BULLY BOY PRESS & CEDRIC'S BIG MIX -- THE KOOL-AID TABLE
CELEBRITY IN CHIEF BARRY O HAS OFFERED ONE BOMB AFTER ANOTHER SO YOU HAVE TO WONDER WHY PEOPLE ARE STILL BUYING TICKETS? IN HIS LATEST HUSTLE & FLOW PRODUCTION KNOWN AS "HEALTH CARE REFORM," HE'S GIFTING BIG BUSINESS WITH BILLIONS BY MAKING IT AGAINST THE LAW FOR ANY AMERICAN NOT TO HAVE INSURANCE. BUT THAT'S NOT ENOUGH FOR BARRY O.
FORCING ALL AMERICANS TO BUY INSURANCE ISN'T ENOUGH, SO HE'S ALSO ATTACKING THE ILL. TODAY HIS MINIONS IN CONGRESS VOTED (51 FOR, 41 AGAINST) CUTTING MEDICARE BENEFITS.
THE ECONOMY IS IN THE TOILET AND BARRY O'S ATTACKING THE HOMEBOUND AND THEIR HOME CARE.
REACHED FOR COMMENT, BARRY O INSISTED, "WHAT I'M DOING IS RIGHT. AND IT'S AMERICAN! OR INDONESIAN! OR KENYAN! ONE OF THOSE COUNTRIES HAS IT OR DOES IT OR MAYBE THEY JUST DO IT IN ONE OF THE 57 STATES THAT MAKE UP THE UNITED STATES? I DON'T KNOW BUT I HAVE TO PUT ON MORE LIP GLOSS AND GET READY FOR ANOTHER MAGAZINE PHOTO SHOOT. IT'S EITHER DISNEY KIDS OR PLAYGIRL TODAY."
FROM THE TCI WIRE:
Starting with NPR's The Diane Rehm Show, the second hour where the panelists are Abderrahim Foukara (Al Jazeera), James Kitfield (National Journal) and Barbara Slavin (Washington Times) which was a wealth of stupidity and lies. So many lies, so little time. Let's start with Barbara.
Barbara, grab your passport and, yes, Annie Grab Your Gun, and get your ass over there. Over where? Where ever it is from one moment to another that Barbra 'knows' Osama bin Laden is. Take your ass, take your gun and get the hell over there, Big Girl. Reality, Barbara Slavin doesn't know where Osama bin Laden is -- a point Diane Rehm should have made -- but it isn't it interesting that Barbara's claims support further war? And isn't that really the point of your claims, Barbara? You really want to be the next Judy Miller? Really? And what about you, Diane? You going to keep letting guests claim to know where Osama is and use that 'knowledge' to launch a verbal attack on a country? You going to do that? And delude yourself that you've informed the public? How very, very sad.
James Kitfield, I have heard repeatedly how I hurt your feelings when I pointed out that you needed to learn speak. Well boo-hoo cry baby. This time you actually finished a few sentences. But maybe you should return to your stammering half-sentences? You don't know what the hell you're talking about as usual. There's reality and then there's James Kitfield's reality. The paying off Sunnis (Sahwa, the "Awakenings," the "Sons Of Iraq") was not about getting people "off the fence." That's a bold face and ignorant lie. Then-US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker and then-top US Commander in Iraq General David Petreaus testified publicly to Congress in April 2008. Where the hell were you, Kitty? What did they say? They said the US paid the Sahwa so that they would stop attacking American military equipment and US service members (they put the emphasis on military equipment in their testimony to the House and Senate). People who are attacking the US military equipment and US service member are not "on the fence." They have made a choice. You can agree with the choice or disagree with it but they are not "on the fence." Try knowing something before you open your mouth.
It was the third Friday show where Iraq was not addressed (in fairness, last Friday was a canned special and not the roundtable). Diane will claim otherwise. No, Iraq popped up as a 'historical' to compare Afghanistan to. Iraq itself was never discussed. Except for the last thirty seconds when Abderrahim Foukara was supposed to provide an 'update' -- in 30 seconds. As he spoke vaguely of whether "elections are going to happen or not" the audience was likely confused if Diane Rehm's show is their primary news source.
Diane Rehm listeners who hear only her show have no idea what's happened for two weeks now in Iraq. And when James Kitty Litter and others are lying about 'success' in Iraq, it damn well matters.
Diane and her guests need to grasp FAILED STATE is the only term for Iraq. FAILED STATE. Now Diane's listeners would know that if they knew there were not going to be January elections. But that topic has NEVER been addressed and the final 30 seconds Diane tossed to Abderrahim Foukara were confusing at best as he attempted to sum up the problems and, honestly, didn't do a very good job. But, in fairness to him, you can't in thirty seconds. You can't update her audience in thirty seconds. The last time The Diane Rehm Show discussed Iraq (a discussion is more than 30 seconds) -- FOUR FRIDAYS AGO -- the listeners were told that elections were a go. What were they told. Let's drop back to the November 13th snapshot for a reminder of what listeners of Diane's show were told:
Susan Page: Roy Gutman, I know that you were reporting from Iraq last month. This week we hear that Iraq's Parliament finally has approved a law for its election in January. There had been a kind of stalemate before that.
Roy Gutman: Well there had been and it was a very damaging stalemate. If they hadn't approved the law by this point then you begin to have to predict the country going downhill rather quickly. Uhm, had they approved it a month ago, you could have said Iraq is almost heading towards a normalcy despite all of the violence. This kind of muddled middle that took a long time to decide actually is nevertheless huge progress. This election, uh, is in a way is going to create a new Parliament. There will be what they call open lists -- every parliamentarian or every person running for a seat uh will be named before the elections so it's possible for people to find out who they are and rather they have dual citizenship. You know I heard while I was there that as many as 70% of the Iraqi -- of the current Iraqi Parliament has dual citizenship. Many of them Iranian-Iraqi dual citizenship. So that-that part will end and it looks like -- they have an independent election commission, they run elections that I think, in comparison with Afghanistan, certainly in comparison with Iran, are going to look good, very clean. It's possible that this election could make a real big difference.
Is that possible? Not currently. There will be NO January elections. Diane's audience still doesn't know that, even after the 30 second update today. But there will be NO January elections. None. That's all fallen apart. Iraq is a FAILED STATE. It may hold elections at the end of Februrary, it may do it in March. It may do it later. But the reality is these elections were supposed to be held in December, mid-year Nouri kicked them back to January and the US wasn't alarmed by that. The Parliament and Nouri are legally no longer in office February 1st. By the Constitution, their terms are over. But they will remain in office, in violation of the Constitution, because they couldn't get it together to meet their Constitutionally mandated deadline. That's reality. It makes Iraq -- forget being ranked the second most corrupt state currently -- a FAILED STATE. When you can't follow your own Constitution for elections, when you can't meet a simple election deadline, you are a FAILED STATE.
And when your show tells listeners that Iraq elections are a go four Fridays ago and then they aren't a go, you do a damn update. In four weeks, you've got more than enough time to do an update. If you don't make the time for it, that's telling something about you and what passes for journalistic standards on your program.
FAILED STATE. The only term for it and though Diane Rehm avoids it, the US State Dept is in the midst of a major spin operation. Tariq al-Hashemi vetoed the law that Roy Gutman was discussing above. As one of the three members of the presidency council (he's one of the country's two vice presidents), he has that right (not explained in the 30 seconds on Diane's show today). The response to the veto from Parliament (not touched on at all) was to offer a counter-proposal which stripped seats from Sunnis and gave them to Kurds and a few of Iraq's minority population (ethnic and relegious). al-Hashemi is not pleased, nor are Sunnis. At present, the UN and Iraq's independent election commission (also not discussed on Diane's show today) say elections might be able to happen at the end of February or the start of March if Iraq can get a law in place.
Yesterday, the US State Dept's Rachel Schneller contributed "Avoiding Elections At Any Cost" at the Council of/on/for Foreign Relations. In this piece of spin, Schneller tries to stamp Happy Faces all over the disarray:
But the derailing of the election law may not be as bad as it sounds. The version approved by the governing council actually could have triggered greater instability in Iraq. Not only could corruption and fraud call the results and a new Iraqi government into question--even if Iraqi elections are free, fair, and uncontested--the new election law could lead to troubling divisions over oil revenues. The law has created conditions for even greater Kurdish control over Kirkuk and oil resources in northern Iraq. Other oil-rich regions of Iraq, such as the largely Shia south, will also have a basis to agitate for oil revenues to flow to regional governments. With the Iraqi central government still relying on oil for more than 90 percent of its national budget, the long-term viability of the country is called into question even if elections signal short-term success. The Sunni minority in Iraq, facing ever more desperate political and economic conditions in Iraq, is likely to resort to increasingly desperate measures to ensure survival as they face another round of elections where they could lose further seats in parliament.
Schneller calls for the US to stop pressing Iraq to put through an Iraq law. Schneller calls for? A US State Dept employee calls for the US to stop doing something?
Are you laughing? How stupid do they think everyone is? The State Dept knows they have no power on this issue (Iraqi MPs tried to block US Ambassador to Iraq Chris Hill from the Parliament in November) but they need to spin it and along comes Rachel Schneller to 'advocate' for the US not to 'pressure' when, in fact, the US has no power to pressure on this issue as has been repeatedly demonstrated in the last weeks.
Is it a good thing, as Schneller argues in her spin, that the election law has not yet gone through? If this were October, it might be. But this is December. And Iraqi elections are Constitutionally mandated to take place in January. That's not blaming al-Hashemi for any of this. He has the right to veto and he used that right and did so, according to his public stated remarks, for valid reasons: Concerns that Iraq's refugee community was being under-represented. He did what he did and he's stated why he did it. But to spin this, as the State Dept is attempting, as a good thing is a HUGE STRETCH to the point that the truth just broke apart.
FAILED STATE. Iraq's installed government always knew that elections had to take place no later than January. That's why they were supposed to take place in December. After the elections take place, it will take weeks for the ballots to be counted and weeks for process to go through -- as has happened with every election held in Iraq since the start of the 2003 war. This is known. It is known that the Parliament and the Prime Minister's term expires at the end of January 2010. Is known and was known. And yet the Constitution is going to be 'bent' (thwarted) and al-Maliki will get to serve additional days. How many? Who knows. But everytime you treat your highest law of the land as something you can ignore, you set a dangerous precedent.
It is a FAILED STATE and the State Dept needs to stop embarrasing itself by sending Rachel Schneller out to spin it. There is no way to spin the Constitutional crisis -- that's what it is -- that Iraq's currently going through. That's true if Iraq's passes a law tomorrow. They are in a Constitutional crisis. They have disregarded their Constitution. That's the reality.
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Saturday, December 05, 2009
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THIS JUST IN! HE'S DEMENTED!
BULLY BOY PRESS & CEDRIC'S BIG MIX -- THE KOOL-AID TABLE
WHAT'S THAT SMELL?
OLD MAN CROTCH?
OH IT'S EMPTY SACK GREG MITCHELL COMING OUR WAY.
GREG MITCHELL IS THE ALWAYS SEXIST AND INCREASINGLY INSANE MAN CURRENTLY DISGRACING EDITOR & PUBLISHER. HOW BAD IS HE? SUNDAY, THIRD WILL AWARD HIM "LIAR OF THE WEEK" BECAUSE EVEN HE CAN'T BE THAT STUPID.
IN THE MEANTIME, GREGERS KEEPS STICKING HIS HANDS DOWN HIS PANTS IN SEARCH OF MORE OF HIS OLD MAN CROTCH SMELL WHILE PRETENDING TO BE A REPORTER.
HIS LATEST DEMENTED CRAP BEGINS:
It's gotten remarkably little coverage so far -- perhaps because no "terrorist" angle -- but we're now catching up with case of an Iraq war vet (pictured left) now captured and suspected of killing two of his fellow servicemen near Fort Drum where they all served. Joshua Hunter fled to Ohio.
IF YOU MISSED GREGERS OPENING (MAYBE YOU WERE HOLDING YOUR NOSE), HE WAS ATTEMPTING TO SAY THE FORT HOOD MURDERS GOT COVERAGE BECAUSE OF THE CRY OF 'TERRORISM!'
YES, HE TRULY IS A LIAR.
LONG BEFORE THE SHOOTER WAS REVEALED, THE FORT HOOD MASSACRE WAS NEWS WITH CONSTANT AND REPEATED UPDATES AND GREGERS CAN CHECK WITH AP ON THAT. AS FOR THE AFTERMATH OF COVERAGE? IT HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE FACT THAT THERE ARE SO MANY WITNESSES. SO MANY SAYING WHO THE SHOOTER WAS.
IT ALSO HAS TO DO WITH THE SHEER NUMBER OF PEOPLE KILLED -- AND HAS GOTTEN ROUGHLY THE SAME AMOUNT OF COVERAGE AS A SCHOOL SHOOTING WOULD.
BUT GREGERS HAS TO PIN THE COVERAGE OFF ON SOME ALLEGED ANTI-MUSLIM BIAS BECAUSE HE LIVES IN HIS OWN PATHETIC WORLD WHERE FREAKS APPLAUD HIM FOR PLAYING WHAT BOB SOMERBY WOULD CALL SHIRTS AND SKINS. YEP, GREGERS IS SERVING UP 'MY SIDE IS SMARTER!' WHILE DEMONSTRATING HOW HE'S INCREDIBLY STUPID.
GOOGLE: IRAQ VETERAN CHARGED WITH MURDER. YOU GET OVER A HALF MILLION RESULTS. HERE'S THE FIRST PAGE:
Mom befriends wife of Iraq war veteran charged with murder - The ...
Nov 26, 2009 ... Mom befriends wife of Iraq war veteran charged with murder. Published: Thursday, November 26, 2009. No comments posted. ...www.pottsmerc.com/articles/2009/11/26/.../srv0000006916972.txt - Cached
3 Charged With Murder in Death Of Iraq Veteran Near D.C. Club ...
3 Charged With Murder in Death Of Iraq Veteran Near DC Club - Three men were charged yesterday with first-degree murder in the slayi : Encyclopedia.com.www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1P2-40630.html - Cached
Soldier's invisible war: Iraq vet charged with attempted murder ...
Aug 6, 2009 ... Soldier's invisible war: Iraq vet charged with attempted murder ... An estimated 20 percent of Iraq war veterans suffer from post-traumatic ...www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/08/06/accused.soldier.../index.html - Cached
Iraq veteran charged with murder of Rice athlete - Democratic ...
4 posts - 3 authors - Last post: Apr 10, 2007Ronald Andrew Johnson Jr., 23, of College Station, was charged Thursday afternoon with murder in the stabbing of Jonathan Bailey during a ...www.democraticunderground.com › Discuss - Cached - Similar
Soldier's invisible war: Iraq vet charged with attempted murder ... - Aug 7, 2009Iraq Vet's Lawyer: He Fired In Self-Defense In Shooting Over Noisy ... - Jan 2, 2009Homeless Iraq & Afghan war veteran: "People come back from war ... - Jan 21, 2008At least 121 American veterans have killed someone or been charged ... - Jan 13, 2008
More results from democraticunderground.com »
Iraq: 2 U.S. Soldiers Charged With Murder - CBS News
Jun 30, 2007 ... Iraq: 2 U.S. Soldiers Charged With Murder. Soldiers Accused Of The Premeditated Murder Of Three Iraqis; President Karzai Condemns Raid On ...www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/06/.../iraq/main3001561.shtml - Cached - Similar
3 Charged With Murder in Death Of Iraq Veteran Near D.C. Club ...
Three men were charged yesterday with first-degree murder in the slaying of an Iraq war veteran early Sunday near a Northwest Washington nightclub.truxtoncircle.org/redirect.php?id=lk86 - Cached
Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles - Series ...
Jan 13, 2008 ... The Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and ... Pierre, S.D.: “Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress. ...www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/us/13vets.html - Similar
Global Grind - Decorated War Veteran Charged With Attempted Murder ...
Aug 9, 2009 ... Those words are now the daily mantra many Iraq war veterans live. .... Veteran LA police detective charged with murder (AP) ...globalgrind.com/.../Decorated-War-Veteran-Charged-With-Attempted-Murder-of-Wife/ - Cached
La Puente Iraq veteran arrested on suspicion of murder ...
Nov 19, 2009 ... Two arrested, one charged with murder in stabbing death of stepfather ... Chavira, a veteran of two tours in Iraq, was taken to the hospital ...www.sgvtribune.com/crime/ci_13826877 - Cached
Iraq veteran convicted in Colorado murder of fellow soldier
Nov 26, 2008 ... Two serving soldiers and veterans of Iraq were charged over two drive-by murders and one attempted murder that took place between May and ...www.wsws.org/articles/2008/nov2008/murd-n26.shtml - Cached - Similar
WHY HASN'T SOMEONE SUSPECTED OF STABBING GOTTEN MORE ATTENTION? COULD BE BECAUSE THERE ARE SO MANY CRIMES. COULD BE BECAUSE HE'S A SUSPECT AND THE WORLD'S NOT AWARE OF HUNDREDS OF WITNESSES. BUT GREGERS JUST 'KNOWS' IT'S ALL SOMEHOW ANTI-MUSLIM. HE 'KNOWS' IT BECAUSE IT MAKES HIM FEEL BETTER AND SMARTER. BY THE WAY, GREGERS, COULD YOU POINT US TO YOUR INDEPTH COVERAGE OF THE MURDER OF MARIA LAUTERBACH? YOU KNOW HER, RIGHT? SERVING IN THE MILITARY. PREGNANT. DISAPPEARS. FOUND DEAD IN THE BACKYARD OF THE MAN SHE ACCUSED OF RAPE. FOUND DEAD IN A HOLE AND BADLY BURNED. HIS WIFE COMES FORWARD TO TELL THAT HER HUSBAND ADMITTED KILLING MARIA. HE FLEES THE COUNTRY AND ENDS UP CAUGHT FINALLY IN MEXICO. WHERE'S YOUR IN DEPTH ON THAT STORY, GREGSTER?
