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| Bush's Bloodbath in Iraq: 2003 vs. 2004 "Mission Accomplished"??? Or ... (But Bush PARTIES!!!) |
| 12.31.04 (5:01 am) [edit] |
[b]Mission accomplished. Or something like that http://story.news.yahoo.com/n... ...[/b]
* The U.S. military suffered at least 348 deaths in Iraq over the final four months of the year, more than in any other similar period since the invasion in March 2003.
* The number of wounded surpassed 10,000, with more than a quarter injured in the last four months as direct combat, roadside bombs and suicide attacks escalated. When President Bush (news - web sites) declared May 1, 2003, that major combat operations were over, the number wounded stood at just 542.
* The number of attacks on U.S. and allied troops grew from an estimated 1,400 attacks in September to 1,600 in October and 1,950 in November. A year earlier, the attacks numbered 649 in September, 896 in October and 864 in November.
That's serious attrition. But of course, "we're making progress". - http://www.dailykos.com
[b]And Bush is gonna' party, party, party at the most expensive inaugural coronation in our nation's history!!! No stopping the laughing, dancing, gorging & swilling-- while others die and disaster afflicts so many!!![/b]
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| Bush's Bloodbath in Iraq: 2003 vs. 2004 "Mission Accomplished"??? Or ... (But Bush PARTIES!!!) |
| 12.31.04 (5:01 am) [edit] |
[b]Mission accomplished. Or something like that http://story.news.yahoo.com/n... ...[/b]
* The U.S. military suffered at least 348 deaths in Iraq over the final four months of the year, more than in any other similar period since the invasion in March 2003.
* The number of wounded surpassed 10,000, with more than a quarter injured in the last four months as direct combat, roadside bombs and suicide attacks escalated. When President Bush (news - web sites) declared May 1, 2003, that major combat operations were over, the number wounded stood at just 542.
* The number of attacks on U.S. and allied troops grew from an estimated 1,400 attacks in September to 1,600 in October and 1,950 in November. A year earlier, the attacks numbered 649 in September, 896 in October and 864 in November.
That's serious attrition. But of course, "we're making progress". - http://www.dailykos.com
[b]And Bush is gonna' party, party, party at the most expensive inaugural coronation in our nation's history!!! No stopping the laughing, dancing, gorging & swilling-- while others die and disaster afflicts so many!!![/b]
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| Bush's Bloodbath in Iraq: 2003 vs. 2004 "Mission Accomplished"??? Or ... (But Bush PARTIES!!!) |
| 12.31.04 (4:59 am) [edit] |
[b]Mission accomplished. Or something like that http://story.news.yahoo.com/n... ...[/b]
* The U.S. military suffered at least 348 deaths in Iraq over the final four months of the year, more than in any other similar period since the invasion in March 2003.
* The number of wounded surpassed 10,000, with more than a quarter injured in the last four months as direct combat, roadside bombs and suicide attacks escalated. When President Bush (news - web sites) declared May 1, 2003, that major combat operations were over, the number wounded stood at just 542.
* The number of attacks on U.S. and allied troops grew from an estimated 1,400 attacks in September to 1,600 in October and 1,950 in November. A year earlier, the attacks numbered 649 in September, 896 in October and 864 in November.
That's serious attrition. But of course, "we're making progress". - http://www.dailykos.com
[b]And Bush is gonna' party, party, party at the most expensive inaugural coronation in our nation's history!!! No stopping the laughing, dancing, gorging & swilling-- while others die and disaster afflicts so many!!![/b]
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| Bush's Bloodbath in Iraq: 2003 vs. 2004 "Mission Accomplished"??? Or ... (But Bush PARTIES!!!) |
| 12.31.04 (4:54 am) [edit] |
[b]Mission accomplished. Or something like that http://story.news.yahoo.com/n... ...[/b]
* The U.S. military suffered at least 348 deaths in Iraq over the final four months of the year, more than in any other similar period since the invasion in March 2003.
* The number of wounded surpassed 10,000, with more than a quarter injured in the last four months as direct combat, roadside bombs and suicide attacks escalated. When President Bush (news - web sites) declared May 1, 2003, that major combat operations were over, the number wounded stood at just 542.
* The number of attacks on U.S. and allied troops grew from an estimated 1,400 attacks in September to 1,600 in October and 1,950 in November. A year earlier, the attacks numbered 649 in September, 896 in October and 864 in November.
That's serious attrition. But of course, "we're making progress". - http://www.dailykos.com
[b]And Bush is gonna' party, party, party at the most expensive inaugural coronation in our nation's history!!! No stopping the laughing, dancing, gorging & swilling-- while others die and disaster afflicts so many!!![/b]
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| Herr Fuhrer Bush's Fascist State of Chaos ... |
| 12.30.04 (5:29 am) [edit] |
[b]George (Herr Fuhrer) Bush has purged the last of his father's senior advisers, handing over control to his neocon allies: [/b]
The transition to President Bush's second term, filled with backstage betrayals, plots and pathologies, would make for an excellent chapter of I, Claudius. To begin with, Bush has unceremoniously and without public acknowledgement dumped Brent Scowcroft, his father's closest associate and friend, as chairman of the foreign intelligence advisory board. The elder Bush's national security adviser was the last remnant of traditional Republican realism permitted to exist within the administration.
At the same time the vice president, Dick Cheney, has imposed his authority over secretary of state designate Condoleezza Rice, in order to blackball Arnold Kanter, former under secretary of state to James Baker and partner in the Scowcroft Group, as a candidate for deputy secretary of state.
"Words like 'incoherent' come to mind," one top state department official told me about Rice's effort to organise her office. She is unable to assert herself against Cheney, her wobbliness a sign that the state department will mostly be sidelined as a power centre for the next four years.
Rice may have wanted to appoint as a deputy her old friend Robert Blackwill, whom she had put in charge of Iraq at the NSC. But Blackwill, a mercurial personality, allegedly assaulted a female US foreign service officer in Kuwait, and was forced to resign in November. Secretary of state Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, presented the evidence against Blackwill to Rice. "Condi only dismissed him after Powell and Armitage threatened to go public," a state department source said.
Meanwhile, key senior state department professionals, such as Marc Grossman, assistant secretary of state for European affairs, have abruptly resigned. According to colleagues who have chosen to remain (at least for now), they foresee the damage that will be done as Rice is charged with whipping the state department into line with the White House and Pentagon neocons. Rice has pleaded with Armitage to stay on, but "he colourfully said he would not", a state department official told me. Rice's radio silence when her former mentor, Scowcroft, was defenestrated was taken by the state department professionals as a sign of things to come.
Bush has long resented his father's alter ego. Scowcroft privately rebuked him for his Iraq follies more than a year ago - an incident that has not previously been reported. Bush "did not receive it well", said a friend of Scowcroft.
In A World Transformed, the elder Bush's 1998 memoir, co-authored with Scowcroft, they explained why Baghdad was not seized in the first Gulf war: "Had we gone the invasion route, the US could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land." In the run-up to the Iraq war, Scowcroft again warned of the danger. Bush's conservative biographers Peter and Rachel Schweizer, quoted the president as responding: "Scowcroft has become a pain in the ass in his old age." And they wrote: "Although he never went public with them, the president's own father shared many of Scowcroft's concerns."
The rejection of Kanter is a compound rejection of Scowcroft and of James Baker - the tough, results-oriented operator who as White House chief of staff saved the Reagan presidency from its ideologues, managed the elder Bush's campaign in 1988, and was summoned in 2000 to rescue Junior in Florida. In his 1995 memoir, Baker observed that the administration's "overriding strategic concern in the [first] Gulf war was to avoid what we often referred to as the Lebanonisation of Iraq, which we believed would create a geopolitical nightmare."
In private, Baker is scathing about the current occupant of the White House. Now the one indispensable creator of the Bush family political fortunes is repudiated.
Republican elders who warned of endless war are purged. Those who advised Bush that Saddam was building nuclear weapons, that with a light military force the operation would be a "cakewalk", and that capturing Baghdad was "mission accomplished", are rewarded.
The outgoing secretary of state, fighting his last battle, is leaking stories to the Washington Post about how his advice went unheeded. Secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld, whose heart beats with the compassion of a crocodile, clings to his job by staging Florence Nightingale-like tableaux of hand-holding of the wounded while declaiming into the desert wind about "victory". Since the election, 203 US soldiers have been killed and 1,674 wounded. - http://www.guardian.co.uk/com...,3604,1380713,00.html
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| Herr Fuhrer Bush's Fascist State of Chaos ... |
| 12.30.04 (5:28 am) [edit] |
[b]George (Herr Fuhrer) Bush has purged the last of his father's senior advisers, handing over control to his neocon allies: [/b]
The transition to President Bush's second term, filled with backstage betrayals, plots and pathologies, would make for an excellent chapter of I, Claudius. To begin with, Bush has unceremoniously and without public acknowledgement dumped Brent Scowcroft, his father's closest associate and friend, as chairman of the foreign intelligence advisory board. The elder Bush's national security adviser was the last remnant of traditional Republican realism permitted to exist within the administration.
At the same time the vice president, Dick Cheney, has imposed his authority over secretary of state designate Condoleezza Rice, in order to blackball Arnold Kanter, former under secretary of state to James Baker and partner in the Scowcroft Group, as a candidate for deputy secretary of state.
"Words like 'incoherent' come to mind," one top state department official told me about Rice's effort to organise her office. She is unable to assert herself against Cheney, her wobbliness a sign that the state department will mostly be sidelined as a power centre for the next four years.
Rice may have wanted to appoint as a deputy her old friend Robert Blackwill, whom she had put in charge of Iraq at the NSC. But Blackwill, a mercurial personality, allegedly assaulted a female US foreign service officer in Kuwait, and was forced to resign in November. Secretary of state Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, presented the evidence against Blackwill to Rice. "Condi only dismissed him after Powell and Armitage threatened to go public," a state department source said.
Meanwhile, key senior state department professionals, such as Marc Grossman, assistant secretary of state for European affairs, have abruptly resigned. According to colleagues who have chosen to remain (at least for now), they foresee the damage that will be done as Rice is charged with whipping the state department into line with the White House and Pentagon neocons. Rice has pleaded with Armitage to stay on, but "he colourfully said he would not", a state department official told me. Rice's radio silence when her former mentor, Scowcroft, was defenestrated was taken by the state department professionals as a sign of things to come.
Bush has long resented his father's alter ego. Scowcroft privately rebuked him for his Iraq follies more than a year ago - an incident that has not previously been reported. Bush "did not receive it well", said a friend of Scowcroft.
