Fed Judge lets Blackwater murderers off the hook.

From the NYT via Crooks and Liars:

In a significant blow to the Justice Department, a federal judge on Thursday threw out the indictment of five former Blackwater security guards over a shooting in Baghdad in 2007 that left 17 Iraqis dead and about 20 wounded.

The judge cited misuse of statements made by the guards in his decision, which brought to a sudden halt one of the highest-profile prosecutions to arise from the Iraq war. The shooting at Nisour Square frayed relations between the Iraqi government and the Bush administration and put a spotlight on the United States’ growing reliance on private security contractors in war zones.

Investigators concluded that the guards had indiscriminately fired on unarmed civilians in an unprovoked and unjustified assault near the crowded traffic circle on Sept. 16, 2007. The guards contended that they had been ambushed by insurgents and fired in self-defense.

A trial on manslaughter and firearm offenses was planned for February, and the preliminary proceedings had been closely watched in the United States and Iraq.

But in a 90-page opinion, Judge Ricardo M. Urbina of Federal District Court in Washington wrote that the government’s mishandling of the case “requires dismissal of the indictment against all the defendants.”

In a “reckless violation of the defendants’ constitutional rights,” the judge wrote, investigators, prosecutors and government witnesses had inappropriately relied on statements that the guards had been compelled to make in debriefings by the State Department shortly after the shootings. The State Department had hired the guards to protect its officials.

Aint’ that some shit to start off the new year with?

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Middle East Developments

Vice President Joe Biden is in Iraq. He is there for meetings with military commanders, Ambassador Chris Hill, and Iraq’s President Talibani and Prime Minister Malaki. His visit comes on the heels of the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from the cities to the bases near the perimeters around metropolitan areas. Iraqis celebrated the transition to more control over their own destiny, and more risk of security breakdowns. But it was by their design and our that we are now implementing this formal Status of Forces agreement signed last December. And from the beginning of this year military operations have been refocusing on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The US army says it has launched a major offensive against the Taliban in south Afghanistan’s Helmand province. “Operation Strike of the Sword gets under way,” according to today’s BBC News. To quote further from the story:

The US military says about 4,000 marines as well as 650 Afghan troops are involved, supported by Nato planes. Brig Gen Larry Nicholson said the operation was different from previous ones because of the “massive size of the force” and its speed.A Taliban spokesman said they would resist in various ways and that there would be no permanent US victory.

. . . It is the first such large-scale operation since US President Barack Obama authorised the deployment of 17,000 extra US troops to Afghanistan, as part of a new strategy for winning the conflict. Many of them are being redeployed from operations in Iraq, to help with training Afghan security forces and to tackle the insurgency.

A House Intelligence panel late last month reported out with a warning of emerging threats to the nation’s security, according to a 6/29 story in CQ Politics. The report also “thinks spy agencies are behind in addressing cybersecurity, diversity and foreign language training, according to a committee report released Monday.” The Democratic Intelligence Committee also approved the 2010 intel authorization bill that includes a provision that eliminated the administration’s “right to control when the full intelligence panels are briefed as opposed to more limited ‘Gang of Eight’ briefings for panel and congressional leaders.”

Countries mentioned that face security challenges include Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Mexico. Today’s post focuses on Middle East developments. The Intel Committee Report says that the “political and military situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan continues to deteriorate.” As an example, according to the Financial Times (6/23/09), “A tribal leader who vowed to lead an uprising against Pakistan’s most notorious Taliban militants was killed, raising doubts over the success of a planned military offensive along the Afghan border.” Qari Zainuddin, 26, was reportedly shot by one of his own guards in Dera Isamil Khan in northwest Pakistan. A BBC 6/24 report said, to quote:

at least 43 people have died in missile strikes by a US drone aircraft in a militant stronghold of Pakistan [in South Waziristan], a Taliban spokesman said. The people killed had been attending the funeral of a military commander killed in an earlier strike.

. . . There have been more than 35 US strikes since last August – killing over 340 people – and most have landed in the North and South Waziristan tribal regions. Pakistan has been publicly critical of drone attacks, arguing that they kill civilians and fuel support for militants like Baitullah Mehsud.

NATO partner, the United Kingdom, has intensified its fight in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand province. Significant progress to hold territory was only made possible because of the arrival of additional U.S. troops to assist. Great Britain has lost 169 soldiers in Afghanistan since 2001. Also, “three German soldiers are killed in Afghanistan when their patrol came under fire, the defence ministry in Berlin says,” to quote the BBC. The attack happened in the northern city of Kunduz, where the Germans have a military base where a 3,700 member German military force is stationed. The Germans have lost 35 troops since 2002.

