By Paul Kiel, ProPublica, and Mitchell Hartman, Marketplace

This story was co-produced with Marketplace. Listen to their coverage.

Seven years after Congress banned payday-loan companies from charging exorbitant interest rates to service members, many of the nation’s military bases are surrounded by storefront lenders who charge high annual percentage rates, sometimes exceeding 400 percent.

The Military Lending Act sought to protect service members and their families from predatory loans. But in practice, the law has defined the types of covered loans so narrowly that it’s been all too easy for lenders to circumvent it.

“We have to revisit this,” said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who chairs the defense appropriations subcommittee and is the Senate’s second-ranking Democrat. “If we’re serious about protecting military families from exploitation, this law has to be a lot tighter.”

Members of the military can lose their security clearances for falling into debt. As a result, experts say, service members often avoid taking financial problems to their superior officers and instead resort to high-cost loans they don’t fully understand.

The Department of Defense, which defines which loans the Military Lending Act covers, has begun a process to review the law, said Marcus Beauregard, chief of the Pentagon’s state liaison office.

The act mainly targets two products: payday loans, usually two-week loans with annual percentage rates often above 400 percent, and auto-title loans, typically one-month loans with rates above 100 percent and secured by the borrower’s vehicle. The law caps all covered loans at a 36 percent annual rate.

That limit “did do a great deal of good on the products that it covered,” Holly Petraeus, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s head of service member affairs, said in an interview. “But there are a lot of products that it doesn’t cover.”

Representatives from payday and other high-cost lenders said they follow the law. Some defended the proliferation of new products as helpful to consumers.

A 400 Percent Loan

In June 2011, when Levon Tyler, a 37-year-old staff sergeant in the Marines, walked into Smart Choice Title Loans in Columbia, S.C., it was the first time he’d ever gone to such a place, he said. But his bills were mounting. He needed cash right away.

Smart Choice agreed to lend him $1,600. In return, Tyler handed over the title to his 1998 Ford SUV and a copy of his keys. Tyler recalled the saleswoman telling him he’d probably be able to pay off the loan in a year. He said he did not scrutinize the contract he signed that day.

If he had, Tyler would have seen that in exchange for that $1,600, he’d agreed to pay a total of $17,228 over two and a half years. The loan’s annual percentage rate, which includes interest and fees, was 400 percent.

Tyler said he provided his military ID when he got the loan. But even with an annual rate as high as a typical payday loan, the Military Lending Act didn’t apply. The law limits the interest rate of title loans — but only those that have a term of six months or less.

In South Carolina, almost no loans fit that definition, said Sue Berkowitz, director of the nonprofit South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center. The reason? Ten years ago, the state legislature passed consumer protections for short-term auto-title loans. In response, lenders simply lengthened the duration of their loans.

Today, plenty of payday and auto-title lenders cluster near Fort Jackson, an army base in Columbia, legally peddling high-cost loans to the more than 36,000 soldiers who receive basic training there each year.

Tyler’s loan showcases other examples of lenders’ ingenuity. Attached to his contract was an addendum that offered a “Summer Fun Program Payoff.” While the loan’s official term was 32 months, putting it outside both South Carolina’s regulations and the Military Lending Act, the “Summer Fun” option allowed Tyler to pay off the loan in a single month. If he did so, he’d pay an annual rate of 110 percent, the addendum said.

Michael Agostinelli, the chief executive of Smart Choice’s parent company, American Life Enterprises, told ProPublica he wants his customers to pay off their loans early. “They’re meant to be short-term loans,” he said. He also said that customers who pay on time get “a big discount.” In Tyler’s case, he would have paid an annual rate of 192 percent if he had made all his payments on time.

But Tyler fell behind after only a couple of payments. Less than five months after he took out the loan, a repo company came in the middle of the night to take his car. Three weeks later, it was sold at auction.

“This was something new, and I will never do it again,” Tyler said. “I don’t care what type of spot I get in.”

American Life Enterprises companies operate nine title-lending branches in Nevada and South Carolina. Agostinelli said loans to members of the military are rare for his companies but that service members might go to a title lender for the same reason anybody else does: They need money immediately and discreetly.

Loans similar to the one Tyler took out are broadly and legally available from stores and over the Internet. QC Holdings, Advance America, Cash America and Ace Cash Express — all among the country’s largest payday lenders — offer loans that fall outside the definitions of the Military Lending Act, which defined a payday loan as lasting three months or less.

The annual rates can be sky high, such as those offered by Ace Cash Express in Texas, where a five-month loan for $400 comes with an annual rate of 585 percent, according to the company’s website.

Ace Cash is among a number of payday lenders just outside the gates of Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, and it has four stores within three miles of Fort Hood in Texas.

A 2012 report on the Military Lending Act by the Consumer Federation of America found there had been no drop in the number of payday lenders around Fort Hood since the 2006 law went into effect.

Amy Cantu of the Community Financial Services Association of America, which represents the payday industry, said payday lenders are careful to screen out service members for their short-term products. But she acknowledged that payday companies may provide soldiers and their families with other types of loans. “We welcome more products in the market,” she said of the trend of payday lenders increasingly offering longer-term loans. “Options are good for consumers.”

Earned a Purple Heart, Lost a Car

Some lenders apparently haven’t bothered to change their loan products in response to the law.

A 2011 federal class-action suit filed in Georgia’s Middle District alleges that one of the largest auto-title lenders in the country, Community Loans of America, has been flouting the law. The suit names among its plaintiffs three soldiers who took out what appeared to be classic title loans. All agreed to pay an annual rate of around 150 percent for a 30-day loan. All had trouble repaying, according to the suit. One, an Army staff sergeant and Purple Heart recipient, lost his car. The other two managed to pay interest but almost none of the principal on their loans for several months.

The company was fully aware that its customers were soldiers, because they presented their military identifications, said Roy Barnes, a former governor of Georgia who is representing the plaintiffs.

Community Loans, which boasts more than 900 locations nationwide, argued in court that the transactions were not covered by the Military Lending Act because they weren’t loans but sales. Here’s how Community Loans said the transaction worked: The soldiers sold their vehicles to the company while retaining the option to buy back the cars — for a higher price. In early 2012, the judge rejected that argument. The case is ongoing.

Community Loans, which did not respond to numerous calls and emails, has been making loans to service members through businesses with various names.

Leading up to the gates of Fort Benning in Columbus, Ga., Victory Drive is crowded with lenders. Among them is Georgia Auto Pawn, a Community Loans of America storefront where one of the plaintiffs in the class action, an Army master sergeant, took out his loan.

Just another half-mile down the road is a lender advertising “Signature Loans for the Military.” The lender goes by the name of Title Credit Finance, but the parent company is Community Finance and Loans, which shares the same corporate address as Community Loans of America.

A billboard for Title Credit Finance promises to rescue borrowers: Showing a picture of a hamster on a wheel, it says, “Avoid the title pawn treadmill,” referring to customers who get caught paying only interest month after month.

Title Credit Finance offers installment loans, a product which, as the company advertises, does seem to provide “CASH NOW The Smart Way” — at least when compared to a title loan. Interest rates tend to be lower — though still typically well above 36 percent. And instead of simply paying interest month upon month, the borrower pays down the loan’s principal over time.