In A World Transformed, the elder Bush's 1998 memoir, co-authored with Scowcroft, they explained why Baghdad was not seized in the first Gulf war: "Had we gone the invasion route, the US could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land." In the run-up to the Iraq war, Scowcroft again warned of the danger. Bush's conservative biographers Peter and Rachel Schweizer, quoted the president as responding: "Scowcroft has become a pain in the ass in his old age." And they wrote: "Although he never went public with them, the president's own father shared many of Scowcroft's concerns."
The rejection of Kanter is a compound rejection of Scowcroft and of James Baker - the tough, results-oriented operator who as White House chief of staff saved the Reagan presidency from its ideologues, managed the elder Bush's campaign in 1988, and was summoned in 2000 to rescue Junior in Florida. In his 1995 memoir, Baker observed that the administration's "overriding strategic concern in the [first] Gulf war was to avoid what we often referred to as the Lebanonisation of Iraq, which we believed would create a geopolitical nightmare."
In private, Baker is scathing about the current occupant of the White House. Now the one indispensable creator of the Bush family political fortunes is repudiated.
Republican elders who warned of endless war are purged. Those who advised Bush that Saddam was building nuclear weapons, that with a light military force the operation would be a "cakewalk", and that capturing Baghdad was "mission accomplished", are rewarded.
The outgoing secretary of state, fighting his last battle, is leaking stories to the Washington Post about how his advice went unheeded. Secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld, whose heart beats with the compassion of a crocodile, clings to his job by staging Florence Nightingale-like tableaux of hand-holding of the wounded while declaiming into the desert wind about "victory". Since the election, 203 US soldiers have been killed and 1,674 wounded. - http://www.guardian.co.uk/com...,3604,1380713,00.html
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| Tsunami Death Toll Nearly 70,000 & Rising. Where's Bush? [Partying!!!] |
| 12.30.04 (5:23 am) [edit] |
[b]To answer the question posed by Dr. Juan Cole: Where's Bush?... The callous, craven & corrupt Bush is partying [i]and [/i]planning for the largest and most lavishly obscene "inauguration" parties, balls, fancy food-fests in our nation's history, while Iraq is a bloodbath aborting the lives of our U.S. Soldiers, innocent Iraqis-- and the tsunami disaster is reeking death, illness, and dire misery... But, the fucking Useful Idiot, Der Fuhrer Bush doesn't care:[i] he's partying[/i]!!![/b]
The known death toll from the tsunami keeps rising so rapidly that a daily weblog cannot hope to keep up with it. Early Wednesday am Reuters was giving 68,000. The largest number of dead were in Indonesia, then Sri Lanka, then India and then Thailand.
The horrific stories of corpses piled up on beaches or in trees, the neeed to bulldoze them into mass graves to dispel the spectre of disease, the wailing of relatives, the threat of cholera and other epidemics, finally filled the US media on Tuesday, as some sense of the full scale of the catastrophe finally began sinking in. The audio I heard of the wailing of relatives was the hardest to experience. The dead don't mourn being dead, that is left to the living.
Such catastrophes can have a political impact and can affect security affairs. The failure of the Turkish government to respond in a timely manner to the 1999 earthquake sounded the death knell for the government of then prime minister Bulent Ecevit, and set the stage for the later victory at the polls of the Muslim reform party, Ak.
As John F. Harris and Robin Wright of the Washington Post cannily note, US President George W. Bush has missed an important opportunity to reach out to the Muslims of Indonesia. The Bush administration at first pledged a paltry $15 million, a mysteriously chintzy response to what was obviously an enormous calamity. Bush himself remained on vacation, and now has reluctantly agreed to a meeting of the National Security Council by video conference. If Bush were a statesman, he would have flown to Jakarta and announced his solidarity with the Muslims of Indonesia (which has suffered at least 40,000 dead and rising).
Indeed, the worst-hit area of Indonesia is Aceh, the center of a Muslim separatist movement, and a gesture to Aceh from the US at this moment might have meant a lot in US-Muslim public relations. Bin Laden and Zawahiri sniffed around Aceh in hopes of recruiting operatives there, being experts in fishing in troubled waters. Doesn't the US want to outflank al-Qaeda? As it is, the president of the United States is invisible and on vacation (unlike several European heads of state), and could think of nothing better to do than announce a paltry pledge. As Harris and Wright rightly say, the rest of the world treated the US much better than this after September 11.
The Indonesian government itself has an opportunity to gain some good will in troubled Aceh, and appears to have taken a good first step by allowing international aid agencies into the area.
Already the speaker of the provincial parliament in Kerala, India, has been mobbed by angry fishermen. He only escaped by promising to deliver their grievances to the chief minister.
Tamil Nadu, another affected area, is important to the Congress government of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, with five cabinet ministers in his government. How he handles the crisis could be important, since Congress came back to power precisely because it was supported by villagers. As of Wednesday, the Indian government was denying that the tsunami would affect over-all economic growth, which was only about 6.6 percent this year, less than the 8 percent PM Singh has said is necessary for the country to develop properly. - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...
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| Tsunami Death Toll Nearly 70,000 & Rising. Where's Bush? [Partying!!!] |
| 12.30.04 (5:19 am) [edit] |
[b]To answer the question posed by Dr. Juan Cole: Where's Bush?... The callous, craven & corrupt Bush is partying [i]and [/i]planning for the largest and most lavishly obscene "inauguration" parties, balls, fancy food-fests in our nation's history, while Iraq is a bloodbath aborting the lives of our U.S. Soldiers, innocent Iraqis-- and the tsunami disaster is reeking death, illness, and dire misery... But, the fucking Useful Idiot, Der Fuhrer Bush doesn't care:[i] he's partying[/i]!!![/b]
The known death toll from the tsunami keeps rising so rapidly that a daily weblog cannot hope to keep up with it. Early Wednesday am Reuters was giving 68,000. The largest number of dead were in Indonesia, then Sri Lanka, then India and then Thailand.
The horrific stories of corpses piled up on beaches or in trees, the neeed to bulldoze them into mass graves to dispel the spectre of disease, the wailing of relatives, the threat of cholera and other epidemics, finally filled the US media on Tuesday, as some sense of the full scale of the catastrophe finally began sinking in. The audio I heard of the wailing of relatives was the hardest to experience. The dead don't mourn being dead, that is left to the living.
Such catastrophes can have a political impact and can affect security affairs. The failure of the Turkish government to respond in a timely manner to the 1999 earthquake sounded the death knell for the government of then prime minister Bulent Ecevit, and set the stage for the later victory at the polls of the Muslim reform party, Ak.
As John F. Harris and Robin Wright of the Washington Post cannily note, US President George W. Bush has missed an important opportunity to reach out to the Muslims of Indonesia. The Bush administration at first pledged a paltry $15 million, a mysteriously chintzy response to what was obviously an enormous calamity. Bush himself remained on vacation, and now has reluctantly agreed to a meeting of the National Security Council by video conference. If Bush were a statesman, he would have flown to Jakarta and announced his solidarity with the Muslims of Indonesia (which has suffered at least 40,000 dead and rising).
Indeed, the worst-hit area of Indonesia is Aceh, the center of a Muslim separatist movement, and a gesture to Aceh from the US at this moment might have meant a lot in US-Muslim public relations. Bin Laden and Zawahiri sniffed around Aceh in hopes of recruiting operatives there, being experts in fishing in troubled waters. Doesn't the US want to outflank al-Qaeda? As it is, the president of the United States is invisible and on vacation (unlike several European heads of state), and could think of nothing better to do than announce a paltry pledge. As Harris and Wright rightly say, the rest of the world treated the US much better than this after September 11.
The Indonesian government itself has an opportunity to gain some good will in troubled Aceh, and appears to have taken a good first step by allowing international aid agencies into the area.
Already the speaker of the provincial parliament in Kerala, India, has been mobbed by angry fishermen. He only escaped by promising to deliver their grievances to the chief minister.
Tamil Nadu, another affected area, is important to the Congress government of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, with five cabinet ministers in his government. How he handles the crisis could be important, since Congress came back to power precisely because it was supported by villagers. As of Wednesday, the Indian government was denying that the tsunami would affect over-all economic growth, which was only about 6.6 percent this year, less than the 8 percent PM Singh has said is necessary for the country to develop properly. - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...
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| Tsunami Death Toll Nearly 70,000 & Rising. Where's Bush? [Partying!!!] |
| 12.30.04 (5:16 am) [edit] |
[b]To answer the question posed by Dr. Juan Cole: Where's Bush?... The callous, craven & corrupt Bush is partying [i]and [/i]planning for the largest and most lavishly obscene "inauguration" parties, balls, fancy food-fests in our nation's history, while Iraq is a bloodbath aborting the lives of our U.S. Soldiers, innocent Iraqis-- and the tsunami disaster is reeking death, illness, and dire misery... But, the fucking Useful Idiot, Der Fuhrer Bush doesn't care:[i] he's partying[/i]!!![/b]
The known death toll from the tsunami keeps rising so rapidly that a daily weblog cannot hope to keep up with it. Early Wednesday am Reuters was giving 68,000. The largest number of dead were in Indonesia, then Sri Lanka, then India and then Thailand.
The horrific stories of corpses piled up on beaches or in trees, the neeed to bulldoze them into mass graves to dispel the spectre of disease, the wailing of relatives, the threat of cholera and other epidemics, finally filled the US media on Tuesday, as some sense of the full scale of the catastrophe finally began sinking in. The audio I heard of the wailing of relatives was the hardest to experience. The dead don't mourn being dead, that is left to the living.
Such catastrophes can have a political impact and can affect security affairs. The failure of the Turkish government to respond in a timely manner to the 1999 earthquake sounded the death knell for the government of then prime minister Bulent Ecevit, and set the stage for the later victory at the polls of the Muslim reform party, Ak.
As John F. Harris and Robin Wright of the Washington Post cannily note, US President George W. Bush has missed an important opportunity to reach out to the Muslims of Indonesia. The Bush administration at first pledged a paltry $15 million, a mysteriously chintzy response to what was obviously an enormous calamity. Bush himself remained on vacation, and now has reluctantly agreed to a meeting of the National Security Council by video conference. If Bush were a statesman, he would have flown to Jakarta and announced his solidarity with the Muslims of Indonesia (which has suffered at least 40,000 dead and rising).
