Hagel Defends Criticisms of Iraq Policy
Administration Calls Statements by

Democrats Harmful to War Effort, Troops
By Glenn Kessler, Washington Post Staff Writer

A Conversation with Senator Chuck Hagel on The

Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy [Prepared Remarks] – Council on Foreign Relations Chuck Hagel, Member, U.S. Senate

(R-NE)

We must avoid the traps of hubris and imperial temptation that come with great power. Our

foreign policy should reflect the hope and promise of America tempered with a mature wisdom that is the mark of our national character.

In this new era of possibilities and responsibilities, America will require a wider lens view of how the world sees us, so that we can

better understand the world, and our role in it. …

The Iraq war should not be debated in the United States on a partisan

political platform. This debases our country, trivializes the seriousness of war and cheapens the service and sacrifices of our men and

women in uniform. War is not a Republican or Democrat issue. The casualties of war are from both parties. The Bush

Administration must understand that each American has a right to question our policies in Iraq and should not be demonized for

disagreeing with them. Suggesting that to challenge or criticize policy is undermining and hurting our troops is not democracy nor what

this country has stood for, for over 200 years. The Democrats have an obligation to challenge in a serious and responsible manner,

offering solutions and alternatives to the Administration’s policies.

Vietnam was a national tragedy partly because Members of

Congress failed their country, remained silent and lacked the courage to challenge the Administrations in power until it was too late.

Some of us who went through that nightmare have an obligation to the 58,000 Americans who died in Vietnam to not let that happen again.

To question your government is not unpatriotic—to not question your government is unpatriotic. America owes its men and women in uniform

a policy worthy of their sacrifices. …

Terrorism is a real threat and a present danger that we must confront and defeat. But we

must not sacrifice the strengths and ideals of America that the world has come to respect and trust, and that define us. That is why I

co-sponsored Senator McCain’s amendment to prohibit cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment or treatment of any detainee under the custody

of any branch of the U.S. Government. I strongly oppose any exception to this prohibition. …

The recent media reports of a

worldwide American system of secret, black-hole jails, run by the Central Intelligence Agency, and developed explicitly to circumvent our

obligations under the Geneva Convention, sullies everything that America represents. It further erodes the world’s confidence in

America’s word and our purpose. …

The Constitution also establishes Congress’ authority and responsibility regarding decisions

to go to war. The course of events in Iraq has laid bare the failure to prepare for, plan for, and understand the broad consequences and

implications of the decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein and occupy Iraq. Where is the accountability?

ABC News: The Note: All the Vice

President’s Men

During the question and answer period that followed his speech, Hagel warned that “there will be

consequences” if the Bush Administration continues to demonize critics of the Iraq war.

“The American people will not put

up with that,” he said.

“The invasion of Iraq I believe will turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history,” said Retired Army Lt. Gen. William

Odom, a Vietnam veteran.

Nieman

Watchdog > Ask This > What’s wrong with cutting and running?

The US invasion of Iraq only serves the interest of:

1)

Osama bin Laden (it made Iraq safe for al Qaeda, positioned US military personnel in places where al Qaeda operatives can kill them

occasionally, helps radicalize youth throughout the Arab and Muslim world, alienates America’s most important and strongest allies – the

Europeans – and squanders US military resources that otherwise might be finishing off al Qaeda in Pakistan.);

2) The Iranians

(who were invaded by Saddam and who suffered massive casualties in an eight year war with Iraq.);

3) And the extremists in both

Palestinian and Israeli political circles (who don’t really want a peace settlement without the utter destruction of the other side, and

probably believe that bogging the United States down in a war in Iraq that will surely become a war between the United States and most of

the rest of Arab world gives them the time and cover to wipe out the other side.) …

The first step, of course, is to establish

as conventional wisdom the fact that the war was never in the US interest and has not become so. It is such an obvious case to make that

I find it difficult to believe many pundits and political leaders have not already made it repeatedly.

Lieutenant General

William E. Odom, U.S. Army (Ret.), is a Senior Fellow with Hudson Institute and a professor at Yale University. He was Director of the

National Security Agency from 1985 to 1988 [mjh: under Raygun]
—–

BTC News »

Worst national security administration ever

The Bush administration and Republicans in general have made national security

their defining theme since 911, but as is so often the case, the record belies the rhetoric. On almost every front — foreign policy, the

military, intelligence, even security related domestic issues such as the deficit — the administration have damaged the country’s

security, sometimes in ways that may take a generation to repair.