But the product comes with traps of its own. Installment lenders often load the loans with insurance products that can double the cost, and the companies thrive by persuading borrowers to use the product like a credit card. Customers can refinance the loan after only a few payments and borrow a little more. But those extra dollars typically come at a far higher cost than the annual rate listed on the contract.

At TitleMax, a title-lender with more than 700 stores in 12 states, soldiers who inquire about a title loan are directed to InstaLoan, TitleMax’s sister company, which provides installment loans, said Suzanne Donovan of the nonprofit Step Up Savannah. A $2,475 installment loan made to a soldier at Fort Stewart near Savannah, Ga., in 2011 and reviewed by ProPublica, for example, carried a 43 percent annual rate over 14 months — but that rate effectively soared to 80 percent when the insurance products were included. To get the loan, the soldier surrendered the title to his car. TMX Finance, the parent company of both TitleMax and InstaLoan, did not respond to multiple calls and emails seeking comment.

Another lender on Victory Drive is the publicly traded World Finance, one of the country’s largest installment lenders, with a market capitalization of about $1 billion and more than 1,000 stores around the country. World was the subject of an investigation by ProPublica and Marketplace earlier this week. Of World’s loans, about 5 percent, approximately 40,000 loans, are made to service members or their families, according to the company. Active-duty military personnel and their dependents comprise less than 1 percent of the U.S. population, according to the Defense Department.

Bill Himpler, the executive vice president of the American Financial Services Association, which represents installment lenders, said the industry’s products had been rightfully excluded from the Military Lending Act. The Pentagon had done a good job preserving soldiers’ access to affordable credit, he said, and only “tweaking the regulations here or there to tighten them up” was necessary.

The Commander and the Collectors

It’s not known how many service members have high-priced loans. The Pentagon says it intends to conduct a survey on the matter soon and issue a report by the end of the year.

But some commanders, such as Capt. Brandon Archuleta, say that dealing with soldiers’ financial problems is simply part of being an officer. Archuleta, who has commanded soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, recalled fielding numerous calls from lenders trying to track down soldiers who were delinquent on debts.

“In the last 12 years we’ve seen military officers as war fighters, we’ve seen them as diplomats, we’ve seen them as scholars,” Archuleta said. “But what we don’t see is the officer as social worker, financial adviser and personal caregiver.”

While some soldiers seek help from their superior officers, many don’t. That’s because debt troubles can result in soldiers losing their security clearance.

“Instead of trying to negotiate this with their command structure, the service member will typically end up refinancing,” said Michael Hayden, director of government relations for the Military Officers Association of America and a retired Air Force colonel. “It’ll typically start out with some type of small crisis. And then the real crisis is just how you get that loan paid off.”

Soldiers who hide their debt often forego the military’s special aid options. Army Emergency Relief and the Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society offer zero-interest loans. But in seeking that help, a soldier risks alerting the commanding officer to his or her troubles, particularly if the sum needed is a large one.

Russell Putnam, a legal-assistance attorney at Fort Stewart, says he often finds himself making a simple argument to soldiers: “A zero percent loan sure as heck beats a 36 percent plus or a 25 percent plus loan.”

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If you lie to Congress, it is a crime.  It’s called perjury.  You may remember that when Roger Clemens did it, he barely escaped two counts of it.  And you should remember that the official reason President Bill Clinton was impeached was because of perjury (you know, it had nothing to do with the rabid hatred the GOP had of him, then Congressman Bob Barr, R-GA, asked aloud, If we can’t get rid of him with impeachment what else can we do?  Uh, win an election.)

So if it is illegal for citizens to lie TO Congress, why is is legal for them to lie to us?

First case of lying: Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA)

Issa has made some wild claims about Benghazi.  One that he has repeated is that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton personally signed a cable about Benghazi.  This has been refuted by all of the whistleblowers and a Washington Post fact checker called that assertion “a whopper” (from Congressman Elijah Cummings’, D-MD testimony at the hearing on the subject on May 8, 2013 — you can watch it online).  All State Department cables have the Secretary’s name.

Yet, Issa repeats this claim over and over and over.  The goal, of course, is to weaken Secretary Clinton because she is the front runner for the Democratic Party and is popular among Republicans.  The only thing they can find to hurt her is this.  Truthfully, that we had people in such a dangerous place left so far away from military support seems really upsetting.  I am torn from thinking this is Libya, this was September 11th, how could we leave our ambassador so unprotected? The Accountability Review Board (ARB) investigated and released this report.   They found that mistakes were made and offered suggestions to prevent this from happening ever again.  They were not wimpy as they have been called by some on the right. They were thorough and pretty scathing.  There is no question that this should not have happened.

What we know is that when the idea of increasing funding for diplomatic security came up, many of these Republicans who are so unhappy with what happened now, said “no.”

(Disclaimer: I worked for the Clinton Administration on and off for most of it.  I also worked for Secretary Clinton’s presidential campaign and support the idea of her running in 2016.)

Liar number 2: Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH)

Senator Ayotte has been questioned about her vote against the recent gun control bill.  Her response has been — more than once — that she opposed it because she doesn’t want there to be a national registry of gun owners.  I support gun control and I don’t want that either.  I voted against former DC Mayor Adrian Fenty because, at least partially, he almost went through with a policy to send DC police door-to-door to request residents turn over any guns they didn’t want in their home.  If said guns could be tied to a crime, the people who turned them over could be charged with that crime.  That is ridiculous.

The bill Senator Ayotte voted against had no such provision.  Senators Pat Toomey (R-PA) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) put a provision in the bill making it a felony to keep information on people who had bought a gun past a certain amount of time.  No one wants to see such a registry.

I don’t know what her real reason was and would like to hear it because I feel like every other five minutes I hear someone on the right whining that “No one read the bill!”  Read the damn bill.  And if you have a real reason for going against this common sense bill, please share it.  I might even agree with the real reason, if I knew what it was.

And the liars that love them.

Could the right be happier about anything than Benghazi?  Were they this upset with President Bush for letting 9/11 happened? (Didn’t he get a report entitled Bin laden determined to attack the US within the US?  Did he not have intelligence that al Qaeda was looking at using airplanes?  Yes on both.  You may remember how I was jumping up and down begging for hearings?  Oh, you don’t?  This isn’t just because I am not a major TV network but because I am not a truther nor do I see politics in every event on earth).

Second problem I have with the right’s response is their comparison to Watergate.  They say “when Obama lied, people died.”  I have two problems with that statement.  The first issue I have is substantive.  President Obama has not lied.  This is not a cover-up.  This is a tragedy and shows some real holes in the way we do business that need to be fixed.  Secondly, it implies that these lies caused deaths.  Even if this was true, they happened after the event in question so any attempts at finding a causality are just ridiculous.

On the gun control thing, the National Rifle Association and American Future Fund have some to Senator Ayotte’s defense.  The latter has sponsored ads that compound her lie with one of their own.  They claim she has voted for increased background checks when she did the opposite.  Read that here (and see the ad).

One thing that gets under my skin more than many things is when people put up with politicians who lie because that’s just how it’s done.  We get the government we settle for, we need to expect better.

