This one will be tough to explain away by those who deny that torture is happening in Gitmo…

Spc. Sean D. Baker, 38, volunteered to take part in a training drill at training drill at the Guantanamo prison in January 2003. To make the drill realistic he was dressed in an orange jumpsuit and the MPs were told that he was an uncooperative detainee who had assaulted an American sergeant.

Baker said he put on the jumpsuit and squeezed under a prison bunk after being told by a lieutenant that he would be portraying an unruly detainee. He said he was assured that MPs conducting the “extraction drill” knew it was a training exercise and that Baker was an American soldier.

As he was being choked and beaten, Baker said, he screamed a code word, “red,” and shouted: “I’m a U.S. soldier! I’m a U.S. soldier!” He said the beating continued until the jumpsuit was yanked down during the struggle, revealing his military uniform.

The assault left him with seizures, blackouts, headaches, insomnia and psychological problems.

Baker is now receiving $2,350 a month in military disability benefits, plus $1,000 a month in Social Security, but–adding insult to inury–regulations require that he give up his military job (including pension) when he started receiving disability.

The Pentagon initially said that Baker’s hospitalization following the training incident was not related to the beating. Later, officials conceded that he was treated for injuries suffered when a five-man MP “internal reaction force” choked him, slammed his head several times against a concrete floor and sprayed him with pepper gas.

“Even in light of all that happened to him,” his lawyer claims, “he still wants to serve his country.”

washingtonpost.com
NYC Squabbles Over Daily Trash Management

By SARA KUGLER
The Associated Press
Sunday, June 19, 2005; 1:56 PM

NEW YORK — In one week, New Yorkers throw out enough garbage to equal the weight of the Empire State Building, and there’s a battle brewing in City Hall to change the way the city gets rid of it.

Each day, 50,000 tons of trash are hauled through the streets and carted out of the city by a fleet of trucks, but Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to start shipping it away on barges and move some trash transfer stations out of low-income communities.

The effort has become a sticky, dirty heap of politics, with accusations of “environmental racism” and trash talk from all sides. One city official from a wealthy Manhattan district doesn’t want a trash transfer station stinking up his backyard, and some opponents to the mayor’s plan say it doesn’t address the overall need to reduce waste.

New York City has a scrappy history of waste disposal. Benjamin Miller, author of “Fat of the Land,” a history of urban waste and its disposal in New York over the past 200 years, describes it as lurching “from one crisis to another.”

“Garbage is always a troublesome thing in New York,” he said. “Other cities can sort of sprawl, keep moving out, and their transfer stations and landfills can be pushed out.”

But not here, where more than eight million people live in close quarters in a space that has no spare room around its edges. The eye-popping density also presents unique problems: where weekly trash pickups might be sufficient in most American cities, some New York neighborhoods see their curbs cleared three times a week.

Long ago, this city dumped its trash in the ocean, a practice halted in the 1930s. After that, garbage ended up in various landfills, including one on Rikers Island. In those days, city planners also used landfill to fill out nooks, crannies and inlets along the borders of the five boroughs, creating foundations for landmarks like LaGuardia Airport and Coney Island.

In 1948, the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island opened as a temporary solution to the city’s waste woes, but much to the dismay of residents there, the city kept carting its trash to Staten Island for more than 50 years. It closed in 2001, under a deal reached by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

The truck system that followed was also supposed to be temporary, but four years later, it is still being used, taking city waste to landfills in other states.

Bloomberg’s new plan _ backed by environmentalists and health groups _ proposes four waterside transfer stations in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens where barges would take away loads of trash. He says the plan would reduce pollution from truck exhaust, improve traffic on city streets and help low-income communities now stuck with trash transfer stations.

“You have to be fair,” Bloomberg said last week. “Let’s spread the pain, if you will, and spread the benefits _ everybody’s going to benefit from fewer trucks on the streets by using the waterway.”

But the City Council voted last week to block the mayor’s plan _ a revolt led by City Council Speaker Gifford Miller. His chief complaint: the Manhattan riverside station is located in his Upper East Side district, next to a park.

“Waste transfer stations do not belong in residential areas,” Miller said. “They do not belong where children run and play, they do not belong where our seniors take their afternoon stroll.”

