in other words, 5 injuries per death).
A second averaging procedure is the median ratio. This is found by setting out all 107 ratios in ascending order, and picking the ratio which occurs at the 54th position (i.e. in the middle of the series). The median injury-death ratio is 2.85 (in other words, around three injuries per death).
Often the mean and the median of a set of scores are quite close to one another. The mean tends to differ from the median when the distribution is statistically skewed. The distribution of injury-death ratios in the IBC data base is indeed skewed, with a small number of incidents having very high injury-death ratios, which are not typical of the larger number of incidents. Only 23 of the incidents have an injury-death ratio of greater than 6, with the majority of these being below 10. However the "top" 10 incidents have injury-death ratios, in ascending order, of 10.2, 13.1, 13.9, 16.2 16.6, 17.8, 20, 24, 45, and 69. These few incidents skew the mean upwards.
In our view, the more "typical" estimate is given by the median. This would suggest that, on average, in a typical incident in this war, there were about 3 injuries for every death. Multiplying the 7711 maximum reported deaths (up to July 7th, 2003) by the median of 2.85 provides a figure of 21,976, which might be considered a more accurate estimate of injuries that takes into account the 43 database entries for which injuries were not reported and other data absent from the IBC database, as noted earlier.
Many of the reports of injuries are simply anonymous numbers. But Western journalists were sometimes able to get close to the field of battle and report their encounters with the wounded.
Heartbreaking Details
Some of the most horrific scenes followed coalition air raids in and around Hillah, where, in the first days of April, the Red Cross reported dozens of civilians killed and more than 450 wounded by aerial bombardment, including by suspected cluster bombs. [3]
Robert Fisk was among the Western journalists to visit the local hospital and report on the aftermath:
"Heartbreaking is the only word to describe 10-year-old Maryam Nasr and her five-year-old sister Hoda. Maryam has a patch over her right eye where a piece of bomblet embedded itself. She also had wounds to the stomach and thighs. I didn't realise that Hoda, standing by her sister's bed, was wounded until her mother carefully lifted the little girl's scarf and long hair to show a deep puncture in the right side of her head, just above her ear, congealed blood sticking to her hair but the wound still gently bleeding. Their mother described how she had been inside her home and heard an explosion and found her daughters lying in their own blood near the door. The little girls alternately smiled and hid when I took their pictures. In other wards, the hideously wounded would try to laugh, to show their bravery. It was a humbling experience." [4]
Futher injuries are, of course, being sustained after the cessation of bombing, by unexploded munitions, many fired by US or UK forces:
"Karbala is typical. At al-Hussein hospital, 35 bodies have been brought in since the city fell April 6, many dismembered by a cluster-bomblet blast, according to chief surgeon Ali Iziz Ali. An additional 50 have been treated for fractures and deep, narrow puncture wounds, typical of the weapons. Karbala civil-defense chief Abdul Kareem Mussan says his men are harvesting about 1,000 cluster bombs a day in places Myers said were not targets." [5]
UNICEF has recently reported that more than 1,000 children have been injured by unexploded ordnance since the end of the war, including by cluster bombs (and now unguarded) Iraqi munitions, and emphasized that "the coalition forces have a clear obligation under humanitarian law to remove these dangers from communities." [2]
Despite "major hostilities" having been declared over, Iraqi civilians are still regularly being shot and injured by American and British troops. This incident in Majar-al-Kabir is just one of literally scores of similar incidents all over Iraq, notable only in that this time British troops were involved:
"Most agree that a local man, possibly a former Ba'ath party official, started shooting with a handgun. The British then opened fire. 'It was about 10.15 and the market was very crowded,' said Mr Younis. 'I threw myself on the ground and shouted to everybody to run away or get down. The shooting lasted for about five minutes but there were bullets going everywhere. They were firing on automatic.' .At least 17 people were hit. They included a 13-year-old girl caught by a ricochet in the shoulder and a nine-year-old boy. Several other casualties have spinal injuries and multiple fractures. In all, five men died from their wounds. As the wounded lay in the bazaar the British soldiers drove away." [6]
And sometimes, like these descriptive on-the-scene reports, even anonymous statistics provide shocking glimpses of the war's toll of pain, horror and long-term suffering:
The Red Cross reported from Baghdad that during its heaviest fighting the city's hospitals were so overwhelmed by admissions that no one could any longer keep an accurate count, but that one major hospital alone had been admitting the war-wounded at a rate of about 100 patients an hour. [7] And in one of the most heart-rending of statistics, another aid organization reported just a month into the war that a hospital, situated in one of the poorest parts of Baghdad, "had amputated more than 100 limbs of children in that one month." [8]
When Will The Injured See Justice?
A sizeable if as yet unknown proportion of Iraqi families will contain a relative whose life was ended or put on hold by the US or British forces. Even if only in self-interest, the US and UK administrations should be putting the needs of the injured at the very heart of its strategy to "win hearts and minds". Instead, along with deaths, the maimed civilians of Iraq have been brushed under the carpet, with the exception of a few recipients of "high-profile" rescues (such as the air-lifting to Kuwait of Ali Abbas who lost all his family and both of his arms, recorded in IBC incident x025--Baghdad, March 30).
MASH units, too, provided immediate help to some Iraqi civilians wounded in the fighting, although it would appear that this was dependent upon the goodwill and resources of commanding officers--and likely to be withdrawn when it conflicted with their primary function. [9,10] Iraq's own hospitals, run-down and neglected for years under the sanctions regime, have suffered looting, vandalism, loss of electrical power, the deaths of staff and even (in at least three of them [11]) direct bombardment, all attributable to the war. But however heroic the efforts of their staff, there is no denying that the country's health system is now in a desperate state.
To our knowledge, no US or UK government-directed programme is specifically targeted towards the injured civilians of Iraq: the men, women, children and old people maimed and traumatised by the brutality of military intervention, and no government-directed report is available on the progress, if any, that has been made to assess and address the serious humanitarian and health issues arising from war injuries. It has been left to a few charities and aid-agencies, which have struggled against US obstruction to gain a foothold for their work with the sick and injured. The United Nations has remained ineffectual, firmly kept in the background by US diktat.
It is the most basic of principles that those who cause damage, harm and injury are responsible for repairing these and making amends if they have the power to do so. "But U.S officials," the Washington Post reported in late May, "have made clear to Iraqis that they do not intend to conduct a complete accounting of war damages, nor compensate those who say the occupying army owes them." [12]
Dina Sarhan, 21, who lost a leg to US shrapnel, sought no more than a prosthetic leg from the occupying power, only to be repeatedly turned down because it was "up to a higher authority." One of "thousands who incarnate the collateral damage of [the] war," she is unable to climb the stairs in her house and is "learning to make do" by sleeping in the dining room. She says she has forgiven the anonymous soldiers who injured her, but recognizes all too clearly the gap between the rhetoric and reality of modern warfare: "Mr. Bush said this would be a clean war. Is this a clean war?"
Unfortunately the "higher authorities" have their minds on other matters. "While sympathetic to individual hardships suffered as a result of war, U.S. officials say they are wary of beginning a legal process that could entail millions of claims against them" (when material damages as well as physical injuries are included); they also fret over "the endemic fraud that would creep into this."
But those, surely, are risks the US brought upon itself.
