Rumsfeld the War Criminal: Snowflakes on Mass Graves

Of course Rumsfeld is a war criminal, but then the entire Executive branch of the US govt. has been in "war criminal" mode since the CIA was invented to carry out secret wars, executions, torture, terrorism & etc. for the Big Corporations & other elite power-brokers.

Rumsfeld is of particular interest in the American story because he spans the Vietnam/Nixon era through the CIA presidency of Bush 41 to the current cowboy regime of oil millionaires... meaning he has his hands in the blood of many nations, from Central America to Indonesia to Iraq & Afghanistan.

Should he be prosecuted at an International War Crimes Tribunal? Sure. If so, will the CIA directors, the Bush family and Richard Cheney be there with him? Not as long as the oil companies control a great portion of the economy...

The Nation
Dec. 14, 2006

Quote

"Did I write a secret memo saying that I don’t believe in this thing anymore? You bet! But you can’t let the public in on that and just cut-and-run. Jeez, how would that look for the Rummy Legacy?" — Donald Rumsfeld, Executive Henchman

by Robert Scheer

What the heck, I’ll pop over to Iraq one last time for a meet-and-greet with the kids I’ve sent to war. Thank goodness I’m not going to have to do this again, though; I was born an upbeat guy, but it does get to you knowing that the thing is such a bloody mess and yet more of them are going to be sacrificed.

Did I write a secret memo saying that I don’t believe in this thing anymore? You bet! But you can’t let the public in on that and just cut-and-run. Jeez, how would that look for the Rummy Legacy? First I go over there back in 1984 and kiss Saddam Hussein’s derriere in order to get him to take on the ayatollahs in Iran, and now I leave Iraq in the hands of those Iraqi Shiites who were trained in a decade of exile in Iran. Those are the insurgents I’m worried about, not those Sunni guys who used to be with us. Should I have tried to convince young Bush that Hussein could be brought over to our side? Probably.

Yeah, sure, the guy’s a killer but he could have been our killer — again. Did I know about his killing those Shiite villagers back in 1982? Hey, I was fully in the loop, but that was then and this is now, so let him hang. Only, why did they have to limit his trial to crimes that I knew all about before we shook hands? Some darn columnist will dig up that photo and point out that if Hussein is guilty of war crimes, then maybe I’ve got blood on my hands. Phooey.

I’m not going down that negative road that finished off old Bob McNamara’s legacy. What a disappointment — this is a guy who could sell us the Vietnam War and then blows it by suddenly getting all squishy about the truth when he’s long retired. Jeez Louise, he was once my role model. No secretary of defense ever sold a losing war better. They think I’ve got a frozen smile — just look at those old pictures of Mac flying into Saigon and giving an upbeat assessment in the midst of carnage. Talk about whistling past the graveyard. And he stayed on the "We’re about to turn the corner" message right to the end when LBJ fired him, just like Georgie Porgie did me.

But then he made his fatal mistake. Am I talking about being silent on Nam for the next 20 years while he hid out as head of the World Bank like Paul Wolfowitz? Heck no. It’s smart to focus on saving the entire world when you’ve messed up just a part of it. No, where Mac went wrong was after he left the bank and wrote that memoir and did that "Fog of War" documentary, babbling on about how he was involved with getting over 58,000 Americans and 3.4 million Indochinese killed and how maybe he could be judged a war criminal. Sheesh! Never, never, use those words when you’re talking about an American statesman, for God’s sake — it’s downright unpatriotic. Worse, when you’re talking about yourself as a possible war criminal and you happen to be one of the most famous Americans. Well, you are just subverting the dreams of ambitious young Americans for generations to come. You have no right to let down kids that way. They need heroes, and for better or worse we are all they’ve got.

Who else are they going to look up to? Malcontents? Like the mothers of kids who’ve died and are now questioning what it was all about? Criminy! Take the medals and shut up! I’m not going to let those kids down, so I put that brave smile back on and go back to Iraq and pretend once again this is all about preventing another 9/11. Hey, I’m a pro and I know what they need to hear: "We feel great urgency to protect the American people from another 9/11 or a 9/11 times two or three."

