[We recently reported some remarks by one of the media's favorite
"military experts," Barry McCaffrey in which he said of our troops in
Iraq, "These are the toughest, most courageous combat troops we've ever
fielded. . . They are mostly not damaged by their combat exposure. In
fact, they come home grateful for hot water, for living in this country,
and for their families, not the victims of PTSD." Later, McCaffrey said,
"It's a tough life," he insisted. "If you can't embrace the brutality of
combat, you shouldn't be in the infantry." Here are some more facts
about the media's friend McCaffrey, including his participation in the
slaughter of retreating Iraqi troops in the first Iraq war]
NEW YORKER MAGAZINE NEWS RELEASE, 2000 - In "Overwhelming Force," in the
May 22, 2000, issue of The New Yorker, Seymour M. Hersh reports on the
activities of the 24th Infantry Division during the 1991 Gulf War. The
24th was commanded by General Barry R. McCaffrey, who now serves as the
director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Hersh concentrates on three episodes in the campaign: the Battle of
Rumaila, on March 2, 1991, which took place two days after President
Bush declared a ceasefire; and two incidents, on February 27th and March
1st, in which Army personnel have been accused of wrongly shooting
Iraqis who posed no threat to them and who, in the case of the February
27th incident, had already surrendered. All three of these episodes have
been investigated by the Army, which found no wrongdoing, but, Hersh
reports, key witnesses and information were either missed or ignored.
Hersh interviewed more than two hundred past and present enlisted men
and officers over the six months he spent preparing this account,
including the Army's own investigators. Taken together, they present a
picture that is, as editor David Remnick remarks in a Comment
accompanying Hersh's article, "at a minimum, unsettling."
March 2, 1991: On the morning of March 2nd, Hersh writes, "McCaffrey
reported that, despite the ceasefire, his division had suddenly come
under attack from a retreating Republican Guard tank division." There
was disagreement among the officers assigned to McCaffrey's mobile
headquarters, Hersh reports, about the significance and strength of the
Iraqi attack and about whether there had indeed been an attack at all.
There was also profound disagreement over the appropriate level for the
division's response. Nonetheless, McCaffrey, after a delay, "ordered an
assault in force -- an all-out attack," Hersh writes. The assault
destroyed some seven hundred Iraqi tanks, armored cars, and trucks.
"Many of the generals interviewed for this account believe that
McCaffrey's attack went too far, and violated one of the most
fundamental military doctrines: that a commander must respond in
proportion to the threat," Hersh writes. "That's the way we're trained,"
one major general tells Hersh. "A single shot does not signal a battle
to the death. Commanders just don't willy-nilly launch on something like
that. A disciplined commander is going to figure out who fired it, and
where it came from. Especially if your mission is to enforce a
ceasefire. Who should have been better able to instill fire discipline
than McCaffrey?"
In testimony before Congress and in written responses to questions sent
to him by Hersh, McCaffrey has said that the Iraqis attacked first and
that the subsequent response by the 24th was necessary to protect the
lives of American soldiers. But, Hersh reports, McCaffrey's version of
events was disputed by soldiers and officers who were at the scene on
March 2nd. The assault "was not so much a counterattack provoked by
enemy fire as a systematic destruction of Iraqis who were generally
fulfilling the requirements of the retreat," Hersh writes. McCaffrey, in
his written responses to Hersh, says, "I believe that my actions at
Rumaila were completely appropriate and warranted in order to defend my
troops against unknown and largely unknowable enemy forces and
intentions."
Among McCaffrey's harshest critics are several of his fellow Gulf War
generals. "There was no need to be shooting at anybody," Lieutenant
General James H. Johnson, Jr. (Ret.), then the commander of the 82nd
Airborne, tells Hersh. "They couldn't surrender fast enough. The war was
over." The officer in charge of enforcing the ceasefire, Lieutenant
General John J. Yeosock (Ret.), says, "What Barry ended up doing was
fighting sand dunes and moving rapidly." He was "looking for a battle."
Major General Ronald Griffith, who commanded the 1st Armored Division of
VII Corps, says of McCaffrey, "He made it a battle when it was never
one.". . .