THAT'S WHAT WE THOUGHT. GO THUMP YOUR SUNKEN CHEST SOME MORE OLD MAN, ALL WE SEE SMELL IS THE STINK WAFTING OFF YOU.
FROM THE TCI WIRE:
Starting with the topic of counter-insurgency, war on a native people, Monday, David Price explained in "Human Terrain Systems, Anthropologists and the War in Afghanistan" (CounterPunch):
Today, in Iraq and Afghanistan, anthropologists are being told that they're needed to make bad situations better. But no matter how anthropological contributions ease and make gentle this conquest and occupation, it will not change the larger neocolonial nature of the larger mission; and most anthropologists are troubled to see their discipline embrace such a politically corrupt cause.Human Terrain Systems is not some neutral humanitarian project, it is an arm of the U.S. military and is part of the military's mission to occupy and destroy opposition to U.S. goals and objectives. HTS cannot claim the sort of neutrality claimed by groups like Doctors Without Borders, or the International Committee of the Red Cross. HTS's goal is a gentler form of domination. Pretending that the military is a humanitarian organization does not make it so, and pretending that HTS is anything other than an arm of the military engaging in a specific form of conquest is sheer dishonesty.
The American Anthropological Association's annual meeting started yesterday in Philadelphia and continues through Sunday. Today the association's Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the US Security and Intelligence Communities issued their [PDF format] "Final Report on The Army's Human Terrain System Proof of Concept Program." The 74-page report is a blow to War Criminals and their cheerleaders who have long thought that the social science could be abused or that the social sciences were psuedo sciences. It was in December 2006 when Dumb Ass George Packer raved over Dumb Ass Montgomery McFate and her highly imaginative and fictional retelling of both her childhood and her current work which Packer identified as "Pentagon consultant" working on Cultural Operations Research Human Terrain. Packer was jizzing in his shorts and not even warnings from other anthropologists ("I do not want to get anybody killed") could sway him.
By the time she showed on up the October 10, 2007 broadcast (link goes to October 11, 2007 snapshot) of NPR's The Diane Rehm Show, Monty was being billed as "senior advisor to the US Army." Monty lied throughout the broadcast and most infamously when she insisted that Afghans or Iraqis can tell the difference between "a lethal unit of the US military and a non-leathal unit of the US military". David Price of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists offered reality during the broadcast by raising the issue of David Rohde's "Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones" (New York Times) and explaining it "talks about an anthropologist I think named Tracy and that's the only name that's given. So anthropologists need to be transparent about who they are and who they're working for. . . . But I worry how transparent the program is if the people who are doing it aren't being self-identified? Now the story says it's being done for security reasons and so on. But if you go to the New York Times story and look at the nifty, little video they have -- you know backing the story, it's very strange because they don't show the anthropologist -- they intentionally withhold the person's identity. Yet they show all these people who are talking to the anthropologist which of course they're doing so at some personal risk, one would assume, in Afghanistan. And I worry about any sort of program where there's a one-way mirror that's going on."
Susan Page: . . . there was a New York Times article last week which actually prompted us to do this show today. And it did talk about this anthropologist named Tracy, but it wasn't clear to me, Montgomery McFate maybe you know, whether her [full] name was just not disclosed to the New York Times article, or if her full name is not being disclosed to the people she's interatcing with in Afghanistan. Do you know -- do you know the answer to that.
Monty [quick intake and slow first word -- always a clue Monty's inventing -- seriously, that was evident when she was a child]: Her name was held from the New York Times story and in other media that's come out of Afghanistan at her own request.
Susan Page: But does she give her [full] name to the Afghanis that she's talking with.
Monty: Yes, she does.
Remember that moment in Annie Hall when Annie (Diane Keaton) and Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) are in line for movie tickets and the man behind them can't shut up about Marshall McLuhan and Alvy confronts him? And pulls McLuhan over? And McLuhan declares, "I heard what you were saying. You know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you got to teach a course in anything it totally amazing."? Well a moment like that happened to Monty with her being the blowhard who got corrected. Monty was swearing that the woman identified herself and gave her full name and did this and did that and blah blah blah. And then David Rohde, who wrote the New York Times article, joined the conversation.
David Rohde: Um, she was transparent with them. I don't think she gave her full name, I think she does identify herself as an anthropologist. I saw her briefly, but I don't know what she does at all times. She personally, um, actually chose to carry a weapon for security that's not a requirement for members of the team, I've been told. And she wore a military uniform which would make her appear to be a soldier, um, to Afghans that she wasn't actually speaking with.
Susan Price: And so you think Aghans knew that she wasn't a soldier even though she was wearing a military uniform and carrying a weapon? Or do you think that they just assumed that she probably was?
David Rohde: I would think that they assumed that she was.
Poor stupid Monty. Counter-insurgency is war on a people. It has been used in many wars and it is not a tactic of peace nor is it anything an ethical person should take part in. That is not a controversial statement to anyone old enough to remember Vietnam or any war further back. But, in the US, whether you want to cite Spengler or make comparisons to Sisyphus, we are a culture put together each dawn with very little historical recall. Which is how Monty McFate and others have been able to market their inhumane acts as a 'science.' Others include A Problem From Hell: Samantha Power. And, of course, Sarah Sewall who played Peppermint Patty to Monty's Marci on Charlie Rose in 2007. For the record, those three and many other counter-insurgency gurus advised Barack Obama during his presidential campaign and/or advise him today. (Yes, despite the fact that Monty's sister was a government spy who spied on peace groups. Or maybe because of.) These War Criminals use their training and the science but do not adhere to any of the ethics of their profession which does include, but it not limited to, full disclosure.
The report released today notes, "Responding to concerns raised about this program, in the fall of 2007 the AAA's Executive Board released a statement on HTS [Human Terrain Systems], in which it expressed its disapproval and concluded the program to be 'an unacceptable application of anthropological expertise'." The report states that by April of this year there were 417 HTS employees. (There have been some reductions since then.) Of that group, only six had PhD in anthropology and only 47 others had masters in the field. The report notes, "It is important to indicate, based on this, that despite the attention given to the central role of anthropology in the program, the great majority of present HTS employees have been trained and hold degrees in other fields of the social sciences and elsewhere." The report notes:
Training in "research methods" for HTTs is notable insofar as it combines what appears to be field-based social scientific data collection (e.g. use of ethnography of the anthropological sort) with instrumental or soft power goals of "shaping the environment." This raises a number of concerns regarding the separability, and so ethics, of the research component from the strategic, tactical, and operational goals of military decision-makers, and the role of HTT activities with respect to the goals of these decision-makers. Such an emphasis upon "rapid ethnographic research," too, suggest an apt comparison of HTTs with other anthropological modes of data collection of the rapid appraisal and assessment sort, which are typically carried out over weeks or months, and which are commonplace in the world of international development, among other applications.
The report explains that the social science methods to increase knowledge of people and cultures are used instead to push military objectives and that is not independent research nor is it what the social sciences exist for. Nor do the social sciences exist to provide targets for the military but some speaking to HTTs may be targeted by the military. This is especially a concern when HTTs turn over raw data to the military but it is a concern regardless especially due to the devices the military issues them.
Some anthropologists voiced criticisms that assert the inherently political nature of HTS as a facilitator of counterinsurgency. These critiques connect HTS to historical instances in which anthropological field techniques and theories were used to subjugate native peoples in colonial and neocolonial campaigns. Identifying participants in HTS with such terms as "technicians of power," these critics pointedly situate the activities of HTS in the context of U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, often described as neo-colonial wars of occupation "in the service of empire." Ethical and political critiques are sometimes kept distinct and sometimes made together. If CEAUSSIC's 2007 Report distinguished ethics from politics, and focused on the former, the political character of many critical reactions to HTS has to be acknowledged. If HTS advocates stress the "reduction of harm" by the use of embedded HTS social scientists, anthropological critics reject such arguments, instead focusing on the political context of what can become of anthropology as a discipline, if used as a tool for problematic military occupations, even if designed to reduce violence.
As Patricia Cohen (New York Times) explains, "The panel concluded that the Pentagon program, called the Human Terrain System, has two conflicting goals: counterinsurgency and research. Collecting data in the context of war, where coercion and offensive tactics are always potentially present, 'can no longer be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology' the report says." Trina was weighing in on counter-insurgency Monday: "Counter-insurgency is a War Crime. It is an abuse of the social science. It breaks all the ethics. And Tom Ricks doesn't know that because he's not a social scientist. He's nothing but a keyboard jockey who sniffed the skivies of a few grunts and generals and decided he was an expert on war. He's not an expert on anything. He's not even an expert on how to be a successful reporter because those days ended some time ago for Ricks. He is an ass and he is a War Criminal." Well said.
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WHAT'S THAT SMELL?
OLD MAN CROTCH?
OH IT'S EMPTY SACK GREG MITCHELL COMING OUR WAY.
GREG MITCHELL IS THE ALWAYS SEXIST AND INCREASINGLY INSANE MAN CURRENTLY DISGRACING EDITOR & PUBLISHER. HOW BAD IS HE? SUNDAY, THIRD WILL AWARD HIM "LIAR OF THE WEEK" BECAUSE EVEN HE CAN'T BE THAT STUPID.
IN THE MEANTIME, GREGERS KEEPS STICKING HIS HANDS DOWN HIS PANTS IN SEARCH OF MORE OF HIS OLD MAN CROTCH SMELL WHILE PRETENDING TO BE A REPORTER.
HIS LATEST DEMENTED CRAP BEGINS:
It's gotten remarkably little coverage so far -- perhaps because no "terrorist" angle -- but we're now catching up with case of an Iraq war vet (pictured left) now captured and suspected of killing two of his fellow servicemen near Fort Drum where they all served. Joshua Hunter fled to Ohio.
IF YOU MISSED GREGERS OPENING (MAYBE YOU WERE HOLDING YOUR NOSE), HE WAS ATTEMPTING TO SAY THE FORT HOOD MURDERS GOT COVERAGE BECAUSE OF THE CRY OF 'TERRORISM!'
YES, HE TRULY IS A LIAR.
LONG BEFORE THE SHOOTER WAS REVEALED, THE FORT HOOD MASSACRE WAS NEWS WITH CONSTANT AND REPEATED UPDATES AND GREGERS CAN CHECK WITH AP ON THAT. AS FOR THE AFTERMATH OF COVERAGE? IT HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE FACT THAT THERE ARE SO MANY WITNESSES. SO MANY SAYING WHO THE SHOOTER WAS.
IT ALSO HAS TO DO WITH THE SHEER NUMBER OF PEOPLE KILLED -- AND HAS GOTTEN ROUGHLY THE SAME AMOUNT OF COVERAGE AS A SCHOOL SHOOTING WOULD.
BUT GREGERS HAS TO PIN THE COVERAGE OFF ON SOME ALLEGED ANTI-MUSLIM BIAS BECAUSE HE LIVES IN HIS OWN PATHETIC WORLD WHERE FREAKS APPLAUD HIM FOR PLAYING WHAT BOB SOMERBY WOULD CALL SHIRTS AND SKINS. YEP, GREGERS IS SERVING UP 'MY SIDE IS SMARTER!' WHILE DEMONSTRATING HOW HE'S INCREDIBLY STUPID.
GOOGLE: IRAQ VETERAN CHARGED WITH MURDER. YOU GET OVER A HALF MILLION RESULTS. HERE'S THE FIRST PAGE:
Mom befriends wife of Iraq war veteran charged with murder - The ...
Nov 26, 2009 ... Mom befriends wife of Iraq war veteran charged with murder. Published: Thursday, November 26, 2009. No comments posted. ...www.pottsmerc.com/articles/2009/11/26/.../srv0000006916972.txt - Cached
3 Charged With Murder in Death Of Iraq Veteran Near D.C. Club ...
3 Charged With Murder in Death Of Iraq Veteran Near DC Club - Three men were charged yesterday with first-degree murder in the slayi : Encyclopedia.com.www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1P2-40630.html - Cached
Soldier's invisible war: Iraq vet charged with attempted murder ...
Aug 6, 2009 ... Soldier's invisible war: Iraq vet charged with attempted murder ... An estimated 20 percent of Iraq war veterans suffer from post-traumatic ...www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/08/06/accused.soldier.../index.html - Cached
Iraq veteran charged with murder of Rice athlete - Democratic ...
4 posts - 3 authors - Last post: Apr 10, 2007Ronald Andrew Johnson Jr., 23, of College Station, was charged Thursday afternoon with murder in the stabbing of Jonathan Bailey during a ...www.democraticunderground.com › Discuss - Cached - Similar
Soldier's invisible war: Iraq vet charged with attempted murder ... - Aug 7, 2009Iraq Vet's Lawyer: He Fired In Self-Defense In Shooting Over Noisy ... - Jan 2, 2009Homeless Iraq & Afghan war veteran: "People come back from war ... - Jan 21, 2008At least 121 American veterans have killed someone or been charged ... - Jan 13, 2008
More results from democraticunderground.com »
Iraq: 2 U.S. Soldiers Charged With Murder - CBS News
Jun 30, 2007 ... Iraq: 2 U.S. Soldiers Charged With Murder. Soldiers Accused Of The Premeditated Murder Of Three Iraqis; President Karzai Condemns Raid On ...www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/06/.../iraq/main3001561.shtml - Cached - Similar
3 Charged With Murder in Death Of Iraq Veteran Near D.C. Club ...
Three men were charged yesterday with first-degree murder in the slaying of an Iraq war veteran early Sunday near a Northwest Washington nightclub.truxtoncircle.org/redirect.php?id=lk86 - Cached
Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles - Series ...
Jan 13, 2008 ... The Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and ... Pierre, S.D.: “Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress. ...www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/us/13vets.html - Similar
Global Grind - Decorated War Veteran Charged With Attempted Murder ...
Aug 9, 2009 ... Those words are now the daily mantra many Iraq war veterans live. .... Veteran LA police detective charged with murder (AP) ...globalgrind.com/.../Decorated-War-Veteran-Charged-With-Attempted-Murder-of-Wife/ - Cached
La Puente Iraq veteran arrested on suspicion of murder ...
Nov 19, 2009 ... Two arrested, one charged with murder in stabbing death of stepfather ... Chavira, a veteran of two tours in Iraq, was taken to the hospital ...www.sgvtribune.com/crime/ci_13826877 - Cached
Iraq veteran convicted in Colorado murder of fellow soldier
Nov 26, 2008 ... Two serving soldiers and veterans of Iraq were charged over two drive-by murders and one attempted murder that took place between May and ...www.wsws.org/articles/2008/nov2008/murd-n26.shtml - Cached - Similar
WHY HASN'T SOMEONE SUSPECTED OF STABBING GOTTEN MORE ATTENTION? COULD BE BECAUSE THERE ARE SO MANY CRIMES. COULD BE BECAUSE HE'S A SUSPECT AND THE WORLD'S NOT AWARE OF HUNDREDS OF WITNESSES. BUT GREGERS JUST 'KNOWS' IT'S ALL SOMEHOW ANTI-MUSLIM. HE 'KNOWS' IT BECAUSE IT MAKES HIM FEEL BETTER AND SMARTER. BY THE WAY, GREGERS, COULD YOU POINT US TO YOUR INDEPTH COVERAGE OF THE MURDER OF MARIA LAUTERBACH? YOU KNOW HER, RIGHT? SERVING IN THE MILITARY. PREGNANT. DISAPPEARS. FOUND DEAD IN THE BACKYARD OF THE MAN SHE ACCUSED OF RAPE. FOUND DEAD IN A HOLE AND BADLY BURNED. HIS WIFE COMES FORWARD TO TELL THAT HER HUSBAND ADMITTED KILLING MARIA. HE FLEES THE COUNTRY AND ENDS UP CAUGHT FINALLY IN MEXICO. WHERE'S YOUR IN DEPTH ON THAT STORY, GREGSTER?
THAT'S WHAT WE THOUGHT. GO THUMP YOUR SUNKEN CHEST SOME MORE OLD MAN, ALL WE SEE SMELL IS THE STINK WAFTING OFF YOU.
FROM THE TCI WIRE:
Starting with the topic of counter-insurgency, war on a native people, Monday, David Price explained in "Human Terrain Systems, Anthropologists and the War in Afghanistan" (CounterPunch):
Today, in Iraq and Afghanistan, anthropologists are being told that they're needed to make bad situations better. But no matter how anthropological contributions ease and make gentle this conquest and occupation, it will not change the larger neocolonial nature of the larger mission; and most anthropologists are troubled to see their discipline embrace such a politically corrupt cause.Human Terrain Systems is not some neutral humanitarian project, it is an arm of the U.S. military and is part of the military's mission to occupy and destroy opposition to U.S. goals and objectives. HTS cannot claim the sort of neutrality claimed by groups like Doctors Without Borders, or the International Committee of the Red Cross. HTS's goal is a gentler form of domination. Pretending that the military is a humanitarian organization does not make it so, and pretending that HTS is anything other than an arm of the military engaging in a specific form of conquest is sheer dishonesty.
The American Anthropological Association's annual meeting started yesterday in Philadelphia and continues through Sunday. Today the association's Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the US Security and Intelligence Communities issued their [PDF format] "Final Report on The Army's Human Terrain System Proof of Concept Program." The 74-page report is a blow to War Criminals and their cheerleaders who have long thought that the social science could be abused or that the social sciences were psuedo sciences. It was in December 2006 when Dumb Ass George Packer raved over Dumb Ass Montgomery McFate and her highly imaginative and fictional retelling of both her childhood and her current work which Packer identified as "Pentagon consultant" working on Cultural Operations Research Human Terrain. Packer was jizzing in his shorts and not even warnings from other anthropologists ("I do not want to get anybody killed") could sway him.
