I was in Burger King today, to pick up a side salad, but now there are all these meat ladened, cheese filled salads.. Now, I don't mind the introduction of salads into the menus, but you have to wonder if this is a way to sneak healthy food into American diets. After all, salads, even those with Parmesan cheese, artfully shaved onto a bed a lettuce, are a lot cheaper to serve fhan hamburgers.
Burger King now has this massive "angus" burger, which isn't bad, a bit much for a meal, but it's not bad. Not that I eat this crap daily or close to daily, but I'm far more interested in the wholesale shift in menus. First came chicken, then cheaper, smaller entrees, now the $5 salad. They even offer their burgers in "low carb" verisons, sans bread.
Part of this is meeting consumer demand.. Moms are tired of packing on the pounds when the new movie toy comes out. Most people try to control their diet, so salads are going to have appeal. But once you add in the meat and dressing, aren't they really as high fat as the burger and the staple taco salad. We are still talking fast food staples here as the base and really calorie ladened dressings.
Is it a start? Sure, but it isn't terribly creative or much better than their burgers. Although, the design of the salads is imptrssive, they rely on a lot of cheese and fatty meat as their base. They're more like meat salads than real vegetable-based salads. They're not using pasta, non-leafy vegetables or any of the things we've come to love in real salads.
Yes, fast food salads are a good idea, but their execution feels like a half-step.
Jim Taranto of Opinion Journal.com is not one of the brighter right wing hacks. They are all so disagreeable. David Brooks may be incredibly wrong, but you could have a drink with the guy and not murder him. You might even be able to enjoy a barbecue with Tucker Carlson and not spend the next four hours shaking your head and drinking vodka and tonic from the big pitcher.
But for the most part, most of these right wing guys are either pathetic (Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh) or aggressively creepy (Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly). I've never met Taranto, but Jen has. However, I think the guy is aggressively stupid.
Although 1864 and 2004 are vastly different times, there is a similarity. Now as then, America is at war, albeit this time with an external enemy; and now as then, some Democrats do not seem to be on the side of their own country.
This is, as I like to point out, an abuse of history. I don't think supporting the mangled, ruinious war in Iraq is "being on my side. I think it is destroying America.
Now, one of the posters accused me of the sin of American exceptionalism. No, God is not on America's side, whatever that means. But I do think America is different, and special, and not because we're God's gift to the world. That belongs to Australia.
America is a special place because it allowd people to coexist relatively peacefully. We can grow and change and admit error without destroying the country in violent upheaval. Americans, except for the aggressively stupid, don't have an idea of what being an American can be. No one serious says "being a Muslim is anti-American". We don't make students take off their hijabs to go to class. I think that makes America special. Not better, or greater, just different. Unlike most countries, we have no state religion and thus no state conformity. No matter how the wingnuts try.
Now, while I have many reasons to dislike Taranto, what I really dislike is the abuse of history. No Democrat is running on a surrender to Al Qaeda plan. The copperheads wanted to end the war we were winning. When I was a teenager, I'd read Bruce Catton. After college, I read James McPherson. I've seen the Ken Burns miniseries The Civil War.
In every book I've read, Catton's history of the Army of the Potomac, McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom and countless others, it was clear that the Union Army was winning in 1864. Not only had large number of Union troops reenlisted, over 180,000 black troops had finally been allowed to join. That was 10 percent of the Union Army and they were highly motivated. While Irish immigrants dodged the draft and rioted in the streets, black men were eager to serve in the Union Army and end slavery.
What Taranto does with his simplistic slander is not explain what was going on in 1864. The Union Army, after a brilliant campaign in Virginia and Tennesee, found themselves in trench warfare at Petersburg and stuck outside Atlanta. The outcome of the war was hardly in doubt. The Confederacy was falling apart, desertions rising. What was driving anti-Lincoln sentiment was disquiet with the draft and casuality figures. Not any reasonable expectation that the Union was losing.
The last two commanders of CENTCOM, Marine Generals Anthony Zinni and Joseph Hoar think we're losing, and losing badly in Iraq. That's quite a difference, Jim. But if he'd read his history, he'd know his comparison is slander.
We are not winning in Iraq, the Democrats are not calling for us to surrender to Al Qaeda or even withdraw from Iraq. I think it's the aggressivly stupid like Taranto who are not on America's side, at least any America most of us would want to be part of.
The upgrade was easy, since I used a standard blogger template. The hard part was the colors, which were too muted for my tastes. For all of you blogging via blogger., the new template and features are pretty cool. I just had to change the colors to suit my taste.
If you notice something off, please let me know.
Also, you can log on anonymously, since blogger seems to be a pain in the ass about it, but if you have an online name, just place it in the body of the text. That should encourage you to post more without fearing that blogger is going to jerk you around.
I think it came out well with only some minor, but time consuming, adjustments, and added a bunch of features.
The interests of the morality-toting Bush administration are not exactly in harmony with those of the United States' 4,000-odd strip clubs. And now the clubs are doing something about it, by registering their patrons to vote in between floor shows and agitating openly to boot the President out of the White House in November.
Voter registration forms are being distributed in clubs in at least three states - Ohio, Wisconsin and North Carolina - and the political rhetoric, from an industry usually noted for its deep reluctance to stick its head above any parapet, is growing ever more vehement.
"We must do everything within our power to help ensure that Bush and his ultra-conservative administration are removed from the White House,'' the president of the industry's Association of Club Executives, Michael Ocello, wrote in a recent letter to his members.
"If we are to survive, we must act now.'' In Ohio, where the association's chapter president describes the Bible-thumping Attorney General, John Ashcroft, as "the American Taliban", 2,000 new voters have been registered in the past few weeks.
In southern Wisconsin, club owner Jim Halbach has begun canvassing clients and dancers, arguing that if President Bush wins a second term it could be the end for all of them.
"I'm actually fighting for my survival,'' he said. "That's the way I look at it." The odd thing is that the administration, while making no secret of its disapproval, has launched no specific crackdown against strip clubs
Think the war against Howard Stern has something to wiith this?
On The McLaughlin Report today, a show where the host seems to be getting more liberal each week, Tony Blankley, GOP Hack, said Bush had a few bad weeks.
Bush is not having a "few bad weeks", he's watching his presidency collapse around him. His refusal to fire people is costing him any chance of victory. People talk about Kerry's lack of charisma and "bad" campaign, and they miss theb point. Bush is not just losing, he's in free fall. He bet his entire presidency on Iraq and only the true believers think some kind of miracle is going to happen.
I think it's delusional to think that our European allies will "put boots on the ground" as Gen. Zinni suggested on 60 Minutes. The Iraqi resistance is anti-occupation, not anti-American. We're just the occupiers. The US has one option: phased withdrawal. Abu Ghraib has the British very skittish, and the Germans wouldn't touch Iraq with a 50 meter pole. The problem for Bush is that phased withdraw is a defeat in the war on terra. And he can't afford that.
The life expectancy of the new Iraqi government is days, not years. If they can set car bombs in the entrance to the green zone, what makes you think the new government won't be attacked as collaborators?
Everywhere Bush turns, he is failing. Even the ecomony is short millions of jobs. And unlike 1988, Kerry is going to do what it takes to win, deal with the egomaniac Nader, wait for nomination, it don't matter much. Whatever it takes.
Once an incumbent slips below 50 percent, especially when Kerry has been low-key, it would take a lot for things to turn around, more than having Osama pop out of a box or blow his brains out. If that did happen, Bush would face real pressure to pull the the troops from both Afghanistan and Iraq because most people would think the war on terra was over. If there was another successful attack on the US, people would be inclined to ask why. Again, Iraq would come up as people ask wouldn't the National Guardsmen there be better served protecting us at home? Endless war may be on the agenda for Bush and the neocons, but it isn't for most Americans.
'
Bush is headed down and Kerry, watching this, isn't going to show his cards yet. Abu Ghraib isn't just getting worse, it may well spin out of control. Pictures, videos, now Dick Sanchez seeing torture? As I've said before, never stop a man from stepping on his dick. Kerry, like the rest of us, has to watch this play out. His numbers will get better without him doing a thing. They already are.
Luke Harding in Baghdad
Monday May 24, 2004
The Guardian
The first Mohammed Munim al-Izmerly's family knew of his death was when his battered corpse turned up at Baghdad's morgue. Attached to the zipped-up black US body bag was a laconic note.
The US military claimed in the note that Dr Izmerly, a distinguished chemistry professor arrested after US tanks encircled his villa, had died of "brainstem compression".
Dr Izmerly's sudden death after 10 months in American custody left his family stunned, not least because three weeks earlier they had visited him in the US prison at Baghdad airport. His 23-year-old daughter, Rana, recalled that he had seemed in "good health".
The family commissioned an independent Iraqi autopsy. Its conclusion was unambiguous: Dr Izmerly had died because of a "sudden hit to the back of his head", Faik Amin Baker, the director of Baghdad hospital's forensic department, certified.
The cause of death was blunt trauma. It was uncertain exactly how he died, but someone had hit him from behind, possibly with a bar or a pistol, Dr Baker confirmed yesterday.
"He died from a massive blow to the head. We don't disagree with the coalition's report, but it doesn't explain how he got his injuries in the first place," he told the Guardian.
The apparent murder of a "high-value" detainee, held as part of the search for weapons of mass destruction, is another blow for the Bush administration, still reeling from the Abu Ghraib jail abuse scandal.
Dr Izmerly was on the coalition's original "200 list" of suspects from Saddam Hussein's regime, and his death happened just two weeks after the US military began its own secret inquiry into the prison west of Baghdad. Last Friday the Pentagon admitted it was now investigating eight more suspected murders.
Several prisoners have been found to have died before or during interrogation. They include Major General Abed Hamed Mowhoush, a former commander of Iraq's air defences, who died last November during interrogation at Qaim.
The original US autopsy said he had died of a heart attack. It now appears he was suffocated during interrogation when a CIA officer put him in a sleeping bag and sat on him.
Last night the family of Dr Izmerly were in little doubt he had been murdered in US custody. The reasons for his death were covered up, they believe.
"This was not natural," Rana told the Guardian yesterday, in the first interview given by the family since his death. "The evidence is clear. It suggests the Americans killed him and then tried to hide what they had done. I will hate Americans and British people for the rest of my life. You are democrats. You said you were coming to bring democracy, and yet you kill my father. By accepting your governments, you accept what they do here in Iraq.
"You offer no proof that he did something wrong, you refuse him a lawyer and then you kill him. Why?"
Dr Izmerly does not appear to be among the cases under the review announced by the US defence department last week.
The President fell off his bike this weekend or he was drunk, either way, he hit his face and looked stupid. Personally, I think, since he never handled his booze problem, when things get tight, he runs to the sauce. My mother thinks he's constantly drunk, but I think he's a binge drinker myself.
However, after seeing Gen. Anthony Zinni call for the resignation of the civilian leadership of the Defense Department on 60 Minutes, which is a stunning thing for a retired general, was hardly surprising, He made it clear that Bush screwed up and his deputies screwed up.
I don 't know what people think will happen on July 1, when sovregnity is "handed" back to the Iraqis. That Iraq will "turn around" and save Bush. It's not going to happen. It won't even be close. Bush is headed for disaster in Iraq and a landslide defeat at home. Iraq could not be going worse.
It was amusing to see Chalabi challenge George Tenet and demanding to be taken before a Congressional committee, instead of the grand jury he richly deserves. But it's not the CIA with the damning evidence, but the DIA and NSA. The generals are behind his fall from grace as much as the CIA, if not more.
I mean they are charging that Gen. Sanchez witnessed torture at Abu Ghraib, which if true, is not only danming as a commander, it means he's been lying to Congress. The result would be the most serious courtmartial in US history.
What seems to have happened is that the good generals want no part of Rumsfeld and his risk players and the lackies got the key jobs. Where is the Army Chief of Staff in this mess? Shouldn't he be worried that one of his key combat commanders may be courtmartialed for a variety of crimes? Myers isn't in the chain of command, he is.
I never imagined, not in my darkest moments, that the US would be reviled as torturers and the idiots who did would laugh their way out of court. Their lawyers are arguing that if Sanchez approved, they were following orders. Uh, no, I don't think that will fly, but the fact that there is a witness, a captain, who will testify to that is downright scary.
Iraq is lost, Bush is going to lose. Unless thinfgs change quickly, and there is no sign that they will, as the US fights two insurgencies and has little political support. The US is losing the war because there is no feasable military option and no political option which doesn't end without a complete, humiliating US withdrawal.
And even worse, Chalabi is seeking to play games with the transition. And the Kurds are chiming in. This is the kind of thing which could force Sistani to turn openly against the Americans. I don't care how many speeches Bush gives, the reality is that Iraq is getting worse than anyone can imagine or can cure.
I'll be making changes to the site all day. I like the new features of Blogger and want to integrate them into the site. If any advertiser wants, I'll give them an extra week for free.because of today's downtime, just e-mail me.
Sorry for the loss of comments, but I want to use blogger comments instead, it seems to be nicer and integral to the design of the site.
So the site will look different for the next couple of hours.
I'm watching Meet the Press, as I drink iced coffee and eat an egg sandwich. I had to walk slowly to the supermarket (still recovering) and since my mother had a slight accident (she's OK), I've had to step up my errands. I'm feeling a lot better and am begining to go out and do things, with help, but it's getting better and I should be fully functional by mid-summer. A long time, but better than being at Walter Reed and learning to walk again.
But I bring this up, not for sympathy, I don't need any at the moment:), but to place the following in context:
I usually wake up on Sundays in time to watch the of This Week. Every week, they run a memorium segment, of both the famous and the dead from Iraq. Quietly, uncontroversally, and weekly.
This week, for the first time in six months, I had to pick up some food from the supermarket. Not a lot, my lifting ability are limited, but since my mother fractured her foot, I was in better shape to walk (slowly) across the street to the store. I knew I could handle it, since I'd been out on Friday to see my friends.
So, except for that, this is a normal Sunday, I get up, watch the chat shows and eat. Except I was too lazy to cook and too hungry to wait to have someone cook, so I bought my food. I also don't keep coffee at home, since I drink it like once a week, I'm a tea person, but that's a discussion for another thread. But I love iced coffee, and a cup and some ice make iced coffee.
As I looked over the last comments thread, James Wolcott, a frequent poster here, and I believe is the same guy as one of my favorite New Yorker writers (now writing for Vanity Fair, and sober to boot), made a point: it was that all the discussion on these shows was tactical, how we fix Iraq and move on.
Now, as I ate my egg,cheese and meat hero (grinder, hogie, whatever) and drank my coffee over ice, this struck me as blunt and true. It's not a comfortable truth, but it is true. Wolcott is saying something which I hadn't really considered in the ebb and flow of the news. I'd touched upon it on the last post, but the man is dead on and said it clearly. The Beltway Kool Kids Klub is mising the point. The world was looking to see which US would deal with 9/11. Was it the America of their hopes and dreams, the one which remade Western Europe and Japan, or the dark, cruel America which destroyed the Philippines and Vietnam.
Well, America number 2 came out in full, ugly force. Osama has achieved a moral victory against the US he could have never achieved without our active assistance. America truly does represent the best of mankind. Not in the exceptionalist way that we usually fall back on, but in our open arms and ending our worst practices. Americans believe in fairness, even when it is painful to make change. There is no way to be an American, anyone can be one. Being an American is what you make of it.
And for this gift, we have an obligation, and that is not to add to evil in the world. We don't kidnap people and hold them incommunicado. We are not the British or the French, we are not supposed to be cynical and old.
Bush and the neocons thought we could just step up from the world's superpower to being an imperial power, and we are now finding that we wear that cloak poorly. We are not imperialists and cannot be imperialists. Our belief in rights and human dignity make us poor supervisors of other peoples.
Iraq, as Wolcott said, is not a tactical problem. It is a moral problem. It goes to the core of who we are and what we believe. It matters if Americans torture and murder in Iraq because thatr is not who we claim to be. When we have to face this reality that Americans aren't only torturers, but take a savage glee in this, we're not only losing Iraq, but failing ourselves. It doesn't matter when we create Vichy Iraq, civil war will break out long before a ballot is cast. It does matter how we act in Iraq,
The neocons suffered from the arrogance of ignorance. Shipping out inexperienced college grads to run a country they could not possibly understand and rarely saw. In today's WaPo, Simone Ledeen, daughter of neocon Michael Ledeen, was a CPA administrator. Betwen bonuses and salary, she took home 100K a year. Now, when one of the translators she worled with was injured in a bomb blast, she visted her in the hospital. Leeden was so clueless that she had no idea that her visit could condemn her friend to death by the resistance. The fact that she was wearing a helmet and flak vest should have been hint, but she was so clueless that she didn't get that working for Americans was a way to get killed in Iraq.
The neocons thought it would be so easy, this act which goes against the grain of every instinct we have. This is how the Spanish-Americn war ended, with a nasty, unpopular guerrilla war in some backwater we'd never heard of in a quest for colonies. History was clear, people hate being colonized and subjected to the experiments of others and we are poor colonizers. in the end, we let them go. To this day, Filipinos are allowed to join the US military from home. To the neocons, Iraq was a playground, a lab to test their theories and then bring them home. But unlike the United States, the opposition doesn't have years of combat experience and RPG's and open weapons dumps to make their point.
Our failure in Iraq is not just political, although it is clearly that, it also, maybe primarily, moral. We tried to remake the world, or at least one corner of it, on the cheap and influenced by lies. The fact that it is failing, and reconstruction has largely stopped due to guerrilla attacks, is no surprise. What is surprising and sad is people refuse to recognize this. Abu Ghraib is like a skin leison. It is not the blemish which counts as much as the underlying cancer. Treating it is the only way to live.
It's late, but I can't sleep. It's a little warm in here, and Apocalyspe Now Redux is on IFC. This mean its unedited and letterboxed. The resolution isn't as good as my monitor, but it's one of the things I have to buy on DVD.
I've seen parts of the redited movie for months, but not in one shot. I've seen the original 10 times, five in theaters. The reason this comes to mind is Iraq. Things are far worse than i predicted. I haven't been following each turn in the erupting scandal because I still have to make sense of it. Something, wrong, horribly and awfully wrong is happening there and I don't mean in the platitude "war is evil" way.
We've entered a hell of our own creation, but one moving at light speed. The CPA, as Atrios points out in his linking to a WaPo story, was run by people who wanted to work at the Heritage Foundation. That doesn't make them evil, or even wrong, just totally unqualified to run anything in Iraq. None spoke Arabic, or had lived in the Middle East. They were woefully undertrained compared to their military counterparts.
But the CPA being a mess is fixable, something else, something deeper, is happening to us in Iraq. I can't make sense of it, not in a meta way, because this is truly a trip into the heart of darkness. Not just some bad decisions, but a decision to use evil means to accomplish a justified goal. They didn't just torture innoncent people, they enjoyed it. They didn't just ignore the Geneva Conventions, they tried to abrogate them. We're now doing Sistani's dirty work by attacking Sadr, as if he'd ever sit for a trial. Chalabi turns out to be an Iranian spy. Hardly a shock, but still stunning.
The abuse at Abu Ghraib is now thought to be Army-wide and in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
It is a loss of morals. George Bush has taken shortcuts his entire life. He even circumvented his quitting drinking by running into the arms of Jeebus. For some reason, Bush and his staff took 9/11 to mean that we could act however we chose in self-defense. Instead of a victory for civilization and rationality (freedom and democracy mean different things to different people), we are now reviled around the world as torturers, murderers and a threat to stability. We became a monster, not the kind that rips off heads, but the kind that lets boys be raped for "intelligence".
Our intel in Iraq is a failure. We can protect no one, we get amushed every day and we kill the innocent. The world knows this if Americans pretend we do not.
Heart of Darkness begins on a pleasure cruise and ends in the Congo. It sums up the brutality and cost of all colonial adventures, which is why Apocalyspe Now was based on it.
'Tell me, pray,' said I, 'who is this Mr. Kurtz?'
"'The chief of the Inner Station,' he answered in a short tone, looking away. 'Much obliged,' I said, laughing. 'And you are the brickmaker of the Central Station. Every one knows that.' He was silent for a while. 'He is a prodigy,' he said at last. 'He is an emissary of pity and science and progress, and devil knows what else. We want,' he began to declaim suddenly, 'for the guidance of the cause intrusted to us by Europe, so to speak, higher intelligence, wide sympathies, a singleness of purpose.' 'Who says that?' I asked. 'Lots of them,' he replied. 'Some even write that; and so HE comes here, a special being, as you ought to know.' 'Why ought I to know?' I interrupted, really surprised. He paid no attention. 'Yes. To-day he is chief of the best station, next year he will be assistant-manager, two years more and . . . but I dare-say you know what he will be in two years' time. You are of the new gang -- the gang of virtue. The same people who sent him specially also recommended you.
......
Now I had suddenly a nearer view, and its first result was to make me throw my head back as if before a blow. Then I went carefully from post to post with my glass, and I saw my mistake. These round knobs were not ornamental but symbolic; they were expressive and puzzling, striking and disturbing -- food for thought and also for vultures if there had been any looking down from the sky; but at all events for such ants as were industrious enough to ascend the pole. They would have been even more impressive, those heads on the stakes, if their faces had not been turned to the house. Only one, the first I had made out, was facing my way. I was not so shocked as you may think. The start back I had given was really nothing but a movement of surprise. I had expected to see a knob of wood there, you know. I returned deliberately to the first I had seen -- and there it was, black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids -- a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and, with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth, was smiling, too, smiling continuously at some endless and jocose dream of that eternal slumber.
The coalition in Iraq wants its troops to remain immune from prosecution by Iraqis after the handover of power, it is reported.
Creating a sovereign Iraq should mean forces become subject to Iraqi laws.
But BBC Correspondent Jonathan Beale says UK and US forces want to remain under their own jurisdictions.
The Foreign Office said negotiations on gaining a new UN security council resolution on the handover are at an "extremely important stage".
Agreement on the resolution governing the return of Iraqi sovereignty, set for 30 June, needs to be reached in the next few weeks.
Jonathan Beale says one of the biggest sticking points is the issue of whose laws the remaining foreign troops will be subject to - their own or Iraqi laws.
Giving them immunity is likely to be controversial after allegations of abuse by troops of Iraqis.
"It seems to be that the British and American governments want to get guarantees that soldiers remain under their own laws not Iraqi laws," he says.
"This is going to be controversial if you are going to make American and British troops immune from Iraqi laws because the wrongs that have been done seem to have been against the Iraqi people themselves," he adds
Whoever agrees to this has betrayed the Iraqi people and is thus a quisling. After Abu Ghraib, who would want US forces immune from Iraqi law?
Note: I must really dislike this guy to screw up his name THREE times. First and last, damn.
No, this isn't about Ariel Sharon or Paul Wolfowitz or anything in the Middle East.
The thing about blogs is that we all steal each other's ideas, being lazy and all that. As much original writing as I do, sometimes I have to comment on something Atrios runs, because they're just so damn clever.
He dug up a piece on this clown, Vernon Walter "Sambo" Robinson, who's running in the North Carolina 5th District by trying to be whiter than white. Now Sambo is running against three other conservatives, but seeing that he's a nigger, he just has to try harder.
You will not believe the shit he's running to prove he's the kind of house nigger the GOP voters of the NC 5th District can trust.
Welcome
"Jesse Helms is back! And this time, he's black." That's what The Winston-Salem Journal (the largest and most liberal newspaper in the 5th Congressional District of North Carolina) had to say about my campaign for Congress.
The radical homosexuals printed the same thing in their publication, which they call "Queer Notes". They scornfully called me, "Helms redux."
Of course, they meant the comparison to Helms to be taken as an insult, but I wear it as a badge of honor.
For 30 years, Jesse Helms was the number one flag carrier for the conservative movement in Washington, and with him gone, someone needs to step in and fill that void.
I'm honored to be accused of picking up where Senator Helms left off.
Some of you may remember all those lonely years, particularly before Ronald Reagan was elected President, when Jesse Helms would be the only vote against some outrageous piece of liberal legislation, only because nobody else in Congress had the courage to stand with him against the Left.
Sometimes it was Teddy Kennedy and the welfare lobby coming after Jesse, or the gun grabbers, or the Jesse Jackson crowd, or the environmental extremists, or the lesbian feminists, or the union bosses, or the pro-abortion zealots, or the tax and spend junkies.
And sometimes it was just good, old-fashioned communist sympathizers who were mad because Jesse wanted to get us out of the United Nations.
But you knew ol' Jesse wasn't going to run from them. He didn't run when the homosexual terrorists erected a giant, 40-foot, inflated, condom-shaped balloon on the roof of his home.
And Jesse didn't run when National Public Radio's Nina Totenberg wished death upon him and his grandkids by telling millions of Americans, "If there is retributive justice, Jesse Helms will get AIDS from a transfusion, or one of his grandchildren will get it . . .." This from the woman who says it is Jesse who is intolerant.
No, Jesse was always willing to go toe-to-toe with these people, even when he had to go it alone, and I'm ready to do the same as a United States Congressman.
Believe me, I know how lonely it can be to stand alone, because I've had to do it repeatedly as a conservative Winston-Salem City Councilman serving on a Council chock full of liberal Democrats and a few wimpy Republicans afraid of their own shadow, who run from controversy like a Clinton from a Grand Jury.
If you haven't heard of me yet, you know many conservatives who have.
At one time or another I have been endorsed by Jesse Helms, Jeb Bush, Alan Keyes, Elizabeth Dole, Dick Armey, Gary Bauer, the NRA, Right-to-Life, the Immigration Reform PAC, the Republican Liberty Caucus, Jack Kemp, Bill Bennett, Pat Buchanan, Pete du Pont, Richard Petty, Dr. D. James Kennedy, Gary Aldrich, Morton Blackwell, Tom Tancredo, and Bob Barr.
If my name sounds familiar, it may be because The Fox News Channel recently called me "a rising star", "the next J.C. Watts", and "the new face of the Republican Party."
The Wall Street Journal wrote, "He's the next black GOP Congressman." and "When elected, Vernon Robinson will be the first black GOP Congressman elected from a Confederate state since Reconstruction."
A local newspaper in the district (The Davie Enterprise-Record) said, "He's like a Rush Limbaugh candidate."
President Bush honored me with an appointment in his administration and hired me to work on his campaign. That should give you a pretty good idea of where I stand.
Currently I am the senior Republican member of the Winston-Salem City Council, where I represent a heavily Democrat district. In my last election I got an unheard-of 70% of the white vote and 20% of the black vote.
I am a proven vote-getter -- the only black Republican in North Carolina to be re-elected to partisan public office and the first black candidate to win the votes of more than one million white voters.
This success hasn't come by accident. I earned the confidence of the voters and these national conservative leaders the same way Ronald Reagan and Jesse Helms did - by proving that I am willing to stand up for my traditional American conservative principles - no matter what the political cost, and no matter what the liberal media try to say about me.
I don't head for the high grass when the Left turns up the heat. That's just not my style. I put my trust in God, not my finger to the wind, and my record proves it.
I jokingly tell my Democrat friends that their party is made up of "the Old Left, the New Left, and the What's Left." I'm proud to tell you that my voting record has infuriated them all:
* the pro-abortion fanatics and the radical feminists
* the atheists who file lawsuits attacking the Pledge of Allegiance & the Ten Commandments
* the gun grabbers, the illegal immigrants, and the trial lawyers
* the environmentalist, tree-huggin' granolas and the animal rights extremists
* the "one world" globalists who worship at the altar of the United Nations
* the militant homosexuals and the burned-out, hippie peaceniks
* the race-hustling poverty pimps like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton
* the union bosses and the socialists posing as journalists & college professors
* the government bureaucrats & the tax-and-spend junkies who create their jobs, and
* the Hollywood elitists - air-headed actors and singers who think we care what they think.
I am pro-Constitution, pro-national sovereignty, pro-business, pro-property rights, pro-growth, pro-family, pro-farmer, pro-states' rights, pro-gun, and pro-life.
I support the death penalty and am disgusted that there are people who believe a convicted murderer like Charles Manson has a right to life, but unborn children do not.
A nationally recognized expert on education reform, I authored North Carolina's Charter Schools Act, and founded two non-profit corporations. One promotes school choice and the other provides scholarships to private schools for poor children from inner-city homes.
Today's public schools are caught between the massive government bureaucracy and the vile teachers' unions.
Most of the public schools serving the inner city are nothing but pre-prison, pre-welfare programs for the students sentenced to attend them. The answer is market-based reform, not "Midnight Basketball" and more wasteful spending.
As a black Republican, I will be especially reviled by the Left
Jesse Helms? Shit, why not say I will hurt black people for personal gain, just like a house nigger should. I've seen some shameless shit in my day, but this is like a Jew running as a Nazi in Argentina. He can bow and scrape all he wants, but the kind of people swayed by this appeal hate niggers. Remember Bobby Jindal? He said all the right things in the Louisiana governor's race, and then the white folks just forgot to come out for him.
I predict Rastus Robinson will meet the same fate. He'll say all these insane things, turning whatever black voters there are against him, and making many whites question his sanity. After all, many of his positions are as anti-black as the Nuremberg Laws were anti-Jewish. Jesse Helms was no Strom Thurmond. He hated niggers the way I hate yogurt. He never made a secret of it. Now Sambo can attack the Sharptons and Jacksons oif the world, but 80 percent of the back voters took one look at his crazy ass and decided he didn't deserve their vote. There are one out of five black voters who will vote for a black person, on the widely discredited theory that black people will look out for each other. This fool would load slave ships to get the approval of white people.
Now to be honest, I have little, if any, use for black conservatives. I think, for the most part. they're opportunists without much dignity or pride, people who would sell out their own kind to get ahead. It's not that black people are liberal, per se, they aren't. But to be a black conservative means to align yourself with racists who haven't changed much since 1964. I mean how many assaults to one's dignity does it take to swan around with the GOP jet set. It's hard enough dealing with liberals who don't openly hate black people, but the crew Shuffle Along Robinson Washington is with really hate niggers. I mean, the kind of folks who would join the Klan if they were smart and less trailer trash.
Now Amos and Andy Robinson Washington may try to out right the right, but unless he's gonna dye his skin pink, people will look at him, say "I agree with that boy" and vote for the white guy Jesse Helms endorsed.
He's also not that bright. Unlike the widely reviled Clarence Thomas, Rochester Robinson is seeking to be the next JC Watts. So he's gonna knock up some women, play for Oklahoma and then grow so disgusted with the GOP, quit his safe seat?
Fools like Uncle Tom Robinson usually never win the favor of their masters. They're treated like pets, to be stared at, and then disposed of like a slave after massa needs to settle a gambling debt.
He can be as right as he want, but unless he turns white, well, I wouldn't expect much from him, except more self-hatred and foolishness.
How quickly the world can turn in a few weeks. Ahmed Chalabi, who was collecting $340K a month from Uncle Sugar only last month is persona non grata in the West Wing.
A few of his old backers, Richard Perle, Michael Rubin, still remain on the team, but it's pretty clear that for most of his former friends, that the grift is over. He's conned his way through London, Amman and Washington. Our man in Iraq, never competent, was busy rigging the IGC for his benefit, ladling his cousins all over like roach traps in a Manhttan apartment.
When, like a good Shia, his heart stopped with the return of our Fallujah New Look Republican Guard and he said something, his masters didn't like it.
His Washington marks still sing his praises, and God knows under the definition of book smart/street stupid Richard Perle's name should be highlighted, but everyone else realizes that Chalabi was a small time crook with a great line. No other Iraqi could have told Jews that Iraq would be open to shipping oil to Israel. No one would have been believed.
Most Iraqis are far more ready to listen to Sadr than any exile lackey, especially the widely despised Chalabi. Perle said that his new anti-Western stance would make him popular in Iraq. Please, Iraqis are among the least stupid people in the Middle East. Chalabi is scum, they know he's scum and they want him back in London or Washington. The rise of Sadr is a refutation of Chalabi. Hell, his little pledge to help Israel is enough to make him a target for many people.
Machiavelli warned of the machinations of exiles, and Chalibi is living proof of this. He lied so the US would make him and his family the next Saddam. The neocons don't realize that if they had had their wishes come true and Iraq had been given over to Chalabi, Sadr wiould be the new ruler of Iraq today. By limiting the power of Chalabi, the CPA bought time. I don't think people realized the resentment of iraqis for the exiles. It's pretty intense.
As to the charges that he's an Iranian spy, why not? All these folks were talking money from everyone anyway. Only the naive would think he wouldn't work for the Iranians. Where did he get his info? From his Washington marks, of course. A con man takes what he can, and Chalabi played every side he could. Saddam, the Israelis, the US, why not add Iran to the mix.
I'd like to see Chalabi in a US court for fraud, personally, bu he's already got his Caspian Sea villa all ready to go, payment from his new masters.
For a long time, 9/11 was turned into the Rudy Giuliani show. Reporters, eager to have a hook on the story, focused on our control-freak egomaniac of a mayor as the city's savior. That crap ended after a few weeks here, because Rudy overplayed his hand and tried to stay in office past his term. The Times killed that idea, but 9/11, for Rudy, became his salvation and gave him a national profile.
The firefighters and police, who hated the way he used them, even as they liked his racial politics, were eager accomplices in the deception, because it veered away from the hard questions, like the institutional hatred between the two services. To this day, no one wants to deal with the frightening level of non-cooperation and poor coordination between the two services. People died because police and firefighters didn't cooperate.
Say that firefighters stole from the dead, and you get protests by the late Stephen Jay Gould's wife. Tell people that the cops saved themselves, and you get denials. Everyone wants to cloak 9/11 in heroism even when it shouldn't be.
The sad truth is that New Yorkers saved themselves on 9/11, with scant help from City Hall or anyone else. The story of 9/11 is about the way people, in good order, walked away fromn the World Trade Center and got home. No one panicked, no one got trampled, no one rioted. New Yorkers pulled together and got about saving themselves.
The city has been in denial for years. About the way Giuliani and the EPA lied about the air quality, as thousands of workers now suffer from mysterious illnesses. You could smell the burning flesh and plastic from miles away, I know I choked on it for days. When I went down to Ground Zero in October, there was still a fine dust covering everything on Broadway. People had to be sick from this.
But the biggest denial cuts to the heart of Giuliani's management style, the inefficient and ultimately contrary way he managed the uniformed services. The rank and file of both the FDNY and NYPD hated Giuliani because he wouldn't give them decent raises. Things were so bad that the LAPD and LA Sheriff's Department held successful recruiting drives in New York. However, he lavished praise on their management, despite the rank incompetance of Howard Safir, Giuliani's lacky and the commissioner of the NYPD during it's worst racial incidents.
The firefighters absolutely hated their commissioner, former union chief Thomas Von Essen. He was so hated he was disinvited to several funerals.
Giuliani picked his staff based on loyalty, not competence. Kerik , PC during 9/11, was a step up in quality, most people would have been, but he shared many of the same showboating qualities of his former boss.