Early on March 2nd, a Scout unit reported to McCaffrey's command post
that it was being fired upon by the retreating Iraqis and that it had
returned fire in self-defense. . . According to many of the enlisted men
Hersh spoke to who were on the scene, there was nothing like an Iraqi
attack forming the morning of the 2nd. James Manchester, a Scout
positioned well forward of the main force, remembers thinking, "It's
over, it's over. These guys are going home. It was just a line of
vehicles on the road." Edward R. Walker, another Scout, tells Hersh,
"Many of the Iraqi tanks were on flatbed trucks and had their turrets
tucked backward." When Manchester heard a captain saying on the radio
that the Iraqis were about to launch anti-tank missiles at his tanks, he
was incredulous. "We are sitting right on top of these people," he says,
referring to the Iraqis, "and there are no vehicles pulled off." . . .
February 27, 1991: On the afternoon of February 27th, the day before the
ceasefire, James Manchester and other Scouts were manning a roadblock in
front of the main forces of Lieutenant Colonel Charles Ware's battalion.
Things proceeded routinely until, as Manchester recalls, "A Buick comes
up, with the commander, and he surrenders his battalion to us." Vehicles
continued to arrive, including a hospital bus, according to Specialist
Edward Walker, who was in charge of counting the men. There were, he
remembers, 382 Iraqis. They were stripped of their weapons, Walker says,
and lined up in rows. One man, who had lost an eye, asked if he was now
a prisoner. When he was told that he was, he said, "Thank, Allah." The
Iraqis were each given a "a white piece of paper, if they didn't have
anything white," Sergeant James Testerman, who was also present, tells
Hersh. The lieutenant in charge of the Scout group, Kirk Allen, "made it
a point to keep the battalion headquarters in the loop," Hersh writes.
Allen told the operations center that he had captured a large number of
prisoners and reported the precise position of the surrendered hospital
bus. According to Walker, Ware's headquarters ordered that the captured
weapons be destroyed, a task which fell to Walker himself. Then the
Scout group was ordered to move. As they drove away, the explosion
detonated. At that moment, Walker says, a platoon of Bradleys came into
view rolling toward the prisoners, and then the Bradleys' machine guns
opened fire. "I saw rounds impact in front of the vehicle," Sergeant
Steven Mulig, another Scout, says. "I could tell that they were hitting
close to the prisoners, because there were people running. There were
some who could have survived, but a lot of them wouldn't have, from
where I saw the rounds hit."
John Brasfield recorded radio transmissions that were being made by the
Scouts and their superiors while the Bradleys were firing toward the
prisoners of war, on a personal tape recorder he had brought with him to
the Gulf. "The lead company behind us is tearing up all those vehicles,"
one man is heard saying. "There's no-one shooting at them. Why'd they
have to shoot?" asks another voice. Lieutenant Allen then reports to
Lieutenant Colonel Ware, "There's shooting, but there's no one there to
shoot at," to which Ware responds, "I understand." On the tape,
Brasfield says, "They want to surrender. Fucking armored vehicles. They
don't have to blow them apart." Someone else says, "It's murder." After
more sporadic firing, someone says, "We shot the guys we had gathered
up," and another adds, "They didn't have no weapons." At this point,
Ware calls for all firing to stop.
March 1, 1991: The day after the ceasefire was announced, Hersh reports,
another incident took place in which American soldiers stand accused of
shooting unarmed Iraqis. Sergeant Steven Larimore, who headed a
ground-surveillance-radar team, was assigned to work with Scouts from
the 3-7 Battalion of McCaffrey's Command. Army troops had discovered a
cache of weapons in a deserted schoolhouse late in the afternoon of the
1st, and Larimore's unit joined the Scouts in clearing the village and
searching the schoolhouse. The weapons were secured, Larimore says, and
after taking souvenirs, he and his men moved out toward the east, along
with the Scouts. There was a group of villagers walking in the area.
"One guy had a white bedsheet on a stick," Larimore says, but "out of
the blue sky, some guy from where we're sitting" -- that is, in the
Scout Platoon -- "begins shooting" into the villagers.
Other machine guns joined in. "We were screaming, 'Cease fire!"'
Larimore tells Hersh. "People hit the ground. The firing went on."
