In Their Skin
Few aspects of reporting in "postwar" Iraq are more important than the job of entering Iraqi minds to see what they think and feel about the American occupation. Four journalists discuss the challenge.
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RANGEL'S REASONING
FOR  DRAFT REINSTATEMENT

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) introduced legislation, along with 13 co-sponsors, to re-introduce the draft "to embarrass the President," because he is against the war, and because he "thought that people would be deterred from talking about going to war if, indeed they thought that their loved ones, their family, their community would be placed in harm's way.  _________________

31st Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad

He remembers fire exploding in his face, being pulled from his burning Humvee and put aboard the chopper that brought him to this hospital room. He remembers pain: he never lost consciousness, until doctors anesthetized him to amputate his left leg below the knee.  There can be no worse place on Earth -- and none better -- than the 31st Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad.

LETTER FROM BAGDHAD

CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE

Ali sat cross-legged on a rug against the wall, and looked directly at me. "Before this war, I was waiting for the Americans to come--and now I feel sort of cheated. All this talk about rebuilding Iraq, and all we see is a couple of light coats of paint. And they say they renovated Iraq."

With a sense of obligation and urgency, The Nation. has asked a range of writers, both regular and new contributors to the magazine, for their ideas on America's way out of Iraq. Some responded with short essays, while others were interviewed:

The War's Lost Weekend

JUST when you've persuaded yourself yet again that this isn't Vietnam, you are hit by another acid flashback. Last weekend that flashback was to 1969. 

       It was in June 1969 that Life magazine ran its cover story "The Faces of the American Dead in Vietnam: One Week's Toll," the acknowledged prototype for Ted Koppel's photographic roll-call of the American dead in Iraq on "Nightline." 

       It was in November 1969 that a little-known reporter, Seymour Hersh, broke the story of the 1968 massacre at My Lai, the horrific scoop that has now found its match 35 years later in Mr. Hersh's New Yorker revelation of a 53-page Army report detailing "numerous instances of `sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses' at Abu Ghraib." 

       No doubt some future edition of the Pentagon Papers will explain just why we restored Saddam Hussein's hellhole to its original use, torture rooms included, even as we allowed Baghdad's National Library, a repository of Mesopotamia's glorious pre-Baath history, to be looted and burned.    =============
 

With G-d on His Side...

So, it was a holy war, a new crusade. No wonder George W. Bush could lie to Congress and the American public with such impunity while keeping the key members of his Cabinet in the dark. He was serving a higher power, according to Bob
Woodward, who interviewed the president for a new book on the months leading up to the Iraq invasion.  +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

By September 12, we became the suspects.

COLD TURKEY
    KEYWORDS: liberal conservative Jesus Mel Gibson Confusius WWII showbiz great depression Studebaker Eugene Debs warondrugs Rumsfeld fossil fuel Cheney Camus Moses NYTimes heroin Pentagon cocaine Constitution LSK TV marijuana Henry VIII Gilbert & Sullivan Edward Gibbons alcoholic Bush     KURT VONNEGUT

Just [f(&^#ing] Trust Us !!! DAMNIT

Didn't you know, in your gut, that something like Abu Ghraib would eventually come to light?
   ___________________

Emmett Till, a Chicagoan who was visiting relatives in Money, Miss., that August, was dragged from his bed, beaten, shot and dropped in the Tallahatchie River after he had been accused of whistling at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in her family's store.

Testimony from witnesses linked two white men--Carolyn Bryant's husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J. W. Milam--to the crime. But an all-white jury acquitted them after the defense appealed to the jurors' white heritage. 

Show & Tell in Abu Ghraib

The fact is, whatever the reason or excuse, however unrepresentative those photos are ever shown to be--and whatever punishment is eventually meted out to the perpetrators--the United States has just lost its last remaining rationale for the misbegotten invasion of Iraq. The WMDs are missing, the nuclear weapons never existed...  thanks to the media's slavish channeling of White House propaganda, 70% of Americans will probably go their graves believing [Hussein was] Osama's best friend. 

 Now the rescue of the Iraqi people from tyranny and brutality is turning out to be another fantasy. The humanitarian argument persuaded a lot of people--good people--to give this war the benefit of the doubt. Does anyone still think Iraqis are about to shower their invaders with roses and sweetmeats?  _____________

the original source:  Seymour Hersh's New Yorker revelation of a 53-page Army report detailing "numerous instances of `sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses' at Abu Ghraib."

ANNALS OF 
  NATIONAL SECURITY 

TORTURE AT ABU GHRAIB 
  by SEYMOUR M. HERSH 

 American soldiers brutalized Iraqis. How far up does the responsibility go? 

...Ryder undercut his warning, however, by concluding that the situation had not yet reached a crisis point. Though some procedures were flawed, he said, he found "no military police units purposely applying inappropriate confinement practices." His
 investigation was at best a failure and at worst a coverup.  

"As the photographs from Abu Ghraib make clear, these detentions have had enormous consequences: for the imprisoned civilian Iraqis, many of whom had nothing to do with the growing insurgency; for the integrity of the Army; and for the United States' reputation in the world.  _______________________________