When the commission said the command and control of the 9/11 response was flawed, they aren't coming up wth some grassy knoll theory. They are stating the obvious. But New Yorkers are never more obstinant or provincial than when discussing our uniform services. We don't learn from others, we teach. Giuliani constantly said that the NYPD was the "world's finest police force". Which is just silly. Half the city neither trusted nor liked the cops. Besides, such boasting prevents long needed reforms.
Some of protesters yelled out about the radios, which had not worked for 10 years. Despite attempted fixes, it didn't ever get resolved.
It was clear, and 343 deaths should make it crystal clear, that the way the NYPD works with the FDNY is dysfunctional. But instead of conceeding ground and the brutal 9/11 report which is coming, Giuliani lied and said we did everything we could. Well, yes and no. On 9/11, the firefighters gave their last full measure. The question is why did they had to.
Giuliani, who's political career is dead, the reaction at the hearings should demonstrate that, wants to remain cloaked in the mantle of 9/11, in the forlorn hope someone will appoint him to a job. In New York, he has far too many tough questions to answer from a city who long ago tired of his act. The deference shown Giuliani was wildly misplaced. As the micromanaging mayor, he had his hands in every pie. The failure of the uniformed services on 9/11, and remember, 343 firefighters died in about 2 hours, was Giuliani's and his commissioners. Bush's cowardice on 9/11 doesn't make Giuliani a hero. It made him competent for the job at hand. But then he ruined it by making 9/11 about him and not the city and the people who acted with amazing grace, dignity and generousity in the days after the attack.
All war, and this was an act of war, reveals the best and worst of people. Giuliani didn't save a person, or do much more than his job. But he stole the credit for what the city of New Yorkers did, and refuses to accept the blame for which he directly controlled.
If you live outside New York, you may not realize that the feelings about 9/11 remain deep, and largely unspoken. The newspapers carried funeral stories for a year. Every day, you'd open up the News or Newsday or the Post or even the times, and there was a 9/11 death story. You'd have to skip over them just to not think about it. The city changed, for the better, in most cases. People were and are more civic minded. That's the story which Giuliani stole from the rest of the country.
The reaction to Giuliani was long suppressed anger at the lies and obfuscation handed down by politicians. People want to know why their kin died, why those who worked at Ground Zero are sick. Giuliani's ass-covering excuses are no longer acceptable. We're past the time for myths and need real answers.
Survivors describe wedding massacre as generals refuse to apologise
Rory McCarthy in Ramadi
Friday May 21, 2004
The Guardian
The wedding feast was finished and the women had just led the young bride and groom away to their marriage tent for the night when Haleema Shihab heard the first sounds of the fighter jets screeching through the sky above.
It was 10.30pm in the remote village of Mukaradeeb by the Syrian border and the guests hurried back to their homes as the party ended. As sister-in-law of the groom, Mrs Shihab, 30, was to sleep with her husband and children in the house of the wedding party, the Rakat family villa. She was one of the few in the house who survived the night.
"The bombing started at 3am," she said yesterday from her bed in the emergency ward at Ramadi general hospital, 60 miles west of Baghdad. "We went out of the house and the American soldiers started to shoot us. They were shooting low on the ground and targeting us one by one," she said. She ran with her youngest child in her arms and her two young boys, Ali and Hamza, close behind. As she crossed the fields a shell exploded close to her, fracturing her legs and knocking her to the ground.
She lay there and a second round hit her on the right arm. By then her two boys lay dead. "I left them because they were dead," she said. One, she saw, had been decapitated by a shell.
"I fell into the mud and an American soldier came and kicked me. I pretended to be dead so he wouldn't kill me. My youngest child was alive next to me."
Mrs Shibab's description, backed by other witnesses, of an attack on a sleeping village is at odds with the American claim that they came under fire while targeting a suspected foreign fighter safe house.
She described how in the hours before dawn she watched as American troops destroyed the Rakat villa and the house next door, reducing the buildings to rubble.
Another relative carried Mrs Shihab and her surviving child to hospital. There she was told her husband Mohammed, the eldest of the Rakat sons, had also died.
As Mrs Shihab spoke she gestured with hands still daubed red-brown with the henna the women had used to decorate themselves for the wedding. Alongside her in the ward yesterday were three badly injured girls from the Rakat family: Khalood Mohammed, aged just a year and struggling for breath, Moaza Rakat, 12, and Iqbal Rakat, 15, whose right foot doctors had already amputated.
By the time the sun rose on Wednesday over the Rakat family house, the raid had claimed 42 lives, according to Hamdi Noor al-Alusi, manager of the al-Qaim general hospital, the nearest to the village.
So, are we going to apologize to King Abdullah for this as well?
Chairman Ferrell Blount Flip-flops and Refuses to Allow Log Cabin NC a Table at NC State Republican Convention
May 19, 2004
(Washington, DC)—Just days before the start of the North Carolina Republican State Convention, Chairman Ferrell Blount has written a letter reversing position and informing Log Cabin North Carolina that it will not be allowed a table at the state convention. "Log Cabin Republicans believe that at a time when our country is at war, we ought to be bringing Republicans together, not dividing them, and certainly not excluding them from their own state convention," said Log Cabin Republicans Executive Director Patrick Guerriero.
........ Just days before the convention, NC State GOP Chairman Ferrell Blount flip-flopped, returning the money, and sending a lengthy vitriolic letter informing Farthing that Log Cabin would not have a table at the convention.
"Chairman Blount's actions are an affront to fair-minded Republicans across the state of North Carolina. To flip-flop and refuse to allow loyal Republicans a seat at their own convention is petty and short sighted," stated Farthing.
Chairman Blount's letter informed Log Cabin that "homosexuality is not normal and should not be established as an acceptable 'alternative' lifestyle." The letter further informed Log Cabin that, "[t]he North Carolina Republican Party and the Log Cabin Republicans do not seem to share the same agenda." Accordingly, Chairman Blount concluded, "Your group will not have a table at our convention as this would seem counter productive to the Republican Party's agenda."
The Log Cabin Republicans website makes it clear what the organization's agenda is: "We are loyal Republicans. We believe in low taxes, limited government, strong defense, free markets, personal responsibility, and individual liberty. ....
"The Republican Party is not owned by Ferrell Blount. It is not his Republican Party. The Republican Party is the party of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, a party built on expanding the definition of liberty. The GOP is made up of individuals with diverse backgrounds, beliefs, and interests. The Republican Party doesn't just belong to one person," said Chris Barron, Log Cabin's Political Director, and a North Carolina native.
I mean, that 's like me being upset my local Klan chapter won't let me join.
The GOP has an anti-faggot agenda. Not anti-gay, or anti-homosexual, but anti-faggot. They hate faggots, and want to make you second class citizens, because that's all faggots deserve. They say this every day, in every way concievable. They ally with people who take pride in denying gay Americans rights.
Rick Santorum compared consensual gay sex to beastiality, with no shame. Was he censured? Yeah, like Theodore Bilbo was when he wrote Segregation or Mongrelization. As long as the Log Cabin Republicans expect to be treated as a member of the family, they will piss into the wind and have it sprayed back on them. Bush has made it clear: no faggots need apply. The Log Cabin Uncle Toms still don't get it. Massa Bush not only doesn't care about you, he doesn't much like you.
Has George Bush ever discussed the dignity and rights of gay people. Kerry may not be for gay marriage, but he doesn' t court homophobic activists. Bush has them tour the White House.
The GOP is coming for your rights and all you can do is whine about a table?
Thursday, May 20, 2004 Posted: 1312 GMT (2112 HKT)
People gather outside the compound after the raid.
(CNN) -- U.S. military personnel and Iraqi police Thursday raided the compound of the Iraqi National Congress and the nearby home of Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi, formerly a close adviser to the Pentagon.
Chalabi aides said its part of a "smear campaign by the CIA" and U.S. Administrator Paul Bremer is trying to intimidate Chalabi because of his call for full Iraqi sovereignty and his insistence that the United Nations Food for Oil program be investigated.
Chalabi's nephew, Salim Chalabi, said the forces entered his uncle's home, put a gun to Chalabi's head and threatened him.
CNN staff on the scene saw a group of Iraqi civilians inside the compound under guard by Iraqi police and U.S. military.
In addition, an SUV was backed into the garage of the compound with people dressed in civilian clothes carrying out files from inside the headquarters.
Salim Chalabi, who serves as Iraq's war crimes prosecutor, said the U.S. military personnel and Iraqi police entered his uncle's home with their weapons drawn, and threatened Chalabi's security personnel. Describing what his uncle told him, Salim said the forces were "looking for something" and were upset with Chalabi.
No more blackmail files for him.
Too bad they didn't drag him to Jordan so he could start serving his jail sentence.
Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.Matbe the generals are sending a message to Rummy Or its a scam.
Exec swears he dropped only 2G
on lap dances, bubbly & food - lawyer
By HELEN PETERSON
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Having a grand old time wasn't hard for an insurance executive, with the help of some lovely ladies and $3,200 per bottle Clos Du Mesnil Champagne (shown).
That's a lot of lap dances.
A Manhattan insurance executive was handed an eye-popping $28,000 bill after hours of Champagne-fueled frolicking at the East Side strip club Scores.
But Mitchell Blaser, 53, contends his wild night out could not have added up to anywhere near the amount charged to his American Express card - enough to buy a new Chevy Trailblazer.
He slapped the topless mecca for celebrities and high rollers with a lawsuit in Manhattan Supreme Court, claiming hanky-panky - of the financial sort - was behind his gargantuan tab.
The upper East Side bachelor's lawyer, Leonard Zack, told the Daily News that Blaser was expecting a bill of about $2,000.
Zack accused Scores of fraud. "It's a swindle, and they probably do it to a lot of people who don't want to do anything," he said.
But Scores spokesman Lonnie Hanover said the naked truth is that Blaser flashed his credit card with a cost-is-no-object zeal while out treating a pal and the pal's girlfriend on Dec. 11.
"If you want to party like a [movie star] you can, but it is going to cost you," Hanover said.
He added that the club has Blaser's signed receipts to prove "this is a totally frivolous lawsuit."
For beginners, he said Blaser - chief financial officer of the Americas division of Swiss Re, the world's second-largest insurance company - ordered five magnums of Clos Du Mesnil Champagne, at $3,200 a pop.
"This man purchased our most expensive bottle of champagne. It is rated the best in the world," Hanover said. "You can have a wonderful bottle of champagne for $300. This is the extreme. ... The last person to buy one was a head of state."
Then there were the lap dances.
I hate strip clubs. I don't want strippers touching me, I hate the way they smell, I find the money grubbing depressing. I can't imagine believing a stripper liked me for more than my wallet. In fact, I usually have an allergic reaction to the place and have to leave after 30 minutes. I like real women, who are really intelligent and not shaking their tits in my face for a $20.
But this guy is full of shit. Scores is expensive. He expected a what? 2K bill? Come on, you can drop that in an hour and you don't have to be Howard Stern to do so. The drinks alone start at $9 for Bud.
With that said, overbilling is common at strip clubs, because the place exists to seperate stupid men from their money. What I think his angle is to negotiate a discount on his bill.
I can't imagine his Swiss bosses were happy with either the charges or the publicity, since he was probably doing something work-related. The guy is a CFO and he does ths? Not good.
Strippers and those unfortunate to deal with them lie a lot, but to be found committing $28K fraud is stupid. They have plenty of ways to run through your money and he committed the cardinal sin, he used a credit card in a strip joint. Tacked on charges are nothing new. But if you want to act like Colin Farrell, you're gonna pay for it, unless you're Colin Farrell, but that's another story.
While the Iraq war was being discussed in Washington, New York was transfixed by two days of 9/11 hearings. While the Commission's report was appropriately brutal about New York's tradition-bound and non-cooperative Police and Fire departments. once again Rudy Giuliani's failed management style was given a pass.
Only John Lehman, who correctly addressed the gross failures on 9/11, ones which killed 343 firefighters, got it even close to right. And even he faltered when he could have challenged Giuliani's management of the FDNY and NYPD before 9/11 directly.
Giuliani placed the Emergency management headquarters in 7 World Trade Center, a situation derisively called the "bunker in the sky". Yet, this political payback to a major contributor was never raised. The facility, on the 23rd Floor of 7 WTC, was destroyed in the attack and was never deemed a wise decision.
The Times coverage mentions the outrage of the audience at the gentle questioning of Giuliani. While Giuliani is regarded as some kind of hero outside New York, inside, his enemies have grown since 2001. While the commisioners may have thought they were placating New Yorkers, they were outraging them. In this most litigious and conflict driven of cities, the idea that one would want to soft-peddle answers goes down as well as pastrami on white with mayo.
The families were pissed at the gentle questioning, with several audience members screaming at the commission and catching them by surprise. Not a surprise to New Yorkers, who routinely scream at elected officials, however.
None of the commissioners asked Mr. Giuliani about the placement of the city's multimillion-dollar emergency command center in 7 World Trade Center, an established terrorist target that the commission staff has identified as a mistake.
James R. Thompson, a commissioner and former governor of Illinois, praised Mr. Giuliani for "extraordinary leadership" and "setting an example for all of us," then raised the matter of what information about threats of terrorist attacks against the city Mr. Giuliani had received from federal authorities in the months preceding Sept. 11. It was a ticklish area that could have opened the door for Mr. Giuliani to fault the Bush administration for failing to pass on warnings.
He went in a different direction, though. He said the information he received in 2001 was similar to what he had gotten in the previous four or five years and pointed out that the city had been on high alert since 1997. Then he said, "When you go back over a report and you know the end of the story, which is a horrible one, but you know the end of the story, the reports that are relevant become much more obvious than before you knew the end of it."
Timothy Roemer, another commissioner, thanked Mr. Giuliani for his "brave and courageous leadership," and then specifically asked about the Aug. 6, 2001, briefing document for President Bush that mentioned New York and the World Trade Center as objects of terrorist threats several times.
"If we had gotten those warnings," Mr. Giuliani said, "I can't honestly tell you we would have done anything differently. We were doing everything we could think of."
When Mr. Lehman, who had been so critical the previous day, got his chance to address Mr. Giuliani and ask about an system that would dictate who would take charge if the mayor was unavailable or incapacitated, he flattered Mr. Giuliani by telling him that on Sept. 11, "There was no question to the world that the captain was on the bridge."
Over time, the agreeable questioning seemed to stimulate unrest in the audience, which began to murmur its displeasure.
Then Slade Gorton, a commissioner who the previous day had uttered some of the more caustic remarks about the city's response, told Mr. Giuliani that his own arithmetic suggested that more than 99.5 percent of the people in the towers who could possibly have been saved, the ones below the fires, were saved, and invited Mr. Giuliani to confirm that "overwhelmingly remarkable" performance.
As Mr. Giuliani began to answer, some members of the audience, angry about the communication problems between the uniformed services, called out:
"No, talk about the radios. Talk about the radios. The radios."
Mr. Kean said, "You are simply wasting time at this point that could be used for questions."
"You're wasting time," someone replied.
That triggered more outbursts. Roughly a dozen people began yelling out, some of them relatives of victims and others from the general public:
"It's lies. Lies."
"My son was murdered. He never got a Mayday."
"Let us rebut him."
"One-sided. One-sided."
"Put one of us on the panel."
Some jeering had broken out the previous day, though nothing like yesterday's level of discontent.
Mr. Giuliani tried to talk over the interruptions, and then stopped, saying, "It's understandable." Mr. Kean tried to quiet the room. After some police officers and staff members entered, the outbursts ceased.
Mr. Giuliani answered two more questions, and as he finished, another round of heckling erupted. One persistent agitator and his girlfriend were removed by the police.
Outside, beneath softly falling rain, Mr. Giuliani took questions from journalists. He said he was not angry at the taunters. "I knew it would happen," he said. "They have to place their anger someplace."
He was asked if it was painful to be called a liar.
"The anger of the families is not painful," he said. "Going over this is painful."
Elsewhere, some of the family members lingered and spoke of how they had not heard the questions and answers they had come to hear. Some had lost faith in the commission, saying it seemed to be committed to a sanitized history of that day.
To be honest, I had no idea that they were that angry at Giuliani, but I'm not surprised. Everyone was quick to call him a hero and not ask why 343 firefighters died on his watch, why systemic failures have not been corrected and long-standing hatreds between the uniformed services are allowed to exist.
Of course, they have to deal with the family's anger in a patronizing way. Those people weren't just mad, they wanted answers about the failures which got their family members killed.
Newsday gets the point , but even so, writes off the anger as some New York quirk:
Then, as Giuliani described firefighters inside the north tower ignoring evacuation orders so they could help people leave the building, spectators yelled "No!" and "Liar!" from their seats in the auditorium.
"Talk about the radios," one man shouted, referring to the Fire Department radios that failed to broadcast evacuation orders. Several of the hecklers have sued the city and radio manufacturer Motorola over transmission failures on Sept. 11 and said they were angry that the commission didn't press Giuliani on why firefighters were using the same radio system that had been problematic during the bombing of the trade center in 1993.
Other spectators, largely relatives of people killed in the trade center, were annoyed that commissioners repeatedly praised Giuliani and seemed to avoid tough questions.
"It actually made me feel sick to my stomach," said Terry McGovern, a Columbia University public-health professor whose mother was killed in the trade center. McGovern was "very concerned" the commission would "soften its criticism" in a final report, due in two months, about what allowed the attacks to occur.
Beverly Eckert of Stamford, Conn., whose husband was killed in the trade center, bristled at the suggestion by Giuliani and commission members that firefighters had saved thousands of lives. "There was a lack of leadership, so the people who lived took responsibility for their own lives," she said.
Thomas Kean, the commission chairman, brushed off criticism after the hearing. "It's New York, what do you expect?" said the former New Jersey governor.
Jimmy Breslin, of course, nails the reality of Giuliani far better than most people.
He was a nowhere guy until the planes hit the World Trade Center buildings. He was a failed mayor, was Rudy Giuliani. He had a commissioner named Harding stealing so obviously that at first people couldn't believe their eyes.
Giuliani had an open fear of blacks that produced the one most memorable sight of the last 10 years in my city.
On the roof of City Hall were cops with rifles. They were ready to rake this small, straggly column of people marching on one strip of Broadway while they pleaded for housing. Many had AIDS and needed assistance. The real trouble with the demonstrators was that some of them were not white.
...........
He wanted an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum closed because it offended his strict Catholicism. And then, with a wife in Gracie Mansion and one girlfriend in a car outside, a friend of mine, a detective, drove in with another girlfriend, and he and the other girlfriend's car nearly hit each other. He marched with his girlfriend in a parade and his kids could watch it on television.
Giuliani wanted a high security bunker, placed 23 stories high in a building at 7 World Trade Center. Anybody with the least bit of common sense knew that the bunker in the sky was insane and the price, $15.1 million, a scandal. But he said it would house "My Police Commissioner" and "My Fire Commissioner." In Giuliani's world, everything was "mine."
And on the morning of Sept. 11, Rudy Giuliani's bunker went out into the air like a Frisbee.
The first thing he did, he was telling the 9/11 Commission yesterday, was to go out and search for a new command post. He walked away from the trade center and headed for the command post that made his career: the nearest television camera.
As Giuliani sought fame that morning, the people of the City of New York walked on all the streets, taking them from downtown to their homes. This was a crowd of millions, and they walked with such care and order and beauty that they brought tears to the eyes.
They needed no Giuliani, no cop, no soldier. They needed only their own strength and bravery; yes, bravery, for so many had gone through going downstairs with fires following them.
Giuliani headed away from the World Trade Center. At most, he had paused at the place.
.................
He had not picked up one piece of metal. He had not helped one person out of the smoke and fire. He made no decision about anything except himself.
.........
And yesterday he sat before the 9/11 commissioners and they collapsed in awe. They listened to him give a walking tour of how he tried to find a command center. Not once did anybody ask him about the stupid idea he had had for his first bunker, the one that fell out of the sky. They asked no questions of a mayor whose fire department had no radios that worked when a police helicopter said the north tower was going to fall. And 343 firefighters died. They wanted to hear nothing of blood on Giuliani's hands. They only wanted to hear whatever he had to say and they regarded his words as those of a hero. They had no idea that the guy was a flop who got lucky with an air raid.
They keep talking about how Giuliani could run for something, but he would lose. For black New Yorkers, it's not so much his failures on 9/11, the FDNY is something like 90 percent white, but the murders of Patrick Dorismond and Amadou Diallo, and the rape of Abner Louima by his vaunted police, which still makes him the most hated politician in half of New York, But the refusal to accept blame for a failure as bad as the Somme has now tainted his image in the other half of New York. The fact that so many people died, so many people got sick from the clean up, another question not asked of Giuliani, that he's wildly unpopular with many New Yorkers.
The Commission made a political decision they thought would placate New Yorkers, instead it outraged them. We don't rely on politicians in New York, we rely on lawyers and protests. We don't seeth quietly. Being nice to Giuliani harmed the credibility of the commission and left many things unanswered. Which people noticed.
The one thing I hate is people abusing and misusing history. Atrios points out a column on wingnut site GOPUSA, by one Debbie Daniel. This ignorant woman raises the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII. The most shameful part abou this wasn't the internment, but the 21 Medal of Honor won by people who's families were in American concentration camps. Anyone who thought these men were a threat to the US should have hung themselves in disgrace. Despite the horrifiic crime done to them, they not only still believed in this country, they fought with distinction.
These are video clips of Japanese-American veterans discussing their experiences in World War II.
This is a list of the decorations won by the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, where most Japanese-Americans served. They won 21 Medals of Honor, and served in Italy, France and Germany, ending the war in Northern Italy with the formerly all-black 92nd Infantry Division.
Here is a portion of Ms. Daniel's column:
Who in the world are we fooling? I agree we are better than that, but I'm here to tell you, if we don't get the same mind set these killers have, it's over.
You have to meet the enemy where he is. You have to get inside his mind; to think like he does or you can't win.
It wasn't like us to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima, but we had to.
It's not like us to use certain tactics to get information, but we have to.
These are not refined people with manners, who will sign papers and say they will treat our prisoners humanely.
Our President couldn't have said it any plainer; we're dealing with the "Axis of Evil" . . . in other words - Satan himself.
Some people have been upset that some of the Iraqi prisoners were mistreated. We're at war . . . it doesn't bother me that they may have been stripped naked and had cold water thrown on them.
If they're not willing to give us information, do you think we should have them over for a steak dinner to see what questions they will answer? My question is: How cold is the water?
We took 120,000 Japanese Americans - two thirds were citizens of the United States - and locked them up during World War II. We put them inside barbed-wire fencing; we didn't strip them of their clothes - we stripped them of their dignity; took them from their homes; caused many to lose their businesses, because we could not take a chance that any one of them might hurt us. None did, but we still couldn't take that chance . . . we were at war.
Here is the letter I wrote to the incredibly ignorant Ms. Daniel:
Dear Ms. Daniel,
Although I find it deeply unpatriotic and un-American to justify torture, that is your right. However, I cannot let your slander against Japanese-Americans go unremarked.
Not only were Japanese-Americans NO THREAT to the US, their patriotism, despite the great injustice done to them, should shame us all. The 442nd Regimental Combat Team, made up exclusively of Japanese-Americans, most of whom relatives were in American concentration camps, was the most highly decorated unit of its size in WWII.
The link goes to a website which lists the number of awards, including 21 Medals of Honor won by members of the unit.
Therefore, to claim that the internment of Japanese-Americans was justified is both shameful and wrong, and a slander on men far more patriotic than you or I. Many of the members of this unit died to liberate people while their families were unjustly jailed.
To claim a post-facto justification for that is both deeply wrong and a slander to the memories of some of the finest Americans ever to live here.
It's been a long few days, and the mistakes and outright lies running through the news have been astounding. The lies about Iraq reminds me of a line from Apocalypse Now "the bullshit flew so fast, you needed wings to stay above it.".
There was no program named "copper green"? Please. Sy Hersh isn't Jayson Blair, sorry. If he claims there was a program, it existed. Not that he was hurt by the useless whining assholes at Counterpunch, and the besotted Christopher 'hic" Hitchens. The White House can issue all the non-denial denials they want, they have no credibility left. Anyone who would trust the word of Bush is either a sucker or a fool.
Then, of course, you have the generals lying, or at least obfuscating what is going on. If Rick Sanchez feels so bad about Abu Ghraib, he can retire. He certainly should do more than say he's sorry. If someone fucked his kid in the ass with a cylume light, he might want more than words,
No one wants to be responsible. They claim responsibility, because words are cheap, but to be responsible, which would require atonement, to sand niggers no less, isn't going to come easy. Cliff May, one of these thinktank assholes who litter cable news, he wanted to know if the Red Cross went to Iran and Syria to check their jails. And I was stunned. Are these our new moral comparisons? Theocracies and dictatorships? What's the point? That because Syria tortures, we get to torture too?
I think not.
Now, we just shot up another Iraqi wedding. With 45 dead. Women and children included. People forget that our war routinely kills the innocent. Abu Ghraib is merely the very thick icing on a very large cake. Of course, the Pentagon is lying again. Claiming they were attacking foreign fighters, yet another gun-firing wedding party is shot up by a helo.
They are lying about who will run Iraq as well. The head of the IGC was blown to shit going into the Green Zone. Do they think that the next guy they pick won't get blowed up the same way? The fact that they have to guess who will be Johnny on the spot shouldn't make anyone feel happy.
These lies are truly disheartening, because it seems everyone is pretending the obvious didn't happen. Something very wrong happened at Abu Ghraib which started in Washington. Yet, we never get straight answers from anyone. Just resign now, tell the truth and be done with it. Don't drag it out. It will all come out in the end anyway.
In his introduction to ''Ten Vineyard Lunches,'' Richard Olney writes that every meal, even the daily ones spent ''for the most part in solitude,'' is ''a celebration.'' But, he adds, ''the most wonderful are those of the summer months. . . . At the dinner hour, the terrace, laced with colored lights, is transformed into a funny little theater with a vaguely carnival atmosphere.''
My terrace does not at the moment have colored lights, but I know exactly what Olney means. It is somehow more festive to dine out in the open, but there is an ease about it too. Olney, who lived in Provence until his death in 1999, wrote that in planning outdoor meals, his menus seemed to come together effortlessly -- most of the ingredients, after all, were taken from the garden, and skewers of lamb or scallops could be finished quickly on the grill. Wines from his adopted home, especially the excellent Bandols from Domaine Tempier, suddenly seemed to go perfectly with everything on his warm-weather table.
Something simple and salady almost always began Olney's midday meal -- sliced tomatoes and onions topped with torn basil and drizzled with olive oil and herb vinegar, or parboiled vegetables tossed in vinaigrette. At the end of the instructions for his favorite tossed salad, a colorful preparation adorned with nasturtium blossoms, he writes, ''I know of nothing more beautiful than the out-of-doors summer light playing across its surface.''
I don't know if Olney was also a painter, but he sure sounds like one, and the salads he made were a lot like those enjoyed a century earlier by Monet at Giverny. Monet was not a cook, but he loved to dine well, to lunch in his gorgeous walled garden (which in summer boasted a profusion of nasturtiums) or to picnic a little farther afield.
In his painting ''Luncheon on the Grass'' (1865-66), the cloth on the ground is covered with pates and grapes and what looks like one of the roasted game birds he was partial to. In ''Luncheon'' (1873), the meal is over, and all that is left on the outdoor table is a silver coffeepot and a bowl of peaches, along with some bread and a bit of red wine in a glass.
Like Olney and his salad, Monet was obsessed with light, and it influenced his meals, but in a different way -- lunch was always at 11:30 sharp so that it would be over in time for him to take advantage of the afternoon sun. He rarely allowed his guests, who ranged from Pissarro and Renoir to the statesman Georges Clemenceau, to arrive on their own, preferring to send for them so that they wouldn't be late.
Once they got there, they were lucky. According to ''Monet's Table: The Cooking Journals of Claude Monet,'' they dined on pike from his pond and vegetables, fruit and even mushrooms from his garden. He served salads of dandelion and strips of bacon, or chicory with garlic and croutons. (He favored so much salt and pepper on the salad that no one else could eat it, so there were always two bowls on the table.) He grew sweet peppers and chili peppers, lima and green beans, zucchini and red, yellow and cherry tomatoes. (Olney, who writes that he ''can ill support a day without a tomato salad at one meal or the other,'' would have approved.)
Some of Monet's illustrious guests sang for their supper. He got his recipe for bouillabaisse from Cezanne and one for bread rolls from Millet. Rodin once sent over Isadora Duncan, who, naturally, danced.
I spent some time studying the Impressionists and Monet is my favorite. I had no idea that he planned his summer meals so carefully. I'll have to dig up the book Reed mentioned. Salads and simply cooked meat and fish are perfect companions to summer vegetables. Not the bland cutlets, which lose their flavor, but things like chicken legs and bone-in steak and whole fish. A lively salad can only make that better.
This isn't picnic or grill food, a stop at a salad bar and grill pan can perform this magic. We may not have the time for a midafternoon repast (or in Monet's case, late morning), but as the sun hangs over the horizon for a bit longer, one can certainly bring summer into their dinner. You can stop at a roadside stand, farmers market or green market and get fresh veggies and greens. The fresher it is, the better it will taste, and in summer, fresh is best,
Sivits gives graphic description of maltreatment by US soldiers to detainees.
By Paul Peachey – BAGHDAD
US prison guard Jeremy Sivits was sentenced to the maximum term of one year in jail on Wednesday after pleading guilty to charges over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners inside Abu Ghraib jail at a court martial in Baghdad.
A military policeman, the 24-year-old Sivits was given a bad conduct discharge and reduced from the rank of specialist to the lowest rank of private, which he will keep until he is discharged from the army after completing his jail sentence.
Sivits admitted conspiracy to maltreat detainees, maltreatment of detainees and dereliction of duty around November 8 last year in the first trial over the scandal that has rocked the US-led coalition and President George W. Bush's administration.
He admitted leading a detainee to a pile of inmates on the floor and then took a photograph of them while another guard, Specialist Charles Graner, kneeled on them and pretended to punch another in the head.
Sivits told the court that one of the six soldiers he was with claimed they were softening up the detainees on behalf of military intelligence. He told the court he did not believe it.
"They had told me before they were asked to do this and keep doing what they were doing.
"They said they were told by military intelligence ... to keep doing what they were doing to the inmates because it was working, they were talking."
One could be optimistic, because this is what the cooperating witness got, the maximum sentence of the court-martial, things have a way of shifting. I wouldn't be surprised to see his sentence cut and his discharged changed, Until they hit Levenworth, everything is up in the air.
Place whole lobster in a pot of boiling water. Boil for one minute, then put lobster in a bath of cold water. Remove tail from lobster and pry meat from shell, keeping it whole. Remove meat from claws and chop the meat. Cut the lobster in half and remove the tomalley, or liver (that soft, blackish-green stuff in the stomach).
Heat 1⁄2 tablespoon of butter in a small saucepan. Add heavy cream and bring to a boil. Cook three minutes while stirring. Strain sauce into a bowl and set aside.
Break eggs into a bowl. Add chives and half of the sauce and beat with a fork.
In an omelet pan, heat 1⁄2 tablespoon butter. Add chopped claw meat and sauté two minutes.
Add the egg-chives mixture and cook slowly over medium heat until firm, about five minutes.
While the omelet is cooking, in another saucepan heat 1⁄2 -tablespoon butter and cook the lobster tail for three minutes. Slice and arrange on top of the omelet and finish cooking in the oven two more minutes.
Place the cooked omelet on a serving plate and spoon remaining sauce over it. Spoon caviar on top and serve.
Bon appétit!
Culinary craziness has reached new heights in New York with the debut of the $1,000 omelet!
Le Parker Meridien hotel on W. 57th St. recently added the bank-breaking breakfast dish to its menu, charging patrons what it costs to buy about 200 omelets at your local greasy spoon.
But the so-called Zillion Dollar Frittata is apparently no ordinary omelet, consisting, as it does, of a mix of eggs, lobster and lots of caviar. It's so exclusive, so spectacular and so expensive that ... nobody's ordered one yet.
"Every six months we come up with new dishes for the menu," said Steven Pipes, the hotel's general manager. "We don't like things to get stale."
For penny pinchers, Norma's, the restaurant in Le Parker Meridien, offers an economy version of the frittata, a crustless quiche that contains 1 ounce of sevruga caviar.
It costs $100.
The supersize version of the frittata boasts 10 ounces of the pricey caviar. Along with its $1,000 price tag comes a written challenge on the menu: "Norma dares you to expense this."
As with several other menu items, the frittata is highlighted in red ink as one of "Norma's recommendations."
When Pipes and Norma's executive chef, Emile Castillo, decided to incorporate caviar into a frittata, they knew it would be a costly proposition. They pay $65 an ounce for sevruga.
"We priced it out and realized we'd have to charge $100 for the regular frittata," Pipes said.
Remember Old Homestead's Kobe Beef Hamburger for $41? The Kobe Beef Hot Dog for $26?
Now we have another entry in the New York food stunt contest. No one is going to order $1000 omelets, nor eat six eggs and a whole lobster. This is designed to get in the newspapers,nothing more. So they make a few, cheaper than an ad.I'm surprised they didn't sell it to dumber than shit rappers pissing their money away.
But the goal is to get in the papers with some wildly extravegant meal,not actually serve it,
The people who got married yesterday seemed to be reasonably happy. As they took their vows, some in relationships of 10, 20, 25 years, they seemed really happy to be getting married while the opponents seemed miserable. Blathering about the Bible and God, they seemed to miss the point that we don't live in a theocracy. This is a matter of civil law, not religion.
I was deeply ashamed to see a group of black homophobic ministers talking about how gay people could change and how they could hide being gay. When black people did that, it was called passing, and it was not deemed to be a favorable activity. These people said the two struggles were not the same. And I'd agree, except for one thing. The same crackers who defended segregation are the same folks who are homophobes today. How anyone could ally with those people is beyond me. Even if I hated gays, I'd rather die than agree with Pat Robertson.
It's simple. All Americans deserve the same rights, to marry, fight, have bitter divorces, regardless of what some theocrats think. This country was founded on laws, not the Bible.
I mean, the couples looked so happy, why anyone would want to take that away from them is beyond me.
Atrios, in the middle of his pledge week (I kicked in $10 of my ad revenues), notes that National Review Online is looking to raise $50,000.
All I could think of is what the fuck? Why doesn't Bill Buckley sell one of his boats or something?
While it's a shame George Soros hasn't come up with a grant program for us, we know NRO makes money and pays their writers. Why would they need to ask for money? I mean I'm no profit making enterprise, neither is Atrios, or Kos or Josh Marshall. But NRO is. Just like the Nation or Mother Jones.
If you're dumb enough to give to a profit making enterprise, so be it. Profit, in the sense that it is a business. But it's really kinda tacky and unfair to do ask for money when you run a business.
Oh, and I should have my PC not only up and running, but enhanced later this week. Thank you. I'll get into the details when I get it up.