By the time she showed on up the October 10, 2007 broadcast (link goes to October 11, 2007 snapshot) of NPR's The Diane Rehm Show, Monty was being billed as "senior advisor to the US Army." Monty lied throughout the broadcast and most infamously when she insisted that Afghans or Iraqis can tell the difference between "a lethal unit of the US military and a non-leathal unit of the US military". David Price of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists offered reality during the broadcast by raising the issue of David Rohde's "Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones" (New York Times) and explaining it "talks about an anthropologist I think named Tracy and that's the only name that's given. So anthropologists need to be transparent about who they are and who they're working for. . . . But I worry how transparent the program is if the people who are doing it aren't being self-identified? Now the story says it's being done for security reasons and so on. But if you go to the New York Times story and look at the nifty, little video they have -- you know backing the story, it's very strange because they don't show the anthropologist -- they intentionally withhold the person's identity. Yet they show all these people who are talking to the anthropologist which of course they're doing so at some personal risk, one would assume, in Afghanistan. And I worry about any sort of program where there's a one-way mirror that's going on."
Susan Page: . . . there was a New York Times article last week which actually prompted us to do this show today. And it did talk about this anthropologist named Tracy, but it wasn't clear to me, Montgomery McFate maybe you know, whether her [full] name was just not disclosed to the New York Times article, or if her full name is not being disclosed to the people she's interatcing with in Afghanistan. Do you know -- do you know the answer to that.
Monty [quick intake and slow first word -- always a clue Monty's inventing -- seriously, that was evident when she was a child]: Her name was held from the New York Times story and in other media that's come out of Afghanistan at her own request.
Susan Page: But does she give her [full] name to the Afghanis that she's talking with.
Monty: Yes, she does.
Remember that moment in Annie Hall when Annie (Diane Keaton) and Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) are in line for movie tickets and the man behind them can't shut up about Marshall McLuhan and Alvy confronts him? And pulls McLuhan over? And McLuhan declares, "I heard what you were saying. You know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you got to teach a course in anything it totally amazing."? Well a moment like that happened to Monty with her being the blowhard who got corrected. Monty was swearing that the woman identified herself and gave her full name and did this and did that and blah blah blah. And then David Rohde, who wrote the New York Times article, joined the conversation.
David Rohde: Um, she was transparent with them. I don't think she gave her full name, I think she does identify herself as an anthropologist. I saw her briefly, but I don't know what she does at all times. She personally, um, actually chose to carry a weapon for security that's not a requirement for members of the team, I've been told. And she wore a military uniform which would make her appear to be a soldier, um, to Afghans that she wasn't actually speaking with.
Susan Price: And so you think Aghans knew that she wasn't a soldier even though she was wearing a military uniform and carrying a weapon? Or do you think that they just assumed that she probably was?
David Rohde: I would think that they assumed that she was.
Poor stupid Monty. Counter-insurgency is war on a people. It has been used in many wars and it is not a tactic of peace nor is it anything an ethical person should take part in. That is not a controversial statement to anyone old enough to remember Vietnam or any war further back. But, in the US, whether you want to cite Spengler or make comparisons to Sisyphus, we are a culture put together each dawn with very little historical recall. Which is how Monty McFate and others have been able to market their inhumane acts as a 'science.' Others include A Problem From Hell: Samantha Power. And, of course, Sarah Sewall who played Peppermint Patty to Monty's Marci on Charlie Rose in 2007. For the record, those three and many other counter-insurgency gurus advised Barack Obama during his presidential campaign and/or advise him today. (Yes, despite the fact that Monty's sister was a government spy who spied on peace groups. Or maybe because of.) These War Criminals use their training and the science but do not adhere to any of the ethics of their profession which does include, but it not limited to, full disclosure.
The report released today notes, "Responding to concerns raised about this program, in the fall of 2007 the AAA's Executive Board released a statement on HTS [Human Terrain Systems], in which it expressed its disapproval and concluded the program to be 'an unacceptable application of anthropological expertise'." The report states that by April of this year there were 417 HTS employees. (There have been some reductions since then.) Of that group, only six had PhD in anthropology and only 47 others had masters in the field. The report notes, "It is important to indicate, based on this, that despite the attention given to the central role of anthropology in the program, the great majority of present HTS employees have been trained and hold degrees in other fields of the social sciences and elsewhere." The report notes:
Training in "research methods" for HTTs is notable insofar as it combines what appears to be field-based social scientific data collection (e.g. use of ethnography of the anthropological sort) with instrumental or soft power goals of "shaping the environment." This raises a number of concerns regarding the separability, and so ethics, of the research component from the strategic, tactical, and operational goals of military decision-makers, and the role of HTT activities with respect to the goals of these decision-makers. Such an emphasis upon "rapid ethnographic research," too, suggest an apt comparison of HTTs with other anthropological modes of data collection of the rapid appraisal and assessment sort, which are typically carried out over weeks or months, and which are commonplace in the world of international development, among other applications.
The report explains that the social science methods to increase knowledge of people and cultures are used instead to push military objectives and that is not independent research nor is it what the social sciences exist for. Nor do the social sciences exist to provide targets for the military but some speaking to HTTs may be targeted by the military. This is especially a concern when HTTs turn over raw data to the military but it is a concern regardless especially due to the devices the military issues them.
Some anthropologists voiced criticisms that assert the inherently political nature of HTS as a facilitator of counterinsurgency. These critiques connect HTS to historical instances in which anthropological field techniques and theories were used to subjugate native peoples in colonial and neocolonial campaigns. Identifying participants in HTS with such terms as "technicians of power," these critics pointedly situate the activities of HTS in the context of U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, often described as neo-colonial wars of occupation "in the service of empire." Ethical and political critiques are sometimes kept distinct and sometimes made together. If CEAUSSIC's 2007 Report distinguished ethics from politics, and focused on the former, the political character of many critical reactions to HTS has to be acknowledged. If HTS advocates stress the "reduction of harm" by the use of embedded HTS social scientists, anthropological critics reject such arguments, instead focusing on the political context of what can become of anthropology as a discipline, if used as a tool for problematic military occupations, even if designed to reduce violence.
As Patricia Cohen (New York Times) explains, "The panel concluded that the Pentagon program, called the Human Terrain System, has two conflicting goals: counterinsurgency and research. Collecting data in the context of war, where coercion and offensive tactics are always potentially present, 'can no longer be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology' the report says." Trina was weighing in on counter-insurgency Monday: "Counter-insurgency is a War Crime. It is an abuse of the social science. It breaks all the ethics. And Tom Ricks doesn't know that because he's not a social scientist. He's nothing but a keyboard jockey who sniffed the skivies of a few grunts and generals and decided he was an expert on war. He's not an expert on anything. He's not even an expert on how to be a successful reporter because those days ended some time ago for Ricks. He is an ass and he is a War Criminal." Well said.
RECOMMENDED: "I Hate The War"
""Iraq snapshot"
"Those forever delayed elections"
"Military suicides"
"Brokedown Democracy"
"NOSW -- the National Organization for Some Women "
"Mail bag"
"Counter-insurgency"
"debra sweet tells the truth, guess who lies"
"Thomas E. Ricks: Pig and Idiot"
"The Kennedys always hated women"
"Desiree Rogers, get your fanny to Congress"
"Barack and his apologists"
"Nutty Naomi Wolf, Brilliant Dashboard Confessional..."
"Everyone pitches in! (Not really)"
"THIS JUST IN! HE'S A MORON!"
Cedric's Big Mix
Barry's boo-boos
10 hours ago
The Daily Jot
THIS JUST IN! BARRY BOMBS!
10 hours ago
Sex and Politics and Screeds and Attitude
barack makes me sick to my stomach
10 hours ago
SICKOFITRADLZ
Recommended reading
10 hours ago
Ruth's Report
Bad Radio, yes, it is Pacifica
10 hours ago
Like Maria Said Paz
The sad special and the sad man
10 hours ago
Ann's Mega Dub
Bully & Poodle
10 hours ago
Kat's Korner (of The Common Ills)
The Battle of the Story of The Battle of Seattle
10 hours ago
The Common Ills
Isaiah's The World Today Just Nuts "I Am The War Hawk You Have Been Waiting For"
"My daughter calls it"
"Barack's awful speech"
"Thomas E. Ricks is an ass and a War Criminal"
"Will premiums go up?"
Thursday, December 03, 2009
THIS JUST IN! HE'S A MORON!
BULLY BOY PRESS & CEDRIC'S BIG MIX -- THE KOOL-AID TABLE
CELEBRITY IN CHIEF BARRY O! ANNOUNCED HIS PLANS TO SEND MORE U.S. SERVICE MEMBERS TO THE HORROR THAT IS THE AFGHANISTAN WAR AND MADE A LOT OF BUSH-LIKE STATEMENTS ABOUT THE WHOLE WORLD PITCHING IN.
ITALY, A COUNTRY WITH A POPULATION OF NEARLY 60 MILLION (58,145,320) HAS JUST ANNOUNCED THEY WILL BE SENDING IN ADDITIONAL TROOPS. TO THE U.S. 30,000 to 35,000 ADDITIONAL TROOPS BEING SENT IN . . . ITALY WILL SEND . . . AN ADDITIONAL 1,000.
MR. BIG SPEECHES BARRY O, PUTTING MORE U.S. LIVES AND DOLLARS AT RISK TO PLAY BIG BOY ON THE WORLD STAGE ONLY TO DISCOVER HE'S AS INEFFECTIVE AS GEORGE W. BUSH. AS WINONA SAYS IN HEATHERS, "LICK IT UP, BABY, LICK IT UP."
FROM THE TCI WIRE:
Last night Barack Obama gave a speech at West Point in which he flashed every last one of his War Hawk feathers. It was so outrageous that Democratic Party boot licker and professional party girl Tom Hayden insists he's taking the Obama bumper sticker off his car. (Or at least off his wife's car.) It's outrageous, fumes Pock Marks On His Soul, but not that outrageous apparently since he goes on to insist: "I'll support Obama down the road against Sarah Palin, Lou Dobbs or any of the pitchfork carriers for the pre-Obama era." The pre-Obama era. One year is now an era? Well, Tom was never smart or informed. Tom's on the prowl (women, watch out) and ready to 'organize' and 'fight' as he insists on "no bumper sticker until the withdrawal strategy is fully carried out." Then he boasts, "the fight is on." Yes, he truly is a limp dick and that's been a fortunate thing for many a woman. Kisses, Tom-Tom, kisses. Remember back in April 2008 when Doug Henwood (at ZNet) rightly pointed out of Barry O, "And despite the grand claims of enthusiasts, he doesn't really have a movmeent behind him -- he's got a fan club. How does a fan club hold a candidate accountable?" As Tom-Tom always demonstrates, they don't.
Unlike the eternal bobby-soxer Hayden, Justin Raimondo (Antiwar) doesn't feel the need to stroke Barack to climax:
Those who were hoping for some real change in our rhetoric, if not our foreign policy, with Obama in the White House are no doubt sorely disappointed right now, because George W. Bush could just as easily have spoken these very same words – and, indeed, he did utter endless variations on this identical theme when justifying our actions in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet the truth of the matter is that there are barely one-hundred al-Qaeda fighters in the whole of Afghanistan – so what are we doing there?
Rebecca never drank the Kool-Aid and she weighed in last night noting, "there is no difference between bush and barack. none. and that realization is making my stomach feel awful. ulcers, i'm sure." Cindy Sheehan (Cindy's Soapbox) explains, "Obama is just another coward that has risen to the highest office in the world and I am tired of having to be shoved by crazy people, chased and shot at by police, tear-gassed, arrested, called names that make even me blush, scrimping for every penny to stay afloat in this peace business, traveling and protesting to the point of exhaustion, etc. Not only did Obama condemn 30,000 troops to horror, with just one speech, he also condemned the real anti-war movement that was opposed to his policies from the beginning, to many more years of our sacrifices." Betty's very young and very pretty daughter got it, "Mommy, I'm sorry. I know it's wrong to hate but he's sending more people to die." Mike shared, "I had to get up every few minutes during the speech. He's such a damn liar. I couldn't take him for too many minutes straight. He such a liar and he revealed that tonight. Let's see who has the guts to stand up and call him out? I bet it'll be the same group of us who always have. And the usual Kool Aid drinkers will find a way to suddenly be in love with war." Chris Floyd (Empire Burlesque) would fall into "the same group" category since he's long exposed Barack's War Hawk nature -- on last night's speech he notes, "Barck Obama's speech, and the policies embraced in it, and the sinister implications underlying it, are all abysmally awful. They are a death warrant not only for the thousands of Afghan and Pakistani civilians who will be killed in the intensified conflict, but also for the countless thousands of innocents yet to die in the coming gnerations of a world roiled and destabilized by an out-of-control empire." Floyd references Arthur Silber's take which opens with:
To all those who repeatedly claimed that, no matter what "mistakes" he might make and regardless of the scope of the devastating effects of those errors, Obama had to represent a markedly better choice than McCain, take note: in certain respects, Obama is far more dangerous than McCain could have been. For the same reasons, Obama is also more dangerous than Bush was. I remind you that I have written numerous essays damning Bush for almost every single one of his policies. It is hardly the case that I viewed Bush in anything approaching a positive light, however remotely. In large part, the danger represented by Obama arises from the fact that Obama's election gutted whatever effective opposition might have existed. To their eternal shame, the Democrats never opposed Bush in any way that mattered -- but at least the possibility of opposition had not been obliterated entirely. In the near term and probably for longer, that possibility now appears to have been extinguished.
Cedric's "Barry's boo-boos" and Wally's "THIS JUST IN! BARRY BOMBS!" had the herculian task of attempting to fact check the wily Barack who insisted April 9, 2009 that he was asking Congress for the last war supplemental but last night acknowledged he'd be asking them for another one (for at least $30 billion) and who self-stroked last night by declaring he "will close Guantanamo" -- uh, after being sworn in, he said Guantanamo would be closed by the end of this year. As of today, he has 29 days before 2009 is over. He might want to forgo yet another trip out of the country this month and instead sit his ass down and get to work. Back to Justin Rainmondo who especially found interesting Barry O's fact-free comments on the Iraq War:
"Then, in early 2003, the decision was made to wage a second war in Iraq. The wrenching debate over the Iraq war is well-known and need not be repeated here. It is enough to say that for the next six years, the Iraq war drew the dominant share of our troops, our resources, our diplomacy, and our national attention -- and that the decision to go into Iraq caused substantial rifts between America and much of the world."
Yes, the bad thing about the Iraq war wasn't that it needlessly killed thousands -- many thousands of Iraqis, and a far lesser number of Americans. Oh no: the really really bad thing about it was that it diverted attention and resources away from the battle Obama wanted to fight, the one in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That all happened in the bad old days of Republican rule, however, before the invention of "hope":"Today, after extraordinary costs, we are bringing the Iraq war to a responsible end. We will remove our combat brigades from Iraq by the end of next summer, and all of our troops by the end of 2011 ... We have given Iraqis a chance to shape their future, and we are successfully leaving Iraq to its people."
What a crock: we have given Iraqis eight years of utter horror, including hundreds of thousands of dead, countless wounded, a sectarian civil war that still rages, and a government just as tyrannical and unaccountable as the one we overthrew, if not more so. If that's "success," then I'd hate to see what failure looks like.
Iraq? As we noted Sunday at Third in "Editorial: Barack The Never Ending Liar," Barry O promised to pull a brigade out of Iraq each month after being sworn in. But never lived up to that promise, now did he? Trivia question: Who said this in response to Barack's promise to end the Iraq War in 2009: "But these were words worth holding the candidate to. The astonishing thing is that antiwar sentiment among Obama's base is running strongly enough to push the candidate forward to a stronger commitment."??????????? Why it's Tom-Tom Hayden. And just as soon as he gets done peeling his bumper sticker off his latest wife's car, maybe he can explain how he thinks he ever held Barack to those words? World Socialist Web Site's editorial board weighs in today on the speech:
The most glaring contradiction in a speech shot through with contradictions was Obama's attempt to disentangle the war in Afghanistan from the war in Iraq. "I opposed the war in Iraq," he said, "precisely because I believe that we must exercise restraint in the use of military force ..." But he was unable to establish any essential difference between that criminal enterprise and his war in Afghanistan.
Obama's escalation is yet another flagrant violation of the will of the American people. In one election after another, they have gone to the polls to express their hostility to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In every case, their will has been ignored and the wars have been expanded.
Obama won the presidency by running as an opponent of the Iraq war and appealing to popular opposition to militarism. Once in office, he quickly increased the US deployment in Afghanistan by 21,000, while reneging on his promise to carry out a rapid withdrawal from Iraq. Now he is increasing the total US troop level in Afghanistan to 100,000, more than double the level under Bush.
Staying in the US, we'll move over to Congress. "I think all of us over our time of service on the committee," US House Rep Bob Filner declared today, "hear about issues that suggest that sometimes federal funds may not be flowing to the local VA facilities in the way that we had envisioned -- either efficiently or effectively -- to best serve our veterans." Filner was chairing the House Veterans Affairs Committee's hearing on VA Health Care Funding: Appropriations to Programs. Chair Filner noted that there is currently a hiring freeze at the VA medical centers in his district "which my be linked to the growing queues that our veterans face for medical health care appointments." Chair Filner represents the 51st House District in California which can be summarized as southern half of the county of San Diego and Imperial County.
US House Rep Steve Buyer is the Ranking Member. In his opening remarks he addressed the allocation process. Following the hearing, his office released the following statement which covers that topic as well as what's been done since the hearing:
Today, Ranking Member Steve Buyer said he will request an independent review of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) allocation process to help ensure that each VA medical center is able to provide timely treatment for veterans.
Buyer pointed to the need for the study during a full House Committee on Veterans' Affairs hearing on the resource distribution process that occurs between VA's Veterans Integrated Service Networks (VISNs) and its 153 medical centers.
Chairman Bob Filner and members on both sides of the aisle, including Subcommittee Chairs Mike Michaud and Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin, and Subcommittee Ranking Members Dr. Phil Roe and Henry Brown, agreed to join Buyer in a joint letter requesting a Government Accountability Office (GAO) review of the process.
Members on both sides of the aisle also expressed special concern about how the allocation process affects veterans in highly rural areas. Michaud, Herseth-Sandlin, and Roe all inquired how VISN directors ensure that facilities affiliated with medical centers, such as outpatient clinics, are afforded proper consideration in funding requests.