Does it make any sense when we always knew that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11? Or when bin Laden is still on the loose and his protectors in the Taliban are on the rise in Afghanistan? Heck no. Do I believe it? Who cares? That’s what I learned from working for young George and what his old man’s Iraq Study Group doesn’t get: Never let the facts get in the way of a good "war on terror" story.

The U.S. war of aggression against Iraq stands in clear violation of the U.N. Charter and the Nuremberg Charter. The U.S. Constitution describes U.S. ratified international treaties such as these, as the "...Supreme Law of the Land...".

Many top Nazi officials were convicted at Nuremberg for many of the same crimes which the Bush League has committed. Many of these top leaders were sentenced to death by hanging.

You are way off the mark. I am not a fan of the Democrat Party, as they are deeply complicit in many of the most serious crimes of the Bush regime. Unless they can demonstrate some accountability, they will also fade into irrelevance, in my opinion.

by Tim Harper
Toronto Star

WASHINGTON — U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld conceded yesterday that fears he could be charged as a war criminal may keep him from a conference in Germany set for next week.
A lawsuit filed by the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights with German prosecutors accuses Rumsfeld and other senior U.S. officials with war crimes for their part in the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal.

Until Rumsfeld was asked about the possibility at a news briefing, the Pentagon had maintained it was merely a scheduling conflict which could prevent him from attending the Munich Conference on Security Policy, an annual event which draws top defense officials from all over the world.

German law allows charges to be laid in war crimes and human rights cases regardless of the nationality of the accused, but because the United States is not a member of the International Criminal Court, charges cannot be laid in this country.

"It’s something that we have to take into consideration,’’ Rumsfeld said.

"Whether I end up there we’ll soon know. It’ll be a week and we’ll find out.’’

The Center for Constitutional Rights filed a complaint last Nov. 30 naming 10 U.S. officials, including Rumsfeld.

This week, they added the name of newly minted Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales to the complaint.

The Center has won important legal challenges on the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay and has also filed suit against former attorney-general John Ashcroft for his role in the arrest and detention in Syria of Canadian Maher Arar.

Center president Michael Ratner said Rumsfeld’s threats not to attend the conference are merely a bid to bully the Germans into dropping the case.

"We believe that Donald Rumsfeld cannot escape accountability for his alleged crimes," he said.

Last night, on CNN’s Larry King Live, Rumsfeld revealed that he twice offered his resignation to U.S. President George W. Bush when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke last spring.

As the Democrats took control of the House of Representatives and were on the verge of taking over the Senate, George W. Bush announced Wednesday that Donald Rumsfeld was out and Robert Gates was in as Secretary of Defense. When Bush is being run out of town, he knows how to get out in the front of the crowd and make it look like he’s leading the parade. The Rumsfeld-Gates swap is a classic example.

The election was a referendum on the war. The dramatic results prove that the overwhelming majority of people in this country don’t like the disaster Bush has created in Iraq. So rather than let the airwaves fill up with beaming Democrats and talk of the horrors of Iraq, Bush changed the subject and fired Rumsfeld. Now, when the Democrats begin to investigate what went wrong, Rumsfeld will no longer be the controversial public face of the war.

Rumsfeld had come under fire from many quarters, not the least of which was a gaggle of military officers who had been clamoring for his resignation. Bush said he decided to oust Rumsfeld before Tuesday’s voting but lied to reporters so it wouldn’t affect the election. Putting aside the incredulity of that claim, Bush likely waited to see if there would be a changing of the legislative guard before giving Rumsfeld his walking papers. If the GOP had retained control of Congress, Bush would probably have retained Rumsfeld. But in hindsight, Bush has to wish he had ejected Rumsfeld before the election to demonstrate a new direction in the Iraq war to angry voters.

Rumsfeld’s sin was not in failing to develop a winning strategy for Iraq. There is no winning in Iraq, because we never belonged there in the first place. The war in Iraq is a war of aggression. It violates the United Nations Charter which only permits one country to invade another in self-defense or with the blessing of the Security Council.

Donald Rumsfeld was one of the primary architects of the Iraq war. On September 15, 2001, in a meeting at Camp David, Rumsfeld suggested an attack on Iraq because he was deeply worried about the availability of "good targets in Afghanistan." Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill reported that Rumsfeld articulated his hope to "dissuade" other nations from "asymmetrical challenges" to U.S. power. Rumsfeld’s support for a preemptive attack on Iraq "matched with plans for how the world’s second largest oil reserve might be divided among the world’s contractors made for an irresistible combination," Ron Suskind wrote after interviewing O’Neill.