Let's see, I'm straight I don;t care who sleeps with whom and I don't wave the Bible around. So read my my carefully considered opinion above and draw your own conclusions,
South Africa exploded in joyous celebrations on Saturday upon the news that it will become the first African country to host the World Cup finals in 2010.
It will be the biggest international event ever organised in South Africa and a multi-billion dollar injection into its economy.
President Thabo Mbeki, who returned home after presenting the South African bid to the Fifa Executive Committee in Zurich, dropped his normal reserve and danced in jubilation with crowds gathered in the capital Pretoria.
You can't keep a good country down
Champagne corks popped at football stadiums, public squares and community centres throughout the country as black and white united in celebration.
"You can't keep a good country down," said an ecstatic Chez Milani, general secretary of the Federation of Unions of South Africa.
"What better news could our industry have asked for to cement the successes we have achieved and are indeed celebrating during this historic year as we celebrate 10 Years of Freedom?" said South African Tourism chief executive officer, Cheryl Carolus.
Waving the multi-coloured South African flags, clapping and singing, South Africans were immediately swept up in euphoria at events organised in downtown Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban.
This is very good news. Ten years ago, no one could have imagined the World Cup in South Africa. Any more than the South African Charlize Theron could have been nominated, much less won an Oscar. As bad as the news can be from there, this signals real change.
Once, South African athletes were once pariahs, barred from international competitrion. The idea of a World Cup there was as likely as the Pope endorsing executions. Now, it's a welcomed member of the world community.
The World Cup is the world's most important sporting event, nothing comes close, not even the Olympics. Americans often don't get soccer, they say it's too slow, too little scoring. I disagree. I love soccer. It's called the beautiful game for a reason. Just watch Brazil play and you'll get it.
By some odd quirk, I grew up watching soccer on PBS. They would show the English Premiership then the German Bundesliga. So I grew up watching Bayern Munich, Manchester United, Leeds and Newcastle. I've always loved soccer, even watching Maradona in '86 on UHF. Despite the miserable reception, his skill shone through.
In 2002, I got up at 5 to see the US national team in the Wotld Cup. In Spanish, After all, Andres Cantor doesn't do the big games in English.
Soccer has an entire culture which makes the Yankees-Red Sox look like pikers. Hell, they make Texas high school football look calm. People riot when their national team loses. Soccer is the world's game. The passion of most of the world. Which is why who gets the world cup matters. It's world politics which more people care about than the EU or UN. The English still wonder why they haven't gotten to host a world cup, despite the fact that their fans act like pigs. English soccer "fans" are about as wanted as a dose of the clap.
Soccer is so large, that a side's fans, like ManU or Real Madrid may never see them play live. Iraqi kids routinely wear Juventus and Chelsea jerseys.Osama Bin Laden is an Arsenal fan. The four major leagues, The Premiership, Italy's Serie A, the Bundesliga, and the Spanish La Liga, have their games shown world wide, In the US, it's on Fox Sports Net. FIFA, the body which runs soccer, makes world wide news with any decision they make. Choosing a FIFA president is major news on the BBC. Only in the US could I walk down the street in my new ManU jersey and have people wonder what team it was. In other places, people might sneer, but they know the team.
Soccer is both sport and celebration, of fan loyalty, national pride, regional hatreds, But to like soccer, there is only one thing you need to see: Brazil's national team play. They may or may not be the best at any given moment, but no team handles the ball better. They are just amazing to see in action. There are other teams, Cameroon, Senegal, Italy, France, which are just as exciting to see, in different ways.
And with the internet you can follow nearly any team, buy their gear, listen to live games. Now, I can follow ManU, see their games on PPV live, or on Fox the next day.
Soccer isn't my favorite sport, but it is the most fun to watch. even if the scoring is low.
One of my favorite breakfasts is the breafast burrito.
It's called this because you basically take a flour tortilla, scramble some eggs, add meat, vegetables, seasoning, cheese and fill it. It's not hard to do, but there are some tricks which help things along.
The most critical thing is getting the eggs right. They must be soft and creamy without being runny. You don't want to have the eggs dripping out while you eat it. Shredded cheese usually does the trick, but butter, sour cream, mayonnaise, can all be used to get that creamy effect.
This is one of those meals which you can empty your fridge out and make a relatively healthy meal, take any meat, veggies and cook them up, then mix in some eggs. It also makes for a nice brunch and is kid friendly as well.
Basically, you want to chop up whatever you add in into small dices, The idea is to blend the flavors and cook it down until the meat and potatoes are crisp, and the other vegetables are soft and carmelized. You want a little toothy feel to the mix, so you need a little crunch, which is where the meat comes in. The reason is that you want to blend flavors, especially with the eggs. This, unlike an egg sandwich, is not the conflict between soft and hard, but a melding of soft on soft, so big chunks of peppers ruins the effect and creates a distraction. The goal should be to feel that this is melting in your mouth while you eat it.
Now, seasoning is simple, but tricky. Season the additives and just toss a little pepper and salt on the eggs. What to use? Well,it all depends on what you like. Fresh herbs would be nice, but my favorite is chili powder. Now, you can go full Mexican, with fresh chilis, like jalopenos, green salsa, avocados, and chorizo, or make it anglo with bacon and American cheese, or anywhere in between. The tricky part is to get a seasoning mix which doesn't overwhelm the eggs. Which is why spices like rosemary and cumin might be too much. The same with hot sauce. Too much kills the gentle egg flavor, but a little bite never hurts. It's a balancing act between the egg, the additions and spices.
This is the kind of meal which can let you serve people quickly and who eat different things, You can make one vegeterian, one with no vegetables, one with eggs and cheese. It is also a clever way to feed a lot of people quickly. Make the eggs, toss them in burritos and everyone eats. If you want, you can make it buffet style, and cook everything seperately and let people add what they want. This isn't optimal, but it can make a breakfast or brunch go from boring tp clever, especially for kids.
I like the blending of flavors, but when you need a new brunch idea, this is perfect. It's quick, clever and adds in a bunch of flavors in a clever way many people may not have had at breakfast. It also allows you to introduce vegetables into breakfast for people who might otherwise avoid them. They think onions and peppers go with Mexican food. And it's Atkins friendly, so those people can eat and shut up about their diet.
One other trick is to fill the burrito and put it on a grill until it crisps up. This seals in the filling and gives the burrito a nice toasty crunch.
Kevin Neff, managing editor of the NY Blade made this comment on how dangerous the closet is.
These black men are much en vogue these days, commanding ink from the New York Times, and even air time with Oprah Winfrey, who isn’t known for devoting much attention to gay rights issues on her popular, self-obsessed show. She recently featured author J.L. King, who said, “You’re not going to find me in a gay club because I have nothing to do with that culture. That’s them.”
King, who is black, wrote a book titled, “On the Down Low.” Instead of going to gay bars, he prefers to meet closeted men in grocery stores and churches, much to the shock of Oprah’s enraptured audience of naïve, pampered, upper middle class women.
I met my partner of nearly seven years at the Hippo nightclub in Baltimore. We didn’t cruise the produce aisle or sneak off to a public toilet. We met, chatted and exchanged phone numbers, then scheduled a date.
King, and others like him living such blatantly dishonest lives, should try “that culture.” They might be surprised.
Black men on the “DL” aren’t carving out some cool new subculture to which anyone should aspire. They are lying to themselves, and more tragically, to the African-American women they’re infecting with HIV at alarming rates.
And African Americans as a whole, particularly black ministers, needs to accept some responsibility for pushing these men into a dangerous existence in the closet.
When I saw this, I nearly fell over. Not because the guy was gay, but because he embraced dishonesty so easily. Life is not free, there is a cost for every activity. Being a straight man, sometimes I have to shave, wear clean clothes and not say fuck every other word. But since I like women, well, I do those things. I don't really care who people sleep with, but I dislike the morality of the down low. I don't get how people can lie about their lives.
There is a massive stigma towards gays in black America and a healthy racism in the gay community, so being black and gay cannot be easy. The down low is the result of that. But if you're going to live an ethical life, you cannot lie to everyone in it. This disdain of gay culture is decptive. The down low IS a gay culture, one adapted for black men entranced by their need for machismo and secrets.
What struck me about King was not only his contempt for women, and the DL is mysoginy in action, but his love of this secret world. Instead of having the courage to date and live an ethical life, the men on the down low choose to hide. He liked picking up men in church, as if openly gay men can't do thar. If it was merely self-delusion, it wouldn't bother me, But it kills women and children.
Everytime a minister launches a homophobic rant, he's creating a climate of death. People have an absolute right to know who their partners sleep with. When you create a climate of homophobia, and the black church can find Leviticus with no problem, people die. Women, children, and gay men.
Instead of creating a welcoming environment, the church is the down low's silent partner. It's as if they say "do what you want on Saturday night, but shut up about it on Sunday." The most important thing is honesty. The down low represents a great ethical failure in black America. Instead of encouraging sexual honesty, we would rather support hypocracy, lies and ultimately death.
THE GRAY ZONE by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib.
Issue of 2004-05-24
Posted 2004-05-15
The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.
According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.
Rumsfeld, during appearances last week before Congress to testify about Abu Ghraib, was precluded by law from explicitly mentioning highly secret matters in an unclassified session. But he conveyed the message that he was telling the public all that he knew about the story. He said, “Any suggestion that there is not a full, deep awareness of what has happened, and the damage it has done, I think, would be a misunderstanding.” The senior C.I.A. official, asked about Rumsfeld’s testimony and that of Stephen Cambone, his Under-Secretary for Intelligence, said, “Some people think you can bullshit anyone.”
The Abu Ghraib story began, in a sense, just weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks, with the American bombing of Afghanistan. Almost from the start, the Administration’s search for Al Qaeda members in the war zone, and its worldwide search for terrorists, came up against major command-and-control problems. For example, combat forces that had Al Qaeda targets in sight had to obtain legal clearance before firing on them. On October 7th, the night the bombing began, an unmanned Predator aircraft tracked an automobile convoy that, American intelligence believed, contained Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader. A lawyer on duty at the United States Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, refused to authorize a strike. By the time an attack was approved, the target was out of reach. Rumsfeld was apoplectic over what he saw as a self-defeating hesitation to attack that was due to political correctness. One officer described him to me that fall as “kicking a lot of glass and breaking doors.” In November, the Washington Post reported that, as many as ten times since early October, Air Force pilots believed they’d had senior Al Qaeda and Taliban members in their sights but had been unable to act in time because of legalistic hurdles. There were similar problems throughout the world, as American Special Forces units seeking to move quickly against suspected terrorist cells were compelled to get prior approval from local American ambassadors and brief their superiors in the chain of command.
Rumsfeld reacted in his usual direct fashion: he authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate “high value” targets in the Bush Administration’s war on terror. A special-access program, or sap—subject to the Defense Department’s most stringent level of security—was set up, with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon. The program would recruit operatives and acquire the necessary equipment, including aircraft, and would keep its activities under wraps. America’s most successful intelligence operations during the Cold War had been saps, including the Navy’s submarine penetration of underwater cables used by the Soviet high command and construction of the Air Force’s stealth bomber. All the so-called “black” programs had one element in common: the Secretary of Defense, or his deputy, had to conclude that the normal military classification restraints did not provide enough security.
“Rumsfeld’s goal was to get a capability in place to take on a high-value target—a standup group to hit quickly,” a former high-level intelligence official told me. “He got all the agencies together—the C.I.A. and the N.S.A.—to get pre-approval in place. Just say the code word and go.” The operation had across-the-board approval from Rumsfeld and from Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser. President Bush was informed of the existence of the program, the former intelligence official said.
I'll write more on this later, but the love of secrets can lead you straight to hell. If this is true, Rumsfeld and his deputies will all have to resign. Who did Rummy think he was? Jack Ryan?Secret hit teams? This is the real world, not a Tom Clancy novel. Things like that can blow up on you very easily.
May 15, 2004
THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ
Far From Ready for More War
With battered gear and nerves, a third of the Army is 'unfit to fight' but preparing to return.
By Esther Schrader, Times Staff Writer
FT. CAMPBELL, Ky. — From their first days as "Screaming Eagles," the 18,000 soldiers of the Army's 101st Airborne Division are taught to be ready for anything. As the force's proud creed goes: "First in, last out."
But at its sprawling home base — after a long year in Iraq that wreaked havoc with the blades of its helicopters, the sights of its guns and the nerves of its soldiers — the 101st is as far from ready as it has ever been.
Outside a gun locker the other day, a soldier used a bristled brush to scrape out Iraqi sand lodged in the seams of his rucksack. In the motor pool, mechanics pulled the transmission from a bomb-battered Humvee. At a social worker's office, a soldier ticked off the names of buddies he had watched die and mourned the breakup of his romance back home.
The 101st has no choice but to fix itself. And fast. With Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld saying this week that the U.S. military presence in Iraq will stand at 135,000 troops for the foreseeable future, the Pentagon must prepare these soldiers to return to the fight.
What the 101st is going through is a microcosm of what lies ahead for the entire Army. Iraq is its biggest test since Vietnam, and the rigors of fighting a counterinsurgency have demolished much of the Army's equipment and allowed its soldiers' skills to atrophy. For the first time, three Army divisions — more than a third of its combat troops — are classified as unfit to fight.
This is a new experience for the Army. In World War II, conscript troops fought for the duration and came home to stay. In Vietnam, soldiers drafted for two-year stretches met up with units already in combat. In Iraq, a volunteer Army that for decades has been largely a peacetime force is being asked to fight hard for a year or more, come home, and gear up to go back again, with no end in sight.
"We have never had the need for a huge Army to stay engaged like we are now," said Col. Michael Linnington, who commands the 3,400 soldiers of the 101st Airborne's 3rd Brigade. "Today if you're an active-duty unit, either you're going be in Iraq, or you're going be preparing to go back to Iraq. That's the way it's going to be."
Along with the 101st, the 82nd Airborne, which returned to Ft. Bragg, N.C., in March, and the 4th Infantry Division, whose soldiers still are returning to Ft. Hood, Texas, and Ft. Carson, Colo., came back from Iraq at readiness levels that the Army says left them unfit. Another division that had been due to return home this spring, the 1st Armored, was ordered in April to stay in Iraq at least three more months. When the 1st Armored does come home, it will likely be in the same shape
Atrios notes the defection of Crossfire host Tucker Carlson from the war supporters, then ran a link to this piece in the NY Post. Now, Ralph Peters is a wacko, who wrote an amazingly racist column last year about fighting Arabs. Now that we know they aren't cowards, Peters reconsiders, and now wants the war criminal in charge to leave for sound reasons.
By RALPH PETERS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
May 14, 2004 -- ACCORDING to his handlers, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld went to Baghdad to "boost troop morale." The best way the SecDef could improve morale would be to resign.
In Operation Iraqi Freedom, Rumsfeld and his apparatchiks boldly defended Washington while our troops fought overseas. Now that the battle's shifted to Capitol Hill in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal, the SecDef's in Iraq.
It's like all those press briefings in which he answers the questions when things are going well, but defers to those in uniform when things are going badly.
Should Rumsfeld resign over the prisoner abuse by rogue MPs? No. He should resign for the good of our military and our country. Those twisted photos are only one symptom of how badly the Rumsfeld era has derailed our military.
Rumsfeld has maintained a positive image with much of America because he controls information fanatically and tolerates no deviation from the party line. Differing opinions are punished in today's Pentagon - and every field general who has spoken plainly of the deficiencies of either the non-plan for the occupation of Iraq, the lack of sufficient troops (in Iraq or overall) or any aspect of Rumsfeld's "transformation" plan has seen his career ended.
It isn't treason to tell the truth in wartime. But it verges on treason to lie. And Rumsfeld lies.
Our military needs vigorous, continual internal debate. Contrary to popular myth, our officer corps has a long tradition of dissenting opinions. And the grave new world in which we find ourselves is not susceptible to party-line solutions.
It's especially noteworthy that the officers who respectfully differed from the views of the Rumsfeld cabal turned out to be right. Consider former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, who was right about the need for more troops and even right about the kind of vehicles we'd need in Iraq. For his service to our country, he was treated dismissively and mocked publicly.
........................
I'm privileged to spend a good bit of time with our military officers, from generals to new lieutenants. And I have never seen such distrust of a public official in the senior ranks. Not even of Bill Clinton. Rumsfeld & Co. have trashed our ground forces every way they could. Only the quality of those in uniform saved us from a debacle in Iraq.
..........
Clinging to power isn't a mark of strength, but of weakness, arrogance and brute obstinacy. Rumsfeld has wounded our military and sent our troops to die for harebrained schemes. In place of sound plans, he substituted political prejudices. Election year or not, he has to go. ........
Peters is absolutely right, Rumsfeld fires anyone with the balls to stand up to him and his plans. This is not the kind of leadership we deserve. Our soldiers are free men and women who volunteered to serve their country. They deserve better from their leaders. Rumsfeld is a liar and an arrogant fool. Our kin need leaders who can send them water in the desert.
I think we forget that many of the soldiers in Iraq signed up to fight Al Qaeda, not Iraqi guerrillas. Seeing Dick Myers and Rummy giving a speech at Abu Ghraib, where innocent people still languish, talking about how great our soldiers are, reminded me of exactly how betrayed they were by those men.
Some are great, some are special, some are scum who belong in jail. But they all deserve better leadership. Our soldiers had to make their own armored Humvees. Which is not unusual in war, nor is using the enemy's weapons. But importing water? While Rummy was playing cute with the press and sucking up to Martha Radddatz and Barbara Starr, parents were sending their kids water via FedEx.
The Army is rotting. There are real heroes, not just Pat Tillman, who was killed in Afghanistan, but hundreds of men and women who are winning Silver and Bronze Stars for combat actions. Yet, they don't even have decent oil to clean their weapons with. They are short vests and rifles and leaders who give a damn. I would hate to think that our Army has more Janis Karpinskis than Antonio Tagubas, but we probably do. Richard Myers is a disgrace. His adivce to the President has been abysmal.
You don't get low rent morons playing naked hopscotch with prisoners except in the most dire and low morale situations. What hasn't been said, and is not meant to be a defense is this: people who believe in their mission and their leaders will not descend into torturers. People who hate their mission, being in Iraq and lacking a sense of purpose will try to find one. So when someone offers a mission, they embrace it. Even if it is evil and wrong. If those guards had a sense of purpose, had been told the truth about how long they'd be in Iraq, the odds of them torturing and taking atrocity photos would be lower.
But the fact that Abu Ghraib happened is a sign the Army is collapsing. It's being ground up in Iraq and losing its moral sense, which has never been as finely tuned as some claim.
It's one thing to support the troops, and one look at Walter Reed's Ward 57 should melt the heart of even the most die hard cynic, it's another to send them water. They should have water. They should have enough water.
We need to remember there are heroes all over the place, the honor guard at Dover, the nurses and doctors who help patch up the wounded from the field hospitals to Walter Reed and Bethesda, the officers who try and keep their men supplied. Most of all, the young men and women who have been greviously injured and decide to live. Being sick is hard, being very sick, that much harder. But facing rehab and a new life takes a lot of character. It's the kind of strength which we rarely see in daily life. It takes far more heroism to learn to walk again than face enemy fire.
And for all that effort and devotion, what are they rewarded with? Indifferent. weak leaders who do not give a damn if they live or die. They were more upset when four mercenaries were killed than when five soldiers were blown up on the same day, or when US soliders are kidnapped. Who sent them into combat without enough water, to fight in the desert. Forget rifles, flak vests or armor.
The leadership we have now, from JCS Chairman Myers to Army Chief of Staff Schoonmaker on down, is failing our kin. They aren't just soldiers, but our family members, our cousins, sons, siblings. They sent them to fight and die without the things they need. If there is a greater dereliction of duty, a greater disgrace, i cannot think of one.
On last night's Nightline, they were discussing torture and it's moral effects. They refered to 24, the Fox series, and how torture is routinely used on it.
The implication was that there was no moral cost to the use of torture on the show. I would draw a very different conclusion. The show demonstrates the moral cost of torture. If you watch the show, would you say anyone on it is, well, happy? Their job seems to extract a pretty high moral cost on the agents. The willingness to torture doesn't mean you don't know what you're doing was evil. I think the use of torture on 24, instead of being an easy solution, is in fact, the hard, desperate solution. And in every circumstance over the last two seaons where torture was depicted, they were discussing a nuclear bomb and biological warfare, not ordinary intelligence gathering. Even then, you don't feel good about seeing it. While some people may cheer it on, I feel sad when I see it in fiction. I'm revolted when I see it in real life.
I was surprised that Alan Dershowitz, who as a panelist on the show, didn't understand the moral cost of torture. Even if you get the answers, you lose something. Torture doesn't work. It doesn't get you the right answers. John McCain, who was tortured, walked out during James Inhofe's disgusting rant. He knows what torture is like first hand, and justifying it was just plain wrong.
The reality is that anyone we could torture and had important information would probably hold out or use a cover story which checked out. So as a practical matter, it doesn't work. But more importantly, we have evidence that torture doesn't work. Tne Germans used very sophisticated techniques in tricking American and British airmen which got far more relevant information than the Gestapo's torture. People have the will to resist beatings, kindness is much harder to resist.
But morally, torture undermines everything we supposedly stand for. Sure, beating the crap out of some AQ lowlife is satisfying, but it doesn't work. Given a choice, I'd like to see Osama and his boys roasted over open fires for a day or so. But when you do that, when you give into that impulse, you become as bad as they are, and that is a luxury we cannot afford. It is a luxury to torture and kill at whim. Americans have to stand for something more than raw power.
Americans have been very lucky in creating a country which welcomes anyone and can admit great error. Segregation was the law of this country for 400 years and it ended in 10. Are we perfect? Is segregation gone? No. You can see any number of reports on racial steering in real estate. But it is no longer the law of the land. That was a moral and legal change of tremendous proportions which is still to our credit today.
When you embrace torture, even as a temporary solution, you negate our laws, traditions and customs. The same as when you deny the wrong being done. This country was founded on the right to not be tortured and abused by police. We wrote it into our first laws, unless cruel and unusual punishment means something other than torture. Anyone who tries to justify this defiles our deepest beliefs and ideals.
As the situation in Iraq goes from bad to worse, Sherle R Schwenninger, Phyllis Bennis and Mansour Farhang outline possible exit strategies for the US
Thursday May 13, 2004
Talk about it
Part 1 of this series
Sherle R Schwenninger: Be bold
The most commonly proposed Democratic alternative to the administration's policy in Iraq - turning over political authority to the UN and getting more countries to provide more troops and money - is well intentioned but lacks seriousness, for two reasons.
First, it is not realistic to expect the UN to assume such responsibility without more resources, without assurances from the US about security and without some control over the conduct of US military strategy.
Likewise, it is not realistic to expect countries such as Egypt, France, Germany, Russia, India and Pakistan, which opposed the war, to now commit substantial troops to Iraq in the middle of a major insurgency, especially without a larger shift in US policy.
For both domestic and international reasons, these countries do not want to be seen as instruments of what they consider to be a misguided US policy toward the Middle East in general.
Second, the Democratic alternative does not go far enough to change the political dynamic from one of occupation (albeit a more legitimate one) to one of Iraqi sovereignty.
After all, the UN itself has been a target of the insurgents, and there now seems to be a general mistrust and impatience with any foreign control over Iraq's future. Any proposal to stabilise Iraq must restore a sense of ownership to the Iraqi people as well as real power.
For these reasons, we need to think in bolder terms about what we can offer to the international community and to the Iraqi people in order to gain their active support for a plan that would transfer authority to the UN and to an Iraqi interim government.
There would need to be three elements to this grand bargain. The first would be the promise of substantial resources to the UN, not only for this Iraqi state-building effort but also for comparable efforts in the future, including resources that would increase the capacity of the UN to provide more of its own security in the future for such missions.
Unless the US can demonstrate to the other major stakeholders in the UN that its attitude toward the organisation has changed, it is unlikely to elicit more than a token response.
The second element of the grand bargain must be the internationalisation of other elements of its Middle East policy that affect the political dynamic inside Iraq. It makes no sense whatsoever for other countries to commit money and security forces to Iraq as long as the US continues to condone Israeli policy toward the Palestinians and pursues a hostile policy toward Iran and Syria.
The Congressmen and women looked shaken as they talked on TV today about the torture gallery they sat through. Many are sexually explicit pictures of soldiers doing each other.
They can only hold back the pictures for so long. As bad as they are, withholding them only prolongs the agony.
John Kerry is already casting about for a new SecDef. John McCain is the obivous choice, but he won't want the job under Bush. While I may not agree with his politics, his ethics are leagues higher than Rumsfeld. What people need to understand about McCain's name popping up with Kerry is this: he trusts McCain. They are pretty close friends, as is the way in Washington. John Warner and Carl Levin are the other names which popped up.
What this means, is that Rummy is getting the Fredo treatment. He's being kissed up to in public, but the knives are out for him. You don't debate who's going to get fired until that's a realistic possibility.
The problem for Bush is that keeping the achingly incompetent Rumsfeld and his crew reminds people exactly what is wrong in Iraq. Rumsfeld has smirked and sneered his way across the media and the press folks were all too happy to play along, even as reports of US abuses filled non-US media.
You'd have to search the web to read about US gunning down children, robbing Iraqis during raids, drinking to insensate levels, shooting up hospitals. The American media ignored and downplayed abuses by US troops for nearly a year. They also downplayed the severe equipment shortages, parents shipping water to their kids, families sending gun oil to units, people using AK's because they were short rifles.
These weren't on Al Jazeera, but in British, Australian, New Zealand and South African papers. It is ridiculous to look at Abu Ghraib in isolation and to say a few privates and NCO's lost their heads. It has its roots in a deep racist contempt for Iraqis.
There seems to be a search for an Israeli connection in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, when it's more than likely, our imported torturers were Arabs. We own Egypt as well as Israel and the potential blowback is far less severe. Same with Albanians, Pakistanis and Gulf State residents. All could practice the art of torture on their coreligionists with scant concern.
There is simply no way to describe exactly how incompetent Rumsfeld has been.Every major decision he made was wrong. From launching the war on to Abu Ghraib. The US media is afraid to raise the questions or even report honestly on the troops and their activties. Instead, we get a sanitized picture of the war until we're staring them in the face. We ignore the cursing and gun waving and robbery, but notice the sodomy and humiliation. When it is way too late to save our efforts in Iraq.
You have to wonder what kind of twisted fuck would do that. Their excuse, Abu Ghraib, is a pale one. They did the same thing to Danny Pearl and there was no reason. Once you enter a world of violence, escape is difficult.
Sen. Inhofe's comments will serve as a death sentence to Americans in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. His use of Saddam will only serve to infuriate Arabs and drive them to harsher measures. It is a contest we cannot win.
I wanted to smash my TV when the White House said "we will bring them to justice". What? This is WAR. These folks are not going to surrender and go to trial. They're living by a code of kill or be killed. You can't build a case against them. Are these people delusional? Every time an American is killed in Iraq, they talk about catching the guy like he's a West Philly crack dealer involved in a driveby. Well, that's not in the cards.
The US government seems to still miss the idea that most Iraqis are perfectly willing to watch Americans die and not lift a finger. Berg was snatched off the streets and held for a month. No one said a word. No one called the cops. When will Bush take the hint. Iraqis are not going to support our little government. The exiles are liars, fools or both. Most Iraqis do not give a damn how many Americans die, and they certainly aren't going to risk anything for us.
This doesn't mean we get to go on a killing spree, but it's time we realize cutting our losses might be the wisest move. We're not going to fix anything, not even the stuff we broke. Imagine the reaction when the US troops come to take the men away.
We're in a land of denial. Every time we try to excuse our troops by claiming they're not all sadistic torturers, we miss the daily humiliation and racist behavior of our troops. When Iraqis deal with Americans, it's not all sunshine and light. People die, are beaten, robbed. Abu Ghraib was just the end of the line for humiliating Iraqis. We need to stop pretending that Abu Ghraib was the exception. Iraqis would heartily disagree.
Jen sent this along, and since this concept amuses me, well....
McDonald's adult Happy Meal arrives
The Go Active! package for grown-ups includes salad, water and even exercise tips.
May 11, 2004: 2:13 PM EDT
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - McDonald's gave its grown-up customers their very own Happy Meal box Tuesday that comes with water, salad and a booklet of exercise tips.
But given that the big kids don't get a fun little toy in it -- just a "stepometer" -- it remains to be seen if this latest gimmick from the fast-food king will get adults to actually start "lovin' it."
Oak Brook, Ill.-based McDonald's (MCD: Research, Estimates), which launched the Go Active! Happy Meal at its U.S. restaurants nationwide, said the Go Active! Meals will be sold only for a short period of time, until June 7. However, a McDonald's spokeswoman said the meal option could become a permanent part of the menu in the future.
The hamburger chain has been a target of obesity lawsuits and has increasingly been criticized for promoting "unhealthy" eating habits among both children and adults. McDonald's over the past year took steps to improve its image by launching premium salads, eliminating its Super Size menu options and touting other diet-conscious options at its outlets. .
The company said that the Go Active! Happy Meals are another way for it to offer customers a balanced option.
The adult meal, priced at $5.99 a box, includes a choice of McDonald's four premium salads, a "stepometer" that clips on a belt and counts the number of steps you take in a day, and a "Step With It!" booklet with tips for walking and working out.
Wow, salad and water. And a stepometer as well. Gee, that's gonna make me stop eating Big Macs.
Actually, a Big Mac bloats me, but this is well, a sign McDonalds fears discovery. The first go round, people laughed at the fat people suing McDonalds. The second go round won't be funny, because they won't be going after the marketing, but the food chemistry. The question McDonald's hasn't had to deal with is what exactly is in their food. People assume it's just the same stuff we buy on our own. It isn't even close. It's filled with chemicals and adulterants designed to create a consistant flavor and taste across regions. How can a McDonald's burger taste the same in London, England and London, Ontario? That's not an accident, but better eating through chemistry.
All of the fast food places face the same dilemma and what's even worse is what we feed kids. When Alice Waters, the inventor of modern American cusine, spoke last night at the James Beard Award, cooking's Oscars, she said her goal was to "reform the way American kids ate. To turn lunch into a curriculum."
If you ever wonder why so many families are fat, think about the crap they sell kids and the way parents eat after their kids. It isn't just Junior eating chicken fingers and going to Chuck E. Cheese. Kids cannot drive to Chuck E. Cheese and parents aren't going to starve.
Most adults would choose different fast food, like Taco Bell, over McDonalds, if it wasn't driven by toys and kids. Taco Bell has smaller portions, more intense flavors, more sophisticated food. But many kids are afraid of tacos. Not that they won't eat them when familiar, but no two year old will say "Taco Bell". They learn M=McDonalds by the time they can walk. When my nephew was 18 months old, he called every M McDonalds. This isn't to say that Taco Bell is good for you, it isn't, but two tacos have about 400 calories and a Big Mac 590. Also, the lack of french fries, even with all the cheese, cuts down on fat. A burrito is far better for you, even with the chemically altered food, than the tryptic of fries, burger and soda.
The revolution in eating is coming. Fast food has to change to offer more alternatives and fresher food. Subway, Quiznos, even Blimpies, by not serving fried food, are better alternatives than the burger places. Even Popeyes and KFC have fewer calories than burgers. The low carb fad, and it's ridiculous with its rules and poor communication of portion control (a burger with cheese and bacon is not healthy for you on a consistant basis, even if you lose weight.), ends, people will have to face the fact that processed, fatty foods will harm you over time. Avoid pasta is stupid, eating less of it, like Europeans, is smart. Only in the US and Argentina would a 24 oz steak for one person would be considered a good meal. Most places wouldn't serve you half that. Tuscan steak is a porterhouse which can serve four people. Most American steakhouses serve the same cut for one.
McDonald's is selling salads as the prelude to big changes in how they design, chemically alter and prepare their food.
James Inhofe (R-OK) is one of the Senate's troglodytes. A dumber than grass reactionary. But today, he completely embarassed himself and most of his collegues.
SEN. INHOFE: Mr. Chairman, I also am -- and have to say, when we talk about the treatment of these prisoners, that I would guess that these prisoners wake up every morning thanking Allah that Saddam Hussein is not in charge of these prisoners. When he was in charge they would take electric drills and drill holes through hands, they would cut their tongues out, they would cut their ears off. We've seen accounts of lowering their bodies into vats of acid. All these things were taking place. This was the type of treatment that they had.
And I would want everyone to get this and read it. This is a documentary of the Iraq special report. It talks about the unspeakable acts of mass murder, unspeakable acts of torture, unspeakable acts of mutilation, the murdering of kids -- lining up 312 little kids under 12 years old and executing them, and then of course what they do to Americans, too.
There's one story in here that was in the I think it was The New York Times, yes, on June 2nd. I suggest everyone take that -- get that and read it. It's about one of the prisoners who did escape as they were marched out there, blindfolded and put before mass graves, and they mowed them down and they buried them. This man was buried alive and he clawed his way out and was able to tell his story.
And I ask, Mr. Chairman, at this point in the record that this account of the brutality of Saddam Hussein be entered into the record, made a part of the record.
SEN. WARNER: Without objection, so ordered.
SEN. INHOFE: I am also outraged that we have so many humanitarian do-gooders right now crawling all over these prisons, looking for human rights violations while our troops, our heroes, are fighting and dying. And I just don't think we can take seven -- seven bad people. There are some 700 guards in Abu Ghraib. There are some 25 other prisons, about 15,000 guards all together, and seven of them did things they shouldn't have done and they're being punished for that.
But what about some 300,000 troops have been rotating through all this time and they have -- all the stories of valor are there.
Now, one comment about Rumsfeld. A lot of them don't like him. And I'm sorry that Senator McCain isn't here, because I just now said to him, "Do you remember back three years ago when Secretary Rumsfeld was up for confirmation, and I said these guys aren't going to like him because he doesn't kowtow to them, he is not easily intimidated." I've never seen Secretary Rumsfeld intimidated. And quite frankly, I can't think of any American today as qualified as Donald Rumsfeld is to prosecute this war.
Now -- oh, one other thing. All the idea about these pictures. I would suggest to you any pictures -- and I think maybe we should get direction from this committee, Mr. Chairman, that if pictures are authorized to be disseminated among the public, that for every picture of abuse or alleged abuse of prisoners, we have pictures of mass graves, pictures of children being executed, pictures of the four Americans in Baghdad that were burned and their bodies were mutilated and dismembered in public. Let's get the whole picture.
During this truly embarassing rant, which got most everything wrong, Sen. McCain walked out. CNN implied that his absence was purposeful.
Why do the knuckleheads always equate our actions with Saddam's as if that is an excuse. Just because Abu Ghraib was an infamous torture center during Saddam's time doesn't give us leave to open our own rape and humiiation center there.
We are supposed to be liberating the Iraqis. Instead we set up penal colonies and started abusing Iraqis, whom the Red Cross claims 90 percent were innocent. Inhofe's "Saddam did worse" rant ignores every standard of decency. Also, it's been pretty clear that the seven MP's, who have no real defense, were not acting alone. Just because they were ordered to torture people doesn't mean those orders were legal. The Nuremberg defense is not valid, not is scapegoating them going to suffice.