Larimore estimates that he saw fifteen or twenty Iraqis fall. "I did not
see anything that looked like return fire," he says. Another eyewitness,
Sergeant Wayne P. Irwin, who headed a different G.S.R. team that was in
the area, says the Iraqis were "just passing through" when the shooting
began. "I yelled for them to cease fire. I couldn't understand why they
were firing." Irwin, a seventeen-year Army veteran, tells Hersh, "To me,
they posed no threat to us-they were all in civilian clothes." Scouts
told Irwin that they had seen the Iraqis carrying "grenade launchers and
stuff like that," but, Irwin says, he did not find that account
credible. "To me," he says, "they had nothing."
Lieutenant John J. Grisillo was the platoon leader of the Scout team
that opened fire. Grisillo tells Hersh that Larimore, who confronted him
at the time, did not understand that his men were responding to a
threat. "They raised a white flag," Grisillo recalls, but "they were
carrying weapons. We fired warning shots, but they didn't stop." Because
they were headed toward the schoolhouse, a building known to contain
weapons, they were, Grisillo determined, a danger. Grisillo also tells
Hersh that after the war he spoke with his brigade commander, Colonel Le
Moyne. "He let me know that he thought the G.S.R. guys didn't understand
the situation at the time," Grisillo says. "Calls had to be made. It's
not nice, but prudent. If I had that situation again, I'd do it again.
I've never lost a minute's sleep about it."
SAM SMITH, PROGRESSIVE REVIEW, 1996 - he nomination of General Barry
McCaffrey as drug czar symbolizes the nation's dramatic retreat from the
principle of separation of military and civilian power. It further
demonstrates the degree to which the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 --
which outlaws military involvement in civilian law enforcement -- is
being ignored and undermined by both the drug warriors and the Clinton
administration. . . In order to avoid violation of the law, General
McCaffrey has retired from the military, but he will not retire from his
military contacts, philosophy, loyalty and access. He is, after all, a
man some thought in line to become the next chair of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff.
General McCaffrey headed the US Southern Command, which provides
military backup for American policy in Latin America -- a policy long
linked with support of dictatorships, suppression of dissidents, human
rights abuses, death squads as well as chronically ineffective and
corrupt management of drug smuggling. The price of this policy has been
heavy: for example, over 100,000 people have been killed since 1960 in
Guatemala, many of them by armed forces and police trained and supported
by the US.
One former US ambassador to a Central American country says of Southcom,
"I wouldn't even let them in the country" because Southcom would
"inexorably militarize political problems." Today, he added, "very few
countries outside of Central America welcome visits" from the commander
of Southcom. . .
McCaffrey came into conflict with the State Department in his attempts
to gain authority over the attaches and run his own foreign policy.
Further, the Dallas Morning News reports that a year ago McCaffrey
circulated a classified plan under which the military would assume
direct control of the Latin American drug fight. The idea "drew the
wrath of civilian agencies from the Drug Enforcement Administration to
the CIA. It was a brash plan to fuse power now spread among dozens of
agencies while raising the military from a limited support role. The
proposal quietly died."
The Dallas paper noted that "colleagues widely describe [McCaffrey] as
outspoken and strong willed, a man whose self-esteem shone brightly even
amid the white light of four-star egos."
One drug enforcement official told US News & World Report that under
McCaffrey, Southcom's "idea of coordination was to brief you after their
plan was fait accompli.". . .
Furthermore, they do substantial damage to the stability and democracy
of the targeted country. . . As the military zig and zags in its Latin
American anti-drug tactics, these operations retain one common
attribute: failure. Between 1994 and 1995, for example, coca leaf
production rose seven percent in Bolivia, Colombia and Peru. The drug
trade continues so merrily along that the radio stations on the Mexican
border are even mocking counter-drug efforts with ballads celebrating
famed traffickers.
Rather than pointing out such facts, press reaction to the McCaffrey
appointment has been overwhelmingly favorable. This is perhaps not
surprising. The media is increasingly composed of journalists who have
had no military experience and who see war as just another movie script,
even if the battle is on our borders or in our own cities.
