Top 25 Censored Stories for 2009/2010

1. US Congress Sells Out to Wall Street
2. US Schools are More Segregated Today than in the 1950s
3. Toxic Waste Behind Somali Pirates
4. Nuclear Waste Pools in North Carolina
5. Europe Blocks US Toxic Products
6. Lobbyists Buy Congress
7. Obama’s Military Appointments Have Corrupt Past
8. Bailed out Banks and America’s Wealthiest Cheat IRS Out of Billions
9. US Arms Used for War Crimes in Gaza
10. Ecuador Declares Foreign Debt Illegitimate
11. Private Corporations Profit from the Occupation of Palestine
12. Mysterious Death of Mike Connell—Karl Rove’s Election Thief
13. Katrina’s Hidden Race War
14. Congress Invested in Defense Contracts
15. World Bank’s Carbon Trade Fiasco
16. US Repression of Haiti Continues
17. The ICC Facilitates US Covert War in Sudan
18. Ecuador’s Constitutional Rights of Nature
19. Bank Bailout Recipients Spent to Defeat Labor
20. Secret Control of the Presidential Debates
21. Recession Causes States to Cut Welfare
22. Obama’s Trilateral Commission Team
23. Activists Slam World Water Forum as a Corporate-Driven Fraud
24. Dollar Glut Finances US Military Expansion
25. Fast Track Oil Exploitation in Western Amazon

Angry Whistleblower Targets Cult in AMORC Unmasked: Author Pierre S. Freeman Reveals Secrets of Rosicrucian Mind Control Program

Medical Whistleblower Letter to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights

By MedicalWhistleblower

For OpEdNews: MedicalWhistleblower - Writer

November 2008 Letter to the United Nations:

(Redacted somewhat to preserve the integrity of the active homicide investigation)

My name is Dr. Janet Louise Parker D.V.M. I am the founder and Executive Director of Medical Whistleblower. As Executive Director, I provide information and direct services to Medical Whistleblowers and actively work to democratically transform legal and social systems to protect their civil and human rights. There are over 600 medical professionals and many attorneys in the database. We also get information from patients, other health care advocates and work with several other NGO organizations. Medical Whistleblower is in the process of selecting persons to serve on the Medical Whistleblower Foundation Board of Directors, and thus do not yet have the Medical Whistleblower Foundation fully organized and incorporated as a US 501(c)3 organization. I currently work as a sole proprietor of Medical Whistleblower and Medical Whistleblowers come to me as clients for advocacy, social networking and informational services.

I would define a Medical Whistleblower as a person who has come forward to report Medical Fraud, Abuse or Neglect to State, Federal or International governmental authorities. Medical Whistleblower is dedicated to advocacy and the emotional support of all Medical Whistleblowers regardless of their professional background or licensing status. Anyone with access to information related to medical fraud, abuse and neglect can be a Medical Whistleblower. Medical Whistleblower provides advocacy and works to mobilize public opinion in support of Medical Whistleblowers who have already made that choice and those still considering their future path. There is no cost to request services from Medical Whistleblower. Medical Whistleblower is not a counseling service and does not provide legal advice or representation. We are an advocate for change and provide meaningful information related to the Medical Whistleblower's experience and networking contacts for further support.

I am by faith, a Quaker, Religious Society of Friends. I participate as an individual in the advocacy of my faith belief and therefore believe firmly in interfaith discussion and participation in social and political issues. My advocacy for Medical Whistleblowers relates to their spiritual strength and I draw support from the greater interfaith community to provide services to them. Medical Whistleblower provides advocacy for all regardless of national origin, religious faith, color, disability, sex, sexual orientation, or age. Medical Whistleblowers come from all walks of life and many professional disciplines. Medical Whistleblowers can be Doctors, Pharmacists, Researchers, Police Officers, Federal Law Enforcement Agents, Nurses, Medical Technicians, Certified Public Accountants, Attorneys, Judges, Therapists, Prosecutors, Hospital CEO's, Academic Medical Instructors, Veterans, Emergency Medical Technicians, and even Patients and their families. Medical Whistleblowers are themselves human rights defenders of others. Medical Whistleblowers are a great untapped resource of dedicated and highly trained professionals – many with medical degrees and even Advanced Medical Board Certifications, who are willing to communicate with and assist law enforcement efforts to protect patients and prevent repeat victimization. Medical Whistleblowers can identify patterns of crime as well as gaps and deficiencies in law enforcement efforts. Medical Whistleblowers are competent and capable professionals who courageously risk their livelihoods when they come forward in the name of transparency and openness, to reveal violations of human rights. It is a sad fact that currently the medical system often repays their advocacy by retaliating against them and they often lose their cherished right to privacy and suffer severe personal loss.