I hope their lawyers come up with a better defense than "we were ordered to torture" and "we never read the Geneva Conventions." Were all their officers all so ignorant?
What Inhofe and his reactionary troll buddies need to get is this: just because Saddam was total animal, it doesn't give us any excuse for mistreating Iraqis. His mass graves, his electric drills, his murders doesn't excuse us for violating our own laws, morals and ethics. The fact that Inhofe could even make that argument makes him look like an idiot.
Juan Cole notes that Sadr has expanded his war after he refused to surrender to Coalition forces. Gee, that's a mystery. How his fellow clerics could expect Sadr to walk voluntarily into custody after our activities in our Abu Ghraib penal colony is beyond me.
There is no way a sane person would walk into Coalition custofdy now.
The Shia leadership is too clever by half. They want to use the US Army to settle their civil dispute. They can kill or arrest Sadr and the unwashed, who Sadr and his father represents, will accept Sistani's leadership. They have waited for a year to see the US hand them power. Every move has played on US stupidity.
Now, we're going to do the Shia clerics dirty work by hunting down Sadr and his movement. At the end of the day, we are choosing which theocrats will invite them to leave. This was the same game the French Communists played before 1943. They did little to fight the Germans, then they became insanely aggressive when it was clear the resistance would run France after WW II., provoking German reprisals. They also hid weapons for their "revolution". DeGaulle was clever. He didn't denounce the Communists, he outfoxed them by disbanding the Resistance in September, 1944 and sent all the young men in the Army.
It is clear that the US wildly underestimated the Sadrist movement. They wanted the undermanned Spanish to take Sadr "dead or alive". Of course, when the body bags flowed back to Madrid, Bush would talk about "our brave Spanish allies". Of course, this errant stupidity helped force Zapatero's hand and have him bring the troops home. Suicide missions in Iraq was not on their agenda. Despite the crap about the Spanish being "disappointed" about being brought home, it was clear the commanders were quite happy to be going home before they were ordered to do something stupid.
The Spanish had around 1200 men and in any showdown with the Sadrists, they were going to be outnumbered, outgunned and in deep trouble. They were not going to launch an offensive with a reenforced battalion into a city of 500,000 people and then catch the blowback. They refused the US command that they bring back Sadr "dead or alive" a phrase Cole attributes to Bush, but could be said by any of the idiots in charge. The whole idea that Spanish troops could break the uneasy truce they had with the Sadrists and Sistani's people and start kicking ass and taking names is an American fantasy. One the Spanish opted out of.
Now the plan is to use the Iranian-backed SCIRI to fight Sadr, unleashing an inter-Shia civil war. SCIRI is hated because they are seen as Iranian tools. Their members tortured Iraqi Shia POW's in Iranian camps. This is an especially stupid move as Sadr becomes increasingly linked to Iraqi nationalism. The last thing the US needs is to be seen as linked to a party many Shia regard as traitors.
When asked about Spc. Jeremy Sivitis, a man from his home town said, among other things "why are we bound by such high standards?"
Well, because we pride ourselves on being decent human beings, for one thing. More importantly, because we represent the rule of law and order over the whims of the powerful. If Iraqis came to his town, said they represented freedom and then raped his daughter, he would be quite unhappy.
Rush started whining about how people were picking on him for calling the torture at our penal colony "fraternity hazing".
The knucklehead impulse runs deep among my fellow Americans. You can hear Howard Stern and Colin Quinn occasionally opine on the final solution to the Middle East problem being a nuclear volley. The fact that we would be seen as war criminals never seems to enter their world view.
Bush is only pandering to this knucklehead impulse with his go it alone stand. It crosses party lines and comes from the relative isolation Americans have from the rest of the world. The people in Sivitis's home town are not likely to have spent much time abroad. They see America as the best place on earth and able to do anything they want. Sand niggers giving us trouble? Nuke them.
Now, usually, people with rational views of the world are able to prevent policy from degenerating into such suicidally savage behavior. The rational usually wins out in the end. But, unfortunately, the neocons who run DOD bought into this American exceptionalism.
"Rights? They don't have any rights. Let's detain them for years."
This idea, that the US could arrest anyone, hold them incommunicado and let them go on our whims has bitten us squarely in the ass. The rules of war exist for a reason. But for Feith and Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, those rules got in the way. It was time to play Dirty Harry. They would do what it took to get the proof they needed. Sloppy, cheap and fast.
The problem is that in the real world, sloppy, fast and cheap gets you killed or screwed over. The torture regime at our Iraqi penal colonies has done more to bolster the resistance than a hundred Fallujahs. Once the knowledge of what Americans would do to the innocent was known, it didn't take much to get people to join the resistance. Public sexual humiliation is reason enough to kill for most anyone. For Arabs, its particularly shameful.
There is another truth that the knuckleheads don't get. We can't be as savage as our enemies, even if we try. For every atrocity we commit, they can top us, It's not a game to play. Instead, like a martial artist, we need to play to their weakness. The one weakness of Arab states is the lack of justice not influenced by the powerful. If we had set up a fair justice system, not Gitmo East with sexual torture added, Iraqis and other Arabs would see why we cherish our justice system, as flawed as it is. But now, they see us as Saddam's replacements, with even less order and logic.
You cannot torture your way to victory. Once you use torture, the odds are against you.
George Bush has been running around the country saying "this is not the American I Know" when talking about our Iraqi penal colonies. I try not to laugh when this comes from a man who once oversaw the running of Huntsville Prison. Who saw James Byrd dragged through the streets like a dead cow while white supremacists laughed. Please, torture in Abu Ghraib is as American as apple pie. We used to lynch people, take pictures and serve lemonade.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Justice Department said Monday it is reopening the investigation into the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a black teenager whose death while visiting Mississippi was an early catalyst for the civil rights movement.
Till was abducted from his uncle's home in Money, Miss., on Aug. 28, 1955. The mutilated body of the 14-year-old from Chicago was found by fishermen three days later in the Tallahatchie River.
Pictures of the slaying shocked the world. Two white men charged with murder -- Roy Bryant and his half brother, J.W. Milam -- were acquitted by an all-white jury. Both men have since died.
Justice Department officials did not say what prompted them to reopen the case. Details of the renewed investigation, which also involves officials in Mississippi, were to be announced Monday by R. Alexander Acosta, assistant attorney general for civil rights.
In 1956, Look magazine published an account of the slaying in which Milam admitted to the killing, which occurred a few days after Till purportedly whistled at a white girl in a store.
``'Chicago boy,' I said, 'I'm tired of them sending your kind down here to stir up trouble,''' Milam was quoted as saying. ``I'm going to make an example of you, just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand.''
Milam said he beat Till and shot him in the head with a .45-caliber pistol, then tied a heavy metal fan to the body and dumped it in the river.
This didn't happen in Iraq. It happened in America. Now, I don't understand what Bush is talking about. In America, lynchings were an all-American part of life. They were entertainment. Our prisons weren't much better. Bush's America may be filled with pretty things, but anyone who's read American history knows he's full of shit. Americans have a long, brutal track record of extrajudicial justice.
There is nothing which happened at Abu Ghraib was out of the American character. Not the torture or the people who tried to stop it. Bush is either woefully misinformed or just straight up lying when he says the torture was some kind of abberation in character. It wasn't and isn't and there is massive evidence to prove that.
We're talking about a country where people rioted when Catholic Irish orphans were to be given to Catholic Mexican families. In 1909, these Orphans were shipped west and when white folks found out that Mexicans were going to get white kids, the torches and guns came out. This is the same country which burnt down predominantly black towns in Florida and Oklahoma. The roots of extrajudicial violence run as deep as a spring in this country.
Sure, we've changed since 1955. We're far less racist and cruel and we do actually investigate hate crimes now, not just cover them up. But to say "his America" couldn't do this is not going to fool anyone. The world knows our history better than we do.
After your generous contributions, I decided to test Paypal's functionality and buy a few things. Bidding is still a pain in the ass, but the bargains you can find on Ebay are actually pretty good, if you're careful.
You can use your Paypal balance either as a virtual credit card or with your balance to pay bills on Ebay and other Paypal shops. I managed to find a copy of the highly recommended Pro Evolution Soccer 3 online. I had tried to buy it on Amazon, but their UK shop will not sell software outside the EU, and their US shop doesn't sell it. Ebay was the only reasonable resource. It wound up to be less than $40, which is reasonable.
There are things I would never touch on Ebay, like components and systems. It's just a lot better to deal with a reliable vendor like Newegg.com, which has return policies and a great reputation. It could be cheaper on Ebay, but people sell any shit there and it may or may not work.
I did decide to buy a Treo 90, a 64MB SD MMC card and a replacement cell phone.
The cell was $30 off retail and I want to give my old phone to my mother. She won't use it much, but I want to be able to reach her when she's out.
The SD card is about $50 in the street, and was $26 new, at Ebay. I needed more megs for my digital camera, which I gave to Jen in the hospital and haven't been able to get back yet. It also fits in the Treo.
Now, why do I want a two year old Treo made by a company which no longer exists as a seperate entity?
Because PDA's are not something to invest in. The cheaper, the better. Unlike PC's, the major functionality difference is color. The newest models are slightly speedier, but only slightly. My olf Handspring Visor works fine, but the reality is that a slight upgrade for $70 and the fact that it is seriously outmoded, makes it worth it..
The price of PDA's, instead of going down, have climbed up. Sure, you can do fancy things like use wireless and have a cellphone, but for those of us who use it as an electronic notebook, why would we spend hundreds of dollars to play MP3's. A lot of people predict a fusion device in the next few years, but while connecting a phone and a PDA would be nice, the two devices have discrete uses. A cell is ubiquitous, a PDA is not.
The problem for PDA makers is that there is no obivous upgrade path for a PDA. So you get colors, that's about it. Why do you need a wireless PDA? Or a PDA phone. My friend Dave has a PDA phone. He rarely uses the PDA part.
I, otoh, rarely use my cell. Maybe four calls a week, max. I would use a PDA a lot more. I figure that even though my Visor works, the monochrome screen was driving me nuts. Color would be easier to use and easy to do things like download maps. Also, the keyboard would be easier to use than graffiti, although I never had a real problem with it.
The computer parts were an easy call. Pro Evolution Soccer was an even easier call. After all, man does not live by work alone. But the reason to upgrade the PDA, which was a fraction of what I paid for my Visor is that I actually use it. I haven't used the Visor in months, but that's because I haven't been going too far.
The PDA is a weird device. It's both useful and really expensive new. Spending $400 for something to take notes on makes no sense. It's the same reason I don't own an iPod. It's a lot cheaper to burn CD's. But for under a hundred bucks, a new PDA makes sense, especially when I'll actually use it,
I don't get why Palm and the Windows PDA makers have opted for features when the basic use of the PDA isn't going to change. The price point should be going down, not up. Expanded features don't make them more attractive. They're little electronic notebooks which have some useful features. Hell, if an iPod was under $200, they'd be worth something. But at their current price point, I don't get it.
One way to save money in technology is to get last year's model. With PDA's, that makes even more sense. Buying some things new is just a waste of cash.
The idea that MP's were "just following orders" may comfort the families of the accused, but it will not shield them from long terms of imprisonment any more that it kept Jodl and Keitel alive. Illegal, immoral orders must be refused. This is a core concept of military discipline and of common sense.
If anyone is confused, you cannot sic dogs on prisoners, beat them, watch them raped at your behest and murder them. Even in the guise of "softening them up", it is nowhere close to permitted.
Sy Hersh deals with this in two passages from his current story in the New Yorker, which has a truly sickening picture of a prisoner tormented by dogs.
When I asked retired Major General Charles Hines, who was commandant of the Army’s military-police school during a twenty-eight-year career in military law enforcement, about these reports, he reacted with dismay. “Turning a dog loose in a room of people? Loosing dogs on prisoners of war? I’ve never heard of it, and it would never have been tolerated,” Hines said. He added that trained police dogs have long been a presence in Army prisons, where they are used for sniffing out narcotics and other contraband among the prisoners, and, occasionally, for riot control. But, he said, “I would never have authorized it for interrogating or coercing prisoners. If I had, I’d have been put in jail or kicked out of the Army.”
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Not everybody went along. A company captain in a military-police unit in Baghdad told me last week that he was approached by a junior intelligence officer who requested that his M.P.s keep a group of detainees awake around the clock until they began talking. “I said, ‘No, we will not do that,’” the captain said. “The M.I. commander comes to me and says, ‘What is the problem? We’re stressed, and all we are asking you to do is to keep them awake.’ I ask, ‘How? You’ve received training on that, but my soldiers don’t know how to do it. And when you ask an eighteen-year-old kid to keep someone awake, and he doesn’t know how to do it, he’s going to get creative.’” The M.I. officer took the request to the captain’s commander, but, the captain said, “he backed me up.
“It’s all about people. The M.P.s at Abu Ghraib were failed by their commanders—both low-ranking and high,” the captain said. “The system is broken—no doubt about it. But the Army is made up of people, and we’ve got to depend on them to do the right thing.”
In every situation, people will refuse to do what is wrong. The problem is that so many people didn't do the right thing. There is a chain of command of officers who either turned their back on this, permitted it or just didn't care.
But we have to prevent the Calley defense from rasing it's head again. Calley, who murdered 400 people at My Lai, was essentially defended by the argument that the enemy did the same thing. Nixon reduced his sentence the man as a way to play to his base.
But the road to savage behavior has roots. It never happens alone or in isolation.
Charlie Company came to Viet Nam in December, 1967. It located in Quang Ngai Province in January, 1968, as one of the three companies in Task Force Barker, an ad hoc unit headed by Lt. Col. Frank Barker, Jr. Its mission was to pressure the VC in an area of the province known as "Pinkville." Charlie Company's commanding officer was Ernest Medina, a thirty-three-year-old Mexican-American from New Mexico who was popular with his soldiers. One of his platoon leaders was twenty-four-year-old William Calley. Charlie Company soldiers expressed amazement that Calley was thought by anyone to be officer material. One described Calley as"a kid trying to play war." [LINK TO CHAIN OF COMMAND DIAGRAM] Calley's utter lack of respect for the indigenous population was apparent to all in the company. According to one soldier, "if they wanted to do something wrong, it was alright with Calley." The soldiers of Charlie Company, like most combat soldiers in Viet Nam, scored low on military exams. Few combat soldiers had education beyond high school.
Seymour Hersh wrote that by March of 1968 "many in the company had given in to an easy pattern of violence." Soldiers systematically beat unarmed civilians. Some civilians were murdered. Whole villages were burned. Wells were poisoned. Rapes were common.
On March 14, a small squad from "C" Company ran into a booby trap, killing a popular sergeant, blinding one GI and wounding several others. The following evening, when a funeral service was held for the killed sergeant, soldiers had revenge on their mind. After the service, Captain Medina rose to give the soldiers a pep talk and discuss the next morning's mission. Medina told them that the VC's crack 48th Battalion was in the vicinity of a hamlet known as My Lai 4, which would be the target of a large-scale assault by the company. The soldiers' mission would be to engage the 48th Battalion and to destroy the village of My Lai. By 7 a.m., Medina said, the women and children would be out of the hamlet and all they could expect to encounter would be the enemy. The soldiers were to explode brick homes, set fire to thatch homes, shoot livestock, poison wells, and destroy the enemy. The seventy-five or so American soldiers would be supported in their assault by gunship pilots.
.......
By 8 a.m., Calley's platoon had crossed the plaza on the town's southern edge and entered the village. They encountered families cooking rice in front of their homes. The men began their usual search-and-destroy task of pulling people from homes, interrogating them, and searching for VC. Soon the killing began. The first victim was a man stabbed in the back with a bayonet. Then a middle-aged man was picked up, thrown down a well, and a grenade lobbed in after him. A group of fifteen to twenty mostly older women were gathered around a temple, kneeling and praying. They were all executed with shots to the back of their heads. Eighty or so villagers were taken from their homes and herded to the plaza area. As many cried "No VC! No VC!", Calley told soldier Paul Meadlo, "You know what I want you to do with them". When Calley returned ten minutes later and found the Vietnamese still gathered in the plaza he reportedly said to Meadlo, "Haven't you got rid of them yet? I want them dead. Waste them." Meadlo and Calley began firing into the group from a distance of ten to fifteen feet. The few that survived did so because they were covered by the bodies of those less fortunate.
.......
As the third platoon moved into My Lai, it was followed by army photographer Ronald Haeberle, there to document what was supposed to be a significant encounter with a crack enemy battalion. Haeberle took many pictures. He said he saw about thirty different GIs kill about 100 civilians. Once Haeberle focused his camera on a young child about five feet away, but before he could get his picture the kid was blown away. He angered some GIs as he tried to photograph them as they fondled the breasts of a fifteen-year-old Vietnamese girl.
An army helicopter piloted by Chief Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson arrived in the My Lai vicinity about 9 a.m. Thompson noticed dead and dying civilians all over the village. Thompson repeatedly saw young boys and girls being shot at point-blank range. Thompson, furious at what he saw, reported the wanton killings to brigade headquarters
Meanwhile, the rampage below continued. Calley was at the drainage ditch on the eastern edge of the village, where about seventy to eighty old men, women, and children not killed on the spot had been brought. Calley ordered the dozen or so platoon members there to push the people into the ditch, and three or four GIs did. Calley ordered his men to shoot into the ditch. Some refused, others obeyed. One who followed Calley's order was Paul Meadlo, who estimated that he killed about twenty-five civilians. (Later Meadlo was seen, head in hands, crying.) Calley joined in the massacre. At one point, a two-year-old child who somehow survived the gunfire began running towards the hamlet. Calley grabbed the child, threw him back in the ditch, then shot him.
Hugh Thompson, by now almost frantic, saw bodies in the ditch, including a few people who were still alive. He landed his helicopter and told Calley to hold his men there while he evacuated the civilians. Thompson told his helicopter crew chief to "open up on the Americans" if they fired at the civilians. He put himself between Calley's men and the Vietnamese. When a rescue helicopter landed, Thompson had the nine civilians, including five children, flown to the nearest army hospital. Later, Thompson was to land again and rescue a baby still clinging to her dead mother.
There are always going to be people who refuse to murder and torment the innocent. They existed in Nazi Germany, and they exist today. The problem is that there are always those willing to kill the innocent, torment and humiliate them. They will always use the excuse of orders to hide their own culpability. But everyone faces a moral choice and a cost for following that moral choice.
The six MP's ignored every instinct they should have had, every shred of human decency, and instead wanted the approval of the Military Intelligence officers and contractors running Abu Ghraib. While there are plenty of people above them who deserve jail, their officers, for a start, let's not forget, if one of these men or women had just refused to torture, to obey orders they had to know were not only illegal, but fundamentally wrong.
I mean if you reach 18 in an American High School, and you do have to to join the US Army, you know siccing dogs on people and beating the shit out of them, much less having them jerk off for your amusement is wrong. You don't need a booklet to understand that. You don't need lectures on the laws of war to understand that. You just need to be raised in a place without stone walls and dirt floors and wolves as parents.
I have genuine compassion for the parents of the six MP's. They didn't realize they raised monsters. They think they're still the same kids they sent off to the Army. They aren't of course. The broad grins and laughter at the utter humiliation of Iraqis are not some hidden part of the human psyche. The need for approval and racial disdain for Iraqis were on the surface.
Sgt. Chip Fredrick wrote home proudly that he was helping OGA (Other Government Agencies) which translates to the DIA and CIA. Why? Because he felt like a big man helping people better educated and more experienced than him. They told him to work the prisoners over and he did. Only when he realized that people were going to get in trouble for this, did he start to worry. This is a man who was a prison guard in civilian life. He knew what he was doing would have gotten him prosecuted in his job at home. Yet, Iraqis got humiliated for sport.
What people need to remember is that everyone is accountable for their actions. We all hope Fredrick's bosses get the jail sentences they deserve for their gross failures. But let us not forget that the camp guards are also guilty. They failed morally and they need to be punished. Not alone, but they should not escape justice because there are others who are guilty as well. We must resist the impulse to excuse or equate their actions. Because torture is always wrong, always a besmirching of our values, no matter what comes from it.
I have fairly sharp memories about the disdain and fear people had for Nixon. We all knew that he was ratshit crazy and mean as a badger. There was no question that he would have been a dictator. Even the Army thought that.
The Abu Ghraib scandal is going to grow. This kind of thing doesn't go away, doesn't get forgotten. I remember in 1972-73, no one wanted to hear that Nixon and his aides were crooks. But the Plumbers weren't raping young boys and killing innocent people.
It's become pretty clear, pretty quickly, that the MP's were the Cubans who broke into the Watergate, not the people who ordered it. I find the spin the lawyers are giving utter bullshit and their clients deserve decades in jail for what they did. You don't need the fucking Geneva Convention to prohibit anal rape of teenage boys. You don't take smiling pictures with humiliated and naked men.
What is becoming clearer is that this was policy. A policy which was directed from the Pentagon and may well wind up in the Vice President's office. After all, the Secretary of State said there were problems with our Iraqi penal colonies and he was ignored. Now Rumsfeld may think the sun shines on his ass, but that kind of disregard had to have support from higher up.
Anytime someone complained, they were blown off by the DOD's civilian chiefs. Besides being arrogant and stupid, there has to be political support to keep blowing off complaints about something so basic.
This is what DOD refused to do in the months before January's release of the pictures:
* Ignored several NGO reports about abuse in the Iraqi penal colony system. Including several secret Red Cross reports.
* Refused to allow Indiana Congressman and Army Reserve Colonel Steve Buyer to take over the unit at Abu Ghraib.
* Ignore the report by MG Ryder, the Army Provost Marshal, about conditions at Abu Ghraib.
* Ignore other reports about abusive conditions in our Iraqi penal colony.
How could the civilian leadership at DOD ignore all these reports streaming in without political support from the White House. Maybe Bush was ignorant of this, but does anyone believe the now silent Dick Cheney wasn't. Rumsfeld and his people have a direct line to Cheney. How was he kept in the dark? Bush is a loose manager, but Cheney is a control freak.
While there may never be record of a conversation between Rumsfeld and Cheney to ignore this, Cheney is obsessed with not only the war, but with proving a Saddam-Al Qaeda link. Much of the expediency permitted by Rumsfeld was endorsed and encouraged by Cheney.
This was not isolated abberations but a planned way to get information from people, regardless of the law or common sense. This wasn't dreamed up by privates or contractors, but had to be permitted from the highest reaches of the civilian leadership.
If this can be proven, we have returned to Watergate.
Getting rid of Rumsfeld is not the snap decision it would seem. Of course, it goes without saying his smug ass deserves to be fired. But if he did, who would take his place.
This is no small question, for Bush or the nation.
Clearly, Wolfowitz and the neocons would never make it pass the Armed Services committee. He's a chickenhawk and so are his deputies. Bad qualifications for someone running DOD. The generals hate Rummy, but they detest Wolfie.
Unless John McCain wanted the job, and he would be right to say no, and wait for Kerry to make the offer, there are no clear candidates, except disgraced Former Speaker Newt Gingrich. As odious as that may seem, there are no clear successors for Bush to pick from.
Now, you have to ask yourself, would you want Newt Gingrich running DOD?
The problem is that if Bush has to pull the trigger, there is no Bill Cohen sitting in the wings, ready to go. And Rummy's deputies are as tainted as he is.
This is no small consideration in a war and one where we may have to withdraw under fire. Rumsfeld incompetence is clear and stark, but the alternatives are not likely to make anyone happy.
And for Bush, having to fire his defense secretary would be an admission of failure. There would be no way to disguise it. At the same time, Sen. Lindsey Graham, an Air Force reserve lawyer, and McCain were brutal to Rumsfeld and Myers yesterday. They were not ready to call for him to be dumped, knowing it may well not only sink Bush's reelection, but their majorities in Congress, but their demeanor was not happy.
As things get worse, we all know Bush's instinct will be to brazen it out and hang tough. But if we're watching Iraqis rape young boys on CNN, heads will roll. There is a limit to what even Bush can withstand.
Let's understand Abu Ghraib in context. This is the greatest command failure since the loss of the 102nd Division in the Battle of the Bulge. Gen. Karpinski was criminally incompetent. Even Congress expects some more people to be courtmartialed. Unlike My Lai, which made us look bad, but had a limited international effect, Abu Ghraib undermines us in the Arab world to a frightening degree.
Basically, throwing Rummy to the wolves may slow the hemmorage, but it may not stop it. The ultimate person to pay for this may well be Bush. Abu Ghraib is so beastial that the conscience cannot let it go unpunished.
A new movie Super Size Me chronicles the adventures of filmmaker Morgan Spurlock eating nothing but McDonalds for a month.
Super Size Me" shows Spurlock eating (and, in one scene, regurgitating) masses of fast food, day after day. His plan requires that he eat only from the McDonald's menu (water is included), he has to eat everything on the menu at least once, and he can't exercise. (A New Yorker, he doesn't even do the normal day's worth of walking most Manhattanites do, opting to take cabs everywhere.) Along the way, Spurlock is supervised by various doctors and health professionals, one of whom warns him that he may be pickling his liver with this diet high in fat, sodium, refined sugars and Lord knows what else.
In an interview with Salon, Spurlock descibes the aftermath of his 30 days of McDonalds.
The subject of the movie is, really, your body -- you gained a lot of weight, your liver was damaged, possibly permanently. How are you feeling? Has it changed how you eat?
I'm much better now. It took me 14 months to lose the weight completely. I pay so much attention to what I eat now because after I gained that weight, I can put it on again just like that. I talked to a doctor -- a friend of mine -- and he said, "Now that you've put on that weight, those fat cells are still in your body, wanting to do what fat cells do, which is store energy. Now whenever you overeat, if your body doesn't use those calories, your body is going to store it."
How did you feel about your girlfriend talking about your sex life
Most of the time she was being interviewed, I wasn't around, because I wanted her to feel comfortable to say whatever she wanted. When I came back later and went through the footage, I saw that Alex was talking about our sex life, and the editors were both like, "Morgan, we can't put that in the movie," and I was like, "Of course we do. That has to go in there."
........
Do you still eat fast food?
I had a burger yesterday. I don't eat much fast food, because there are so many better places to get burgers.
What's your favorite thing on the McDonald's menu?
Big Macs. Big Macs are so good. I will smell a Big Mac, and immediately my mouth will water and I will crave it. I'm like one of Pavlov's dogs. But I can't eat them now. I can't stomach their food -- it doesn't even taste like food to me. If I eat their french fries they taste like smoked plastic to me. They taste like the most artificial, manufactured, long, yellow thing. And their Cokes -- if I drink a fountain Coke from there, up and down my nasal passages for hours afterward I'll smell this chemical aroma.
I've become so hypersensitive to their food that my body just instantly picks up on everything artificial in it, which is a lot of it. It's probably been about a year now since I've eaten there. Though to this day I'll smell it and I'll want it.
What was the scariest thing about the whole "Super Size Me" experience for you?
You know, of all the crazy things that happened to me and as bad as I felt, the most frightening thing of all is the school lunch program. We feed our kids terribly in schools. It's atrocious. When it comes to the lunchroom, they might as well be eating in a 7-Eleven in a lot of these schools.
While McDonald's has been knocking the film, their last CEO dropped dead of a heart attack and the new one has colorectal cancer.
McDonald's is the most guilty of the great American sin, massive portions. A soda and a large fries has well over a thousand calories. A full McD's meal has about 1500 calories, or what a dieting person eats in a day.
When kids tried to sue McDonald's, they were widely ridiculed. The Congress even tried to protect restarants from lawsuits. Yet, it is clear the way McDonald's and other fast food places fix their food and promote it, it encourages people to gain weight. Spurlock got sick after 30 days. Is it any wonder that kids blow up on a steady diet of the stuff?
People can eat burgers every day, some do, but what is it in the mechanization of American food which makes it bad for you? Why do parents get fat eating like their kids? Why is kid's food so bad? It's the fat and sugars. A burger made in a place like Burger Heaven (a local NY chain diner) has ground beef which is about 80 percent lean, no chemicals, no flash freezing, and cooked specifically to the diner's taste. The odds are good that it will have vegetables other than iceberg lettuce, also lightly fried, and bought from wholesalers local to the region. So you'll get Jersey tomatoes, locally supplied goods.
McDonald's uses beef from all over the world. It gets its fries from one Idaho supplier who grows a special potato for them and sells it to no one else.
Now, before McDonald's, food was very uneven from region to region. When you traveled, you risked your health, had to guess at the quality of the food, there was a randomness to food which made it guesswork. McDonald's makes it easy to get a standard meal at a standard price at a standard quality. That's no small thing. Remember. the interstate highway system and fast food rose together. McDonald's expansion was due to a society which relied on the car to travel long distances.
The problem is that McDonald's can't be eaten daily or even weekly.
The fat inherent in McDonalds makes it a bad health experience. One could eat two slices of pizza a day, every day and deal with far fewer chemicals and fat. Store bought pizza is only a few ingredients with no preservatives and mostly fresh items. The same with fried chicken.
While none of that may be great for you, it's not the chemical ladened McDonald's.
Remember, McDonald's food isn't just a burger and fries, but chemically treated and mechanically designed food which gets the same result every time it's cooked. If you made fresh fries, one of the world's great treats, and a burger from freshly ground beef, you wouldn't be having an optimum meal, but it would be something which wouldn't cause liver damage.
McDonald's is the least spontaneous, most controlled fast food around. It uses the least about of fresh vegetables and the most amount of salt, fat and sugar. One of the ironies of the American diet is a love of salt and sugar together. French fries and catchup anyone? McDonald's sneaks lots of sugar in their food where you wouldn't expect it.
Then there's the American habit of soda. Hundreds of extra calories per drink. A large soda has 500 calories in its regular version. There is a clear reason adults drink diet soda. If they didn't, they would be even fatter.
Spurlock is right, most of McDonald's food is artificial, flavor enhanced and heightened. A french fry isn't just a fry, but a carefully designed potato enhanced to taste a certain way.
The day of legal exemption and lack of examination is coming to a close. If the relatively healthy Spurlock can see his health damaged from a month of McDonalds, imagine what happens to the unhealthy.
Today is the 50th Anniversary of the Viet Mihn victory at Dien Bien Phu. Until nearly the end, the French thought they would win. The fact that Gen. Giap had outclassed them, negated their airpower and cult of the para had eluded them.
The Iraqis have performed no such feat. They may not be able to. But then, they may not need to.
America faces a brutal choice. We can either be like the Germans, and grudingly acknowledge our crimes, or be like the Japanese and excuse them.
Apologies and excuses are not enough. Nor facile comparisons to Saddam Hussein and his dungeons.
Joe Lieberman embarassed himself today, by mangling a relatively decent point. The people we fight give no quarter. But is not their standards we have to live up to. It doesn't matter if Al Qaeda apologizes, they are outside the law. It does matter what we do and how we act. We have to be better than our enemies, not because of who we are, but what we should stand for.
Bush and his men were too eager to show how ruthless we could be. Even though that's a contest we could never win. We can bomb, but send suicide bombers? Instead, we have to be more moral, offer more alternatives. Not torture the innocent and jail them without cause.
Bush bought into an ideology which doesn't work in democracies, that we need to be freed from law to promote security. What happens in the end is usually embarassing failure and a loss of morals. The French tortured their way through Algeria, but they lost in the end.
Does anyone really think we can win in Iraq now. No matter what? Our moral authority has evaporated as the price of expediency. The Iraqis can no longer have us in their country. We are not worthy of their trust.
Our words no longer matter, it is our deeds which speak for us.
And our deeds can no longer be defended by humans.
The US military has said it will investigate claims by a former inmate of Abu Ghraib prison that a girl as young as 12 was stripped and beaten by military personnel.
Suhaib al-Baz, a journalist for the al-Jazeera television network, claims to have been tortured at the prison, based west of Baghdad, while held there for 54 days.
Mr al-Baz was arrested when reporting clashes between insurgents and coalition forces in November.
He said: "They brought a 12-year-old girl into our cellblock late at night. Her brother was a prisoner in the other cells.
"She was naked and screaming and calling out to him as they beat her. Her brother was helpless and could only hear her cries. This affected all of us because she was just a child.
The allegations cannot be verified independently but Mr al-Baz maintains psychological and physical violence were commonplace in the jail.
He also claims that a father and his 15-year-old son were tortured in front of his cell.
He said: "They made the son carry two jerry cans full of water. An American soldier had a stick and when he stopped, he would beat him.
"He collapsed so they stripped him and poured cold water over him. They brought a man who was wearing a hood. They pulled it off. The son was shocked to see it was his father and collapsed.
"When he recovered, he now saw his father dressed in women's underwear and the Americans laughing at him.
Joe Conason has a logical answer to why this kind of torture was permitted.
Indeed, Horton says that the JAG officers specifically warned him that Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith,one of the most powerful political appointees in the Pentagon, had significantly weakened the military's rules and regulations governing prisoners of war. The officers told Horton that Feith and the Defense Department's general counsel, William J. Haynes II, were creating "an atmosphere of legal ambiguity" that would allow mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Haynes, who was recently nominated to a federal appeals court seat by President Bush, is responsible for legal issues concerning prisoners and detainees. But the general counsel takes his marching orders from Feith, an attorney whose scorn for international human rights law was summed up by his assessment of Protocol One, the 1977 Geneva accord protecting civilians, as "law in the service of terrorism."
How did the "permissive environment" that encouraged rampant criminality and cruelty arise at Abu Ghraib? According to the JAG senior officers who spoke with Horton, Pentagon civilian officials removed safeguards that were designed to prevent such abuses. At a detention facility like Abu Ghraib, those safeguards would include the routine observation of interrogations from behind a two-way mirror by a JAG officer, who would be empowered to stop any misconduct.
The JAG officers told Horton that those protective policies were discontinued in Iraq and Afghanistan. They said that interrogations were routinely conducted without JAG oversight -- and, worse, that private contractors were being allowed unprecedented participation in the interrogation process. Moreover, the contractors who participated in the interrogation of Iraqi prisoners were operating in a legal twilight zone, says Horton.
"The Uniform Code of Military Justice, which governs the conduct of officers and soldiers, does not apply to civilian contractors," he adds. "They were free to do whatever they wanted to do, with impunity, including homicide."
Feith, like the rest of the chickenhawks, thought law was in the way of justice. He didn't care that the rules were created for a reason. But let's be fair, Feith and his political masters wanted results. They didn't say rape 12 year old Iraqi girls. But their abrogation of the law lead directly to that.
Rumsfeld should have been fired last summer. His incompetence is rank and obvious. His job has been saved because he played cute with the press. But, for once, Congress has been doing its job and asking questions which need to be asked. Rummy screwed up, he messed with Congressional imperatives.
This is a systemic failure and most of the civilian leadership of the Pentagon is implicated, either by ommission or comission.
The Bush Administration has lived out movie fantasies, thinking the rule of law inhibits justice like Dirty Harry. Well, in real life, you can't make up the rules as you go along.