Rumsfeld defensively sought to decouple oil access from regime change in Iraq when he appeared on CBS News on November 15, 2002. In a Hamlet moment, Rumsfeld proclaimed the United States’ beef with Iraq has "nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil." The Secretary doth protest too much.

Prosecuting a war of aggression isn’t Rumsfeld’s only crime. He also participated in the highest levels of decision-making that allowed the extrajudicial execution of several people. Willful killing is a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, which constitutes a war crime. In his book, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, Seymour Hersh described the "unacknowledged" special-access program (SAP) established by a top-secret order Bush signed in late 2001 or early 2002. It authorized the Defense Department to set up a clandestine team of Special Forces operatives to defy international law and snatch, or assassinate, anyone considered a "high-value" Al Qaeda operative, anywhere in the world. Rumsfeld expanded SAP into Iraq in August 2003.

But Rumsfeld’s crimes don’t end there. He sanctioned the use of torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, which are grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and thus constitute war crimes. Rumsfeld approved interrogation techniques that included the use of dogs, removal of clothing, hooding, stress positions, isolation for up to 30 days, 20-hour interrogations, and deprivation of light and auditory stimuli. According to Seymour Hersh, Rumsfeld sanctioned the use of physical coercion and sexual humiliation to extract information from prisoners. Rumsfeld also authorized waterboarding, where the interrogator induces the sensation of imminent death by drowning. Waterboarding is widely considered a form of torture.

Rumsfeld was intimately involved with the interrogation of a Saudi detainee, Mohamed al-Qahtani, at Guantánamo in late 2002. General Geoffrey Miller, who later transferred many of his harsh interrogation techniques to Abu Ghaib, supervised the interrogation and gave Rumsfeld weekly updates on his progress. During a six-week period, al-Qahtani was stripped naked, forced to wear women’s underwear on his head, denied bathroom access, threatened with dogs, forced to perform tricks while tethered to a dog leash, and subjected to sleep deprivation. Al-Qahtani was kept in solitary confinement for 160 days. For 48 days out of 54, he was interrogated for 18 to 20 hours a day.

Even though Rumsfeld didn’t personally carry out the torture and mistreatment of prisoners, he authorized it. Under the doctrine of command responsibility, a commander can be liable for war crimes committed by his inferiors if he knew or should have known they would be committed and did nothing to stop of prevent them. The U.S. War Crimes Act provides for prosecution of a person who commits war crimes and prescribes life imprisonment, or even the death penalty if the victim dies.

Although intending to signal a new direction in Iraq with his nomination of Gates to replace Rumsfeld, Bush has no intention of leaving Iraq. He is building huge permanent U.S. military bases there. Gates at the helm of the Defense Department, Bush said, "can help make the necessary adjustments in our approach." Bush hopes he can bring congressional Democrats on board by convincing them he will simply fight a smarter war.

But this war can never get smarter. Nearly 3,000 American soldiers and more than 650,000 Iraqi civilians have died and tens of thousands have been wounded. Our national debt has skyrocketed with the billions Bush has pumped into the war. Now that there is a new day in Congress, there must be a new push to end the war. That means a demand that Congress cut off its funds.

And the war criminals must be brought to justice - beginning with Donald Rumsfeld. On November 14, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Lawyers Guild, and other organizations will ask the German federal prosecutor to initiate a criminal investigation into the war crimes of Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials. Although Bush has immunized his team from prosecution in the International Criminal Court, they could be tried in any country under the well-established principle of universal jurisdiction.

Donald Rumsfeld may be out of sight, but he will not be out of mind. The chickens have come home to roost.

Marjorie Cohn, a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, is president of the National Lawyers Guild, and the U.S. representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists. Her new book, Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law, will be published this spring by PoliPointPress.

November 9, 2006

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I R A Q G A T E
The ’Old School’ on the ’Pirates’: by William Bowles
Patriots and Profits: By PAUL KRUGMAN

Could George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and maybe Alberto Gonzales all end up sucking poison gas?