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Greenwald: Supported the Iraq war whether he likes it or not

Perhaps I should take a break from lobbing grenades at Glenn Greenwald. After all, I do actually agree with him far more than I disagree. It’s just that, well, he’s unbelievably irritating and the more I read him the more annoyed I get.

We had a pretty big traffic spike here at the Banter over the past couple of days, mostly because Sam Harris linked to us in a piece he wrote defending himself from Glenn Greenwald’s assertion that he was a closet racist. I’m actually (mostly) siding with Greenwald on the debate because I find Harris to be a pedantic fundamentalist when it comes to his anti religious views, and I believe Greenwald correctly nails him for disproportionally focusing on Islam. [I see this as a common meme amongst atheist fundamentalists - a complete inability to understand that any ideology, whether it be political, spiritual, religious or economic can be distorted by humans to evil ends. Harris relentlessly focuses on religion - particularly Islam - and it is, to be frank, rather childish. Human conflict almost always boils down to resources and who controls them, and ideology a convenient pretext.]

This isn’t to say Harris doesn’t have anything interesting to say – he does and he makes a number of good points in his debate with Greenwald. Which brings me to the war with Iraq and Greenwald’s infuriating hypocrisy on the subject. Harris linked to a short piece I wrote last year in regards to Greenwald’s initial support for the Iraq war, stating the following:

I have never written or spoken in support of the war in Iraq. This has not stopped a “journalist” like Glenn Greenwald from castigating me as a warmonger (Which is especially rich, given that he supported the war.) The truth is, I have never known what to think about this war, apart from the obvious: 1) prospectively, it seemed like a very dangerous distraction from the ongoing war in Afghanistan; 2) retrospectively, it was a disaster.  Much of the responsibility for this disaster falls on the Bush administration, and one of the administration’s great failings was to underestimate the religious sectarianism of the Iraqi people.

Greenwald confessed to general political apathy this in his book ‘How Would a Patriot Act?’ and admitted that despite his doubts about the war:

I had not abandoned my trust in the Bush administration. Between the president’s performance in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the swift removal of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the fact that I wanted the president to succeed, because my loyalty is to my country and he was the leader of my country, I still gave the administration the benefit of the doubt. I believed then that the president was entitled to have his national security judgment deferred to, and to the extent that I was able to develop a definitive view, I accepted his judgment that American security really would be enhanced by the invasion of this sovereign country.

Fast forward to 2013, and Greenwald apparently didn’t actually give the Bush administration the ‘benefit of the doubt’, ‘trust and defer to them’, or ‘accept their judgement’ that  the invasion of Iraq would have ‘enhanced’ US security. In a piece titled ‘Frequently Told Lies‘, Greenwald penned a lengthy retort to a number of supposed myths told about him by progressives. Amazingly, he stated:

These claim [sic] are absolutely false. They come from a complete distortion of the Preface I wrote to my own 2006 book, How Would a Patriot Act?…

When the Iraq War was debated and then commenced, I was not a writer. I was not a journalist. I was not politically engaged or active. I never played any role in political debates or controversies. Unlike the countless beloved Democrats who actually did support the war – including Obama’s Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – I had no platform or role in politics of any kind.

I never once wrote in favor of the Iraq War or argued for it in any way, shape or form.Ask anyone who claims that I “supported” the Iraq War to point to a single instance where I ever supported or defended it in any way. There is no such instance. It’s a pure fabrication.

So Greenwald didn’t technically support the war because he wasn’t yelling on MSNBC that America should trust George Bush, and you can’t find written record of him saying it either. You see, Greenwald can’t be painted with the same brush he paints everyone else who supported the war with, because was apathetic at the time and didn’t have a blog.

Look, I think it’s a great thing that Greenwald did an about turn on the Bush Administration and their astonishing lies. Greenwald clearly woke up from his apathy and relentlessly cataloged the administration’s severe abuses of power and hammered them for it until Bush and Cheney left in 2008. But he can’t lecture people who initially supported the Iraq war then turned against it when he did exactly the same thing. Virtually everyone who supported the Iraq war has used the same defense – “Had I known then what I know now, I would not have supported it”. Greenwald is a former constitutional lawyer, so he knows how to argue on technicalities, and that’s exactly what he is doing – using semantics to disguise the fact that he supported one of the dumbest wars in history.

It’s highly embarrassing  and I understand why Greenwald went to great lengths to obfuscate his support for the Bush administration’s catastrophic decision to invade Iraq.

But he did, and he should be big enough to admit it.

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An American soldier carries a wounded Iraqi child to a treatment facility in March 2007. (Photo credit: Lance Cpl. James F. Cline III)

By Kathy Kelly

Ten years ago, in March of 2003, Iraqis braced themselves for the anticipated “Shock and Awe” attacks that the U.S. was planning to launch against them. The media buildup for the attack assured Iraqis that barbarous assaults were looming.

I was living in Baghdad at the time, along with other Voices in the Wilderness activists determined to remain in Iraq, come what may. We didn’t want U.S.-led military and economic war to sever bonds that had grown between ourselves and Iraqis who had befriended us over the previous seven years.

Since 1996, we had traveled to Iraq numerous times, carrying medicines for children and families there, in open violation of the economic sanctions which directly targeted the most vulnerable people in Iraqi society — the poor, the elderly, and the children. I still feel haunted by children and their heartbroken mothers and fathers whom we met in Iraqi hospitals.

“I think I understand,” murmured my friend Martin Thomas, a nurse from the U.K., as he sat in a pediatric ward in a Baghdad hospital in 1997, trying to comprehend the horrifying reality. “It’s a death row for infants.”

Nearly all of the children were condemned to death, some after many days of writhing in pain on bloodstained mats, without pain relievers. Some died quickly, wasted by water-borne diseases. As the fluids ran out of their bodies, they appeared like withered, spoiled fruits. They could have lived, certainly should have lived – and laughed and danced, and run and played- but instead they were brutally and lethally punished by economic sanctions supposedly intended to punish a dictatorship over which civilians had no control.

The war ended for those children, but it has never ended for survivors who carry memories of them. Likewise, the effects of the U.S. bombings continue, immeasurably and indefensibly.

Upon arrival in Baghdad, we would always head to the Al Fanar hotel which had housed scores of previous delegations. Often, internationals like us were the hotel’s only clients during the long years when economic sanctions choked Iraq’s economy and erased their infrastructure.

But in early March of 2003, rooms were filling quickly at the Al Fanar. The owner invited his family members and some of his neighbors and their children to move in, perhaps hoping that the U.S. wouldn’t attack a residence known to house internationals.

Parents in Iraq name themselves after their oldest child. Abu Miladah, the father of two small girls, Miladah and Zainab, was the hotel’s night desk clerk. He arranged for his wife, Umm Miladah, to move with their two small daughters into the hotel.

Umm Miladah warmly welcomed us to befriend her children. It was a blessed release to laugh and play with the children, and somehow our antics and games seemed at least to distract Umm Miladah from her rising anxiety as we waited for the U.S. to rain bombs and missiles down on us.

When the attacks began, Umm Miladah could often be seen uncontrollably shuddering from fear. Day and night, explosions would rattle the windows and cause the Al Fanar’s walls to shake. Ear-splitting blasts and sickening thuds would come from all directions, near and far, over the next two weeks.