"Over the past twelve years, VA has relied on a decentralized funding model for the VISNs to fund their respective medical centers," Buyer said. "VA provides general guidance but permits a substantial amount of flexibility to allow for a more patient-centric process at the local level."
"I believe this requires clear delineation of responsibility, careful planning, and performance measures to gauge coordination and accountability. Therefore, it is prudent for us to ask the key questions such as whether the allocations should be formula-driven or standards based with real-time analysis."
"It has been five years since GAO has placed its eyes on VA funding allocation issues, so I will request that it perform a review of the criteria and process VA has established for VISNs, how VA ensures that VISNs comply with those criteria, and how VA centrally tracks and assesses the distribution and use of the funds at the medical center level."
"Accurate assessment of these measures is critical to VA's ability to provide timely access to quality veterans' care, and prevent delays that could be detrimental to veterans with critical conditions and those with special health care needs."
The hearing was composed of two panels. The panel was Clyde Parkis who has many credits including being a Vietnam veteran, many years with the Department of Veterans Affairs as well as the former director of Veterans Integrated Service Network. The second panel was composed of the Department of Veterans Affairs' Rita Reed and Michael S. Finegan (Finegan was accompanied by William Schoenhard and W. Paul Kearns III).
Parkis's prepared statement is posted here (if that doesn't work go to the Committee's hearings page and select it -- but I'm told the bugs have been worked out and that link will work). Chair Filner said the statement would be entered in full into the record and encourage Parkis to utilize his opening five minutes hitting additional topics. We'll note this from his opening remarks where he's speaking of his time working for the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Clyde Parkis: As a Vietnam veteran, I sometimes have trust issues and it took me a long time to figure out who to -- who to trust in the process as we move through the budget cycles. I was aware that OMB liked to screen VA testimony before it came to the committees and I thought sometimes that prevented us from asking for what we thought we really needed. I was told to say, 'We don't have our budget official yet so I can't speculate on the impact of that.' That made it difficult to answer my local Congressman in terms of what was going on with the VA. And I thought some of that was actually coming from this Committee but maybe that was not the case. As I gained some trust over time, there are some things I wished I had spoken up about a little -- a little earlier.
OMB is the Office of Management and Budget and falls under the executive branch of the federal government. That statement, an important one, wasn't an issue in the questioning. Despite the fact that this committee and every other one has heard that answer repeatedly "no final budget, can't speculate." Instead, there were questions regarding the counting of veterans, US House Rep David Roe praised the VA outpatient clinics (CBOCs) and wondered how they were determined? Parkis explained, "It was a combination of where the veterans are -- you look at your demographics spread out by zip code or by county -- and in addition to that where are you experiencing the demand?"
US House Rep Harry Teague noted how, in New Mexico (his state), "the number of people who have to travel five, six hours" to a VA "is pretty large." And he also wanted to drop back to Roe's questions and know about the outpatient and how New Mexico might qualify so that "people don't have to drive five, six hours" to get care? Parkis began stressing tele-care (health care over the phone). Since many of the veterans Teague is speaking of (we speak to veterans groups in New Mexico quite often) are complaining about the lengthy drives to Alberquerque for check ups or to diagnose new issues, it's not really clear how tele-care would assist them in that.
US House Rep Ann Kirkpatrick worried that "demand" qualification might hurt rural areas where many factors effected how many veterans in an area utilized a VA facility. This includes some veterans, including Native American veterans, who do not access care because they aren't aware of the care that is available. Parkis identified Prescott, Arizona as one such area and Kirkpatrick agreed it was. He suggested outreach, "talking to the tribal leaders" and insisted that "most health care these days is actually chronic not acute." Kirkpatrick's concerns really weren't addressed by Parkis who admitted rural areas really weren't his expertise; however, Chair Filner said that in "January we're going to be concentrating on rural -- access for rural veterans because everything you say is right."
Moving to Iraq, Saturday barriers around the US base in Basra collapsed. Steven Edwards (CANWEST News Service) reports that the US military is insisting the collapse was not a result of mortar attacks or any other attack but a result of "rainfall". Because Iraq is infamous for rainfall. In fact, dust storms are a thing of the long ago past. Right? Right? (No.) In other news, Li Xianzhi (Xinhua) reports armed clashes between US forces and Iraqis "guarding their own homes" in Baquba today which resulted in the death of 1 Iraqi and three more injured. Xianzhi quotes a police source who states, "The gunmen thought the [US] soldiers approaching their homes were insurgents." Xianzhi quotes the source explaining a US helicopter was called and it "bombed a house and totally destroyed it".
RECOMMENDED: "Iraq snapshot"
"Barack and Other War Hawks"
"Xinhua shows up CNN"
"The Cowardly Kucinich"
"Bob Somerby & the Corn Princess"
"The War Hawk and those who support him"
"barack and the goons who love him"
"Another blow to equality"
"Depressing time in the House and Senate"
"Not one word from me on the War Hawk (promise)"
"Look who's crying now"
"The Curious Mister Erik Prince"
"Grammys"
"THIS JUST IN! BARRY BOMBS!"
"Barry's boo-boos"
CELEBRITY IN CHIEF BARRY O! ANNOUNCED HIS PLANS TO SEND MORE U.S. SERVICE MEMBERS TO THE HORROR THAT IS THE AFGHANISTAN WAR AND MADE A LOT OF BUSH-LIKE STATEMENTS ABOUT THE WHOLE WORLD PITCHING IN.
ITALY, A COUNTRY WITH A POPULATION OF NEARLY 60 MILLION (58,145,320) HAS JUST ANNOUNCED THEY WILL BE SENDING IN ADDITIONAL TROOPS. TO THE U.S. 30,000 to 35,000 ADDITIONAL TROOPS BEING SENT IN . . . ITALY WILL SEND . . . AN ADDITIONAL 1,000.
MR. BIG SPEECHES BARRY O, PUTTING MORE U.S. LIVES AND DOLLARS AT RISK TO PLAY BIG BOY ON THE WORLD STAGE ONLY TO DISCOVER HE'S AS INEFFECTIVE AS GEORGE W. BUSH. AS WINONA SAYS IN HEATHERS, "LICK IT UP, BABY, LICK IT UP."
FROM THE TCI WIRE:
Last night Barack Obama gave a speech at West Point in which he flashed every last one of his War Hawk feathers. It was so outrageous that Democratic Party boot licker and professional party girl Tom Hayden insists he's taking the Obama bumper sticker off his car. (Or at least off his wife's car.) It's outrageous, fumes Pock Marks On His Soul, but not that outrageous apparently since he goes on to insist: "I'll support Obama down the road against Sarah Palin, Lou Dobbs or any of the pitchfork carriers for the pre-Obama era." The pre-Obama era. One year is now an era? Well, Tom was never smart or informed. Tom's on the prowl (women, watch out) and ready to 'organize' and 'fight' as he insists on "no bumper sticker until the withdrawal strategy is fully carried out." Then he boasts, "the fight is on." Yes, he truly is a limp dick and that's been a fortunate thing for many a woman. Kisses, Tom-Tom, kisses. Remember back in April 2008 when Doug Henwood (at ZNet) rightly pointed out of Barry O, "And despite the grand claims of enthusiasts, he doesn't really have a movmeent behind him -- he's got a fan club. How does a fan club hold a candidate accountable?" As Tom-Tom always demonstrates, they don't.
Unlike the eternal bobby-soxer Hayden, Justin Raimondo (Antiwar) doesn't feel the need to stroke Barack to climax:
Those who were hoping for some real change in our rhetoric, if not our foreign policy, with Obama in the White House are no doubt sorely disappointed right now, because George W. Bush could just as easily have spoken these very same words – and, indeed, he did utter endless variations on this identical theme when justifying our actions in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet the truth of the matter is that there are barely one-hundred al-Qaeda fighters in the whole of Afghanistan – so what are we doing there?
Rebecca never drank the Kool-Aid and she weighed in last night noting, "there is no difference between bush and barack. none. and that realization is making my stomach feel awful. ulcers, i'm sure." Cindy Sheehan (Cindy's Soapbox) explains, "Obama is just another coward that has risen to the highest office in the world and I am tired of having to be shoved by crazy people, chased and shot at by police, tear-gassed, arrested, called names that make even me blush, scrimping for every penny to stay afloat in this peace business, traveling and protesting to the point of exhaustion, etc. Not only did Obama condemn 30,000 troops to horror, with just one speech, he also condemned the real anti-war movement that was opposed to his policies from the beginning, to many more years of our sacrifices." Betty's very young and very pretty daughter got it, "Mommy, I'm sorry. I know it's wrong to hate but he's sending more people to die." Mike shared, "I had to get up every few minutes during the speech. He's such a damn liar. I couldn't take him for too many minutes straight. He such a liar and he revealed that tonight. Let's see who has the guts to stand up and call him out? I bet it'll be the same group of us who always have. And the usual Kool Aid drinkers will find a way to suddenly be in love with war." Chris Floyd (Empire Burlesque) would fall into "the same group" category since he's long exposed Barack's War Hawk nature -- on last night's speech he notes, "Barck Obama's speech, and the policies embraced in it, and the sinister implications underlying it, are all abysmally awful. They are a death warrant not only for the thousands of Afghan and Pakistani civilians who will be killed in the intensified conflict, but also for the countless thousands of innocents yet to die in the coming gnerations of a world roiled and destabilized by an out-of-control empire." Floyd references Arthur Silber's take which opens with:
To all those who repeatedly claimed that, no matter what "mistakes" he might make and regardless of the scope of the devastating effects of those errors, Obama had to represent a markedly better choice than McCain, take note: in certain respects, Obama is far more dangerous than McCain could have been. For the same reasons, Obama is also more dangerous than Bush was. I remind you that I have written numerous essays damning Bush for almost every single one of his policies. It is hardly the case that I viewed Bush in anything approaching a positive light, however remotely. In large part, the danger represented by Obama arises from the fact that Obama's election gutted whatever effective opposition might have existed. To their eternal shame, the Democrats never opposed Bush in any way that mattered -- but at least the possibility of opposition had not been obliterated entirely. In the near term and probably for longer, that possibility now appears to have been extinguished.
Cedric's "Barry's boo-boos" and Wally's "THIS JUST IN! BARRY BOMBS!" had the herculian task of attempting to fact check the wily Barack who insisted April 9, 2009 that he was asking Congress for the last war supplemental but last night acknowledged he'd be asking them for another one (for at least $30 billion) and who self-stroked last night by declaring he "will close Guantanamo" -- uh, after being sworn in, he said Guantanamo would be closed by the end of this year. As of today, he has 29 days before 2009 is over. He might want to forgo yet another trip out of the country this month and instead sit his ass down and get to work. Back to Justin Rainmondo who especially found interesting Barry O's fact-free comments on the Iraq War:
"Then, in early 2003, the decision was made to wage a second war in Iraq. The wrenching debate over the Iraq war is well-known and need not be repeated here. It is enough to say that for the next six years, the Iraq war drew the dominant share of our troops, our resources, our diplomacy, and our national attention -- and that the decision to go into Iraq caused substantial rifts between America and much of the world."
Yes, the bad thing about the Iraq war wasn't that it needlessly killed thousands -- many thousands of Iraqis, and a far lesser number of Americans. Oh no: the really really bad thing about it was that it diverted attention and resources away from the battle Obama wanted to fight, the one in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That all happened in the bad old days of Republican rule, however, before the invention of "hope":"Today, after extraordinary costs, we are bringing the Iraq war to a responsible end. We will remove our combat brigades from Iraq by the end of next summer, and all of our troops by the end of 2011 ... We have given Iraqis a chance to shape their future, and we are successfully leaving Iraq to its people."
What a crock: we have given Iraqis eight years of utter horror, including hundreds of thousands of dead, countless wounded, a sectarian civil war that still rages, and a government just as tyrannical and unaccountable as the one we overthrew, if not more so. If that's "success," then I'd hate to see what failure looks like.
Iraq? As we noted Sunday at Third in "Editorial: Barack The Never Ending Liar," Barry O promised to pull a brigade out of Iraq each month after being sworn in. But never lived up to that promise, now did he? Trivia question: Who said this in response to Barack's promise to end the Iraq War in 2009: "But these were words worth holding the candidate to. The astonishing thing is that antiwar sentiment among Obama's base is running strongly enough to push the candidate forward to a stronger commitment."??????????? Why it's Tom-Tom Hayden. And just as soon as he gets done peeling his bumper sticker off his latest wife's car, maybe he can explain how he thinks he ever held Barack to those words? World Socialist Web Site's editorial board weighs in today on the speech:
The most glaring contradiction in a speech shot through with contradictions was Obama's attempt to disentangle the war in Afghanistan from the war in Iraq. "I opposed the war in Iraq," he said, "precisely because I believe that we must exercise restraint in the use of military force ..." But he was unable to establish any essential difference between that criminal enterprise and his war in Afghanistan.
Obama's escalation is yet another flagrant violation of the will of the American people. In one election after another, they have gone to the polls to express their hostility to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In every case, their will has been ignored and the wars have been expanded.
Obama won the presidency by running as an opponent of the Iraq war and appealing to popular opposition to militarism. Once in office, he quickly increased the US deployment in Afghanistan by 21,000, while reneging on his promise to carry out a rapid withdrawal from Iraq. Now he is increasing the total US troop level in Afghanistan to 100,000, more than double the level under Bush.
Staying in the US, we'll move over to Congress. "I think all of us over our time of service on the committee," US House Rep Bob Filner declared today, "hear about issues that suggest that sometimes federal funds may not be flowing to the local VA facilities in the way that we had envisioned -- either efficiently or effectively -- to best serve our veterans." Filner was chairing the House Veterans Affairs Committee's hearing on VA Health Care Funding: Appropriations to Programs. Chair Filner noted that there is currently a hiring freeze at the VA medical centers in his district "which my be linked to the growing queues that our veterans face for medical health care appointments." Chair Filner represents the 51st House District in California which can be summarized as southern half of the county of San Diego and Imperial County.
US House Rep Steve Buyer is the Ranking Member. In his opening remarks he addressed the allocation process. Following the hearing, his office released the following statement which covers that topic as well as what's been done since the hearing:
Today, Ranking Member Steve Buyer said he will request an independent review of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) allocation process to help ensure that each VA medical center is able to provide timely treatment for veterans.
Buyer pointed to the need for the study during a full House Committee on Veterans' Affairs hearing on the resource distribution process that occurs between VA's Veterans Integrated Service Networks (VISNs) and its 153 medical centers.
Chairman Bob Filner and members on both sides of the aisle, including Subcommittee Chairs Mike Michaud and Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin, and Subcommittee Ranking Members Dr. Phil Roe and Henry Brown, agreed to join Buyer in a joint letter requesting a Government Accountability Office (GAO) review of the process.
Members on both sides of the aisle also expressed special concern about how the allocation process affects veterans in highly rural areas. Michaud, Herseth-Sandlin, and Roe all inquired how VISN directors ensure that facilities affiliated with medical centers, such as outpatient clinics, are afforded proper consideration in funding requests.
"Over the past twelve years, VA has relied on a decentralized funding model for the VISNs to fund their respective medical centers," Buyer said. "VA provides general guidance but permits a substantial amount of flexibility to allow for a more patient-centric process at the local level."
"I believe this requires clear delineation of responsibility, careful planning, and performance measures to gauge coordination and accountability. Therefore, it is prudent for us to ask the key questions such as whether the allocations should be formula-driven or standards based with real-time analysis."
"It has been five years since GAO has placed its eyes on VA funding allocation issues, so I will request that it perform a review of the criteria and process VA has established for VISNs, how VA ensures that VISNs comply with those criteria, and how VA centrally tracks and assesses the distribution and use of the funds at the medical center level."
"Accurate assessment of these measures is critical to VA's ability to provide timely access to quality veterans' care, and prevent delays that could be detrimental to veterans with critical conditions and those with special health care needs."
The hearing was composed of two panels. The panel was Clyde Parkis who has many credits including being a Vietnam veteran, many years with the Department of Veterans Affairs as well as the former director of Veterans Integrated Service Network. The second panel was composed of the Department of Veterans Affairs' Rita Reed and Michael S. Finegan (Finegan was accompanied by William Schoenhard and W. Paul Kearns III).
Parkis's prepared statement is posted here (if that doesn't work go to the Committee's hearings page and select it -- but I'm told the bugs have been worked out and that link will work). Chair Filner said the statement would be entered in full into the record and encourage Parkis to utilize his opening five minutes hitting additional topics. We'll note this from his opening remarks where he's speaking of his time working for the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Clyde Parkis: As a Vietnam veteran, I sometimes have trust issues and it took me a long time to figure out who to -- who to trust in the process as we move through the budget cycles. I was aware that OMB liked to screen VA testimony before it came to the committees and I thought sometimes that prevented us from asking for what we thought we really needed. I was told to say, 'We don't have our budget official yet so I can't speculate on the impact of that.' That made it difficult to answer my local Congressman in terms of what was going on with the VA. And I thought some of that was actually coming from this Committee but maybe that was not the case. As I gained some trust over time, there are some things I wished I had spoken up about a little -- a little earlier.
OMB is the Office of Management and Budget and falls under the executive branch of the federal government. That statement, an important one, wasn't an issue in the questioning. Despite the fact that this committee and every other one has heard that answer repeatedly "no final budget, can't speculate." Instead, there were questions regarding the counting of veterans, US House Rep David Roe praised the VA outpatient clinics (CBOCs) and wondered how they were determined? Parkis explained, "It was a combination of where the veterans are -- you look at your demographics spread out by zip code or by county -- and in addition to that where are you experiencing the demand?"
US House Rep Harry Teague noted how, in New Mexico (his state), "the number of people who have to travel five, six hours" to a VA "is pretty large." And he also wanted to drop back to Roe's questions and know about the outpatient and how New Mexico might qualify so that "people don't have to drive five, six hours" to get care? Parkis began stressing tele-care (health care over the phone). Since many of the veterans Teague is speaking of (we speak to veterans groups in New Mexico quite often) are complaining about the lengthy drives to Alberquerque for check ups or to diagnose new issues, it's not really clear how tele-care would assist them in that.