Indeed, the worst-hit area of Indonesia is Aceh, the center of a Muslim separatist movement, and a gesture to Aceh from the US at this moment might have meant a lot in US-Muslim public relations. Bin Laden and Zawahiri sniffed around Aceh in hopes of recruiting operatives there, being experts in fishing in troubled waters. Doesn't the US want to outflank al-Qaeda? As it is, the president of the United States is invisible and on vacation (unlike several European heads of state), and could think of nothing better to do than announce a paltry pledge. As Harris and Wright rightly say, the rest of the world treated the US much better than this after September 11.
The Indonesian government itself has an opportunity to gain some good will in troubled Aceh, and appears to have taken a good first step by allowing international aid agencies into the area.
Already the speaker of the provincial parliament in Kerala, India, has been mobbed by angry fishermen. He only escaped by promising to deliver their grievances to the chief minister.
Tamil Nadu, another affected area, is important to the Congress government of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, with five cabinet ministers in his government. How he handles the crisis could be important, since Congress came back to power precisely because it was supported by villagers. As of Wednesday, the Indian government was denying that the tsunami would affect over-all economic growth, which was only about 6.6 percent this year, less than the 8 percent PM Singh has said is necessary for the country to develop properly. - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...
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| Tsunami Death Toll Nearly 70,000 & Rising. Where's "Christian" Bush? [Partying!!!] |
| 12.30.04 (5:11 am) [edit] |
[b]To answer the question posed by Dr. Juan Cole: Where's Bush?... The callous, craven & corrupt Bush is partying [i]and [/i]planning for the largest and most lavishly obscene "inauguration" parties, balls, fancy food-fests in our nation's history, while Iraq is a bloodbath aborting the lives of our U.S. Soldiers, innocent Iraqis-- and the tsunami disaster is reeking death, illness, and dire misery... But, the fucking Useful Idiot, Der Fuhrer Bush doesn't care:[i] he's partying[/i]!!![/b]
The known death toll from the tsunami keeps rising so rapidly that a daily weblog cannot hope to keep up with it. Early Wednesday am Reuters was giving 68,000. The largest number of dead were in Indonesia, then Sri Lanka, then India and then Thailand.
The horrific stories of corpses piled up on beaches or in trees, the neeed to bulldoze them into mass graves to dispel the spectre of disease, the wailing of relatives, the threat of cholera and other epidemics, finally filled the US media on Tuesday, as some sense of the full scale of the catastrophe finally began sinking in. The audio I heard of the wailing of relatives was the hardest to experience. The dead don't mourn being dead, that is left to the living.
Such catastrophes can have a political impact and can affect security affairs. The failure of the Turkish government to respond in a timely manner to the 1999 earthquake sounded the death knell for the government of then prime minister Bulent Ecevit, and set the stage for the later victory at the polls of the Muslim reform party, Ak.
As John F. Harris and Robin Wright of the Washington Post cannily note, US President George W. Bush has missed an important opportunity to reach out to the Muslims of Indonesia. The Bush administration at first pledged a paltry $15 million, a mysteriously chintzy response to what was obviously an enormous calamity. Bush himself remained on vacation, and now has reluctantly agreed to a meeting of the National Security Council by video conference. If Bush were a statesman, he would have flown to Jakarta and announced his solidarity with the Muslims of Indonesia (which has suffered at least 40,000 dead and rising).
Indeed, the worst-hit area of Indonesia is Aceh, the center of a Muslim separatist movement, and a gesture to Aceh from the US at this moment might have meant a lot in US-Muslim public relations. Bin Laden and Zawahiri sniffed around Aceh in hopes of recruiting operatives there, being experts in fishing in troubled waters. Doesn't the US want to outflank al-Qaeda? As it is, the president of the United States is invisible and on vacation (unlike several European heads of state), and could think of nothing better to do than announce a paltry pledge. As Harris and Wright rightly say, the rest of the world treated the US much better than this after September 11.
The Indonesian government itself has an opportunity to gain some good will in troubled Aceh, and appears to have taken a good first step by allowing international aid agencies into the area.
Already the speaker of the provincial parliament in Kerala, India, has been mobbed by angry fishermen. He only escaped by promising to deliver their grievances to the chief minister.
Tamil Nadu, another affected area, is important to the Congress government of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, with five cabinet ministers in his government. How he handles the crisis could be important, since Congress came back to power precisely because it was supported by villagers. As of Wednesday, the Indian government was denying that the tsunami would affect over-all economic growth, which was only about 6.6 percent this year, less than the 8 percent PM Singh has said is necessary for the country to develop properly. - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...
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| Tsunami Death Toll Nearly 70,000 & Rising. Where's Bush? [Partying!!!] |
| 12.30.04 (5:01 am) [edit] |
[b]To answer the question posed by Dr. Juan Cole: Where's Bush?... The callous, craven & corrupt Bush is partying [i]and [/i]planning for the largest and most lavishly obscene "inauguration" parties, balls, fancy food-fests in our nation's history, while Iraq is a bloodbath aborting the lives of our U.S. Soldiers, innocent Iraqis-- and the tsunami disaster is reeking death, illness, and dire misery... But, the fucking Useful Idiot, Der Fuhrer Bush doesn't care:[i] he's partying[/i]!!![/b]
The known death toll from the tsunami keeps rising so rapidly that a daily weblog cannot hope to keep up with it. Early Wednesday am Reuters was giving 68,000. The largest number of dead were in Indonesia, then Sri Lanka, then India and then Thailand.
The horrific stories of corpses piled up on beaches or in trees, the neeed to bulldoze them into mass graves to dispel the spectre of disease, the wailing of relatives, the threat of cholera and other epidemics, finally filled the US media on Tuesday, as some sense of the full scale of the catastrophe finally began sinking in. The audio I heard of the wailing of relatives was the hardest to experience. The dead don't mourn being dead, that is left to the living.
Such catastrophes can have a political impact and can affect security affairs. The failure of the Turkish government to respond in a timely manner to the 1999 earthquake sounded the death knell for the government of then prime minister Bulent Ecevit, and set the stage for the later victory at the polls of the Muslim reform party, Ak.
As John F. Harris and Robin Wright of the Washington Post cannily note, US President George W. Bush has missed an important opportunity to reach out to the Muslims of Indonesia. The Bush administration at first pledged a paltry $15 million, a mysteriously chintzy response to what was obviously an enormous calamity. Bush himself remained on vacation, and now has reluctantly agreed to a meeting of the National Security Council by video conference. If Bush were a statesman, he would have flown to Jakarta and announced his solidarity with the Muslims of Indonesia (which has suffered at least 40,000 dead and rising).
Indeed, the worst-hit area of Indonesia is Aceh, the center of a Muslim separatist movement, and a gesture to Aceh from the US at this moment might have meant a lot in US-Muslim public relations. Bin Laden and Zawahiri sniffed around Aceh in hopes of recruiting operatives there, being experts in fishing in troubled waters. Doesn't the US want to outflank al-Qaeda? As it is, the president of the United States is invisible and on vacation (unlike several European heads of state), and could think of nothing better to do than announce a paltry pledge. As Harris and Wright rightly say, the rest of the world treated the US much better than this after September 11.
The Indonesian government itself has an opportunity to gain some good will in troubled Aceh, and appears to have taken a good first step by allowing international aid agencies into the area.
Already the speaker of the provincial parliament in Kerala, India, has been mobbed by angry fishermen. He only escaped by promising to deliver their grievances to the chief minister.
Tamil Nadu, another affected area, is important to the Congress government of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, with five cabinet ministers in his government. How he handles the crisis could be important, since Congress came back to power precisely because it was supported by villagers. As of Wednesday, the Indian government was denying that the tsunami would affect over-all economic growth, which was only about 6.6 percent this year, less than the 8 percent PM Singh has said is necessary for the country to develop properly. - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...
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| HERR FUHRER BUSH'S Christmas Card |
| 12.19.04 (6:16 am) [edit] |
I got mine early:
"If love and peace doesn’t fill your heart, 50,000 volts should do the trick." - http://hammeroftruth.com/2004...
But if[i] this [/i]doesn't fill you with joy, then consider what[i] more [/i]is being done to prisoners at Abu Ghraib:
[u][b]Company fed rotten food to Abu Ghraib prisoners, sparking rebellion[/b][/u]
To those Iraqi detainees whom guards and interrogators did not humiliate or torture last winter -- along with those who they did -- a private military contractor fed spoilt and rancid meals laden with dirt and bugs, according to an article published by CorpWatch, an organization that investigates war profiteering.
Army Major David Dinenna, a military policeman stationed at the facility, spent part of last fall trying to remedy the food situation, which he described to his superiors in an email as a "contract meals disaster" that led to prisoners falling violently ill after meals. A military report quoted by CorpWatch concluded that the "deplorable food and living conditions" had in fact led to a prisoner uprising the Army had originally blamed on a "mass" escape attempt.
The contract company blamed for the bad food is identified as a small, Qatar-based firm called American Service Center.
[b]Sources:[/b]
TheNewsStandard, http://newstandardnews.net/co...
Project for the OLD American Century, http://www.oldamericancentury...
[b]Courtesy of SamAdams http://samadams.tblog.com [/b]
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| HERR FUHRER BUSH'S Christmas Card |
| 12.19.04 (6:15 am) [edit] |
I got mine early:
"If love and peace doesn’t fill your heart, 50,000 volts should do the trick." - http://hammeroftruth.com/2004...
But if[i] this [/i]doesn't fill you with joy, then consider what[i] more [/i]is being done to prisoners at Abu Ghraib:
[u][b]Company fed rotten food to Abu Ghraib prisoners, sparking rebellion[/b][/u]
To those Iraqi detainees whom guards and interrogators did not humiliate or torture last winter -- along with those who they did -- a private military contractor fed spoilt and rancid meals laden with dirt and bugs, according to an article published by CorpWatch, an organization that investigates war profiteering.
Army Major David Dinenna, a military policeman stationed at the facility, spent part of last fall trying to remedy the food situation, which he described to his superiors in an email as a "contract meals disaster" that led to prisoners falling violently ill after meals. A military report quoted by CorpWatch concluded that the "deplorable food and living conditions" had in fact led to a prisoner uprising the Army had originally blamed on a "mass" escape attempt.
The contract company blamed for the bad food is identified as a small, Qatar-based firm called American Service Center.
[b]Sources:[/b]
TheNewsStandard, http://newstandardnews.net/co...
Project for the OLD American Century, http://www.oldamericancentury...
[b]Courtesy of SamAdams http://samadams.tblog.com [/b]
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| HERR FUHRER BUSH'S Christmas Card |
| 12.19.04 (6:14 am) [edit] |
I got mine early:
"If love and peace doesn’t fill your heart, 50,000 volts should do the trick." - http://hammeroftruth.com/2004...
