Criminal Investigations Still Needed for Architects of US Invasion of Iraq
An excellent suggestion…
Criminal Investigations Still Needed for Architects of US Invasion of Iraq
Repealing the AUMF recognizes the error of the Iraq War that began in 2003, but to acknowledge its true nature, we must go further.
by Dennis Fritz, Matthew Hoh, Lawrence Wilkerson, Coleen Rowley, Karen Kwiatkowski, Gregory Daddis
CommonDreams.org, Apr 12, 2023
The U.S. Senate repealing the 2002 Authorization for Military Force in Iraq was necessary and just. Still, that action should be viewed only as a first step in a national process of reckoning with and accounting for the consequences of the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Often identified as the worst foreign policy decision in United States history, the Iraq War was catastrophic for millions of Americans and Iraqis and cataclysmic for Iraqi society, regional stability and international law. The invasion and occupation are correctly acknowledged as a crime: a war commissioned on lies and a violation of the Nuremberg Principles. As men and women in military or federal government service at the time of the invasion, we’re compelled to remind others of the devastation this war has wrought to ensure that the US does not re-commit this sin.
The costs of the Iraq War are staggering. As veterans we know this all too well. Over 4,500 US servicemembers were killed and more than 30,000 wounded. At least 3,600 contractors lost their lives, all men and women who would have been wearing military uniforms in previous wars. Hundreds of thousands of veterans returned from Iraq and Afghanistan (for those who fought the war it is difficult to untie the two, as so many of us participated in both) physically and mentally destroyed. Suicide, as in all wars, looms large. Limited data by the Veterans Administration states that the suicide rates for Iraq veterans are four to 10 times higher than that of their civilian peers. This grim figure supports the age-old adage that only the dead have seen the end of war.
In the U.S., many Iraq veterans will tell you that they know more dead from suicide now than from combat.
The horrific cost to the Iraqi people is as hard to grasp as it is shameful to face. Credible estimates of the number of Iraqis killed since 2003 total one million. There is no known number of wounded; it must also total in the millions. The psychological scars run deep: More than half of the Iraqi population is believed to be living with PTSD and depression, while in 2021, nearly one in four Iraqis were refugees. For those of us who were there, these are some of the hardest memories to face.
As members of the military, our expectations of entering Iraq to help the people, or at least doing them no harm, as promised in the thankfully discredited doctrine of Counter Insurgency, were replaced with the visceral understanding that we were nothing more than agents of the war’s immoral and catastrophic provenance. While our experiences of the Iraq War vary, when taken together, the joint agreement that our willingness to serve our country was being used to conduct such unaccounted for and unjust harm to the Iraqi people defines our shared sense of betrayal.
A sentiment shared widely, as almost two-thirds of Iraq veterans believe the war was not worth fighting.
The signatories of this letter do not all share political or economic philosophies, but we are united in our astonishment at this war’s massive price tag. Invading Iraq cost the US $2 trillion directly. That’s nearly $9,000 for each taxpayer in the US. However, the Iraq War cannot be divorced from the Afghan War, the larger Global War on Terror or this century's militarism, which has seen Pentagon spending balloon from $331 billion in 2001 to $858 billion today. Including future veterans' care and interest payments, the long-term cost of these conflicts will total $8 trillion by 2050.
Dozens still perish every month in militant violence in Iraq in a seemingly unending war. VA hospitals in the US strain to keep up with a generation of shattered veterans. The war succeeded only in traumatizing millions; creating terror groups where there had been none; and instigating chaos and continual hostilities, while providing hundreds of billions of dollars to weapons manufacturers.
The Iraq War was based on lies that have brought unimaginable suffering to an entire nation and ongoing loss, grief and hardship to hundreds of thousands of American families. It was and is a great crime. And in our view, as men and women who participated in the war in one way or another, the greatest crime of all may be our nation’s inability to hold accountable those responsible for authorizing such atrocities and continuing to watch our government repeat its wars over and over again.