US House Rep Ann Kirkpatrick worried that "demand" qualification might hurt rural areas where many factors effected how many veterans in an area utilized a VA facility. This includes some veterans, including Native American veterans, who do not access care because they aren't aware of the care that is available. Parkis identified Prescott, Arizona as one such area and Kirkpatrick agreed it was. He suggested outreach, "talking to the tribal leaders" and insisted that "most health care these days is actually chronic not acute." Kirkpatrick's concerns really weren't addressed by Parkis who admitted rural areas really weren't his expertise; however, Chair Filner said that in "January we're going to be concentrating on rural -- access for rural veterans because everything you say is right."
Moving to Iraq, Saturday barriers around the US base in Basra collapsed. Steven Edwards (CANWEST News Service) reports that the US military is insisting the collapse was not a result of mortar attacks or any other attack but a result of "rainfall". Because Iraq is infamous for rainfall. In fact, dust storms are a thing of the long ago past. Right? Right? (No.) In other news, Li Xianzhi (Xinhua) reports armed clashes between US forces and Iraqis "guarding their own homes" in Baquba today which resulted in the death of 1 Iraqi and three more injured. Xianzhi quotes a police source who states, "The gunmen thought the [US] soldiers approaching their homes were insurgents." Xianzhi quotes the source explaining a US helicopter was called and it "bombed a house and totally destroyed it".
RECOMMENDED: "Iraq snapshot"
"Barack and Other War Hawks"
"Xinhua shows up CNN"
"The Cowardly Kucinich"
"Bob Somerby & the Corn Princess"
"The War Hawk and those who support him"
"barack and the goons who love him"
"Another blow to equality"
"Depressing time in the House and Senate"
"Not one word from me on the War Hawk (promise)"
"Look who's crying now"
"The Curious Mister Erik Prince"
"Grammys"
"THIS JUST IN! BARRY BOMBS!"
"Barry's boo-boos"
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
THIS JUST IN! BARRY BOMBS!
BULLY BOY PRESS & CEDRIC'S BIG MIX -- THE KOOL-AID TABLE
CELEBRITY IN CHIEF BARRY O SUNK LIKE A STONE TONIGHT AT WEST POINT. SOME WHITE HOUSE SOURCES (OKAY, ROBERT GIBBS) AGREED TO TALK PROVIDED WE GAVE THEM INCENTIVE (A HONEY BAKED HAM WHICH HE CONSUMED -- BONE AND ALL -- IN 5 MINUTES). THE WHITE HOUSE SOURCE TOLD US BARRY O WAS THROWN FOR A LOOP WHEN RAHM EMANUEL REFUSED TO ALLOW BARACK TO WEAR THE WHITE DRESS HE WANTED TO WEAR.
"IT'S WHAT MARILYN MONROE WORE IN THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH!" INSISTED BARRY O ACCORDING TO GIBBS WHO SWEARS "BARRY O WAS HIGHLY FETCHING IN THAT DRESS. AND WHEN RAHM SAID NO, NO, NO, BARRY O EVEN OFFERED TO WEAR PANTIES BUT IT WAS NO GO. AFTER THAT, OUR CELEBRITY IN CHIEF WAS IN A FUNK."
WHICH EXPLAINED HIS STOP, START, SANDY DENNIS DELIVERY AS WELL AS HIS LACKLUSTER LOOK WHICH APPEARED TO PAY HOMAGE TO CHER'S "HALF-BREED" PERIOD (PHOTO: ISAIAH/TCI IMAGES). IT DIDN'T HELP THAT HE WAS CAUGHT IN ONE LIE AFTER ANOTHER.
HE ANNOUNCED, FOR EXAMPLE, THAT "OUR NEW APPROACH IN AFGHANISTAN IS LIKELY TO COST US ROUGHLY $30 BILLION FOR THE MILITARY THIS YEAR, AND I WILL WORK CLOSELY WITH CONGRESS TO ADDRESS THESE COSTS AS WE WORK TO BRING DOWN OUR DEFICIT." BUT THE 2010 FISCAL YEAR BUDGET ALREADY PASSED AND STARTED OCTOBER 1ST. TO PAY $30 BILLION MORE, BARRY O WOULD NEED TO DO A SUPPLEMENTAL.
A SUPPLEMENTAL?
BUT APRIL 9TH, WHEN HE SENT ANOTHER SUPPLEMENTAL TO CONGRESS HE SWORE NEVER AGAIN. HE WROTE A FAN LETTER TO NANCY PELOSI WHERE HE USED THE WORD "LAST" ON SUPPLEMENTAL. AND THE WHITE HOUSE ISSUED A STATEMENT THAT DAY:
This is the last planned war supplemental. Moving forward, the President is committed to honest budgeting and fiscal discipline in which these costs are accounted for in the budget -- and are clear for all to see. After seven years of war, the American people deserve an honest accounting of the cost of our involvement in our ongoing military operations.
IN OTHER LAUGH GETTING LINES, BARRY O DECLARED HE "WILL CLOSE GUANTANAMO." OF COURSE, HE PROMISED IT WOULD BE CLOSED BY THE END OF THE YEAR. YOU SEE THAT HAPPEN YET?
BEST OF ALL WAS WHEN HE TALKED ABOUT VIETNAM AND THE PRESS ROOM EXCLAIMED, "BUT YOU WERE ONLY EIGHT YEARS OLD!"
FROM THE TCI WIRE:
Today in London, the Iraq Inquiry continued. Last Tuesday was when the public hearings began. Mary Dejevsky (Independent of London) offers this evaulation of the Inquiry thus far, "The Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war is a week old and even at this very early stage it appears that its chief victim could be Tony Blair, the man who has so successfully prevented the mud sticking to him hitherto. The questioning may have been gentle, but one after another, the top civil servants of the time have plunged the knife in to the former prime minister, sometimes brutally, sometimes with a surgeon's finesse. Whenever the question of responsibility for the war arose, they were clear that it was not theirs. Which is the constitutional truth. Their duty as civil servants is to execute the policies of the elected government, not, for all the fun and games of Yes, Minister, to thwart them." Sian Ruddick (Great Britain's Socialist Worker) also weighs in, "Many people feared that the Iraq inquiry, which opened last week, was going to be a whitewash. While that is still a strong possibility, the inquiry's first week has revealed the continuing crisis in the establishment over the invasion in March 2003."
Today the committee heard from Peter Ricketts (Political Director of the UK Foreign Office Sept. 2001 through July 2003) and Edward Chaplin (British Ambassador to Jordan May 2000 to April 2002, Director for Middle East and North Africa April 2002 to Sepember 2003). The session opened with Chair John Chilcot offering a "good morning everyone" before noting there were not "as many in the 'everyone' as there have been on previous days, but you are very welcome." The witnesses are not put under oath before they offer their testimony; however, after the transcripts have been typed up and corrected, they are "asked to sign a transcript of their evidence to the effect that the evidence they have given is truthful, fair and accurate." Chair Chilcot went over the particulars with a little more emphasis today and the hearing also got to the point a little more quickly today.
Committee Member Martin Gilbert: My first question is from the perspective of the Foreign Office, from your perspective, when did it become apparent that the United States was contemplating a more active approach to regime change in Iraq than during the first years of the Bush administration, during the first year?
Peter Ricketts repeated what he had said last week about it being policy Bully Boy Bush being installed in the White House by the Supreme Court -- he again pointed to an article Condi Rice wrote for the journal Foreign Affairs calling on regime change. The way Ricketts continuously references this article by Condi Rice, you'd think it was all about Iraq. It's not. "Campaign 2000: Promoting the National Interest" was in the January/February 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs (house organ of the Council on, of and for Foreign Relations). She uses a sizable amount of space blaming Bill Clinton for everything -- including for deploying, in her opinion, too many miltiary personnel overseas (yes, it is laughable) and claiming that the next president will have to clean up after Clinton (yes, it is laughable). She mentions Saddam in passing in terms of 1990s action and then, much later in the paper, she writes:
As history marches toward markets and democracy, some states have been left by the side of the road. Iraq is the prototype. Saddam Hussein's regime is isolated, his conventional military power has been severely weakened, his people live in poverty and terror, and he has no useful place in international politics. He is therefore determined to develop WMD. Nothing will change until Saddam is gone, so the United States must mobilize whatever resources it can, including support from his opposition, to remove him.
She's much more concerned with Russia (which was her area of expertise -- although I never saw any expertise in any of her statements on that country), China and North Korea. The way Ricketts and others have referenced this lengthy article one could easily walk away with the impression that Iraq was her focus in the paper. That is simply incorrect. Her call for regime change in Iraq (the section quoted above) is 83 words -- 83 word out of over 6,596 words in the essay. And, repeating, China, Iran, North Korea, Russia and other areas receive far more attention in the paper. I'm not saying Rice didn't want regime change in Iraq, she clearly advocated for it. Far into her paper. It would be interesting to know what other things she advocated for in that paper the British government was willing to sign off on.
Interestingly for someone who keeps name dropping Rice and referencing her paper, Ricketts never explains -- nor is he asked -- why either the US or the UK governments were insisting they believed Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction? In Rice's paper -- from 2000, only two years prior -- she's asserting Hussein is "determined to develop WMD." When did he do that? In two years time, how did he manage that? Iraq had no WMD -- NONE -- but it's interesting that the official position in 2000 was that he was "determined" to create some and two years later -- while Iraq is still under sanctions and still has no-fly zones and is heavily monitored by many Western countries -- the word Bush and Blair's administrations put out is that Iraq has WMD. Ricketts the one who can't shut up about Condi's article. So maybe he should have been asked when he believed Iraq developed WMD and why he believed that? That really is more to the point or does he just intend to hide behind Condi's skirts for the entire inquiry? But would it even matter if the question were asked? Follow this exchange from today, note the very clear question and try to find where in Ricketts' response he answers the question.
Commitee Member Martin Gilbert: How do you account for the scepticism, the general scepticism of the British public, that Saddam constituted a serious danger to the region.
Peter Ricketts: We had spent the previous months concentrating on the threat from Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. We had been through the military intervention in Afghanistan and we were still, at that stage, involved in the aftermath of that, an international security force and the civilian effort in Afghanistan. There was a lot of public attention on Al-Qaeda and the threat from Afghanistan. As we have discussed in previous evidence sessions, we had, in Whitehall, been seriously concerned about the threat from weapons of mass destruction and the risk that they would be reconstituted as the sanctions regime broke down and Saddam got access to more moeny, and it had been a consistent worry. 9/11 and the evidence of terrorist interest in weapons of mass destruction was a further boost. It was a very strong strand in the Prime Minister's thinking and the Foreign Secretary's thinking, but it hadn't been a big feature of public presentation of the counter-terrorism strategy. Therefore, as we focused harder on Iraq, as that was clearly rising up the US political agenda, it was important that we should get out to the public more information about what we saw as the threat from Saddam, Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
That was Ricketts' full response. I didn't leave out a word. Did he answer the question? No, not really. Unless the answer is: "We worked real hard to sell the war on Afghanistan and then had to scramble after that to sell the war on Iraq -- and since we were already tired from selling one war, we didn't have it in us to be convincing and the public caught on."
Pressed by Committee Member Martin Gilbert, Ricketts admitted that the Foreign Office was involved in planning "just after the Crawford meeting" with the Ministry of Defence. Let's jump in at his but. And see if you can catch Peter Ricketts lying.
Peter Ricketts: We didn't discuss military planning as such. We discussed the implications of military planning for other departments' activities, and the key initial work that I was involved in was trying to define an end-state for any miltiary action we took. We had never supported the idea simply of regime change, that was not our proposal, but to say disarming Saddam of his weapons of mass destruction was not adequate either, and so we developed some ideas on what an end-state should be, the sort of Iraq that we would want to see, law-abiding, sovereign, with territorial integrity, not posing a threat to its neighbours, respecting its obligations on weapons of mass destruction and so on. We worked up in that group an end-state which was one of the political implications of any military plan.
Ricketts is such a liar. He says that "we" "never supported the idea simply of regime change." He creates the impression that this wasn't the UK goal but it was the UK goal and it was the goal post-Crawford (which is when Tony Blair begins using the phrase in speeches -- speeches echoing the Blair Doctrine he outlined in his 1999 speech). He's being asked about that and he's lying. Gilbert persists and forces this response out of Ricketts: "It is hard to imagine that an Iraq of that kind was possible with Saddam Hussein in charge, and if -- because the presumption of this work was that in due course there would be a miltiary operation." Yes, it is hard to imagine that UK was planning for anything other than regime change. Ricketts then attempts to backtrack insisting that would only be the outcome -- regime change would be the outcome -- if there was military action. At which point, Edward Chaplin jumps in.
Edward Chaplin: Could I add one point? There was also the possibility, perhaps you have touched on already, that under pressure, including military pressure, build-up, Saddam Hussein would be persuaded by other Arab heads of government to step down and go into exile; in other words, we would achieve a change in the regime's policies without military action.
And forcing someone into exile? That's regime change. Or failed regime change if you want to consider the CIA-backed attempt to force Hugo Chavez into exile in 2002. On the issue of countries neighboring Iraq and how they were sounded out, Edward Chaplin offered:
Obviously there were very frequent conversations with leaders in the Arab world, particularly those likely to be most affected. I already mentioned conversations I had when I was ambassador in Jordan. There were real fears about the impact of military action in Iraq articulated very clearly by the King of Jordan and others, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. In terms of the impact it would have on the stability of the Middle East, and the impact it would have on the peace process -- the double standards I have indicated -- and, indeed, the impact it would have on the wider campaign against terrorism post-9/11. So they were flagging those up. What we were doing was the messages we were passing to all these governments, particularly those with any influence in Baghdad, was, "We hear all that and we can see it very clearly, as clearly as you can, but this is a very serious problem and it has to be resolved. We have been at this for 11/12 years, we cannot go on, particularly after 9/11, without resolving this threat." Therefore, our hope was that they would add their own actions and pressure through private or public means, to persaude the Iraqi regime to start cooperating seriously with the UN, and we assured them that, if they did that, then, you know, we would react accordingly. We were not looking for an excuse to take military action, far from it. We did want this problem resolved and that was as much, we thought, in their interest as ours. Of course, their perception of the threat, the WMD threat, was not as serious as ours, with the one exception perhaps of Iran, the neighbour that had suffered quite severely from the actual use of WMD, I have to say.
Mark Stone (Sky News) feels that today offered "a developing narrative" which he sums up as:
In the run-up to war -- those key months between 9/11 (when the Bush Administration's grumblings about Iraq turned to more distinct drum-beats) and the invasion in March 2003 -- the UK was determined to lead America down the 'UN route'.
All the witnesses have cited numerous occasions when Tony Blair, with the help of his diplomats and ambassadors, pushed an increasingly disinterested American Administration back to the UN table.
If that is the narrative, the UK push for the UN ended with 1441 (authorization for weapons inspectors to return to Iraq) -- which was made obvious by Jeremy Greenstock's testimony last week or have we all forgotten that?
Michael Savage (Independent of London) emphasizes, "Despite declarations that Britain would lead an 'exemplary' operation to bring back normality to the area around Basra, in the south of the country, the Chilcot Iraq inquiry heard that the demands of the task soon outstripped the money provided by the Government." Ruth Barnett (Sky News -- link has text and video) emphasizes the testimony by Chaplin that the US had "touching faith": "The US administration had 'toughing faith that once Iraq had been liberated from Saddam Hussein . . . there would be dancing in the streets,' Mr Chaplain said. 'We tried to point out that was estremely optimistic'." Chaplain returned to that 'touching faith' in another response which we'll note in full:
Edward Chaplin: I think we were all very concerned at the lack of preparations in terms of what we could see happening in Washing. What was happening there was that the rather detailed work that had already been done by the State Department over many months, didn't seem to be finding its way into the policy-making, the preparation for the aftermath, which was all in the hands of the Pentagon. The Pentagon took the decision to set up this organisation ORHA [Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance], and appoint an ex-General to be in charge of it. But there was a certain disregard -- an unwillingness, I think, to use the State Department expertise to devise a policy and -- or indeed to attach some of the experts who actually knew a lot about the region and spoke the language and so on. Again, this goes back to what I was saying earlier about a touching belief that we shouldn't worry so much about the aftermath because it was all going to be sweetness and light.
But where could this 'touching faith' have come from?
Edward Chaplin: I think one of the problems that the Amreicans had this view was that they relied heavily on what they were hearing from different opposition groups, and these were the opposition groups outside Iraq. We were always a great deal more sceptical about what they were saying and what they were claiming would happen in the aftermath of an invasion, but I think some Americans were hearing some very happy talk from the likes of Mr [Ahmed] Chalabi that, once Saddam Hussein had gone, they didn't need to worry, everything would be fine, the subtext being particularly if they handed over power to someone like Mr Chalabi. We were always very firmly of the view and expressed this to everyone including the Americans, but also in the region, that we held no particular candle for any opposition, any exiled group. We had a view that they carried actually very little credibility where it mattered in Iraq.
Wait a minute. The British government thought that? Then why has the press never thought it? Why has the US press -- in total -- refused to question the installing of exiles? The role of the press is supposed to be a skeptical one. So why is it that all these exiles got installed and the press didn't question it? No fiery editorials from the New York Times, for example. It was always basic. It's popped up in many snapshots. A group of people who flee the country while you live there and suffer aren't seen as 'heroes' or 'special' or 'leaders' when they strut back in with foreign invaders. Doesn't work that way. Never has historically. But the press was somehow blind to that. It's a strange sort of blind spot -- one that the British government didn't have. The press had and continues to have that blind spot because they're not about what's right or what's fair. The press long ago enlisted to sell this illegal war. In the US, they embedded with the illegal war while dickering over a few details. The illegal war? Richard Norton-Taylor (Guardian) explains, "In the event of military action, Ricketts told the inquiry, Lord Boyce, then chief of the defence staff, needed the agreement of the government's law officers. That was an 'absolute requirement', said Ricketts. On 7 March 2003, less than a fortnight before the invasion, Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, advised that British commanders could be arraigned before the international criminal court if they joined the US-led invasion." On the legality issue, Johan Steyn's "Invading Iraq was not just a disaster: it was illegal" (Financial Times of London) went up last night and advocates for the inquiry to release an interim report issuing a finding "on the legality of the Iraq war". Steyn writes, "I would expect the inquiry to conclude -- in agreement with Kofi Annan, former secretary-general of the United Nations -- that in the absence of a second UN resolution authorising invasion, it was illegal."