I wish to report violations against the Human Rights of Medical Whistleblowers as a class of people. First I would like to bring to your attention the brutal murder on Oct. 11, 2001 of Assistant United States Attorney Tom Wales, Head of the Civil Rights Division of the Western Division of the US Attorney's Office in Washington State (located in Seattle). AUSA Tom Wales was a strong defender of civil and human rights and a dedicated public servant. As a matter of personal conviction and also professional responsibility, Attorney Tom Wales represented persons exercising their fundamental right to free speech and called on the United States government to investigate violations of human and civil rights and bring justice to those responsible for any violations of persons exercising those rights. He was murdered in the line of duty, investigating a criminal enterprise that preys on vulnerable individuals and launders the money illegally gained through mortgage fraud. AUSA Tom Wales was cooperating with the US Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York and working quietly and covertly with FBI Supervisory Agent, John O'Neill. There was a level of governmental criminal corruption that made this investigation especially dangerous and ultimately led to the murder of AUSA Tom Wales.

Medical Whistleblowers represent dedicated advocates for the victims of medical fraud, patient abuse and patient neglect caused by a failure to protect the vulnerable in our society. Patient abuse can be physical, financial, emotional, psychological or sexual abuse. Medical Whistleblowers represent significant sources of intelligence about criminal activity and violation of patients' rights within the medical community due to their unique access to information not readily available to law enforcement. Medical Whistleblowers often do not know how to report and adequately interface with law enforcement. Medical Whistleblowers often have too little information about police procedure and what happens during the initial response to and the subsequent investigation of a crime. Because of their efforts to “Tell Truth to Power” Medical Whistleblowers often become themselves victims of crime. Medical Whistleblowers are often retaliated against by those whose criminal wrongdoings the Whistleblower is exposing. The types of crimes Medical Whistleblowers can be victims of include: bullying in the workplace, witness intimidation and obstruction of justice, physical assault, sexual assault, sexual harassment, stalking, privacy violations, illegal break and entry, criminal conspiracy to violate Civil Rights, and many others. Medical Whistleblowers need to get adequate protection so that they can “Tell Truth to Power” without intimidation by those who are criminally involved. Law Enforcement officials need to act pro-actively to prevent repeat victimization of Medical Whistleblowers. The risk of re-victimization increases with each victimization. Criminal cases are lost because of the inevitable loss of physical evidence and the loss of testimony of witnesses due to intimidation. Many Medical Whistleblowers are unable to withstand the onslaught of the oppressive retaliation that includes threats to remove their medical licenses, which then proceeds without due process to a kangaroo court (Bad Faith Peer Review). This leads to an evitable loss of their medical license and right to practice their chosen profession. The grueling nature of being a victim of this kind of workplace psychological violence has often driven Medical Whistleblowers to desperation and poverty. Some Medical Whistleblowers who have exposed millions of dollars of Medical Fraud have even faced homelessness in spite of their professional credentials and competence. Others have even been so distraught about their inability to get Due Process and Protection under the Law, which led to humiliating and degrading treatment, that they have resorted to the act of suicide. The most fundamental principle of ethical behavior is “Do No Harm,” this is true in the law enforcement field as well as the medical field.

Medical Whistleblowers are concerned about human rights involving violations of vulnerable minor children, mental health patients, prisoners, and patients in hospital treatment for addiction. Unfortunately a criminal enterprise has so pervaded the US law enforcement and justice system, that when the investigation got close to the truth, US Attorneys were fired from their positions for daring to open investigations into allegations of corruption and corporate greed. Many believe that US Attorney John McKay, from the US Attorney's Office in Seattle, was fired as a result of demanding a more vigorous investigation into the murder of AUSA Tom Wales. US Attorney John McKay had expressed concern, with good cause, that the US Justice Department did not immediately secure the murder site for Federal FBI investigation, but left the responsibility to the local police force and the King County Sheriff's Office. The King County Sheriff's Office was already under a Bureau of Internal Affairs investigation and a concurrent FBI investigation for governmental corruption and abuse of power. It must be remembered that AUSA Tom Wales's office was the office investigating this governmental corruption of the local police force. There were several transnational pharmaceutical companies with their economic and political power who were targets of the investigation. The criminal enterprise corrupts the whole state, by creating a bureaucracy to administer their own brand of justice and to inflict the Color of Official Right abuse of power. The criminal enterprise used campaign contributions to influence policy makers, law enforcement officials and even judges. It corrupted even innocent people by peer pressure and coercion. The Former US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales then went on to dismiss several of the US Attorneys replacing them with attorneys who would be more influenced by political power.