I would often hold Miladah, who was age 3, and Zainab, her baby sister of 1½ years, in my arms. That’s how I realized that they both had begun to grind their teeth, morning, noon and night. Several times, we witnessed 8-year-old Dima, the daughter of another hotel worker, gazing up in forlorn shame at her father from a pool of her own urine, having lost control of her bladder in the first days of “Shock and Awe.”

And after weeks, when the bombing finally ended, when we could exhale a bit, realizing we had all survived, I was eager to take Miladah and Zainab outside. I wanted them to feel the sun’s warmth, but first I headed over to their mother, wanting to know if she felt it was all right for me to step out with her children.

She was seated in the hotel lobby, watching the scene outside. U.S. Marines were uncurling large bales of barbed wire to set up a check point immediately outside our hotel. Beige military jeeps, Armored Personnel Carriers, tanks and Humvees lined the streets in each direction.

Tears were streaming down Umm Miladah’s face. “Never before did I think that this would happen to my country,” she said. “And I feel very sad. And this sadness — I think, it will never go away.” She was a tragic prophet.

The war had just ended for those killed during the “Shock and Awe” bombing and invasion, and it was to abruptly end for many thousands killed in the ensuing years of military occupation and civil war. But it won’t end for the survivors. Effects go on immeasurably and indefensibly.

Effects of war continue for the 2.2 million people who’ve been displaced by bombing and chaos, whose livelihoods are irreparably destroyed, and who’ve become refugees in other countries, separated from loved ones and unlikely to ever reclaim the homes and communities from which they had to flee hastily.

Within Iraq, an estimated 2.8 million internally displaced people live, according to Refugees International, “in constant fear, with limited access to shelter, food, and basic services.”

The war hasn’t ended for people who are survivors of torture or for those who were following orders by becoming torturers. Nor has it ended for the multiple generations of U.S. taxpayers who will continue paying for a war which economists Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz have so far priced at $4 trillion.

For Bradley Manning, whose brave empathy exposed criminal actions on the part of U.S. warlords complicit in torture, death squads and executions, the war most certainly isn’t over. He lives as an isolated war hero and whistle-blower, facing decades or perhaps life in prison.

The war may never end for veterans who harbor physical and emotional wounds that will last until they die.

On March 19, on the 10-year anniversary of the Shock and Awe invasion, members of Iraq Veterans Against the War, joined by the Center for Constitutional Rights and other activist groups gathered in front of the White House in Washington, D.C. to launch an initiative claiming their right to heal. Rightfully, they’re calling for health care, accountability, and reparations, and just as rightfully, they’re calling for our support.

A civilized country would heed their call. A civilized country would demand heartfelt reparations to the people of Iraq and cease to interfere in their internal affairs, would secure freedom and official praise for whistleblowers like Bradley Manning , and would rapidly begin to liberate itself from subservience to warlords and war profiteers.

Gandhi was once asked, “What do you think of western civilization?” And famously, he answered, “I think it would be a good idea.”

Kathy Kelly (Kathy@vcnv.org) co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence (www.vcnv.org) and is syndicated through PeaceVoice.

(Originally posted at Consortium News)

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Yesterday morning I was making my usual rounds through the blogs when I habitually clicked over to Andrew Sullivan’s site, as I do every day because I dig the insight, variety and brevity of Sullivan’s writing even though I don’t always agree with him.

As I scrolled down through several of Sullivan’s posts there was something about The Simpsons, a Hathos Alert, a post about George Washington and Barack Obama, and then it hit me — a sucker-punch of revulsion, anger and mild nausea at what had, without warning or invitation, appeared on my screen. It was a photograph of three people in what appeared to be a back alley in Iraq during the war: two very sad-looking men, one of whom was carrying a child who could’ve been a boy or a girl and appeared to have been two or three years old. The child was wrapped in a bloody white sheet and he or she was clearly dead, as indicated by the morning sunlight showing through a large, grisly head wound.

Sullivan included this horrifying photograph in a post (WARNING! Death porn!) that served as a tenth anniversary “maxima culpa” for having supported the Iraq invasion and occupation so vocally throughout much of the previous decade. In other words, Sullivan is still (and should be) coping with his own guilty conscience, and so those of us who didn’t support the war and were in fact hectored as unpatriotic for opposing it were forced to look at this terrible photograph. And as much as I want to, nothing will allow me to un-see it. I will, for the rest of my days, carry the kneejerk manifestation of a stranger’s guilty conscience inside my physical body. And I viscerally resent it.

It’s death porn. I’m not necessarily describing fantasy or theatrical scenes of fictitious death, I’m talking about graphic, real life images of dying and dead humans or animals, displayed for the sole purpose of shocking unsuspecting viewers.

It’s nothing new or inventive. As a student of Civil War history, I’ve seen the first war casualty photos, captured on the battlefields of Antietam and Gettysburg by Alexander Gardner. I’m familiar with the death porn videos of the 1980s — the Faces of Death series — and its various website copycats, even though I honestly haven’t watched any of them. I deliberately didn’t watch the Daniel Pearl execution, knowing from the descriptions how mind-blowingly grotesque it was.

These are just several examples, and I’m sure you can probably name others, but there’s an important distinction here. Most death porn photos and videos carry some sort of firewall, a warning or click-through, before actually seeing them. You have to decide to see Gardner’s battlefield corpse photographs or to visit one of the various death video sites. There’s a barrier between your eyes and the morbidity: a choice.

At 41 years old, I’ve seen a lot of heinous things and I’ve reached an age when I’d prefer to be a little more picky when it comes to which additional heinous things are implanted in the memory cortex of my brain. That’s not to say that I’ll shy away from a violent movie or TV series, or that I’ll avoid my Civil War texts. I simply don’t like being unexpectedly blindsided like I was by Sullivan yesterday, or on the other occasions when he’s stooped this tactic, or by The Huffington Post last week, for that matter, when it displayed a Brady Bunch style grid of death porn photographs at the top of the front page. In that case, it was a series of photos of dead children who had evidently been killed in American drone strikes.

And this leads me to a more salient point here. Forcing people to unwittingly view death porn images could be the cheapest, most hamfisted form of persuasion. It’s the last resort of the speechless — of activists and writers who are simply incapable of forming a stirring argument using words and (non-death porn) images. If you’re completely incapable of making a strong case against war or drones or whatever your pet issue might be without infecting your readers’ brains with death porn, then get off the stage. You have no business participating in the discourse. By using these images as a shockingly unexpected cudgel, you show total contempt for your readers, regardless of whether they agree with what you’re trying to do.

However, if you just can’t help yourself and you really, really have to post such photography and videos, have some decency and post it with a warning or within a permalink instead of in a place where it’s involuntarily viewed. This goes especially for Facebook friends (or former friends) who think it’s powerful activism to post photos of tortured animals in my feed. Not only is it a one-way ticket to being un-friended, but it only serves to repulse both the people who agree, and especially those who disagree. I’m a strong supporter of animal rights, and I’ve seen many of the animal abuse videos released by PETA and the others, but I’ve only done so by choosing to click on a link — not by force, either by a photograph or even a thumbnail on a video. That’s a crucial distinction. Again: choice.

