Show 2009-01-10

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Richardson bows out of cabinet, Israel/Gaza conflict with Saleem Siddiqui from HotConflict.com, compromising with a failed ideology.

Continue Reading…

Was the whole Wassup thing really eight years ago?

John… you were wrong!

Jason Linkins wins Nail on the Head Award for today

Brrrrilliant!

Katie Couric To Obama: People Are “Scratching Their Heads” About Your Opposition To Surge
Even if we could cast the “Surge” as an unqualified success, the overall strategy has netted America four major failures. And within the larger context of a failure to find WMDs, a failure to improve America’s security, a failure to thwart or even impede al Qaeda in the wake of 9/11, and a failure to prevent malign regional forces like Iran and Hezbollah from increasing their regional influence, the “Surge” is entirely without relevance – a fourth quarter field goal when you’re down four touchdowns.

General who probed Abu Ghraib says Bush officials committed war crimes

McClatchy Washington Bureau | 06/18/2008 | General who probed Abu Ghraib says Bush officials committed war crimes
WASHINGTON — The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing “war crimes” and called for those responsible to be held to account.

The remarks by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who’s now retired, came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices.

“After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes,” Taguba wrote. “The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

Taguba, whose 2004 investigation documented chilling abuses at Abu Ghraib, is thought to be the most senior official to have accused the administration of war crimes. “The commander in chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture,” he wrote.

The number one thing I will be watching for from the Obama Administration is whether they pull a “Gerry Ford” and decide to put this dark national nightmare behind us and in the “spirit of healing” decide to pardon or not prosecute the war crimes of this Administration.  The pardon of Nixon for raping the Constitution is what put us in this position in the first place, with many of the same traitorous thugs from that administration leading this one down the same “unitary executive” path.

Let the world see our Constitution in action.  Let us all regain the faith that no one, not a former president, not a former vice president, no matter how deeply in the pockets of big oil, is above the law.  Let us restore our reverence for the Constitution and mete out strong punishment for those who would violate it willingly and to act as a deterrent for the future administrations who’d usurp our rights given the chance.

100 Years in Iraq – six months at a time

5 soldiers a day attempt suicide

I remember not so long ago when my conservative friends (yes, I have them) lamented how Bill Clinton destroyed the military. I don’t hear that from them so much anymore.

Stories like this are why:

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Every day, five U.S. soldiers try to kill themselves. Before the Iraq war began, that figure was less than one suicide attempt a day.

The dramatic increase is revealed in new U.S. Army figures, which show 2,100 soldiers tried to commit suicide in 2007.
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Female soldiers/contractors more likely to be raped by our troops and contractors in Iraq than killed

Notes from my April 5, 2008 show… compiled from an article in The Nation magazine and AP wire reports and blog posts at ThinkProgress.org.

It was an early January morning in 2008 when 42-year-old Lisa Smith*, a paramedic for a defense contractor in southern Iraq, woke up to find her entire room shaking. The shipping container that served as her living quarters was reverberating from nearby rocket attacks, and she was jolted awake to discover an awful reality. “Right then my whole life was turned upside down,” she says.

That dawn, naked, covered in blood and feces, bleeding from her anus, she found a US soldier she did not know lying naked in the bed next to her: his gun lay on the floor beside the bed, she could not rouse him and all she could remember of the night before was screaming and screaming as the soldier anally penetrated her while a colleague who worked for defense contractor KBR held her hand–but instead of helping her, as she had hoped, he jammed his penis in her mouth.

Smith’s attorney, Daniel Ross, speculates that someone slipped the date-rape drug Rohypnol in her drink.

Over the next few weeks Smith would be told to keep quiet about the incident by a KBR supervisor. The camp’s military liaison officer also told her not to speak about what had happened, she says. And she would follow these instructions. “Because then, all of a sudden, if you’ve done exactly what you’ve been instructed not to do–tell somebody–then you’re in danger,” Smith says. Continue Reading…

Dick

On the heels of Martha Raddatz’s exclusive interview with Dick, when asked about how 2/3rds of the American people hate this war and Dick said “So?”, comes this gem from Dick noting the death of the 4,000th American soldier in Iraq. It’s even worse than “So?”

“I want to start with the milestone today of 4,000 dead in Iraq. Americans. And just what effect do you think it has on the country?” asked ABC News’ White House correspondent, Martha Raddatz, who traveled with the vice president on a nine-day overseas trip to Iraq and other countries in the Middle East.”It obviously brings home I think for a lot of people the cost that’s involved in the global war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Cheney said in the interview, conducted in Turkey. “It places a special burden obviously on the families, and we recognize, I think – it’s a reminder of the extent to which we are blessed with families who’ve sacrificed as they have.”

“The president carries the biggest burden, obviously,” Cheney said. “He’s the one who has to make the decision to commit young Americans, but we are fortunate to have a group of men and women, the all-volunteer force, who voluntarily put on the uniform and go in harm’s way for the rest of us.”

Yes, the Iraquagmire has been so hard on poor li’l George W. Bush. It’s not easy telling lies with a straight face for five years. But the rest of you soldiers? Hey, you volunteered, remember? So it really doesn’t matter that your civilian leadership SNAFUed this war from the beginning, when you signed the line, you volunteered to be used and misused in any way the Commander-In-Chief sees fit. And if your parents back home don’t like the war, well, “So?”

Raddatz noted that some soldiers, Air Force members, and Marines have been on multiple deployments and have been sent back to Iraq because of the stop-loss policy – an involuntary extension of a service member’s enlistment contract. The Army alone says 58,000 US soldiers have been redeployed to war because of the stop-loss policy.”When you talk about an all-volunteer force, some of these soldiers, airmen, Marines have been on two, three, four, some of them more than that, deployments,” Raddatz said. “Do you think when they volunteered they had any idea that there would be so many deployments or stop-loss? Some of those who want to get out can’t because of stop-loss?”

“A lot of men and women sign up because sometimes they will see developments,” Cheney said. “For example, 9/11 stimulated a lot of folks to volunteer for the military because they wanted to be involved in defending the country.”

“…too bad for them they volunteered,” Dick continued, “so that we could send them somewhere that wasn’t involved in 9/11 and a mission that has nothing to do with defending the country.”

Nice of Dick to talk about stimulation, though. Not “motivated”, “stimulated”. Is that a slip? Because I think it’s Freudian… you’re “motivated” from within, you’re “stimulated” from without. It’s almost as if Dick was talking about using a prod on cattle to get the herd to move.