Repealing the AUMF recognizes the error of the war, but to acknowledge its true nature, we must go further. As veterans and former national security officials we call for criminal investigations of the authors of the Iraq War as the next steps in a national reckoning.
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
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I sure as hell haven't. They fucked up the last 20 years of my career life in the most spectacular fashion and rendered me impoverished for the rest of my life by their fucking actions... I'm one out of millions whose lives were royally fucked within the first year of these bastards' regime.
I don't care if they are dead before the process is complete, they're treachery HAS to be properly recorded and addressed.
Graves I'll be looking to piss on.
I think I should start a touring company that takes people around to the graves of traitors and war criminals to piss on. Might be pretty lucrative.
Could get messy. Of course this brings me back to that indelible memory of the chinese tour bus full of tourists pulled into a rest stop with vault 2 toilets. The driver parked and handed out rolls of toilet paper while the tourists squatted around the outside of the outhouses and did their business right there... I have many horror stories.
Yeah, some kind of sanitary system would have to be worked out. 
I'm sure that your Tombstone Tour will work out the kinks 
Cheney’s Multi-Million Dollar Revolving Door
As Bush Sr.’s secretary of defense, Dick Cheney steered millions of dollars in government business to a private military contractor — whose parent company just happened to give him a high-paying job after he left the government.
by Robert Bryce
Mother Jones / AUGUST 2, 2000
Ever since George W. Bush named him as a running mate, Dick Cheney has been all smiles. And why not? Cheney has led a charmed life. His political career included stints in the White House, Congress and the Defense Department. Then he went into the private sector and got rich.
But just how Cheney got rich deserves some scrutiny. As secretary of defense, Cheney oversaw one of the largest privatization efforts in the history of the Pentagon, steering millions of military dollars to civilian contractors. Two and a half years after Cheney left his federal job, he began cashing in on the very contracts that he helped initiate.
In 1992, the Pentagon, then under Cheney’s direction, paid Texas-based Brown & Root Services $3.9 million to produce a classified report detailing how private companies — like itself — could help provide logistics for American troops in potential war zones around the world. BRS specializes in such work; from 1962 to 1972, for instance, the company worked in the former South Vietnam building roads, landing strips, harbors, and military bases. Later in 1992, the Pentagon gave the company an additional $5 million to update its report. That same year, BRS won a massive, five-year logistics contract from the US Army Corps of Engineers to work alongside American GIs in places like Zaire, Haiti, Somalia, Kosovo, the Balkans, and Saudi Arabia.
After Bill Clinton’s election cost Cheney his government job, he wound up in 1995 as CEO of Halliburton Company, the Dallas-based oil services giant — which just happens to own Brown & Root Services. Since then, Cheney has collected more than $10 million in salary and stock payments from the company. In addition, he is currently the company’s largest individual shareholder, holding stock and options worth another $40 million. Those holdings have undoubtedly been made more valuable by the ever-more lucrative contracts BRS continues to score with the Pentagon.
Between 1992 and 1999, the Pentagon paid BRS more than $1.2 billion for its work in trouble spots around the globe. In May of 1999, the US Army Corps of Engineers re-enlisted the company’s help in the Balkans, giving it a new five-year contract worth $731 million.
To critics, this all adds up to classic revolving-door politics: Cheney’s work for Halliburton, they say, has allowed him to improperly profit off of actions he took and contacts he made while in government.
Continues…
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2000/08/cheneys-multi-million-dollar-revolving-door/
The Mad Tea Party
Trillions Lost is one thing. Millions of human beings, including more than 4,400 US servicemen and women, is another. All thanks to a REAL stolen election where SCOTUS decided 5-4.
Know your BFEE: They kill good soldiers like Col. Ted Westhusing for profit...
https://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x126094
OP from 2007. Busted links are on Internet Archive Waybac.
https://archive.org/
Shaking Hands: Iraqi President Saddam Hussein greets Donald Rumsfeld, then special envoy of President Ronald Reagan, in Baghdad on December 20, 1983.