There is an appalling lack of Due Process for Medical Whistleblowers who report what they know about the human rights violations. One Medical Whistleblower, Allen Jones, was the Investigator for the State of Pennsylvania's Office of the Inspector General. IAG Investigator Allen Jones reported a widespread corruption of the governmental process to allow wholesale violation of the human rights of vulnerable children and adults by the pharmaceutical companies for profit. Human rights derive from the dignity of the human person. These rights were violated for commercial profit and personal power. When Allen Jones and other Medical Whistleblowers, many of them doctors (Psychiatrists and Psychologists) came forward to report the abuses they saw, they were retaliated against by constructive discharge, employment discrimination, threats against person, and even removal of their medical licenses. Gross mistreatment in connection with in-patient treatment of vulnerable children and adults should not be tolerated under international law. The criminals used Guardian abuse to generate profit by prolonged arbitrary detention of involuntary patients for medical fraud. A courageous attorney from the state of Alaska, Jim Gottstein, formed The Psychiatric Law Project to look into the legal means to try to protect the human rights of the victims of Medical Fraud, Psychiatric abuse and Guardian Abuse. What he found was a system that although initially meant to assist those with mental illness, is now so broken that there continue to be egregious violations of human rights and assaults on human dignity. For his efforts in cooperating with US Attorneys into the actions of the transnational pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, he was hit with a S.L.A.P.P. law suit and an injunction.

I have thousands of Medical Whistleblowers who have confided in me their concerns about the human rights violations they have witnessed. The normal safeguards which should protect Medical Whistleblowers can no longer be relied on and when Medical Whistleblowers come forward they face a judicial system that is so corrupted that there is no Due Process at all. Medical Professionals are routinely stripped of their medical licenses and their right to work in their chosen profession as a result of their whistleblowing status. They face chronic harassment and workplace bullying that often leads to Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. If they seek psychological or psychiatric help for the retaliation induced stress disorder, they face loss of their personal privacy and permanent removal of their medical license. The Medical Professionals are put through a Kangaroo Court and Sham Peer Review to remove them as a threat against the transnational pharmaceutical companies. These whistleblowers express concern for their own ability to provide for themselves and their families because of the employment discrimination due to whistleblower retaliation and the lack of a judicial process that permits them to address the systemic problems.

I, myself, became involved in the investigation run by the FBI. I attempted to provide discretely and covertly information that was being passed on to me by Medical Whistleblowers, patients and patient advocates. I interfaced with several patient advocacy groups in direct contact with the victims of these abuses and also with parents in the foster care system. I found that these human rights abuses were being reported, but the investigations were being halted at some point up the chain of command in the United States Department of Justice. Sometimes this interference was quite obvious, other times more subtle. Because of the several FBI investigations and the US Congressional interest in these human rights violations, the criminals became more concerned in being caught and punished and possibly loosing the millions of dollars they had greedily acquired from their crimes. So the outright buying of political influence took place as well as an effort by the criminals to put their own people in charge of the investigatory process.

I was appalled to find out who was in charge of investigating any allegation against a licensed medical professional in the State of Washington. The governmental contract that gives them this power is hidden from the public, provides for little substantive oversight of their actions against targeted doctors, and has provisions to give them almost absolute immunity for their actions of retaliation. AUSA Tom Wales was in the process of coming forward with information regarding this criminal enterprise and the corruption of the governmental process, when they started a brutal campaign of retaliation against him. I was caught in this backlash from the criminals. I tried to get further information and documentation of the criminal enterprise. I was drugged and forcibly raped for my efforts, then slandered, and railroaded to a kangaroo court removal of my medical license. I was raped in Vancouver Washington the weekend that AUSA Tom Wales' body was finally returned to his family for burial. The US Department of Justice and the State Attorney General's Office instead of investigating the criminal enterprise or even my DFSA rape refused to open any investigation at all and may have allowed evidence to be destroyed. I believe this to be obstruction of justice in AUSA Tom Wales' murder investigation, which is now considered an unsolved Federal Homicide.

As an advocate, I have talked to hundreds of sexual assault victims who wish to remain anonymous. It has been found that in cases where a drug has been used to facilitate the rape, the investigatory process is not only difficult, but even when a victim/survivor comes forward, there may be secondary trauma from lack of support and proper timely intervention. Relating to my own case of whistleblower retaliation, there was bias against me as a victim of rape and sexual assault. I found that as a DFSA rape victim, that I was not afforded any of the normal crime victim protections, and even my medical license could be removed from me for reporting that I had been raped in relationship to my veterinary employment. Those who drugged me with GHB and then raped me, fabricated an elaborate entrapment scheme and corresponding complaint against my medical license. I sought sexual assault counseling through the RAINN network and asked Attorney Jim Gottstein to be my own legal advocate for mental health care. I was denied Due Process not only in preserving my medical license intact after the sexual assault, but was also subjected to repeated sexual harassment at my workplace making it so hostile, that I finally gave up being a veterinary doctor and moved out of state.