In an interesting aside, Steven Aftergood of Secrecy News (6/15/09), wrote that the new U.S. Afghanistan Commander did not get complete support for his appointment to the post. To quote:

Gen. Stanley McChrystal was confirmed by the Senate last week to be the new commander of U.S. (and NATO) forces in Afghanistan, a role that he assumed today. But his nomination was opposed by Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) who objected to the General’s advancement on unspecified “classified” grounds.

“I oppose the nomination of LTG Stanley McChrystal to command U.S. forces in Afghanistan for two reasons,” Senator Feingold said on June 11. “The first relates to a classified matter about which I have serious concerns. I have conveyed those concerns in a letter to the President.”

The second reason cited by Sen. Feingold was McChrystal’s embrace of interrogation techniques that went beyond those authorized in the Army Field Manual on the subject.

News bites associated with the above items come from CQ Behind the Lines newsletter July 1, 2009, by David C. Morrison. To quote:

Courts and rights: The alleged shooter in the deadly Holocaust Memorial Museum assault, himself wounded, is still unfit to appear in court, CNN has a judge declaring — as Pakistan’s The Nation says a defense-hired shrink will testify in a New York courtroom today on the mental soundness of a terror-charged Pakistani neuroscientist. The foreman of the Florida jury that acquitted an Egypt-born student on terror charges is convinced that the defendant — now facing deportation on charges levied by ICE — is a victim of profiling, CNN, again, spotlights. A federal judge who authorized habeas challenges in U.S. courts for military detainees in Afghanistan ruled Monday that that right doesn’t apply to at least one Afghan prisoner, AP reports.

[Post date July 2, 2009]
See also Behind the Links, for further info on this subject.

Blogs: My general purpose/southwest focus blog is at Southwest Progressive. My creative website is at Making Good Mondays. And Carol Gee – Online Universe is the all-in-one home page for all my websites.

Technorati tags: news foreign policy middle east national security

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• U.S. launches ‘major’ Afghanistan operation (cnn.com)
• Marines launch major Afghan attack (msnbc.msn.com)
• Obama’s First Op: U.S., Afghan Troops Close In on Taliban (abcnews.go.com)

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US Veterans Urge Release of Detainee Abuse Photos

Three military veteran organizations are calling on the Obama Administration to release photographs that depict the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody. Veterans For Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans for Common Sense jointly composed a letter to President Obama that states that they believe that releasing the pictures is crucial to U.S. national security, to upholding international law and to safeguarding domestic democracy. They ask veterans to co-sign this letter online before it is sent to the President. The text of the letter is available on the Veterans For Peace website.

Their letter rejects the contention that the photos’ release will do more harm than good. The letter quotes Harith al Obaidi, the head of the largest Sunni Muslim bloc in Iraq’s Parliament and the deputy chairman of the Committee on Human Rights, saying “The people who want to express their opinions through violence are already trying their best to do so. Showing them a few pictures wouldn’t make them any more able to do it.” Al Obaidi continues to say that keeping the pictures secret will augment suspicions that the American government is suppressing evidence of more widespread abuse.

President of Veterans For Peace and former Navy Corpsman, Mike Ferner said, “The biggest threat to our service members and our Republic is that we forget what has happened and do it again.” He continued, “Withholding these photographs makes it more likely that the people of our country can push these horrendous acts to the edge of our collective memory. This will not serve our nation well.”

According to information provided by the three groups, Veterans for Common Sense Executive and Gulf War veteran Director Paul Sullivan asks for the photos to “be turned over to a special war crimes prosecutor. Never again should our nation’s leaders order torture with impunity.”

“Being open about our mistakes by releasing these pictures is not only a way to ensure this dark episode in our history will not be repeated, but also a crucial step in our healing process as a nation,” stated Iraq War veteran and Board Chair of Iraq Veterans Against the War Camilo Mejia.

As part of their efforts to have the photos released Veterans For Peace has launched www.picturenomoretorure.org. This initiative asks the public to take photos of themselves with messages indicating their support of ending torture and releasing the torture photographs. The project will deliver these photos to the White House.