And instead of facing up to its responsibilities, the Pentagon is already ducking them--by restraining those of its more enlightened on-the-ground commanders who have acted in recognition of the strength of war of victims' claims. In a recent briefing US military leaders explicitly ruled out any compensation for injuries (or deaths) sustained during the combat period prior to May 1st. Families will only be eligible for compensation if they can "prove clear-cut negligence or wrongdoing by soldiers" in the "post-combat" phase of the occupation. This ruling will exclude the vast majority of injuries from potential compensation. For example, claims are ineligible in the case of soldiers mistaking civilians for combatants. However, some military commanders have been making ad-hoc discretionary payments to the victims or their families. When this was pointed out, a US official said he would investigate these payments and, if necessary, tell the commanders concerned to stop making them. [13]
So much for the "sympathetic" Pentagon--but exactly how justifiable is the USA's fear of "millions" of claims against it?
Given that most Iraqis who are asking for damages "seek a few thousand dollars to get their lives running again", it is possible to make an estimate of the cost of such reasonable compensation and then compare it to other expenditures in this war. Assuming the Pentagon's "millions" of claims were a credible prediction, then perhaps two million Iraqis (including those seeking only compensation for financial losses) could be awarded $10,000 each. That would amount to $20 billion, or the cost of occupying the country for 5 months, which Sec. of State Rumsfeld has pegged at $4 billion a month. [14]
This is a large sum, to be sure, but not one that the US isn't already countenancing in its open-ended occupation of Iraq. And arguably, the US occupation could be cut short by as many months and its soldiers sent home wreathed in roses if the US were to distribute its money in this way.
If however we restrict our calculations to more realistic scenarios and 20,000 injury claims at $10,000 each, the total amount awarded would be $200 million--less than the US spends every two days on the occupation. (And approximately the amount the UK spends monthly in its role.[15])
What excuse can the US possibly have for declining this opportunity to do some good for those who desperately need it (and for whose hurt it is responsible), and in the process, win back some of that "goodwill" it has lost in Iraq and much of the world? Even if the number of claims or of average awards is ultimately twice or ten times higher than this, it will still be trivial compared to the overall cost of the war and occupation.
Hamit Dardagan, John Sloboda and Kay Williams run the invaluable Iraq Body Count project. They can be reached at: hamit@iraqbodycount.org
Notes:
1. As at July 7th 2003. The Minimum total count of injuries in the IBC database is 16,439. However, given the more limited reporting of injuries by the media and IBC's data-gathering methodology which focuses on reports of deaths, we feel that in this instance the Maximum count (of 19,733) is likely to be a closer approximation to the true number of wounded--and as discussed in the body of this report, may itself be an under-estimate.
2. http://www.un.org/
3. Pepe Escobar, Asia Times Online, April 4 2003 http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/ED04Ak07.html
4. Robert Fisk, Independent, April 3 2003 (IBC incident x030) http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/
5. Michael Weisskopf, Time Magazine, May 3 2003 (IBC incident x072) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/
6. Jason Burke, Guardian, June 26 2003 (IBC incident x100) http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,985237,00.html
7. http://www.icrc.org/
8. "But due to the lack of time and sutures, the limbs after being amputated were sewn up very basically and bandaged. 'They are re-opening the bandages and trying to stitch the wounds up properly.'"--Dr Jemilah Mahmood of Mercy Malaysia, who brought much-needed supplies to the hospital and suffered a bullet wound in the process. Reported in The Star Online, April 18 2003
9. "Medical staff here [at 86th Combat Support Hospital at Tallil Airfield] have admitted more than 500 people since the war began--most of them Iraqi men, women and children. Many more have been treated for ailments that didn't require hospitalization."--Associated Press, April 26 2003. http://www.etaiwannews.com/
10. After the ordeal of seeing their three other children killed when a US tank machine-gunned their car in Nasiriyah, Daham and Gufran Ibed Kassim and their wounded five-year-old daughter Mawra were taken for treatment at a US Army field hospital:
"For two nights, the remains of the family slept in a bed. It appears that the story is reaching an end. 'Wait!' insists Kassim, his tears preparing themselves for what is to come, as if his trials could get any worse. 'Don't ask me questions. I will tell you what happened.' On the third night, that of 27 March, 'there were some Americans wounded that night, in the fighting. Maybe they needed the beds. So they told us we had to go outside. I heard the order--"put them out"--and they carried us like dogs, out into the cold, without shelter, or a blanket. It was the days of the sandstorms and freezing at night. And I heard Zainab crying: "Papa, Papa, I am cold, I am cold." Then she went silent. Completely silent.' Kassim breaks off in anguish. His wife continues the story of the night. 'What could we do? She kept saying she was cold. My arms were broken, I could not lift or hold her. If they had given us even a blanket, we might have put it over her. We had to sit there, and listen to her die.'Ed Vuillamy, The Observer, July 6, 2003 http://observer.guardian.co.uk/
11. 1. Al-Rutbah children's hospital (on March 19) http://www.fortwayne.com/ 2. Al-Yarmouk, Baghdad (on April 7) http://www.28news.com/stories 3. General Surgical Hospital, Nasiriyah (on March 24) http://observer.guardian.co.uk/
12. Scott Wilson, Washington Post, May 31 2003 http://www.washingtonpost.com/
13. "U.S. Limits Payments to Kin of Slain Iraqi Civilians"--Robyn Dixon, LA Times, August 4, 2003 http://www.latimes.com/
14. "The Cost Of Occupation"--Dorothy Pomerantz, Forbes.com, July 15 2003 http://forbesbest.com/2003/07/15/cz_dp_0715conflict.html (It has been widely mooted--including by officials in Dick Cheney's office--that the occupation's costs could be borne directly by Iraqis through the sale of their oil.)
15. "Cost of occupation: ?5m a day--human cost extra"--Richard Norton-Taylor and Larry Elliott, Guardian July 17 2003 http://politics.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4714030,00.html
http://www.jihadunspun.com/intheatre_internal.php?article=71148&list=/home.php&
Friday, July 25, 2003
This is weird and I am not sure what it means, if anything. It could just be suicide, but then again it could be something else, given his proximity to Roswell.
Navy Chief Nominee May Have Killed Self
By RICHARD BENKE, Associated Press Writer
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - Oilman Colin McMillan, who was awaiting Senate confirmation as Navy secretary, died from a single gunshot wound, and investigators said Friday it might have been self-inflicted.
"All indications are it could be suicide, but we're not going to reach that conclusion until the investigation is over," said District Attorney Scot Key of Alamogordo.
McMillan was nominated as Navy secretary by President Bush (news - web sites) in May. He was 67.
He died around lunch time Thursday and his body was found at his southern New Mexico ranch by two employees, said Roswell Mayor Bill Owen, a family spokesman and longtime McMillan employee. The 55,000-acre Three Rivers ranch is on the edge of the White Sands Missile Range.
McMillan had run Permian Exploration Corp. in Roswell, chaired Bush's New Mexico presidential campaign in 2000 and served as an assistant defense secretary under the first President Bush.
Sen. Pete Domenici (news, bio, voting record) and Rep. Steve Pearce, both New Mexico Republicans, issued statements mourning McMillan's death.
"America has lost a leader, a patriot and statesman," Pearce said.
Domenici said McMillan was "someone who succeeded at everything he tried and everything he did, and yet he was about as humble as anyone you will ever meet."
President Bush had submitted McMillan's nomination to the Senate in May to fill a post left vacant since January, when Gordon England left to become deputy secretary of the new Homeland Security Department.