The more I pressed to get the answers that I needed, to understand the case so abruptly halted by AUSA Tom Wales' murder, the more retaliation was heaped on me. Expressing concerns about the lack of support of the FBI investigation into the retaliation, led to incidents of involuntary detention, intimidation, persecution and harassment at my workplace and social contacts. I was denied Due Process in my attempt to get a restraining order against the continuing sexual harassment and even another sexual assault at the hands of the “Wellness Committee Chair” of the Washington State Veterinary Medical Association. There were official documents drafted to create the impression that I was not a credible witness. In addition, I was placed under extensive surveillance, had illegal search and seizure of my property with the removal of documentary evidence. I was especially threatened in my place of worship as a Quaker, the Religious Society of Friends with actual entrapment events staged using members of my congregation. This severely impacted my ability to practice my faith and stripped me of the emotional support of my faith community. There was abuse of power through Color of Law and also Color of Official Right to prevent my right to seek, receive and impart information. There was intimidation to prevent me from being a witness in the official investigation into Tom Wales' murder or even wider investigation regarding the initial case. In order to silence my dissent, I was threatened with use of criminal statutes and mental health statutes against me. In spite of my own concerns for the very private and confidential nature of the details of sexual assault on me, I sought assistance of those in the media to publicize the issue of the crime victim rights of all DFSA victims. This was met with even increasing surveillance and intimidation, including attempts at abduction. This continuing harassment and retaliation, from which I could not find respite, finally drove me to a suicide attempt.

I ask that you consider this case not for me, but for the hundreds of Medical Whistleblowers for whom I am an advocate. I write this letter of allegation in order to set the record straight in regards to AUSA Tom Wales' murder and his right to be honored as a Civil Rights and Human Rights Defender. Attorney Tom Wales acted above and beyond the call of duty and placed himself in personal peril because of his moral and ethical values. I am humbled by his sacrifice, and his unique personal and professional courage. He was a brave and honorable man. I also wish to honor the dedicated service of the FBI Supervisory Agent, John O'Neill, whom I was honored to know and work with. John O'Neill acted with professional leadership to balance the critical needs of the investigation with caring compassionate support for human rights values. John O'Neill, as a FBI agent, understood that he was sworn to uphold the US Constitution as the prime guarantor of rights. He understood that to be effective, the FBI must, in their varied missions, obtain the trust and confidence of the community. He understood that when individual human rights are not protected, public trust and confidence are undermined. John O'Neill died tragically in the Twin Towers on 9/11/2001.

Enforcement against criminal behavior within the medical community must also include civil rights protection for both patients and their advocates. The retaliation that I experienced left me even more committed to this fight for justice. I have found dedicated allies in fighting this wall of bureaucracy that is preventing any USA whistleblowing doctor from getting Due Process and a fair hearing of their concerns for the welfare and safety of their patients. It seems clear to anyone with any ethical or moral grounding, that we need to preserve and protect our Medical Whistleblowers, not destroy their careers and throw them away like disposable objects. I see these 600+ Medical Whistleblowers as competent caring dedicated medical professionals who have courageously come forward to provide a service for the public good. I listen to their stories of personal trauma and my heart reaches out to them. But there seems to be no place to go in the US Justice System to help them. When the actions of the US Attorney General clearly leave no doubt, that the Federal Government will fire any US Attorney in the Civil Division who goes against the political power of the transnational pharmaceutical companies and their associated in-patient treatment centers, the Medical Whistleblowers feel helpless to protect the human rights of the patients they are defending. I respectfully request that you consider an investigation into the lack of Due Process rights for Medical Whistleblowers who are reporting human rights violations.

Sincerely,

Dr. Janet Louise Parker D.V.M.

Executive Director, Medical Whistleblower

By Sarah Seltzer, AlterNet. Posted September 17, 2009.

Biking Out of Iraq

By Tom Engelhardt

August 13, 2009

The Bush administration invaded Iraq in March 2003 with a force of approximately 130,000 troops. Top White House and Pentagon officials like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz were convinced that by August those troops, welcomed with open arms by the oppressed Iraqis, would be drawn down to 30,000-40,000 and housed in newly built, permanent military bases, largely away from the country's urban areas. This was to be part of what now is called a "strategic partnership" in the Middle East.

Almost five-and-a-half years later, the United States still has approximately 130,000 troops in Iraq. Top administration officials are now talking about "modestly accelerated" rates of troop withdrawal, if all goes well. By August 2010, the Obama administration expects to have only 30,000-50,000 troops housed mainly on American mega-bases largely away from urban areas, part of a special American/Iraqi strategic partnership in the region.

