Ray McGovern to Colin Powell: Come clean dude

ConsortiumNews has an article up by the wonderful Ray McGovern. Ray is the man that spoke truth to power when BushCo was lying their way into the Iraq War. Ray spent an entire career working for the CIA as an analyst. He is also co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. Ray has a few choice words for Colin Powell on how to restore his reputation. From the article:

Dear Colin,

You have said you regret the “blot” on your record caused by your parroting spurious intelligence at the U.N. to justify war on Iraq. On the chance you may not have noticed, I write to point out that you now have a unique opportunity to do some rehab on your reputation.

Ray then goes on to point out the obvious to Powell:

Your U.N. speech of Feb. 5, 2003 left me speechless, so to speak - largely because of the measure of respect I had had for you before then.

Outrage is too tame a word for what quickly became my reaction and that of my colleagues in Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), as we watched you perform before the Security Council less than six weeks before the unnecessary, illegal attack on Iraq.

The purpose - as well as the speciousness - of your address were all too transparent and, in a same-day commentary, we VIPS warned President George W. Bush that, if he attacked Iraq, “the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic.”

Catastrophic is an understatement. What happened is beyond catastrosphic to me. McGovern then goes on to list each lie perpetrated by either Powell or the smarmy idiots in the Bush Administration. He doesn’t mince words and he backs up what he says. Its worth a read, so check out the entire article. Here is what McGovern suggests Colin Powell do:

Let me suggest that you offer yourself as a witness to help clear the air on these very important issues. This would seem the responsible, patriotic thing to do in the circumstances and could also have the salutary effect of beginning the atonement process for that day of infamy at the Security Council.

If we hear no peep out of you in the coming weeks, we shall not be able to escape concluding one of two things:

(1) That, as was the case with the White House Situation Room sessions on torture, you were a willing participant in suppressing/falsifying key intelligence on Iraq; or

(2) That you lack the courage to expose the scoundrels who betrayed not only you, but also that segment of our country and our world that still puts a premium on truth telling and the law.

Think about it.

With all due respect,

Ray McGovern

Its simple and straightforward isn’t it? McGovern suggests Powell appear before Conyer’s committee and tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Any bets on whether Powell will do it? My guess is no..how about yours?

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A bitch wouldn’t even know..

After a night off from thinking spent enjoying the company of my sister, Sweetie the three legged mostly-chow and my two sorta-beagles…and a decent night of sleep (yay!)…this bitch is feeling human again.

Thank Gawd!

Shall we?

Like many St. Louisans I was deeply touched by the story of Private First Class LaVena Johnson, who died as a result of a non-combat incident near Balad, Iraq. PFC Johnson, who was from Florissant Missouri, died July 19, 2005 and was the first woman from Missouri to die while serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. I will never forget seeing her family interviewed on local television and witnessing their pain and frustration over the lack of information they’d been given concerning their loved one’s death. It was wrenching and emotional…and I was left frustrated that this story had not garnered national media attention like other similar investigations.

Fellow St. Louis blogger Phillip Barron of WaveFlux fame has done an amazing job covering the case of PFC Johnson on his blog and on a separate site, LaVena Johnson dot com, where there is a petition seeking to compel the Army to reopen their investigation into PFC Johnson’s death.

The army ruled the death of PFC Johnson a suicide despite physical evidence inconsistent with suicide. As Philip relates in the first post on the LaVena Johnson petition site, that evidence includes “indications of physical abuse that went unremarked by the autopsy, the absence of psychological indicators of suicidal thoughts; indeed, testimony that LaVena was happy and healthy prior to her death, indications, via residue tests, that LaVena may not even have handled the weapon that killed her, a blood trail outside the tent where Lavena’s body was found and indications that someone attempted to set LaVena’s body on fire.”

The name of Corporal Pat Tillman, who died as result of friendly fire, and the story of the cover-up of his cause of death has held firm in the national press with good reason. Corporal Tillman was a sports hero who gave up millions for a military career after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

And who can forget the perfect script of a rescue that was the story of PFC Jessica Lynch? The war hungry media latched onto the Jessica Lynch capture and rescue story and there was even a movie made. But the truth of it all… a truth Lynch testified to before Congress…took years to come out.

Meanwhile the family of LaVena Johnson must fight for a legitimate investigation into her cause of death without the assistance of the national media or public outcry.

I wonder if her family finds any comfort in the fact that Johnson’s death was mentioned in a proposed report from the House Oversight and Governmental Reform Committee: Misleading Information from the Battlefield: The Tillman and Lynch Episodes.

But I know that this bitch finds comfort from knowing that I can turn to Waveflux for information about this disturbing case.

And so this is a sincere thank you to Phillip Barron for keeping up with this investigation and for seeking justice for PFC Johnson and her family.