That, apparently, is a concern now being taken seriously by Attorney General Gonzales, who is quietly working with senior White House officials and friendly members of Congress to do what murderous dictators in Chile, Argentina and other bloodthirsty regimes have done as their future in office began to look uncertain: pass laws exempting them from prosecution for murder.

At issue is a growing legal threat of the president and other top administration officials facing prosecution for violations of the U.S. War Crimes statutes, which since 1996 have made violation of Geneva Conventions adopted by the U.S. violations of American law, too.

Gonzales knows the seriousness of this threat. As he warned the president, in a January, 25, 2002 "Memorandum to the President" (published in full in the appendix of Barbara Olshansky’s and my new book, The Case for Impeachment), "It is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges based on Section [the US War Crimes law]." In another part of that same memo, Gonzales notes that the statute "prohibits the commission of a `war crime’" by any U.S. official, with a war crime being defined as "any grave breach of" the Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War" or of the Geneva Convention’s Article 3. That article extends protection to combatants in other than official wars or military roles. Gonzaqles, in that memo, also pointedly notes that the punishments for such violations, under U.S. law, in the event that mistreated captives die in custody, "include the death penalty."

What has the White House and Bush’s mob attorney, Gonzales, worried is the decision last month by the U.S. Supreme Court in Hamden v. Rumsfeld, which expressly established that the president had "violated" the Geneva Convention’s Article 3 by arbitrarily deciding that captives in the so-called War on Terror and in Afghanistan would not be considered POWs, and would not be accorded protection under the Geneva Convention. This determination by a 5-3 majority of the US Supreme Court could easily be the basis for the prosecution Gonzales warned about.

Of course, the president could not be indicted for this offense while in office. The Constitution provides a protection against that. But he could be indicted once his term ends. Meanwhile, other administration personnel, including the vice president, have no such protection against indictment even while in office.

The very fact that Gonzales, according to a report in today’s Washington Post, has been ’quietly approaching" Republican members of Congress about passing legislation exempting Americans involved in the "terrorism fight" from war crimes prosecution suggests how worried Bush and his subordinates really are.

It’s interesting how this has become the tactic of choice for the criminals in the White House. When Bush was caught violating the clear provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by authorizing spying by the National Security Agency on Americans’ communications without a warrant, the administration went to Congress to seek legislation retroactively authorizing the crime. Since the president was exposed as having summarily and unconstitutionally invalidated some 800 laws passed by Congress through the use of what he calls "signing statements," an astonishing breach of the separation of powers, the administration has been seeking a new law in Congress that would in effect grant that power to presidents, again retroactively. Now Bush is apparently hoping to get the same compliant Republican-led House and Senate to backdate a law exempting him and his cohorts from punishment under the War Crimes statute-a law, ironically, passed almost without objection by both houses of a Republican-led Congress in 1996.

Of course, this legal dodge might not work. Not only could a future prosecutor seek to have such a law ruled illegal itself (after all, the U.S. is a signatory of the Geneva Conventions, making them legally binding anyhow), but because the U.S. is a signatory of the Geneva Conventions prohibiting torture in any form, the president and his subordinates could also be charged as war criminals by other nations-particularly if it were determined that the U.S. was unwilling or legally unable to prosecute.

That could make things a little claustrophobic for administration personnel once they leave office.

No doubt Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et all would like to continue their world travels once they leave government "service." For one thing, there’s lots of money to be made on the internation speaking circuit. Lots more can be made by doing international business consulting. But if there is a threat of arrest and prosecution by prosecutors in countries like Spain, Germany or Canada, such travels would pose a huge risk. Similar fears have kept former National Security Director and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger pretty much housebound since a near detention in Paris on war crimes charges a few years back.

Gonzales’ anxious behing-the-scenes scuttling about in the halls of Congress in an effort to save his boss’s neck also suggests that the White House is getting worried about the November election. After all, if they thought they had a secure grip on Congress through November 2008, why the sudden rush to get a bill through undermining the War Crimes statute now? Maybe Bush is afraid that if he waits until November, he’ll be dealing with a Democratic House and/or Senate, which would be unlikely to grant him such legal protection.