This passes for progress in Iraq.

A History of the Bicycle in Iraq

In imagistic terms, the Bush administration biked into Iraq. Back in its salad days, when all was green and upbeat, its top officials loved the idea that they were training the eager Iraqi kid in how to ride the bike of democracy. President George W. Bush liked to talk about the moment when we might take the " training wheels" off the Iraqi bike and let the little fella ride into the democratic sunset on his own. His secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, ran with an allied image--the difficult moment when a parent has to decide whether to take that steadying hand off the bike seat and let the tyke pedal on his own. "You're running down the street," as he put it in 2004, "holding onto the back of the seat. You know that if you take your hand off they could fall, so you take a finger off and then two fingers, and pretty soon you're just barely touching it."

Some years later, after kid and parent had made it around one of those "corners" they were always turning--on the way to various "tipping points" in the Iraq War--and found themselves instead at the "precipice," after Rumsfeld had, in fact, been asked to resign by his president, he wrote a final memo, the last of his famed "snowflakes," to the White House, on "new options" in Iraq. In it, he suggested: "Begin modest withdrawals of US and Coalition forces (start 'taking our hand off the bicycle seat'), so Iraqis know they have to pull up their socks, step up and take responsibility for their country."

His tenure could qualify as the longest biking lesson in history and still, it seemed, the Iraqis couldn't do without that hand on the seat. Even when his president followed him two years later, their imagery of choice remained behind. This March, for instance, the chief American military spokesman in Iraq, Major General David G. Perkins, discussing a possible draw-down of American forces, said: "We need to take our hands off the handlebars, or the training wheels, at some point."

And then, two weeks ago, Colonel Timothy R. Reese, an American adviser to the Iraqi military's Baghdad command, created a front-page New York Times stir when a memorandum he had written was leaked. In a distinctly imagistic mode, he began: "As the old saying goes, 'Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.' Since the signing of the 2009 Security Agreement, we are guests in Iraq, and after six years in Iraq, we now smell bad to the Iraqi nose."

While the official Obama-era target for an American withdrawal remains (as it was in the last months of the Bush era) the end of 2011, Reese urged that all US forces be pulled out on an expedited schedule by August 2010--the moment by which, according to present plans, only American "combat brigades" are to be removed. Resurrecting a Vietnam-era suggestion of Vermont Republican Senator George Aiken (ignored then, as it will be now), he headlined his memo: "It's Time for the US to Declare Victory and Go Home."

And there, in the midst of a generally scathing assessment of the deficiencies of the Iraqi military (and the Iraqi government), was that bicycle again:

The SA [Bush-era Security Agreement between the US and Iraq] outlines a series of gradual steps towards military withdrawal, analogous to a father teaching his kid to ride a bike without training wheels.... We now have an Iraqi government that has gained its balance and thinks it knows how to ride the bike in the race. And in fact they probably do know how to ride, at least well enough for the road they are on against their current competitors. Our hand on the back of the seat is holding them back and causing resentment. We need to let go before we both tumble to the ground.

It just goes to show. Under the pressure of war, images that won't go away, like people, have the capacity to change. The Iraqi child with the training wheels is now, according to Reese, old enough to enter an actual bike race.

Who exactly will bike out of Iraq under the Obama withdrawal plan, however, still remains to be defined. After all, at the end of his memo, the most urgent call for withdrawal from Iraq yet to emerge from the higher levels of the US military, Colonel Reese offers his version of a full-scale American withdrawal. "During the withdrawal period," he writes, "the USG [United States government] and GOI [government of Iraq] should develop a new strategic framework agreement that would include some lasting military presence at 1-3 large training bases, airbases, or key headquarters locations. But it should not include the presence of any combat forces save those for force protection needs or the occasional exercise."

And keep in mind: his proposal has, with rare exceptions, been rejected out of hand by all and sundry, in and out of the military high command and in Washington.

In other words, even the most Xtreme American biker of this moment still imagines us in Iraq forever and a day.

A History of Experts on Iraq

Once upon a time, the playing field, the stadium, and sports events were regularly compared to war, even considered suitable preparation for actual battle. Ever since the First Gulf War, this has been reversed. Now, war--or at least its coverage--is based on sports.

Just as, sooner or later, the smoothest players and savviest coaches depart the "field of battle" for the press box and the TV spotlight, for pre-game, game, and post-game commentary, so the commanders of the last war now leave the battlefield for the TV booth and offer us their expertise on the next war. As former Houston Rockets coach Jeff Van Gundy has had to discuss the decisions of his brother Stan, coach of the Orlando Magic, in ESPN playoff commentary, so the commanders of our previous wars cover next wars and their commanders, possibly even officers once under their own command.