Since 911, the administration have corrupted our intelligence

agencies; led the country into a ruinous war on false pretenses; added nearly $2 trillion to the national debt (and counting); increased

the trade deficit; increased the poverty rate; emasculated critically important federal agencies (such as FEMA); slighted our allies

abroad; broken a variety of international laws; and, on at least two occasions, compromised our own and other countries’ security by

leaking the identities of secret intelligence assets for purely political reasons.

Changing the Subject — Back

Jimmy Carter Speaks

The former president is on a book tour, and visited with Matt Lauer on NBC’s Today Show this morning.

“In the last five years, there has been a profound and radical change in the basic policies or moral values of our

country,” Carter said. The existence of secret CIA prisons, as exposed by The Post, “is just one indication of what has been

done in this administration to change policies that have persisted all the way through our history,” he said. …

Carter had quite

a list of grievances against Bush. The “insistence by our government that the CIA or others have the right to torture prisoners,” the

doctrine of pre-emptive war, “the abandonment of basic human rights, the derogation of American civil liberties and personal privacy, the

vast rewarding in a time of war of extremely rich Americans at the expense of working class people, the abandonment of protecting the

American environment — all of these things, are massive and radical departures from what our country has seen under every

president in the past 100 or more years. . . .

“It’s this administration vs. every administration that has

preceded it.”

Another Thunderbolt from Wilkerson

“Mr. WILKERSON: What happened was that the secretary of Defense, under the cover of the vice president’s office, began to

create an environment — and this started from the very beginning when David Addington, the vice president’s lawyer [Addington,

incidentally, was promoted this week to the position of vice presidential chief of staff, replacing his indicted former boss, Scooter

Libby], was a staunch advocate of allowing the president in his capacity as commander in chief to deviate from the Geneva Conventions.

Regardless of the president having put out this memo, they began to authorize procedures within the armed forces that led to, in my view,

what we’ve seen.

“INSKEEP: We have to get more detail about that because the military will say, the Pentagon will say they’ve

investigated this repeatedly and that all the investigations have found that the abuses were committed by a relatively small number of

people at relatively low levels. What hard evidence takes those abuses up the chain of command and lands them in the vice president’s

office, which is where you’re placing it?

“Mr. WILKERSON: I’m privy to the paperwork, both classified and unclassified, that the

secretary of State asked me to assemble on how this all got started, what the audit trail was, and when I began to assemble this

paperwork, which I no longer have access to, it was clear to me that there was a visible audit trail from the vice president’s

office through the secretary of Defense down to the commanders in the field that in carefully couched terms — I’ll give you

that — that to a soldier in the field meant two things: We’re not getting enough good intelligence and you need to get that evidence,

and, oh, by the way, here’s some ways you probably can get it. And even some of the ways that they detailed were not in accordance with

the spirit of the Geneva Conventions and the law of war.

“You just — if you’re a military man, you know that you just don’t do

these sorts of things because once you give just the slightest bit of leeway, there are those in the armed forces who will take advantage

of that. There are those in the leadership who will feel so pressured that they have to produce intelligence that it doesn’t matter

whether it’s actionable or not as long as they can get the volume in. They have to do what they have to do to get it, and so you’ve

just given in essence, though you may not know it, carte blanche for a lot of problems to occur.”
—–

Former Insider Lashes Out
By Dan

Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Thursday, October 20, 2005; 1:12 PM

It didn’t make the front page this morning, but

it seems to me that it’s a big deal when a former top administration official declares that a secret cabal led by the vice

president has hijacked U.S. foreign policy, inveigled the president, condoned torture and crippled the ability of the government to

respond to emergencies.

Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell until both men

resigned in January, unleashed his blistering attack on the Bush White House yesterday at a luncheon at a Washington think tank. …

“The comments, made at the New America Foundation, a Washington think-tank, were the harshest attack on the administration by a

former senior official since criticisms by Richard Clarke, former White House terrorism czar, and Paul O’Neill, former Treasury

secretary, early last year.”
—–

The White House Stonewall

It seems that Addington is who Libby turned to,

after his breakfast with New York Times reporter Judy Miller, when he needed more information about Plame. …

Addington was one

of the authors of the White House memo that critics said justified the use of torture on terrorism suspects. And he formally requested

that a website making fun of Lynne Cheney, the vice president’s wife, take down its material.