Otherwise I fear that a bitch wouldn’t even know…

Crossposted from The Angry Black Bitch.

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Holy Joe’s fearmongering Sunday

From C&L a Face the Nation stump for Liebermann. Holy Joe is fearmongering his ass off.

It’s a two minute video..and thankfully that is about all I can take of this bag of batshit.

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Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment

It was so damn good, I gave him a Standing-O in my own fucking living room Bush lies about giving up Golf..to pander to those who have lost their children in Iraq. A big cyber hug to John Amato, Silent Patriot and all the good people at Crooks and Liars that bust their ass to get us the good stuff.

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Another book from a former Bush employee..

Dougie Feith wrote one. George Tenet wrote his and Rummy did a big ole interview about his time in the Bush Administration with a mens magazine. Now, Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of U.S. Forces in Iraq in 2003-2004 has written a book about his part in history. Sanchez’s book, Wiser in Battle: A Soldier’s Story, isn’t a fond walk down memory lane, not by a long shot. Some may say his book is sour grapes. From a RawStory writeup:

Sanchez commanded the US military in Iraq from 2003-2004. The three-star general was relieved of his commander in 2004 following the Abu Ghraib scandal, and in 2005, was told his career was over and he wouldn’t be promoted to a fourth star.

Time has printed a three page excerpt. Was Sanchez a scapegoat for Rummy, and the horrors of Abu-Ghraib among other things? Read the excerpt and make up your own mind. From the Time excerpt:

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It’s Not an Insurgency

By ReasonOne, aka Kyle

Why is it the Iraq War gets worse whenever George W.Bush and FOX news brag about how well the surge is working? Why does the Administration and our boot licking media insist on calling this blood bath an insurgency?

As you might have already heard this was another bad day in Iraq. Insurgents killed at least 40 people in Baquba, the capital city of Diyala Province, using car bombs to destroy restaurants, shops, and several cars. Of the dead 15 were so severely burned that their bodies could not be recognized. Meanwhile, in the Iraqi city of Ramadi a suicide bomber walked into Al Sahl Al Akhdar Restaurant, wearing a suicide belt and blew himself up. This particular restaurant is a popular haunt for police officers and with students from a near by university. According to local policemen, four policemen we killed and15 people were wounded. A total of four cities were struck with a death toll of at least 66 people.

I find it interesting that this takes place despite the escalation, the so-called Surge, which Bush, Petreus, Fox News, and the delusional Neocons maintain has been working. But as the left has pointed out on past occasions ,the Surge won’t work, it will only change the nature of the insurgency. And that has been proven true. We have said before that the escalation will only only succeed in moving the insurgency from one area to another, suppressing it in one locale only to see it erupt in another. Is this not what we are seeing today? Isn’t the insurgency disappearing from one area only to reappear in another?

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Cospeak is nothing less than Doublespeak

COSPEAK IS NOTHING LESS THAN DOUBLESPEAK
The Convoluted Language of Crocker and Petreus
By PraetorOne and ReasonOne

I don’t know about you, but I am constantly amazed by our corporate, right wing media as they continue to misrepresent the relationship between Army General David Petreus and George W. Bush. It seems as if you can’t turn on our TV, read a paper, or open a website but what you’re told that General Petreus is offering an opinion as to what President Bush should do in Iraq. This of course is a blatant misrepresentation of the facts. General Petreus is hardly offering an objective opinion based on a critical observation of the facts. Instead, he is doing what he has been hired to do. He is serving as an obedient mouth piece for the administration which selected him to offer a biased opinion in the first place.

Equally obnoxious is Ambassador Crocker, a semi-literate lout who can barely express himself without tripping over and “uh”, an “and-ah,” or an “ahhhmmm.” Both Petreus and Crocker are dangerous, but if Crocker is an embarrassment who can hardly put together a simple sentence, Petreus is the more dangerous of the two because he not only understands the English language, he also knows how to use the English language to mislead and prevaricate.

In a recent article by Dick Cavett (Memo to Petreus and Crocker: More Laughs Please) Cavett points out that Petreus doesn’t use English as much as he does Cospeak, a bastardization of the English Language which substitutes complicated language with big words in an attempt to make the unacceptable sound acceptable. You just have to give Petreus credit. Not only is he a spokesperson for the Administration, a propaganda tool for the Bush Administration, he also knows how to tell the truth in language so that the average Joe won’t know what he’s talking about. According to Cavett:

Petraeus uses “challenge” for a rich variety of things. It covers ominous developments, threats, defeats on the battlefield and unfound solutions to ghastly happenings. And of course there’s that biggest of challenges, that slapstick band of silent-movie comics called, flatteringly, the Iraqi “fighting forces.” (A perilous one letter away from “fighting farces.”) The ones who are supposed to allow us to bring troops home but never do.
Petraeus’s verbal road is full of all kinds of bumps and lurches and awkward oddities. How about “ongoing processes of substantial increases in personnel”?
Try talking English, General. You mean more soldiers

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Chimpletons, Your Monkey ADMITS That He LIES

Now you Chimpletons have parroted your monkey’s insistences that we were just doing wonderfully in Iraq all along. You ignored the mountains of evidence to the contrary, preferring to take the word of a man who has never done a thing in his life that could be considered on the up-and-up.Guess what? Your monkey is a LIAR. He admits it (albeit in a sideways manner) himself right here. Let’s see what he says.