We now live with the ESPN version of war, including slo-mo replays, and the logos, interactive charts, and fabulous graphics of the sports world. And once anointed as experts, our John Maddens of war, like their sports counterparts, never go away. Back in April 2008, for instance, New York Times journalist David Barstow wrote a front-page expose focused on the many retired military officers who had been hired as media consultants for the Iraq War. As a group, they made up, he suggested, a "kind of media Trojan horse," because most of them were marching to a carefully organized Pentagon campaign of disinformation on the war. In addition, most of them had ties, not acknowledged on the air, "to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess."

Barstow's piece concluded:

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as '"military analysts" whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world. Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration's wartime performance.

Barstow named names and made connections. Those names included, for example, retired Air Force general and Fox News senior military analyst Thomas G. McInerney, retired Army general and NBC/MSNBC military analyst Montgomery Meigs, retired Army general and NBC/MSNBC military analyst Barry R. McCaffrey, and retired Marine Colonel and Fox News military analyst William V. Cowan. After the expose appeared, they seem to have just carried right on with their media duties.

Some of the print media has similarly adhered to the principle of once-an-expert-always-an-expert. For instance, on the fifth anniversary of Bush's disastrous invasion of Iraq, the New York Times decided to ask a range of "experts on military and foreign affairs" to look back on that fiasco--and then rounded up the usual suspects. Of the nine experts it came up with, six were intimately involved in that catastrophe either as drumbeaters for the invasion, instigators of it, or facilitators of the occupation that followed--Kenneth Pollack, Danielle Pletka and Frederick Kagan (enthusiasts all), Richard Perle (a k a "the prince of darkness"), L. Paul Bremer (the administration's first viceroy in Baghdad), and General Paul D. Eaton (who trained Iraqi troops in the early years of the occupation).

Notably absent was anyone who had seriously opposed the invasion. The closest was Anne-Marie Slaughter, a "liberal hawk" who wrote a supportive New York Times op-ed on March 18, 2003, two days before the invasion began, headlined, "Good Reasons for Going Around the U.N."

The Times anniversary spread appeared in March 2008. Jump ahead a year-plus and the Times once again launched what undoubtedly was a mighty search for experts who might consider Colonel Reese's suggestion that we take our hand off that Iraqi bike--and came up with a typical crew of seven:

One, retired Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, is president of the Center for a New American Security, and was an advisor to General David Petraeus, former top US commander in Iraq, now Centcom commander overseeing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A second, Stephen Biddle, senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, was also an advisor to Petraeus and most recently on the "team" that advised General Stanley A. McChrystal, the top US commander in Afghanistan under Petraeus, in his recent review of Afghan War strategy. A third, Anthony Cordesman, Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was on the same McChrystal team. A fourth, Thomas Ricks, former Washington Post military reporter and now senior fellow at Nagl's Center, is the author of the bestselling book The Gamble, a highly complimentary account of Petraeus's role in Iraq in which Nagl is, of course, a figure. (Ricks, by the way, has long made it clear that he believes we will be in that country for years to come.) A fifth, Kori Schake, now at the Hoover Institution, was a former national security adviser on defense issues to President George W. Bush. A sixth, Jonathan Morgenstein, is a senior national security policy fellow at Third Way, another Washington think tank, and just recently returned from Iraq where "he was a military transition team adviser to the Iraqi Army."

Not surprisingly, all six of these experts, with the most modest of caveats, dismissed Reese's suggestion out of hand ("The pace of progress in Iraq will be slow, but we can't throw up our hands and walk away..."), agreeing that it was in no one's interest to expedite an American departure. Only a seventh expert, author and retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor, agreed with Reese.

Consider that a little history of expertise about our recent wars. There's a corollary. If you're not anointed an expert, you're never likely to be. Among those automatically disqualified for expertise on Iraq: just about anyone who bluntly rejected the idea of invading Iraq or predicted any version of the catastrophe that ensued before it happened. Disqualified above all are any of those antiwar types who actually took to the streets of American cities by the hundreds of thousands before the invasion to raise homemade placards to its un-wisdom. They obviously knew nothing. Their very stance indicated a bias that evidently disqualified them on the spot.

Someone--I can't claim to remember who--once made the point that within any administration you could afford to be a hawk and be wrong, just not a dove and right. When it comes to TV war commentators, that seems to hold true as well.

It would, of course, be possible to imagine the antiwar equivalent of those generals-as-analysts. From the ranks of the last antiwar movement (all still active anti-warriors), you could, for example, choose Tom Hayden, Daniel Ellsberg and Howard Zinn to offer commentary on our ongoing wars. Only you know as well as I do that that fantasy will never turn into media reality. In our world of expertise, it's unthinkable.