But if[i] this [/i]doesn't fill you with joy, then consider what[i] more [/i]is being done to prisoners at Abu Ghraib:
[u][b]Company fed rotten food to Abu Ghraib prisoners, sparking rebellion[/b][/u]
To those Iraqi detainees whom guards and interrogators did not humiliate or torture last winter -- along with those who they did -- a private military contractor fed spoilt and rancid meals laden with dirt and bugs, according to an article published by CorpWatch, an organization that investigates war profiteering.
Army Major David Dinenna, a military policeman stationed at the facility, spent part of last fall trying to remedy the food situation, which he described to his superiors in an email as a "contract meals disaster" that led to prisoners falling violently ill after meals. A military report quoted by CorpWatch concluded that the "deplorable food and living conditions" had in fact led to a prisoner uprising the Army had originally blamed on a "mass" escape attempt.
The contract company blamed for the bad food is identified as a small, Qatar-based firm called American Service Center.
[b]Sources:[/b]
TheNewsStandard, http://newstandardnews.net/co...
Project for the OLD American Century, http://www.oldamericancentury...
[b]Courtesy of SamAdams http://samadams.tblog.com [/b]
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| HERR FUHRER BUSH'S Christmas Card |
| 12.19.04 (6:14 am) [edit] |
I got mine early:
"If love and peace doesn’t fill your heart, 50,000 volts should do the trick." - http://hammeroftruth.com/2004...
But if[i] this [/i]doesn't fill you with joy, then consider what[i] more [/i]is being done to prisoners at Abu Ghraib:
[u][b]Company fed rotten food to Abu Ghraib prisoners, sparking rebellion[/b][/u]
To those Iraqi detainees whom guards and interrogators did not humiliate or torture last winter -- along with those who they did -- a private military contractor fed spoilt and rancid meals laden with dirt and bugs, according to an article published by CorpWatch, an organization that investigates war profiteering.
Army Major David Dinenna, a military policeman stationed at the facility, spent part of last fall trying to remedy the food situation, which he described to his superiors in an email as a "contract meals disaster" that led to prisoners falling violently ill after meals. A military report quoted by CorpWatch concluded that the "deplorable food and living conditions" had in fact led to a prisoner uprising the Army had originally blamed on a "mass" escape attempt.
The contract company blamed for the bad food is identified as a small, Qatar-based firm called American Service Center.
[b]Sources:[/b]
TheNewsStandard, http://newstandardnews.net/co...
Project for the OLD American Century, http://www.oldamericancentury...
[b]Courtesy of SamAdams http://samadams.tblog.com [/b]
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| TIME Magazine's NON-"Person" of 2004: Biggest Asshole of the Year!!! |
| 12.19.04 (6:11 am) [edit] |
[u][b]Bush Named Time's Person of 2004[/b][/u]
NEW YORK - After winning re-election and "reshaping the rules of politics to fit his 10-gallon-hat leadership style," President George Bush (news - web sites) for the second time was chosen as Time magazine's Person of the Year.
The magazine's editors tapped Bush "for sharpening the debate until the choices bled, for reframing reality to match his design, for gambling his fortunes — and ours — on his faith in the power of leadership."
Time's 2004 Person of the Year package, on newsstands Monday, includes an Oval Office interview with Bush, an interview with his father, former President George H. W. Bush, and a profile of Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove.
In an interview with the magazine, Bush attributed his victory over Democratic candidate John Kerry (news - web sites) to his foreign policy and the wars he began in Afghanistan (news - web sites) and Iraq (news - web sites).
"The election was about the use of American influence," Bush said.
After a grueling campaign, Bush remains a polarizing figure in America and around the world, and that's part of the reason he earned the magazine's honor, said Managing Editor Jim Kelly.
"Many, many Americans deeply wish he had not won," Kelly said in a telephone interview. "And yet he did."
In the Time article, Bush said he relishes that some people dislike him.
"I think the natural instinct for most people in the political world is that they want people to like them," Bush said. "On the other hand, I think sometimes I take kind of a delight in who the critics are."
Bush joins six other presidents who have twice won the magazine's top honor: Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower (first as a general), Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan (news - web sites) and Bill Clinton (news - web sites). Franklin Roosevelt holds the record with three nods from the editors.
Kelly said Bush has changed dramatically since he was named Person of the Year in 2000 after the Supreme Court awarded him the presidency.
"He is not the same man," Kelly said. "He's a much more resolute man. He is personally as charming as ever but I think the kind of face he's shown to the American public is one of much, much greater determination."
The magazine gives the honor to the person who had the greatest impact, good or bad, over the year.
Kelly said other candidates included Michael Moore and Mel Gibson, "because in different ways their movies tapped in to deep cultural streams," and political strategist Rove, who is widely credited with engineering Bush's win. Kelly said choosing Rove alone would have taken away from the credit he said Bush deserves.
This is the first time an individual has won the award since 2001, when then-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was celebrated for his response to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
The American soldier earned the honor last year; in 2002, the magazine tapped Coleen Rowley, the FBI (news - web sites) agent who wrote a critical memo on FBI intelligence failures, and Cynthia Cooper and Sherron Watkins, who blew the whistle on scandals at Enron and Worldcom. - http://story.news.yahoo.com/n...
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| TIME Magazine's NON-"Person" of 2004: Biggest Asshole of the Year!!! |
| 12.19.04 (6:11 am) [edit] |
[u][b]Bush Named Time's Person of 2004[/b][/u]
NEW YORK - After winning re-election and "reshaping the rules of politics to fit his 10-gallon-hat leadership style," President George Bush (news - web sites) for the second time was chosen as Time magazine's Person of the Year.
The magazine's editors tapped Bush "for sharpening the debate until the choices bled, for reframing reality to match his design, for gambling his fortunes — and ours — on his faith in the power of leadership."
Time's 2004 Person of the Year package, on newsstands Monday, includes an Oval Office interview with Bush, an interview with his father, former President George H. W. Bush, and a profile of Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove.
In an interview with the magazine, Bush attributed his victory over Democratic candidate John Kerry (news - web sites) to his foreign policy and the wars he began in Afghanistan (news - web sites) and Iraq (news - web sites).
"The election was about the use of American influence," Bush said.
After a grueling campaign, Bush remains a polarizing figure in America and around the world, and that's part of the reason he earned the magazine's honor, said Managing Editor Jim Kelly.
"Many, many Americans deeply wish he had not won," Kelly said in a telephone interview. "And yet he did."
In the Time article, Bush said he relishes that some people dislike him.
"I think the natural instinct for most people in the political world is that they want people to like them," Bush said. "On the other hand, I think sometimes I take kind of a delight in who the critics are."
Bush joins six other presidents who have twice won the magazine's top honor: Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower (first as a general), Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan (news - web sites) and Bill Clinton (news - web sites). Franklin Roosevelt holds the record with three nods from the editors.
Kelly said Bush has changed dramatically since he was named Person of the Year in 2000 after the Supreme Court awarded him the presidency.
"He is not the same man," Kelly said. "He's a much more resolute man. He is personally as charming as ever but I think the kind of face he's shown to the American public is one of much, much greater determination."
The magazine gives the honor to the person who had the greatest impact, good or bad, over the year.
Kelly said other candidates included Michael Moore and Mel Gibson, "because in different ways their movies tapped in to deep cultural streams," and political strategist Rove, who is widely credited with engineering Bush's win. Kelly said choosing Rove alone would have taken away from the credit he said Bush deserves.
This is the first time an individual has won the award since 2001, when then-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was celebrated for his response to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
The American soldier earned the honor last year; in 2002, the magazine tapped Coleen Rowley, the FBI (news - web sites) agent who wrote a critical memo on FBI intelligence failures, and Cynthia Cooper and Sherron Watkins, who blew the whistle on scandals at Enron and Worldcom. - http://story.news.yahoo.com/n...
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| Slut-Fucker Bush Should Donate His Lunch Money to U.S. Troops |
| 12.18.04 (5:35 am) [edit] |
[b]U.S. obviously didn't do all it could to protect troops[/b]
This past week the headlines in the news fit together like the pieces of a puzzle. Each news story added another dimension to the emerging picture of war policy that is increasingly costly and incompetent.
Start with the centerpiece, the Q & A in Kuwait with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and 2,300 National Guard soldiers soon to be headed to Iraq. Among his fellow troops, Tennessean Thomas Wilson's query about why they had to scrounge through landfills to find armor for their trucks and Humvees was right on the money.
Rumsfeld's reply: "You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time." Those words will certainly be in the first paragraph of his obituary.
For families of National Guard serving in Iraq, Wilson's question came as no surprise. They have been hearing from their sons and daughters about equipment deficiencies since the war began. But the question uncovered the sad fact that less than one-third of the 19,389 Humvees in Iraq are fully armored. Once the insurgency hit, the Army found it needed 35 times the number of armored Humvees than originally planned.
Letters to the editor asked: "Shouldn't they have considered the Army they had before the war?" And: "Did Rumsfeld have nothing to do with planning for the war?"
Rumsfeld also noted that you "can have all the armor in the world" on a vehicle and it still can be blown up. But Wilson's question had a profound result. The Pentagon suddenly announced it found $4.1 billion, immediately earmarked to armor up Humvees.
Then there was the story of the six Ohio reservists who were court marshaled for cannibalizing abandoned Army vehicles in Kuwait. When a convoy is moving, the policy is to abandon any vehicle that would take more than 30 minutes to fix. These soldiers took parts from two abandoned tractor-trailers to fix their own vehicles so they could carry out their mission in Iraq. You might think they would get a commendation for ingenuity. No, they were convicted of theft and destruction of Army property. They got jail for six months. That takes us to those who did get commendations this week. President Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to three of the central architects of the Iraq war.
One went to retired CIA Director George "Slam Dunk" Tenet, who tried but failed to produce intelligence proving that Saddam had WMD, and produced very little about al-Qaida before 9/11.
Another went to Gen. Tommy Franks, who planned for the invasion but failed to plan at all for any insurgency. Then Franks took early retirement while his war was still going on. What general does that?
The final medal was awarded to L. Paul Bremer, who helped feed the insurgency by disbanding the entire Iraqi army, thereby creating hundreds of thousands of armed, unemployed troops who hated the U.S. Well done!
Thus President Bush puts an official stamp of success on a war whose endgame grows more uncertain day by day. The people who know that best are the families of the reservists who drive most of the unarmored trucks and Humvees.