Shaking Hands with Saddam Hussein:
The U.S. Tilts toward Iraq, 1980-1984
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 82
Edited by Joyce Battle
February 25, 2003
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/
Upwards of a million dead in Iraq, with no end in sight for the ongoing carnage.
Every time I see a commercial about wounded warriors I curse the war criminals for sending our soldiers to kill, die, and/or come home wounded in mind & body for a pack of lies and the greed & ambition of Big Oil and neocons deluded with their Project for a New American Century.
Know your BFEE: The Carlyle Group
https://upload.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=3454166
For the same reasons, I remember the Victims of War.
until they have one or both feet in the grave so they can spend most of their life enjoying the spoils and passing the fortune and hidden burden of death to their sweet and innocent offspring and so on and so on. They could care less if justice is finally served when they're 95 with a diaper on. Its no coincidence you see (even though few) more 80 year old super wealthy crooks in handcuffs than 40 year old ones.
If I can con my way into 100 million in the next year no matter the human cost and get prosecuted 35 years from now when Im 95 Ill plead guilty. Done had my selfish fun.
Know your BFEE: Like a NAZI
https://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x133897
Unfinished PNAC business:
“Boys go to Baghdad. Real men go to Tehran.”
Cheney became a billionaire (I think) from that war his portfolio made something like 3,800%
returns after we started that unneeded war in Iraq.
* Haliburton/KBR got God only knows how much in cost plus no bid contracts from the Iraq War
and under HW Cheney got the Pentagon to outsource jobs that the military used to do themselves.
... crisis in history*, let bin Laden walk away, millions and millions of dead, wounded, orphans, and homeless,
made Dick Cheney a billionaire, and provided God only knows how much money for right wing causes ..... for
the 1st 6 months we pumped Iraqi oil non stop and never metered it.
*
As Bush Sr.’s secretary of defense, Dick Cheney steered millions of dollars in government business to a private military contractor — whose parent company just happened to give him a high-paying job after he left the government.
by Robert Bryce
Mother Jones / AUGUST 2, 2000
Ever since George W. Bush named him as a running mate, Dick Cheney has been all smiles. And why not? Cheney has led a charmed life. His political career included stints in the White House, Congress and the Defense Department. Then he went into the private sector and got rich.
But just how Cheney got rich deserves some scrutiny. As secretary of defense, Cheney oversaw one of the largest privatization efforts in the history of the Pentagon, steering millions of military dollars to civilian contractors. Two and a half years after Cheney left his federal job, he began cashing in on the very contracts that he helped initiate.
In 1992, the Pentagon, then under Cheney’s direction, paid Texas-based Brown & Root Services $3.9 million to produce a classified report detailing how private companies — like itself — could help provide logistics for American troops in potential war zones around the world. BRS specializes in such work; from 1962 to 1972, for instance, the company worked in the former South Vietnam building roads, landing strips, harbors, and military bases. Later in 1992, the Pentagon gave the company an additional $5 million to update its report. That same year, BRS won a massive, five-year logistics contract from the US Army Corps of Engineers to work alongside American GIs in places like Zaire, Haiti, Somalia, Kosovo, the Balkans, and Saudi Arabia.
After Bill Clinton’s election cost Cheney his government job, he wound up in 1995 as CEO of Halliburton Company, the Dallas-based oil services giant — which just happens to own Brown & Root Services. Since then, Cheney has collected more than $10 million in salary and stock payments from the company. In addition, he is currently the company’s largest individual shareholder, holding stock and options worth another $40 million. Those holdings have undoubtedly been made more valuable by the ever-more lucrative contracts BRS continues to score with the Pentagon.
Between 1992 and 1999, the Pentagon paid BRS more than $1.2 billion for its work in trouble spots around the globe. In May of 1999, the US Army Corps of Engineers re-enlisted the company’s help in the Balkans, giving it a new five-year contract worth $731 million.
To critics, this all adds up to classic revolving-door politics: Cheney’s work for Halliburton, they say, has allowed him to improperly profit off of actions he took and contacts he made while in government.
Continues…
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2000/08/cheneys-multi-million-dollar-revolving-door/
“Money trumps peace.”