These new journalistic romanticists are easy prey for Pentagon flacks
and the drug warriors. Their understanding of such matters comes not
from experience and history, but from Stallone and Schwarzenegger.
http://prorev.com/mil.htm
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
"military experts," Barry McCaffrey in which he said of our troops in
Iraq, "These are the toughest, most courageous combat troops we've ever
fielded. . . They are mostly not damaged by their combat exposure. In
fact, they come home grateful for hot water, for living in this country,
and for their families, not the victims of PTSD." Later, McCaffrey said,
"It's a tough life," he insisted. "If you can't embrace the brutality of
combat, you shouldn't be in the infantry." Here are some more facts
about the media's friend McCaffrey, including his participation in the
slaughter of retreating Iraqi troops in the first Iraq war]
NEW YORKER MAGAZINE NEWS RELEASE, 2000 - In "Overwhelming Force," in the
May 22, 2000, issue of The New Yorker, Seymour M. Hersh reports on the
activities of the 24th Infantry Division during the 1991 Gulf War. The
24th was commanded by General Barry R. McCaffrey, who now serves as the
director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Hersh concentrates on three episodes in the campaign: the Battle of
Rumaila, on March 2, 1991, which took place two days after President
Bush declared a ceasefire; and two incidents, on February 27th and March
1st, in which Army personnel have been accused of wrongly shooting
Iraqis who posed no threat to them and who, in the case of the February
27th incident, had already surrendered. All three of these episodes have
been investigated by the Army, which found no wrongdoing, but, Hersh
reports, key witnesses and information were either missed or ignored.
Hersh interviewed more than two hundred past and present enlisted men
and officers over the six months he spent preparing this account,
including the Army's own investigators. Taken together, they present a
picture that is, as editor David Remnick remarks in a Comment
accompanying Hersh's article, "at a minimum, unsettling."
March 2, 1991: On the morning of March 2nd, Hersh writes, "McCaffrey
reported that, despite the ceasefire, his division had suddenly come
under attack from a retreating Republican Guard tank division." There
was disagreement among the officers assigned to McCaffrey's mobile
headquarters, Hersh reports, about the significance and strength of the
Iraqi attack and about whether there had indeed been an attack at all.
There was also profound disagreement over the appropriate level for the
division's response. Nonetheless, McCaffrey, after a delay, "ordered an
assault in force -- an all-out attack," Hersh writes. The assault
destroyed some seven hundred Iraqi tanks, armored cars, and trucks.
"Many of the generals interviewed for this account believe that
McCaffrey's attack went too far, and violated one of the most
fundamental military doctrines: that a commander must respond in
proportion to the threat," Hersh writes. "That's the way we're trained,"
one major general tells Hersh. "A single shot does not signal a battle
to the death. Commanders just don't willy-nilly launch on something like
that. A disciplined commander is going to figure out who fired it, and
where it came from. Especially if your mission is to enforce a
ceasefire. Who should have been better able to instill fire discipline
than McCaffrey?"
In testimony before Congress and in written responses to questions sent
to him by Hersh, McCaffrey has said that the Iraqis attacked first and
that the subsequent response by the 24th was necessary to protect the
lives of American soldiers. But, Hersh reports, McCaffrey's version of
events was disputed by soldiers and officers who were at the scene on
March 2nd. The assault "was not so much a counterattack provoked by
enemy fire as a systematic destruction of Iraqis who were generally
fulfilling the requirements of the retreat," Hersh writes. McCaffrey, in
his written responses to Hersh, says, "I believe that my actions at
Rumaila were completely appropriate and warranted in order to defend my
troops against unknown and largely unknowable enemy forces and
intentions."
Among McCaffrey's harshest critics are several of his fellow Gulf War
generals. "There was no need to be shooting at anybody," Lieutenant
General James H. Johnson, Jr. (Ret.), then the commander of the 82nd
Airborne, tells Hersh. "They couldn't surrender fast enough. The war was
over." The officer in charge of enforcing the ceasefire, Lieutenant
General John J. Yeosock (Ret.), says, "What Barry ended up doing was
fighting sand dunes and moving rapidly." He was "looking for a battle."
Major General Ronald Griffith, who commanded the 1st Armored Division of
VII Corps, says of McCaffrey, "He made it a battle when it was never
one.". . .