President Bush said, "As I have told many families I met with, we're doing everything we possibly can to protect your loved ones in a mission that is vital and important." In fact, until Wilson's question, we obviously were not.
That brings us to the final headline: "At Bush Inauguration, Lunch Will Set You Back $250,000."
This is a lunch with Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, obviously exclusive to the high tax brackets. There will also be a "Salute To Those Who Serve," with free tickets for the military.
The arithmetic is too tempting. It costs $25,000 to fully armor a Humvee. Each $250,000 lunch ticket could go straight to equipping 10 vehicles, so our reservists and Guards in Iraq won't have to ride around with homemade sandbags on the floor.
Do it, Mr. Bush. Donate your lunch money to the troops. - http://www.indystar.com/artic...
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| Slut-Fucker Bush Should Donate His Lunch Money to U.S. Troops |
| 12.18.04 (5:34 am) [edit] |
[b]U.S. obviously didn't do all it could to protect troops[/b]
This past week the headlines in the news fit together like the pieces of a puzzle. Each news story added another dimension to the emerging picture of war policy that is increasingly costly and incompetent.
Start with the centerpiece, the Q & A in Kuwait with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and 2,300 National Guard soldiers soon to be headed to Iraq. Among his fellow troops, Tennessean Thomas Wilson's query about why they had to scrounge through landfills to find armor for their trucks and Humvees was right on the money.
Rumsfeld's reply: "You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time." Those words will certainly be in the first paragraph of his obituary.
For families of National Guard serving in Iraq, Wilson's question came as no surprise. They have been hearing from their sons and daughters about equipment deficiencies since the war began. But the question uncovered the sad fact that less than one-third of the 19,389 Humvees in Iraq are fully armored. Once the insurgency hit, the Army found it needed 35 times the number of armored Humvees than originally planned.
Letters to the editor asked: "Shouldn't they have considered the Army they had before the war?" And: "Did Rumsfeld have nothing to do with planning for the war?"
Rumsfeld also noted that you "can have all the armor in the world" on a vehicle and it still can be blown up. But Wilson's question had a profound result. The Pentagon suddenly announced it found $4.1 billion, immediately earmarked to armor up Humvees.
Then there was the story of the six Ohio reservists who were court marshaled for cannibalizing abandoned Army vehicles in Kuwait. When a convoy is moving, the policy is to abandon any vehicle that would take more than 30 minutes to fix. These soldiers took parts from two abandoned tractor-trailers to fix their own vehicles so they could carry out their mission in Iraq. You might think they would get a commendation for ingenuity. No, they were convicted of theft and destruction of Army property. They got jail for six months. That takes us to those who did get commendations this week. President Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to three of the central architects of the Iraq war.
One went to retired CIA Director George "Slam Dunk" Tenet, who tried but failed to produce intelligence proving that Saddam had WMD, and produced very little about al-Qaida before 9/11.
Another went to Gen. Tommy Franks, who planned for the invasion but failed to plan at all for any insurgency. Then Franks took early retirement while his war was still going on. What general does that?
The final medal was awarded to L. Paul Bremer, who helped feed the insurgency by disbanding the entire Iraqi army, thereby creating hundreds of thousands of armed, unemployed troops who hated the U.S. Well done!
Thus President Bush puts an official stamp of success on a war whose endgame grows more uncertain day by day. The people who know that best are the families of the reservists who drive most of the unarmored trucks and Humvees.
President Bush said, "As I have told many families I met with, we're doing everything we possibly can to protect your loved ones in a mission that is vital and important." In fact, until Wilson's question, we obviously were not.
That brings us to the final headline: "At Bush Inauguration, Lunch Will Set You Back $250,000."
This is a lunch with Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, obviously exclusive to the high tax brackets. There will also be a "Salute To Those Who Serve," with free tickets for the military.
The arithmetic is too tempting. It costs $25,000 to fully armor a Humvee. Each $250,000 lunch ticket could go straight to equipping 10 vehicles, so our reservists and Guards in Iraq won't have to ride around with homemade sandbags on the floor.
Do it, Mr. Bush. Donate your lunch money to the troops. - http://www.indystar.com/artic...
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| Slut-Fucker Bush Should Donate His Lunch Money to U.S. Troops |
| 12.18.04 (5:33 am) [edit] |
[b]U.S. obviously didn't do all it could to protect troops[/b]
This past week the headlines in the news fit together like the pieces of a puzzle. Each news story added another dimension to the emerging picture of war policy that is increasingly costly and incompetent.
Start with the centerpiece, the Q & A in Kuwait with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and 2,300 National Guard soldiers soon to be headed to Iraq. Among his fellow troops, Tennessean Thomas Wilson's query about why they had to scrounge through landfills to find armor for their trucks and Humvees was right on the money.
Rumsfeld's reply: "You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time." Those words will certainly be in the first paragraph of his obituary.
For families of National Guard serving in Iraq, Wilson's question came as no surprise. They have been hearing from their sons and daughters about equipment deficiencies since the war began. But the question uncovered the sad fact that less than one-third of the 19,389 Humvees in Iraq are fully armored. Once the insurgency hit, the Army found it needed 35 times the number of armored Humvees than originally planned.
Letters to the editor asked: "Shouldn't they have considered the Army they had before the war?" And: "Did Rumsfeld have nothing to do with planning for the war?"
Rumsfeld also noted that you "can have all the armor in the world" on a vehicle and it still can be blown up. But Wilson's question had a profound result. The Pentagon suddenly announced it found $4.1 billion, immediately earmarked to armor up Humvees.
Then there was the story of the six Ohio reservists who were court marshaled for cannibalizing abandoned Army vehicles in Kuwait. When a convoy is moving, the policy is to abandon any vehicle that would take more than 30 minutes to fix. These soldiers took parts from two abandoned tractor-trailers to fix their own vehicles so they could carry out their mission in Iraq. You might think they would get a commendation for ingenuity. No, they were convicted of theft and destruction of Army property. They got jail for six months. That takes us to those who did get commendations this week. President Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to three of the central architects of the Iraq war.
One went to retired CIA Director George "Slam Dunk" Tenet, who tried but failed to produce intelligence proving that Saddam had WMD, and produced very little about al-Qaida before 9/11.
Another went to Gen. Tommy Franks, who planned for the invasion but failed to plan at all for any insurgency. Then Franks took early retirement while his war was still going on. What general does that?
The final medal was awarded to L. Paul Bremer, who helped feed the insurgency by disbanding the entire Iraqi army, thereby creating hundreds of thousands of armed, unemployed troops who hated the U.S. Well done!
Thus President Bush puts an official stamp of success on a war whose endgame grows more uncertain day by day. The people who know that best are the families of the reservists who drive most of the unarmored trucks and Humvees.
President Bush said, "As I have told many families I met with, we're doing everything we possibly can to protect your loved ones in a mission that is vital and important." In fact, until Wilson's question, we obviously were not.
That brings us to the final headline: "At Bush Inauguration, Lunch Will Set You Back $250,000."
This is a lunch with Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, obviously exclusive to the high tax brackets. There will also be a "Salute To Those Who Serve," with free tickets for the military.
The arithmetic is too tempting. It costs $25,000 to fully armor a Humvee. Each $250,000 lunch ticket could go straight to equipping 10 vehicles, so our reservists and Guards in Iraq won't have to ride around with homemade sandbags on the floor.
Do it, Mr. Bush. Donate your lunch money to the troops. - http://www.indystar.com/artic...
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| Slut-Fucker Bush Should Donate His Lunch Money to U.S. Troops |
| 12.18.04 (5:33 am) [edit] |
[b]U.S. obviously didn't do all it could to protect troops[/b]
This past week the headlines in the news fit together like the pieces of a puzzle. Each news story added another dimension to the emerging picture of war policy that is increasingly costly and incompetent.
Start with the centerpiece, the Q & A in Kuwait with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and 2,300 National Guard soldiers soon to be headed to Iraq. Among his fellow troops, Tennessean Thomas Wilson's query about why they had to scrounge through landfills to find armor for their trucks and Humvees was right on the money.
Rumsfeld's reply: "You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time." Those words will certainly be in the first paragraph of his obituary.
For families of National Guard serving in Iraq, Wilson's question came as no surprise. They have been hearing from their sons and daughters about equipment deficiencies since the war began. But the question uncovered the sad fact that less than one-third of the 19,389 Humvees in Iraq are fully armored. Once the insurgency hit, the Army found it needed 35 times the number of armored Humvees than originally planned.
Letters to the editor asked: "Shouldn't they have considered the Army they had before the war?" And: "Did Rumsfeld have nothing to do with planning for the war?"
Rumsfeld also noted that you "can have all the armor in the world" on a vehicle and it still can be blown up. But Wilson's question had a profound result. The Pentagon suddenly announced it found $4.1 billion, immediately earmarked to armor up Humvees.
Then there was the story of the six Ohio reservists who were court marshaled for cannibalizing abandoned Army vehicles in Kuwait. When a convoy is moving, the policy is to abandon any vehicle that would take more than 30 minutes to fix. These soldiers took parts from two abandoned tractor-trailers to fix their own vehicles so they could carry out their mission in Iraq. You might think they would get a commendation for ingenuity. No, they were convicted of theft and destruction of Army property. They got jail for six months. That takes us to those who did get commendations this week. President Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to three of the central architects of the Iraq war.
One went to retired CIA Director George "Slam Dunk" Tenet, who tried but failed to produce intelligence proving that Saddam had WMD, and produced very little about al-Qaida before 9/11.
Another went to Gen. Tommy Franks, who planned for the invasion but failed to plan at all for any insurgency. Then Franks took early retirement while his war was still going on. What general does that?
The final medal was awarded to L. Paul Bremer, who helped feed the insurgency by disbanding the entire Iraqi army, thereby creating hundreds of thousands of armed, unemployed troops who hated the U.S. Well done!
Thus President Bush puts an official stamp of success on a war whose endgame grows more uncertain day by day. The people who know that best are the families of the reservists who drive most of the unarmored trucks and Humvees.
President Bush said, "As I have told many families I met with, we're doing everything we possibly can to protect your loved ones in a mission that is vital and important." In fact, until Wilson's question, we obviously were not.
That brings us to the final headline: "At Bush Inauguration, Lunch Will Set You Back $250,000."
This is a lunch with Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, obviously exclusive to the high tax brackets. There will also be a "Salute To Those Who Serve," with free tickets for the military.
The arithmetic is too tempting. It costs $25,000 to fully armor a Humvee. Each $250,000 lunch ticket could go straight to equipping 10 vehicles, so our reservists and Guards in Iraq won't have to ride around with homemade sandbags on the floor.