There is a delicious irony in watching this law-and-order, let-’em-fry president and his tough-guy VP, attorney general and defense secretary, resorting to the same kind of dodgy legal tactics that they accuse convicted killers (and terrorists) of using in an attempt to avoid the gallows.

Chances are their strategy will work, at least in the U.S. But at least it’s entertaining to watch.

"Snowflakes" were dictated memos, often just one line, demanding an answer to a question or a study on a thought that occurred to him, and they carried the weight of his office on them. Pentagon workers complained that when a snowflake came in, they were expected to drop whatever they were working on — no matter how urgent — and provide an answer to the boss by his deadline, always noted at the bottom.

According to Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman, Rumsfeld issued 29,302 of them during his six years at the Pentagon.

On Friday, he issued the 29,303rd snowflake.

"This is my final snowflake," said Rumsfeld, who was replaced Monday as defense secretary by Robert Gates.

"As surprising as this may seem to those who may have been buried in the deluge, there are many people in the department who have never received a snowflake. A few souls have even requested one.

"This snowflake is especially for them. It’s message is, perhaps typically, to the point: Thank you!"

"The men and women of this department have worked long hours to accomplish a multitude of missions and to keep the American people safe. You have played important roles during times of great consequence for our country. For that you have my respect and appreciation. I will treasure our time together," he wrote.

Rumsfeld notes that there are still outstanding snowflakes on which their recipients may be trying "to run out the clock."

STAR INVESTIGATION
By Carol Ann Alaimo
Arizona Daily Star

Tucson, Arizona Published: 12.17.2006

Midtown strip mall that should have housed the best of the best served as Corruption Central in Tucson.

Two military recruiting stations sit side-by-side there, one run by the Army, the other by the Marines. Between them, a total of seven recruiters were on the take, secretly accepting bribes to transport cocaine, even as most spent their days visiting local high schools.
They had help from several more recruiters at an Army National Guard office, where one recruiter was said to be selling cocaine from the trunk of his recruiting vehicle.

Together, these dozen or so recruiters formed the nucleus of one of the FBI’s biggest public corruption cases, the sting known as Operation Lively Green, which unfolded in Southern Arizona from 2002-2004 and was made public last year.

Many of the drug-running recruiters remained on the job, with continued access to local schools, for months — and often, years — after FBI agents secretly filmed them counting cash next to stacks of cocaine bricks, the Arizona Daily Star found in a months-long probe of court records and military employment data.

Some were still recruiting three years after they first were caught on camera running drugs in uniform. Most have pleaded guilty and are to be sentenced in March. Some honorably retired from the military.

There is no suggestion in court records that the recruiters were providing drugs to students.
What they did between FBI drug runs isn’t known because they weren’t under constant surveillance, the FBI said. For example, in the middle of the cocaine sting, one of the recruiters was arrested by another law-enforcement agency in an unrelated drug case, accused of transporting nearly 200 pounds of marijuana on Interstate 19, court records show.

Military recruiting officials say the corruption was not widespread. They also say they kept these recruiters on the job because they either didn’t know they were under investigation, or were told by the FBI to leave the suspects alone so as not to jeopardize the sting’s outcome.
Some Tucson parents and school officials, contacted by the Star about the results of the paper’s research, said students should not have been left exposed for so long to recruiters known by the FBI to be involved in cocaine-running.

"I don’t like the thought of someone involved with drugs having access to my child, and I don’t know anything about it and the school doesn’t know anything about it," said Kathy Janssen, who has a 15-year-old son at Tucson High Magnet School, the city’s largest high school. "High school students are very vulnerable."

This isn’t the first time the FBI has come under criticism in the Lively Green case. Allegations of sexual misconduct by undercover informants also have dogged the case and could result in reduced punishment for the recruiters and dozens of other defendants.

SCHOOLS

At a press conference to unveil the case last year, the FBI announced that many Lively Green defendants were military members. Agents didn’t say that recruiters were involved.
A Phoenix-based FBI spokeswoman said the agency can’t say much at this point about the Lively Green probe because it’s still in progress.

Special Agent Deb McCarley did say the FBI generally performs risk assessments before deciding to keep suspects who work in public positions on the job during undercover probes.
"We recognize the range of ethical issues that inherently arise in the course of our undercover investigations," McCarley said in an e-mail.