A History of the Iraqi Air Force

Recently, while Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was visiting Iraq, the top American commander in that country, General Ray Odierno, indicated that the Iraqis would not be able to defend their own airspace for the foreseeable future. Essentially, they have no air force--or rather, at this point they have helicopters, C-130 transports, and some smaller Cesna trainers and the like, but no jet fighters. Despite the fact that a US Air Force "assessment team" is being rushed to Baghdad to look for "some creative solutions" to the problem, it's clear that the Iraqi air force will remain the US Air Force for some time to come (which undoubtedly means manning the giant US airbase built at Balad as well).

The Iraqis now want American F-16s. Unfortunately, according to New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, General Odierno pointed out a sad truth: "it would be impossible to build and deliver them by the end of 2011, even if the Iraqis were able to afford them." And don't forget this: Iraq has no trained pilots to fly them either! Sigh... much work remains on the horizon for the USAF.

Fortunately, Aviation Week reported in April that the Iraqis have a plan to overcome their problem. It's a "three-phase, 11-year improvement plan" that will move their air force from T-6 trainers to a few dozen F-16s by "the middle of the next decade" (in case you were wondering just how long the USAF is likely to be filling in).

Here, then, is the true tragedy of our moment. We want to leave Iraq. Maybe not as quickly as Colonel Reese would like, but really we do. President Obama has made that clear. Unfortunately, the Iraqis just won't let us. Imagine! They weren't even thinking about an air force until recently--and what would a country in the Middle East be if, as Bumiller points out, it had "no way to intercept another jet that invades the country's airspace."

Just who might invade Iraqi airspace remains a subject for speculation: The Israelis on their way to bomb Iran? (Not likely the USAF would start shooting those planes down.) The Iranians on their way to bomb...? Well, who? After all, the present government in Iraq is essentially an ally of Iran. The Turks? Not really an issue when you think about it. Their planes have been invading Iraqi airspace for a while to attack Kurdish rebels and the USAF hasn't exactly been shooting them down either.

Since it's so easy to obliterate the past, just for a moment let's recall the history of the Iraqi air force. Now that Iraq essentially has no air force, who remembers that Saddam Hussein's Iraq once had a very large and active one--up to 950 planes in the 1980s. In 1990, according to the website GlobalSecurity.org, it still had the sixth largest air force in the world, and plenty of trained pilots to go with it. During the First Gulf War, nearly half of that air force fled to neighboring Iran (on which Iraqi planes had dropped more than their share of bombs and even poison gas in the 1980s). Those planes were never returned. Of the relatively small force that remained, many were destroyed in the First Gulf War and some of the rest, at Saddam's orders, were buried in the desert as the invasion of 2003 began.

The history that's really been forgotten, though, is even more recent. Put in a nutshell, the Iraqis don't have an air force because Washington didn't want them to. Much attention has been paid to the Bush administration's lack of planning for the occupation of Iraq, but relatively little to what it did plan. Let's start with the fact that, in May 2003, L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority in a burst of blind pride disbanded the Iraqi Army. Pentagon plans for rebuilding it called for a future, border-patrolling Iraqi military (lite) of perhaps 40,000 men with minimal armaments and no air force to speak of.

In the Middle East, this had only one meaning: from a series of newly built mega-bases already on Pentagon drawing boards as American troops crossed the Kuwaiti border in 2003, the US Army and Air Force would fill in as the real Iraqi military for eons to come. Under the pressure of a fierce Sunni insurgency, the army part of that plan was soon jettisoned. But "standing up" the Iraqi military--As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down," was long President Bush's mantra--has meant just that: two feet on the ground.

Until relatively recently, the Iraqis were functionally not permitted to take to the skies. Now, the lack of that air force will surely come to the fore as an excuse for why any American "withdrawal" will have to have caveats and qualifications--and why, if ours proves to be a non-withdrawal withdrawal, it will be their fault.

A History of Devastation in Iraq

Until the US arrived in Baghdad, things seemed bad enough. There was Saddam Hussein, the megalomanic dictator--he of the endless Disney-esque palaces and giant sculpted hands--with his secret prisons, torture chambers and helicopter gunships. There were the international sanctions strangling the country. There were the mass graves in the north and the south. There was an oil industry held together by scotch tape and ingenuity. It was a gruesome enough mess.