Tell me, the next time you see anti-choice zealots protesting outside of a school or a doctor’s office, waving placards with blown-up photos of aborted fetuses, does the death porn convince you to support their cause, or does it repulse you?

I can’t really muster any sympathy for Sullivan or Ezra Klein or Jonathan Chait, even though I applaud their respective epiphanies and their subsequent honesty about their mistakes. These are writers I like and otherwise respect, but who fucked up and supported the biggest and bloodiest foreign policy blunder in American history short of the Vietnam War. But Andrew, please stop bludgeoning me with your own self-flagellation. Your penitence shouldn’t be my punishment.

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Former Secretary of State Colin Powell. (Photo credit: Charles Haynes)

By Ray McGovern

Ten years ago, Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations in a speech which routed what was left of American resistance to the Bush/Cheney push for invading Iraq. The next day, the Washington Post’s editorial pages spoke for the conventional wisdom, filled with glowing reviews of Powell’s convincing arguments.

Today, of course, we know that much of what Powell said on Feb. 5, 2003, was wrong. He himself has acknowledged that the speech was a “blot” on his record.

We also know that then-CIA Director George Tenet and his deputy John McLaughlin knew full well that key data that they were giving Powell was highly dubious or outright fraudulent. It was not simply “mistaken,” as George W. Bush and his careerist defenders still claim.

There is also circumstantial evidence that Powell was a willing co-conspirator, despite his repeated insistence that he didn’t know he was spreading falsehoods to justify an aggressive (and thus illegal) war. It’s clear that he was eager to please his bosses and thus was predisposed to do whatever he was told.

But the question remains: Was Powell a full-fledged participant in the fraud or was he duped by CIA officials who were taking direction from Vice President Dick Cheney and other war hawks? It seems to me likely that Tenet and McLaughlin (and in a larger sense Bush and Cheney) exploited Powell’s long-held tendency toward careerism (or as his acolytes put it, “being a good soldier”) to easily overcome Powell’s misgivings.

From his days as a young officer in Vietnam through his long climb up the ladder of the U.S. national security bureaucracy, Powell never bucked the system. Indeed, that’s the secret to understanding how Powell ascended to become a four-star general, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Secretary of State.

Whether the question was joining other early Vietnam military advisers in warning President Lyndon Johnson about the hopelessness of that conflict, or participating in President Ronald Reagan’s illegal Iran-Contra operation, or finding less violent ways to deal with international disputes under President George H.W. Bush, Powell consistently chose to be a yes man and do what his bosses wanted. [For details on Powell's past, see the book, Neck Deep.]

Jury Still Out

Still, in my view, the jury is still out on whether Powell was more conned regarding the Iraq War than con-man. Like anyone else, he is entitled to some benefit of the doubt, though to this day he has resisted providing any comprehensive explanation of his deceptive speech or admitting that the invasion of Iraq was wrong.

Powell has limited himself to some handwringing about how the speech was a “blot” on his record, not that it contributed to the unnecessary deaths of nearly 4,500 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. He still insists that the war was justified.

It’s also true that Powell remains one of the important links in the chain of excuses used to fend off allegations of war crimes against the architects of the invasion. As long as each link in that chain doesn’t admit wrongdoing and points to the link in the chain next to him or her as providing justification for whatever was done, no single link can be found guilty and surely not the entire chain.

The Bush-Cheney team used a similar chain of reinforcing justification to evade responsibility for illegal torture. The CIA’s torturers point to authorization from the CIA brass, which points to approval from Bush and other senior White House officials, who point to the Justice Department lawyers who created legal excuses and other evasions, some of which were suggested by the CIA torturers, the CIA brass and the White House officials.

Thus, regarding the false testimony on the Iraq War, Powell resists stating clearly that Tenet and McLaughlin lied to his face or admitting that he agreed to deliver the deceptions with his trademark gravitas and sincerity because he wanted to stay in President Bush’s good graces.

Slam or Sham Dunk?

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell’s chief of staff at the time, has described his boss as dubious about elements of the intelligence that he was getting from not only Vice President Cheney’s office but from the CIA.

Surely, Powell understood that the intelligence on Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s links to Islamist terrorism was weak and that evidence of his “weapons of mass destruction“ was far from a “slam dunk,” as Tenet famously assured President Bush on Dec. 21, 2002. The appropriate adjective would have been sham, not slam.

Even Bush has said he was underwhelmed at McLaughlin’s presentation of the evidence that day and put a must-do-better on the CIA’s report card. So, with their wrists slapped at the White House, Tenet and McLaughlin returned to the CIA and redoubled their efforts to fulfill their role in this chain of self-reinforcing arguments for giving Bush and his neocon advisers their war of choice in Iraq.

At CIA’s Langley headquarters, McLaughlin and Tenet swept up every scrap of dubious intelligence and assembled it to justify war. The significance of the CIA’s role in this perverted process became clear to CIA analysts on Feb. 5, 2003, when they saw Tenet sitting solemnly behind Powell as the Secretary of State exaggerated the evidence on WMD and spoke of a “sinister nexus” between Iraq and al-Qaeda, the other key “justification” adduced for war on Iraq.

CIA analysts at the working level had stood firm against the alleged al-Qaeda link and thought they had successfully beaten back “intelligence” conjured up by Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pointing to operational ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

Rumsfeld described the evidence as “bulletproof” though Gen. Brent Scowcroft, then chair of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, labeled it “scant.” And the normally taciturn CIA ombudsman came out of the shadows to tell Congress bluntly that never in his 32-year career with the agency had he encountered such “hammering” on CIA analysts to reconsider their judgments on operational ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

Powell’s Doubts

According to Wilkerson, Powell recognized how flimsy this evidence was just four days before his UN speech. “Powell and I had a one-on-one — no one else even in the room — about his angst over what was a rather dull recounting of several old stories about Al Qa’ida-Baghdad ties [in the draft speech],” Wilkerson said. “I agreed with him that what we had was bull___t, and Powell decided to eliminate all mention of terrorist contacts between AQ and Baghdad.

“Within an hour, [CIA Director George] Tenet and [CIA Deputy Director John] McLaughlin dropped a bombshell on the table in the [CIA] director’s Conference Room: a high-level AQ detainee had just revealed under interrogation substantive contacts between AQ and Baghdad, including Iraqis training AQ operatives in the use of chemical and biological weapons.”

Though Tenet and McLaughlin wouldn’t give Powell the identity of the al-Qaeda source, Wilkerson said he now understands that it was Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, an al-Qaeda operative who later claimed he gave the CIA false information in the face of actual and threatened torture.

Not realizing that the new intelligence was tainted, “Powell changed his mind and this information was included in his UNSC presentation, along with some more general information from the previous text about Baghdad’s terrorist tendencies,” Wilkerson said.

Wilkerson’s account underscores how the Bush administration’s reliance on harsh interrogations of al-Qaeda suspects influenced the rush to war with Iraq, while also pointing out how the need to justify the war gave impetus to the use of torture for extracting information.

These and other charges in Powell’s speech were the kind of consequential fraud that, in my view, should land the perpetrators behind bars. But you don’t have to take my word for it.