Early on March 2nd, a Scout unit reported to McCaffrey's command post
that it was being fired upon by the retreating Iraqis and that it had
returned fire in self-defense. . . According to many of the enlisted men
Hersh spoke to who were on the scene, there was nothing like an Iraqi
attack forming the morning of the 2nd. James Manchester, a Scout
positioned well forward of the main force, remembers thinking, "It's
over, it's over. These guys are going home. It was just a line of
vehicles on the road." Edward R. Walker, another Scout, tells Hersh,
"Many of the Iraqi tanks were on flatbed trucks and had their turrets
tucked backward." When Manchester heard a captain saying on the radio
that the Iraqis were about to launch anti-tank missiles at his tanks, he
was incredulous. "We are sitting right on top of these people," he says,
referring to the Iraqis, "and there are no vehicles pulled off." . . .
February 27, 1991: On the afternoon of February 27th, the day before the
ceasefire, James Manchester and other Scouts were manning a roadblock in
front of the main forces of Lieutenant Colonel Charles Ware's battalion.
Things proceeded routinely until, as Manchester recalls, "A Buick comes
up, with the commander, and he surrenders his battalion to us." Vehicles
continued to arrive, including a hospital bus, according to Specialist
Edward Walker, who was in charge of counting the men. There were, he
remembers, 382 Iraqis. They were stripped of their weapons, Walker says,
and lined up in rows. One man, who had lost an eye, asked if he was now
a prisoner. When he was told that he was, he said, "Thank, Allah." The
Iraqis were each given a "a white piece of paper, if they didn't have
anything white," Sergeant James Testerman, who was also present, tells
Hersh. The lieutenant in charge of the Scout group, Kirk Allen, "made it
a point to keep the battalion headquarters in the loop," Hersh writes.
Allen told the operations center that he had captured a large number of
prisoners and reported the precise position of the surrendered hospital
bus. According to Walker, Ware's headquarters ordered that the captured
weapons be destroyed, a task which fell to Walker himself. Then the
Scout group was ordered to move. As they drove away, the explosion
detonated. At that moment, Walker says, a platoon of Bradleys came into
view rolling toward the prisoners, and then the Bradleys' machine guns
opened fire. "I saw rounds impact in front of the vehicle," Sergeant
Steven Mulig, another Scout, says. "I could tell that they were hitting
close to the prisoners, because there were people running. There were
some who could have survived, but a lot of them wouldn't have, from
where I saw the rounds hit."
John Brasfield recorded radio transmissions that were being made by the
Scouts and their superiors while the Bradleys were firing toward the
prisoners of war, on a personal tape recorder he had brought with him to
the Gulf. "The lead company behind us is tearing up all those vehicles,"
one man is heard saying. "There's no-one shooting at them. Why'd they
have to shoot?" asks another voice. Lieutenant Allen then reports to
Lieutenant Colonel Ware, "There's shooting, but there's no one there to
shoot at," to which Ware responds, "I understand." On the tape,
Brasfield says, "They want to surrender. Fucking armored vehicles. They
don't have to blow them apart." Someone else says, "It's murder." After
more sporadic firing, someone says, "We shot the guys we had gathered
up," and another adds, "They didn't have no weapons." At this point,
Ware calls for all firing to stop.
March 1, 1991: The day after the ceasefire was announced, Hersh reports,
another incident took place in which American soldiers stand accused of
shooting unarmed Iraqis. Sergeant Steven Larimore, who headed a
ground-surveillance-radar team, was assigned to work with Scouts from
the 3-7 Battalion of McCaffrey's Command. Army troops had discovered a
cache of weapons in a deserted schoolhouse late in the afternoon of the
1st, and Larimore's unit joined the Scouts in clearing the village and
searching the schoolhouse. The weapons were secured, Larimore says, and
after taking souvenirs, he and his men moved out toward the east, along
with the Scouts. There was a group of villagers walking in the area.
"One guy had a white bedsheet on a stick," Larimore says, but "out of
the blue sky, some guy from where we're sitting" -- that is, in the
Scout Platoon -- "begins shooting" into the villagers.
Other machine guns joined in. "We were screaming, 'Cease fire!"'
Larimore tells Hersh. "People hit the ground. The firing went on."