Other City Council members who voted against Bloomberg’s plan said it fails to address recycling and waste reduction. This week a group of them released a new proposal that, among other things, creates a new office dedicated to those efforts. The alternative plan also suggests that the mayor’s proposed Upper East Side station be used only for recyclable paper.

The debate over that station has escalated into claims that opponents are trying to keep trash transfer points out of wealthier neighborhoods, penalizing minority communities.

“Far too long communities of color have carried that burden,” said Councilman Charles Barron, of Brooklyn. “It’s called environmental racism. We now have a chance to have environmental justice.”

Bloomberg has also accused the City Council Speaker, who is one of four Democrats vying to unseat him this November, of tossing campaign politics into the mess.

“We will go ahead with a well-thought out plan … not a plan made by somebody who’s looking at what might sell in an election,” Bloomberg said.

The mayor vetoed the council’s vote, and unless the parties reach a compromise in the next few days, the measure will head for an override effort. Bloomberg said he was optimistic he would prevail.

“We cannot continue to have certain communities shoulder all the burden here … and we can’t continue to run trucks down those streets and pollute the air,” he said. “Shame on us if that’s what we do.”

© 2005 The Associated Press

washingtonpost.com
FBI Failed to Hire Mideast Terror Experts

By JOHN SOLOMON
The Associated Press
Sunday, June 19, 2005; 9:33 PM

WASHINGTON — In sworn testimony that contrasts with their promises to the public, the FBI managers who crafted the post-Sept. 11 fight against terrorism say expertise about the Mideast or terrorism was not important in choosing the agents they promoted to top jobs.

And they still do not believe such experience is necessary today even as terrorist acts occur across the globe.

“A bombing case is a bombing case,” said Dale Watson, the FBI’s terrorism chief in the two years after Sept. 11, 2001. “A crime scene in a bank robbery case is the same as a crime scene, you know, across the board.”

The FBI’s current terror-fighting chief, Executive Assistant Director Gary Bald, said his first terrorism training came “on the job” when he moved to headquarters to oversee anti-terrorism strategy two years ago.

Asked about his grasp of Middle Eastern culture and history, Bald responded: “I wish that I had it. It would be nice.”

“You need leadership. You don’t need subject matter expertise,” Bald testified in an ongoing FBI employment case. “It is certainly not what I look for in selecting an official for a position in a counterterrorism position.”

In a development that has escaped public attention, FBI agent Bassem Youssef has questioned under oath many of the FBI’s top leaders, including Director Robert Mueller and his predecessor, Louis Freeh, in an effort to show he was passed over for top terrorism jobs despite his expertise. Testimony from his lawsuit was recently sent to Congress.

Those who have held the bureau’s top terrorism-fighting jobs since Sept. 11 often said in their testimony that they _ and many they have promoted since _ had no significant terrorism or Middle East experience. Some could not even explain the difference between Sunnis and Shiites, the two primary groups of Muslims.

“Probably the strongest leader I know in counterterrorism has no counterterrorism in his background,” Bald insisted.

The hundreds of pages of testimony obtained by The Associated Press contrast with assurances Mueller repeatedly has given Congress that he was building a new FBI, from top to bottom, with experts able to stop terrorist attacks before they occurred, not solve them afterward.

“The FBI’s shift toward terrorism prevention necessitates the building of a national level expertise and body of knowledge,” Mueller told Congress a year after the suicide hijackings, as lawmakers approved billions of new dollars to fight terrorism.

Despite the testimony of its managers, the FBI said it has fundamentally reshaped itself to ensure the field agents on the ground who work the cases have the necessary skills, training and background for fighting terrorism. It noted it hired or redeployed more than 1,000 agents to counterterrorism and hired an additional 1,200 intelligence analysts and linguists.

“We fundamentally changed the criteria for hiring special agents and intelligence analysts to ensure that we get the critical skills, knowledge and experience we need to address today’s threats,” Assistant Director Cassandra Chandler told the AP.

“New agents receive personalized training from Muslim leaders. Street agents and managers in every field office have gotten to know the Middle Eastern and Muslim communities in their territories and regularly attend training sessions sponsored by community leaders,” she said.