RECOMMENDED: Isaiah's The World Today Just Nuts "I Am The War Hawk You Have Been Waiting For"
"Iraq snapshot"
"Steyn says Iraq War illegal and Inquiry should conclude that"
"US military deaths in Iraq highest since June"
"Michelle and Barry wasting our money"
"Monday"
"What are we paying for and how?"
"new cbo report"
"Harry Reid, no leadership"
"About the Joni review . . .."
"The always laughable ACORN"
"No surprise, Barack doesn't listen to the people"
"Joni Mitchell, faux universal insurance"
"Isaiah, Paul Kirk, Third"
"THIS JUST IN! MELANCHOLY BARRY!"
"Ready to play dress up"
CELEBRITY IN CHIEF BARRY O SUNK LIKE A STONE TONIGHT AT WEST POINT. SOME WHITE HOUSE SOURCES (OKAY, ROBERT GIBBS) AGREED TO TALK PROVIDED WE GAVE THEM INCENTIVE (A HONEY BAKED HAM WHICH HE CONSUMED -- BONE AND ALL -- IN 5 MINUTES). THE WHITE HOUSE SOURCE TOLD US BARRY O WAS THROWN FOR A LOOP WHEN RAHM EMANUEL REFUSED TO ALLOW BARACK TO WEAR THE WHITE DRESS HE WANTED TO WEAR.
"IT'S WHAT MARILYN MONROE WORE IN THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH!" INSISTED BARRY O ACCORDING TO GIBBS WHO SWEARS "BARRY O WAS HIGHLY FETCHING IN THAT DRESS. AND WHEN RAHM SAID NO, NO, NO, BARRY O EVEN OFFERED TO WEAR PANTIES BUT IT WAS NO GO. AFTER THAT, OUR CELEBRITY IN CHIEF WAS IN A FUNK."
WHICH EXPLAINED HIS STOP, START, SANDY DENNIS DELIVERY AS WELL AS HIS LACKLUSTER LOOK WHICH APPEARED TO PAY HOMAGE TO CHER'S "HALF-BREED" PERIOD (PHOTO: ISAIAH/TCI IMAGES). IT DIDN'T HELP THAT HE WAS CAUGHT IN ONE LIE AFTER ANOTHER.
HE ANNOUNCED, FOR EXAMPLE, THAT "OUR NEW APPROACH IN AFGHANISTAN IS LIKELY TO COST US ROUGHLY $30 BILLION FOR THE MILITARY THIS YEAR, AND I WILL WORK CLOSELY WITH CONGRESS TO ADDRESS THESE COSTS AS WE WORK TO BRING DOWN OUR DEFICIT." BUT THE 2010 FISCAL YEAR BUDGET ALREADY PASSED AND STARTED OCTOBER 1ST. TO PAY $30 BILLION MORE, BARRY O WOULD NEED TO DO A SUPPLEMENTAL.
A SUPPLEMENTAL?
BUT APRIL 9TH, WHEN HE SENT ANOTHER SUPPLEMENTAL TO CONGRESS HE SWORE NEVER AGAIN. HE WROTE A FAN LETTER TO NANCY PELOSI WHERE HE USED THE WORD "LAST" ON SUPPLEMENTAL. AND THE WHITE HOUSE ISSUED A STATEMENT THAT DAY:
This is the last planned war supplemental. Moving forward, the President is committed to honest budgeting and fiscal discipline in which these costs are accounted for in the budget -- and are clear for all to see. After seven years of war, the American people deserve an honest accounting of the cost of our involvement in our ongoing military operations.
IN OTHER LAUGH GETTING LINES, BARRY O DECLARED HE "WILL CLOSE GUANTANAMO." OF COURSE, HE PROMISED IT WOULD BE CLOSED BY THE END OF THE YEAR. YOU SEE THAT HAPPEN YET?
BEST OF ALL WAS WHEN HE TALKED ABOUT VIETNAM AND THE PRESS ROOM EXCLAIMED, "BUT YOU WERE ONLY EIGHT YEARS OLD!"
FROM THE TCI WIRE:
Today in London, the Iraq Inquiry continued. Last Tuesday was when the public hearings began. Mary Dejevsky (Independent of London) offers this evaulation of the Inquiry thus far, "The Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war is a week old and even at this very early stage it appears that its chief victim could be Tony Blair, the man who has so successfully prevented the mud sticking to him hitherto. The questioning may have been gentle, but one after another, the top civil servants of the time have plunged the knife in to the former prime minister, sometimes brutally, sometimes with a surgeon's finesse. Whenever the question of responsibility for the war arose, they were clear that it was not theirs. Which is the constitutional truth. Their duty as civil servants is to execute the policies of the elected government, not, for all the fun and games of Yes, Minister, to thwart them." Sian Ruddick (Great Britain's Socialist Worker) also weighs in, "Many people feared that the Iraq inquiry, which opened last week, was going to be a whitewash. While that is still a strong possibility, the inquiry's first week has revealed the continuing crisis in the establishment over the invasion in March 2003."
Today the committee heard from Peter Ricketts (Political Director of the UK Foreign Office Sept. 2001 through July 2003) and Edward Chaplin (British Ambassador to Jordan May 2000 to April 2002, Director for Middle East and North Africa April 2002 to Sepember 2003). The session opened with Chair John Chilcot offering a "good morning everyone" before noting there were not "as many in the 'everyone' as there have been on previous days, but you are very welcome." The witnesses are not put under oath before they offer their testimony; however, after the transcripts have been typed up and corrected, they are "asked to sign a transcript of their evidence to the effect that the evidence they have given is truthful, fair and accurate." Chair Chilcot went over the particulars with a little more emphasis today and the hearing also got to the point a little more quickly today.
Committee Member Martin Gilbert: My first question is from the perspective of the Foreign Office, from your perspective, when did it become apparent that the United States was contemplating a more active approach to regime change in Iraq than during the first years of the Bush administration, during the first year?
Peter Ricketts repeated what he had said last week about it being policy Bully Boy Bush being installed in the White House by the Supreme Court -- he again pointed to an article Condi Rice wrote for the journal Foreign Affairs calling on regime change. The way Ricketts continuously references this article by Condi Rice, you'd think it was all about Iraq. It's not. "Campaign 2000: Promoting the National Interest" was in the January/February 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs (house organ of the Council on, of and for Foreign Relations). She uses a sizable amount of space blaming Bill Clinton for everything -- including for deploying, in her opinion, too many miltiary personnel overseas (yes, it is laughable) and claiming that the next president will have to clean up after Clinton (yes, it is laughable). She mentions Saddam in passing in terms of 1990s action and then, much later in the paper, she writes:
As history marches toward markets and democracy, some states have been left by the side of the road. Iraq is the prototype. Saddam Hussein's regime is isolated, his conventional military power has been severely weakened, his people live in poverty and terror, and he has no useful place in international politics. He is therefore determined to develop WMD. Nothing will change until Saddam is gone, so the United States must mobilize whatever resources it can, including support from his opposition, to remove him.
She's much more concerned with Russia (which was her area of expertise -- although I never saw any expertise in any of her statements on that country), China and North Korea. The way Ricketts and others have referenced this lengthy article one could easily walk away with the impression that Iraq was her focus in the paper. That is simply incorrect. Her call for regime change in Iraq (the section quoted above) is 83 words -- 83 word out of over 6,596 words in the essay. And, repeating, China, Iran, North Korea, Russia and other areas receive far more attention in the paper. I'm not saying Rice didn't want regime change in Iraq, she clearly advocated for it. Far into her paper. It would be interesting to know what other things she advocated for in that paper the British government was willing to sign off on.
Interestingly for someone who keeps name dropping Rice and referencing her paper, Ricketts never explains -- nor is he asked -- why either the US or the UK governments were insisting they believed Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction? In Rice's paper -- from 2000, only two years prior -- she's asserting Hussein is "determined to develop WMD." When did he do that? In two years time, how did he manage that? Iraq had no WMD -- NONE -- but it's interesting that the official position in 2000 was that he was "determined" to create some and two years later -- while Iraq is still under sanctions and still has no-fly zones and is heavily monitored by many Western countries -- the word Bush and Blair's administrations put out is that Iraq has WMD. Ricketts the one who can't shut up about Condi's article. So maybe he should have been asked when he believed Iraq developed WMD and why he believed that? That really is more to the point or does he just intend to hide behind Condi's skirts for the entire inquiry? But would it even matter if the question were asked? Follow this exchange from today, note the very clear question and try to find where in Ricketts' response he answers the question.
Commitee Member Martin Gilbert: How do you account for the scepticism, the general scepticism of the British public, that Saddam constituted a serious danger to the region.
Peter Ricketts: We had spent the previous months concentrating on the threat from Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. We had been through the military intervention in Afghanistan and we were still, at that stage, involved in the aftermath of that, an international security force and the civilian effort in Afghanistan. There was a lot of public attention on Al-Qaeda and the threat from Afghanistan. As we have discussed in previous evidence sessions, we had, in Whitehall, been seriously concerned about the threat from weapons of mass destruction and the risk that they would be reconstituted as the sanctions regime broke down and Saddam got access to more moeny, and it had been a consistent worry. 9/11 and the evidence of terrorist interest in weapons of mass destruction was a further boost. It was a very strong strand in the Prime Minister's thinking and the Foreign Secretary's thinking, but it hadn't been a big feature of public presentation of the counter-terrorism strategy. Therefore, as we focused harder on Iraq, as that was clearly rising up the US political agenda, it was important that we should get out to the public more information about what we saw as the threat from Saddam, Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
That was Ricketts' full response. I didn't leave out a word. Did he answer the question? No, not really. Unless the answer is: "We worked real hard to sell the war on Afghanistan and then had to scramble after that to sell the war on Iraq -- and since we were already tired from selling one war, we didn't have it in us to be convincing and the public caught on."
Pressed by Committee Member Martin Gilbert, Ricketts admitted that the Foreign Office was involved in planning "just after the Crawford meeting" with the Ministry of Defence. Let's jump in at his but. And see if you can catch Peter Ricketts lying.
Peter Ricketts: We didn't discuss military planning as such. We discussed the implications of military planning for other departments' activities, and the key initial work that I was involved in was trying to define an end-state for any miltiary action we took. We had never supported the idea simply of regime change, that was not our proposal, but to say disarming Saddam of his weapons of mass destruction was not adequate either, and so we developed some ideas on what an end-state should be, the sort of Iraq that we would want to see, law-abiding, sovereign, with territorial integrity, not posing a threat to its neighbours, respecting its obligations on weapons of mass destruction and so on. We worked up in that group an end-state which was one of the political implications of any military plan.
Ricketts is such a liar. He says that "we" "never supported the idea simply of regime change." He creates the impression that this wasn't the UK goal but it was the UK goal and it was the goal post-Crawford (which is when Tony Blair begins using the phrase in speeches -- speeches echoing the Blair Doctrine he outlined in his 1999 speech). He's being asked about that and he's lying. Gilbert persists and forces this response out of Ricketts: "It is hard to imagine that an Iraq of that kind was possible with Saddam Hussein in charge, and if -- because the presumption of this work was that in due course there would be a miltiary operation." Yes, it is hard to imagine that UK was planning for anything other than regime change. Ricketts then attempts to backtrack insisting that would only be the outcome -- regime change would be the outcome -- if there was military action. At which point, Edward Chaplin jumps in.
Edward Chaplin: Could I add one point? There was also the possibility, perhaps you have touched on already, that under pressure, including military pressure, build-up, Saddam Hussein would be persuaded by other Arab heads of government to step down and go into exile; in other words, we would achieve a change in the regime's policies without military action.
And forcing someone into exile? That's regime change. Or failed regime change if you want to consider the CIA-backed attempt to force Hugo Chavez into exile in 2002. On the issue of countries neighboring Iraq and how they were sounded out, Edward Chaplin offered:
Obviously there were very frequent conversations with leaders in the Arab world, particularly those likely to be most affected. I already mentioned conversations I had when I was ambassador in Jordan. There were real fears about the impact of military action in Iraq articulated very clearly by the King of Jordan and others, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. In terms of the impact it would have on the stability of the Middle East, and the impact it would have on the peace process -- the double standards I have indicated -- and, indeed, the impact it would have on the wider campaign against terrorism post-9/11. So they were flagging those up. What we were doing was the messages we were passing to all these governments, particularly those with any influence in Baghdad, was, "We hear all that and we can see it very clearly, as clearly as you can, but this is a very serious problem and it has to be resolved. We have been at this for 11/12 years, we cannot go on, particularly after 9/11, without resolving this threat." Therefore, our hope was that they would add their own actions and pressure through private or public means, to persaude the Iraqi regime to start cooperating seriously with the UN, and we assured them that, if they did that, then, you know, we would react accordingly. We were not looking for an excuse to take military action, far from it. We did want this problem resolved and that was as much, we thought, in their interest as ours. Of course, their perception of the threat, the WMD threat, was not as serious as ours, with the one exception perhaps of Iran, the neighbour that had suffered quite severely from the actual use of WMD, I have to say.
Mark Stone (Sky News) feels that today offered "a developing narrative" which he sums up as:
In the run-up to war -- those key months between 9/11 (when the Bush Administration's grumblings about Iraq turned to more distinct drum-beats) and the invasion in March 2003 -- the UK was determined to lead America down the 'UN route'.
All the witnesses have cited numerous occasions when Tony Blair, with the help of his diplomats and ambassadors, pushed an increasingly disinterested American Administration back to the UN table.
If that is the narrative, the UK push for the UN ended with 1441 (authorization for weapons inspectors to return to Iraq) -- which was made obvious by Jeremy Greenstock's testimony last week or have we all forgotten that?
Michael Savage (Independent of London) emphasizes, "Despite declarations that Britain would lead an 'exemplary' operation to bring back normality to the area around Basra, in the south of the country, the Chilcot Iraq inquiry heard that the demands of the task soon outstripped the money provided by the Government." Ruth Barnett (Sky News -- link has text and video) emphasizes the testimony by Chaplin that the US had "touching faith": "The US administration had 'toughing faith that once Iraq had been liberated from Saddam Hussein . . . there would be dancing in the streets,' Mr Chaplain said. 'We tried to point out that was estremely optimistic'." Chaplain returned to that 'touching faith' in another response which we'll note in full:
Edward Chaplin: I think we were all very concerned at the lack of preparations in terms of what we could see happening in Washing. What was happening there was that the rather detailed work that had already been done by the State Department over many months, didn't seem to be finding its way into the policy-making, the preparation for the aftermath, which was all in the hands of the Pentagon. The Pentagon took the decision to set up this organisation ORHA [Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance], and appoint an ex-General to be in charge of it. But there was a certain disregard -- an unwillingness, I think, to use the State Department expertise to devise a policy and -- or indeed to attach some of the experts who actually knew a lot about the region and spoke the language and so on. Again, this goes back to what I was saying earlier about a touching belief that we shouldn't worry so much about the aftermath because it was all going to be sweetness and light.
But where could this 'touching faith' have come from?
Edward Chaplin: I think one of the problems that the Amreicans had this view was that they relied heavily on what they were hearing from different opposition groups, and these were the opposition groups outside Iraq. We were always a great deal more sceptical about what they were saying and what they were claiming would happen in the aftermath of an invasion, but I think some Americans were hearing some very happy talk from the likes of Mr [Ahmed] Chalabi that, once Saddam Hussein had gone, they didn't need to worry, everything would be fine, the subtext being particularly if they handed over power to someone like Mr Chalabi. We were always very firmly of the view and expressed this to everyone including the Americans, but also in the region, that we held no particular candle for any opposition, any exiled group. We had a view that they carried actually very little credibility where it mattered in Iraq.
Wait a minute. The British government thought that? Then why has the press never thought it? Why has the US press -- in total -- refused to question the installing of exiles? The role of the press is supposed to be a skeptical one. So why is it that all these exiles got installed and the press didn't question it? No fiery editorials from the New York Times, for example. It was always basic. It's popped up in many snapshots. A group of people who flee the country while you live there and suffer aren't seen as 'heroes' or 'special' or 'leaders' when they strut back in with foreign invaders. Doesn't work that way. Never has historically. But the press was somehow blind to that. It's a strange sort of blind spot -- one that the British government didn't have. The press had and continues to have that blind spot because they're not about what's right or what's fair. The press long ago enlisted to sell this illegal war. In the US, they embedded with the illegal war while dickering over a few details. The illegal war? Richard Norton-Taylor (Guardian) explains, "In the event of military action, Ricketts told the inquiry, Lord Boyce, then chief of the defence staff, needed the agreement of the government's law officers. That was an 'absolute requirement', said Ricketts. On 7 March 2003, less than a fortnight before the invasion, Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, advised that British commanders could be arraigned before the international criminal court if they joined the US-led invasion." On the legality issue, Johan Steyn's "Invading Iraq was not just a disaster: it was illegal" (Financial Times of London) went up last night and advocates for the inquiry to release an interim report issuing a finding "on the legality of the Iraq war". Steyn writes, "I would expect the inquiry to conclude -- in agreement with Kofi Annan, former secretary-general of the United Nations -- that in the absence of a second UN resolution authorising invasion, it was illegal."
RECOMMENDED: Isaiah's The World Today Just Nuts "I Am The War Hawk You Have Been Waiting For"
"Iraq snapshot"
"Steyn says Iraq War illegal and Inquiry should conclude that"
"US military deaths in Iraq highest since June"
"Michelle and Barry wasting our money"
"Monday"
"What are we paying for and how?"
"new cbo report"
"Harry Reid, no leadership"
"About the Joni review . . .."