Do it, Mr. Bush. Donate your lunch money to the troops. - http://www.indystar.com/artic...
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| Bush's Bloodbath in Iraq: America Fails Again & Loses Control of Mosul ... |
| 12.18.04 (5:29 am) [edit] |
[b]Westerner beheaded on Mosul street as American forces lose control of key city[/b]
Gunmen raked a car with machine-gun fire in the northern city of Mosul yesterday, killing three foreigners and their driver. They then cut off the head of one of their victims.
The killings show that at the same time as the US was recapturing Fallujah in a heavily publicised assault it largely lost control of Mosul, Iraq's northern capital. Though US troops launched a counter-attack, their grip on the city remains tenuous. The four men who died yesterday were travelling in a white sedan when it was attacked with automatic weapons and set on fire at a traffic intersection in Mosul.
One of the foreigners was briefly captured by the insurgents, according to an eyewitness. When he tried to escape they cut his head off and left his body in a pool of blood.
A photographer for Reuters news agency saw four bodies lying beside the burning car. Three of those who died appeared to be foreigners, one of whom looked Turkish and the other two European. The fourth body, possibly of the driver, was partly burnt, but appeared to be that of an Arab.
The men were carrying small automatic weapons, indicating that they may have been working for one of the private security companies in Iraq.
Mosul, a city on the Tigris river with a population of 1.2 million, is largely populated by Sunni Muslims but has a large Kurdish minority. It has increasingly fallen into the hands of Sunni insurgents over the past six weeks.
Insurgents launched an uprising on 10 November, two days after the US Marines started their attack on Mosul, and stormed 10 police stations. Out of a local police force of 8,000, all but 1,000 have deserted and only 400 of those remaining are considered reliable.
Earlier in the year, the US occupation of Mosul by the 101st Airborne was presented as a model of what the occupation should have been in the rest of the country. Several thousand army officers publicly renounced Baathism. The local police force was being built up. The unpopular political parties of returned exiles in Baghdad were kept at bay.
Until the past few months, guerrilla attacks in Mosul were both less frequent and less effective than further south around Baghdad. This may have been because Mosul and Nineveh province, of which it is the centre, was never seen as a bastion of support for Saddam Hussein. But the city was always a nationalist centre and a recruiting ground for the officer corps of the Iraqi army. The defence minister under the old regime was usually from Mosul.
Unlike Fallujah, the guerrillas did not contest the recapture of Mosul by US and Iraqi forces in November. Leaflets were issued instructing fighters to hide their weapons and stay in the city. Since then 150 bodies have found, many of them members of the National Guard or other security forces. US forces in Iraq are being built up from 138,000 to 150,000 men and are already stretched trying to hold Sunni Muslim cities and towns around Baghdad. They were never able to surround Fallujah, even at the height of the battle last month, and many fighters escaped.
Much of the US Army in Iraq is tied down providing support services, guarding fixed positions or protecting convoys that are frequently attack. US patrols often seem to serve no particular purpose but severely disrupt traffic because Iraqi drivers do not want to get close to the American vehicles in case they are attacked.
In Fallujah, the mayor, Mahmoud Ibrahim, said the first families would start to return to the south of the city yesterday. But this may be in doubt because there is shelling is continuing in northern Fallujah.
There are more than 250,000 refugees who fled the city to seek shelter in Baghdad 35 miles away or the nearby city of Ramadi. Others are in camps on the city outskirts or in neighbouring villages. Fallujah has had no power or water since the US assault and these will take time to restore. - http://news.independent.co.uk...
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| Bush's Bloodbath in Iraq: America Fails Again & Loses Control of Mosul ... |
| 12.18.04 (5:29 am) [edit] |
[b]Westerner beheaded on Mosul street as American forces lose control of key city[/b]
Gunmen raked a car with machine-gun fire in the northern city of Mosul yesterday, killing three foreigners and their driver. They then cut off the head of one of their victims.
The killings show that at the same time as the US was recapturing Fallujah in a heavily publicised assault it largely lost control of Mosul, Iraq's northern capital. Though US troops launched a counter-attack, their grip on the city remains tenuous. The four men who died yesterday were travelling in a white sedan when it was attacked with automatic weapons and set on fire at a traffic intersection in Mosul.
One of the foreigners was briefly captured by the insurgents, according to an eyewitness. When he tried to escape they cut his head off and left his body in a pool of blood.
A photographer for Reuters news agency saw four bodies lying beside the burning car. Three of those who died appeared to be foreigners, one of whom looked Turkish and the other two European. The fourth body, possibly of the driver, was partly burnt, but appeared to be that of an Arab.
The men were carrying small automatic weapons, indicating that they may have been working for one of the private security companies in Iraq.
Mosul, a city on the Tigris river with a population of 1.2 million, is largely populated by Sunni Muslims but has a large Kurdish minority. It has increasingly fallen into the hands of Sunni insurgents over the past six weeks.
Insurgents launched an uprising on 10 November, two days after the US Marines started their attack on Mosul, and stormed 10 police stations. Out of a local police force of 8,000, all but 1,000 have deserted and only 400 of those remaining are considered reliable.
Earlier in the year, the US occupation of Mosul by the 101st Airborne was presented as a model of what the occupation should have been in the rest of the country. Several thousand army officers publicly renounced Baathism. The local police force was being built up. The unpopular political parties of returned exiles in Baghdad were kept at bay.
Until the past few months, guerrilla attacks in Mosul were both less frequent and less effective than further south around Baghdad. This may have been because Mosul and Nineveh province, of which it is the centre, was never seen as a bastion of support for Saddam Hussein. But the city was always a nationalist centre and a recruiting ground for the officer corps of the Iraqi army. The defence minister under the old regime was usually from Mosul.
Unlike Fallujah, the guerrillas did not contest the recapture of Mosul by US and Iraqi forces in November. Leaflets were issued instructing fighters to hide their weapons and stay in the city. Since then 150 bodies have found, many of them members of the National Guard or other security forces. US forces in Iraq are being built up from 138,000 to 150,000 men and are already stretched trying to hold Sunni Muslim cities and towns around Baghdad. They were never able to surround Fallujah, even at the height of the battle last month, and many fighters escaped.
Much of the US Army in Iraq is tied down providing support services, guarding fixed positions or protecting convoys that are frequently attack. US patrols often seem to serve no particular purpose but severely disrupt traffic because Iraqi drivers do not want to get close to the American vehicles in case they are attacked.
In Fallujah, the mayor, Mahmoud Ibrahim, said the first families would start to return to the south of the city yesterday. But this may be in doubt because there is shelling is continuing in northern Fallujah.
There are more than 250,000 refugees who fled the city to seek shelter in Baghdad 35 miles away or the nearby city of Ramadi. Others are in camps on the city outskirts or in neighbouring villages. Fallujah has had no power or water since the US assault and these will take time to restore. - http://news.independent.co.uk...
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| The Three Stooges -- (Bush Pisses on the Medal of Freedom to Reward Asslickers) |
| 12.18.04 (5:26 am) [edit] |
Anybody who has any doubts that George Bush is a true believer in himself should finally be convinced by his awarding the Medal of Freedom to the three blunderers of the war in Iraq.
Gen. Tommy Franks allowed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to browbeat him into planning a war with fewer troops than were needed. He no doubt noted that when Gen. Eric Shinseki and the secretary of the Army publicly said many more troops were needed, they were gotten rid of. Shinseki was humiliated when the Pentagon announced his replacement a year and a half before he was due to step down. Secretary of the Army Thomas White was fired.
Today, there is no doubt that Shinseki and White were correct, but Franks, who sacrificed his professional judgment to Rumsfeld's ideological rigidity, gets the medal.
Then there's Paul Bremer. Nobody could have made more mistakes as head of the occupation than Bremer. He and Franks allowed the looting that proved disastrous. He fired all the civil servants who could have helped run the government, and he disbanded the army. All the problems we face today in Iraq stem directly from these blunders. But he gets the medal.
And finally there is George Tenet, the former CIA director. He failed to detect the attack on 9/11, and he padded the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction to please the president. "It's a slam-dunk," he said. Sure. He makes a blunder of stupendous importance and gets the medal.
What should alarm people, but probably won't, is not the series of blunders in Iraq. Anyone and any administration can make mistakes. No one is infallible or omniscient. What should alarm people is the president's iron-tight refusal to acknowledge that any mistakes have been made. That's exactly what he was saying when he handed out those three medals: I have not made any mistakes whatsoever. Rumsfeld, Franks, Tenet and Bremer have made no mistakes. The only people who are wrong are people who disagree with me.
Such arrogance is characteristic of fanatics. I'm not suggesting that the president should agonize in public about his decisions. The public wants a leader with self-confidence. But this arrogance is present behind the scenes. All during the buildup to the war, people with advice to be cautious or even with professional judgments about what would be required were dismissed out of hand if their ideas conflicted with preconceived notions.
Apparently, when the president and his ideologues get an idea into their heads, they view any facts to the contrary as evidence of hostility and disloyalty. Nobody in recent history has been more arrogant and more wrong than the Bush administration has been in its dealing with Iraq.
Unfortunately, this same mind-set will be present in dealing with all of the problems and crises of the future. I recognize that Bush's partisans strongly disagree with me and are overjoyed by his re-election. Truly, I hope they are right, because if I am right, then we're in for more hatred, more death, more destruction and more economic hardship. Iraq was not a cakewalk, and neither will be Syria, Iran and North Korea. Furthermore, if Bush can't summon the courage to force the Israelis to get rid of all of their settlements in the West Bank, that fire will continue to burn, and as much as American politicians wish to deny it, that conflict is the fuel of terrorism.
When a leader makes it clear that he doesn't want anyone around who will tell him things he doesn't want to hear, he guarantees that he will be surrounded by sycophants and manipulators. Great leaders, whether military or civilian, do exactly the opposite. They surround themselves with smart people who aren't afraid to speak up during the decision-making process.
Humans succeed when they adapt to reality, and that involves taking into account feedback. Oh, this wasn't so; that didn't work, so now I have to adjust. People who take no notice of reality's feedback usually fail. They are like a ship sailing at full speed with no rudder and no radar.
Let us all pray that there is nothing but open sea in the path of Bush's second term. - http://www.antiwar.com/reese/...
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| The Three Stooges -- (Bush Pisses on the Medal of Freedom to Reward Asslickers) |
| 12.18.04 (5:25 am) [edit] |
Anybody who has any doubts that George Bush is a true believer in himself should finally be convinced by his awarding the Medal of Freedom to the three blunderers of the war in Iraq.