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Guantanamo and detainee treatment — truth be told

“Dangerous people, detainees, prisoners of war, terrorists, extremists” – The words we use to describe our adversaries are important. Not only are they important to those people, but they matter all over the world. We must also be accurate when we describe what we have done to detainees says Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com (6/6/09). His post is titled, “The NYT’s nice, new euphemism for torture.” To quote (his links):

. . . according to the NYT, detainees in CIA black sites were merely subjected to “intense interrogations.” That’s all? Who opposes “intense interrogations”? This active media complicity in concealing that our Government created a systematic torture regime — by refusing ever to say so — is one of the principal reasons it was allowed to happen for so long

. . . The steadfast, ongoing refusal of our leading media institutions to refer to what the Bush administration did as “torture” — even in the face of more than 100 detainee deaths; the use of that term by a leading Bush official to describe what was done at Guantanamo; and the fact that media outlets frequently use the word “torture” to describe the exact same methods when used by other countries — reveals much about how the modern journalist thinks.

At the heart of the biggest arguments about what to do about releasing Guantanamo’s is the one about whether they remain security risks. Conservatives have exaggerated their level of dangerousness, it turns out. How often do they return to jihad? The story is headlined, “NYT: We made big mistakes on front-page Gitmo story, but we did not get spun,” and it is reported by Justin Eliot at TPM Muckraker (6/5/09). “The confirmed category in the Pentagon report claims that just one in 20, not one in seven, former detainees returned to terrorism.” To quote further:

The New York Times has published a lengthy “Editors’ Note” rolling back key claims in its front-page story on Guantanamo “recidivism” last month, and the paper’s Washington bureau chief concedes it wouldn’t have been a Page 1 story if the paper realized the errors in the story when it ran.

. . . The editors’ note, which is pasted in full below, acknowledges use of terms like “rejoined” and “recidivism” “accepted a premise of the report that all the former prisoners had been engaged in terrorism before their detention.”

. . . McClatchy and others have reported on evidence that some detainees may have in fact been radicalized while imprisoned at Gitmo.

The editors’ note also acknowledges the story “conflated two categories of former prisoners” — which were broken up into suspected and confirmed categories in the Pentagon report (which we have posted here).

There are very good reasons why President Obama ordered the closing of Guantanamo as one of his first official acts. Given our Constitution, it was not working, not for foreign policy, not for justice, and not for American values. The story of Guantanamo is a tragic one on several fronts, including detainee suicides: “Death by Detention,” by ACLU (6/4/09). “Gitmo detainee dead in ‘apparent suicide,’ “ is from TPM Muckraker (6/2/09). In 2005 the detainee had been on hunger strike and lost down to 86 pounds. This is the 5th suicide at Guantanamo. To quote:

A Guantanamo detainee has died in what the military are calling an “apparent suicide” — and civil liberties groups are calling for action.Guards found 31-year-old Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Salih, known as Al-Hanashi, unresponsive and not breathing in his cell Monday night, U.S. military officials announced, according to the AP.

“Another Club Gitmo guest kills himself,” was the ironic post written on this same subject by Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com (6/2/09). His firmly held conclusion,

It’s very difficult to know why someone commits suicide, if that’s what happened here. And since he had no trial, one can’t know what Salih did or didn’t do. But what is not hard to see is that it is simply wrong to imprison people for life with no charges. That should not be something that we even have to debate.

Guantanamo Bay’s plan for closing, the story of the torture regime that started there, the Constitution and and detainee treatment — the truth must still be told. Painful as it is, disheartening as it feels as new information comes out, there is no getting around it if we are ever to heal and return to the rule of law.

References to earlier detainee stories:

• Britain responds to the “rule of law” nuisance is by Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com (3/27/09). Regards returned British detainee Binyam Mohamed.
• Britain’s bizarre reaction to war crimes allegations: investigations needed is by Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com (3/8/09).

My all-in-one Home Page of websites where I post regularly: Carol Gee – Online Universe

Technorati tags: news news and politics guantanamo detainee treatment

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Would you buy this SOFA? Should the Iraqi people?

Next year, thanks to Iraq President Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi’s will get to actually vote on the Status of Forces Agreement that was ratified by their government and finally their Presidential Council Thursday. All our troops must be out of Iraq by 2011.The Iraqi’s will supposedly vote on the agreement next year.

I say supposed to vote because we are now propping up one of the most corrupt regimes in the world, right behind Myanmar and Somalia, according to Transparency International. The irony is thick indeed, isn’t it? We took out Saddam and put in an entire government of Saddam’s.