McMillan had run for the U.S. Senate in 1994, losing to incumbent Jeff Bingaman in a bitter and costly campaign. He was a member of the New Mexico House of Representatives from 1971 to 1982.
Besides managing the 2000 Bush campaign in New Mexico, McMillan was state chairman for Bob Dole's presidential campaign in 1996.
He served in the Marine Corps from 1957-72 and was an assistant defense secretary in the early 1990s when Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) was the defense secretary.
Owen said he worked for McMillan for about 22 years in the oil and gas industry, at McMillan Production Co. He praised his honesty, ethics and business skill.
"He was involved in numerous types of business, was successful in all those business ventures and did so in a very up-front and honest and straightforward fashion," Owen said.
Navy Chief Nominee May Have Killed Self
By RICHARD BENKE, Associated Press Writer
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - Oilman Colin McMillan, who was awaiting Senate confirmation as Navy secretary, died from a single gunshot wound, and investigators said Friday it might have been self-inflicted.
"All indications are it could be suicide, but we're not going to reach that conclusion until the investigation is over," said District Attorney Scot Key of Alamogordo.
McMillan was nominated as Navy secretary by President Bush (news - web sites) in May. He was 67.
He died around lunch time Thursday and his body was found at his southern New Mexico ranch by two employees, said Roswell Mayor Bill Owen, a family spokesman and longtime McMillan employee. The 55,000-acre Three Rivers ranch is on the edge of the White Sands Missile Range.
McMillan had run Permian Exploration Corp. in Roswell, chaired Bush's New Mexico presidential campaign in 2000 and served as an assistant defense secretary under the first President Bush.
Sen. Pete Domenici (news, bio, voting record) and Rep. Steve Pearce, both New Mexico Republicans, issued statements mourning McMillan's death.
"America has lost a leader, a patriot and statesman," Pearce said.
Domenici said McMillan was "someone who succeeded at everything he tried and everything he did, and yet he was about as humble as anyone you will ever meet."
President Bush had submitted McMillan's nomination to the Senate in May to fill a post left vacant since January, when Gordon England left to become deputy secretary of the new Homeland Security Department.
McMillan had run for the U.S. Senate in 1994, losing to incumbent Jeff Bingaman in a bitter and costly campaign. He was a member of the New Mexico House of Representatives from 1971 to 1982.
Besides managing the 2000 Bush campaign in New Mexico, McMillan was state chairman for Bob Dole's presidential campaign in 1996.
He served in the Marine Corps from 1957-72 and was an assistant defense secretary in the early 1990s when Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) was the defense secretary.
Owen said he worked for McMillan for about 22 years in the oil and gas industry, at McMillan Production Co. He praised his honesty, ethics and business skill.
"He was involved in numerous types of business, was successful in all those business ventures and did so in a very up-front and honest and straightforward fashion," Owen said.
Thursday, July 24, 2003
Cracking Windows passwords made easy
(article found at theregister.com)
Cryptographic researchers have outlined techniques to greatly reduce the time it takes to crack alphanumeric Windows passwords.
Brute force attacks on such passwords have always been possible but the techniques outlined in a paper from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) show how such passwords could be broken up to eight or 10 times more quickly than previously possible.
The technique involves building a large lookup tables that matches the hashed (encoded) versions of passwords stored in Windows with text entered by a user.
By loading such pre-calculated data stored in memory its possible to reduce the time a particular piece of crypto analysis will take. Crypto analysts like Ron Rivest have understood this time-memory trade-off since the 1980s. The Swiss researchers have simply optimised the process, developing a demo programme than can crack Windows passwords more quickly. This demo is available online here.
A paper on this work, Making a Faster Cryptanalytic Time-Memory Trade-Off, is to be presented by Philippe Oechslin and his colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne during the Crypto'03 conference next month.
An abstract for the paper explains: "Using 1.4GB of data (two CD-ROMs) we can crack 99.9% of all alphanumerical passwords hashes in 13.6 seconds whereas it takes 101 seconds with the current approach using distinguished points. We show that the gain could be even much higher depending on the parameters used."
By email, Oechslin told us the researchers have since refined the techniques, bringing down the average time it takes to crack passwords to five seconds.
The research re-invigorates calls for Microsoft, in particular, to improve the cryptographic security of its passwords. Although NTHash is more secure than LANManager (the password scheme used in Win 9x) it's still insufficiently random, as the Swiss researchers have shown.
Meanwhile users shouldn't be too concerned about the issue since lifting password hash files in only possible where an attacker has control of your machine. If that happens, weak NT passwords will be the least of your worries.
(article found at theregister.com)
Cryptographic researchers have outlined techniques to greatly reduce the time it takes to crack alphanumeric Windows passwords.
Brute force attacks on such passwords have always been possible but the techniques outlined in a paper from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) show how such passwords could be broken up to eight or 10 times more quickly than previously possible.
The technique involves building a large lookup tables that matches the hashed (encoded) versions of passwords stored in Windows with text entered by a user.
By loading such pre-calculated data stored in memory its possible to reduce the time a particular piece of crypto analysis will take. Crypto analysts like Ron Rivest have understood this time-memory trade-off since the 1980s. The Swiss researchers have simply optimised the process, developing a demo programme than can crack Windows passwords more quickly. This demo is available online here.
A paper on this work, Making a Faster Cryptanalytic Time-Memory Trade-Off, is to be presented by Philippe Oechslin and his colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne during the Crypto'03 conference next month.
An abstract for the paper explains: "Using 1.4GB of data (two CD-ROMs) we can crack 99.9% of all alphanumerical passwords hashes in 13.6 seconds whereas it takes 101 seconds with the current approach using distinguished points. We show that the gain could be even much higher depending on the parameters used."
By email, Oechslin told us the researchers have since refined the techniques, bringing down the average time it takes to crack passwords to five seconds.
The research re-invigorates calls for Microsoft, in particular, to improve the cryptographic security of its passwords. Although NTHash is more secure than LANManager (the password scheme used in Win 9x) it's still insufficiently random, as the Swiss researchers have shown.
Meanwhile users shouldn't be too concerned about the issue since lifting password hash files in only possible where an attacker has control of your machine. If that happens, weak NT passwords will be the least of your worries.
Microsoft once again proves that big is not beautiful, it's a pain in the ass and flawed:
MS alerts users to Windows DirectX vulnerability
By John Leyden
Posted: 24/07/2003 at 07:40 GMT
Microsoft yesterday warned of security flaws with DirectX's DirectShow component that might be used by an attacker to run hostile code on vulnerable Windows machines.
Redmond has issued a patch - designated as critical - which users are urged to review.
The list of affected software is extensive: Microsoft DirectX 5.2 on Windows 98; MS DirectX 6.1 on Windows 98 SE; DirectX 7.0a and DirectX 9.0a on Windows Me; DirectX and DirectX 9.0a 7.0 on Win 2000; DirectX 8.1 and DirectX 9.0a on Win XP; DirectX 8.1 and DirectX 9.0a on Win Server 2003 are all potentially vulnerable.
So too is Windows NT 4.0 with either Windows Media Player 6.4 or IE 6 SP 1 installed and Microsoft Windows NT 4.0, Terminal Server Edition with either Windows Media Player 6.4 or IE 6 SP 1 installed.
The DirectX APIs are used by Windows programs for multimedia and games support. Within DirectX, DirectShow performs client-side audio and video sourcing, manipulation, and rendering.