Gen. Tommy Franks allowed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to browbeat him into planning a war with fewer troops than were needed. He no doubt noted that when Gen. Eric Shinseki and the secretary of the Army publicly said many more troops were needed, they were gotten rid of. Shinseki was humiliated when the Pentagon announced his replacement a year and a half before he was due to step down. Secretary of the Army Thomas White was fired.
Today, there is no doubt that Shinseki and White were correct, but Franks, who sacrificed his professional judgment to Rumsfeld's ideological rigidity, gets the medal.
Then there's Paul Bremer. Nobody could have made more mistakes as head of the occupation than Bremer. He and Franks allowed the looting that proved disastrous. He fired all the civil servants who could have helped run the government, and he disbanded the army. All the problems we face today in Iraq stem directly from these blunders. But he gets the medal.
And finally there is George Tenet, the former CIA director. He failed to detect the attack on 9/11, and he padded the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction to please the president. "It's a slam-dunk," he said. Sure. He makes a blunder of stupendous importance and gets the medal.
What should alarm people, but probably won't, is not the series of blunders in Iraq. Anyone and any administration can make mistakes. No one is infallible or omniscient. What should alarm people is the president's iron-tight refusal to acknowledge that any mistakes have been made. That's exactly what he was saying when he handed out those three medals: I have not made any mistakes whatsoever. Rumsfeld, Franks, Tenet and Bremer have made no mistakes. The only people who are wrong are people who disagree with me.
Such arrogance is characteristic of fanatics. I'm not suggesting that the president should agonize in public about his decisions. The public wants a leader with self-confidence. But this arrogance is present behind the scenes. All during the buildup to the war, people with advice to be cautious or even with professional judgments about what would be required were dismissed out of hand if their ideas conflicted with preconceived notions.
Apparently, when the president and his ideologues get an idea into their heads, they view any facts to the contrary as evidence of hostility and disloyalty. Nobody in recent history has been more arrogant and more wrong than the Bush administration has been in its dealing with Iraq.
Unfortunately, this same mind-set will be present in dealing with all of the problems and crises of the future. I recognize that Bush's partisans strongly disagree with me and are overjoyed by his re-election. Truly, I hope they are right, because if I am right, then we're in for more hatred, more death, more destruction and more economic hardship. Iraq was not a cakewalk, and neither will be Syria, Iran and North Korea. Furthermore, if Bush can't summon the courage to force the Israelis to get rid of all of their settlements in the West Bank, that fire will continue to burn, and as much as American politicians wish to deny it, that conflict is the fuel of terrorism.
When a leader makes it clear that he doesn't want anyone around who will tell him things he doesn't want to hear, he guarantees that he will be surrounded by sycophants and manipulators. Great leaders, whether military or civilian, do exactly the opposite. They surround themselves with smart people who aren't afraid to speak up during the decision-making process.
Humans succeed when they adapt to reality, and that involves taking into account feedback. Oh, this wasn't so; that didn't work, so now I have to adjust. People who take no notice of reality's feedback usually fail. They are like a ship sailing at full speed with no rudder and no radar.
Let us all pray that there is nothing but open sea in the path of Bush's second term. - http://www.antiwar.com/reese/...
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| Presidential Medals of Failure (For Bush Ass-lickers Willing to Betray the U.S.A. for Der Fuhrer) |
| 12.16.04 (12:38 pm) [edit] |
Where's Kerik?
This is the question I asked myself as, one by one, the pictures of the latest Presidential Medal of Freedom awardees flashed by on my computer screen. First came George Tenet, the former CIA director and the man who had assured President Bush that it was a "slam-dunk" that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Then came L. Paul Bremer, the former viceroy of Iraq, who disbanded the Iraqi army and ousted Baathists from government jobs, therefore contributing mightily to the current chaos in that country. Finally came retired Gen. Tommy Franks, the architect of the plan whereby the United States sent too few troops to Iraq.
One by one these images flicked by me, each man wearing the royal-blue velvet ribbon with the ornate medal -- one failure after another, each now on the lecture circuit, telling insurance agents and other good people what really happened when they were in office, but withholding such wisdom from the American people until, for even more money, their book deals are negotiated. (Franks has already completed this stage of his life. His book, "American Soldier," was a bestseller.)
I braced myself. Could Bernard Kerik be next? Would we skip the entire process of maladministration, misjudgments in office and sycophantic admiration of the current president and go straight to the celebrated failure? After all, what seems to matter most to this president is not performance -- certainly not excellence -- but a matey kind of loyalty and obsequiousness, of which Kerik had plenty.
"Bernie," Bush called out at a White House ceremony last year.
Kerik, who was walking away, stopped. "Yes, sir," he said.
"You're a good man," the president said.
It is this manly affection that explains how Kerik came to be nominated to head the Department of Homeland Security. The president liked him. He was the president's kind of guy: a wayward, messy kind of youth and then -- wow! -- this explosive career, coming out of the starting gate like Seabiscuit, another runt with something less than an elite East Coast pedigree. What's more, he had been recommended by Rudy Giuliani, another very tough guy who, everyone somehow forgot, is a man hobbled by awful judgment, in people as well as in himself.
Had the president given the awards a moment's thought, he might have asked himself what he was doing. A pretty good argument can be made that Tenet was incompetent. He not only failed to prevent the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 but he failed to protect the president from what has to be a historic embarrassment: the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
As for Franks and Bremer, they cannot -- on the face of it -- both deserve medals. Since coming home from Iraq, Bremer has said the United States did not use enough troops there. "We never had enough troops on the ground," he confided to the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers in October. This allowed the looting that broke out shortly after Baghdad was captured and the subsequent insurgency. For the record, Franks -- prodded by Donald Rumsfeld -- is the guy who never had enough troops on the ground. Which one deserved the medal? Easy. Neither.
The White House medal ceremony was really about George W. Bush. It had a slight touch of the absurd to it, as if facts do not matter and failure does not count. The War to Rid Iraq of WMD has now become The War to Bring Democracy to the Middle East. No one is ever held accountable, because the president will not do as much for himself. He admits no mistakes because he is convinced that he has made none. The terrorist attacks themselves, for which Tenet should have been sacked, are no one's fault because they cannot be the president's fault. He was warned. Condi Rice was put on notice. But, still, who could have known?
To make these awards in the face of failure -- the mounting American death toll, the awful suffering of the Iraqis, the looming possibility of civil war, the nose-thumbing of the still-at-large Osama bin Laden and the madness of making war for a nonexistent reason -- has the creepy feel of the old communist states, where incompetents wore medals and harsh facts were denied. For this reason Bernie Kerik -- three months in Iraq building a police force as good as rhetoric can make it -- seemed as likely and appropriate a recipient of a presidential medal as any of the others.
Maybe next year. - http://www.washingtonpost.com...
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| Presidential Medals of Failure (For Bush Ass-lickers Willing to Betray the U.S.A. for Der Fuhrer) |
| 12.16.04 (12:38 pm) [edit] |
Where's Kerik?
This is the question I asked myself as, one by one, the pictures of the latest Presidential Medal of Freedom awardees flashed by on my computer screen. First came George Tenet, the former CIA director and the man who had assured President Bush that it was a "slam-dunk" that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Then came L. Paul Bremer, the former viceroy of Iraq, who disbanded the Iraqi army and ousted Baathists from government jobs, therefore contributing mightily to the current chaos in that country. Finally came retired Gen. Tommy Franks, the architect of the plan whereby the United States sent too few troops to Iraq.
One by one these images flicked by me, each man wearing the royal-blue velvet ribbon with the ornate medal -- one failure after another, each now on the lecture circuit, telling insurance agents and other good people what really happened when they were in office, but withholding such wisdom from the American people until, for even more money, their book deals are negotiated. (Franks has already completed this stage of his life. His book, "American Soldier," was a bestseller.)
I braced myself. Could Bernard Kerik be next? Would we skip the entire process of maladministration, misjudgments in office and sycophantic admiration of the current president and go straight to the celebrated failure? After all, what seems to matter most to this president is not performance -- certainly not excellence -- but a matey kind of loyalty and obsequiousness, of which Kerik had plenty.
"Bernie," Bush called out at a White House ceremony last year.
Kerik, who was walking away, stopped. "Yes, sir," he said.
"You're a good man," the president said.
It is this manly affection that explains how Kerik came to be nominated to head the Department of Homeland Security. The president liked him. He was the president's kind of guy: a wayward, messy kind of youth and then -- wow! -- this explosive career, coming out of the starting gate like Seabiscuit, another runt with something less than an elite East Coast pedigree. What's more, he had been recommended by Rudy Giuliani, another very tough guy who, everyone somehow forgot, is a man hobbled by awful judgment, in people as well as in himself.
Had the president given the awards a moment's thought, he might have asked himself what he was doing. A pretty good argument can be made that Tenet was incompetent. He not only failed to prevent the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 but he failed to protect the president from what has to be a historic embarrassment: the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
As for Franks and Bremer, they cannot -- on the face of it -- both deserve medals. Since coming home from Iraq, Bremer has said the United States did not use enough troops there. "We never had enough troops on the ground," he confided to the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers in October. This allowed the looting that broke out shortly after Baghdad was captured and the subsequent insurgency. For the record, Franks -- prodded by Donald Rumsfeld -- is the guy who never had enough troops on the ground. Which one deserved the medal? Easy. Neither.
The White House medal ceremony was really about George W. Bush. It had a slight touch of the absurd to it, as if facts do not matter and failure does not count. The War to Rid Iraq of WMD has now become The War to Bring Democracy to the Middle East. No one is ever held accountable, because the president will not do as much for himself. He admits no mistakes because he is convinced that he has made none. The terrorist attacks themselves, for which Tenet should have been sacked, are no one's fault because they cannot be the president's fault. He was warned. Condi Rice was put on notice. But, still, who could have known?
To make these awards in the face of failure -- the mounting American death toll, the awful suffering of the Iraqis, the looming possibility of civil war, the nose-thumbing of the still-at-large Osama bin Laden and the madness of making war for a nonexistent reason -- has the creepy feel of the old communist states, where incompetents wore medals and harsh facts were denied. For this reason Bernie Kerik -- three months in Iraq building a police force as good as rhetoric can make it -- seemed as likely and appropriate a recipient of a presidential medal as any of the others.
Maybe next year. - http://www.washingtonpost.com...