Senate Cries Foul

In June 2008, the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a bipartisan report based on a five-year investigation of the pre-Iraq-war intelligence. Two of the committee’s six Republicans, Chuck Hagel and Olympia Snowe, approved the committee’s findings, making the vote 10 to 5.

Committee Chair Jay Rockefeller, D-West Virginia, summed up the findings: “In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.”

The report noted that Powell had said, “Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.” Not so, concluded the committee. The report stressed that, “Much of the information provided or cleared by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for inclusion in Secretary Powell’s speech was overstated, misleading, or incorrect.”

How might this happen with analysts at the working level, who used to be able to depend on career protection in honoring their ethos of speaking truth to power? One example may suffice.

Here’s what we know about the handling of “Curveball,” the Iraqi defector who gave German intelligence the fairy tale about mobile biological weapons factories. Remember those vivid “artist renderings” featured in Powell’s speech? Beautifully “rendered” mobile laboratories fabricated in the village of Potemkin.

It turns out that only one U.S. analyst had met with the now-completely-discredited Curveball, the source of that fabrication. In a last-ditch attempt to warn his superiors the day before Powell’s UN speech, this analyst wrote an e-mail to the deputy director of CIA’s Task Force on WMD raising strong doubt regarding Curveball’s reliability.

I personally became almost physically ill reading the cynical response from the deputy director of the CIA Task Force, but it is a sign of the mood among CIA’s malleable managers at the time.

The deputy director replied: “As I said last night, let’s keep in mind the fact that this war’s going to happen regardless of what Curveball said or didn’t say, and the powers that be probably aren’t terribly interested in whether Curveball knows what he’s talking about.” (That e-mail message and similar material were released in July 2004 by Sen. Dianne Feinstein of the Senate Intelligence Committee.)

Tyler Drumheller, then chief of the European Division of CIA’s Directorate of operations, called Tenet the evening before Powell’s UN testimony, appalled when he found out that Powell intended to include Curveball’s information in his speech, but also was brushed aside by Tenet.

And so, Powell ended up telling the UN Security Council, and the world, that the alleged germ-producing vehicles were “one of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq.”

Was Powell lying? On Curveball, at least, I am inclined to think that Powell was taken in by the shysters at CIA’s top level, though you could argue that an experienced old hand like Powell should have known better. He might well have concluded, like the CIA Task Force deputy director, that Bush had long ago made up his mind about invading Iraq and that only a fool would stand in the way.

‘Made an Honest Man of Me’

In former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s memoir, Interventions: A Life in War and Peace, published last year, Annan reports that several weeks after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq – and the embarrassing failure to discover WMD – Powell visited the UN to privately exult with Annan over initial reports that U.S. forces believed they finally had found something in Iraq, those mobile weapons laboratories.

“Kofi, they’ve made an honest man of me,” Powell declared, according to an excerpt from the book.

Writing about Powell’s demeanor, Annan noted that “The relief — and the exhaustion — was palpable. I could not help but smile along with my friend, and wanted to share in his comfort,” even though Annan remained dubious. “I could only be impressed by the resilience of this man, who had endured so much to argue for a war he clearly did not believe in.”

On May 29, 2003, President Bush, while visiting Poland, also jumped at the prospect that his WMD claims had been vindicated. He declared on Polish TV, “We have found the weapons of mass destruction.”

But these supposed mobile weapons labs turned out to be more sham dunk. Under mounting pressure to point to some WMD proof in Iraq, CIA analysts misrepresented a tractor-trailer outfitted to inflate balloons used for artillery as one of the promised mobile bio-labs.

On May 28, 2003, CIA analysts had cooked up a fraudulent six-page report claiming that the trailer was proof that they had been right about Iraq’s “bio-weapons labs” after all. They then performed what we Army officers used to call a “night-time requisition,” getting the only Defense Intelligence Agency analyst sympathetic to their position to provide DIA “coordination,” to make the discovery look more legit.

When the State Department’s intelligence analysts learned of this subterfuge, they “went ballistic,” according to their Director, Carl Ford. It fell to Ford to tell Powell there was a serious problem – that the President had been misinformed and that no bio weapons lab had been found.

When Tenet learned that Ford would not be part of the team – that he would not become one of the links in the chain – the CIA director called Ford on the carpet, literally, the following day. No shrinking violet, Ford held his ground at CIA headquarters, telling Tenet and McLaughlin, “That report is one of the worst intelligence assessments I’ve ever read.”

This vignette — and several like it — are found in Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, who say Ford was still angry over the fraudulent paper years later. Indeed, Ford told the book’s authors that Tenet and McLaughlin had taken a personal hand in this abortive attempt to salvage some credibility for the notorious Curveball.

Ford told the authors: “It was clear that they [Tenet and McLaughlin] had been personally involved in the preparation of the report. … It wasn’t just that it was wrong. They lied. … they should have been shot.”

Too bad the outspoken Carl Ford made the incorrect assumption that he could rely on his credibility and entrée with Secretary Powell to thwart the likes of Tenet and McLaughlin, as they peddled their meretricious wares at CIA headquarters.

Col. Wilkerson, whom Powell had put in charge of overseeing the UN speech, rued the fact that he did not insist that Ford take part on his team. “I wanted Carl – or even more so, one of his deputies whom I knew well and trusted completely, Tom Fingar, to be on my team.”

Key Intelligence Kept From Powell?

Some honest intelligence analysts surely would have been important if the goal was to make a truthful presentation to the United Nations. But it’s clear from a historical perspective that honesty was not foremost on the Bush administration’s agenda; it was trying to extract a Security Council resolution giving legal cover to the invasion.

For instance, we now know that, with the help of Allied intelligence services, the CIA had recruited Naji Sabri, Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister, and Tahir Jalil Habbush, the chief of Iraqi intelligence. They were cajoled into remaining in place while giving the United States critical intelligence well before the war and before Powell’s speech laying the groundwork for the war.

In other words, at a time when Saddam Hussein believed that Sabri and Habbush were working for him, they had been “turned” into U.S. agents, providing information that was evaluated and verified. The trouble was they weren’t saying what Bush and his neocon advisers wanted to hear. The pair independently affirmed that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

So, what to do? Former CIA officials have said that this information on the absence of WMD was then concealed from Congress as well as from senior U.S. military officers and from intelligence analysts, including those working on the infamous Iraq-WMD National Intelligence Estimate of Oct. 1, 2002. Even Secretary of State Colin Powell, Naji Sabri’s U.S. counterpart, was kept in the dark.

As Col. Wilkerson noted, Vice President Cheney was the real person in charge of foreign policy, intelligence and Iraq War. Knowledgeable officials at State, CIA and elsewhere were forced to look on as what we used to call “straphangers,” when they were allowed in the room at all.

I vividly recall Wilkerson fielding a question from Rep. Walter Jones, R-North Carolina, at a congressional hearing on June 25, 2006.

Jones: “My point is as a congressman who trusted what I was being told. … And I wish I’d the wisdom then that I might have now. I would have known what to ask. … So where along the way – how did these people so early on get so much power that they had more influence … in the administration to make decisions than you the professionals?”

Wilkerson: “I’d answer you with two words. Let me put the article in there and make it three. The Vice President.”