Two buffer overrun flaws in the function used by DirectShow to check parameters in a Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) file create a means to inject malicious code into vulnerable machines, hence the alert.
An attacker could seek to exploit this vulnerability by creating a specially crafted MIDI file designed to exploit this vulnerability and then host it on a Web site or on a network share, or send it by using an HTML-based e-mail. Simply visiting a maliciously constructed site might be enough to get infected, Microsoft warns. If the users open a maliciously constructed HTML email the effect will be the same.
Little wonder that Microsoft designates the problem as critical.
MS alerts users to Windows DirectX vulnerability
By John Leyden
Posted: 24/07/2003 at 07:40 GMT
Microsoft yesterday warned of security flaws with DirectX's DirectShow component that might be used by an attacker to run hostile code on vulnerable Windows machines.
Redmond has issued a patch - designated as critical - which users are urged to review.
The list of affected software is extensive: Microsoft DirectX 5.2 on Windows 98; MS DirectX 6.1 on Windows 98 SE; DirectX 7.0a and DirectX 9.0a on Windows Me; DirectX and DirectX 9.0a 7.0 on Win 2000; DirectX 8.1 and DirectX 9.0a on Win XP; DirectX 8.1 and DirectX 9.0a on Win Server 2003 are all potentially vulnerable.
So too is Windows NT 4.0 with either Windows Media Player 6.4 or IE 6 SP 1 installed and Microsoft Windows NT 4.0, Terminal Server Edition with either Windows Media Player 6.4 or IE 6 SP 1 installed.
The DirectX APIs are used by Windows programs for multimedia and games support. Within DirectX, DirectShow performs client-side audio and video sourcing, manipulation, and rendering.
Two buffer overrun flaws in the function used by DirectShow to check parameters in a Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) file create a means to inject malicious code into vulnerable machines, hence the alert.
An attacker could seek to exploit this vulnerability by creating a specially crafted MIDI file designed to exploit this vulnerability and then host it on a Web site or on a network share, or send it by using an HTML-based e-mail. Simply visiting a maliciously constructed site might be enough to get infected, Microsoft warns. If the users open a maliciously constructed HTML email the effect will be the same.
Little wonder that Microsoft designates the problem as critical.
Here is a report from the English website the register:
UK workers talk favourite revenge tactics
By John Leyden
Posted: 24/07/2003 at 15:18 GMT
More than half of UK workers would take revenge against a former employer if they were unhappy about losing their job.
Badmouthing the company (31 per cent), taking customer leads (38 per cent), signing their ex-boss up to an X-rated mailing list (10 per cent) and sending nasty emails (10 per cent) were identified as key revenge tactics by UK workers in a survey commissioned by Novell.
Novell argues that a recent spate mismanaged redundancy announcements, including reports of workers being informed of their job loss by text message or voicemail, make the issue all the more pressing. As well damaging a company's reputation, ex-workers could cost their former employers "millions" by continuing to use company resources and benefits that have not been stopped when they leave.
The research reveals that 58 per cent of employees would continue to use company mobile phones, at a potential cost to UK industry of more than £1m per week. More than half of those questioned would carry on accessing the corporate IT network, and continue to take advantage of their season ticket, company car, laptop and gym membership if they were able to get away with it.
Research by the Department of Trade and Industry suggests that only 27 per cent of UK companies have the necessary documented security policies in place to ensure that access to company resources are stopped when an employee leaves.
According to Government Statistics Office research an average 1.67 per cent of the workforce (465,930 people) part from their employment for various reasons each month.
"Losing your job is upsetting whatever the circumstances and it is vital that employers handle the situation with professionalism and sensitivity," commented Steve Brown, UK MD of Novell. "What concerns me most about this survey is the impact that former employees could have on the remaining staff. The costs will be felt throughout an organisation and could impact on pay, bonuses and benefits. Many organisations are like leaky buckets and companies need to start plugging the holes in their organisations to ensure that they are water tight when an employee leaves."
Having being told they had lost their job, 67 per cent would take information that would help them with their next job and examples of their best work. Four in five (79 per cent) of the survey's respondents confessed that if requested, they would forward company sensitive information to a former colleague, even if they were now working for a rival firm.
Slack security procedures make it easier for ex-employees to take revenge, Novell concludes. The company is calling on firms to invest in access management technology as part of more comprehensive attempts to improve an enterprise's overall security policy.
But that only treats the disease rather than prevents it in the first place. TLC (tender loving care) of soon-to-be ex-employees rather than technology is far more important in preventing the urge for revenge, which is bound to find some outlet. Having said that, putting technology in place to revoke network credentials is a sensible step, not least because such spare credentials are frequently misused by third party crackers.
The survey, conducted by TNS in June 2003, involved quizzing a representative sample of 1174 adults in full and part time work in the UK on their attitudes towards revenge against former employers. ®
UK workers talk favourite revenge tactics
By John Leyden
Posted: 24/07/2003 at 15:18 GMT
More than half of UK workers would take revenge against a former employer if they were unhappy about losing their job.
Badmouthing the company (31 per cent), taking customer leads (38 per cent), signing their ex-boss up to an X-rated mailing list (10 per cent) and sending nasty emails (10 per cent) were identified as key revenge tactics by UK workers in a survey commissioned by Novell.
Novell argues that a recent spate mismanaged redundancy announcements, including reports of workers being informed of their job loss by text message or voicemail, make the issue all the more pressing. As well damaging a company's reputation, ex-workers could cost their former employers "millions" by continuing to use company resources and benefits that have not been stopped when they leave.
The research reveals that 58 per cent of employees would continue to use company mobile phones, at a potential cost to UK industry of more than £1m per week. More than half of those questioned would carry on accessing the corporate IT network, and continue to take advantage of their season ticket, company car, laptop and gym membership if they were able to get away with it.
Research by the Department of Trade and Industry suggests that only 27 per cent of UK companies have the necessary documented security policies in place to ensure that access to company resources are stopped when an employee leaves.
According to Government Statistics Office research an average 1.67 per cent of the workforce (465,930 people) part from their employment for various reasons each month.
"Losing your job is upsetting whatever the circumstances and it is vital that employers handle the situation with professionalism and sensitivity," commented Steve Brown, UK MD of Novell. "What concerns me most about this survey is the impact that former employees could have on the remaining staff. The costs will be felt throughout an organisation and could impact on pay, bonuses and benefits. Many organisations are like leaky buckets and companies need to start plugging the holes in their organisations to ensure that they are water tight when an employee leaves."
Having being told they had lost their job, 67 per cent would take information that would help them with their next job and examples of their best work. Four in five (79 per cent) of the survey's respondents confessed that if requested, they would forward company sensitive information to a former colleague, even if they were now working for a rival firm.
Slack security procedures make it easier for ex-employees to take revenge, Novell concludes. The company is calling on firms to invest in access management technology as part of more comprehensive attempts to improve an enterprise's overall security policy.
But that only treats the disease rather than prevents it in the first place. TLC (tender loving care) of soon-to-be ex-employees rather than technology is far more important in preventing the urge for revenge, which is bound to find some outlet. Having said that, putting technology in place to revoke network credentials is a sensible step, not least because such spare credentials are frequently misused by third party crackers.