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| For Their Faith And Their Country: Insurgents Fight On |
| 12.16.04 (11:22 am) [edit] |
[b]As a US general conceded Iraqi cells are getting more effective, Rory McCarthy speaks to two fighters[/b]
He sat at a plain white table in a deserted building not far from Haifa Street, a stronghold of militancy in the heart of the Iraqi capital. Before him was a tray bearing cups of sweet dark tea and a plate of bananas, and as American helicopter gunships carved circles in the sky above, he described how he had become the commander of a hardline Islamic cell in the Iraqi insurgency.
The man, in his mid-30s with a trimmed dark beard, studious black-rimmed spectacles and a red-and-white keffiyeh thrown loosely over his shoulders, gave his name only as Abu Mojahed.
Before the war he had been a labourer in Baghdad and was jailed four times under Saddam Hussein's regime because of his adherence to the Salafi creed of Sunni Islam, a strict and conservative belief. He would gather with friends for secret Salafi classes and discussions.
He did not fight when America invaded last year, but did not welcome the war either. "I didn't fight. I stayed at home. If you fight for Saddam and he wins, you are not winning. If America wins, you are not winning," he said. "They freed us from evil but they brought more evil to the country."
As the weeks passed, the clerics in the mosques instructed him and his friends to take up arms."We fight the Americans because they are non-believers and they are coming to fight Islam, calling us terrorists," he said.
[b]The real resistance [/b]
Theirs is a story rarely told, a brief insight into the lives of thousands of Iraqi men who have spent the past 18 months fighting a costly guerrilla war against the most powerful army in the world.
Their motivations vary: some are undoubtedly from Saddam's military and intelligence apparatus, others fight to defend tribal or nationalistic honour, but alongside them a much more extreme Islamic militancy has emerged.
The US military has in the past dismissed the fighters as "anti-Iraqi forces" and "terrorists". Several US commanders announced that the back of the insurgency has been broken by the assault on Falluja.
However, Lieutenant General Lance Smith, deputy chief of US central command, told Reuters yesterday: "[The insurgency] is becoming more effective. They may use doorbells today to blow things up. They may use remote controls from toys to morrow. And as we adapt, they adapt."
The Iraqi fighters, who describe themselves as the "mujahideen", the holy warriors, or for the more secular, the "muqawama", the resistance, insist there is more fighting still to come.
In the past year Haifa Street, in an area full of narrow alleyways in a poor Sunni area on the banks of the Tigris river, has become a focal point - even though it is near the heavily-fortified Green Zone, which houses the US and British embassies and the Iraqi interim government.
Insurgents have laid dozens of bombs beneath the road surface and still appear to be largely in control of the area.
Three groups are understood to operate there: Tawhid and Jihad, the group led by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi; the Islamic Army, another extreme group also responsible for kidnappings and beheadings; and a third group of fighters whose name is unclear. Abu Mojahed said he spoke for all three groups, whom he called the "Haifa mujahideen".
He said his targets were the US military and "those supporting them", and that his men had attacked helicopters, tanks and individual soldiers, although he would not describe specific incidents. Unlike other more secular elements in the insurgency, the Salafis have their own agenda for the future of their country, shaped in a language of anger, revenge and rigid Islamic conservatism.
"We fight for our land, against those who are fighting Islam, for our country and for our women," he said.
"Our goal is to fight whoever fights us and not just the Americans. And we want this country ruled by the Tawhid and Sunna," he said. The two words are fundamentals for the Salafis: Tawhid meaning monotheism and Sunna the ways of the Prophet Muhammad. "If that doesn't happen, that means all of us die because we fight until the last breath," he said.
In a second interview, conducted several miles away, a young fighter from a different group spoke of his motivation. He said he fought for his religion. He used a more secular Arabic vocabulary and, typical of many in the insurgency, appeared to have no clear agenda for his country's future.
He gave his name as Abu Abdul Rahman, and sat with a red-and-white keffiyeh wrapped so uncomfortably tight around his face that his dark brown eyes were only occasionally visible.
"Before the war I was an ordinary person living my life and minding my own business," he said. "After the Americans came and invaded my country there was no war to go to except jihad."
Abu Rahman, 25, had been a student, working occasionally. He said he had not supported Saddam, but had chosen not to fight the regime.
[b]From bad to worse [/b]
"You could say we were hypnotised by it," he said. Like others, he was grateful that the war brought the dictator's fall, but was angered by the American occupation that followed. "Thanks to the Americans for getting rid of Saddam, but no thanks for still staying in Iraq," he said.
"The idea of jihad came step by step as I watched what the Americans were doing to our country," he said. "In the beginning we were only cousins and friends, and later other people came to join us, people who were presented to us by the sheikhs."
He appeared undeterred by the strength of the US military arsenal, and spoke keenly of martyrdom. "My group and I, we always race to death, so we may die and go to heaven. Our goal is to get the invaders out of our country, and from all the Arab countries, and I hope that after we get them out we will have a couple of moments of peace in our life."
He fought in Falluja in April, during the first attempt by the US marines to take control of the city. "There are many people who have died in my group," he said. "But only one of them really broke my heart. He was a cousin of mine, but it was written for him to be in heaven." The emir, or commander, of their group was also killed in Falluja in April. "He was a friend from childhood," Abu Rahman said.
Because of the intense fighting, it took five days to retrieve the emir's body. "He was always telling us to pray for him to die that day. He would fight with us, not like those leaders who stay in the back. We made a celebration like a wedding party when he died."
Abu Rahman said that although he belonged to a tribe, his motivation was religious, not tribal. He also said some Iraqi police and soldiers should not be touched, and were "serving for the good of their country". Foreign contractors should not be targeted either, he said.
In the end, he said, it was the lack of reconstruction and the continued occupation that had left people so embittered.
"We don't want them, thanks. We can rebuild our own country, we have a long and ancient history. All we are asking is for them to pull out." - http://www.commondreams.org/h...
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| Bush Fucks America (Again): War Funding Request May Hit $100 Billion!!! |
| 12.16.04 (7:20 am) [edit] |
The Bush administration plans to ask for between $80 billion and $100 billion to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan next year, rather than the $70 billion to $75 billion the White House privately told members of Congress before the election, according to Pentagon and White House officials.
Administration officials said yesterday they have not concluded how much money they will request in a "supplemental" spending package that is scheduled to go to Congress in January.
"There's work going on inside the department to understand what's needed, and there's work going on with the Office of Management and Budget," the Defense Department's chief spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, told reporters yesterday.
But some analysts and government officials said the request is expected to run as high as $100 billion, bringing the total cost of operations in Iraq alone to well over $200 billion since the March 2003 invasion.
Earlier this fall, members of Congress said the Defense Department told them in private briefings the supplemental package would be between $70 billion and $75 billion. The budget request will be higher, sources said, because of the greater number of soldiers -- temporarily boosted to 150,000 -- needed to provide security around the time of the Jan. 30 Iraqi elections, and the loss of equipment due to the vigorous insurgency there.
In June, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the 2005 supplemental to be submitted this January for Iraq and Afghanistan would be between $55 billion and $60 billion.
The January supplemental will be the third special budget request to cover the military costs of Iraq. The administration asked for $55.8 billion in April 2003 and $71.8 billion in November 2003. In May of this year, Congress added $25 billion in war costs to the fiscal 2005 defense budget. In total, $152.6 billion in military funding for Iraq has been provided through the end of this year.
Those statistics do not include emergency money to support the 20,000 US troops in Afghanistan, which brings the total bill to $162.3 billion.
In addition, the military has been spending more than was approved for 2004, in anticipation of a fresh infusion of funds in early 2005.
"They ran out of the 2004 budget a month early [and] had to borrow [from] 2005," said John Pike, a defense specialist at the military think tank GlobalSecurity.org, a military think tank in Alexandria, Va. "They're already starting to suggest that the 2005 budget is going to be $100 billion for one year alone."
The Iraq operation, he said, has "been running over a billion a week thus far. I think we're probably getting up to $2 billion a week fairly soon."
Few analysts expect the Iraq mission to be wrapped up in a year, and many question why the Bush administration is continuing to budget its war costs through supplementals -- usually reserved for one-time, emergency expenses -- rather than include them in the annual budget request that is sent to Capitol Hill every February.
Democrats and some fiscally conservative Republicans believe the administration is trying to hide the effects of rising war costs on the federal deficit, thereby justifying President Bush's calls for making some tax cuts permanent and spending more on education and other domestic priorities.
Although war costs ultimately get added to the deficit, keeping them off the annual budget creates a false picture of the government's commitments at a time when Congress is making funding decisions, critics said.
Brian Reidl, an economist with the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation, said the Iraq funding should be put in the defense budget, because the Pentagon knows it will need money to pay for the operation. Leaving it out masks the true size of the deficit, he said.
"There's an argument to be made that [early in the year] you don't know what you'll need" for Iraq funding, Reidl said. But "there's no reason why you can't put in a place-holder to at least estimate the cost."
The administration separates the Iraq funding because "it's easier to sell the budget resolution with a smaller deficit and a smaller spending total because Iraq is excluded," Reidl said.
Steve Kosiak, a defense budget specialist at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, added that "the idea is [supplementals] are supposed to be used when there is a surprise. This is no longer a surprise that we are in Iraq."
The actual cost of the military operations in Iraq is higher than any of the supplementals suggest, analysts said, because the wartime wear and tear on people and equipment will require expenditures long after the war ends.
A soon-to-be-completed classified study by the Government Accountability Office requested by Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee concludes that the cost of "resetting" the worn-out armed forces for peacetime will require billions more than the money needed simply to maintain combat operations, according to congressional officials.
"They will need new training and the sense is that the longer this thing goes on the deeper the problems get," said a congressional staff member who has been briefed on the GAO study.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon yesterday alerted more units to be ready for duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Tens of thousands of Army soldiers from Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, New York, and Texas -- including a brigade of the Army's 10th Mountain Division based at Fort Drum in New York -- will prepare to deploy overseas by the middle of 2005. The planned rotations, and others to be announced in the coming weeks, would maintain a force of 138,000 US troops in Iraq well into 2006.
However, Di Rita called the notifications "prudent planning" and cautioned that it does not necessarily mean the United States will need all those forces.
"It would be wrong to say that, as far as the eye can see, this is the number," Di Rita said. "It may very well be less than this. It may be the same amount. It may be more." - http://www.commondreams.org/h...
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| Bush Fucks America (Again): War Funding Request May Hit $100 Billion!!! |
| 12.16.04 (7:19 am) [edit] |
|
The Bush administration plans to ask for between | |
