So the Americans decided to test the commandos in early October by sending them as part of a mixed U.S.-Iraqi force to regain control of Samarra, north of Baghdad. On the day the commandos were set to go, their headquarters was hit by a car bomb, with dozens of casualties. Adnan’s troops moved out anyway, a few hours later. They fought well in Samarra and, using their own local intelligence, captured 38 suspected insurgent leaders.
The commandos next moved into Mosul in mid-November, after local police there had been shattered by the insurgents. Coffman accompanied them into battle. On Nov. 14, he and the Iraqi commandos were caught in a well-prepared ambush. They fought for more than four hours; four of the commandos were killed and 38 wounded, but they held their ground. Coffman was shot in one hand, but with the other, he kept firing his M-4 rifle and then, when he ran out of ammunition, an Iraqi AK-47.
Coffman was still wearing a heavy bandage on his hand when we visited Adnan’s headquarters. His thumb and two joints were shattered in the Mosul fight. U.S. military doctors tried to evacuate him to Germany, but he refused. The Iraqi general looks over at his American adviser and says he’s a brave soldier. “In the Mosul battle, he stood shoulder to shoulder with my men.” It’s obvious he could not pay a higher compliment.
As one of the commentors notes, beyond the inspirational content of this story is the fact that it happened last year but wasn’t reported on until recently. Perhaps it’s a sign that Iraq is being pushed to the forgotten story department as things turn around, just like Afghanistan was.
Haven’t heard about any abuses of the Patriot Act recently? It’s not because no one is looking. The Patriot Act requires the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General to collect complaints about alleged civil liberties abuses and to put out a report every six months cataloging the findings. The first one of these reports made front-page news a few years ago when the press failed to understand the difference between allegations of abuses and actual cases of abuses; the New York Times, for example, accidentally reported the former as the latter. When it became clear that the allegations were unfounded, the story quickly fell out of the media spotlight.
These days, the DOJ OIG report comes and goes with no fanfare or press attention. Why? Because the DOJ isn’t finding much in the way of abuses, and isn’t finding anything at all related to the Patriot Act.
The biggest problem with the “Patriot Act” (a name that ranks with “Homeland Security” for fascist imagery) has always been that it was the typical “if there’s a problem all we need is more laws! : What we really needed was to fix broken agencies, not to reward their failures.