The survey, conducted by TNS in June 2003, involved quizzing a representative sample of 1174 adults in full and part time work in the UK on their attitudes towards revenge against former employers. ®
When will these fools simply decide to disappear and accept that theior fifteen minutes of fame was a complete waste of time, money and psychic energy:
WASHINGTON - A federal judge refused to release Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (news - web sites) from a lawsuit by Gennifer Flowers which accuses the senator of masterminding a campaign to discredit Flowers' claim of an affair with Bill Clinton (news - web sites).
U.S. District Judge Philip Pro dismissed Flowers' defamation claim against Mrs. Clinton, but allowed a conspiracy allegation to proceed. Former presidential aide George Stephanopoulos and campaign strategist James Carville also are being sued.
Judicial Watch, a conservative group representing Flowers, said Wednesday it will seek the senator's testimony in the case.
In 1992, a supermarket tabloid wrote that Bill Clinton and Flowers had an affair while he was Arkansas governor. When the presidential candidate denied it, Flowers held a news conference to play audio tapes she said were of secretly recorded intimate phone calls between them.
Carville, now on CNN's "Crossfire," and Stephanopoulos, now an anchor on ABC's Sunday morning program "This Week," said that Flowers had doctored the tapes. Stephanopoulos repeated that allegation in a book.
WASHINGTON - A federal judge refused to release Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (news - web sites) from a lawsuit by Gennifer Flowers which accuses the senator of masterminding a campaign to discredit Flowers' claim of an affair with Bill Clinton (news - web sites).
U.S. District Judge Philip Pro dismissed Flowers' defamation claim against Mrs. Clinton, but allowed a conspiracy allegation to proceed. Former presidential aide George Stephanopoulos and campaign strategist James Carville also are being sued.
Judicial Watch, a conservative group representing Flowers, said Wednesday it will seek the senator's testimony in the case.
In 1992, a supermarket tabloid wrote that Bill Clinton and Flowers had an affair while he was Arkansas governor. When the presidential candidate denied it, Flowers held a news conference to play audio tapes she said were of secretly recorded intimate phone calls between them.
Carville, now on CNN's "Crossfire," and Stephanopoulos, now an anchor on ABC's Sunday morning program "This Week," said that Flowers had doctored the tapes. Stephanopoulos repeated that allegation in a book.
Wednesday, July 23, 2003
This is a ripe one, it turns out that Boyden Gray, who was intimately involved in trying to subvert the law right at the start of the Whitewater scandal, by getting the FBI to announce it was investigating, then presidential candiodate Bill Clinton for ethical improprieties, is now weighing in on judicial appointments, claiming the democrats are anti-catholic:
Ads run in Maine and Rhode Island newspapers last weekend show a sign hanging from closed doors under the words "Judicial Chambers." The sign reads: "Catholics need not apply."
The ads -- probably the toughest so far in the Senate's battle over President Bush's judicial nominations -- accuse "some in the U.S. Senate," apparently meaning Democrats, of opposing the appeals court nomination of Alabama Attorney General William H. Pryor Jr. because he is a devout Catholic.
The ads are being run by the Committee for Justice -- founded by C. Boyden Gray, a White House counsel in the administration of President George H.W. Bush, to help rally support for judicial nominees -- and the Ave Maria List, an organization of lay Catholics that works for the election of antiabortion candidates to Congress.
Ads run in Maine and Rhode Island newspapers last weekend show a sign hanging from closed doors under the words "Judicial Chambers." The sign reads: "Catholics need not apply."
The ads -- probably the toughest so far in the Senate's battle over President Bush's judicial nominations -- accuse "some in the U.S. Senate," apparently meaning Democrats, of opposing the appeals court nomination of Alabama Attorney General William H. Pryor Jr. because he is a devout Catholic.
The ads are being run by the Committee for Justice -- founded by C. Boyden Gray, a White House counsel in the administration of President George H.W. Bush, to help rally support for judicial nominees -- and the Ave Maria List, an organization of lay Catholics that works for the election of antiabortion candidates to Congress.
Tuesday, July 22, 2003
It's nice to know that King Ethelred's courtiers do not believe in freedom of speech and ideas. For example a TV station in Madison got the following from the Republican National Committee:
Dear Station Manager:
It has come to our attention that your station will begin airing false and misleading advertisements on July 21, 2003, paid for by the Democratic National Committee. The advertisement in question misrepresents President George W. Bush's January 28, 2003, State of the Union address. The advertisement states that President Bush said, "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
In fact, President Bush said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." By selectively quoting President Bush, the advertisement is deliberately false and misleading. Furthermore, the British government continues to stand by its intelligence and asserts that it believes the intelligence is genuine.
The Democratic National Committee certainly has a legitimate First Amendment right to participate in political debate, but it has no right to willfully spread false information in a deliberate attempt to mislead the American people. These advertisements will not be run by legally qualified candidates; therefore, your station is under no legal obligation to air them. On the contrary, as an FCC licensee you have the responsibility to exercise independent editorial judgment to not only oversee and protect the American marketplace of ideas, essential for the health of our democracy, but also to avoid deliberate misrepresentations of the facts. Such obligations must be taken seriously.
This letter puts you on notice that the information contained in the above-cited advertisement is false and misleading; therefore, you are obligated to refrain from airing this advertisement.
Respectfully,
Caroline C. Hunter
Counsel
Republican National Committee
Dear Station Manager:
It has come to our attention that your station will begin airing false and misleading advertisements on July 21, 2003, paid for by the Democratic National Committee. The advertisement in question misrepresents President George W. Bush's January 28, 2003, State of the Union address. The advertisement states that President Bush said, "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
In fact, President Bush said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." By selectively quoting President Bush, the advertisement is deliberately false and misleading. Furthermore, the British government continues to stand by its intelligence and asserts that it believes the intelligence is genuine.
The Democratic National Committee certainly has a legitimate First Amendment right to participate in political debate, but it has no right to willfully spread false information in a deliberate attempt to mislead the American people. These advertisements will not be run by legally qualified candidates; therefore, your station is under no legal obligation to air them. On the contrary, as an FCC licensee you have the responsibility to exercise independent editorial judgment to not only oversee and protect the American marketplace of ideas, essential for the health of our democracy, but also to avoid deliberate misrepresentations of the facts. Such obligations must be taken seriously.
This letter puts you on notice that the information contained in the above-cited advertisement is false and misleading; therefore, you are obligated to refrain from airing this advertisement.
Respectfully,
Caroline C. Hunter
Counsel
Republican National Committee
Monday, July 21, 2003
Apologies to Moja at Turning Tables, but I thought the following post was interesting enough to reproduce:
the cursor...it blinks...as it waits...for something prolific...so you type...something heroic maybe...a story of valor...or the mundane...and as soon as you stop...it's blinking again...
i feel like that cursor...in an automatic mode...doing things with out thought...because they have become a part of me and my day...each day...off into the unending infinity of everything...blinking...
still waiting...it hangs on my every word...literally...
i get out of the rack only when i have to...i would be content to sleep the day away...but lately i get up...to go find a story...an event...something to write about...i have to search out something interesting because absolutely nothing of interest happens to me...but i'm not complaining...if i'm bored then i'm safe...my family knows this...my women knows this...i know this...
but i try to pay attention...because there is always something to see...something of note...like today...they called in iraqi vendors to hold a bazaar in our 'moral building'...they call it 'THE CHILLVILLE'...it's equipped with some huge a/c's and a flat screen t.v. pumping in the cnn or foxnews...we watch bootleg copies of the latest movies burned off the internet...it's a good place for the troops...
