Reason no. 1827 why it's a bad idea to go to war behind leaders whose first interest is compensating for their tiny penises

Iraqi interpreter Ali Kanaan suffered hearing loss and burns to more than a third of this body as a result of a 2006 bombing while he was working as an interpreter for the U.S. military. He says he was pressured into taking an insurance settlement he did not think was adequate. [L.A. Times caption]

by Ken

It's hard to believe that stupidity and deceit practiced at this level don't rise to the level of a crime.

I know we've said it, and said it, and said it. But we are paying a horrendous price for pretending that it's okay to allow the crimes and malfeasances of the Bush regime go unaccounted for. President Obama's nice-sounding rhetoric about wanting "to look ahead" is, I"m sorry to have to say, nonsense. Allowing past blunders to go unexamined -- and, yes, unpunished where that applies -- all but guarantees that those same blunders will be repeated, and compounded.

The indications are that not only are we going to continue paying, but the price is going to continue going up. I think most Americans still have little idea the extent to which the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were planned by ideologically blinded dimwits, liars, and wholly unaccountable thugs.

I think people have some idea that there were some crossed wires in the planning for the Iraq war. If you read the first couple of Bob Woodward "privileged insider" in (a politer way of saying designated propagandist for) the Bush regime, you can see then-Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld terrorizing his nonpolitical subordinates in the Pentagon (the political people, of course, understood that they were involved in planning a political, not a military, undertaking) to produce a war plan that matched what Chimpy the Prez and especially "Big Dick" Cheney were insisting on: something lean and quick involving a bare minimum of troops -- especially relative to what seasoned military commanders thought necessary.

Of course their "war on the cheap" came close to bankrupting us, or maybe did bankrupt us, because nobody involved in the process of planning the invasion seems to have felt responsible for figuring out how to pay for it. Possibly they believed some of the rhetoric we heard about Iraqi oil revenues paying for the whole fine adventure. Ha ha! Or maybe they just understood all they had to do was keep the expense out of the regular budget, and Congress could be counted on to keep passing "supplemental" appropriations, and never mind how those would be paid for.

This was all quite monstrous, but the real monstrosity was the failure to think through the real-world contingencies, starting with the question that you or I would probably have thought the second most basic, right have the question of how we would manage the invasion: What do we do afterward? The degree to which the Rumsfeld brain trust was unprepared in every way for every single thing that happened is staggering.

I'll assume that DWT are familiar with the basic outlines of that catastrophic failure, and are aware that in fact in the State Department they actualy were trying to plan for what would happen after the invasion. And we're also aware of just how far Cheney and Rumsfeld to keep the State Department entirely out of the planning and execution, sneering at those sissies' pussyfooting and thumb-sucking. The great innovation of fighting a war with mercenaries called "contractors" was all DoD, and all the ways in which that was completely out of control, literally so in the matter of policing the behavior of the contract employees -- that's all the handiwork of Rumsfled's geniuses' innovation of fighting a "secret" war. . And of course it kept costing us extra billions of dollars we didn't have.

What's new, at least to me, is the continuing unveiling of yet more ways in which the Cheney-Rumsfeld war plan ignored considerations you would have thought basic. My attention was directed to the third part of series by a team of Los Angeles Times reporters ("Injured war zone contractors fight to get care" -- following "Foreign interpreters hurt in battle find U.S. insurance benefits wanting" and "Foreign workes for U.S. are casualties twice over") and the story is in almost equal measures shocking and nauseating.

It concerns the contractors, but not the glamorous ones like the Blackwell and KBR ones, and this last installment concerns interpreters in particular. Maybe it's not all that surprising that Rumsfeld's Robots never stopped to think that our forces in Iraq would need to be able to communicate with the locals, especially once the adventure switched from invasion to occupation. Americans generally have a habit of forgetting that not everybody in the world speaks American, and for some reason our defense establishment seems especially resistant to this fact of life, as witness the glee with which it has expunged most of our linguistically qualified military personnel under DADT. "It's only them gays that speak furrin languages," I can hear the generals saying.

Eventually, of course, something had to be done, and the Pentagon went the contractor route. But the contractors who are the subject of the LAT reports weren't the regime-favored soldiers of fortune who were paid enormous salaries and benefits and excused from what appears to be any kind of oversight. No, these people, and the interpreters in particular, were not well paid, were treated even worse, lied to repeatedly while they were being killed an maimed in our service, and then left pretty much to fend for themselves. We have simply walked away from our obligation to those people.

The detail is horrifying and stomach-turning, so I'll refer you to the Times for that. But for the overall picture, here's just the start of T. Christian's Miller's Part 3.

FORGOTTEN WARRIORS

Foreign interpreters hurt in battle find U.S. insurance benefits wanting

For Iraqis and Afghans killed or injured while working for the U.S. military, benefits have often fallen far short of what was promised to them and their families.

By T. Christian Miller
December 18, 2009

After the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. military discovered that rebuilding the country and confronting an insurgency required a weapon not in its arsenal: thousands of interpreters.



To fill the gap, the Pentagon turned to Titan Corp., a San Diego defense contractor, which eventually hired more than 8,000 interpreters, most of them Iraqis.



For $12,000 a year, these civilians served as the voice of America's military, braving sniper fire and roadside bombs. Insurgents targeted them for torture and assassination. Many received military honors for their heroism.



At least 360 interpreters employed by Titan or its successor company were killed between March 2003 and March 2008, and more than 1,200 were injured. The death toll was far greater than that suffered by the armed forces of any country in the American-led coalition other than the United States. Scores of interpreters assisting U.S. forces in Afghanistan also have been killed or wounded.



An insurance program funded by American taxpayers was supposed to provide a safety net for interpreters and their families in the event of injury or death. Yet for many, the benefits have fallen painfully short of what was promised, an investigation by the Los Angeles Times and ProPublica found.



Interviews, corporate documents and data on insurance claims show that:



* Insurers have delayed or denied claims for disability payments and death benefits, citing a lack of police reports or other documentary evidence that interpreters' injuries or deaths were related to their work for the military. Critics, including some U.S. Army officers, say it is absurd to expect Iraqis and Afghans to be able to document the cause of injuries suffered in a war zone.



* Iraqi interpreters taken to neighboring Jordan for medical treatment say they were pressured to accept lump-sum settlements from insurers, rather than a stream of lifetime benefits potentially worth more, and were told that if they didn't sign, they would be sent back home -- a potential death sentence for Iraqis associated with the American war effort.



* Interpreters who have immigrated to the United States as refugees have ended up penniless, on food stamps or in menial jobs because their benefits under the U.S. insurance program are based on wages and living costs in their home countries. Payments intended to provide a decent standard of living in Iraq or Afghanistan leave the recipients below the poverty level in this country.

Now Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld are apparently all off the hook. It's not their problem. Somehow, even though it wouldn't directly help the victims, these disclosures would feel more palatable if Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld and a bunch of their co-conspirators were languishing in dungeons. It would at least be a statement of acceptance of moral responsibility, a necessary prelude to accepting legal responsibility.

You feel bad for President Obama, with all the problems he has inherited from the Bush regimistas. But it's truly his problem now., and by now he's lost the window of opportunity for blaming it all on the Bushfolk.

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