That was before the invasion to "liberate" the country. Since then hundreds of thousands, possibly a million or more Iraqis have died (depending on whose figures and studies you believe). Saddam's killing fields have been dwarfed by a fierce set of destructive American military operations as well as insurgencies-cum-civil-wars-cum-terrorist-acts; major cities have been largely or partially destroyed, or ethnically cleansed; millions of Iraqis have been forced from their homes, becoming internal refugees or going into exile; untold numbers of Iraqis have been imprisoned, assassinated, tortured or abused; and the country's cultural heritage has been ransacked. Basic services--electricity, water, food--were terribly impaired and the economy, in the process of being privatized by the neocon overseers of the occupation, was simply wrecked. Health services were crippled. Oil production, upon which Iraq now depends for up to 90 percent of its government funds, has only relatively recently surpassed the worst levels of the Saddam era.

Iraq, in other words, has been devastated. The American invasion and the occupation that followed acted like whirlwinds of destruction, unraveling a land already bursting with problems and potential animosities.

What men begin, the gods end. If such a saying doesn't exist, it should, since the American catastrophe now seems to be morphing into an unparalleled natural disaster as well. In what once was the breadbasket of civilization, Iraqi agriculture, ignored by the occupiers, is withering and the country is desertifying at a frightening pace under the pressure of a several-year-old drought.

So fierce is the process that, according to Liz Sly of the Los Angeles Times, who has written an apocalyptic account of all this, the country received only 20 percent of its normal rainfall in 2008, and so far in 2009 but half the usual amount. Rivers are drying up, wells are disappearing, and desperate Iraqi farmers are deserting the land for the city (where unemployment rates remain high). Everywhere dust gathers, awaiting the winds which create the monstrous duststorms that carry the precious land of Iraq into the fragile lungs of urban Iraqis. "Now," writes Sly, "the Agriculture Ministry estimates that 90 percent of [Iraq's] land is either desert or suffering from severe desertification, and that the remaining arable land is being eroded at the rate of 5 percent a year."

Expecting the worst harvest in a decade and with the wheat crop at 40 percent of normal, the government has been forced to buy enormous amounts of grain abroad at a time when oil prices, dropping precipitously from 2008 highs, left it with far less money available. However overused the image may be, the Bush administration created the perfect storm in Iraq, a "mission accomplished" version of hell on Earth. And it's because Iraq is in such desperate shape that, of course, we, as the protectors of its fragile "stability," can't leave.

A History of Justifications

When we invaded Iraq, serial justifications were offered. There was the grim dictator to rid the world of. There were his killing fields. (Never again!) There was 9/11 and his "support for terrorism." (Top Bush administration officials long claimed a link between Saddam and Al Qaeda, despite convincing evidence to the contrary.) There was liberation for the Shiites and the ending of what Wolfowitz called "criminal treatment of the Iraqi people." There was the re-establishment of an American version of order in the region. There were those heavily emphasized, if nonexistent, weapons of mass destruction the dictator supposedly had squirreled away, as well as his (also nonexistent) program to get his hands on a nuclear weapon. (As Wolfowitz put it in May 2003: "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason...")

Later, when things began to take a turn for the worse and another reason was needed, there was the propagation of democracy (a great guiding principle to which the Bush administration arrived rather late in Iraq and only under pressure from Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani). Even later, when things were going far worse, there was the idea that it was far better to fight the terrorists over there than here. And, of course, as the president liked to confide to foreign leaders, there was God Himself commanding him to strike Saddam and so thwart Gog and Magog.

Among the cognoscenti, of course, there were other expectations and justifications, caught best perhaps in the neoconservative quip of 2003, "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran." After all, the neocons in and around the Bush administration truly did believe that a Pax Americana in what they liked to call "the Greater Middle East" was within their shock-and-awe grasp, and possibly even a global version of the same. As for oil--or what President Bush referred to, on the rare occasion when he mentioned it, as Iraq's "patrimony"--mum was the word, even though that country had the world's third-largest proven petroleum reserves and sat strategically at the heart of the energy heartlands of the planet.

Now, with those 130,000 troops still there, not to speak of the scads of rent-a-guns and private contractors, with that overstuffed, overstaffed embassy the size of the Vatican built for 1,000 "diplomats," with that series of major bases (which the Pentagon used to call, charmingly enough, "enduring camps") still well occupied, with significant numbers of Iraqis and small numbers of Americans dying each month, with millions of Iraqis still internal or external refugees, with the land devastated, and basic services hardly restored, with ethnic tensions still running high, and a government quietly allied to Iran in place in Baghdad backed by a 250,000-man military, with an American withdrawal still officially years off, and "withdrawal" itself a matter of definition, no one even bothers to offer the slightest justification for being in Iraq. After all, why would explanations be necessary when we're getting ready to leave?

If you don't believe me, go hunting for an official explanation today. Why are we in Iraq? Because we're there. Because the Iraqis need us. Because something terrible would happen if we left precipitously. So we still occupy Iraq and no one even asks why.

A History of Withdrawal from Iraq

There is no history of withdrawal from Iraq.