the vendors like that 'money money'...who doesn't...they bring in persian rugs...jewelry...copper pieces...leather shoes and jackets...video games...oil paintings that i think were recreations of famous iraqi art...and knock off electronics with names like 'SUNY' and 'MAGNAVOK'...we eat it up...because we've got more money then we know what to do with...hazardous fire pay will burn a hole through a flak jacket when a soldier is bored out of his kevlar'd mind...
the vendors aren't dim...in kuwait...at the bazaars...they will research MTV...and they will be up on the latest lingo to grab your attention..."very BLING BLING"..."makes you look dope yo"..."this is how we do it"..."the honies will love it playa"...it's hard to say no to these guys...with their middle eastern accents...they put you in a good mood...because you realize that they probably have absolutely no idea what the hell they are saying...they just know that you think it's funny...
there was a table...in the back...with the rugs...that had some very interesting pieces...either they were very old or they were very ill made...i hope they were old because i liked many of them...amber bracelets and silver necklaces...there was so much to see...i used to love buying souvenirs of my travels...i had always dreamed of a home with walls of shelves filled with tokens and trinkets...glass ware and platters...from my rotations around our earth...but since afghanistan...i just don't care any more...maybe because i'm not enjoying myself...like i did in venice...or san fransisco...or thailand...or amsterdam(where i really enjoyed myself)...
i usually shop for gifts...i'm a gift giver...even if it's small...i know people will cherish it because i lugged all the way around this stinking planet to deliver it to their hand...and most people respect stuff like that...even if its a little MRE tabasco bottle of dirt from afghanistan...they will treasure it always...
the cursor...it blinks...as it waits...for something prolific...so you type...something heroic maybe...a story of valor...or the mundane...and as soon as you stop...it's blinking again...
i feel like that cursor...in an automatic mode...doing things with out thought...because they have become a part of me and my day...each day...off into the unending infinity of everything...blinking...
still waiting...it hangs on my every word...literally...
i get out of the rack only when i have to...i would be content to sleep the day away...but lately i get up...to go find a story...an event...something to write about...i have to search out something interesting because absolutely nothing of interest happens to me...but i'm not complaining...if i'm bored then i'm safe...my family knows this...my women knows this...i know this...
but i try to pay attention...because there is always something to see...something of note...like today...they called in iraqi vendors to hold a bazaar in our 'moral building'...they call it 'THE CHILLVILLE'...it's equipped with some huge a/c's and a flat screen t.v. pumping in the cnn or foxnews...we watch bootleg copies of the latest movies burned off the internet...it's a good place for the troops...
the vendors like that 'money money'...who doesn't...they bring in persian rugs...jewelry...copper pieces...leather shoes and jackets...video games...oil paintings that i think were recreations of famous iraqi art...and knock off electronics with names like 'SUNY' and 'MAGNAVOK'...we eat it up...because we've got more money then we know what to do with...hazardous fire pay will burn a hole through a flak jacket when a soldier is bored out of his kevlar'd mind...
the vendors aren't dim...in kuwait...at the bazaars...they will research MTV...and they will be up on the latest lingo to grab your attention..."very BLING BLING"..."makes you look dope yo"..."this is how we do it"..."the honies will love it playa"...it's hard to say no to these guys...with their middle eastern accents...they put you in a good mood...because you realize that they probably have absolutely no idea what the hell they are saying...they just know that you think it's funny...
there was a table...in the back...with the rugs...that had some very interesting pieces...either they were very old or they were very ill made...i hope they were old because i liked many of them...amber bracelets and silver necklaces...there was so much to see...i used to love buying souvenirs of my travels...i had always dreamed of a home with walls of shelves filled with tokens and trinkets...glass ware and platters...from my rotations around our earth...but since afghanistan...i just don't care any more...maybe because i'm not enjoying myself...like i did in venice...or san fransisco...or thailand...or amsterdam(where i really enjoyed myself)...
i usually shop for gifts...i'm a gift giver...even if it's small...i know people will cherish it because i lugged all the way around this stinking planet to deliver it to their hand...and most people respect stuff like that...even if its a little MRE tabasco bottle of dirt from afghanistan...they will treasure it always...
Ah, once again them commies accross the water have nailed the bastards:
The spies who pushed for war
Julian Borger reports on the shadow rightwing intelligence network set up in Washington to second-guess the CIA and deliver a justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force
Thursday July 17, 2003
The Guardian
As the CIA director, George Tenet, arrived at the Senate yesterday to give secret testimony on the Niger uranium affair, it was becoming increasingly clear in Washington that the scandal was only a small, well-documented symptom of a complete breakdown in US intelligence that helped steer America into war.
It represents the Bush administration's second catastrophic intelligence failure. But the CIA and FBI's inability to prevent the September 11 attacks was largely due to internal institutional weaknesses.
This time the implications are far more damaging for the White House, which stands accused of politicising and contaminating its own source of intelligence.
According to former Bush officials, all defence and intelligence sources, senior administration figures created a shadow agency of Pentagon analysts staffed mainly by ideological amateurs to compete with the CIA and its military counterpart, the Defence Intelligence Agency.
The agency, called the Office of Special Plans (OSP), was set up by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to second-guess CIA information and operated under the patronage of hardline conservatives in the top rungs of the administration, the Pentagon and at the White House, including Vice-President Dick Cheney.
The ideologically driven network functioned like a shadow government, much of it off the official payroll and beyond congressional oversight. But it proved powerful enough to prevail in a struggle with the State Department and the CIA by establishing a justification for war.
Mr Tenet has officially taken responsibility for the president's unsubstantiated claim in January that Saddam Hussein's regime had been trying to buy uranium in Africa, but he also said his agency was under pressure to justify a war that the administration had already decided on.
How much Mr Tenet reveals of where that pressure was coming from could have lasting political fallout for Mr Bush and his re-election prospects, which only a few weeks ago seemed impregnable. As more Americans die in Iraq and the reasons for the war are revealed, his victory in 2004 no longer looks like a foregone conclusion.
The White House counter-attacked yesterday when new chief spokesman, Scott McClellan, accused critics of "politicising the war" and trying to "rewrite history". But the Democratic leadership kept up its questions over the White House role.
The president's most trusted adviser, Mr Cheney, was at the shadow network's sharp end. He made several trips to the CIA in Langley, Virginia, to demand a more "forward-leaning" interpretation of the threat posed by Saddam. When he was not there to make his influence felt, his chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was. Such hands-on involvement in the processing of intelligence data was unprecedented for a vice-president in recent times, and it put pressure on CIA officials to come up with the appropriate results.
Another frequent visitor was Newt Gingrich, the former Republican party leader who resurfaced after September 11 as a Pentagon "consultant" and a member of its unpaid defence advisory board, with influence far beyond his official title.
An intelligence official confirmed Mr Gingrich made "a couple of visits" but said there was nothing unusual about that.
Rick Tyler, Mr Gingrich's spokesman, said: "If he was at the CIA he was there to listen and learn, not to persuade or influence."
Mr Gingrich visited Langley three times before the war, and according to accounts, the political veteran sought to browbeat analysts into toughening up their assessments of Saddam's menace.
Mr Gingrich gained access to the CIA headquarters and was listened to because he was seen as a personal emissary of the Pentagon and, in particular, of the OSP.
In the days after September 11, Mr Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, mounted an attempt to include Iraq in the war against terror. When the established agencies came up with nothing concrete to link Iraq and al-Qaida, the OSP was given the task of looking more carefully.