Now, the NCO's and EM's are claiming "we were only following orders". Well, there are no legal orders which permit you to rape and torture prisoners. Obeying them was no defense in 1945 or 2004. At least one MP had the common sense to go to an officer and defend human decency. I feel for the families, who try to defend their kin, by claiming they were only following orders, but that will only see them jailed for a very long time. Obeying illegal orders is going to get you jailed.
Jail is the only possible outcome for such acts. The only one. The question is if any of Rumsfeld's henchmen will join them in prison.
With Mother's Day coming up this weekend, I've been thinking about how proud I am of our children.
Which ones? The dry drunk, the whoremonger who abandoned his wife, the one who's kids have all been arrested?
And it's with a mother's pride that I'm writing you today to ask you to support our eldest, George W., and his re-election campaign with a donation of $1000, $500, $250, $100 or $50.
What? He hasn't raised enough money from GOP fat cats and the Christian right? Why doesn't he hit up his lackies at Clear Channel and Sinclair for more?
www.GeorgeWBush.com/Million/
George W. has been President during challenging times and he has met the tasks at hand with a steely determination and clarity of purpose. From fighting the War on Terrorism to defending the homeland, the President has shown steady and strong leadership.
OK. Strong and steady leadership in torture, rape and illegal imprisonment. His ass should go to the Hague as a war criminal. Or for not finding our friend Osama. Seems he's still free as they come, plotting to kill Americans and Europeans.
He has worked with Congress to lower taxes three times so American workers and entrepreneurs can get the economy growing again; pass the No Child Left Behind Act to help every child learn to read; and provide seniors with a prescription drug benefit.
You mean kick all the kids who fail the test in their behinds? Lowered taxes during wartime. That's novel. It's leading to economic disaster, but it is novel. Presciption drug benefits? Oh well, Big Pharma made out well..
The President has accomplished a lot in the past three and half years but there is much more he would like to accomplish. He will continue to help strength our homeland defense and lay a strong groundwork to win the War on Terrorism. He has put forward plans to save Social Security, secure pension plans and enhance retirement security for all Americans. And he has a comprehensive energy plan to make America less dependent on foreign oil.
He doesn't care about Homeland Defense, or First Responders wouldn't be begging for cash and our seaports left open. He plans to gut social security and turn it from old age insurance to a pension plan. When they say "invest" your own money, that's a trillion dollar subsidy for Wall Street. And given Barbara and her kids reliance on Saudi money, well, take that at face value.
Earlier this week, our son's re-election team announced their "March to a Million" campaign. Never before has a presidential campaign received contributions from over one million supporters. With your help, we'll make history.
Why not give to Osama and eliminate the middleman. A dollar for Bush helps Osama beat the US. How? Well, do you really need to ask after this week? Do you think anally raping teenage boys and closed door apologies make us more popular? Defeat Bush and bring competence to defending America
www.GeorgeWBush.com/Million/
This election is going to be a tough one. That is why I'm asking for your support. For months the President has been facing negative advertising from John Kerry and all sorts of pro-Kerry groups. I've been particularly disappointed in the personal attacks.
You mean like Swift Boat veterans Against Kerry and Karen Hughes saying Kerry lied about throwing his medals away. You mean those personal attacks? Ones which besmirshed Kerry's honorable and heroic service? You mean those personal attacks? After all, GW could have enlisted. Instead he whored around Alabama for a year or so.
Your donation, no matter what the size, will help advertise the President's positive agenda for America and deliver his compassionate conservative message directly to the voters.
Yeah, all the rape and beating victims in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gitmo can tell you how compassionate America is. All their families can testify to American compassion. I watched Deutche Welle's European Journal, their english language roundup of their human interest storie which airs on PBS over the weekend. A Bosnian woman married to an Algerian man wanted help in finding him at Gitmo. I don't know whether her husband was an AQ member or not, but she collapsed twice on camera and it looked real to me. That's compassionate conservatism in action.
Positive? How about fear-based agenda. That's what Bush offers. More fear and ineptitude.
www.GeorgeWBush.com/Million/
America needs a strong leader like George W. Bush. He is the right man to lead America during these challenging times.
Sure he is. Just like he was a good businessman and great fighter pilot.
Thank you very much for your support today. I hope you and your family enjoy a wonderful Mother's Day.
Sincerely,
Barbara Bush
Oh, just ignore the horns and 666 on the back of my neck, It's a family birthmark, not the mark of the beast. Why would you ever think that?
George Bush has mortgaged the scientific future of this country to Jesus. Yesterday, the FDA refused to allow the sale of morning after pills OTC because "teenage girls might not take them correctly". Instead of limiting the sale to 18 year olds, women still have to see a doctor to prevent pregnancy.
This isn't the only thing, of course. Stem cell research, booming in the UK, has been dealt as a hostage to the Jesus freaks on the right.
But what absolutely drives me nuts is the drive to teach creationism as science. It isn't science, it's faith. There is nothing wrong in faith. Please pray for me when I'm sick, but pray for me while a doctor treats me.
The drive to teach creationism, in whatever guise, is religious indoctrination. It isn't fact, it isn't science. My grandmother literally believed the Bible, which is fine. But she wasn't a doctor.
Every few years, a school board gets a few fundy wackos and they start in on the Intelligent Design crap. It's not science, it's fucking religion, OK. The late Stephen Jay Gould repeated debated these people. Which, I think was a mistake.
This is the scientific equivilent of Holocaust denial. We know the Holocaust happened, we have witnesses and photos from the US Army. Denying it is racism, not history. Most reputable historians of the Holocaust and WWII will not even talk to these proto-Nazis, and certainly not debate them.
When these freaks can prove God built the world in six days, then debate them. If they can't, it's just enforcing religious dogma on innocent children. And denying them the joys of Sunday school.
Sure, evolution is a theory, but one with a lot of evidence. Creationism has NO evidence. None. No place where you can say God laid his hand down.
Biology teachers have to deal with one or two kids every semester who disagree with evolution. They have to tell these kids that evolution isn't really debatable. One teacher refused to write recommendations for pre-med programs unless the kids recognized that evolution was not an equal theory to creationism. People pissed and moaned, but he said, "how can you be a doctor if you don't believe evolution happened."
The drive to inflict creationism is clearly the most obvious attempt to make a Christian nation. Despite the fact that we are not one and should never be one.
People wonder if Bush really beiieves all this crap, but I don't think that's the right question. The question is what has he done to promote his religious world view as social policy. When you get bassackwards decisions from the FDA and about Stem Cell research, it's time to worry.
Someone asked me why didn't buy a new machine instead of upgrading my old one.
Well, I've never bought a new computer. Every machine I've had was built either by hand or as a barebone. Honestly, I just don't trust people to do what I can do.
I started down this road when I paid a repair shop to fix my 386. Not only did they take weeks, I had to fix my hard drive when it died from the vibrations on the bus ride home. I paid like $200 bucks for the initial repair and I didn't have any more cash to spare. So I bought a 400MB Western Digital drive and installed it myself.
With a book or two, I realized that this was not rocket science. That I could do this with a little patience and some reading. And I've never looked back.
I'm hardly the best builder, no modded cases, no overclocking, no massive cooling systems. There are kids who can blow me away with their hardware skills. But I can sit down and build a machine and get it up and running.
Why do I do this? Because I didn't have the money to give to Michael Dell and I hated the crap the pre-built machines came with. I dare you to name the last time you used 3D Home Modeler. Besides, I wanted to know what parts were in my machine.
With a little effort, my machine, pre-upgrade, has better parts than most low end Dells. Also, you lose flexibility when you buy off the shelf. I need reliability, since I'm my own repairman. I need to choose between parts and not rely on some company's lowest bidder.
Building your own machine is liberating in that you know what it is going on inside the box. Which means when something goes wrong, you can figure it out. It's a personality quirk, I know, but I enjoy taking something and making it whole and figuring things out. Sure, it's a half a day, or more like a whole day, but it is satisfying beyond belief.
When I tell people that I build computers, they often look at me like I'm crazy. They don't believe it can be done, and when you do it, they wonder why. Most people treat the computer as a magic box and most refuse to open it and look inside, But when you do, it's a pretty simple tool. Most of the "magic" is electronic and not touched by human hands at any point.
Once you learn to work around the box, and it's easy, your comfort level grows, your confidence grows. An old friend of mine once compared PC's to Corvettes and Macs to Hondas. Macs work right out the box and when something goes wrong, you need a mechanic. But PC's can be tinkered with. It may take a while, but you can get it to do what you want.
I think, in the end, that's the reason I build machines. I can do it the way I want with the parts I choose and that's a lot more fun than checking off the boxes on the Dell website.
COLTON, Calif. (Reuters) - Democrat John Kerry on Thursday challenged President Bush's performance as commander-in-chief and vowed to take responsibility for "the bad as well as the good" if he wins the White House.
........
"When I was in the Navy, the captain of the boat was in charge and the captain always took responsibility," Kerry told teachers and students at Colton High School. "Today I have a message for the men and women of our Armed forces ... I will take responsibility for the bad as well as the good."
As the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee spoke in California, Bush told reporters in Washington he had apologized to Jordan's King Abdullah.
"I told him I was sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners and the humiliation suffered by their families," the Republican president said after a White House meeting with the monarch.
..........
"As president, I will not be the last to know what is going on in my command," Kerry said.
Looks like Rummy either covered the Abu Ghraib mess up, or even more importantly, didn't think it was very important. He and his buddy Gen. Myers were more interested in a cover up than telling Congress that a potential international scandal was on their hands.
Yet today, Bush's enablers in Congress were all over John Murtha's (D-PA) back for saying the war is unwinnable. Wayne Morse he is not. They didn't even acknowledge the degree of screwup this was and how's Rummy's arrogant behavior made it worse.
Of course, Rummy and Myers should be fired. They should have been fired last year. After his little war turned to shit. Or in November, after 82 soldiers died and others had to have water sent from their parents. Rummy's snide little comments make for great theater, but they are the hallmark of a showboat, ineffective leader.
His arrogance and ineptitude were on fine display Tuesday, when he dickered over the word torture. Uh, didn't he see the pictures?
Look, comparisons to Saddam's time are pointless. The US is not a dictatorship and the US doesn't have a system where police are unaccountable to anyone. We don't need comparisons to a bloody, ruthless murderer to say what happened in Abu Ghraib is wrong. This is not tit for tat. In a democracy, we never have any justification for violating other people's rights. What we did was a violation of our ethics and morals. Saddam's excesses are no cover for our behavior.
It was Rummy who didn't want to obey the Geneva Conventions and hoked up this "enemy combatant" bullshit. He didn't seem to realize rules protect the occupier as well as the occupied.
Now, he's facing the ire of Congress, and I cannot wait to see how he tries to smug his way out his current predicament.
The problem is that if you fire Rumsfeld, not only will Congress be tied up with confirmation hearings, Bush's credibility as a wartime leader evaporates.
John Kerry said the right thing. The boss needs to be responsible, not give apologies in closed rooms. I don't care if it makes Bush sick, it should make him angry that US troops could act so beastially and their direct commanders are filled with more excuses than a drunk teenager.
If Bush wasn't a coward, he would have called in the Army Chief of Staff and demanded a world wide review of confinment practices. Not just a few reports, but visits by him and the theater commanders to every confinement facility in their charge.
But because Bush is a coward, he can only think of saving his own skin. If Rummy has to go to do that, he will.
No one could have foreseen the destruction of the World Trade Center leading to Abu Ghraib. It took an extraordinary effort to turn the world's sympathy into the world's disgust.
But, with 9/11, a deep and abiding racism was permitted to be unleashed. It wasn't just Arabs, but any brown skinned people from the Middle East and South Asia. The war against Iraq was sold on barely veiled racial terms. The subtext was "they're all in it together". "The Muslims are evil".
Franklin Graham, son of Billy, made some of the most racist, anti-Muslim statements imaginable. Yet, he was invited to speak at the Pentagon. a lot of the Bush racial appeal is written off as an appeal to his base, but it goes beyond that. Race is the great American divide, and even if we are less racist to each other, we are more than willing to replace nigger with sand nigger and spic with haji. We can embrace racism even when the targets change. You don't think working class blacks, trained in a racist America, see the very different Iraqis as brothers. Many, especially if they grew up around Arabs, may have deep resentments because of previous, racially negative contact.
We didn't take a very long detour to get to Abu Ghraib. US interrigators were smacking around Afghan prisoners and tortured John Walker Lindh as soon as they got their hands on them. No one cared. After all, they were guilty. When it turned out that we can only try six out of 600 prisoners, people still want to keep Gitmo, our gulag in the sun.
Instead of getting the world's sympathy, we have managed to earn the world's contempt. Gitmo offends our allies, our war in Iraq is a total, miserable failure, and now Abu Ghraib reveals the deeply racist contempt we have for Arabs.
Our conduct in Iraq is about as isolated as German behavior on the Eastern Front. We have untold shootings of unarmed Iraqis, including blowing away a Jordanian hospital outside Fallujah, killing the handicapped, robbing people in their homes, rape, murder and now torture. Blaming a few NCO's and EM's is like grabbing a few guys in the 2nd SS Panzer and trying them for Malmedy, while ignoring their officers.
We created a racist system which allowed people to dehumanize our enemies. The White House constantly told people that Saddam and Osama were linked. That he laughed as the twin towers burned, that we needed to control Iraq to make America safe. This message, as deeply racist and evil as could be, because it linked Iraqis to an act which they had no role in, was as subtle as Ilya Ehrenberg's exhortation to Russian troops entering Germany in 1945. "Kill the fascist beast in it's lair" was one of the more subtle slogans. No one was surprised when 100,000 German women were raped by the second line troops. The combat infantry didn't have time to chase down girls.
Now, Cheney never said anything as obvious as that, but his lies were nearly as bad. Inflating Iraq into a threat fed the already racist preconceptions Americans had. Mingling Osama and Saddam fed the need for conquest. The fact that Iraq was no threat is lost in the resulting uproar. Even liberals bit on this insanity. Even as now they admit their error.
War hysteria, like the clap, can be caught by anyone. Of course, anyone with a thinking mind would have known that Ken Pollack's The Threatening Strom was a poorly written, slapped together book which summarized 5000 years of Iraqi history in one chapter. The Big Media Matt's, Josh Marshall's and Kevin Drum's could have actually taken more than Pollack's word on Iraqi history and Saddam, read a map, and realized much of what Saddam did had strategic reasoning behind it, that Iraqis don't like any rulers, and Saddam needed a 12,000 man bodyguard to stay alive.
But no, there was just the rush to embrace fear and see Saddam as just another enemy. When Wesley Clark said these lunatics at DOD wanted to conquer Iran and Syria next, as part of their new American Reich, no one wanted to hear him. No one wanted to hear that there hasn't been a violence-free day in Iraq since last March. Everyone, still stunned and fearful after 9/11 wanted to eliminate "threats" in the way one kills mice.
"Preemptive war" was about the same logic Hitler used in invading Russia. The reality is that Iraq may have been the worst country to invade because they could barely tolerate Saddam, who stayed alive by using torture, bribes and politics, along with a massive bodyguard. The Special Republican Guard wasn't just to make Saddam seem like a big man. If he had waited a few years, he could have probably hired Blackwater or Control Risks to cover his security.
Robert Baer, a former CIA officer who worked with Iraqi tribes, said he'd been told, repeatedly, that torture was not permitted, "You don't do it, watch it, stay around if it's being done."But after 9/11, "things changed."
The CIA, DIA and the contractors felt free to abuse their prisoners, and did so on a worldwide scale. Before Abu Ghraib, there was Bagram Air Base and Khandahar. And no one noticed and no one cared. Gitmo was the end of the line and the vast majority of people there may not be guilty of anything.
If 9/11 was the greatest intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor, our conduct after 9/11 may be second. No Al Qaeda cells broken up, no one brought to trial, losing the war in Iraq. These failures will have serious consequences in the coming years, and the Bush Administration remains oblivious to it.
Michael Moore will give the film its world premiere in Cannes
Controversial director Michael Moore has said film studio Disney is refusing to release his new documentary, which heavily criticises President Bush.
Fahrenheit 911 was to be distributed by Miramax, a division of Disney.
But Disney has "officially decided to prohibit" Miramax from distributing the film, the director said on his website.
Moore, who won an Oscar for Bowling for Columbine in 2003, questioned whether in a "free and open society" Disney should be making such a decision.
Fahrenheit 911 links Mr Bush with powerful families in Saudi Arabia, including that of Osama Bin Laden, and attacks his actions before and after 11 September.
Now, let's be honest. This is a private commercial agreement between Moore and Disney worth millions. It isn't censorship. After all, Moore stands to make seven figures in the end, and he knew the deal from day one. When you deal with the mouse, you'll probably get screwed.
But the reason Disney is showing it's corporate yellow streak is simple: George W. Bush is a very, very vengeful man. You ridicule him, he'll get you back. Ask Helen Thomas, Valerie Plame or Howard Stern. His supporters are such moral cowards, like Sinclair Broadcasting Group, they hide from American dead. But they believe in revenge at any cost. Why should Disney risk their tax breaks for Michael Moore? He won't be around for the revenge on Capitol Hill.
While I think they should releasen the film, this is more symptom than cause. Bush crushes his critics, he tries to break them by any means neccessary. Richard Clarke was loyal to George Bush for three years and all Karl Rove could do was try to call him a faggot. He helped ruin Valerie Plame's career, allowed Donald Rumsfeld to humiliate Eric Shinseki. In short, Rove and Cheney and that crew will destroy their enemies however they can.
There is no way Disney will take the heat for Moore when dealing with the ever vengeful Bush. While the Democratic, Clinton-loving Harvey Weinstein, head of Miramax, would gladly release this film with all his liberal employees like Gywneth Paltrow, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon in attendence at the premier, they won't be around when Disney lawyers find their stations fined for the Oprah Winfrey show which described tossing salads and rainbows, which seems to have drawn a large number of Stern-prompted complaints. ABC affliates are the largest number of stations which show Oprah Winfrey. The last thing they need is a sudden, revenge-inspired change of course on the subject by the FCC.
Disney can take a lot of heat for being cowards, but not the financial pressure from Washington.
Bush is constitutionally unable to accept blame or responsibility for anything which happens under his watch. An Arab journalist said on Nightline last night "If Bush were a man , he'd apologize on Arab TV". Well, we all know the answer to that. He's a coward, which is why he's afraid of radio talk show hosts and movies.
People are worried that Kerry is moving too slow, that he doesn't have a lead. Well, folks, Kerry has been smacked around like a pinata and lied about for a month and Bush is still tied with him under 50 percent. The experts say Bush is on the cusp. I say never stop a man from stepping on his dick. With six months to go and looming disaster in Iraq, Kerry's got time and character on his side. After all, Bush decided to let Ayatollah Sistani decide his election for him. Well, that wasn't wise when he did it, and Sistani can't have been too charmed to see our Dear Leader on Al Arabiya today.
Bush is not capable of simple acts of grace. He has no humility. He thinks Jesus is his personal friend, except he doesn't live in South Park and Kyle, Stan and Cartman are not his friends. All presidents live in a bubble, but Bush is afraid to meet people who don't support him. I watched some Uncle Tom Latino ask him how he can increase the Latino vote. I had to laugh. I think, if I were Latino, I'd have asked him why men have to die in combat before they get their citizenship, or about his neither fish nor fowl immigration plan for Mexicans. Why any Latino outside of Miami would vote for the guy is beyond me. There was a story about a WWII vet who was escorted from a Bush audience when he said he didn't vote for him in 2000 and wouldn't vote for him again.
When does meeting the President have to be contingent on voting for him? When the GOP comes to New York, Bush may remain in his bubble, but the streets of New York will be alive with protest. And given the general demeanor of the NYPD, it will be like Streets of New York, filled with bloody street fights.
Bush's weak leadership grows weaker under pressure. The fact that people are even asking for Rumsfeld's resignation is a big deal. If I were his neocon cronies, I'd have my resume out. The President may not fire Rummy, but there are many heads who could roll.
Bush is a weak, cowardly leader who bases his actions more on American myth than the realities of leadership. I learned at 14 that not making excuses and apologies were signs of strength. But if Bush was a drunk for 20 years or more, he stopped growing when he hit the bottle, A man of his age and education should act differently, with more dignity, than he does.
Kevin Drum calls him the failed CEO, which I agree with. Not that I respect Drum's hemming and hawing much, and this is the man who's war he supported, but he's dead on here. My question would be that how could expect the war to go right when the people running it are clones of Bush?
The same with Josh Marshall, who I respect a great deal more. This is the same guy who's war he backed. Now that it's all turned to shit, he's decided Bush is a bad leader. Well, he was a bad leader in 2001, 2002 and in February, 2003. Now, it's May, 2004, and he's still the same bad leader. Now, if Josh is bright enough to get a Ph.D from Brown, why couldn't he figure out Bush was going to eventually wind up in this hole?
Bush has created a Republic of Fear, where people, when they aren't jumping from fear of an Al Qaeda attack, they have to fear a vengeful White House seeking to ruin their reputations if they challenge them.
And if they're Iraqi, they can be shot, robbed and anally raped for the most spurrious of reasons.
Disney's fear of Washington and of Jeb seeking revenge in Florida against Walt Disney World. Now, when Moore says this, Disney, trying to keep shred of dignity, calls him a liar. Please, he's not lying and Disney is right to be afraid. We all know what lengths Jeb will go to protect his big brother.
I just have to thank you folks again for your support. I'm deeply impressed by the random acts of generousity. You're probably sick of me thanking you by now, but I just sit here, stunned by the good works of people. I was stunned when I was sick, but people are nice to you when you're sick, after all. But now? All I can say is that this is the best web experience I've ever had. And one of the best experiences of my life.
I have to admit, this is more like a PBS fundraising drive with more asskissing. But I'm just fucking stunned. Floored. Now, I know I do good work, I know I work hard at this, but shit, I worked as hard at NetSlaves and they were mean to us and never gave us any money. If women had only responded as eagerly to my entrities....anyway, I'm going to rebuild my machine, new cables, power supply, maybe an additional hard drive. Most of this isn't that expensive, actually, but I want more power and round cables. Power supplies are the things you never notice until they die on you. It's about a $40 replacement for a normal machine, but dumping the crappy PS that comes with most low-end cases is a smart move.
I'm going to jam a new Athlon 2500+ in there as well. Which should give a nice boost of speed. I was briefly considering starting from scratch, but the mobo I have is only a year old. There is always a debate between going with the best and the brightest, but since I don't host LAN parties, and won't be modding my own case, I think I can make my machine last another 18 months or so with a new chip.
The bleeding edge is just too expensive for minimal speed gains. Once the thing is over 1.5Ghz, what are you really gaining in terms of usable speed? As long as you can play games, and do your work online, the best and brightest is just too much money.
I know it's impolitic to say, but I like XP Pro. It is a pretty intuative OS and is lightyears better than Win98. I know there are die hard Linux folks out there, but Linux is hard to master. Not to you folks, but when all you want to do is play Fifa 2004, using an emulator is not my idea of fun. Linux is great when the user doesn't have to tweak it, but I just don't have the energy to mess with it.
I think the improvements in my machine will make it more stable. Not that it was unstable, but I don't want to take any chances.
Unless you're building a gaming machine, most improvements are under $100. My one debate is whether to spring for a new nVidia video card or just use the one on my mobo. The sound is fine, but the video is only OK and I have a 19" monitor.
I'll post a list of everything I wind up getting when I get it. After all, if you contribute, you have a right to know where the money goes, except for drunken weekend strolls.:). No, seriously, you work for your cash and I'm not Save Karyn, asking for cash to bail my ass out after running up my cards. If I ask, decency requires that I tell you what I'm doing with the money. Just like a regular charity.
Anyway, enough about money. I just ramble on because I feel guilty, though I shouldn't, and it makes me think about the better angles of human nature.
The report by MG Antonio Taguba, the one Gen. Myers and Sec. Rumsfeld were too busy to read, is now online.
Excerpts from the report make for fascinating reading:
(U) That the 320th Military Police Battalion of the 800th MP Brigade is responsible for the Guard Force at Camp Ganci, Camp Vigilant, & Cellblock 1 of FOB Abu Ghraib (BCCF).Ê That from February 2003 to until he was suspended from his duties on 17 January 2004, LTC Jerry Phillabaum served as the Battalion Commander of the 320th MP Battalion.Ê That from December 2002 until he was suspended from his duties, on 17 January 2004, CPT Donald Reese served as the Company Commander of the 372ndMP Company, which was in charge of guarding detainees at FOB Abu Ghraib. I further find that both the 320th MP Battalion and the 372ndMP Company were located within the confines of FOB Abu Ghraib.(ANNEXES 32 and 45)
Both the battalion commander and company commander were relieved of duty because of this investigation. My question is why were they not courtmartialed?
That between October and December 2003, at the Abu Ghraib Confinement Facility (BCCF), numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees. This systemic and illegal abuse of detainees was intentionally perpetrated by several members of the military police guard force (372nd Military Police Company, 320thMilitary Police Battalion, 800th MP Brigade), in Tier (section) 1-A of the Abu Ghraib Prison (BCCF). The allegations of abuse were substantiated by detailed witness statements (ANNEX 26) and the discovery of extremely graphic photographic evidence. Due to the extremely sensitive nature of these photographs and videos, the ongoing CID investigation, and the potential for the criminal prosecution of several suspects, the photographic evidence is not included in the body of my investigation. The pictures and videos are available from the Criminal Investigative Command and the CTJF-7 prosecution team.
In addition to the aforementioned crimes, there were also abuses committed by members of the 325th MI Battalion, 205th MI Brigade, and Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center (JIDC). Specifically, on 24 November 2003, SPC Luciana Spencer, 205th MI Brigade, sought to degrade a detainee by having him strip and returned to cell naked
6.(S) I find that the intentional abuse of detainees by military police personnel included the following acts:
a.(S) Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet;
b.(S) Videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees;
c (S) Forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing;
d.(S) Forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time;
e.(S) Forcing naked male detainees to wear women's underwear;
f.(S) Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped;
g.(S) Arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them;
h.(S) Positioning a naked detainee on a MRE Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture;
i.(S) Writing "I am a Rapest" (sic) on the leg of a detainee alleged to have forcibly raped a 15-year old fellow detainee, and then photographing him naked;
j.(S) Placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee's neck and having a female Soldier pose for a picture;
k.(S) A male MP guard having sex with a female detainee;
l.(S) Using military working dogs (without muzzles) to intimidate and frighten detainees, and in at least one case biting and severely injuring a detainee;
m. (S) Taking photographs of dead Iraqi detainees. (ANNEXES 25 and 26
So this isn't torture? This is pretty horrible stuff. Just not as organized as Saddam.
8 (U) In addition, several detainees also described the following acts of abuse, which under the circumstances, I find credible based on the clarity of their statements and supporting evidence provided by other witnesses (ANNEX 26):
a.(U) Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees;
b.(U) Threatening detainees with a charged 9mm pistol;
c. (U) Pouring cold water on naked detainees;
d. (U) Beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair;
e.(U) Threatening male detainees with rape;
f. (U) Allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell;
g. (U) Sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick.
h.(U) Using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.
So where were the officers? This kind of torture, and God help anyone trying to minimize it, doesn't work and is just wrong.
SPC Sabrina Harman, 372nd MP Company, stated in her sworn statement regarding the incident where a detainee was placed on a box with wires attached to his fingers, toes, and penis, that her job was to keep detainees awake. She stated that MI was talking to CPL Grainer.Ê She stated: ÒMI wanted to get them to talk. It is Grainer and Frederick's job to do things for MI and OGA to get these people to talk.
b.(U) SGT Javal S. Davis, 372nd MP Company, stated in his sworn statement as follows:I witnessed prisoners in the MI hold section, wing 1A being made to do various things that I would question morally. In Wing 1A we were told that they had different rules and different SOP for treatment. I never saw a set of rules or SOP for that section just word of mouth. The Soldier in charge of 1A was Corporal Granier. He stated that the Agents and MI Soldiers would ask him to do things, but nothing was ever in writing he would complain (sic).
When asked why the rules in 1A/1B were different than the rest of the wings, SGT Davis stated: The rest of the wings are regular prisoners and 1A/B are Military Intelligence (MI) holds. When asked why he did not inform his chain of command about this abuse, SGT Davis stated: Because I assumed that if they were doing things out of the ordinary or outside the guidelines, someone would have said something. Also the wing belongs to MI and it appeared MI personnel approved of the abuse.
SGT Davis also stated that he had heard MI insinuate to the guards to abuse the inmates. When asked what MI said he stated: "Loosen this guy up for us." "Make sure he has a bad night." "Make sure he gets the treatment." He claimed these comments were made to CPL Granier and SSG Frederick.
Finally, SGT Davis stated that (sic): Òthe MI staffs to my understanding have been giving Granier compliments on the way he has been handling the MI holds.Ê Example being statements like, Good job, they're breaking down real fast. They answer every question. They're giving out good information, Finally, and Keep up the good work . Stuff like that.
c. (U) SPC Jason Kennel, 372nd MP Company, was asked if he were present when any detainees were abused. He stated: "I saw them nude, but MI would tell us to take away their mattresses, sheets, and clothes." He could not recall who in MI had instructed him to do this, but commented that, Òif they wanted me to do that they needed to give me paperwork.ÓÊ He was later informed that Òwe could not do anything to embarrass the prisoners.
d. (U) Mr. Adel L. Nakhla, a US civilian contract translator was questioned about several detainees accused of rape. He observed (sic): "They (detainees) were all naked, a bunch of people from MI, the MP were there that night and the inmates were ordered by SGT Granier and SGT Frederick ordered the guys while questioning them to admit what they did.Ê They made them do strange exercises by sliding on their stomach, jump up and down, throw water on them and made them some wet, called them all kinds of names such as 'gays' do they like to make love to guys, then they handcuffed their hands together and their legs with shackles and started to stack them on top of each other by insuring that the bottom guys penis will touch the guy on tops butt."
e. (U) SPC Neil A Wallin, 109th Area Support Medical Battalion, a medic testified that: "Cell 1A was used to house high priority detainees and cell 1B was used to house the high risk or trouble making detainees. During my tour at the prison I observed that when the male detainees were first brought to the facility, some of them were made to wear female underwear, which I think was to somehow break them down."
12 (U) I find that prior to its deployment to Iraq for Operation Iraqi Freedom, the 320th MP Battalion and the 372nd MP Company had received no training in detention/internee operations.Ê I also find that very little instruction or training was provided to MP personnel on the applicable rules of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, FM 27-10, AR 190-8, or FM 3-19.40
The fact that MP's alone face courtmartials for this is revolting. Clearly MI and the CIA and DIA had a role in this mess. Why are they skating free from this. This is absolutely revolting.
Reading exceprts of the excuses from the right about the torture, and no it's not "abuse", as Sec. Rumsfeld tried to say yesterday, at Abu Ghraib prison, I realize they're all moral pygmies. They have no sense of decency or common human understanding.
How can anyone see fellow human beings being degraded and then compare it to frat hazing. Here's a hint, you pay for frat hazing, no one drags you in off the street at gunpoint and then sexually humiliates you. You volunteer for it. No one volunteered for anything at Abu Ghraib.
It's beyond a mere failure of command. The whole intelligence structure in Iraq is a grotesque failure. Over a year after fighting the insurgency, we have no clear idea of its structure or comannders, their main weapons stocks, or how they operate.
Does anyone tie this to the failed rape and torture center at Abu Ghraib? It's not just a public diplomacy problem any more. It's not just a command failure problem any more. Quite simply, most of the intelligence from Abu Ghraib sucked. Because they snatched people off the street, locked them up and assumed they were terrorists. Of course, with cylume sticks being shoved up their asses, I'm surprised that they didn't say Ahmed Chalabi was a member of the resistance.
The whole year of running Abu Ghraib was a waste of time and effort. American racism drove the treatment of Iraqis, beyond common sense. The MI thugs, because Karpiniski turned her back at Bagram, had free reign at Abu Ghraib. And they tried to torture their way to success. But for the most part, they got nothing for their efforts.
How badly has US intelligence failed?
* We had little advance warning that the Iraqi resistance would stand and fight in Fallujah.
*We completely underestimated the reaction of closing Sadr's paper.
* Movement outside the Green Zone is strictly limited.
*We cannot freely move convoys along Iraq's main highways.
* We still have no clear idea of the makeup and composition of Iraqi resistance units.
To top this off, we have various Republican Guard generals telling us that "there are no foreign fighters in Fallujah". Now, I believe this because there weren't that many there to begin with. But the US expects Iraqis to arrest their cousins and throw them in jail for the benefit of the US.
But it's amazing to think, that after a year, the US effort is racked with failure. Not just for trying to seize Fallujah with a woefully inadequate force of 3,000 Marines. The idea was that we were going to sweep in, kick a little ass, and leave was belied by the Army's bitter ambush during the winter. A unit of the 4ID was jumped and then lied about the body count. The 82nd Airborne couldn't move from outside the city's limits without getting hammered.
But now, the world, rightfully, sees us as brutal torturers and killers. Our soldiers shoot the innocent, humiliate the innocent and lie about it.
I was watching Nightline last night, when Ted Koppel said there was no comparison between the old Abu Ghraib and the new one. Well, thanks Ted. We haven't hung prisoners or raped them in front of their families. The fact that we didn't descend into Saddam's worse practices says little for us.
We failed by our standards. We will be judged by our standards. Not Saddam's. Just because we only brought back some torture and rape doesn't mean it's not so bad because Saddam was worse. Why in God's name are we comparing ourselves to Saddam? Why, after a year of occupation, can that comparison be made? Why did we do anything which could be compared to Saddam? Wasn't the point of this fiasco to eliminate torture and extrajudicial punishment for Iraqis? Instead, we privatized it.
The bankruptcy of the US effort in Iraq can no longer be denied.
First, let me thank you again. I am amazed at the generousity of people. Please don't feel bad if you only kick in a nominal amount. I'll spend a dollar or a hundred dollars with ease. It is a wonderful thing to do. Not just because it helps me out, but because you're supporting your beliefs with your words.
It will take me a few days to claim the Paypal money, because I have a new account. So don't worry, I know you sent the cash and will claim it. Newegg will really appreciate it.:)
But, there is a larger point. For nearly a decade, the right has had access to money and support for even the wackiest causes. They could run us to ground because their folks had money and time to discuss their views.
It is important to support those of us on the left. Not just in the "if you don't give us money, we won't be here" way, as Pacifica usually does its fear based fund-raising drives, but in support of what we say and do. It should be a positive affirmation of what we can do, not some fear-based gifts to prevent the rule of capitalism.
When you kick in to me or Billmon or Kos or Atrios, it's nice to have the money and in-kind contributions, but more importantly, you're backing your beliefs with cash. And in America, cash rules over all. It's nice to know that so many people open their hearts and wallets when times are tough. When times get better, there is a lot more to do and things to build.