"We have sound policies in place" to address such dilemmas, she said, and "this case has been no exception."

Some high schools in Tucson Unified, Flowing Wells Unified and Marana Unified school districts, and in Amphitheater Public Schools, were visited by one or more of these recruiters on a regular or occasional basis, according to military recruiting officials. Schools in other districts may have had visits as well, but precise records no longer are available in some cases, officials said.

One TUSD Governing Board member was incensed to hear the recruiters remained on the job so long.

"It’s ludicrous to me that the FBI would leave these people in place and allow them onto our high school campuses," Judy Burns said.

"If they were going to do that, they should have been monitoring them constantly."
Monica Young, who has two children attending TUSD high schools, agreed.

"It is appalling that recruiters who were known to be involved in such activity were allowed on any school campus," she said.

Legal expert Stephen Saltzburg, who teaches criminal procedure at George Washington University, said it’s entirely possible that the Tucson recruiters were running drugs in their free time and still functioning normally on the job.

Once the FBI made the decision to leave them in place at local schools "one would hope they would be watching that very carefully," he said.

ETHICS

From a military standpoint, it’s especially egregious that recruiters took part in the cocaine runs, experts say.

"The military definitely views recruiters as persons in a special position of trust," said Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, in Washington, D.C.
Recruiters are supposed to meet high standards to promote an honorable image of the military, Fidell said. If court-martialed, they probably would be punished more harshly than non-recruiters, he said.

The willingness of Tucson recruiters to run drugs was clear to FBI agents from the start of the Lively Green sting, according to agent testimony at the court-martial of a Davis-Monthan technical sergeant — a non-recruiter — convicted in the Lively Green case in June.
In fact, it was a recruiter who caused the FBI to set up the sting in the first place, FBI Special Agent Adam Radtke said.

That recruiter, Radtke said, was former Army National Guardsman Darius W. Perry, who pleaded guilty Thursday in U.S. District Court.

Radtke said the sting got started in late 2001, when the FBI received numerous complaints that Perry, who worked out of the Guard’s East Side recruiting office, was taking bribes to fix the military aptitude test scores of new recruits.

The FBI put an undercover informant in place to check it out. As the FBI plant was paying Perry to fix a test score in the parking lot of a Tucson restaurant, Perry opened the trunk of his recruiting vehicle and offered to sell part of a kilo of cocaine, Radtke said.

"Perry basically introduced the crime to us," the agent testified.

Perry couldn’t be reached for comment. His federal court file, including the name of his attorney, has been sealed by the court. The Arizona Daily Star has filed a legal motion to have the case unsealed, and the action is pending.

Perry, 42, and another former Army National Guard recruiter, Mark A. Fillman, 56, were the first to offer their drug-running services to undercover informants who posed as Mexican drug lords during the sting, Radtke said.

The sting was set up so participants could make money in two ways — by agreeing to help transport cocaine and by finding others to do so.

The Tucson recruiters, trained to sell people on the military, often used those skills to recruit for the drug ring, helping the sting to mushroom, court records show.

One Army recruiter, Rodney E. Mills, 40, brought in six people. Perry persuaded six others, all Army National Guard members, to join, his plea deal said.

In one case not mentioned in the plea agreement, Perry is said to have recruited a Nogales woman named Leslie Hildago, then in her early 20s, to join the drug ring after he had recruited her to join the National Guard.

Hildago’s lawyer, Richard Bacal of Tucson, said he is "not going to deny" that’s what took place, but said he can’t elaborate because of the plea bargain Hildago signed.

If recruiters used data from recruiting rolls to solicit people for drug running, that’s particularly offensive, said military law expert Scott Silliman, a former senior lawyer for the Air Force who now is a law professor at Duke University.

Such recruiters "took advantage of their positions to commit crime," Silliman said.
Another Tucson recruiter, former National Guard member Demian F. Castillo, 35, got his own younger brother — John M. Castillo, 31, — to join the drug ring, court records show.

The younger Castillo, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection port inspector, agreed to wave through two vehicles he believed were loaded with cocaine at the Mariposa Port of Entry in Nogales, in exchange for $19,000. He, too, pleaded guilty.