William Luti, a former navy officer and ex-aide to Mr Cheney, runs the day-to-day operations, answering to Douglas Feith, a defence undersecretary and a former Reagan official.
The OSP had access to a huge amount of raw intelligence. It came in part from "report officers" in the CIA's directorate of operations whose job is to sift through reports from agents around the world, filtering out the unsubstantiated and the incredible. Under pressure from the hawks such as Mr Cheney and Mr Gingrich, those officers became reluctant to discard anything, no matter how far-fetched. The OSP also sucked in countless tips from the Iraqi National Congress and other opposition groups, which were viewed with far more scepticism by the CIA and the state department.
There was a mountain of documentation to look through and not much time. The administration wanted to use the momentum gained in Afghanistan to deal with Iraq once and for all. The OSP itself had less than 10 full-time staff, so to help deal with the load, the office hired scores of temporary "consultants". They included lawyers, congressional staffers, and policy wonks from the numerous rightwing thinktanks in Washington. Few had experience in intelligence.
"Most of the people they had in that office were off the books, on personal services contracts. At one time, there were over 100 of them," said an intelligence source. The contracts allow a department to hire individuals, without specifying a job description.
As John Pike, a defence analyst at the thinktank GlobalSecurity.org, put it, the contracts "are basically a way they could pack the room with their little friends".
"They surveyed data and picked out what they liked," said Gregory Thielmann, a senior official in the state department's intelligence bureau until his retirement in September. "The whole thing was bizarre. The secretary of defence had this huge defence intelligence agency, and he went around it."
In fact, the OSP's activities were a com plete mystery to the DIA and the Pentagon.
"The iceberg analogy is a good one," said a senior officer who left the Pentagon during the planning of the Iraq war. "No one from the military staff heard, saw or discussed anything with them."
The civilian agencies had the same impression of the OSP sleuths. "They were a pretty shadowy presence," Mr Thielmann said. "Normally when you compile an intelligence document, all the agencies get together to discuss it. The OSP was never present at any of the meetings I attended."
Democratic congressman David Obey, who is investigating the OSP, said: "That office was charged with collecting, vetting and disseminating intelligence completely outside of the normal intelligence apparatus. In fact, it appears that information collected by this office was in some instances not even shared with established intelligence agencies and in numerous instances was passed on to the national security council and the president without having been vetted with anyone other than political appointees."
The OSP was an open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House not only for the Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise.
"None of the Israelis who came were cleared into the Pentagon through normal channels," said one source familiar with the visits. Instead, they were waved in on Mr Feith's authority without having to fill in the usual forms.
The exchange of information continued a long-standing relationship Mr Feith and other Washington neo-conservatives had with Israel's Likud party.
In 1996, he and Richard Perle - now an influential Pentagon figure - served as advisers to the then Likud leader, Binyamin Netanyahu. In a policy paper they wrote, entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, the two advisers said that Saddam would have to be destroyed, and Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran would have to be overthrown or destabilised, for Israel to be truly safe.
The Israeli influence was revealed most clearly by a story floated by unnamed senior US officials in the American press, suggesting the reason that no banned weapons had been found in Iraq was that they had been smuggled into Syria. Intelligence sources say that the story came from the office of the Israeli prime minister.
The OSP absorbed this heady brew of raw intelligence, rumour and plain disinformation and made it a "product", a prodigious stream of reports with a guaranteed readership in the White House. The primary customers were Mr Cheney, Mr Libby and their closest ideological ally on the national security council, Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice's deputy.
In turn, they leaked some of the claims to the press, and used others as a stick with which to beat the CIA and the state department analysts, demanding they investigate the OSP leads.
The big question looming over Congress as Mr Tenet walked into his closed-door session yesterday was whether this shadow intelligence operation would survive national scrutiny and who would pay the price for allowing it to help steer the country into war.
A former senior CIA official insisted yesterday that Mr Feith, at least, was "finished" - but that may be wishful thinking by a rival organisation.
As he prepares for re-election, Mr Bush may opt to tough it out, rather than acknowledge the severity of the problem by firing loyalists. But in that case, it will inevitably be harder to re-establish confidence in the intelligence on which the White House is basing its decisions, and the world's sole superpower risks stumbling onwards half-blind, unable to distinguish real threats from phantoms.
The spies who pushed for war
Julian Borger reports on the shadow rightwing intelligence network set up in Washington to second-guess the CIA and deliver a justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force
Thursday July 17, 2003
The Guardian
As the CIA director, George Tenet, arrived at the Senate yesterday to give secret testimony on the Niger uranium affair, it was becoming increasingly clear in Washington that the scandal was only a small, well-documented symptom of a complete breakdown in US intelligence that helped steer America into war.
It represents the Bush administration's second catastrophic intelligence failure. But the CIA and FBI's inability to prevent the September 11 attacks was largely due to internal institutional weaknesses.
This time the implications are far more damaging for the White House, which stands accused of politicising and contaminating its own source of intelligence.
According to former Bush officials, all defence and intelligence sources, senior administration figures created a shadow agency of Pentagon analysts staffed mainly by ideological amateurs to compete with the CIA and its military counterpart, the Defence Intelligence Agency.
The agency, called the Office of Special Plans (OSP), was set up by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to second-guess CIA information and operated under the patronage of hardline conservatives in the top rungs of the administration, the Pentagon and at the White House, including Vice-President Dick Cheney.
The ideologically driven network functioned like a shadow government, much of it off the official payroll and beyond congressional oversight. But it proved powerful enough to prevail in a struggle with the State Department and the CIA by establishing a justification for war.
Mr Tenet has officially taken responsibility for the president's unsubstantiated claim in January that Saddam Hussein's regime had been trying to buy uranium in Africa, but he also said his agency was under pressure to justify a war that the administration had already decided on.
How much Mr Tenet reveals of where that pressure was coming from could have lasting political fallout for Mr Bush and his re-election prospects, which only a few weeks ago seemed impregnable. As more Americans die in Iraq and the reasons for the war are revealed, his victory in 2004 no longer looks like a foregone conclusion.
The White House counter-attacked yesterday when new chief spokesman, Scott McClellan, accused critics of "politicising the war" and trying to "rewrite history". But the Democratic leadership kept up its questions over the White House role.
The president's most trusted adviser, Mr Cheney, was at the shadow network's sharp end. He made several trips to the CIA in Langley, Virginia, to demand a more "forward-leaning" interpretation of the threat posed by Saddam. When he was not there to make his influence felt, his chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was. Such hands-on involvement in the processing of intelligence data was unprecedented for a vice-president in recent times, and it put pressure on CIA officials to come up with the appropriate results.
Another frequent visitor was Newt Gingrich, the former Republican party leader who resurfaced after September 11 as a Pentagon "consultant" and a member of its unpaid defence advisory board, with influence far beyond his official title.
An intelligence official confirmed Mr Gingrich made "a couple of visits" but said there was nothing unusual about that.
Rick Tyler, Mr Gingrich's spokesman, said: "If he was at the CIA he was there to listen and learn, not to persuade or influence."
Mr Gingrich visited Langley three times before the war, and according to accounts, the political veteran sought to browbeat analysts into toughening up their assessments of Saddam's menace.
Mr Gingrich gained access to the CIA headquarters and was listened to because he was seen as a personal emissary of the Pentagon and, in particular, of the OSP.
In the days after September 11, Mr Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, mounted an attempt to include Iraq in the war against terror. When the established agencies came up with nothing concrete to link Iraq and al-Qaida, the OSP was given the task of looking more carefully.