I guess the reason people support bloggers is a complete and total frustration with the mass media. I learned how to deal with it, courtesy of a $50K education in journalism. But for most people, it must drive them nuts to see the news and know they're getting half the story.
But bloggers haven't been the only people to benefit. John Kerry just kicked off the largest ad buy in history. Democratic candidates have not lacked for money this election cycle and that means people are learning that they have to back their ideas with not just words, but cash.
Democracy is not free. It is not cheap. We have had to learn that we must defend our priniciples with a bodyguard of cash. I wish this wasn't the case. I don't think there's a blogger who likes asking for cash. I would write for free, because writing is what I do every day. But, if Andy Sullivan can raise $86K in one drive, we have to do the same. We have to have the resources to project our views. The Center for American Progress, John Podesta's new think tank, and David Brock's Media Matters, as well as Air America, are all essential to defending our rights.
The bestselling books were the hint that there was liberal money out there. But there has to be more. We have to support candidates who represent our views, opinion writers who support our views. Because if you don't, only one side of the debate gets heard.
And it doesn't always take money. Just writing your editor or TV station when you disagree with an article or show matters. They say time is money and your time is valuable. Even if you don't give anyone a dime, just making your voice heard is payment enough. I'm no ideologue, but if a crazy liar like Ann Coulter can be heard in public forums, we need to heard as well.
There was a famous psychology experiment where people were asked to shock a test subject they could see. It turned out that most people, seeking the approval of those running the test, not only shocked other people, but were willing to use lethal force.
The escapades in Abu Gharib should not be written off as an aberation of a few misguided young people. Two of the MP's were prison guards, highly commeneded for their civilian work. But when you give people the power of life and death, many would act little better than these guards.
It is easy to be dehumanized in that setting. It is easy to treat a people you cannot communicate with as playthings. It takes strong moral character, as some of the witnesses against the six MP's had, to resist the temptation to be cruel.
The reason officers exist is to temper this impulse. We supervise the guards to make sure that the enlisted men and women don't act out their worst impulses. To sit back, shocked, that these people treated prisoners badly is to be a liar, a fool or hopelessly naive.
Given the conduct of civilian guards in an American prison, why is anyone surprised that with no supervision, Americans inflicted the worst kind of sexual humiliation on Iraqis. Americans cherish the idea of sexual humiliation in prison. Anal rape is widely seen as just deserts for convicts. Female convicts wind up pregnant. So this shock that Abu Gharib was turned into a sexual torture center is disingenious at best. It would have taken strong leadership to prevent this from happening.
Any American, given this power, over a people we had been told we had to subjugate or they would kill us, would have had to been fully under control to not act out their worst impulses. Remember, Bush and his administration had hinted over and over that Saddam was behind or cooperated in 9/11. What could anyone possibly think would be the outcome of that?
The failures in Abu Gharib, a gross dereliction of duty from any number of people, were no secret. Iraqis surely knew the place was merely under new management, and they only beat people to death and didn't hang them, Salon even mentioned this two months ago.
"Guantanamo on steroids" Abu Ghraib was an infamous prison under Saddam. Now, for Iraqis seeking relatives detained by the U.S. military, it is still a place where men disappear.
Editor's note: Last week it was reported that U.S. troops, acting with the knowledge and approval of high-ranking military intelligence personnel, abused Iraqi prisoners at Saddam Hussein's infamous Abu Ghraib prison. In early March this year, Salon correspondent Jen Banbury filed this story on Abu Ghraib prison -- including allegations by Iraqis of beatings, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and neglect leading to death.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Jen Banbury
March 3, 2004 | BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Abu Ghraib prison became famous in Saddam's time as the place where men disappeared. Behind its high, ochre-colored walls and looping spans of barbed wire, prisoners faced miserable living conditions, regular torture, and (in some cases) execution. Now the U.S. military controls Abu Ghraib, calling it the Baghdad Correctional Facility (though no Iraqis I've met seem to be aware of the name change). And for many Iraqis seeking information about relatives detained by the American military, Abu Ghraib is still a place where men disappear.
Abu Ghraib now houses thousands of prisoners. The military will not release specific numbers, for security reasons, but the Associated Press reported that 12,000 people are being held there. Prisoners are pouring into the system: According to Human Rights Watch, in December and January the U.S. military said it was arresting approximately 100 Iraqis per day. Each visit requires two guards -- one to supervise the prisoner and one to escort his family members. The backlog for visitation is months long. Families have no contact with their interned relatives while waiting for that date. Many of the people at the prison that day were waiting to hear whether their relative's sequence number would be read so that they could come back in May for a visit. Others had come in November and were just now able to see their relatives. Some detainees are allowed no visits at all. And some relatives don't even know where their parents, brothers or sons are being held. The system, frankly, is a mess.
Some Iraqis who have been held as security detainees claim they were subjected to ill treatment, including beatings, sleep deprivation and psychological abuse. Most of these allegations are anecdotal and cannot be confirmed. But a variety of human rights and peace groups, including Human Rights Watch, Occupation Watch, Christian Peacemakers, Amnesty International, as well as various Iraqi NGOs, have interviewed former security detainees who have described some kind of mistreatment at the hands of the Americans -- at the time of arrest, during interrogation or during incarceration.
Last week, the U.S. military announced that 17 military personnel, including a battalion commander and a company commander, had been relieved of duty pending the results of a criminal investigation into alleged abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib. The military did not specify the nature of the abuse. But in a separate incident in January, the military discharged three soldiers who had been found guilty of beating, kicking and harassing detained Iraqis at Camp Bucca in the south of the country.
The detainees' living conditions are poor. In Abu Ghraib, most prisoners are housed in tents that offer little respite from cold, wet winter weather and scorching summer heat and provide no shelter from incoming mortar attacks.
What I fear now is that command influence is being used to scapegoat the six being courtmartialed. It's a bad thing for the president to comment on this case, for their former commanding officer to condemn them. They have a right to a fair trial. Anyone expecting these people to serve long terms of confinement are delusional. Their parents, as bad as I feel for them, after all, no one expects to raise monsters, are already blaming anyone and everyone else for their fate. With appeals, most will serve nominal sentences, if convicted.
The Geneva Conventions is a pathetic fig leaf. Rape is wrong, sexual humiliation is wrong and you don't need a class for that. If these MP's are guilty, they are to blame. Not MI, not the CIA. After all, several of their comrades refused to participate. Now, there is plenty of blame to go around, but these folks, if guilty, deserve to be placed in Levenworth for years. So do their commanders, ending with Karpinski. Her excuses enrage me. "I didn't know" is not an acceptable answer for a general officer.
The effect of the torture at Abu Gharib could be far reaching, damaging our ability to secure ourselves from Al Qaeda.
Iraq Abuse May Undermine U.S. 'War on Terror'
Mon May 3, 2004 03:20 PM ET
By Caroline Drees, Security Correspondent
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers feeds Arab and Muslim fears that the "war on terror" is part of a broad effort to humiliate them and plays into the hands of extremists like al Qaeda, analysts say.
While experts say the war in Iraq and the "war on terror" are not necessarily related, the maltreatment of Iraqi prisoners will hurt efforts to rein in global terrorism and blurs the distinction for many who already question U.S. motives, credibility and respect for human rights.
"Those Americans who mistreated the prisoners may not have realized it, but they acted in the direct interests of al Qaeda, the insurgents, and the enemies of the U.S.," said Tony Cordesman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who has held various positions in government.
"These negative images validate all other negative images and interact with them," he said in a statement, citing "careless U.S. rhetoric about Arabs and Islam," failures to stabilize Iraq, continued Israeli-Palestinian violence and fears the United States is out to dominate the Middle East.
Photographs of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, shown on television and in the press last week, triggered outrage across the globe. Some reports also cite incidents of physical abuse. Searing wartime images have often served to galvanize public opposition, as did the famous Vietnam era picture of a young girl, fleeing naked from the battle zone. It is, however, too soon to tell whether the Iraq abuse photographs will have a similar impact.
Yahya Alshawkani, Yemen's deputy chief of mission in Washington, said the images could undermine his and other governments' efforts to convince restive populations that the U.S.-led "war on terror" is legitimate and in their interest.
"This certainly won't be helpful to each country's campaign against terrorism," he said. "The damage has been done."
Many Arabs and Muslims are wary of Washington's "war on terror" and believe it is empty rhetoric designed to impose U.S. foreign policy goals abroad at their expense.
Lies rarely benefit anyone in the end. The tissue of lies which Bush and his neocon buddies used to launch this war damaged our credibility with the Islamic world. Our treatment of prisoners at Gitmo didn't help. Now this, the sexual humiliation and torture of largely innocent Iraqi men and women, may well put the nail in the coffin for any chance of us gaining meaningful cooperation in the Islamic world.
No matter what we say, those pictures show who we are to millions of Muslims. Unless we act decisively, meaning closing Abu Gharib and jailing all those who tortured the prisoners, more Americans will die in terrorist attacks.
We are all monsters. Anyone can be cruel and mean. It is knowing this about human nature that we set up safeguards to prevent us from being our worst. When removed, some will descend into their darkest corners, and some will not. It is sad that the prisoners at Abu Gharib had to depend on the morals of individuals to safeguard them.
Ok, I finally put up a Paypal button. I'm going to put up Amazon as well, since some of you dislike using Paypal.
Now, you don't have to give much, or anything, actually. I'll still be here.
But I am trying to raise money to upgrade my computer. So kicking in as much as you can would be nice. Oddly enough, I'm still amazed that anyone cares about my opinions, much less to be breathtakingly generous. And you guys have been so generous I get choked up when I think about it.
We all do this in a void. The fact that people read what you write is always surprising. The fact that it matters to people is even more surprising. The fact that you'll pay for it is as amazing as losing your virginity. I didn't have any idea that people would make my comments part of their day, I just had things to say.
Writing is a solitary act. The fact that people like what I write is tremendously satisfying.
Let me thank you in advance, since i am always amazed at your investment in me and my work.
Amnesty Internation issued apress release which calls for a full investigation of torture in Coalition-run jails in Iraq.
Iraq: Torture not isolated -- independent investigations vital
There is a real crisis of leadership in Iraq -- with double standards and double speak on human rights, Amnesty International said today.
"The latest evidence of torture and ill-treatment emerging from Abu Ghraib prison will exacerbate an already fragile situation. The prison was notorious under Saddam Hussein -- it should not be allowed to become so again. Iraq has lived under the shadow of torture for far too long. The Coalition leadership must send a clear signal that torture will not be tolerated under any circumstances and that the Iraqi people can now live free of such brutal and degrading practices," Amnesty International said.
"There must be a fully independent, impartial and public investigation into all allegations of torture. Nothing less will suffice. If Iraq is to have a sustainable and peaceful future, human rights must be a central component of the way forward. The message must be sent loud and clear that those who abuse human rights will be held accountable.
"Our extensive research in Iraq suggests that this is not an isolated incident. It is not enough for the USA to react only once images have hit the television screens".
Amnesty International has received frequent reports of torture or other ill-treatment by Coalition Forces during the past year. Detainees have reported being routinely subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment during arrest and detention. Many have told Amnesty International that they were tortured and ill-treated by US and UK troops during interrogation. Methods often reported include prolonged sleep deprivation; beatings; prolonged restraint in painful positions, sometimes combined with exposure to loud music; prolonged hooding; and exposure to bright lights. Virtually none of the allegations of torture or ill-treatment has been adequately investigated by the authorities.
Amnesty International is calling for investigations into alleged abuses by Coalition Forces to be conducted by a body that is competent, impartial and independent, and seen to be so, and that any findings of such investigations be made public. In addition reparation, including compensation, must be paid to the victims or to their families.
Every time a case of police brutality surfaces, it's isolated. Always. Rape Abner Louima in a jail cell, isolated. Shoot Amadou Diallo 41 times, isolated. They shot an escaped bull from a Queens rodeo 40 times, but Diallo's death wasn't police overkill, but an isolated mistake. Gun down Patrick Dorismond on a midtown street corner, isolated.
It's never the culture of police, or the indifference of their superiors, but isolated bad acts. And when the victims are black or Latino, they must have done something wrong.
The lawyers for the six accused MP's are claiming that they were never taught about the Geneva Conventions. So what? In what world is having prisoners jerk off into another prisoner's mouth permitted, decent, or humane. Not one of those guards would have wanted to be treated by Iraqi jailers in the way that they treated those prisoners. You don't need the Geneva Conventions to know what they were doing was deeply, deeply wrong.
Now, it turns out, this wasn't just some "bad people" as Gen. Karpinski claims, neatly claiming ignorance of then activities of the people under her command, but standard Military Intelligence practice.
I don't think there is any way to explain how gross Karpinski's failure was and how vile her excuses are. She was a general in charge of MP's, not some pencil pusher. She had a combat command. Prisoners were in her care and she didn't do anything like her job. She was relieved of command, which is a career-killing shame for a general officer.
It's easy to blame the CIA and military intelligence, but her actions led to their abuses. If she had cared about her command, and stood up to MI, which as a general officer, she could have and should have done, the abuses would have stopped. Instead, she barely supervised her command. I will bet any amount of money that her senior officerstold her, not once, not twice, but repeatedly, that they had problems with MI in their jails.
The idea that it was just a few NCO's and EM's "softening up" the prisoners is bullshit. Where are the officers? Where are the captains and majors and light colonels who were supervising the jail for Karpiniski? What is their role in this mess? Those on trial had to have been failed by their chain of command from their lieutenants on up. No MP officer noticed the sex games going on in the jail? No intellingence officer got reports from the Iraqi street that torture was common in Abu Gharib?
Karpinski's failure was so gross that two major generals had to investigate. That is remarkable. When you have that kind of investigation, a complete and total failure has occured. When you send generals to investigate other generals, something deeply wrong has happened.
Get used to the words command failure. You'll be hearing them a lot.
An internal Army investigation has found a virtual collapse of the command structure in a prison outside Baghdad where American enlisted personnel are accused of committing acts of abuse and humiliation against Iraqi detainees.
A report on the investigation said midlevel military intelligence officers were allowed to skirt the normal chain of command to issue questionable orders to enlisted personnel from the reserve military police unit handling guard duty there.
The Army has already begun one investigation into the abuse allegations. Maj. Gen. George R. Fay, the incoming deputy commander of Army intelligence, is examining the interrogation practices of military intelligence officers at all American-run prisons in Iraq and not just the Abu Ghraib prison.
A second review was ordered Saturday by Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly, head of the Army Reserve, to assess the training of all reservists, especially military police and intelligence officers, the soldiers most likely to handle prisoners. Six members of an Army Reserve military police unit assigned to Abu Ghraib face charges of assault, cruelty, indecent acts and maltreatment of detainees.
Gary Myers, a lawyer for Staff Sgt. Ivan L. Frederick II, one of the enlisted men charged in the case, requested over the weekend that the Army open a court of inquiry into the abuse at Abu Ghraib, a move that would expand the investigation beyond the six enlisted personnel to look at the broader command failures.
The widening prison-abuse scandal in Iraq, which has stirred anger in the Arab world just as the Marines have tried to defuse a bloody confrontation in Falluja, holds the potential to damage efforts by American officials to meet a June 30 deadline to transfer limited self-rule to the Iraqi people. It appeared to have caught senior Pentagon officials and some top officers off guard on Sunday, despite President Bush's condemnation of the abuses on Friday
There is no way to explain what kind of public diplomacy failure this. It is horrific, with blame to go from the MP's who played naked Iraqi prisoner leapfrog to Karpiniski, to the slow pace Gen. Sanchez dealt with this gross command failure. The fact that Gen. Myers hadn't bothered to read the report is even more disturbing. The failure here, the worst since Vietnam, has dire implications for US policy in the entire Middle East. It isn 't just about a bad reserve Brigadier General and some ignorant, racist MP's.
This kind of failure is akin to when Gen. Fredendall was beaten at Kasserine Pass. It wasn't just that he lead from a bunker, the US Army lacked the ability to fight the Germans.
Almost everything the Americans believed was wrong. The M3 Lee and Grant tanks, mounting a 75mm fixed gun, had a high silhouette and was difficult to operate in combat with the heavy German pzkpfw Mark IV and Tiger panzers. Also, the Americans fought tank-to-tank, while the Germans concentrated their fire. The M3 would burn when hit and the riveted construction would shoot hot flying rivets around the crew compartment when it was hit. Also, tactical doctrine was inflexible and did not account for the rapid German advance
One could say that everything we thought we knew about Iraq was wrong and much of what we did is wrong.
Jim Holt has eight kids and no job except state senator from Springdale, paying $13,751 a year. He says two of his vehicles are on the blink and that the one he’s driving into Fort Smith while talking on the cell phone is making a sound suggesting belt trouble.
“We probably have less need for money than just about anyone you know,” Holt says. “We know how to stretch a dollar. Please don’t make it sound like I’ve got a benefactor or anything. That’s what everybody always tries to say.”
If anything, I was simply going to say it was weird.
Holt says he’s not going to take for personal use any contributions to his campaign for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate. That’s not to say, though, he believes there’s anything wrong necessarily with the similarly unemployed Marvin Parks doing that very thing for his family of seven kids.
A state representative from Greenbrier, Parks is seeking the Republican nomination for Congress in the 2nd District. He intends to write himself a check for $4,000 each month from the campaign fund. It’s legal. It’s even defensible, since people without cushy and flexible professional careers ought to be able to seek office, too. And it’s perfectly public. If you don’t like it, don’t vote for him. Not that that would be the only reason.
But is anyone else seeing a pattern? Extreme religious conservatives sire armies of kids, hold down no jobs and pursue lofty political aspirations.
I’m thinking also of former state Rep. Jim Bob Duggar of Springdale, who has spawned 14 youngsters (a 15th is on the way) and, to his special advantage, enjoys substantial family real estate holdings. Then you have Sen. Gilbert Baker of Conway, who is perhaps less fringe-worthy than the others. He might in fact contend someday for a Senate leadership position. But he has eight kids himself and he’s retired at 47 from his music professorship at the University of Central Arkansas. He feeds all those mouths with allocations of retirement income and a half-time job as music director at his church
As I was reading the WaPo today, I glanced at Dear Abby. What I saw was pretty freaking stunning.
Dear Abby:
My 15-year-old daughter was hired to baby-sit our friend's year-old infant. When she arrived, she was told she would also be watching the next-door neighbor's two small children, both under 3. The parents were going out together, the babies next door were put to bed, the house was locked, and my daughter was given a baby monitor so she could hear if there was a problem.
When I heard this, I was furious that they'd put a 15-year-old in that position and leave small children locked in a house alone. I said as much.
Now my daughter, husband and our friends are all mad at me for making them uncomfortable about their "arrangement." Apparently, they do it all the time -- both couples hire one sitter and leave one house unattended. These people are young, educated, drive expensive cars and can afford a sitter.
I told them I would call Social Services if they continue to leave the babies unattended.
My family thinks I owe them an apology. Do I?
Furious in California
No, you do not. What these "friends" are doing is illegal, as well as unconscionable. If something should go wrong -- like a fire -- your daughter could be left with lifelong guilt and trauma. Please continue to look out for your daughter's interests. Being a conscientious parent means not always being popular.
These parents are stupid and cheap. Leaving kids under three alone is about the goddamnest stupidest thing you can do. My mother was a home day care provider for 14 years, dealing mostly with 2 year olds. We had to watch them every single minute of every day they were in our home. Leaving them alone for a second was not gonna happen.
Apology? For what? The letter writer was right. She should call social services . Why? What happens if someone breaks in, or a fire starts?
See, this is why Dr. Phil is rich. So many people in America lack common sense. Leaving a small child alone at home defies basic, fundamental common sense. Expecting a 15 year old babysitter to cover two homes is disgusting. So which set of children does she save if something goes wrong?
What is even more amazing is the lack of support she got from her husband. The two sets of parents are cheap, selfish and dangerously stupid. But the 15 year old's father should be backing up his wife without question.
I don't think it's wise to leave anyone under 12 alone, at any time. But toddlers? They get into enough shit when you watch them.
There is a surprising lack of moral courage among people in modern America. Here you have a life threatening situation, one which should not exist, one for which poor people are jailed for, and everyone is worried about feelings. Who cares about feelings if those kids die?
Everyone wants to slide through life without conflict and it doesn't work. Why is Dr. Phil a millionaire? Because, despite the psychobabble and antics, he actually makes it ok for people to have moral courage. That it's OK to say no to things and not have people like you. Now, I may not have a Ph.D in psychology, but everything I see him say makes sense. Things I don't need him to tell me, like infidelity is wrong.
But the people he deals with treat his words as received wisdom, because in their sad, dysfunctional lives (not everyone, obviously), they have never had an adult say to them "you are responsible for your actions, and your actions suck." Everyone offers excuses and explainations, not acceptance that they are wrong.
After seeing General Kapinski's pathetic excuses in the Times today, this is stood out. No realization that her actions were wrong, an utter and complete failure of her job. Nope, just "they were bad people" and "MI ran that wing".
I bet these idiot parents would blame the sitter if their home caught on fire and the kids died. "But she had a baby monitor."
It is far easier in this society to blame anyone and everyone for your failures but yourself.
In a phone interview from her home in South Carolina in which she offered her first public comments about the growing international furor over the abuse of the Iraq detainees, General Karpinski said the special high-security cellblock at Abu Ghraib had been under the direct control of Army intelligence officers, not the reservists under her command.
She said that while the reservists involved in the abuses were "bad people" who deserved punishment, she suspected that they were acting with the encouragement, if not at the direction, of military intelligence units that ran the special cellblock used for interrogation. She said that C.I.A. employees often joined in the interrogations at the prison, although she said she did not know if they had unrestricted access to the cellblock.
According to the New Yorker article, by the investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh, one of the soldiers under investigation, Staff Sgt. Ivan L. Frederick II, an Army reservist who is a prison guard in civilian life, may have reinforced General Karpinski's contention in e-mails to family and friends while serving at the prison.
In a letter earlier this year, Sergeant Frederick wrote, "I questioned some of the things that I saw." He described "such things as leaving inmates in their cell with no clothes or in female underpants, handcuffing them to the door of their cell." He added, "The answer I got was, `This is how military intelligence wants it done.' "
Prisoners were beaten and threatened with rape, electrocution and dog attacks, witnesses told Army investigators, according to the report obtained by The New Yorker. Much of the abuse was sexual, with prisoners often kept naked and forced to perform simulated and real sex acts, witnesses testified. Mr. Hersh notes that such degradations, while deeply offensive in any culture, are particularly humiliating to Arabs because Islamic law and culture so strongly condemn nudity and homosexuality.
General Karpinski said she was speaking out because she believed that military commanders were trying to shift the blame exclusively to her and other reservists and away from intelligence officers still at work in Iraq.
"We're disposable," she said of the military's attitude toward reservists. "Why would they want the active-duty people to take the blame? They want to put this on the M.P.'s and hope that this thing goes away. Well, it's not going to go away."
The Army's public affairs office at the Pentagon referred calls about her comments to military commanders in Iraq
General Karpinski said in the interview that the special cellblock, known as 1A, was one of about two dozen cellblocks in the large prison complex and was essentially off limits to soldiers who were not part of the interrogations, including virtually all of the military police under her command at Abu Ghraib.
She said repeatedly in the interview that she was not defending the actions of the reservists who took part in the brutality, who were part of her command. She said that when she was first presented with the photographs of the abuse in January, they "sickened me."
"I put my head down because I really thought I was going to throw up," she said. "It was awful. My immediate reaction was: these are bad people, because their faces revealed how much pleasure they felt at this."
But she said the context of the brutality had been lost, noting that the six Army reservists charged in the case represented were only a tiny fraction of the nearly 3,400 reservists under her command in Iraq, and that Abu Ghraib was one of 16 prisons and other incarceration centers around Iraq that she oversaw.
"The suggestion that this was done with my knowledge and continued with my knowledge is so far from the truth," she said of the abuse." I wasn't aware of any of this. I'm horrified by this."
She said she was also alarmed that little attention has been paid to the Army military intelligence unit that controlled Cellblock 1A, where her soldiers guarded the Iraqi detainees between interrogations.
She should be courtmartialed and busted. If she didn't know, she should have. If she did know and didn't do anything, she belongs in jail. Her excuses are repellent. She was running the prisons. She had a bunch of senior officers to act in her stead. Blaming the prison guards for the abuse is like blaming the camp guards for the Holocaust. They had superiors who were responsible. I don't want her to play vicitim. They weren't "bad people", they were her people. She IS responsible for everything that happens under her command. The fact that her guards were racost thugs speaks ill of her ability to command her people.
I felt bad for SSgt's Fredricks parents, trying to defend him by saying he was following orders. That excuse wasn't acceptable or legal in 1945 and it does not sound better 59 years later. Orders or not, what they were asked to do was immoral and illegal.
But sadly, Karpinski is right. Military Intelligence, the CIA, DIA and private contractors set the conditions in Abu Gharib. This excuses Gen. Karpinski in no way, shape or form. She was a general officer, She should have complained to her superiors about the conditions in the MI wing and ordered them to prevent abuses. She outranked them. But as Sy Hersh's article points out, she wasn't big on personal accountability.
The problems inside the Army prison system in Iraq were not hidden from senior commanders. During Karpinski’s seven-month tour of duty, Taguba noted, there were at least a dozen officially reported incidents involving escapes, attempted escapes, and other serious security issues that were investigated by officers of the 800th M.P. Brigade. Some of the incidents had led to the killing or wounding of inmates and M.P.s, and resulted in a series of “lessons learned” inquiries within the brigade. Karpinski invariably approved the reports and signed orders calling for changes in day-to-day procedures. But Taguba found that she did not follow up, doing nothing to insure that the orders were carried out. Had she done so, he added, “cases of abuse may have been prevented.”
General Taguba further found that Abu Ghraib was filled beyond capacity, and that the M.P. guard force was significantly undermanned and short of resources. “This imbalance has contributed to the poor living conditions, escapes, and accountability lapses,” he wrote. There were gross differences, Taguba said, between the actual number of prisoners on hand and the number officially recorded. A lack of proper screening also meant that many innocent Iraqis were wrongly being detained—indefinitely, it seemed, in some cases. The Taguba study noted that more than sixty per cent of the civilian inmates at Abu Ghraib were deemed not to be a threat to society, which should have enabled them to be released. Karpinski’s defense, Taguba said, was that her superior officers “routinely” rejected her recommendations regarding the release of such prisoners.
Karpinski was rarely seen at the prisons she was supposed to be running, Taguba wrote. He also found a wide range of administrative problems, including some that he considered “without precedent in my military career.” The soldiers, he added, were “poorly prepared and untrained . . . prior to deployment, at the mobilization site, upon arrival in theater, and throughout the mission.”
General Taguba spent more than four hours interviewing Karpinski, whom he described as extremely emotional: “What I found particularly disturbing in her testimony was her complete unwillingness to either understand or accept that many of the problems inherent in the 800th MP Brigade were caused or exacerbated by poor leadership and the refusal of her command to both establish and enforce basic standards and principles among its soldiers.”
Taguba recommended that Karpinski and seven brigade military-police officers and enlisted men be relieved of command and formally reprimanded. No criminal proceedings were suggested for Karpinski; apparently, the loss of promotion and the indignity of a public rebuke were seen as enough punishment.
Hersh should know better. Karpinski's career is over. She'll be lucky to retire at brigadier general. Taguba's recommendations for a general officer are akin to an article 32 in terms of any future in the Army. As soon as the courtmartials are over, she'll be forced out. Not that this is enough. Not even close.
Her command failure is the worst since an Americal Division's base camp was overrun in the Central Highlands of Vietnam in 1971. It is that much of a disaster and potentially that fatal to US troops. Any Iraqi looking for a reason to kill Americans need only open a newspaper. This is akin to having police rape teenage girls and pose afterwards to Americans. These pictures might as well have been commissioned by Osama Bin Laden.
There are direct military consequences to these pictures and Karpinski's command failure is so gross, the idea that she would escape a courtmartial for dereliction of duty, as well as permitting war crimes, and that IS what these are, is revolting. She is directly responsible for this, not the contractors, not MI, not DIA, not CIA. She ran the prisons. Not the intelligence agencies. The "CIA is evil" defense doesn't mitigate her responsibility one bit.
Sure, they should all be prosecuted as well. But to shift blame to MI is a joke. They may be guilty, but it was her direct charge to care and protect the prisoners. The frightening part is that upwards of 60 percent may have been innocent.
If this is what MI and contractors are doing in Abu Gharib, what the hell is happening in Gitmo?
Usually, I ignore the Motley Fool e-mails I get. Frankly, their advice was second rate when it mattered. But when they ran a piece knocking the Google IPO, I bit. After all, it ran against all the hype I'vbe been seeing.
Having some experience in this area, I figured most of the stories about Google were bullshit. The great working conditions, which in reality hide slave-like conditions, the great bosses, yeah, OK. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice....
So I read the piece with some interest. It had some really interesting conclusions:
I also had to laugh out loud when I read about the hoops Google put up for investment bankers: 24-hour turnaround times for questionnaires, lengthy and onerous non-disclosures, banning them from Google headquarters. It all reminds me of Coming to America: "What kind of music do you like?" "Whatever kind of music you like." That's power.
And it's power that the insiders are trying to keep, over customers, investment bankers, and soon-to-be shareholders. Wouldn't you know it? Google's set up a Dual Class stock structure. The publicly traded Class A stock and management-held Class B stocks have identical economic rights, but the Class B shares get 10 votes for each one that the Class A shares receive.
Guess how every single vote in the history of the company will go? However management wants it to, it's already stuffed the voting boxes. Fellows, if you're going to quote Warren Buffett in your owner's manual (a fine document, by the way), you ought to at least recognize that Buffett considers Berkshire shareholders as partners and gives them the right to buy shares that have the same power as his. If you don't want to have to listen to others, then don't go public.
Google will not be able to control the pricing on the opening day of the IPO. But I really have to wonder whether this really just isn't anything more than cashing in at the peak. Yes, the insiders will be wealthy beyond their wildest dreams, as will many employees. But if Google's business is so insanely great, why in the world would they want to share? Public offerings have always been about companies needing to raise capital for operations or for new capital projects. Google's financial statements reveal no such need.
Being public is both hard and expensive for companies, and for Google, it seems to be utterly unnecessary -- the company generates plenty of cash from what it does, and it's taking on some risk that being public will change its core culture.
But these are all just window dressing. Here's the thing that I would fear as a Google investor: Ask Jeeves' (Nasdaq: ASKJ) algorithmic search engine Teoma already receives rave reviews for its results, and Yahoo! recently unbundled Google's search so it could feature its Inktomi technology. And wouldn't you know it, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), not one to leave nickels in billion-dollar stacks lying on the ground, will include an algorithmic search engine bundled in its next generation of Windows products, due out next year.
Look at the Google S-1, and you immediately ask why, with its $105m in net profits, is worth a capitalization of $25b, more than Costco. What is clear is that the stock will eventually fall from whatever price the IPO mania drives and investors will be dealing with a company worth less than they paid. Before you get all glossy-eyed about Google, remember, the most successful IPO of the dotcom era was Krispy Kreme. Most IPO investors lost their shirt and while Google is profitable, Google is only one company in a market vunerable to technological change.
In essence, the Google shareholders have no voice in the company, while insiders can run it into the ground. They also aren't issuing quarterly reports. In short, they are even more arrogant than the dotcom folks. Not only do they want the IPO money, they don't want any kind of supervision.
Google's management wants the money of being public, but not the responsibility. Quarterly reports are a very good way of tracking how the company is performing. Not issuing them means you have to trust the company to be responsible.
Google is an ad-driven company, it relies on ads to make money, If cusotmers find another way to sell goods online, well, there goes their profitability. Google will also be smaller than Yahoo and Microsoft, both of whom could be gunning for their market.
This doesn't mean that Google won't maintain their profiability, or grow, but their aquisition profile has been less than robust. Google is merely the most successful of a number of search companies, it doesn't have a lock on the market in anyway, nor is its technology unique. It may be efficient, but there are many ways to search the web.
The problem with IPO's, as rule, is that they rarely keep their opening price. Selling them quickly is the only way to lock in profit. As the Motley Fool article notes, this is a way to pay off insiders with other people's money. They get the reward for all those long nights and sexless social lives. In exchange, because of their dual class stock system, you have to hope the management doesn't screw up. You won't be able to vote them out.
This doesn't mean Google won't be a good investment a year or two from now, when the stock price has shaken down and the company's responses to Microsoft and Yahoo, who was an early investor in Google, are clearer. Will they go on a buying spree? Will key people leave? You need time to sort these things out, something which the dotcoms didn't have. Running to buy Google's IPO is a mug's game for small investors and poker for my trader friends. And like Texas Hold 'Em, it's fun to watch and nervewracking to play.
I was, as I usually do on Saturday mornings when I wake up early, listening to my local Pacifica station. The host of the show was ragging on Air America, and the idea that Pacifica needed to change to meet the "challenge".
I rolled my eyes and laughed. For 30 years, Pacifica has been embrolied in internal disputes, a stagnant audience base, and politics which would make most people heads swim. Pacifica has been completely ineffective in offering alternative viewpoints to the mainstream media in most cases, and has, more often than not, embarassed itself in the kind of internecine warfare best reserved for college English departments.
So, clearly, listener-supported Pacifica isn't going to do more than preach to the converted and continue to limp along.
NPR, which I listened to next, is the pale shadow of a national broadcasting network. A creature of the Washington Beltway, it appeals to college professors and their graduate student girlfriends (or boyfriends). They hire a religious loon as their religious reporter, the sister of Washington's most important lobbyist as a political reporter, and the wife of a major advocacy group head as their Supreme Court reporter. As a rule, Americans don't listen to VOA, but at least they aren't filled with the relatives of Washington insiders.
Has anyone noticed that the major nets often do more challenging stories than NPR when it comes to Washington stories. I know they all rub up on each other there, but NPR's conflicts are so notorious that expecting them to actually break stories is like expecting a pimp to let his girls have a day off and keep the money from their work.
Complaining about the nascent Air America in this context is comical. Pacifica had 30 years to get their act together. What does it do? Pretty much let Amy Goodman, the first reasonably sane newscaster on their network, carry the ball. With money and airtime, it spends more effort on promoting the dead causes of the left and fighting each other, than doing anything useful.
One of my big complaints about Pacifica is that it is still an analog network, dealing with every fringe loon left with a mimeograph. Air America is internet friendly, not just because they've had my collegues Kos, Atrios and Josh Marshall on their shows, but because they stream their shows online and seem to rely on blogs for their themes.
Ten years ago, if Ted Koppel had wanted to read the names of killed from Somalia, and someone objected, it would have gone largely unnoticed. Sinclair could have knocked the show off their stations, and other than a few stray e-mails, faced no real notice or opposition.
Now? The arrest of Sinclair's CEO on sex charges was all over the Internet. Their e-mail and phone systems were collapsed by calls. John McCain's nasty letter was read by millions. Why? Because of the internet, and more importantly, blogs.