Daniel Byman, a national security expert who worked on both congressional and presidential investigations of terrorism and intelligence failures, reviewed the Youssef case for the court. Byman concluded the spurned agent is one of the government’s most-skilled terrorism fighters and that the FBI overall remains weak in expertise on the Middle East, terrorism and intelligence liaison.

“Many of its officers _ including those quite skilled in other aspects of the bureau’s work, lack the skills to work with foreign governments or even their U.S. counterparts,” Byman concluded.

“Knowing about counterterrorism would help a supervisor ensure a proper investigation and avoid missing important aspects of the case,” he said.

Watson, who oversaw the first two years of transformation, testified he could not recall a single meeting in the aftermath of Sept. 11 in which FBI leaders discussed the type of skills or training needed for counterterrorism.

Youssef’s lawyer, Steve Kohn, pressed further.

“What skill sets would they need to better identify, penetrate and/or prevent a future Osama bin Laden-style terrorist attack?” Kohn asked.

Watson answered: “They would need to understand the attorney general guidelines for counterterrorism and counterintelligence investigation.”

“Anything else?” the lawyer inquired.

“No,” Watson answered.

John Pikus, who held a key supervisory job during the reallocation of agents from traditional crime-fighting to terrorism, testified that the FBI did not create new screening standards to promote terrorism experts to its upper ranks.

“Strengthening up the criteria for selection,” Pikus answered when asked where the FBI was deficient in its terrorism hiring.

Pat D’Amuro, one of the FBI’s most-experienced senior managers in terrorism, testified that when he was brought to Washington to oversee the Sept. 11 investigation, eventually promoted to executive assistant director, he brought lots of agents with him from New York who had terrorism backgrounds.

But rather than conducting a systematic search for the bureau’s most talented Middle Eastern and terrorism agents worldwide, D’Amuro testified, he brought to Washington the agents he personally knew had worked successfully on al-Qaida and other terrorism cases.

He said that in later promotions, Middle East and terrorism experience was helpful but not mandatory, noting the FBI also must deal with terrorism from domestic sources and the Irish Republican Army.

“It could be a benefit. When you look for managers, you’re looking for people that can lead people, manage people, knows how to conduct an investigation, knows how to collect certain intelligence or information, you know,” he testified.

When asked if he had any formal terrorism training that justified his appointment as the No. 3 FBI official, Bald said, “It would have been on-the-job in the counterterrorism division.” Bald entered the counterterrorism division in 2003 after leading the FBI’s Baltimore office during the Washington sniper case.

The assistant Bald brought in to run the division last year gave a similar account.

“It’s a tremendous learning experience, the seat that I’m sitting in. You learn every single day about this,” Deputy Assistant Director John Lewis testified.

When asked whether he, as the FBI’s former counterterrorism chief, could describe the differences between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, Watson answered, “Not technically, no.”

He also said that his assertion a few years ago that bin Laden had been killed _ a declaration that conflicted with CIA assessments and fresh video evidence _ was not based on fact. “It’s my gut instinct,” he answered.

Youssef, the agent suing the bureau, was credited with improving relations with Saudi Arabia during the late 1990s as bin Laden’s threat grew and the bureau struggled to solve the case of the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing.

He received a special award from the intelligence community for meritorious work and was singled out by his managers for “continuous creativity and perseverance” in terrorism cases. Saudi officials said they regarded Youssef as the most skilled U.S. agent in conducting lie detector tests on Arabic-speaking suspects.

But after Sept. 11, Youssef repeatedly was passed over for top-level headquarters jobs in terrorism. Instead, he was offered same-rank positions in budgeting or exploiting intelligence from terrorism documents.

Freeh, the former FBI director who left that job three months before the terrorist attacks, testified that he believed Youssef should have gotten an important terror-fighting job in the post-Sept. 11 era

“I think, you know, given his experience, certainly his language, you know, domestically he would probably have a much more required role and be of greater help back at headquarters,” Freeh said.

One FBI supervisor, just-retired Agent Paul Vick, testified that Youssef had the “many skills that were badly needed” after Sept. 11 and the FBI’s failure to utilize him was “inappropriate and a waste of a very important human resource.”

___

On the Net:

FBI: http://www.fbi.gov

Justice Department: http://www.usdoj.gov

© 2005 The Associated Press