Bush conceded earlier that before the surge began last year, he was pessimistic about the way the war in Iraq was going.

“How worried were you?” Raddatz asked.

“I was worried. Look, I’m worried any time it looks like we’re going to fail in Iraq,” Bush said.

During that time in 2006, when many were saying Iraq was in a full-blown civil war, Bush kept his rhetoric upbeat, saying in speeches that We’re winning” and “We have a plan for victory.”

Raddatz asked the president about that, and the president insisted he did it to keep up troop morale.

“That’s as much to try and bolster the spirits of the people in the field as well - you can’t have the commander in chief say to a bunch of kids who are sacrificing that either it’s not worth it or you’re losing. What does that do for morale?” Bush said.

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Doug and his Feith-based bullshit.

Douglas Feith is a tool, among other things. Last night on Sixty Minutes he attempted to spin a yarn so big, I thought the interviewer, Steve Kroft, was going to piss down both legs as he stared at Feith in amazement.Feith attempted to spin the War in Iraq as a preemptive strike. No, I am not kidding..its in the link above either in the transcript or the video of the show. From Feith’s own piehole:

“What we did after 9/11 was look broadly at the international terrorist network from which the next attack on the United States might come. And we did not focus narrowly only on the people who were specifically responsible for 9/11. Our main goal was preventing the next attack.” (emphasis mine)

Incredulous at this point, Kroft says Feith’s logic stinks to high heaven and could be used to attack Iran, North Korea, Syria and countless other countries that talk a good game but haven’t done anything to us on US soil. Then Feith drops this little turd:

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Remember those missing arms shipments..I think we have found them..

Back as far as 2004, plenty of stories came out about the millions of weapons that went missing in Iraq. Check out the crazy bastard in the photo..I think his boys are well-armed at this point in time.

So, I do believe those weapons have been found. They are in the hands of the…cough..insurgency taking place in Iraq and of course that batshit crazy sumbitch Al-Sadr and his wingnuts known as the Mahdi Army. Although we were told that nothing big was missing back then..that appears to be bullshit my dear reader as the Green Zone is currently under siege. Rockets are blasting away at American zones like the Embassy there. From the Salon link:

Reuters reported that a giant column of black smoke could be seen near the U.S. Embassy after what was believed to be a mortar strike on a former palace of Saddam that is being used as a headquarters for American civilian and military personnel. However, an embassy spokeswoman said there had been no serious injuries or deaths as a result of the attack. Four people, including two U.S. civilians, were wounded by mortar attacks in the Green Zone Wednesday.

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The Failing Escalation

Orwellian half truths and distortions from the Regime in Washington

By PraetorOne and  ReasonOne

You really have to give the Bush Administration credit–when it decides to engage in Orwellian Doublespeak it doesn’t go half way. On March 19th, the fifth anniversary of our invasion of Iraq we kept hearing about all the wonderful things that “the surge” had accomplished, but at no time did we hear the term “escalation,” which is a more accurate and more descriptive term than the term “surge” ever could be. In this sense the word “Surge” is no different than the titles this administration gives to various forms of legislation. Think about “No Child Left Behind” which might better have been described as the “Loss of Local Control Act” or “No Child Left Unrecruited” and various pollutant-friendly environmental bills which do little to clean the environment but actually help corporate polluters. In a similar vein, the term “Surge” not only describes an escalation and prolongation of our presence in Iraq, it also tends to distract from some truly horrific policies which border on ethnic cleansing. In early 2007 the Bush Regime struck a horrific deal with Iraq leader Nouri al-Malaki which went something like this. In essence we promised al-Malaki that we would disarm Sunni Arab Guerrillas in Baghdad before we asked Shi’tes to disarm. We then promised Muuqtada al-Sadr that we would destroy some of his (Sunni) enemies for him if he stopped the paramilitary activities of his Mahdi Army Militia. As if that weren’t sweet enough American military leaders in Iraq began to pay Sunni Arab Iraqi guerrillas to turn on foreign insurgents. At the same time American forces began a counterinsurgency in Sunni neighborhoods. This involved clearing out armed insurgents and then replacing them with American troops who essentially took control of those neighborhoods, playing the part of an over-glorified police force.