What blogs deliver, differently than web pages, is this: instant updating without having to rebuild the page. If you're not technically aware, let me explain: when web pages first started using images, it was very difficult to add content unless you went directly into the page.
With the new CMS systems, and blogger is the easiest to use in this regard, what you do is simply post content to a page and it's updated. You can use some HTML, but it isn't neccessary to do more than use italics and bold.
But all of them, from Kos's adaptation of Scoop to MoveableType, make updating easy. Far easier than having to replace webpages.
This ease of publishing has allowed people to move away from working on design issues to working on writing. It allows people like Juan Cole and Josh Marshall to publish and not get bogged down in the details of publishing.
This brings a lot of expertise to the web without the burden of hiring a team to design a page and keep it up. Cole basically used a standard blogger template to put up his pages. Which let him write on a subject people pay good money to hear him opine on.
Air America relies heavily on blogs for their daily content. Not exclusively, but the number of internet people on there is pretty striking. I don't think the right relies on the web nearly as much. They once did, but the suits by the LA Times and WaPo on Free Republic for near total reposting of copyrighted articles, as well as the demand for near-total ideological conformity, turned the community into a joke.
As internet content moves from static pages, to message boards, to blogs with comments, the quality of responses has also changed. From the noise one would get from a message board, blog responses are not only well thought out, but from an older user as well.
Take the Bush ANG controversy. That has filtered on the web for years, with all manner of documents coming up. When it finally exploded, Kerry had the grounds to question Bush's entire service. Without bloggers doing years of research, the whole thing would have died. The traditional media doesn't take these issues seriously They write off as politics and crawl back into their hole.
I think a lot of left criticism of the So-Called Liberal Media is off base. Why? Because these are endemic issues within the newsroom. Gore was jumped on because he annoyed reporters. Bush tried to either cultivate or scare them and I know from personal experience, people have no problem trying to bounce you from stories, call you a liar or take your job. The reason you get Jack Kelleys and Jayson Blairs, both varieties of sociopaths to me, in newsrooms is that editors want great stories. They want to read the most exciting thing possible.
When you find the atrocious reporting of Nedra Pickler and Steno Sue Schmidt alongside the excellent reporting of Rick Atkinson and Anthony Shadid, the reason is a lot less conspiracy than the ability to get along with bosses, screw them, drink with them. Journalism is a job, not a cult. The same factors at work on your job is the same ones in a newsroom, but worse.
What blogs are doing is filling in the gaps created by budget cuts in newsrooms. Where you would have reporters to cover every major agency in DC, now you only cover the big ones. Which is why labor reporting is an anomaly and everyone is obsessed with the numbers on Wall Street without the context.
Blogs are run by people who, if they have some ethics, serve as a multiplier for the work of mainstream journalists. They have also added the major British newspapers to the conversation. How else could the Guardian seek to expand to the US without a proven web audience?
The fact that blogs can be supported by direct contributions, ads and merchandize sales allows them to go beyond navel gazing. The next big push should be to get Lexis-Nexis database access. Once bloggers have use of that resource, the potential will grow. Lexis-Nexis is the memory hole for the major media, but extremely expensive, like $120 a month, last time I checked. A major burden for a blogger. As it stands, Google's caching provides an invaluable function.
There are days that when I hear Paul Begala open his mouth, I know his researcher has been reading the blogs. The thing which surprises me, is the amount of notice I've gotten with my humble enterprise and the people who read it. The thing is that most impresses me about blogs is not that people read them, but the general ethics and honesty in getting facts right and correcting them. Which is a lesson the major media needs to learn.
April 30, 2004 | WASHINGTON ((AP) -- The top U.S. military commander in the Persian Gulf area said Friday he needs no more American troops in Iraq, but he pointedly urged Muslim nations to send forces.
Gen. John Abizaid, chief of the U.S. Central Command, also disclosed that about a dozen Iraqi security battalions, which failed to perform in recent weeks of anti-occupation violence in central and south-central Iraq, are being reorganized and retrained. As a result, he said, those units will not be ready for any major challenges until at least November, a delay of two months from previous schedules.
In a video teleconference with reporters at the Pentagon, Abizaid said from his Persian Gulf headquarters that despite a rising death toll and other recent setbacks he remains confident that the U.S.-led military coalition in Iraq will bring stability.
He urged the American public to be patient and to understand that results will come slowly.
We are not in any military danger of losing control of the situation," he said.
Asked about the debate in the United States over whether more American troops are needed in Iraq, Abizaid said if the security situation should deteriorate further he would not hesitate to ask for more. For now, he said, he is satisfied that the 138,000 troops he has are enough.
"I do favor the inclusion of more international troops, especially more Muslim troops," he said. "For example, Morocco, Pakistan, Tunisia – they all have very capable and very professional forces that could be added to the stability equation" once Iraq regains its political sovereignty. The target date for the partial turnover of power to an interim Iraqi government is June 30.
The key to progress in Iraq, he said, is getting more Iraqis to defend their country.
"I think Iraqis will second me on this: This needs to be less of an American occupation and more of an international military activity that includes Iraqis, international forces and Americans," he said.
The Bush administration has been unable so far to persuade more countries to send troops to Iraq, and the surging violence and mounting death toll have further complicated the matter. Spain, the Dominican Republic and Honduras are pulling their troops out. Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov said this week that his country's contingent, which is operating in the southern Iraqi city of Karbala, has found itself in "a real war it was not prepared for."
Abizaid cautioned against expecting quick results from a new arrangement with Iraqis to quell violence in the besieged city of Fallujah, and a major battle for Fallujah may not be avoidable.
He described the a "step-by-step effort" to train an Iraqi force for Fallujah, which others said is being called the Fallujah Brigade, under leadership of former senior officers of deposed President Saddam Hussein's army.
The outcome will depend on the actions of the insurgents inside the city, he said.
Ok, in a week where humilating pictures of naked Iraqi men circulated around the Arab world, enrgaging them as much as Michael Jackson's boy dating antics enrage Americans, Abizaid has the balls to ask for Arab troops? What country could afford to send troops to Iraq and survive? When the Iraqis adopt what one Kos poster calls the "Israqi" flag?
Help is not coming. The Arab world has little interest or political reason to rescue the US in Iraq.
The Pakistanis are in no position to send anyone to Iraq if Musharraf wants to live. If he were to send troops to help the US occupation or the puppet government on July 1, they'd find his head on a pike. Morocco isn't much better off. For mostly ill, the US struggle in Iraq has been defined as an anti-Muslim struggle. Abizaid, who's of Lebanese heritage, and not only speaks Arabic, but like all US general officers, has at least a masters, should know better.
He should be able to see that the pattern, the flag, the pictures are adding up to a very nasty picture for Arabs. Our words are pure, but our intentions and actions are not.
The expectation that the Iraqis would, after 30 years of a soul-killing, body killing, initative killing society, leap up and join the Americans, is well, insane. People were killed for "thinking outside the box" until last year. The idea that they would "embrace" a political concept which they have never lived under, in a society where clandestine activities were not only common, but the only way to survive.
There is no government, no reason to join the security forces other than the police, and while it doesn't get much play in the US media, there is a nasty, Iraq-wide stigma against working with the security forces. What amazes me is that no one connects the deaths and intimidation towards those who work for Americans with a general hostility in the society towards the occupation.
Americans keep trying to define Iraqi identity for Iraqis and it's about the same as trying to tell Texans how to be Texan or New Yorkers how to be New Yorkers. Iraqis are fiercely nationalistic and Americans keep insulting their pride and dignity.
The Americans keep expecting someone to step in and save them. Iraqis aren't going to do so. The fig leaf to cover our retreat in Fallujah had our new Baathist, Republican Guard (probably lavishly bribed) General show up for work with his old uniform, the old flag and cheers from his buddies, er, local residents. Why he did so is a mystery, but it is more than likely his former colonels are running the resistance and this is a buffer to allow them to recover while not humiliating the Americans and driving them to greater revenge.
There is also the mistaken idea that Iraqis wouldn't kill other Muslims. Miles of graveyards in Iran prove differently. A Pakistani occupier is still an enemy to an Iraqi nationalist. Remember, there are over 10,000 Pakistani and Indian graves outside Basra from Britain's colonial wars. Thinking different is little better than a wet dream.
Some asshat from a Sinclair station said that more people died training for D-Day than have died in Iraq.
Which is true only in raw numbers. Proportionally, Iraq is far bloodier than any single WWII battle.
You have to remember that the WWII Army was 12 million strong and the modern Army is about 1/24th the size. So every death or injury in Iraq is about the equivlent of 24 men in WW II, not even counting the advances in body armor and medical care.
Sure, you can argue that, if you want to spit on the graves of the dead. I wish these people would stop using WWII as an example. There were more paratroopers who dropped into Normandy than soldiers in combat in Iraq. So what? How many Armies landed on Normandy on D-Day? Two.
The point these people need to take away is that we're not fighting WW II in Iraq. The army is 1/24th the size. So proportionally, more people have died in Iraq than on D-Day, Iwo Jima or Okinawa.
If you multiply the 736 dead by 24, you get 17,664 dead, which is a lot more than the raw numbers the right is fond of using. This, with far better protective gear and medical treatment.
The equivlent would be 86,000 wounded in WWII. So you would have more than 100,000 dead and wounded from one year in Iraq in WWII terms.
First, hit the Planned Parenthood box. I've already been paid for it, but you need to sign the petition. Karen Hughes's comments comparing the pro-choice movement to Al Qaeda are deeply unpatriotic and she needs to know Americans will not stand for such vile slander.
Ok, I'm finally going to put up the Amazon/Paypal box this weekend. We're trying to raise enough money for a computer upgrade. The PC still lies dormant because I'm lazy and the Mac works fine. But this is not a state which can last forever. It must be repaired, with more memory and a faster CPU. Thankfully, we're not talking more that $200. But to be honest, I'd also like to buy a wireless router and some other stuff. Give what you can, a dollar is fine, seriously, I'm not greedy and I'm still convalescing, so, do what what you can when the box goes up and it will be used well. No beers, no porterhouses, just hardware and software and DSL fees.:)
As I said before, when I use money raised from the site, I'll tell you what it goes for. Unlike George Bush, I believe in accountability.
Once again, I have to thank the people who sent cards and gifts when I was sick. Thank you cards will be coming, now that I can write clearly. It was unexpected and I remain grateful as one can be.
I remain undecided about attending the Democratic convention, I think the GOP convention will make for great TV with the drunk cops rioting and all. However, unlike my peers, I probably won't be raising cash for Boston. You can take a bus from New York round trip for $20 to Boston and my sister lives near downtown, so no need to raise cash if I go. Unless you want to buy me stuff from Filenes and the Eddie Bauer outlet near Downtown Crossing.:)
If I decide to go, I'll let you know. But to be honest, most of those things are a great ego boost for the people covering it, but if I'm right, the news from Iraq will be more important.
Also, let me just thank you all for your responses and general civility with your comments. While we haven't gotten our weekly spot on Air America yet, or hosted a show, your contributions are what excite me and keep me going. And if you're just lurking, please post, the more the merrier. Besides, I don't have the greatest radio voice. Trust me on this.
Someone asked me why I write about food. Well, of all the responses I get, they are the best, the most honest. I'm hardly a foodie or even a food writer. I just love the way people open up about something where there are no right opinions.
The thing about the pictures of Iraqi prisoners being humiliated is that it is the result of braindead management and racism.
The whole culture of Abu Gharib was designed to control and humiliate Iraqi detainees. The photos come from a fairly wide culture of contempt. These are not the first prisoners to be abused by Americans or the first courtmartial to happen over this kind of treatment.
What is incindiary are the pictures of a woman humilating Arab men and dogs being sicced on them. These are gross violations of Arab culture and sure to assist the resistance in killing Americans. The idea of a woman humiliating men will go down poorly in the Arab world, as will the idea of dogs being used on prisoners.
Saddam didn't take pictures of the people he tortured, and more importantly, he didn't humiliate them for pleasure. Iraqis kept their torture secret.
The fact that the prison officials allowed contract interrogators to have supervisory roles with the prison guards is even more revolting.
Now, why did these things happen? Why would American, and now British, soldiers, seek to abuse, humiliate and then record their acts?
Because that is what you do when you have a racist contempt for those in your charge.
Omer Bartov, the leading German historian of the Eastern Front, helped create an exhibit of Wehrmacht soldiers abusing Russians a few years ago. The exhibit broke the myth that all of the abuses on the Eastern Front were done by the SS. Of course, this exhibit went down like a lead balloon. People were angry at confronting the lies they had hidden behind for decades.
The guards and the interrogators had a deep racist contempt for the Iraqis. They felt no need to treat them decently. When you can call them hajis and sand niggers, how far is it to allowing an Iraqi translator to rape a teenage boy, who was arrested for whatever reason? The abuse didn't come from thin air, but a casual racism which the US command has tolerated from its soldiers.
With communication limited, and a barrier of interrorgators and translators, it becomes very easy to be divorced from the humanity of their prisoners. So things which are clearly horrific, like pyramids of naked men and exposing their genitals, become a giantic joke. They aren't people, but things to abuse. They aren't like us, they can't even communicate with us. Their country is a mess, they needed us to save them, they don't even have a Taco Bell, why should we respect them as fellow humans.
Now, to Arabs, these images are akin to seeing child porn. It couldn't be more offensive or humiliating if you tried. A woman displaying the gentials of Arab men? Dogs? If you wanted a recruiting poster to kill Americans, this would be it.
The soldiers who did this had no clue. Not about Arab culture, the laws of war or the Geneva Convention and the general running the prison was more interested in looking good than running an effective prison. That doesn't mean they aren't guilty of vile abuses, but their superiors shouldn't get a free pass.
God help any Americans captured by the resistance now.
I am genuinely perplexed by the reaction of Sinclair Broadcasting Group to tonight's Nightline. I'm even more perplexed by calls to read the names of the 9/11 dead instead.
I honestly don't get this reaction.
Those Americans died in the service of their country. What is so wrong about reading the names of those killed in Iraq, whether in combat or in accidents, which Nightline expanded to do, after several parents called to ask why their loved ones were excluded.
I don't see this as any more political as the ceremonies for the opening of the WWII Memeorial on the Mall. I never knew that an accounting of war dead would harm the president and was "anti-war". Most sane people are against war.
But because they are so afraid that people might link our retreat in Fallujah, the general mayhem in Iraq and 724 dead, to Bush's failure to control the situation, they have to dishonor the American dead like this. And make no mistake, they are dishonoring the dead, denying their families the small comfort of seeing their loved ones honored on national TV.
If reading all the names is an anti-war statement, then it's an anti-war statement. If it isn't, it isn't. What it is to me is an acknowledgement of their sacrifice.
But the naked fear of Sinclair's bosses and their conservative allies is quite telling. They were just saying a month ago that casualities didn't matter. That it was less than those that died on Omaha Beach, or living in California. That Americans would take casualities to support the war on terror.
But when called on their bullshit, and faced with the real names of real people, most of who weren't even old enough to drink, they turn tail and cry politics. When their families were crying for their loss, they minimized it and used macho talk to excuse their callousness. Now, when faced with reality, all 724 people are really dead, they ran like the cowards they are.
If reading the names of the war dead is bad for Bush, so be it. It shouldn't be an excuse for the cowardice of Sinclair Broadcasting Group's naked and disrepectful politics.
Note:John McCain sent a letter to Sinclair today:
MCCAIN LETTER TO SINCLAIR BROADCAST ON PREEMPTION OF NIGHTLINE
For Immediate Release
Friday, Apr 30, 2004
U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) issued the following letter today to Mr. David Smith, President and CEO of Sinclair Broadcast Group, in response to the preemption of this evening’s Nightline program:
I write to strongly protest your decision to instruct Sinclair’s ABC affiliates to preempt this evening’s Nightline program. I find deeply offensive Sinclair’s objection to Nightline’s intention to broadcast the names and photographs of Americans who gave their lives in service to our country in Iraq.
I supported the President’s decision to go to war in Iraq, and remain a strong supporter of that decision. But every American has a responsibility to understand fully the terrible costs of war and the extraordinary sacrifices it requires of those brave men and women who volunteer to defend the rest of us; lest we ever forget or grow insensitive to how grave a decision it is for our government to order Americans into combat. It is a solemn responsibility of elected officials to accept responsibility for our decision and its consequences, and, with those who disseminate the news, to ensure that Americans are fully informed of those consequences.
There is no valid reason for Sinclair to shirk its responsibility in what I assume is a very misguided attempt to prevent your viewers from completely appreciating the extraordinary sacrifices made on their behalf by Americans serving in Iraq. War is an awful, but sometimes necessary business. Your decision to deny your viewers an opportunity to be reminded of war’s terrible costs, in all their heartbreaking detail, is a gross disservice to the public, and to the men and women of the United States Armed Forces. It is, in short, sir, unpatriotic. I hope it meets with the public opprobrium it most certainly deserves.
Atrios has a post on Ben Affleck joining Ted Kennedy on Capital Hill to campaign for the minimum wage.
The current minimum wage, which has made Walmart millions by underpaying its workers and providing no benefits doesn't work. If calculated for real needs, the average mininmum wage should be around $!2.
Every time raising the minimum wage comes up, conservatives, who haven't worked for the minimum wage for years, think it will "hurt" business. Which is insane. The owner of Godfather's Pizza, a truly shitty fast food chain, had health insurance for his office staff, but his line workers were simply too "expensive" to insure or pay well. He testified in the mid-90's that raising wages would force him to close stores.
This, is, of course, a lie. Anyone who defends the penury which American law permits is either a liar or a fool. The current minimum wage has climbed two dollars in 20 years. No one ever correlates the cost of federal assistance to the working poor with the cost of a sub-poverty line living wage. If America's employers actually paid their least skilled workers enough to live on from one job, maybe American tax payers wouldn't have to suppliment their income with food stamps and medicaid.
Make no mistake, we are making up the difference between the minimum wage and the profits companies are making.
I watched Duncan Hunter (R-San Diego), talk about self-reliance and individuals coming together as service families lined up for free food given out by the Boy Scouts.
So many Americans have swallowed bullshit which comes from movies, not from actual American history. The West was the largest government grant program in history. Most farms failed long before the mandated five years of the Homestead Act. The real story of the West is the growth of cities, not the individual farmer, who usually failed badly and abandoned the farm for the city as soon as they could. I have to wonder about the sanity of any person, watching people line up for food and spout this drivel.
The minimum wage is a gift to service and retail businesses. It allows them to underpay for labor and profit. Even most fast food places have to pay around $7 an hour to hire anyone, so the legal minimum wage is fictional in most places. What the current mimimum wage does is depress wages for work and allow owners to save on labor costs.
Needless to say, this system doesn't exist in Europe, where the government covers the cost of benefits, like health care and encourages unionization. Too many Americans believe that they can handle their own problems, which is a myth best left on the movie screen.
Raining hell on Falluja is a tactic bursting with political danger. So why do it? The answer, according to Newhouse's David Wood, is because thin-skinned American Humvees can't handle an up-close fight.
"A shortage of armored combat vehicles in Iraq is pressing U.S. forces into a cruel dilemma: either advance stealthily on foot, or hold up at a city's outskirts and use artillery, mortars and airstrikes," Wood writes.
"Using bombs and AC-130s is a strategic defeat," given the political repercussions, said Kenneth Brower, a weapons designer and consultant to the U.S. and Israeli military. "But we've had to use them."
In contrast, Israel has developed special armored vehicles for urban combat in Gaza and the West Bank, senior Israeli officers said, enabling them to drive up close to the enemy and use pinpoint weapons. Soldiers ride into Palestinian neighborhoods in tanks with turrets replaced by armored boxes with bulletproof glass, which allow the vehicle commanders to see 360 degrees without exposing themselves to fire.
American tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, like the Bradley, have notoriously restricted vision when hatches are closed. In city streets, they must operate with crewmen exposed in open hatches or be flanked by walking infantrymen to protect against side attack.
"We have a whole spectrum of vehicles that enable you to see where you are going and who shoots at you, without being hit," said a senior Israeli officer who recently commanded a brigade in Gaza.
"This enables you to advance inside the city and to get closer" to the enemy, said the officer, who spoke on condition that he not be identified by name. "As far as I can recall we have never used indirect fire in 3 1/2 years in the West Bank and Gaza."
See, if we had known we'd be colonial occupiers, we could have built a whole fleet of weapons for repression. Looks like we screwed up.
Of course, sending Humvees into areas with RPG's is insane. But then, what else is new in this war.
Maybe if we don't read the names of the dead in public we can pretend this isn't happening.
By Lisa de Moraes
Wednesday, April 28, 2004; Page C01
ABC News's "Nightline" will devote its entire broadcast on Friday to reading the names of the more than 500 U.S. servicemen and servicewomen who have been killed in action in Iraq.
As anchor Ted Koppel reads the names for the entire half-hour, viewers will see photographs of those killed since March 19, 2003, as certified by the Defense Department.
In its announcement yesterday, ABC News said the program was its way of paying tribute to the dead. And "Nightline" executive producer Leroy Sievers called it the program's way to "remind our viewers -- whether they agree with the war or not -- that beyond the casualty numbers, these men and women are serving in Iraq in our names, and that those who have been killed have names and faces."
That is good to know because otherwise we might be left thinking that Friday's broadcast, which ABC will simulcast on its Jumbotron in New York's Times Square, is a cheap, content-free stunt designed to tug at our heartstrings and bag a big number on the second night of the May ratings race
Atrios mentioned that the Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which owns several ABC affliates, is refusing to air this broadcast because they think it's a political stunt to undermine Bush.
I would suggest that you call them to ask why honoring American war dead is beyond them. It would especially help if you were a veteran. Also, don't be shy, if you're a member of a veteran's organization, let them know that these people would rather air a sitcom rerun than remember those who died for this country in combat. I'm sure they'll be airing stories on the new WWII memorial on the Mall. So why don't those who died in Iraq deserve the same respect and honor as those who died in other American wars?
Here's the list to contact the Sinclair stations which Atrios dug up:
Contact the Sinclair Broadcast Group at 410-568-1500 and ask them why they refuse to acknowledge those who have served this country honorably.
You can also contact your local affiliate:
WXLV, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, High Point NC 336-274-484
WEAR, Pensacola 850-456-3333
KDNL, St. Louis
WSYX, Columbus OH 614-481-6666
WLOS, Asheville NC 828-684-1340
WCHS, Charleston, Huntington W VA 304-346-5358
WGGB, Springfield MA (413) 733-4040
WTXL, Tallahassee (850)893-4140
Be polite with them - recognize that it isn't their decision but you're nonetheless calling to voice your objection
Now, some of you have a point, maybe I do watch too much TV. But not as much as Lisa de Moraes, who also deserves a few e-mails for her unrelenting cynicism.
So, it would be a good idea to air the show about the dead on Memorial Day? When no one is watching and is sitting around drunk and well fed?
I think the idea is "not to tug on our heartstrings", but to remind the country of the cost of war at a time people may actually watch. I guess she's not watching the news every night to see a glimpse of her relatives in Iraq. It's only content-free when you don't have to see someone you know name being read. Otherwise, it's about all you will ever need to know about the Iraq war.
What doesn't surprise me is her complete cluelessnes about the topic. I hope ABC gets landmark ratings for this, although they won't. I would want them to air it during sweeps so people can see it. They should get as much publicity as possible for this, so people can at least see the names of the dead who didn't play for the NFL.
There has been no complete reading of the names of the dead in the media. If Nightline wants to sell Levitra while doing so, it's still a public service.
I don't think the Beltway crowd gets it. For many Americans, watching the news is hellish because they don't know if they'll see their relatives wounded or in combat. It's a frightening thing for many families. That machine gunner blasting away at unseen Iraqi positions is someone's son. That guy climbing out of a tank with a bloody face has a mother who had to see that.
The news is only news for those of us who don't have someone in Iraq. For those that do, it's a combination of expectation and horror.
It's easy to be cynical and snide about ABC's motives if we're not talking about your family.
I think it might serve as some small comfort to have your child's sacrifice noted by someone besides your family and local newspaper, regardless of the motives. After all, they're not coming back from the dead. A night of remembering the dead can't hurt, even if the motives are less than pure.
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Robin Wright
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, April 29, 2004; Page A01
FALLUJAH, Iraq, April 28 -- Perched atop sandbags and peering through powerful binoculars, Marine officers manning front-line positions around this tense city can see the problem clearly enough, even through the swirling dust that gives Fallujah the sepia hue of a Wild West town: Military-age men in white robes swagger about with impunity, they say, hardening their defenses and resupplying their encampments.
The Marines say the men are Sunni Muslim guerrillas who have taken over this Euphrates River city and transformed it into a stronghold of resistance to the American occupation of Iraq.
But neither here, nor in the Baghdad palace that serves as the headquarters of the U.S. occupation administration, nor in the corridors of official Washington, is the solution to the Fallujah problem clear. Although American officials and Iraq's U.S.-backed leaders agree that the insurgents should be captured or killed, preferably before the Americans hand over limited sovereignty on June 30, no good options exist to accomplish that goal, according to U.S. officials familiar with the issue.
A further incursion into Fallujah -- the only way many Marine officers say the insurgency here can be squelched -- has been rejected by local and national Iraqi leaders as an unacceptable risk to tens of thousands of noncombatants in the city.
"There are a lot of different proposals on the table, but all of them are fraught with problems," said one senior U.S. official in Iraq, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The same dilemma confronts U.S. military commanders and civilian officials 130 miles to the south, in the holy city of Najaf, as they attempt to resolve a standoff with a radical Shiite Muslim cleric and hundreds of his militiamen. Even more so than in Fallujah, a full-scale move into the city by U.S. forces would fuel Iraqi anger and further poison relations between the United States and the country's Shiite majority.
As military commanders and civilian administrators scramble to craft solutions to the crises in Fallujah and Najaf, "all the choices are unpalatable," said a senior U.S. official in Washington who spent several months in Iraq last year and who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject. "No one likes the options."
A post on Atrios goes into great detail on the numbers of US forces, but the reality is that the Marines are facing the Iraqi Army, not just "guerrillas", which is being centrally directed by former commanders of the army, maybe the Republican Guard.
I nearly broke my TV, when ABC's David Wright said it was inevitable the Marines will win. It isn't. The Marines should have won already. If these were just guerrillas, the Spectre should have broken their backs. It didn't even come close. Instead, when the Marines tried to seize the train station, they got repulsed. Guerrillas can't do that. Soldiers can.
The Marines need a divisional push to seize Fallujah and they don't have the men. Not even close. When you get into urban warfare, you need men, not machines. If they launch their battalions into Fallujah, they'll get ground up.
Any time someone says the Marines can win, remember, every Iraqi has an AK-47. Shopowners, kids, ex-soldiers, and Iraq, a veteran's meeting would fill a soccer stadium, old ladies. When those .223 rounds start slamming into your house, picking up and shooting is easy. No guerrilla force has been as lavishly equipped and and as cheaply equipped as the Iraqis. They merely had to drive to dumps and pick up all the weapons they wanted. Saddam's gift to Iraq was free weapons. He may have starved and tortured them, but he gave them the means for self-defense.
So when a "guerrilla" leader in Iraq looks to face the Americans, his men go into the streets with all the weapons of a modern infantry platoon, machine guns, automatic weapons, rpgs, hand grenades, mines, and with most of the men trained professionally as soldiers. The lie that these are foriegn fighters and remnants is just that. The remnants died in frontal attacks last March and April and foreign fighters would have been killed without an Iraqi support network.
Imagine if you lived in Ohio and all of a sudden Britons, Canadians and Australian guerrillas showed up to fight the Iraqi occupation Army. How long would they last if they didn't have local support? A month? Maybe two? They don't have the local accent, they can't eat or hide out. They wouldn't even be an effective military force.
Instead, we are facing people who have enough military training to dig in and hold defensive positions, just like they did against Iran. Say the older guys were 19-20 in 1988. They're in their mid-30's now and the younger guys know the techniques of combat, even if they haven't been shot at.
Another thing, which should have been evident from the Iran-Iraq war was that the Iraqis are extremely brave when well led. The poor leadership of the Gulf War has not been replicated. Instead, the Iraqis are demonstrating a real courage on the battlefield. Even posting bounties on Kimmit, Sanchez and Rumsfeld for $15m. That's more like the 101st at Bastogne than some scared guerrilla force. The Iraqis definitely seem to have a swagger to match the Marines. And their leaders, unlike US reporters, know exactly the position the Marines are in. They are also experienced enough not to try and go on the offensive against the Marines. It may have thrown them off balance at Ramadi, but the cost was very high.
The US command keeps trying to minimize who we are facing, and anyone with a brain can see Fallujah has a coordinated, widely supported defense led by professionals. If it wasn't, the Marines would have rolled it up weeks ago. They didn't agree to a cease-fire because they were winning. And despite the talk, it is clear the "local leaders" are not in charge. Former Iraqi Army officers are. If we ever get the whole story of the defense of Ramadi, many American commanders will be proven a liar or very lucky they didn't press the issue.
WASHINGTON — A senior Defense Department official is under investigation by the Pentagon inspector general for allegations that he attempted to alter a contract proposal in Iraq to benefit a mobile phone consortium that includes friends and colleagues, according to documents obtained by The Times and sources with direct knowledge of the process.
John A. Shaw, 64, the deputy undersecretary for international technology security, sought to transform a relatively minor police and fire communications proposal into a contract allowing the creation of an Iraq-wide commercial cellular network that could generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue per year, the sources said.
Shaw brought pressure on officials at the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad to change the contract language and grant the consortium a noncompetitive bid, according to the sources.
The consortium, under the guidance of a firm owned by Alaskan natives, consisted of an Irish telecommunications entrepreneur, former officials in the first Bush administration and such leading telecommunications companies as Lucent and Qualcomm, according to sources and consortium members.
Shaw's efforts resulted in a dispute at the Coalition Provisional Authority that has delayed the contract, depriving U.S. military officials and Iraqi police officers, firefighters, ambulance drivers and border guards of a joint communications system.
That has angered top U.S. officials and members of the U.S.-led authority governing Iraq, who say the deaths of many Americans and Iraqis might have been prevented with better communications.
In interviews, Shaw said he had a long-standing personal relationship with at least one member of the consortium, but had no financial ties or agreement with the consortium for future employment. One other member of the consortium's board of directors is under contract with his office as a researcher.
Shaw said he was trying to help the group because it could quickly install the police and fire communications system, and because the group was using a U.S.-based cellphone technology called CDMA that had lost out in what he called a "rigged" competition last year for commercial licenses in Iraq. Three companies using European-based technology won contracts.
Additionally, Shaw said that he had been contacted by Rep. Darrell E. Issa, a Republican whose San Diego County district was packed with Qualcomm employees, and the office of Republican Sen. Conrad R. Burns of Montana, the head of the Commerce Committee's communications subcommittee, urging him to ensure that U.S. technology was allowed to compete for cellular phone contracts in Iraq. Issa confirmed they he had contacted Shaw on the issue. Burns' office did not respond to inquiries.
CDMA, which was developed by Qualcomm, is used in the United States and some countries in Asia. Its rival, a standard developed by Europeans called GSM, is used in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East.
"Hey, we won the war," Shaw said in an interview. "Is it not in our interests to have the most advanced system that we possibly can that can then become the dominant standard in the region?
Here is a GSM vs CDMA map of the world. Notice that ALL of the countries in the Middle East are GSM only. Introducing a CDMA network into the region effectively prevents local cellular companies from bidding on Iraqi work projects.
There is a long, taudry history of Darrel Issa pushing Qualcomm's CDMA, the worldwide loser in the GSM/CDMA battle, on Iraq.
As US troops were fighting their way to Baghdad, there was already a fierce bidding war to slide CDMA into Iraq. As the Register notes:
Spread-spectrum radio began life as a military technology; Qualcomm grew fat on Pentagon pork defense contracts in the late Reagan years as it sought to tame CDMA for civilian use. Which it eventually did, after many delays, and with some admirable panache. Only CDMA arrived, when it eventually did arrive - three years after co-founder Dr Jacobs promised - too late to make an impact on the cellphone industry as it was. The world had multilaterally decided on an older time-division digital technology several years previously.
The result is that the world has a single standard, and enjoys economies of scale and very, very cool gadgets. The USA on the other hand decided to allow four incompatible standards to battle it out, thus blocking innovation from overseas, and allowing cellphone carriers to play atrocious bait and switch games with cellphone users.
Like so many things connected to the CPA and Iraq, the whole wireless phone contracting process has been tainted with corruption. As fighting was going on, MCI was awarded a contract to develop a wireless phone network in Iraq.
WorldCom's Iraq deal assailed
Critics wonder why MCI got contract after fraud scandal
By BRIAN BERGSTEIN
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK -- The Pentagon made an interesting choice when it hired a U.S. company to build a small wireless phone network in Iraq: MCI, aka WorldCom Inc., perpetrator of the biggest accounting fraud in U.S. business and not exactly a big name in cellular service.
The Iraq contract incensed WorldCom rivals and government watchdogs who say Washington has been too kind to the company since WorldCom revealed its $11 billion accounting fraud and plunged into bankruptcy last year.
"We don't understand why MCI would be awarded this business, given its status as having committed the largest corporate fraud in history," AT&T Corp. spokesman Jim McGann said. "There are many qualified, financially stable companies that could have been awarded that business, including us."
The whole Bush approach to Iraq's economy is about the same as GI's who robbed Iraqis during searches of their home. It was never about helping Iraqis, but getting rich. Foisting CDMA on Iraq was never in Iraq's best interest. Any more than the flag they cooked up.
As I watched the BBC News last night, Iraqis outside Fallujah took a new Iraqi flag and burned it. As I laughed, the presenter said that the locals called it the flag of the infidel.
It it any surprise that someone connected to this CDMA fiasco now needs a lawyer?
I admit that during my convelenscence that I watch a lot of TV. Part of the reason is that my cousin lost my reading classes, and at 39, I need them as much as I did at 12. And I needed them then.
But I don't watch it with an empty mind. If you catch Dr. Phil or Oprah, a lot of their shows revolve people's money problems. When a couple starts bickering, sure the glossy stuff is about sex and childcare, but at the root is money.
On Oprah, one family owed $92,000 in debt, many in legally usurious "payday loans". What did their family have for that massive debt? A computer on payments, a camcorder, a truck costing $700 a month. In short, junk.
The wife was addicted to spending. She bought useless crap because it made her feel good.
Here's a simple rule: never buy any electronics on time. If you don't have the cash, leave the flat screen TV at the store. Buying a depreciating asset with credit, which is what a computer is, is stupid. You have to replace it every three years. Which is why I use used ones and build my own. You never want to go in hock for a computer.
More and more, these shows are dealing with couples with financial problems. Now, the "expert" they had wanted people to cut their cable and cellphone bills. But that's bullshit thinking. You could probably save more by adapting the way you shop and eat than not paying for cable. After all, this isn't 1980. We now pay for TV. You can look to chop channels, like Showtime, or get a cheaper cellphone plan. He suggested that "you use a payphone". Well, that's not going to work if you have small kids and need to keep in touch with them.