The Iraqi’s could vote to reject the agreement. What that would mean is unclear at this point. Whether a vote will actually happen is the larger question. One thing is clear, the violence still continues with bombings this week that killed and injured scores of Iraqi’s. Two American Soldiers will also be coming home in boxes.

In addition to the official deadlines for troop withdraw, it gives Iraqi courts limited jurisdiction over American military personnel and eliminates immunity for US defense contractors working within Iraq. What does this mean for Americans? From a Jurist OpEd on the subject:

Earlier this week the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq issued a report that is highly critical of the absence of due process in Iraq’s criminal justice system. The UN Report notes that “many detainees have been deprived of their liberty for months or even years, often under precarious physical conditions, without access to defence counsel, or without being formally charged with a crime or produced before a judge. Continuing allegations of widespread torture and ill-treatment of inmates are of particular concern.” The report is particularly timely, given that as of January 1, 2009, U.S. citizens who are contractors in Iraq will be subject to the jurisdiction of Iraqi criminal and civil courts, according to the terms of the Status of Forces Agreement signed on November 17, 2009.

Nothing in this newly-signed Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with Iraq guarantees that a U.S. citizen contractor arrested in Iraq will get even the most basic due process protections. The SOFA doesn’t even permit the U.S. Government to detain U.S. citizen contractors who are awaiting trial in Iraqi courts. The SOFA requires that U.S. soldiers and government employees arrested by the Iraqi police will be handed over to U.S. authorities within 24 hours of detention or arrest. However, if the detained American citizen is a contractor, he or she is left entirely to the disposition of the Iraqi system, and will be left to sit in the Iraqi jail awaiting Iraqi justice.

In other words contractors, like the employees of Blackwater, will be treated similar to our prisoners in Guantanamo, perhaps even worse. Irony, thy name is SOFA…

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Leadership By Fire Drill

Like most of us, I learned about and participated in fire drills at a very early age, starting in primary grades, then continuing all through middle and high school, in the military, and in the work environment. Fire drills are important, they prepare us to react to a dangerous situation, to remove ourselves from harm’s way as safely and quickly quickly as possible. But fire drills do not prevent fires, nor do they guarantee to always protect us from sustaining casualties, nor do they extinguish fires. Fire drills are in essence an ad hoc response to an unplanned event, with temporary effect, minimizing but not always preventing casualties.

Common sense helps us to realize that in addition to fire drills, good management of fire protection involves fire prevention efforts, and effective fire suppression tools and tactics. Effective prevention includes knowledge of cause and effect coupled with appropriate proactive planning actions, effective suppression includes developing appropriate tactics to respond to individual and diverse situations, acquisition and training of effective manpower, acquisition and mastery of appropriate tools; taken together, this all adds up to effective strategic thinking by those charged with the responsibility to protect us from fires.

Over the course of the past seven plus years both the Bush administration and Congress (whether a Republican or democratic majority) have led our country through a series of fire drills, at varying degrees of success, but arguably, lacking in strategic thinking and action. Or have they? Has the strategy all along been to back the American people in to a corner through fear and intimidation garnered from natural events and human actions in order to consolidate power in to the office of the president, and perhaps more significantly consolidate the power and reach of corporate interests, who pull the strings of the Oval Office and both houses of Congress? All in service to the fulfillment of ever greater corporate greed.

The 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center should have been a wake-up call, and the intelligence about Al- Qaeda available to our government prior to the 9/11 attacks should have led to appropriate, proactive, strategic planning and action, instead government and civilian resources were left scrambling, in a catch-up effort at protecting the security of our nation in the intervening years. Then based upon fear and misinformation the Bush administration hoodwinked the country in to an invasion and start of a five year war in Iraq in which our military assets have been exhausted, been disabled from protecting us in other parts of the world, lead to needless casualties of Americans and Iraqis, and put future generations of American tax payers on the hook to the foreign nations that have loaned the money to the United States to conduct the folly that is the Iraq war. All the while enriching war profiteering corporations (Haliburton, Blackwater, KBR, et al).

In the midst of all of the damage done to our economy, to human life, to our reputation and influence in the world because of the Iraq war, our government has taken us through more fire drills:

The natural disaster that was hurricane Katrina and the bungled fire drill that followed, including the complete mismanagement of the situation by the local, state and federal government entities and in particular FEMA.

The fire drill that has followed 9/11 and the pursuit of the “war on terrorism” has resulted in the suspension of our constitutional protections, when prisoners of the United States have been denied the right of habeus corpus, and where, playing upon fear and claiming urgency the FISA rules were overridden and the government allowed to listen and read virtually all of our telecommunications at will. The Constitution has been discarded in this fire drill.