William Luti, a former navy officer and ex-aide to Mr Cheney, runs the day-to-day operations, answering to Douglas Feith, a defence undersecretary and a former Reagan official.
The OSP had access to a huge amount of raw intelligence. It came in part from "report officers" in the CIA's directorate of operations whose job is to sift through reports from agents around the world, filtering out the unsubstantiated and the incredible. Under pressure from the hawks such as Mr Cheney and Mr Gingrich, those officers became reluctant to discard anything, no matter how far-fetched. The OSP also sucked in countless tips from the Iraqi National Congress and other opposition groups, which were viewed with far more scepticism by the CIA and the state department.
There was a mountain of documentation to look through and not much time. The administration wanted to use the momentum gained in Afghanistan to deal with Iraq once and for all. The OSP itself had less than 10 full-time staff, so to help deal with the load, the office hired scores of temporary "consultants". They included lawyers, congressional staffers, and policy wonks from the numerous rightwing thinktanks in Washington. Few had experience in intelligence.
"Most of the people they had in that office were off the books, on personal services contracts. At one time, there were over 100 of them," said an intelligence source. The contracts allow a department to hire individuals, without specifying a job description.
As John Pike, a defence analyst at the thinktank GlobalSecurity.org, put it, the contracts "are basically a way they could pack the room with their little friends".
"They surveyed data and picked out what they liked," said Gregory Thielmann, a senior official in the state department's intelligence bureau until his retirement in September. "The whole thing was bizarre. The secretary of defence had this huge defence intelligence agency, and he went around it."
In fact, the OSP's activities were a com plete mystery to the DIA and the Pentagon.
"The iceberg analogy is a good one," said a senior officer who left the Pentagon during the planning of the Iraq war. "No one from the military staff heard, saw or discussed anything with them."
The civilian agencies had the same impression of the OSP sleuths. "They were a pretty shadowy presence," Mr Thielmann said. "Normally when you compile an intelligence document, all the agencies get together to discuss it. The OSP was never present at any of the meetings I attended."
Democratic congressman David Obey, who is investigating the OSP, said: "That office was charged with collecting, vetting and disseminating intelligence completely outside of the normal intelligence apparatus. In fact, it appears that information collected by this office was in some instances not even shared with established intelligence agencies and in numerous instances was passed on to the national security council and the president without having been vetted with anyone other than political appointees."
The OSP was an open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House not only for the Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise.
"None of the Israelis who came were cleared into the Pentagon through normal channels," said one source familiar with the visits. Instead, they were waved in on Mr Feith's authority without having to fill in the usual forms.
The exchange of information continued a long-standing relationship Mr Feith and other Washington neo-conservatives had with Israel's Likud party.
In 1996, he and Richard Perle - now an influential Pentagon figure - served as advisers to the then Likud leader, Binyamin Netanyahu. In a policy paper they wrote, entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, the two advisers said that Saddam would have to be destroyed, and Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran would have to be overthrown or destabilised, for Israel to be truly safe.
The Israeli influence was revealed most clearly by a story floated by unnamed senior US officials in the American press, suggesting the reason that no banned weapons had been found in Iraq was that they had been smuggled into Syria. Intelligence sources say that the story came from the office of the Israeli prime minister.
The OSP absorbed this heady brew of raw intelligence, rumour and plain disinformation and made it a "product", a prodigious stream of reports with a guaranteed readership in the White House. The primary customers were Mr Cheney, Mr Libby and their closest ideological ally on the national security council, Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice's deputy.
In turn, they leaked some of the claims to the press, and used others as a stick with which to beat the CIA and the state department analysts, demanding they investigate the OSP leads.
The big question looming over Congress as Mr Tenet walked into his closed-door session yesterday was whether this shadow intelligence operation would survive national scrutiny and who would pay the price for allowing it to help steer the country into war.
A former senior CIA official insisted yesterday that Mr Feith, at least, was "finished" - but that may be wishful thinking by a rival organisation.
As he prepares for re-election, Mr Bush may opt to tough it out, rather than acknowledge the severity of the problem by firing loyalists. But in that case, it will inevitably be harder to re-establish confidence in the intelligence on which the White House is basing its decisions, and the world's sole superpower risks stumbling onwards half-blind, unable to distinguish real threats from phantoms.
Found this at King Ethelred's web portal:
The danger is grave and growing. The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons and is rebuilding facilities to make more. It could launch a biological or chemical attack 45 minutes after the order is given. The regime is seeking a nuclear bomb -- and, with fissile material, could build one within a year.
Iraq's regime has longstanding and continuing ties to terrorist groups -- there are al-Qaida terrorists inside Iraq. The regime also practices the rape of women and the torture of dissenters and their children as methods of intimidation.
Hey Ethelred can you spell the word liar, we can GEORGE BUSH
The danger is grave and growing. The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons and is rebuilding facilities to make more. It could launch a biological or chemical attack 45 minutes after the order is given. The regime is seeking a nuclear bomb -- and, with fissile material, could build one within a year.
Iraq's regime has longstanding and continuing ties to terrorist groups -- there are al-Qaida terrorists inside Iraq. The regime also practices the rape of women and the torture of dissenters and their children as methods of intimidation.
Hey Ethelred can you spell the word liar, we can GEORGE BUSH
Sunday, July 20, 2003
Thank youy Ms Dowd. Once again the estimable columnist has nailed Ethelred and his annoying court of dishonor.
What we are witnessing is how ugly it can get when control freaks start losing control.
Beset by problems, the Bush team responds by attacking those who point out the problems. These linear, Manichaean managers are flailing in an ever-more-chaotic environment. They are spending $3.9 billion a month trying to keep the lid on a festering mess in Iraq, even as Afghanistan simmers.
The more Bush officials try to explain how the president made the bogus uranium claim in his State of the Union address, despite the C.I.A. red flags and the State Department warning that it was "highly dubious," the more inexplicable it seems. The list of evils the administration has not unearthed keeps getting longer — Osama, Saddam, W.M.D., the anthrax terrorist — as the deficit gets bigger ($455 billion, going to $475 billion).
After 9/11, this administration had everything going for it. Republicans ruled Congress. The president had enormously high approval ratings. Yet it overreached while trying to justify the reasons for going to war.
Even when conservatives have all the marbles, they still act as if they're under siege. Now that they are under siege, it is no time for them to act as if they're losing their marbles.
What we are witnessing is how ugly it can get when control freaks start losing control.
Beset by problems, the Bush team responds by attacking those who point out the problems. These linear, Manichaean managers are flailing in an ever-more-chaotic environment. They are spending $3.9 billion a month trying to keep the lid on a festering mess in Iraq, even as Afghanistan simmers.
The more Bush officials try to explain how the president made the bogus uranium claim in his State of the Union address, despite the C.I.A. red flags and the State Department warning that it was "highly dubious," the more inexplicable it seems. The list of evils the administration has not unearthed keeps getting longer — Osama, Saddam, W.M.D., the anthrax terrorist — as the deficit gets bigger ($455 billion, going to $475 billion).
After 9/11, this administration had everything going for it. Republicans ruled Congress. The president had enormously high approval ratings. Yet it overreached while trying to justify the reasons for going to war.
Even when conservatives have all the marbles, they still act as if they're under siege. Now that they are under siege, it is no time for them to act as if they're losing their marbles.