So, even if Powell suspected he was being lied to by Tenet and McLaughlin, he would have been unlikely to call them out on it with the Vice President and his bloated staff standing foursquare behind the whole charade.

The UN speech was hardly Powell’s first display of abject acquiescence. The Bush administration documents on the crafting of imprisonment and torture policy show Powell, though a military man knowing the risks to American soldiers from the U.S. government casting aside legal conventions against torture, unwilling to stand up for what he knew was right, i.e. not to torture or play word games about torture.

A year before his UN speech, rather than confront President Bush personally on White House pressure for legal wiggle-room for torture, Powell asked State Department lawyers to engage White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and Cheney’s legal adviser David Addington in what Powell knew would be a quixotic effort, absent his personal involvement.

Powell’s lawyers put in writing his concern that making an end-run around the Geneva protections for prisoners of war “could undermine U.S. military culture which emphasizes maintaining the highest standards of conduct in combat, and could introduce an element of uncertainty in the status of adversaries.”

But when Gonzales and Addington simply declared parts of the Geneva Conventions “quaint” and “obsolete,” Powell caved, acquiescing in the corruption of the Army to which he owed so much. We know the next chapters of that story. They are entitled CIA “black sites,” Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

Powell was right in his position on torture but timid about risking his political status. He knew that Cheney would badmouth him to the President. Once again, Powell put his career before his principles – and before what ultimately would be in the best interests of the United States of America.

Briefing the Bosses

I personally know Colin Powell and consider him more a tragic – than a venal – figure. When he wore only two stars, as military assistant to Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger (1983-1986), I would brief Powell, as a courtesy, on my way in to what had to be a one-on-one briefing of his boss with the CIA’s President’s Daily Brief and other highly sensitive substantive material.

Not surprisingly, Powell was interested in learning what I was about to tell his boss. So, I would usually make it a point to arrive at the Pentagon five or ten minutes early in order to fill him in to the extent I could.

From that experience, as well as from briefings of Weinberger on his occasional visits to the West Coast, I came to consider Powell a very clever, reasonably smart, highly ambitious, and – when he thought it was necessary – highly obsequious functionary.

Suffice it to say that, despite his two stars (to my none), he was almost always polite, and extremely careful to abide by the rigid guidelines regarding one-on-one delivery of the PDB, for example. Only once did he try, unsuccessfully, to wrest the PDB from my hands so that he, not I, could take it into Weinberger’s hotel room.

I interpreted Powell’s subsequent deferential demeanor toward me as a sign of his acute awareness that my boss at the time, CIA Director William Casey, had the ear of President Ronald Reagan much more often than his boss, Weinberger.

I thought of this as I watched Powell’s obvious attempts two decades later to become a full-fledged member in good standing of the George W. Bush team. Powell knew only too well that “slam dunk” Tenet, with Cheney’s encouragement, was a high scorer. Clearly, Powell knew that Tenet and Cheney were working hand-in-glove on conjuring up “intelligence” to justify the attack on Iraq.

Colin Powell was hardly the only senior official thoroughly intimidated by the Vice President and his minions. Even so, could Powell have brought himself to believe that Tenet and McLaughlin would lie to his face in portraying Curveball’s fairy tale as authentic and corroborated? I think that would have been difficult for Powell.

One of Rumsfeld’s dicta (reflected in the Teflon he still wears) was: “Some people think they can lie and get away with it.” This observation raises another key question: How did Cheney, Tenet and their co-conspirators think they could get away with it, when no WMD, much less Iraqi ties with al-Qaeda, were found?

They should be asked this under oath in a formal inquiry into the Iraq War, a process that the United States has not undertaken even though its ally, the United Kingdom, at least asked some official questions (though little more) into how the disaster unfolded. Presumably, if such an inquiry were ever held in the United States, the participants – the links in the chain – would simply point to the interlocking others on either side.

The thinking of Team Bush apparently assumed that after the successful removal of “ruthless dictator” Saddam Hussein, the thankful Iraqis would accept an indefinite U.S. occupation, grant permanent military bases along with access to Iraqi oil, and embrace Israel. Amid such “success,” who would be petty enough to criticize the heroic “war president” and his brilliant neocon advisers over the little detail about the absence of WMD?

If the Iraq War had played out that way, Colin Powell also could have basked in the glow of victory. Who would have talked about a “blot” on his record?

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. An Army infantry/intelligence officer in the early 60s, he then served as a CIA analyst under nine CIA directors, from the administrations of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush. McGovern is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

(Originally posted at Consortium News)

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‘American Sniper’ author Chris Kyle.

The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From AP:

The 25-year-old man charged with murdering former Navy SEAL and “American Sniper” author Chris Kyle and his friend at a Texas gun range was an Iraq war veteran.

The U.S. military confirmed Sunday that Eddie Ray Routh was in the Marines from 2006 to 2010. He was deployed to Iraq in 2007. His current duty status is listed as reserve.

Routh is charged with two counts of capital murder. He’s accused of killing 38-year-old Kyle and 35-year-old Chad Littlefield at the Rough Creek Lodge shooting range Saturday evening.

Officer Kyle Roberts at the Erath County Jail said Routh is being held on $3 million bond. Roberts did not have information on information on whether Routh had a lawyer. No one answered the door at Routh’s home.

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Syrian President Bashar al-Assad before a poster of his late father, Hafez Assad.

By Ivan Eland:

The U.S. government recently designated the Syrian opposition group Jabhat al-Nusra Front a foreign terrorist organization. The move was designed to build Western support against the Syrian government by alleviating fears that money and weapons donated to the opposition would flow to a militant group.

The designation means that Americans cannot have financial ties to the Nusra Front and is meant to be a precedent for other nations considering imposing similar sanctions on the group. U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford noted that “Extremist groups like Jabhat al-Nusra are a problem, an obstacle to finding the political solution that Syria’s going to need.”

What the ambassador forgot to mention was that U.S. Middle East policy has played a big role in the group’s rise and potency. The group has some of the Syrian opposition’s most competent and battle-hardened warriors, and the reason is that the group is an offshoot of al-Qaeda in Iraq. The Nusra Front gets funding, fighters, and training from its Iraqi brethren.

And of course, al-Qaeda in Iraq came into being to fight the ill-advised U.S. invasion of Iraq. Critics of the Iraq War predicted that battle-tested fighters from the conflict would be exported, after it was finished, to other Islamic countries to destabilize their governments. Of course, you didn’t have to be Nostradamus to see that that prediction would likely come true.

In addition, U.S. sanctions are mere symbolism, because during a chaotic civil war, arms sent to the Syrian opposition by, say, Turkey, Qatar or Saudi Arabia could easily end up in the Nusra Front’s hands, either on purpose or because of the unsettled conditions in the country. Likewise, if John McCain and the other salivating American hawks have their way, and the U.S. begins overt arms supplies to the rebels, the United States could become an inadvertent arms supplier to a group on its own terrorism list.

Even now with supposed U.S. vetting of Syrian groups getting weapons from the three aforementioned countries, more and more weapons are getting into the hands of Islamist militants. And there are other militant groups in Syria besides the Nusra Front.