"The always laughable ACORN"
"No surprise, Barack doesn't listen to the people"
"Joni Mitchell, faux universal insurance"
"Isaiah, Paul Kirk, Third"
"THIS JUST IN! MELANCHOLY BARRY!"
"Ready to play dress up"
THIS JUST IN! MELANCHOLY BARRY!
BULLY BOY PRESS & CEDRIC'S BIG MIX -- THE KOOL-AID TABLE
CELEBRITY IN CHIEF BARRY O IS PREPARING TO ANNOUNCE TOMORROW THAT TWO MORE U.S. BRIGADES WILL BE SENT TO FIGHT IN THE MEANINGLESS AFGHANISTAN WAR.
BARRY O SPENT THE DAY TRYING ON COSTUMES AND CONFESSED TO THESE REPORTERS, "I WAS SURPRISED I WASN'T PACKING. I REALLY THOUGHT I'D HAVE A MAJOR BONER BUT MAYBE, LIKE L.B.J., I ONLY GET THAT WHEN THE DEATH REPORTS ROLL IN."
FROM THE TCI WIRE:
Starting with employment opportunities: "Desperately seeking dirty whores willing to lie and look the other way while Iraqis are slaughtered. If you have no ethics and no real training, we'll send you to Iraq where you can be a reporter! Call 1-800-Reuters." The news agency continues to falter in Iraq without Tim Cocks to lead their coverage. Which is how you get them reporting no deaths -- NONE -- since Thursday. Today Michael Christie and Mark Trevelyan fetch coffee and take stenography for the Iraqi government as they announce the Interior Ministry's official death toll numbers of 88 dead in Iraq. They try to dress up with civilians, but what's a civilian? If a police officer and his or her family is slaughtered at their homes -- which did happen this month -- are they civilians? It's not even an issue of killed in the line of fire and it's such a stupid division to begin with. Are resistance fighters civilians? Again, it's a stupid division but then it's stupid for anyone to run with a count from the Interior Ministry which can't even release a total of the number of Iraqis imprisoned (including imprisioned in the Interior Ministry's secret prisons).
Excluding foreign forces and foreign contractors, how many people died in Iraq during the month of November thus far? November 1st through 7th saw at least 51 reported dead and 97 reported injured ("Sunday saw 25 Iraqis reported deaths and 97 injured. Monday saw 4 reported dead and 3 reported wounded. Tuesday saw 3 reported dead and 10 reported injured. Wednesday saw 7 reported dead and 25 reported wounded. Thursday saw 5 person reported dead and 15 reported injured. Friday saw 4 people reported dead and six people reported injured. Saturday saw 3 reported dead and 3 reported injured."). November 8th through 14th saw at least 29 reported dead and at least 44 reported wounded ("Sunday were reported 8 dead and 6 were reported wounded, Monday it was 2 dead and 15 wounded, Tuesday it was 4 dead and 2 wounded, Wednesday found 3 dead and 5 wounded, Thursday it was 6 dead and 10 wounded, Friday there were reported 3 dead and on Saturday the number killed was 3 and the number injured was 6. [Saturday's number may be 4 -- we are going with 3, use links and you'll see why.]"). November 15th through 22nd saw at least 44 reported dead and at least 93 reported injured ("Last Sunday 1 person was reported dead in Iraq and 8 were reported injured, Monday's numbers were 28 dead and 36 wounded, Tuesday's were 4 dead and 14 wounded, Wednesday's numbers were 2 dead and 5 wounded, Thursday's numbers were 4 dead and 6 wounded, Friday's numbers were 2 dead and 10 wounded and Saturday's numbers were 3 dead and 14 wounded."). November 23 through November 28th saw 34 reported dead and 120 reported wounded ("Sunday 11 Iraqis were reported dead and 22 wounded, Monday the numbers were 2 dead and 18 wounded, Tuesday the death total was 3 and the number wounded was 16, Wednesday the death toll was 13 and the injured numbered 38, Thursday were 5 dead and 43 wounded"). Yesterday the press reported 3 dead and 5 injured. That's a total of at least 161 reported dead and at least 359 reported injured. There's very little follow up reporting out of Iraq so those in the injured column who didn't recover, who died? There's no way of knowing.
The laughable ICCC count is 105 (civilians and non-civilians) killed in Iraq in November (thus far). Is it a count or is it a dabble? According to their 'count,' no one died in Iraq on November 19th, n one died in Iraq November 9th, 10th or 11th. So if you want to be crazy, idiotic or just a liar, feel free to cite the laughable count of ICCC. We don't cite Iraqi Body Count because it is an undercount and it has always given an undercount. Undercounts help sell the illegal war. We note ICCC's death toll for US service members since the start of the Iraq War -- the only thing they do worth citing. That number is 4367. Sunday the US military announced: "BASRA -- A Multi-National Division -- South Soldier died Nov. 29 of non-combat related injuries. The name of the deceased is being withheld pending notification of next of kin and release by the Department of Defense. The names of service members are announced through the U.S. Department of Defense official website at http://www.defenselink.mil/releases/. The announcements are made on the Web site no earlier than 24 hours after notification of the service member's primary next of kin. The incident is under investigation." The month is not yet over and the military often announces monthly deaths a few days into the next month but currently the monthly death toll is 11 making the month of November the deadliest month for US service members in Iraq since June.
Warren P. Strobel (McClatchy Newspapers) offers a lenthy state-of-Iraq piece today which includes this:
After Iraqi army troops and [Kurdish] peshmerga forces nearly came to blows last spring, Army Gen. Raymond Odierno, the commander of American forces in Iraq, proposed joint patrols by the two armies, under U.S. supervision. The patrols have yet to begin.
Sheikh Jaafar Sheikh Mustafa, the minister of the peshmerga, told McClatchy that the Kurdish regional government has accepted Odierno's plan, but with reservations. However, he ruled out pulling back from the tense front-line region around Mosul.
"We will not withdraw one step, under any pressure, or any threat, or any request," Sheikh Jaafar said in an interview in Irbil, the Kurdish regional government's capital. "Solve the problems, we will withdraw the troops."
There are many sections from Strobel's report worthy of noting; however, we're noting that section because some outlets have falsely reported that those joint-patrols have already started.
Staying in the real world, if you were a kiddie rapist and the murderer of four people and were damn lucky enough to have been sentenced only to life in prison, you might want to consider that a 'win.' But Steven D. Green was never known for smarts and his cheap lawyers were never known for their ethics. Steven D. Green was convicted last May 7th of the gang-rape of 14-year-old Iraqi Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi, her murder, the murder of her five-year-old sister and the murders of both of her parents. The War Crimes took place in Iraq where Green was serving with the US military. Green was the ringleader and part of the plan was to blame the War Crimes on 'insurgents.' By the time the War Crimes were discovered, Green had already been discharged. The War Criminal was sentenced to life in prison only after the civilian jury appeared split on whether or not to sentence him to the death penalty. No reporter has covered this story as much as AP's Brett Barrouquere. Today Barrouquere reports that Green's attorneys filed an appeal today claiming that the 2000 Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act was not appropriate or legal and should be overturned (a claim the defense made in federal court already and a claim that was rejected). His attorneys are claiming that Green would have received more leniancy in military courts and want the conviction tossed out and for Green to be re-tried before a military court -- in other words, his attorneys are attempting to garner the death penalty for Green.
Green and his attorneys seem unaware of the reasons why some of the others involved received lighter sentences than Green did (Green is sentenced to life without parole). The reasons include that all four family members killed were shot dead by Steven D. Green. The reasons include that Green was the ringleader who plotted the entire attack. The reasons include that Green showed no remorse while others begged for the mercy of the court, going so far as to cry in court. Green showed no remorse. It should also be noted that Green and his two-bit attorneys did a lousy job in court. After Green was found guilty, the attorneys attempted to spin it and say that was their strategy. Hey, put that on a business card: "Defense attorneys who will work overtime so that you're found guilty." They claimed that they intended that and were saving their fight for the sentencing. That's an outright lie. They tried many tactics before the first day of the trial and the judge repeatedly shot them down. Pouting and not all that smart to begin with, they went through the motions in court and never regained their balance. So when you put your client in the courtroom and you never challenge the accusastions against him, when you never dispute them, when you never argue he's not guilty, don't be surprised when he gets convicted. Don't be surprised at all.
Green showed no remorse and that's public information now. It's unlikely that a judge will toss out the civilian court's conviction but it could happen. If it does, Green's not likely to face a jury nervous about sentencing him to death. Green is a War Criminal. A military jury (or just a judge if he skips a military jury) will see him as a disgrace to the uniform and someone who brought shame to the US military. They will know that he offered no remorse. Oops.
Let's stop a moment. In May, after being convicted and with the sentence hearing concluding and Abeer's family in the courtroom, Green read a statement (this is the prepared statement e-mailed to the public account of TCI, it varied a bit as Green stumbled through his public reading):
What I am about to say is completely my own. No one told me what to say. No one wrote this for me. Not my lawyers, not the government, not anybody.My feelings of remorse are directed solely towards the victims, and towards the family of the victims, who I do not deny are victims themselves.I am truly sorry for what I did in Iraq and I am sorry for the pain my actions, and the actions of my co-defendants, have caused you and your family. I imagine it is a pain that I cannot fully comprehend or appreciate. I helped to destroy a family and end the lives of four of my fellow human beings, and I wish that I could take it back, but I cannot. And, as inadequate as this apology is, it is all I can give you.I know you wish I was dead, and I do not hold that against you. If I was in your place, I am convinced beyond any doubt that I would feel the same way. And, if I thought it would change anything, or if it would bring these people back to life, I would do everything I could to make them execute me. I also know that you think I am evil, and I understand that as well, and even though I do not think that you want to hear this, I have to tell you that despite the evil that I have done, I am not an evil person. Before I was in the Army, I never thought I would kill anyone, and even after I was in the Army, but before I went to Iraq, I never thought I would intentionally kill a civilian. When I was in Iraq, something happened to me that I can only explain by saying that I lost my mind. At some point while I was in Iraq, I stopped seeing Iraqis as good and bad, as men, women, and children. I started seeing them all as one, and evil, and less than human. When that happened, any natural, learned, or religious morality, that normally would have stopped this, was gone. But I see now that I was wrong, and that Iraqis are human beings, and that despite differences of race, religion, culture, and language, they are still human. And that at their core, they have the same feelings, emotions, and needs as Americans. It was wrong to kill Iraqis, just like it was wrong to kill Americans, just like it is wrong to kill anyone, and I am very sorry. Most of all I am sorry for the deceased, but aside from them, I am the most sorry for the boys whose family are gone. I know what we did left a hole in their lives, and scars on their minds, and that there is no making up for that. I only hope for them that they can somehow, and I don't know how, move forward, and have a good future despite the nightmare in their past that I helped create. They have my apologies and my prayers, as meaningless as they must seem. The Government is not going to execute me, as I am sure you wish they would, but there is really no chance that I will step foot outside of prison for as long as I live. I know that if I live one more year or fifty more years that they will be years that Fahkriya, Kassem, Abeer, and Hadeel won't have not matter where I am. And even though I did not learn their names until long after their deaths, they are never far from my mind. But in the end, whether in one year or fifty, I will die, and when I die I will be in God's hands. In the Kingdom of God where there will be justice, and whatever I deserve, I will get. On the day of judgment, God will repay everyone according to his works, and affliction and distress will come upon every human being who does evil. I know that I have done evil, and I fear that the wrath of the Lord will come upon me on that day. But, I hope that you and your family at least can find some comfort in God's justice. I see now that war is intrinsically evil, because killing is intrinsically evil. And, I am sorry I ever had anything to do with either. And, I cannot say this enough times, whether or not you can ever forgive me, and I don't see how you could, I am and will always be sorry for what I did.
Oh, what a sweet little War Criminal. Abeer's family didn't buy his little act. Renee Murphy reported on the events in the court room for WHAS11:
Renee Murphy: I mean, they came face to face with the killer. Once again, the only thing different about this time was that they were able to speak with him and they had an exchange of dialogue and the family is here from Iraq and they got to ask Steven Green all the questions they wanted answered. They looked each other in the eye. Green appeared calm and casual in court. The victims' family, though, outraged, emotional and distraught. Now cameras were not allowed in the courtroom so we can't show video of today's hearing but here's an account of what happened. [Video begins] This is a cousin of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl raped and killed by Steven Green. He and other family members in this SUV were able to confront Green in federal court this morning. Their words were stinging and came from sheer grief. Former Fort Campbell soldier Steven Green was convicted of killing an Iraqi mother, father and their young daughter. He then raped their 14-year-old daughter, shot her in the head and set her body on fire. Today the victim's family was able to give an impact statement at the federal court house the young sons of the victims asked Green why he killed their father. an aunt told the court that "wounds are still eating at our heart" and probably the most compelling statements were from the girls' grandmother who sobbed from the stand and demanded an explanation from Green. Green apologized to the family saying that he did evil things but he is not an evil person. He says that he was drunk the night of the crimes in 2006 and he was following the orders of his commanding officers. In his statement, Green said if it would bring these people back to life I would do everything I could to make them execute me. His statement goes on to say, "Before I went to Iraq, I never thought I would intentionally kill a civilian. When I was in Iraq, something happened to me that I can only explain by saying I lost my mind. I stopped seeing Iraqis as good and bad, as men, women and children. I started seeing them all as one, and evil, and less than human." Green didn't act alone. His codefendants were court-martialed and received lesser sentences. Green will be formally sentenced to life in prison in September. [End of videotape.] The answers that Green gave were not good enough for some of the family members. at one point today, the grandmother of the young girls who were killed left the podium and started walking towards Green as he sat at the defendant's table shouting "Why!" She was forcibly then escorted to the back of the court room by US Marshalls. She then fell to the ground and buried her face in her hands and began to cry again. The family pleaded with the court for the death sentence for Green. but you can see Green's entire statement to the court on our website whas11.com and coming up tonight at six o'clock, we're going to hear from Green's attorneys.
His performance wasn't at all convincing and he dropped it when he popped back into court in September. From the September 4th snapshot:
May 7th Steven D. Green (pictured above) was convicted for his crimes in March 12, 2006 gang-rape and murder of Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi, the murder of her parents and the murder of her five-year-old sister while Green was serving in Iraq. Green was found to have killed all four, to have participated in the gang-rape of Abeer and to have been the ringleader of the conspiracy to commit the crimes and the conspiracy to cover them up. May 21st, the federal jury deadlocked on the death penalty and instead kicking in sentence to life in prison. Today, Green stood before US District Judge Thomas B. Russell for sentencing. Kim Landers (Australia's ABC) quotes Judge Russell telling Green his actions were "horrifying and inexcusable." Not noted in any of the links in this snapshot (it comes from a friend present in the court), Steven Dale Green has dropped his efforts to appear waif-ish in a coltish Julia Roberts circa the 1990s manner. Green showed up a good twenty pounds heavier than he appeared when on trial, back when the defense emphasized his 'lanky' image by dressing him in oversized clothes. Having been found guilty last spring, there was apparently no concern that he appear frail anymore.
Italy's AGI reports, "Green was recognised as the leader of a group of five soldiers who committed the massacre on September 12 2006 at the Mahmudiyah check point in the south of Baghdad. The story inspired the 2007 masterpiece by Brian De Palma 'Redacted'." BBC adds, "Judge Thomas Russell confirmed Green would serve five consecutive life sentences with no chance of parole." Deborah Yetter (Courier-Journal) explains, "Friday's federal court hearing was devoted mostly to discussion of technical issues related to Green's sentencing report, although it did not change Green's sentence. He was convicted in May of raping and murdering Abeer al-Janabi, 14, and murdering her parents, Kassem and Fakhriya, and her sister, Hadeel, 6, at their home outside Baghdad."
Green was tried in civilian court because he had already been discharged before the War Crimes were discovered. Following the gang-rape and murders, US soldiers attempted to set fire to Abeer's body to destroy the evidence and attempted to blame the crimes on "insurgents." In real time, when the bodies were discovered, the New York Times was among the outlets that ran with "insurgents." Green didn't decide he wanted to be in the military on his own. It was only after his most recent arrest -- after a long string of juvenile arrests -- while sitting in jail and fearing what sentence he would face, that Green decided the US Army was just the place he wanted to be. Had he been imprisoned instead or had the US military followed rules and guidelines, Green wouldn't have gotten in on a waiver. Somehow his history was supposed to translate into "He's the victim!!!!" As if he (and the others) didn't know rape was a crime, as if he (and the others) didn't know that murder was considered wrong. Green attempted to climb up on the cross again today. AP's Brett Barrouguere quotes the 'victim' Green insisting at today's hearing, "You can act like I'm a sociopath. You can act like I'm a sex offender or whatever. If I had not joined the Army, if I had not gone to Iraq, I would not have got caught up in anything." Climb down the cross, drama queen. Your entire life was about leading up to a moment like that. You are a sociopath. You stalked a 14-year-old Iraqi girl while you were stationed at a checkpoint in her neighborhood. You made her uncomfortable and nervous, you stroked her face. She ran to her parents who made arrangements for her to go live with others just to get her away from you, the man the army put there to protect her and the rest of the neighborhood. You are one sick f**k and you deserve what you got. Green play drama queen and insist "you can act like I'm a sex offender" -- he took part in and organized a gang-rape of a 14-year-old girl. That's a sex offender. In fact, "sex offender" is a mild term for what Green is.
His September statements, where he pushed off guilt, rendered his carefully worded May statement a lie. That's public record. Even if the verdict is overturned and he's taken to military court, all that happened is public record and out there. And Green better understand that sympathy for those who cried, showed remorse and established that they were led around by a ringleader (Green) will not be there for him. He got very lucky that a civilian court didn't sentence him to death. A military court will not give him as much benefit of the doubt. They will not buy into his the cheap theatrics of his cheap attorneys. They will not fret that Green was 'forced' into these War Crimes by the military because they will grasp that Green's War Crimes are not common, are not universal and they will most likely decide that a strong, strong example needs to be made of Green. He seems to think that after he's murdered four people and raped a young girl that he deserves to roam the streets in two to five years. He's never accepted the horrifica nature of his crimes, he's never accepted the lives he destroyed and he's never taken accountability for the shame he brought to the US military. Most kiddie rapists who murdered their victim and her family would see life in prison as getting off easy but Green's never taken accountability for his crimes. Now Abeer's family may have to face yet another trial. But that doesn't concern Steve-o, he just knows he's itching to get out of prison. After all, there are lots of young girls in the United States. Who knows who he might be able to rape next? Repeating: No remorse, no guilt. He's never shown either.
