JAG CENTRAL

From the NY Times, Senate Moves to Protect Military Prisoners Despite Veto Threat ("Defying the White House, the Senate overwhelmingly agreed Wednesday to regulate the detention, interrogation and treatment of prisoners held by the American military. The measure ignited a fierce debate among many Senate Republicans and the White House, which threatened to veto a $440 billion military spending bill if the detention amendment was tacked on, saying it would bind the president's hands in wartime. Nonetheless, the measure passed, 90 to 9, with 46 Republicans, including Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, joining 43 Democrats and one independent in favor. More than two dozen retired senior military officers, including Colin L. Powell and John M. Shalikashvili, two former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, endorsed the amendment, which would ban use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" against anyone in United States government custody."); 3 Fort Bragg Teachers Charged ("Three people who taught foreign languages at the Joint Special Operations Command Center at Fort Bragg were arrested on immigration charges, federal officials said. Two Indonesians, Nurkis Qadariah, 34, and Sayf Rimal, 37, were arrested on Tuesday and charged with possessing and using false documents. Another man, Ousmane Moreau, 38, of Senegal, was arrested on Monday and charged with being in the country illegally."); Reimbursement
For Gear to Protect GI's ("The Pentagon issued regulations for providing reimbursement for some combat equipment bought privately for use in Iraq and Afghanistan. The rules, effective immediately, were issued more than seven months after Congress required such a program be finalized. They allow military personnel and those who bought equipment for them to make claims of up to $1,100 for health, safety and protective gear bought from Sept. 11, 2001, to July 31, 2004."), and
More Prosecutions Likely To Stem From New Srebrenica Report:

The war crimes tribunal in Bosnia-Herzegovina said yesterday that it expected to increase the number of its prosecutions in connection with the 1995 Srebrenica massacre after the announcement on Tuesday that a list of names of more than 17,000 Bosnian Serb soldiers, police officers and officials involved in the killings had been completed by a government commission.

In November of last year, the Bosnian Serb authorities acknowledged responsibility for the Srebrenica massacre and apologized officially after years of playing down the extent of the violence that occurred in July 1995 and the expulsions of millions of people.

The turning over of the list to war crimes officials completes a two-year investigation by the Bosnian Serb government of the Srebrenica massacre. The panel said the list included 19,473 civilians and armed forces members, of whom 17,074 were named. The massacre left an estimated 8,000 people, mostly Muslim men and boys, dead in Europe's worst massacre since World War II.

A senior Bosnian Serb official familiar with the commission's work investigating the atrocity said he expected 90 people named on the list to be prosecuted by Bosnia's recently established war crimes court.

Leandro Aragoncillo, Ex-Marine Accused of Spying at White House (ABC News)

From the Washington Post, Spy Probe Widens to Years Suspect Was At White House:

The Justice Department is investigating whether a naturalized U.S. citizen from the Philippines stole classified documents while he worked in the office of Vice President Cheney and provided the information to opposition politicians in Manila, Bush administration officials said yesterday.

The possibility that Leandro Aragoncillo was passing the material while stationed as a U.S. Marine security official at the White House marks a dramatic expansion of the case against him and a former Philippine police official, Michael Ray Aquino. Both were arrested and charged in federal court in Newark last month with sending classified information obtained this year to the Philippines -- more than two years after Aragoncillo left the White House and went to work as an FBI intelligence analyst.

Officials from the White House, Justice Department and FBI declined to comment late yesterday, other than to confirm that Aragoncillo first went to work at the White House in 1999, when Al Gore was vice president. ABC News reported last night that Aragoncillo had admitted taking classified documents while he worked in Cheney's office. Officials with the FBI and the U.S. attorney's office in Newark declined to comment on the report.

Joseph Estrada, the former Philippine president who was forced from office four years ago by mass demonstrations, has acknowledged receiving documents from Aragoncillo while the suspect was still in the Marines. Estrada told a Philippine newspaper last month that Aragoncillo had passed material while visiting him at the Veterans Memorial Medical Center in Manila, where the former president was receiving treatment while being held on corruption charges from 2001 through 2003. Part of that stay would coincide with Aragoncillo's time in Cheney's office.

In other news from the Post, Senate Supports Interrogation Limits; U.S. Interrogator Charged ("A U.S. interrogator accused of threatening to sexually assault prisoners in Afghanistan has been charged, the Army said. Pfc. Damien M. Corsetti, an interrogator with the 519th MI Battalion at Fort Bragg, N.C., is the 15th soldier to face charges since the 2002 deaths of two detainees at Bagram Airfield."); and Pentagon Releases Repayment Rules.

From USA Today, Spying Suspect Worked at FBI, White House (regarding the alleged Marine Spy in the Post article above).

Categories: Espionage, Bosnia, War+Crimes, Detainee+Abuse, Fiscal+Law, Newspapers

Army BG Rhett Hernandez, Human Resources Center Commander, Reportedly Deciding Not To Punish AWOL IRR Soldiers (U.S. Army)

From USA Today, in one of their very few scoops, Army Not Punishing Absent Special Reserve Soldiers:

Seventy-three soldiers in a special reserve program have defied orders to appear for wartime duty, some for more than a year, yet the Army has quietly chosen not to act against them.

“We just continue to work with them, reminding them of their duty,” says Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, an Army spokesman.