In the worst case, by putting the Nusra Front on the U.S. government’s list of terrorist groups, the United States, as it has done many times before, will create a new enemy. A group that wasn’t focusing its attacks on the United States may begin to have incentives to do so, as has happened with the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula from Yemen.

And all of this is occurring in Syria in the face of many previous examples of inadvertent consequences of arming either foreign groups or countries. For example, in 1980s, the United States funneled arms and money through Pakistan to the Afghan mujahedeen fighting the Soviets. The Pakistanis gave the military aid to the most radical groups, which morphed into the anti-U.S. terrorist group al-Qaeda.

Now, the United States is giving arms and aid to a Pakistani government that is supporting Taliban insurgents fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan; some of the American aid is leaking through to the Afghan Taliban.

Lastly, the chaotic Western war against Libya liberated many of Muammar Gaddafi’s weapons stocks from Libyan government control. Those arms ended up being used by al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamist rebels to create a potential terrorist sanctuary in northern Mali. Not learning a thing, the United States is pushing Mali’s African neighbors to use force to take out the Islamists by force. Who knows where the weapons from that potential war might end up?

Given the very real possibility of inadvertent adverse consequences from any U.S. intervention in Syria, the U.S. should not ship arms or money to the Syrian rebels, should not have deemed the Nusra Front a terrorist organization, and should not have imposed financial sanctions on the group, which is no enemy of the United States. The United States already has enough enemies and doesn’t need more.

Ivan Eland is Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute. Dr. Eland has spent 15 years working for Congress on national security issues, including stints as an investigator for the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Principal Defense Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office. His books include Partitioning for Peace: An Exit Strategy for Iraq The Empire Has No Clothes: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed, and Putting “Defense” Back into U.S. Defense Policy.

(Originally posted at Consortium News)

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A Syrian army helicopter flies over the northern city of Aleppo in October. Iraq has shut its airspace to four Syrian flights scheduled to pick up attack helicopters that had been repaired in Russia, the Iraqi Prime Minister’s spokesman said Tuesday. (Tauseef Mustafa/AFP/GettyImages)

Iraq has shut its airspace to four Syrian flights scheduled to pick up attack helicopters that had been repaired in Russia, the spokesman to Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki said Tuesday. Syria has failed several times since June to retrieve the refurbished helicopters from Russia, and the regime of Bashar al-Assad appears to be growing more desperate as fighting intensifies.

Iraq’s denial of the flights appears to be a diplomatic breakthrough for the U.S. Although Baghdad has said it won’t allow arms shipments to Syria and has recently begun to inspect some planes flying from Iran, White House and State Department officials have been pressuring Iraq to act much more aggressively to choke off military aid.

Two U.S. diplomatic officials who are closely monitoring Iraq-Syria relations expressed relief when told that Baghdad said it had denied Syria’s overflight request for the helicopters.

But one of the officials emphasized caution, noting that flights continue over Iraqi airspace from Iran to Syria. Iraq has maintained that the flights carry humanitarian goods but the United States suspects they contain matériel. “The abuse of Iraq’s airspace continues to be a concern,” the official said. “We urge Iraq either to require flights enroute to Syria over its territory to land for inspection or deny overflight requests for these aircraft.”

ProPublica reported on the Syrian fly-over requests last week, noting that the cargo plane expected to pick up the helicopters did not land or take off at the scheduled times at a military airfield near Moscow. The reason was unknown at the time.

Ali al-Mousawi, the prime minister’s media adviser, told ProPublica on Tuesday that Syria’s requests had been denied by the Iraqi Civil Aviation Authority.

“We will not authorize any overflight until we make sure that it does not contain any military equipment in line with the Iraqi government’s policy which firmly rejects allowing transporting any military shipments via our airspace from or to Syria,” he wrote in an email.

Syria has tried various ways to retrieve its attack helicopters from Russia.

In June, a cargo ship carrying helicopters from the Russian port of Kaliningrad to Syria was turned back after the ship’s insurer withdrew coverage in response to sanctions. A second attempt by sea a month later also failed.

The new plan, according to flight records obtained by ProPublica, was to fly an Ilyushin IL-76 cargo plane in late November and early December from Damascus to Ramenskoye Airport outside Moscow, also known as Zhukovsky Airport. The records described the cargo as an “old helicopter after overhaullling” (sic) and identified the model as an Mi-25 — a heavy combat helicopter that has been filmed in online videos appearing to fire at rebels.

Some of the flight records were posted by hackers associated with the online collective Anonymous. Many of those documents, as well as others, were obtained separately by ProPublica, which reported last week that Syria appears to have flown 240 tons of bank notes from Moscow this summer.

One of the U.S. diplomatic officials said Iraq’s decision to block the flights — and to acknowledge doing so publicly — risks angering Moscow. Failure to deliver the helicopters, this official said, could mean a delay in payment for the Russians. Russia has long been Syria’s main supplier of arms.

Officials at the Russian Foreign Ministry and its lead arms exporter Rosoboronexport did not return phone calls from ProPublica. The 150 Aircraft Repair Plant, which is listed as the charterer of the flights, declined to answer questions.

Russia’s Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev told reporters last week that Russia was obliged to fulfill its existing contracts even in the teeth of international pressure.

Until last year, Iraqi airspace had been largely controlled by the U.S. Air Force. But American officials have gradually turned over control to the Iraqis and now have little involvement in day-to-day operations, according to U.S. aviation advisers working with the Iraqis.

The New York Times reported Sunday on the struggle of American officials to stop arms shipments from Iran. According to the Times, Iraq’s foreign minister promised Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in September that Iraq would inspect the flights from Iran. But since then, the newspaper said, it has only inspected two planes, including one that was returning from Syria.

President Obama, speaking yesterday at the National War College, said, “We will continue to support the legitimate aspirations of the Syrian people — engaging with the opposition, providing them with humanitarian aid and working for a transition to a Syria that’s free of the Assad regime.”

(Originally posted at ProPublica)

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It really is a guilty pleasure, but I do love it when clever, funny writers take on not so clever, humorless writers. Intellectual slap downs are like junk food to journalists, and Matt Taibbi has provided years of unhealthy food to people like myself, largely at the expense of the New York Time’s resident metaphor butcher Tom Friedman. I try not to poke fun at other writer’s too much, but with Friedman it’s hard to resist.

In his latest Rolling Stone blog, Taibbi takes apart Friedman’s latest attempt to explain the crisis in Syria with a series of metaphors so absurdly convoluted you wonder whether Friedman might be having his readers on. Inexplicably, Friedman seems to have changed his views on the state of Iraq post America’s invasion and occupation, at least in comparison to what we’re now seeing in Syria. Friedman had once used described Iraq as a “pottery barn” that had been “broken” by “1,000 years of Arab-Muslim authoritarianism, three brutal decades of Sunni Baathist rule, and a crippling decade of U.N. sanctions.” Friedman described the pottery barn (Iraq) as being “held together only by Saddam’s iron fist,” that was subsequently smashed by the US invasion. Friedman then argued that Iraq was a disaster in part because the US didn’t give it “political therapy” during its occupation.

But now the emotionally stunted broken pottery barn once held together by Saddam’s iron fist looks rather appealing, at least in Friedman’s eyes. Writes Taibbi:

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