On the surface it all seemed very logical. Clear out the Sunni insurgency and you might stand a better chance of reducing the level of hostility. And to a certain degree it worked. There had been a slight lowering in the amount of violence in Iraq but (or so Bush and his sycophantic generals tell us), but what the Bush Regime fails to mention is that it was achieved through a policy of revenge, a policy of ethnic cleansing by an angry Shi’ite majority which suffered horribly under Saddam Hussein. By disarming the Sunnis before the Shi’ites the Bush Regime again opened the gates of hell and set the stage for the ethnic cleansing of the Sunni minority by the Shi’ite majority.

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HALF TRUTHS FROM FOX

On Wednesday, March 19th, FOX (Fools, Oddballs, and Xenophobes) News ran a highly deceptive story in which it claimed that life was all sunshine and pretty colors in Iraq. Part of this thankfully brief story stated that the military wasn’t broken, that it had enough manpower, and that morale in Iraq was up. Now to a certain degree the story contained some accurate information so I shall address that first.

At the present time we have 158,000 troops in Iraq, 11 percent of which say that morale is high. In a similar vein personal morale is up to approximately 20 percent. More over there has been a decrease in violence in Iraq, but as usual, FOX News has only told half the story. Other factors which might explain the increase in morale are “Battlemind training” which teaches soldiers, troops and families what to expect during the deployment and which trains them how to readjust when they come back home. At the sane time there has been an effort to reduce the fear and embarrassment associated with asking for help. In 2006, 34 percent said they were fearful or embarrassed to ask for help. In 2007 that figure had dropped slightly to 29 percent. Some of that might account for the increase in morale.

In a recent Army Mental Health Report compiled by Mental Health professionals, the results revealed that soldiers who had been deployed “only” once or twice had fewer mental health problems than those who had served in three or four deployments. But among the latter group it was discovered that incidents of anxiety, depression, and PTSD were about the same as they were in the previous year’s survey: 30 percent of the troops on repeated tours reported that they had a problem.

Here’s the rub. This is what FOX did NOT mention.

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Did you celebrate Colin Powell Day?

Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations Security Council to push for war with Iraq. Powell’s speech, as we now know, was full of lies. His speech was entitled: Iraq, failing to disarm. He even had a nifty slide show for the attendees. Behind him sat George Tenet, then head of the CIA.

No one fact-checked Powell, no one bothered to ask questions. It was accepted as fact by pretty much everyone. Bush had been beating the war drums for quite some time prior to Powell’s speech and the MSM fell right in line. The MSM did their job by selling us the war, and they did it very well:

CNN’s Bill Schneider said that “no one” disputed Powell’s findings. Bob Woodward, asked by Larry King on CNN what happens if we go to war and don’t find any WMD, answered: “I think the chance of that happening is about zero. There’s just too much there.” George Will suggested that Powell’s speech would “change all minds open to evidence.”

The Washingotn Post’s liberal columnist, Mary McGrory, wrote that Powell “persuaded me, and I was as tough as France to convince.” She even likened the Powell report to the day John Dean “unloaded” on Nixon in the Watergate hearings. Another liberal at that paper, Richard Cohen, declared that Powell’s testimony “had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn’t accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool-or possibly a Frenchman-could conclude otherwise.”

For the skeptical, Powell’s speech was the turning point. It was a slam dunk and BushCo was quite happy with the fact that even moderate and liberal pundits fell right in line after hearing Powell’s speech at the UN. The week prior to Powell’s speech, more than two-thirds of the nation’s leading editorial pages, E&P had found, called for the release of more detailed evidence and increased diplomatic maneuvering. After the 80-minute speech, there were no more doubting Thomas’s. Powell’s speech filled with lies changed our lives and those of all Iraqi’s forever.

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If you ran your business like BushCo runs the war..

You wouldn’t be in business for long. RawStory, via CNN gives us the financial’s for the Iraq War:

CNN: Price of Iraq war 10 times pre-war predictions

When President Bush’s emergency supplemental funding request is granted by Congress in the coming weeks, the cost of the Iraq War will reach ten times its original projected cost of $50-60 billion, CNN reports.
At what will soon be a total tab of $576 billion, the Iraq war is second in cost only to World War II. According to CNN’s report, every minute troops are deployed in Iraq, the American public pays $200,000 to keep them there. Since the money is not allocated by Congress as part of the regular budget, there is little oversight of how it is spent and Billions of dollars remain unaccounted for in Iraq as the costs continue to mount.

“There’s even funding that the Congressional Research Service and the Congressional Budget Office identify that they don’t have any idea where the funding went,” Says Travis Sharp of the Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Center. “They don’t know if it went for weapons systems, they don’t know if it was operating costs in Iraq and Afghanistan.”(emphasis mine)

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