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FROM THE TCI WIRE:
Starting with employment opportunities: "Desperately seeking dirty whores willing to lie and look the other way while Iraqis are slaughtered. If you have no ethics and no real training, we'll send you to Iraq where you can be a reporter! Call 1-800-Reuters." The news agency continues to falter in Iraq without Tim Cocks to lead their coverage. Which is how you get them reporting no deaths -- NONE -- since Thursday. Today Michael Christie and Mark Trevelyan fetch coffee and take stenography for the Iraqi government as they announce the Interior Ministry's official death toll numbers of 88 dead in Iraq. They try to dress up with civilians, but what's a civilian? If a police officer and his or her family is slaughtered at their homes -- which did happen this month -- are they civilians? It's not even an issue of killed in the line of fire and it's such a stupid division to begin with. Are resistance fighters civilians? Again, it's a stupid division but then it's stupid for anyone to run with a count from the Interior Ministry which can't even release a total of the number of Iraqis imprisoned (including imprisioned in the Interior Ministry's secret prisons).
Excluding foreign forces and foreign contractors, how many people died in Iraq during the month of November thus far? November 1st through 7th saw at least 51 reported dead and 97 reported injured ("Sunday saw 25 Iraqis reported deaths and 97 injured. Monday saw 4 reported dead and 3 reported wounded. Tuesday saw 3 reported dead and 10 reported injured. Wednesday saw 7 reported dead and 25 reported wounded. Thursday saw 5 person reported dead and 15 reported injured. Friday saw 4 people reported dead and six people reported injured. Saturday saw 3 reported dead and 3 reported injured."). November 8th through 14th saw at least 29 reported dead and at least 44 reported wounded ("Sunday were reported 8 dead and 6 were reported wounded, Monday it was 2 dead and 15 wounded, Tuesday it was 4 dead and 2 wounded, Wednesday found 3 dead and 5 wounded, Thursday it was 6 dead and 10 wounded, Friday there were reported 3 dead and on Saturday the number killed was 3 and the number injured was 6. [Saturday's number may be 4 -- we are going with 3, use links and you'll see why.]"). November 15th through 22nd saw at least 44 reported dead and at least 93 reported injured ("Last Sunday 1 person was reported dead in Iraq and 8 were reported injured, Monday's numbers were 28 dead and 36 wounded, Tuesday's were 4 dead and 14 wounded, Wednesday's numbers were 2 dead and 5 wounded, Thursday's numbers were 4 dead and 6 wounded, Friday's numbers were 2 dead and 10 wounded and Saturday's numbers were 3 dead and 14 wounded."). November 23 through November 28th saw 34 reported dead and 120 reported wounded ("Sunday 11 Iraqis were reported dead and 22 wounded, Monday the numbers were 2 dead and 18 wounded, Tuesday the death total was 3 and the number wounded was 16, Wednesday the death toll was 13 and the injured numbered 38, Thursday were 5 dead and 43 wounded"). Yesterday the press reported 3 dead and 5 injured. That's a total of at least 161 reported dead and at least 359 reported injured. There's very little follow up reporting out of Iraq so those in the injured column who didn't recover, who died? There's no way of knowing.
The laughable ICCC count is 105 (civilians and non-civilians) killed in Iraq in November (thus far). Is it a count or is it a dabble? According to their 'count,' no one died in Iraq on November 19th, n one died in Iraq November 9th, 10th or 11th. So if you want to be crazy, idiotic or just a liar, feel free to cite the laughable count of ICCC. We don't cite Iraqi Body Count because it is an undercount and it has always given an undercount. Undercounts help sell the illegal war. We note ICCC's death toll for US service members since the start of the Iraq War -- the only thing they do worth citing. That number is 4367. Sunday the US military announced: "BASRA -- A Multi-National Division -- South Soldier died Nov. 29 of non-combat related injuries. The name of the deceased is being withheld pending notification of next of kin and release by the Department of Defense. The names of service members are announced through the U.S. Department of Defense official website at http://www.defenselink.mil/releases/. The announcements are made on the Web site no earlier than 24 hours after notification of the service member's primary next of kin. The incident is under investigation." The month is not yet over and the military often announces monthly deaths a few days into the next month but currently the monthly death toll is 11 making the month of November the deadliest month for US service members in Iraq since June.
Warren P. Strobel (McClatchy Newspapers) offers a lenthy state-of-Iraq piece today which includes this:
After Iraqi army troops and [Kurdish] peshmerga forces nearly came to blows last spring, Army Gen. Raymond Odierno, the commander of American forces in Iraq, proposed joint patrols by the two armies, under U.S. supervision. The patrols have yet to begin.
Sheikh Jaafar Sheikh Mustafa, the minister of the peshmerga, told McClatchy that the Kurdish regional government has accepted Odierno's plan, but with reservations. However, he ruled out pulling back from the tense front-line region around Mosul.
"We will not withdraw one step, under any pressure, or any threat, or any request," Sheikh Jaafar said in an interview in Irbil, the Kurdish regional government's capital. "Solve the problems, we will withdraw the troops."
There are many sections from Strobel's report worthy of noting; however, we're noting that section because some outlets have falsely reported that those joint-patrols have already started.
Staying in the real world, if you were a kiddie rapist and the murderer of four people and were damn lucky enough to have been sentenced only to life in prison, you might want to consider that a 'win.' But Steven D. Green was never known for smarts and his cheap lawyers were never known for their ethics. Steven D. Green was convicted last May 7th of the gang-rape of 14-year-old Iraqi Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi, her murder, the murder of her five-year-old sister and the murders of both of her parents. The War Crimes took place in Iraq where Green was serving with the US military. Green was the ringleader and part of the plan was to blame the War Crimes on 'insurgents.' By the time the War Crimes were discovered, Green had already been discharged. The War Criminal was sentenced to life in prison only after the civilian jury appeared split on whether or not to sentence him to the death penalty. No reporter has covered this story as much as AP's Brett Barrouquere. Today Barrouquere reports that Green's attorneys filed an appeal today claiming that the 2000 Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act was not appropriate or legal and should be overturned (a claim the defense made in federal court already and a claim that was rejected). His attorneys are claiming that Green would have received more leniancy in military courts and want the conviction tossed out and for Green to be re-tried before a military court -- in other words, his attorneys are attempting to garner the death penalty for Green.
Green and his attorneys seem unaware of the reasons why some of the others involved received lighter sentences than Green did (Green is sentenced to life without parole). The reasons include that all four family members killed were shot dead by Steven D. Green. The reasons include that Green was the ringleader who plotted the entire attack. The reasons include that Green showed no remorse while others begged for the mercy of the court, going so far as to cry in court. Green showed no remorse. It should also be noted that Green and his two-bit attorneys did a lousy job in court. After Green was found guilty, the attorneys attempted to spin it and say that was their strategy. Hey, put that on a business card: "Defense attorneys who will work overtime so that you're found guilty." They claimed that they intended that and were saving their fight for the sentencing. That's an outright lie. They tried many tactics before the first day of the trial and the judge repeatedly shot them down. Pouting and not all that smart to begin with, they went through the motions in court and never regained their balance. So when you put your client in the courtroom and you never challenge the accusastions against him, when you never dispute them, when you never argue he's not guilty, don't be surprised when he gets convicted. Don't be surprised at all.
Green showed no remorse and that's public information now. It's unlikely that a judge will toss out the civilian court's conviction but it could happen. If it does, Green's not likely to face a jury nervous about sentencing him to death. Green is a War Criminal. A military jury (or just a judge if he skips a military jury) will see him as a disgrace to the uniform and someone who brought shame to the US military. They will know that he offered no remorse. Oops.
Let's stop a moment. In May, after being convicted and with the sentence hearing concluding and Abeer's family in the courtroom, Green read a statement (this is the prepared statement e-mailed to the public account of TCI, it varied a bit as Green stumbled through his public reading):
What I am about to say is completely my own. No one told me what to say. No one wrote this for me. Not my lawyers, not the government, not anybody.My feelings of remorse are directed solely towards the victims, and towards the family of the victims, who I do not deny are victims themselves.I am truly sorry for what I did in Iraq and I am sorry for the pain my actions, and the actions of my co-defendants, have caused you and your family. I imagine it is a pain that I cannot fully comprehend or appreciate. I helped to destroy a family and end the lives of four of my fellow human beings, and I wish that I could take it back, but I cannot. And, as inadequate as this apology is, it is all I can give you.I know you wish I was dead, and I do not hold that against you. If I was in your place, I am convinced beyond any doubt that I would feel the same way. And, if I thought it would change anything, or if it would bring these people back to life, I would do everything I could to make them execute me. I also know that you think I am evil, and I understand that as well, and even though I do not think that you want to hear this, I have to tell you that despite the evil that I have done, I am not an evil person. Before I was in the Army, I never thought I would kill anyone, and even after I was in the Army, but before I went to Iraq, I never thought I would intentionally kill a civilian. When I was in Iraq, something happened to me that I can only explain by saying that I lost my mind. At some point while I was in Iraq, I stopped seeing Iraqis as good and bad, as men, women, and children. I started seeing them all as one, and evil, and less than human. When that happened, any natural, learned, or religious morality, that normally would have stopped this, was gone. But I see now that I was wrong, and that Iraqis are human beings, and that despite differences of race, religion, culture, and language, they are still human. And that at their core, they have the same feelings, emotions, and needs as Americans. It was wrong to kill Iraqis, just like it was wrong to kill Americans, just like it is wrong to kill anyone, and I am very sorry. Most of all I am sorry for the deceased, but aside from them, I am the most sorry for the boys whose family are gone. I know what we did left a hole in their lives, and scars on their minds, and that there is no making up for that. I only hope for them that they can somehow, and I don't know how, move forward, and have a good future despite the nightmare in their past that I helped create. They have my apologies and my prayers, as meaningless as they must seem. The Government is not going to execute me, as I am sure you wish they would, but there is really no chance that I will step foot outside of prison for as long as I live. I know that if I live one more year or fifty more years that they will be years that Fahkriya, Kassem, Abeer, and Hadeel won't have not matter where I am. And even though I did not learn their names until long after their deaths, they are never far from my mind. But in the end, whether in one year or fifty, I will die, and when I die I will be in God's hands. In the Kingdom of God where there will be justice, and whatever I deserve, I will get. On the day of judgment, God will repay everyone according to his works, and affliction and distress will come upon every human being who does evil. I know that I have done evil, and I fear that the wrath of the Lord will come upon me on that day. But, I hope that you and your family at least can find some comfort in God's justice. I see now that war is intrinsically evil, because killing is intrinsically evil. And, I am sorry I ever had anything to do with either. And, I cannot say this enough times, whether or not you can ever forgive me, and I don't see how you could, I am and will always be sorry for what I did.
Oh, what a sweet little War Criminal. Abeer's family didn't buy his little act. Renee Murphy reported on the events in the court room for WHAS11:
Renee Murphy: I mean, they came face to face with the killer. Once again, the only thing different about this time was that they were able to speak with him and they had an exchange of dialogue and the family is here from Iraq and they got to ask Steven Green all the questions they wanted answered. They looked each other in the eye. Green appeared calm and casual in court. The victims' family, though, outraged, emotional and distraught. Now cameras were not allowed in the courtroom so we can't show video of today's hearing but here's an account of what happened. [Video begins] This is a cousin of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl raped and killed by Steven Green. He and other family members in this SUV were able to confront Green in federal court this morning. Their words were stinging and came from sheer grief. Former Fort Campbell soldier Steven Green was convicted of killing an Iraqi mother, father and their young daughter. He then raped their 14-year-old daughter, shot her in the head and set her body on fire. Today the victim's family was able to give an impact statement at the federal court house the young sons of the victims asked Green why he killed their father. an aunt told the court that "wounds are still eating at our heart" and probably the most compelling statements were from the girls' grandmother who sobbed from the stand and demanded an explanation from Green. Green apologized to the family saying that he did evil things but he is not an evil person. He says that he was drunk the night of the crimes in 2006 and he was following the orders of his commanding officers. In his statement, Green said if it would bring these people back to life I would do everything I could to make them execute me. His statement goes on to say, "Before I went to Iraq, I never thought I would intentionally kill a civilian. When I was in Iraq, something happened to me that I can only explain by saying I lost my mind. I stopped seeing Iraqis as good and bad, as men, women and children. I started seeing them all as one, and evil, and less than human." Green didn't act alone. His codefendants were court-martialed and received lesser sentences. Green will be formally sentenced to life in prison in September. [End of videotape.] The answers that Green gave were not good enough for some of the family members. at one point today, the grandmother of the young girls who were killed left the podium and started walking towards Green as he sat at the defendant's table shouting "Why!" She was forcibly then escorted to the back of the court room by US Marshalls. She then fell to the ground and buried her face in her hands and began to cry again. The family pleaded with the court for the death sentence for Green. but you can see Green's entire statement to the court on our website whas11.com and coming up tonight at six o'clock, we're going to hear from Green's attorneys.
His performance wasn't at all convincing and he dropped it when he popped back into court in September. From the September 4th snapshot:
May 7th Steven D. Green (pictured above) was convicted for his crimes in March 12, 2006 gang-rape and murder of Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi, the murder of her parents and the murder of her five-year-old sister while Green was serving in Iraq. Green was found to have killed all four, to have participated in the gang-rape of Abeer and to have been the ringleader of the conspiracy to commit the crimes and the conspiracy to cover them up. May 21st, the federal jury deadlocked on the death penalty and instead kicking in sentence to life in prison. Today, Green stood before US District Judge Thomas B. Russell for sentencing. Kim Landers (Australia's ABC) quotes Judge Russell telling Green his actions were "horrifying and inexcusable." Not noted in any of the links in this snapshot (it comes from a friend present in the court), Steven Dale Green has dropped his efforts to appear waif-ish in a coltish Julia Roberts circa the 1990s manner. Green showed up a good twenty pounds heavier than he appeared when on trial, back when the defense emphasized his 'lanky' image by dressing him in oversized clothes. Having been found guilty last spring, there was apparently no concern that he appear frail anymore.
Italy's AGI reports, "Green was recognised as the leader of a group of five soldiers who committed the massacre on September 12 2006 at the Mahmudiyah check point in the south of Baghdad. The story inspired the 2007 masterpiece by Brian De Palma 'Redacted'." BBC adds, "Judge Thomas Russell confirmed Green would serve five consecutive life sentences with no chance of parole." Deborah Yetter (Courier-Journal) explains, "Friday's federal court hearing was devoted mostly to discussion of technical issues related to Green's sentencing report, although it did not change Green's sentence. He was convicted in May of raping and murdering Abeer al-Janabi, 14, and murdering her parents, Kassem and Fakhriya, and her sister, Hadeel, 6, at their home outside Baghdad."
Green was tried in civilian court because he had already been discharged before the War Crimes were discovered. Following the gang-rape and murders, US soldiers attempted to set fire to Abeer's body to destroy the evidence and attempted to blame the crimes on "insurgents." In real time, when the bodies were discovered, the New York Times was among the outlets that ran with "insurgents." Green didn't decide he wanted to be in the military on his own. It was only after his most recent arrest -- after a long string of juvenile arrests -- while sitting in jail and fearing what sentence he would face, that Green decided the US Army was just the place he wanted to be. Had he been imprisoned instead or had the US military followed rules and guidelines, Green wouldn't have gotten in on a waiver. Somehow his history was supposed to translate into "He's the victim!!!!" As if he (and the others) didn't know rape was a crime, as if he (and the others) didn't know that murder was considered wrong. Green attempted to climb up on the cross again today. AP's Brett Barrouguere quotes the 'victim' Green insisting at today's hearing, "You can act like I'm a sociopath. You can act like I'm a sex offender or whatever. If I had not joined the Army, if I had not gone to Iraq, I would not have got caught up in anything." Climb down the cross, drama queen. Your entire life was about leading up to a moment like that. You are a sociopath. You stalked a 14-year-old Iraqi girl while you were stationed at a checkpoint in her neighborhood. You made her uncomfortable and nervous, you stroked her face. She ran to her parents who made arrangements for her to go live with others just to get her away from you, the man the army put there to protect her and the rest of the neighborhood. You are one sick f**k and you deserve what you got. Green play drama queen and insist "you can act like I'm a sex offender" -- he took part in and organized a gang-rape of a 14-year-old girl. That's a sex offender. In fact, "sex offender" is a mild term for what Green is.
His September statements, where he pushed off guilt, rendered his carefully worded May statement a lie. That's public record. Even if the verdict is overturned and he's taken to military court, all that happened is public record and out there. And Green better understand that sympathy for those who cried, showed remorse and established that they were led around by a ringleader (Green) will not be there for him. He got very lucky that a civilian court didn't sentence him to death. A military court will not give him as much benefit of the doubt. They will not buy into his the cheap theatrics of his cheap attorneys. They will not fret that Green was 'forced' into these War Crimes by the military because they will grasp that Green's War Crimes are not common, are not universal and they will most likely decide that a strong, strong example needs to be made of Green. He seems to think that after he's murdered four people and raped a young girl that he deserves to roam the streets in two to five years. He's never accepted the horrifica nature of his crimes, he's never accepted the lives he destroyed and he's never taken accountability for the shame he brought to the US military. Most kiddie rapists who murdered their victim and her family would see life in prison as getting off easy but Green's never taken accountability for his crimes. Now Abeer's family may have to face yet another trial. But that doesn't concern Steve-o, he just knows he's itching to get out of prison. After all, there are lots of young girls in the United States. Who knows who he might be able to rape next? Repeating: No remorse, no guilt. He's never shown either.
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