The soldiers are part of the Individual Ready Reserve (IRR), a pool of about 110,000 inactive troops who still have contractual obligations to the military but are rarely summoned back to active duty. But an Army stretched thin by the demands of war in Iraq and Afghanistan began a phased call-up of 6,545 of those soldiers in June 2004.

About half have served. About one-fifth have been excused for reasons such as finances, family or health.

The Army has failed to reach 386 of the reservists, often because of invalid or outdated addresses or phone numbers. But Lt. Col. Karla Brischke, who supervises call-ups, says some reservists may simply be avoiding the orders.

Only one officer is among the 73 soldiers who either ignored their orders or refused to serve. Brischke says Army staffers keep calling and reminding them of “duty, honor, country” and their need to fulfill their obligations.

Hilferty says the Army hasn't acted in part because IRR troops have historically not been expected to serve. “It's sensitive because we understand they're different soldiers.”

The decision to declare these soldiers AWOL or a deserter is up to their commanding officer, Brig. Gen. Rhett Hernandez, the Army's personnel management director. He could not be reached for comment.

Failing to punish those who disobey an order “sets a bad precedent, especially for those in the IRR who have accepted the call to serve,” says retired major general John Meyer Jr., the Army's former chief of public affairs.

Categories: AWOL, Reserve, Newspapers

From the NY Times, Reimbursement Program for Troops Stalls:

The Pentagon has not completed guidelines for allowing soldiers, their families and charities to be reimbursed for some combat equipment they bought for use in Iraq and Afghanistan, a year after the passage of legislation calling for such a program.

The measure, which allows for groups and individuals to make claims of up to $1,100, called for the Department of Defense to set rules for a reimbursement program by February 2005.

The sponsor of the original legislation, Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, says he plans to introduce an amendment to a defense bill this week to take authority for the program from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and give it to military commanders in the field.

"We should not be sending our young men and women into harm's way less than as well prepared as their nation can prepare them and provide them with the kind of protection they deserve," Mr. Dodd said. "The Pentagon has never acted on this legislation despite the fact that it is the law of the land."

"It has been frustrating," he said. "And the problem still persists."

On Friday, a Pentagon spokeswoman, Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke, said in an e-mail message that Defense Department officials were "in the final stages of putting a reimbursement program together and it is expected to be operating soon." Colonel Krenke declined to discuss a reason for the delay.

Army surveys have shown that infantry members spend hundreds of dollars of their own money each year on gloves, boots, flashlights and other tools used in combat.

ANALYSIS: Soldiers often buy equipment other than that issued to them because it works better. For instance, most soldiers buy MiniMag or similar flashlights instead of the issue angle-head flashlight because it is more manageable and works better. These nickel-and-dime items add up after a while. Moreover, some soldiers had to buy their own body armor before deploying to Iraq because it wasn't fielded to their unit yet. (When I deployed to Kosovo, many of my pilots anted up for their own body armor.) On some level, that is simply a part of being a soldier, spending some money so you can be more effective. However, there's no excuse for a private first class spending $1500 on an interceptor body armor because his unit was shortchanged.

Moreover, a key principle of fiscal law is that money appropriated by Congress must be spent and spent in the manner it was earmarked. The fact that a year has passed and the services have not implemented a plan to spend that money is unacceptable.


Former Army Chaplain James Yee, Who Faced Espionage Charges at Guantanamo (USA Today)

In other news from the Times, In New Book Ex-Chaplain at Guantanamo Tells of Abuses:

James J. Yee, a former Muslim chaplain at the Guantánamo Bay detention center, says in a new book that military authorities knowingly created an atmosphere in which guards would feel free to abuse prisoners.

Mr. Yee, 37, is a former Army captain and a West Point graduate who was arrested and imprisoned in 2003 on suspicion of espionage. It was a case that, in the end, proved groundless, to the embarrassment of the Pentagon.

Mr. Yee was ultimately deemed guilty of minor administrative charges involving adultery and the presence of pornography on his computer, and given an honorable discharge. But those convictions, too, were later dropped.

The book, "For God and Country: Faith and Patriotism Under Fire," offers Mr. Yee's first public comments on what occurred at the camp while he was there.

In the book, to be published this week by PublicAffairs, Mr. Yee writes that Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, the prison's commanding officer - who would later become Mr. Yee's chief antagonist in pressing suspicions of espionage against him - regularly incited anger toward the prisoners with emotional slogans delivered to the troops.

Mr. Yee writes that when General Miller visited the prison, he would tell the guards sternly, "The war is on." That remark and similar comments, Mr. Yee writes, were designed to let soldiers know they were operating in a combat environment where it was understood that rules protecting detainees were relaxed and instances of mistreatment would be overlooked.

"Soldiers know that when you are in combat there's considerable leniency in the rules," Mr. Yee said in an interview, "and the leaders, including General Miller, wanted to put them in that frame of mind."

He said that General Miller told him that he remained deeply angry over the loss of military friends who were killed in the attack on the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.

The general, who is now assigned to duty in the Pentagon, declined through a spokesman to comment on the book.

Mr. Yee says the guards were constantly reminded of the Sept. 11 attacks by General Miller and others, and they "retaliated in whatever way they could" against the detainees.

Categories: Fiscal+Law, Guantanamo, Espionage, Detainee+Abuse, Newspapers