Now capping an era of uncontrolled corporate greed, an era in which many demanded less government oversight in to various facets of life in the United States (in the financial sector, in protection of the environment, in mine safety, in health care, etc.), an era in which government intervention in the form of sound regulation has been ridiculed and avoided, an era in which the government, corporations and individual American citizens pursuing short sighted, greedy financial gains, have resulted in the latest fire drill, with a claimed immediate need to inject as much as or more than $700 billion of our hard earned cash in to the financial system. In essence saying to those who put the country in to this situation, “OK, you screwed up, but we will bail your asses out, and let you go back to playing your games all over again”. The bailout bill as it seems to be presently constituted does little, if anything to address the root cause of the current financial disaster facing our country, it just, at best, restarts the economic cycle. It does not mandate any true change in behavior in the financial markets or in the conduct of business in the United States, it is simply just another fire drill, going through the motions of evacuating the financial industry principals, who through their playing with matches have started this conflagration, and evacuating them so they can play another day.

Is this really how we, as intelligent American people, as fathers and mothers responsible for providing a safe, nurturing environment compatible with a thriving life for our children want our society to operate, as one fire drill after another. With never an effort to embrace long term, strategic thinking, planning and actions. Never giving sufficient time, thought and effort towards building a better infrastructure, whether financial, medical, energy, transportation or telecommunications, to live safely and thrive in this county, but just constantly responding in a reactive, fire drill mode to the next crisis?

It is time that we, as American citizens, active in our role as owners of this society demand an end to governance by fire drill, time that we impose our will upon those who serve us in all governmental offices, whether elected or appointed, time that we say to the greedy, profit driven corporations and their lobbying agents that we have had enough of the fire drills, and that we demand more and smarter fire protection, that we demand fire suppression that serves not greedy corporation interests, but the greater good of all of the people.

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Iraq War Effects Missing from Coverage of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Troubles

Libhomo blogs at Godless Liberal Homo. His article today is spot-on in my humble estimation. ~Dusty

This New York Times article ( “U.S. Weighs Takeover of Two Mortgage Giants” – 7/10/08) is typical of how the corporate media omit underlying causes in reporting on current economic difficulties.

You can see how the Iraqtastrophe is impacting events, but you have to think very carefully while you read. Here’s one example, a sentence starting the second paragraph:

The companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have been hit hard by the mortgage foreclosure crisis.

Let’s review three of the ways that the war on Iraq has contributed to this foreclosure crisis.

- The resulting increase in oil prices has pushed some people who were near default on their mortgages over the edge.

- The rising oil prices and increased budget deficits have slowed the overall US economy down. Newly unemployed people are much more likely to lose their homes to foreclosure.

- Higher oil prices have increased trade deficits. Those deficits, along with growing budget deficits, have resulted in a falling dollar. A weak dollar is unattractive to foreign investors, including risk tolerant ones that otherwise might be interested in buying heavily discounted US mortgage paper.

Now, let’s review a paragraph later in the article (bolding mine).

The companies are by far the biggest providers of financing for domestic home loans. If they are unable to borrow, they will not be able to buy mortgages from commercial lenders. In turn, that would make it more expensive and difficult, if not impossible, for home buyers to obtain credit, freezing the United States housing market. Even healthy banks are reluctant to tie up scarce capital by offering mortgages to low-risk home buyers without Fannie and Freddie taking the loans off their books.

One of the reasons capital is so scare is that the Bush regime is borrowing so much money to pay for their colonial occupation of Iraq. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been borrowed to feed this fiscally voracious war, money which is unavailable for home and commercial credit.

Obviously, Iraq isn’t the only cause of our economic difficulties. Financial market deregulation, tax cuts for the rich, and other policies which shift wealth from the middle class and the poor to the super rich all are important as well. Yet, how can we have an informed political debate if so much of what is ailing us is kept off of the metaphorical table?

Some opponents of the war say that the vast majority of Americans are not sacrificing anything to the war in Iraq. It certainly is true that military members and their families make much larger sacrifices than everyone else. However, all of us are sacrificing for this unpopular war. We are just being lied to about it.

Iraq is a proverbial “elephant in the living room” of American economic discussion. Our nation better start talking about it.