PROSECUTION

Of the more than 60 Lively Green defendants who have pleaded guilty so far, 10 were Tucson military recruiters. Between the 10, they pocketed a total of $180,600 in bribe payments, court records show.

Five worked at the Army’s Midtown recruiting office: Mills, Sheldon L. Anderson, 27; Derreck J. Curry, 30; Ronricco M. Allen, 36; and Jason E. Kitzmiller, 27.

Two Marine recruiters whose office was next door to the Army recruiters also pleaded guilty: James M. Clear, 26, and Jared A. Wright, 28.

National Guard recruiters who pleaded guilty include Perry, Fillman and Castillo. A fourth National Guard recruiter, Raul F. Portillo, 34, was identified by the FBI as a suspect but was never charged. Portillo is the recruiter arrested during the FBI sting by another police agency on marijuana trafficking charges. He is believed to have fled to Mexico.

In May, Perry retired honorably from the military, six months before the FBI arrested him. Fillman also retired honorably in May 2003, two years before he was charged.

In two cases, the Arizona Army National Guard gave suspected or convicted recruiters general discharges under "honorable" conditions.

One went to Castillo, the recruiter who brought his brother into the drug ring.

The lawyer for the Arizona Army National Guard, Col. Richard Palmatier, said Castillo resigned from the Guard a day before his guilty plea, which kept his personnel file free of information about the crime.

Portillo, the former recruiter believed to be in Mexico, also received a general discharge under honorable conditions, even though he was wanted in Santa Cruz County — and still is — on the unrelated drug charges. Palmatier said Guard officials didn’t know about those charges, and even if they had, Portillo wasn’t convicted so the case couldn’t be used against him upon discharge.

Portillo was stopped on northbound I-19 in a vehicle filled with pot in July 2003, and is thought to have left the country to escape prosecution, said Santa Cruz County Attorney George Silva. Portillo couldn’t be reached for comment.

Silva was astonished to hear the National Guard gave Portillo a military discharge that includes the word "honorable."

"That is shocking. It’s absolutely amazing," he said.

WHAT NOW

What happens next with the recruiters and other Lively Green defendants is in the court’s hands.

Each defendant who pleaded guilty faces the possibility of up to five years in prison. But all have signed plea bargains that say their sentences will be determined by their willingness to cooperate with prosecutors and testify against others, if needed.

In their plea deals, none of the defendants was charged with drug trafficking, which has higher potential penalties. Instead, they were charged with bribery, conspiracy and extortion for the cash they accepted.

How much prison time they get — if any — also may be influenced by the allegations of misconduct that have surfaced in the Lively Green probe.

The complete extent of misconduct has never been publicly revealed, but according to witness testimony at the D-M court-martial in June, there was an incident in October 2002 in which informants posing as drug dealers hired hookers after a drug run to a Las Vegas hotel.

The FBI informant paid the prostitutes to have sex with several men who later became defendants, witnesses said.

At one point, they said, a prostitute who was drunk and high appeared to pass out and one of the FBI informants performed lewd acts over the woman’s face while someone else took photographs.

The informant involved later destroyed the photos, said the defense lawyer in the D-M court-martial case.

A Tucson lawyer and former federal prosecutor said it’s "absolutely probable" that Lively Green defendants will get a break on their sentences because of the misconduct.

"Any time you have credible allegations of misconduct, it is going to impact the resolution of a case," said A. Bates Butler III, who prosecuted drug cases and other federal cases from 1977 to 1981 as U.S. attorney for the District of Arizona.

"Jurors don’t like misconduct," Bates said, so prosecutors sometimes will try to salvage such cases by offering plea deals to lesser charges so the cases don’t get to trial.

Military recruiting officials said they removed the corrupt recruiters once they learned of the crimes, or when they got the go-ahead from the FBI to do so.

"We suspended the soldiers from recruiting duties as soon as we were notified of their involvement," which often was the same day they pleaded guilty, said Douglas Smith, a spokesman for Army Recruiting Command at Fort Knox, Ky.

Military officials say the criminal acts of Tucson’s recruiters are regrettable but not the norm.

"Allegations of recruiter misconduct are rare," considering the thousands of recruiters on the job nationwide, said Janice Hagar, a Marine Corps recruiting spokeswoman. "This was an isolated incident."

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