Larimore estimates that he saw fifteen or twenty Iraqis fall. "I did not
see anything that looked like return fire," he says. Another eyewitness,
Sergeant Wayne P. Irwin, who headed a different G.S.R. team that was in
the area, says the Iraqis were "just passing through" when the shooting
began. "I yelled for them to cease fire. I couldn't understand why they
were firing." Irwin, a seventeen-year Army veteran, tells Hersh, "To me,
they posed no threat to us-they were all in civilian clothes." Scouts
told Irwin that they had seen the Iraqis carrying "grenade launchers and
stuff like that," but, Irwin says, he did not find that account
credible. "To me," he says, "they had nothing."
Lieutenant John J. Grisillo was the platoon leader of the Scout team
that opened fire. Grisillo tells Hersh that Larimore, who confronted him
at the time, did not understand that his men were responding to a
threat. "They raised a white flag," Grisillo recalls, but "they were
carrying weapons. We fired warning shots, but they didn't stop." Because
they were headed toward the schoolhouse, a building known to contain
weapons, they were, Grisillo determined, a danger. Grisillo also tells
Hersh that after the war he spoke with his brigade commander, Colonel Le
Moyne. "He let me know that he thought the G.S.R. guys didn't understand
the situation at the time," Grisillo says. "Calls had to be made. It's
not nice, but prudent. If I had that situation again, I'd do it again.
I've never lost a minute's sleep about it."
SAM SMITH, PROGRESSIVE REVIEW, 1996 - he nomination of General Barry
McCaffrey as drug czar symbolizes the nation's dramatic retreat from the
principle of separation of military and civilian power. It further
demonstrates the degree to which the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 --
which outlaws military involvement in civilian law enforcement -- is
being ignored and undermined by both the drug warriors and the Clinton
administration. . . In order to avoid violation of the law, General
McCaffrey has retired from the military, but he will not retire from his
military contacts, philosophy, loyalty and access. He is, after all, a
man some thought in line to become the next chair of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff.
General McCaffrey headed the US Southern Command, which provides
military backup for American policy in Latin America -- a policy long
linked with support of dictatorships, suppression of dissidents, human
rights abuses, death squads as well as chronically ineffective and
corrupt management of drug smuggling. The price of this policy has been
heavy: for example, over 100,000 people have been killed since 1960 in
Guatemala, many of them by armed forces and police trained and supported
by the US.
One former US ambassador to a Central American country says of Southcom,
"I wouldn't even let them in the country" because Southcom would
"inexorably militarize political problems." Today, he added, "very few
countries outside of Central America welcome visits" from the commander
of Southcom. . .
McCaffrey came into conflict with the State Department in his attempts
to gain authority over the attaches and run his own foreign policy.
Further, the Dallas Morning News reports that a year ago McCaffrey
circulated a classified plan under which the military would assume
direct control of the Latin American drug fight. The idea "drew the
wrath of civilian agencies from the Drug Enforcement Administration to
the CIA. It was a brash plan to fuse power now spread among dozens of
agencies while raising the military from a limited support role. The
proposal quietly died."
The Dallas paper noted that "colleagues widely describe [McCaffrey] as
outspoken and strong willed, a man whose self-esteem shone brightly even
amid the white light of four-star egos."
One drug enforcement official told US News & World Report that under
McCaffrey, Southcom's "idea of coordination was to brief you after their
plan was fait accompli.". . .
Furthermore, they do substantial damage to the stability and democracy
of the targeted country. . . As the military zig and zags in its Latin
American anti-drug tactics, these operations retain one common
attribute: failure. Between 1994 and 1995, for example, coca leaf
production rose seven percent in Bolivia, Colombia and Peru. The drug
trade continues so merrily along that the radio stations on the Mexican
border are even mocking counter-drug efforts with ballads celebrating
famed traffickers.
Rather than pointing out such facts, press reaction to the McCaffrey
appointment has been overwhelmingly favorable. This is perhaps not
surprising. The media is increasingly composed of journalists who have
had no military experience and who see war as just another movie script,
even if the battle is on our borders or in our own cities.
These new journalistic romanticists are easy prey for Pentagon flacks
and the drug warriors. Their understanding of such matters comes not
from experience and history, but from Stallone and Schwarzenegger.
http://prorev.com/mil.htm
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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