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The Cost of War in Iraq

I thought I would take a look at the local cost of the War in Iraq.  The National Priorities Project has a page where you can get the costs as it pertains to your locality. Taxpayers in California’s Congressional District 36 (Harman) will pay $1.3 billion for total Iraq war spending approved to date. For the same amount of money, the following services could have been provided:

• 550,963 People with Health Care for One Year OR
• 2,385,106 Homes with Renewable Electricity for One Year OR
• 23,915 Public Safety Officers for One year OR
• 18,911 Music and Arts Teachers for One Year OR
• 201,177 Scholarships for University Students for One Year OR
• 4,007 Affordable Housing Units OR
• 500,391 Children with Health Care for One Year OR
• 160,123 Head Start Places for Children for One Year OR
• 19,226 Elementary School Teachers for One Year OR
• 16,907 Port Container Inspectors for One year

I am rendered speechless. We need to bring all our resources home:  our soldiers, who don’t deserve the horrors they’ve been handed; and our tax dollars so we can repair the soul of our nation by providing the services we lose daily  due to Bush’s arrogance.

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Bushliburton, Masters of Compartmentalization

Photo: Todd Heisler/The Rocky Mountain News

The image was originally published in illustration of Jim Sheeler’s 2006 Pulitzer Prize winning feature writing about the impact of Iraq war casualties to families, in the Rocky Mountain News. It was republished today by the New York Times to illustrate a review by Janet Maslin of Sheeler’s book, “Final Salute – A Story of Unfinished Lives”.

In the book review, Maslin describes the circumstances of the moment captured in the photograph:

Among the eloquent Rocky Mountain News photographs included here is a shocking image — by Todd Heisler, now of The New York Times — of commercial airline passengers looking out plane windows at Reno-Tahoe International Airport in Nevada, trying to see what is happening beneath them. Down there, in the cargo hold, a Marine honor guard is preparing to deliver the flag-draped coffin of Second Lt. James J. Cathey to its final resting place.

This image is truly indicative of how George W. Bush and his enablers would have the American public view the reality of the war in Iraq, as an event compartmentalized, below our consciousness, leaving us in the dark about the harsh realities, or at best, wondering what is going on. The aim of Bushliburton is to keep us all fat, happy and dumb, ever consuming their distortions and outright lies, ever consuming more mindless drivel via the media, ever consuming more hard goods to bolster the industrial economy and burning ever more of the finite amount of oil remaining on this planet, while transferring wealth from the many to the few, while transferring wealth and power away from our people and making future generations beholden to those who represent markedly less free and democratic society.

Read more

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No More!

Pearl Jam -No More…

This is a live version of “No More” from the new documentary Body of War. Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam perform. The movie opens nationwide this month.

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8 CHILDREN A DAY

Choosey Mutha’s choose….PEACE

Eight children a day are killed by guns in our country — for a total of almost 3,000 a year — and another 13,000 a year are wounded. Nearly 1.7 million children under the age of 18 live in homes with firearms that are both loaded and unlocked.

The Million Mom March will be focusing on this topic on Mother’s Day.

8 CHILDREN KILLED A DAY ~ NO WAY!

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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:

Read more

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Iraq Moratorium Day #8; April 18

Following is from iraqmoratorium.org:

The Iraq Moratorium, a nationwide grassroots movement uniting individuals and groups against the Iraq war, will be observed on Friday, April 18.

Since September, the Iraq Moratorium has asked people and groups opposed to the war and occupation to take some action on the third Friday of every month to end the war.

Individual actions can range from wearing a black armband or a button to school or work to writing letters, putting up signs, calling members of Congress, and a wide variety of other actions. The group’s website, www.IraqMoratorium.org offers ideas, and lists planned group actions across the country.

Since it began eight months ago, the Iraq Moratorium has sparked more than 800 group events – vigils, rallies, marches, speakers, films, and other actions – listed on the group’s website, with reports, photos and videos.

The Iraq Moratorium encourage local organizers to “do their own thing” on the third Friday of the month – but to do something, whatever it is, to end the war. It is all a loosely-knit national grassroots effort operating under the Iraq Moratorium umbrella.

“Two-thirds of the people in the United States want this war to end,” said Eric See, a Moratorium organizer in California. “Our goal is to get that Silent Majority to speak out, in whatever way they choose, as a way to inspire others to action and build a movement that will end this senseless bloodshed.”

“Doing something on Friday, even something small, is a first step toward ending the war,” See said. “It all makes a difference, and our individual actions are magnified when we all act on the same day. The Moratorium asks that people interrupt business as usual and do something to end the war.”

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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?

Read more

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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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