One of the most expensive things you have in your home is your landline phone, yet most people never look at the bill. A lot of bills people get, they never examine. They just pay them.
The problem with a lot of the financial advice handed out on TV is that itn isn't realistic. People get in debt because of lving above their means. Hell, this woman was bitching about going to the dollar store with a Louis Vutton purse. Uh, honey, if you hadn't bought that pointless purse, maybe you wouldn't be broke now.
Americans have lost the distinction between quality and cost. They see some celebrity, who gets a whopping discount on their purchase, and they have to have them. I once passed by the Manolo Blahnik boutique in Midtown one day. You have never seen skimpier shoes. When you hear an actress praise these shoes, or Jimmy Choo's or a Vera Wang dress, they aren't paying retail. Hell, just the mention might be a paid endorsement. They may get it for free. The trick is to lure you in to pay the retail they don't.
Now, I'm not against quality. I will pay good money for quality items, like a suit. Now that I can wear them, I'd buy a Brooks Brothers suit without hesitation, if I had the cash. The same with a Mercedes or BMW. Why? Because if I can afford them, I know they will last me a long time. But this year's Armani? I am not George Clooney, sorry. I don't make that kind of cash. Nor can I pretend to.
Too many people go into debt, not for their own business or a home improvement, but over status items. A too expensive car, too much for their home, things they cannot hope to keep if times go south.
I'll never forget this. On an Oprah, a woman wanted to buy an $800K house while her husband couldn't come close to affording this. She had no idea about financial management, no idea of the down payment, the mortgage payments, much less the property taxes. All these very expensive things which would not only affect her income, but her lifestyle for years to come.
A fancy house is nice, but not when you work 60 hours a week to pay for it. And then can lose it at the first economic dowturn.
Just today, Dr. Phil was dealing with a family which had a deeply troubled nine year old, but the husband was working 60-80 hours a week. Well, what do you think happens when you spend so much time out of the home. Dr. Phil had to tell the guy to take some time off, and he wasn't the first guy to be told this.
We have a cycle of buy and bust with consumer spending, People are never educated in school about the basics of the economy. So many people define their lives by vanity purchases which have no real appreciable value. It's one thing to buy a Coach purse or bag which will last a decade or more, but another to buy a bag which will be unfashionable next year.
The fact that many people are more interested in toys, whether Xboxes and Playstations 2 or Air Jordan's, throwback jerseys, than the kind of purchases which bring real value, or even saving money. Yeah, Jay-Z looks great in a throwback jersey, but he's a multimillionare who can afford that stuff, most of us aren't.
The most amazingly stupid thing I've heard was on Suze Orman, where this guy took money from his IRA to buy a laptop and PDA. Wha? You take money from your retirement fund for a depreciable device which will have to be replaced in three years?
Oh yeah, the guy was unemployed at the time.
I also am bothered by the tightwads who become rich. This guy was chortling over shopping at Costco. Well, you know, some of the things I want can't be found at Costco. I don't take pride in buying in bulk and tying my purchases to coupons. It's unseemly. Just as displaying great wealth is vulgar, so is excessive cheapness. It's embarassing and degrading.
Saving money is smart, but being cheap is as sinful as being wasteful.
The smart thing to do is to live below your means. Live on less than you make and when bad times come, you may survive them without too much pain. If not, when they repo your car and foreclose your home, you have no one to blame.
WHEN friends come for dinner we tend to cook what we know. There is no sense attempting sea urchin napoleons when roasted chicken and braised pork shoulder have proven to be crowd pleasers. But life gets dull without a challenge, so we decided to stir some risk and ambition into our routine, composing a spring dinner inspired by the new wave chefs, the ones turning culinary tradition on its head from suburban Barcelona to the Lower East Side of New York.
Even if you have never sampled their handiwork, you may have heard about such haute-cuisine iconoclasts as Heston Blumenthal, the chef at the Fat Duck in Bray, England, which recently earned three Michelin stars for a repertory that includes bacon-and-egg ice cream and sardine-on-toast sorbet (Carvel take note). There's Ferran Adrià, the chef of El Bulli in Rosas, Spain, and the de facto dean of avant-garde chefs, who spends six months of every year in a Barcelona lab refining such inventions as wonton wrappers made from the "skin" of scalded milk. On these shores are visionaries like Grant Achatz at Trio, who has introduced Evanston, Ill., diners to the pleasures of lobster slow-cooked with Thai iced tea.
They're the sort of chefs who consider themselves artists and philosophers more than fish grillers and asparagus poachers, testing the limits of a diner's trust (and often charging a king's ransom for the privilege), but succeeding far more often than they fail.
As for us, we had an agenda other than simply shaking off the winter doldrums with a night of kitchen gymnastics. We wanted to rifle through the chefs' high-concept tool bags for any techniques or tools that amateur cooks might take home. An encounter earlier this year with a bright red pixie dust at the Manhattan restaurant WD-50 had encouraged us: the powder had a fruity, exotic and deliciously intense pepper flavor. It was in fact a common bell pepper, Wylie Dufresne, WD-50's chef, revealed, dehydrated in a simple device you can buy on eBay for less than the price of a fancy cocktail, and then pulverized in a coffee grinder. If we could learn to tease sophisticated flavors from everyday sources, the exercise would be worth the risk.
So we ordered a dehydrator (rather than risk losing an eBay auction, we bought a brand-new Nesco/American Harvest dehydrator direct from the manufacturer, $59.95 at www.nesco.com) and went to work planning the menu. The cookbook "El Bulli 1998-2002," the nearly 500-page, nine-pound volume by Mr. Adrià and his associates seemed the ideal place to start, and fortunately a friend lent us a copy — it's about $200. Flipping through the book was an instant immersion in the new wave mindset, where sweet meets savory in alarming ways (olive and white chocolate, tuna and black currant), where hot and cold are transposed (barbecued corn sorbet, hot mayonnaise) and where textural expectations are upended wherever possible (cauliflower is couscouslike, almonds foamy).
Some of Mr. Adrià's tools seemed out of reach — anybody got a Pacojet, the Swiss-made, 2,000 r.p.m. frozen-food processor? Or a Thermomix, the German steamer/food processor? And the photos of the superminimalist kitchen at El Bulli with leagues of lab-coated chefs at attention, were intimidating. But the book got us thinking outside of the box.
Now most of us are not going to cook haute cusine at home, or even try. But this interested me because it covers a theme I've been thinking about for a while, what do you keep on hand at home.
There are a few basics which we all have, sugar, salt, black pepper, eggs. But whens someone raised the issue of canned olives, it set me to thinking. Fresh olives are available in delis, supermarkets, farmers markets. If you really wanted an olive, a nice, salty olive, this isn't the 1970's. Get fresh ones.
The same wirh cheese, bread and vegetables. We can get them fresh and eat them daily.
Americans tend to shop as hoarders. We get frozen food, hoard it, try to buy days out for bread and cheese and other things which taste best when fresh. When my mother was a girl, she went to the butcher for my grandmother, everyone did in the 30's and 40's. It was common and well understood. A supermarket was for canned goods. People expected to get things like milk and bread and meat as they needed them. Not to store and hoard.
We know most Europeans don't shop like this. They tend to buy as they need and cook as they need. But it is rare in France to cook at home for guests. Most eating in Europe tends to be either intimate, and at home, or takes place outside. Americans tend to cherish home cooking, even as more of us lose the basic skill of cooking.
But it occurs to me that to cook, you need some creativity and some flexibility and that requires both tools and basic food stuffs.
Everyone needs a good knife. A good knife matters more than most things, because it is so flexible. What is a good knife? One which has a reliable handle and feels good in your hand. That's it. Some folks might like a Wustoff, finely balanced and expensive, some might like a single cast piece of metal. It depends solely on your tastes.
A non-stick frying pan also is crucial. It can do most things on most days. I'd get one with an oven-proof handle. One of the great tricks of cooking is to start something on a stove and finish it off in the oven. You can then get crunchy and not oily.
I live without a food processor, but I can see it being useful. Unlike a bread machine. Most people get it, use it a couple of times and let it sit. Now, I know there are some of you who use it every day, and there are those of use who floss daily. You remain exceptions.
A deep, large pot is essential. It can serve as both pasta boiler and less admitted, a fryer. Instead of buying a dedicated fryer, a relatively deep pot can fry up most of what you need, especially with the metal basket most of the good pasta pots have.
What essential food stuffs should you keep around? A can of tuna, a can of salmon, rice, pasta, a lot of spices, canned tomatoes, frozen veggies, at least one frozen piece of meat, breakfast meats, eggs, canned mushrooms, kosher salt, flour, olive oil, pizza dough, two kinds of cheese.
A quick pizza is a great dinner when you're wiped out. Omletes and even sausages sandwiches can be a filling meal. If you get frozen peppers and onions, you pick up a roll and you have a hero in five minutes. The thing is to keep around food that you can fix quickly and when tired. Not just frozen chicken fingers and Hot Pockets, but real food which doesn't take forever to cook. Kielbasa is a quick meal on its own. Kielbasa and eggs is heavenly.
Quick cook rice and salmon with onions is one of my favorite meals.
The trick to stocking your cubbard is to have food you can cook quickly. Which is not a Lean Cusine and a diet soda. Sure, you can cook that quickly, but it isn't really a meal. It's frozen crap ladened with salt, which is what preservatives really are.
You should be able to have a hot, fresh meal when you come home, one you fix. The key is to make sure that you have the basic ingredients and tools to execute a decent meal. Yeah, you can save money and have better tasting food, but with a little foresight and planning, you can actually have food you can enjoy when all you want to do is sit down and watch the black people get voted off American Idol.:)
Send Jobs to India? Some Find It's Not Always Best
Send Jobs to India? Some Find It's Not Always Best
By EDUARDO PORTER
Published: April 28, 2004
Even as the prospect of high-skilled American jobs moving to low-wage countries like India ignites hot political debate, some entrepreneurs are finding that India's vaunted high-technology work force is not always as effective as advertised.
"For three years we tried all kinds of models, but nothing has worked so far," said the co-founder and chief technology officer of Storability Software in Southborough, Mass. After trying to reduce costs by contracting out software programming tasks to India, Storability brought back most of the work to the United States, where it costs four times as much, and hired more programmers here. The "depth of knowledge in the area we want to build software is not good enough" among Indian programmers, the executive said.
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If it sounds like "Made in the U.S.A." jingoism, consider this: The entrepreneur, Hemant Kurande, is Indian. He was born and raised near Bombay and received his master's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in that city, now known as Mumbai. Mr. Kurande is not alone in his views on "outsourcing" technology work to India. As more companies in the United States rush to take advantage of India's ample supply of cheap yet highly trained workers, even some of the most motivated American companies — ones set up or run by executives born and trained in India — are concluding that the cost advantage does not always justify the effort.
For many of the most crucial technology tasks, they find that a work force operating within the American business environment better suits their needs.
"Only certain kinds of tasks can be outsourced — what can be set down as a set of rules," said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist of Global Insight, a forecasting and consulting firm based in Waltham, Mass. "That which requires more creativity is more difficult to manage at a distance.
Nightline is going to read the name of every American soldier killed in combat on Friday. The Newshour with Jim Leher and This Week with George Stehpanopolous note the dead every week, but no one has read all of the known dead at one place and one time.
It would be nice if we could do the same for the Iraqis, but since there is no real government, they don't collect the names of kidnapped, raped and murdered girls, the crime victims and those gunned down by American troops. We many have killed 8000 people, but the occupation may have killed twice that many. Not even the anti-war movement sites those other, incidental deaths as our fault, but they are. The lack of security is as much our fault as an errant artilery shell.
There was a debate on Atrios yesterday, where some people tried to claim that the soldiers dying in Iraq weren't dying in their name because they opposed the war.
Well, that's a nice fanatsy, but the AC-130 pounding the shit out of Fallujah doesn't have a sign saying "Sponsored by Rush Limbaugh and EIB". It is an American plane, crewed by American citizens, not just like the readers here, but who may well have been readers here or be readers here. They don't come from caves, but nice homes, with nice American parents, and they live in America, supported by American tax dollars.
We would like to say that because we opposed the war, those horrible things happening in Iraq are not our fault. But they are.
We are all guilty.
It will be to our everlasting shame that we watched Bush get elected, then watched him lie about 9/11, prostituting it so badly that Karen Hughes could compare the pro-choice movement to terrorists. An idea Osama Bin Laden and other Muslim fundamentalists, who are rabidly anti-family planning, would agree with.
What was our response?
We let some anti-semitic wackjobs from ANSWER define much of the anti-war movement for a long time. With their "out of everywhere" signs and their refusal to let supporters of Israel speak, many of us were far too silent about their excesses. Now, no one says much, even as Bush's insane tough talk ensures more Americans will die. Our Congress looks for some kind of fix so this won't end like George Bush's others failures. Maybe if he hid in Alabama for a year and took Dick Cheney with him, we might salvage this.
The troops fight in our name because we cannot opt out of that. They fight for us because that is what you do when you take that oath. We can't say "oh no, I disagree with the war, so they don't die for me."
Wrong.
They die for you because the people you voted for sent them to Iraq, and your tax dollars keep them alive. They don't get to choose where they go or what they do there, except at the sharp end of the weapon, where every choice comes down to your morals.
The sad reality is that our troops are attacked, every day, while Iraqis stand around and watch these men die. When people bemoan Iraqi casualities, they forget a good portion of them were trying to kill Americans, and many others are killed in response to combat. The majority of Iraqis say nice things in polls, but the IED's still get planted, the militias still roam the streets and American soldiers die. This is a pointless exercise, a futile one, because you cannot fix anything when the reaction is indifference and silence.
We are all guilty. The bombs dropped and the bullets fired come from Americans no different than you or me. It does not matter to an Iraqi family if we oppose the war when their son is killed. Americans killed him. Our tax dollars are making their lives hell. Almost no one in our Congress wants to end this madness. So why should an Iraqi care if there is an anti-war movement. It isn't stopping the war for them.
The only way to reedeem ourselves is to force Bush from office and force Kerry to end the war.
We don't get to pretend the troops didn't die for us, that the bombs dropped aren't our fault. We pay our taxes, we obey the law, we let Bush wage this war, they died for us. Can you blame Iraqis if they aren't exactly impressed if you opposed the war personally. It isn't helping them. Our Americn soldiers are kiling their children and our lives remain undisturbed. The Iraqis have no such luxury.
The sad part is that we can't end the war on our own. But neither can we opt out of the consequences of waging it. We can't pretend we, as Americans, aren't stakeholders in this awful, as all wars are awful, war. We are all guilty and will be until it ends.
Wednesday, April 28, 2004 Posted: 0219 GMT (1019 HKT)
The ski resorts say they will return the guns.
RENO, Nevada (AP) -- The U.S. military is demanding the return of five howitzers that two Sierra Nevada ski resorts use to prevent avalanches, saying it needs the guns for the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Alpine Meadows and Mammoth Mountain received the artillery pieces on loan from the Army and began using them last year to fire rounds into mountainsides and knock snow loose.
But the ski resorts received word earlier this month that the Army's Tank Automotive and Armaments Command at the Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois needs the howitzers back.
"I need to have them back in the troops' hands within 60 to 90 days," said Don Bowen, the Army command's team leader in charge of the howitzers.
"It's a very short timeframe to get them serviceable and back into the theater in southwest Asia. Afghanistan-Iraq is the immediate concern."
On the Daily Show yesterday, Bob Kerrey said he had left off his Naval service on his first resume. This from a Medal of Honor winner, one of three SEAL's to win the medal in Vietnam.
While Bush dregdes up Vietnam to discrete John Kerry, he forgets exactly how ugly a time it was.
I first became familiar with John Kerry in the mid-1980's, when I read the Winter Soldier hearings transcripts. They were bound, like all hearing transcripts, and lots of soliders were angry about their service in Vietnam. People forget the insane tension which had existed in the US during 1970-71.
Vets were caught in the middle between anti-war protestors, who had only recently gained steam, and the working class who'd fought in WWII and Korea. Construction workers attacked an anti-war protest in downtown Manhattan, while the White House chortled. Domestic enemies of Nixon faced the Huston plan, a full-scale violation of their rights. Only J. Edgar Hoover's common sense prevented the White House from making the Plumbers illegal break-ins state policy.
The US Army was collapsing, drug use exploding, combat refusals rife, fragging (the murder of officers and senior NCO's) common. People have forgotten how divided the US was. Veterans were routinely attacked on college campuses. Wearing a fatgue jacket with a unit patch was asking to be called baby killer.
And while stories of vets being spit on at airports were probably fictional, the open hostility they faced was not. Admitting service in Vietnam was an easy way to be scorned by both pro-war supporters and anti-war activists. The reason Vets now seem so self-protective and cloistered is that they only had each other to turn to.
The Nixon Administration was full of big talk, but their VA hospitals were rundown and as Bob Kerry found out, filled with rats, as one ran over his chest.
John Kerry joined the anti-war movement older and probably angrier than a lot of his peers. He knew the folly that he saw was wrong. So, yes, like a lot of angry young men, especially those who had been betrayed by both their government and their peers, said things which didn't sound great. But the cold hard fact was there were atrocities in Vietnam, as there are in every war. The Toledo Blade just won a Pulitzer for uncovering the activities of Tiger Force, a unit of the 101st which killed over a hundred innocent Vietnamese.
The vets who are so indignant about Kerry's public statements in 1971 are for the most part lying or didn't see enough combat to know people at war kill civilians as well as the enemy.
For Bush to drag this all up, especially behind the skirts of Karen Hughes, is insane. Bush not only supported the war, he avoided service in it, and thus benefitted from being a part-time soldier, which advanced his career, such that it was.
What people forget is that despite the success of John Kerry, Vietnam was like a giant weight on people's lives long after the war was over. To say the words "Vietnam Vet" was to create a stigma which lasted well into the 1980's. All those who didn't serve, the Clinton's, the Cheney's, they had their careers enahanced while those who did either downplayed their service or faced roadblocks. Bob Kerry didn't hide his military service for no reason. Employers simply did not hire Vets. They didn't and they never said why. My father worked with Vietnam Vets and they had a brutal time in the 70's and 80's.
Most people didn't go to Canada or lie to avoid the draft. Going to Canada was a lifetime decision. You couldn't expect to come back. Meanwhile over 30,000 Canadians served in Vietnam. So the idea that they wanted draft dodgers, deserters and draft avoiders has been overblown in popular legend. More than a few men with short haircuts were turned over to the FBI by the Mounties. While going into exile was a brave decision, so was facing the draft.
Bush made his decision, one that many people tried to make, which was to avoid service in Vietnam. The problem with what Bush did, as opposed to Clinton was that he supported the war. Now he's trying to denigrate Kerry's service, which should engrage people. Kerry didn't take the easy way out. He didn't avoid combat, and he could have, having served a tour off Vietnam on a destroyer. Instead, in a span of five months, he won three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star and a Silver Star, a remarkable record for a junior officer. There is absolutely no question about his service or his personal bravery.
John Kerry did what George Bush never had the guts to do, which is face the Vietcong. Bush wanted the aura of military service and risk, without the actual risk of death. Now flying a jet is risky, but Bush couldn't even do that. At least a year of his service was missing from his record. They don't even know he showed up and they don't know why he was booted from flight status.
George Bush could have gotten his daddy to send him into an F-4 Squadron in Thailand, but he didn't. He wanted to emulate daddy without daddy's balls. He refused to fight in a war he supported. For God's sake, he could have been a supply officer at Udon, Thailand, stayed drunk and still served his country. Daddy fought the Japanese and was shot down. Bush wanted to be a pilot without the risk. A lifetime of personal cowardice which continues today.
The new Iraqi flag reminds me of what the Israelis would impose over the West Bank, so everyone would know they had a colony. The colors are an anti-semite's dream, and Iraq is filled with Jew-haters, convinced they are being colonized by Israel, and who's people are buying up houses in Baghdad.
This flag is ridiculous, because it violates traditional Islamic and Arab rules for flags, which include green, white, black and red. Blue and white is most often seen on fire in the Arab world, because it is usually in the Israeli flag.
The colors in the Arab flag have specific meanings which respresent Islam and Arab nationalism. None of which are represented by the current Iraqi flag.
One would have to wonder, exactly why someone would pick a flag which reflects nothing of 1500 years of Islamic and Arab culture, and only make a nod to it by throwing in a crescent of the wrong color.
Riverbend has a rather concise comment on the new "Iraqi" flag:
I also heard today that the Puppets are changing the flag. It looks nothing like the old one and at first I was angry and upset, but then I realized that it wouldn't make a difference. The Puppets are illegitimate, hence their constitution is null and void and their flag is theirs alone. It is as representative of Iraq as they are- it might as well have "Made in America" stitched along the inside seam. It can be their flag and every time we see it, we'll see Chalabi et al. against its pale white background.
My email buddy and fellow Iraqi S.A. in America said it best in her email, "I am sure we are all terribly excited about the extreme significance of the adoption by the completely illegitimate Iraq Puppet Council of a new national piece of garishly colored cloth. Of course the design of the new national rag was approved by the always tastefully dressed self-declared counter terrorism expert viceroy of Iraq, Paul Bremer, who is well known for wearing expensive hand-stitched combat boots with thousand dollar custom tailored suits and silk designer ties.
The next big piece of news will be the new pledge of allegiance to said national rag, and the empire for which it stands. The American author of said pledge has yet to be announced."
Now they can burn a third flag in Arab street demonstrations.
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, April 27, 2004; Page A01
While attention remains riveted on the rising count of Americans killed in action -- more than 100 so far in April -- doctors at the main combat support hospital in Iraq are reeling from a stream of young soldiers with wounds so devastating that they probably would have been fatal in any previous war.
More and more in Iraq, combat surgeons say, the wounds involve severe damage to the head and eyes -- injuries that leave soldiers brain damaged or blind, or both, and the doctors who see them first struggling against despair.
For months the gravest wounds have been caused by roadside bombs -- improvised explosives that negate the protection of Kevlar helmets by blowing shrapnel and dirt upward into the face. In addition, firefights with guerrillas have surged recently, causing a sharp rise in gunshot wounds to the only vital area not protected by body armor.
The neurosurgeons at the 31st Combat Support Hospital measure the damage in the number of skulls they remove to get to the injured brain inside, a procedure known as a craniotomy. "We've done more in eight weeks than the previous neurosurgery team did in eight months," Poffenbarger said. "So there's been a change in the intensity level of the war."
Numbers tell part of the story. So far in April, more than 900 soldiers and Marines have been wounded in Iraq, more than twice the number wounded in October, the previous high. With the tally still climbing, this month's injuries account for about a quarter of the 3,864 U.S. servicemen and women listed as wounded in action since the March 2003 invasion.
About half the wounded troops have suffered injuries light enough that they were able to return to duty after treatment, according to the Pentagon.
The others arrive on stretchers at the hospitals operated by the 31st CSH. "These injuries," said Lt. Col. Stephen M. Smith, executive officer of the Baghdad facility, "are horrific."
100 killed, 600 wounded.
And the Iraqis have 800 dead and god knows how many wounded.
Our war in Iraq is not going well, except to the White House.
Karen Hughes, a campaign adviser to President Bush, described herself as "very troubled" by the fact that Kerry only throw away his ribbons -- not the medals themselves.
"He only pretended to throw his," she charged Sunday on CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer."
"Now, I can understand if out of conscience you take a principled stand and you would decide that you were so opposed to this that you would actually throw your medals. But to pretend to do so, I think that's very revealing."
Here's a wonderful idea: why doesn't Karen Hughes shut the fuck up? What does she know about Vietnam, being under fire or being wounded.
Her boss was too much of a pussy to go to Canada, blow his eardrum out, much less go to Vietnam, happily sending a poor Texan to take his place, so he ran to Daddy's friends and got slid into a "champagne" squadron protecting the US from Mexico, and then coudn't even complete his service. He got booted off of flight status.
Meanwhile, people were trying to kill Kerry every day he was in Vietnam.
They're dragging out people who don't know the man, don't have Silver Stars and didn't serve with him to play the same game they did with John McCain. But their problem is that Kerry isn't going to take this, since it is the seminal event in his life, and seems ready to toss it back in Bush's face.
Bush and his campaign keep trying to press this issue, and it bites them in the ass. Kerry was fearlessly courageous, and won two medals in less than five months. While the Bronze Star is awarded frequently, the Silver Star is not.
It's nice to see the chickenhawks quibble over Kerry's wounds. Have any of them been wounded in combat? No? Any of them aware of the lifelong pain most shrapnel wounds can cause? No? Then they should all be ashamed of themselves. My father was wounded by shrapnel in a training exercise in Japan. It is still a nasty wound, decades later. And he didn't get a Purple Heart, either. It wasn't massive, but it sure as hell hurt. Anyone who hasn't been wounded and isn't a doctor is in no position to discuss this.
John Kerry was wounded in the service of his country. He was highly decorated. Unlike Bush, he went to Vietnam, already opposed to the war. Yet, he sought out combat duty, writing his request during the Tet Offensive and despite his opposition, served honorably. His actions were consistent with his beliefs.
There aren't many words I would use to express my contempt for this tactic. Why even raise the subject? Kerry served honorably, Bush slacked his way through. It shouldn't matter now. But it does. The Bush campaign is, dishonorably and disgustingly slandering Kerry's service. I don't care if his first Purple Heart was a scratch. He got it in combat. His third certainly wasn't, considering he picked up a SF Officer from the drink with a wounded arm. The man was so impressed, he put him in for a Silver Star, and he got a Bronze
George Bush avoided ANY service in Vietnam. He asked to not serve overseas. He wrangled his way into the Guard because of his daddy. He didn't even attend OCS. Yet, he allows his campaign to attack Kerry's war record?
Bush has been a coward his entire life. John Kerry clearly was not. If they want to compare the two records, let's do so. Too bad he can't get daddy to buy him a few medals now. Bush's entire career is the result of a father's errant love for his son. He never asked of his son what he asked of himself. Which is a tragedy. Maybe if he had, maybe his son wouldn't be the cowardly failure that he is today. He even has to hide behind a woman to attack Kerry. If he thinks Kerry didn't deserve his awards, why not say so himself? No, like a coward, he sends a woman to do his dirty work. If he were a man, he'd say it himself or drop the issue.
I don't watch American Idol, I watch Gilmore Girls instead. Why? I think the writing on Gilmore Girls is some of the best on TV and I think most of the people one American Idol can't sing to save their lives. Even though the subject matter may not, at first, be appealing, I will watch or read anything which is well written or compelling, which is how I've been drawn into watching Nova, American Chopper and Trading Spaces, even the Roman Empire in the First Century.
How do I know if the writing is good? Well, if I watch something and it makes sense, like many of the romantic complications on Gilmore Girls, something many shows get wrong or just recycle from movies (how many times can Ross and Rachel play at being a couple), then I'm going to watch it.
Of course, I have to excuse 24's plot holes because any group of writers who can keep the plot moving, which is a pretty hard task, deserves praise. You try moving a story along from plot point to plot point for 22 episodes. Few people can do it for two hours. Ever see the Battle of Algiers? That movie is captivating because it moves quickly and there are few movies which do.
But, if anything is a Rorhschact test on the American pysche, American Idol is it, at least with teenagers. And as this piece from Salon indicates, there is something else going on:
Take, for example, last week's results on "American Idol." As I mentioned in my last column, there are three extremely talented contestants on "American Idol" this year, all of whom happen to be black women. The other contestants range from just OK to cringe-inducingly bad. This past week, when Ryan Seacrest announced the three contestants who received the least number of votes, most viewers assumed that Diana DiGarmo and John Stevens, two white teenagers who should be practicing their box steps in show choir instead of paining the nation with their clumsy karaoke routines, would surely land in the bottom heap.
Not so, America! Instead, La Toya London, Fantasia Barrino and Jennifer Hudson, all of whom were praised to high heaven for their fantastic performances, were in the bottom three. The judges were asked what they thought of the results. They expressed disappointment, but reminded us that, after all, this is a democracy.
Others talked about a conspiracy.
Um, racism isn't really a conspiracy. It's pretty much out in the open. This is a racist country. Most people in this country are racists. Every single black person in this country knows it. Can't you just take their word for it? Even if you don't personally see evidence of racism in this country, can't you trust those who are in the position to see it, those who are telling you, day after day, that it's there?
Or do you not trust them?
Now, having seen just enough of the show to understand this, the black girls are the only ones with real talent. But Idol is as much about appeal as talent. And there is clearly a racial cast to all "reality" shows. Was anyone really surprised that Donald Trump, a man well known for his racial issues, didn't hand over a company to Harvard MBA Kwame? Or that in the history of reality shows, only ONE black contestant has won.
And as Dave Chappelle so adroitly pointed out, black male characters are usually driven off shows like the Real World?
The reality, however, is a bit more complex than racism. Remember, Ruben Studdard won the last season and Justin Guarini, who is biracial, came in second in the first season. I'd argue that it isn't racism alone, although that's a factor, but an unwillingness to vote for certain kinds of black people.
On reality skill shows, black men are at a disavantage. On talent-based shows, black women are at a disadvantage. While it is perfectly fine for black men to sing, and a lot of this is based on sexual attraction as much as talent, black women are simply discarded. No matter how talented black women are, they will lose to either a cute white girl or a man. Who do you think watches and votes on American Idol? White teenage girls. Why else do you think Clay Aiken came in second and got an insane amount of publicity?
As to the question if white people believe black people's claims of racism, of course not. No way in hell. White people live in a state of denial. Which is how, as Atrios keeps pointing out, Howie Kurtz could harp on Jayson Blair, seeing only his race, and not his asskissing and backstabbing skills, and ignore Jack Kelley, who wrote some of the most turgid, racially and ethinically tained prose since Theodore Bilbo published Segregation or Mongrelization, a copy of which is on Stormfront.
Unless directly confronted with evidence of racial bias, most whites will treat minority claims of racism with the sort of eyerolling denial small children get when monsters are under their bed. But unlike the monsters, whom to date have eaten no children, racism is quite real.
White people can see it, as in police stops of minority kids, and excuse it. They excused the beating of Rodney King "because he was threatening". He was on the ground, getting stomped, the only threat he posed was bleeding on their uniforms.
You can see that the most talented singers on American Idol gets the least votes. Why? Well, it just happens that they are black women. Even the show's hosts and judges were stunned by the result. Now, people will deny it, as they deny the open racism of US troops in Iraq, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Today's abortion rights march was successful and hopefully reminded people that pro-choice is not a slogan, but critical for millions of women and the people who sleep with them.
This is the nonsense Karen Hughes spewed today:
"I think that after September 11, the American people are valuing life more and we need policies to value the dignity and worth of every life," she said. "President Bush has worked to say, let's be reasonable, let's work to value life, let's reduce the number of abortions, let's increase adoptions. And I think those are the kinds of policies the American people can support, particularly at a time when we're facing an enemy and, really, the fundamental issue between us and the terror network we fight is that we value every life."
Huh? What does 9/11 have to do with abortion? Nothing. Bush knows if he said he thought abortion was a sin next to gay marriage, he'd be doomed. But he is so close to the Jesus freaks we know his personal prayers include the "unborn". Except when it may embarass him or his kin.
The fact is that every doctor who worked in an emergency room before 1970 knew exactly what abortions were, because they would see the effects every weekend. Lye, hangers, self-infliction of wounds. Women were desperate to end their pregnancies and did anything to do so.
Hughes is offensive as hell, considering that her boss revels in death. Death row in Texas, death in Iraq. Hell, he's even been accused of paying for an abortion in his Prince Hal days. His daughter, Jenna, is rumored to have had two abortions, on the account she likes to get drunk and sleep around and there are witnesses for both. Although none for the abortions except people who can't talk.
Not that it should matter. No one should have a child they don't want and can't care for. Seeing teenage mothers struggle with children they can't take care of is far from a pretty sight. The pro-life movement makes claims to care about these kids, but you don't see them talking about adopting seven year olds.
Most people rarely ever discuss their abortions. It remains hidden long after the fact. There is little joy or casualness about the issue. No one does it frivilously or without thinking. The additional cruelty the pro-life movement inflicts on people seems both pointless and needless. No harridan screaming keep your baby is going to buy Pampers or clean shit 10 months later. And if they think abortion is bad, what about child abuse? Nothing like seeing a 14 month old with it's head caved in.
The pro-life movement is based on a smug sense of personal moral superiority, as in "we're saving babies". Which they aren't, of course. They aren't saving anything, just annoying and scaring the clinic workers.
But what's even worse is the way many of these folks are against birth control and sex education. The Army realized that abstinance education didn't work in 1940 and handed out billions of condoms. And don't think those 11 Bravos in Iraq are going without. Condoms are part of their basic equipment. But when a servicewoman gets pregnant, she either goes home and has the kid, or pays for the abortion out of her own pocket. Why? To satisfy the right wingers. No federal funds for abortion.
This ridiculous notion extends to foreign policy. No funding of family planning programs overseas, no matter how it benefits the people affected.
These people aren't just a danger to pregnant women, but to everyone's reproductive freedom. They want schools to tell kids not to have sex, which is as successful as their don't go crash diets and stop smoking dope programs. In other words, a complete and utter failure. No culture is as obsessed with sex and as ashamed of it. We pour $11 Billion into porn yet debate Howard Stern's language. America is a land of vast sexual hypocrisy.
It is important that the national debate not be reduced into a sterile conversation about abortion. I'm not going to have one in this lifetime, yet these people pose a clear and present danger to my reproductive freedom. I want to know my partner can get birth control so we might be able to plan when we have kids, or that I can buy condoms without a hassle any time or any place. Or that my niece and nephews are taught about sex and not some wacky absitnance program. Their religious impetus is fine for them but for most of us, who don't talk to Jesus every day, we'd like to live by common sense rules not dictated from God, at least directly.
Too often, the abortion debate is reduced to liberal spokeswomen on one side, and creepy bearded men using young women as their spokespersons. Most of whom are hypocrites and don't know it. Abortion is like combat in one sense, you have no idea what you'll do until you're faced with the decision. I'm sure some pro-choice women had their kids and kept marching. I'm positive some pro-life women have snuck into abortion clinics to dump their unwanted fetus.
The reason the pro-life movement offends me is simple: they are so certain of their cause and so indifferent to the consequences. No one chooses abortion casually. To vilify them or to act morally superior is dead wrong. It's a hard choice for anyone, at any time, one they wish they wouldn't have to make. To think, as Hughes's insulting words imply "we just need to respect life" is to reduce humn reporductive freedom to that of brood mares.
Part of freedom is to have the choice to have children or not and not have it dictated by people who think God has a pipeline to them and blessed them specially.
If you listen to John Kerry, you would think Iraq could be fixed. If you listened to Joe Biden, you would think all we have to do is defeat the insurgency and get the UN aboard. Even if you listened to Howard Dean, you would think the great sin was not getting the UN aboard.
The neocon's delusion was that we were invading France, 1944 and the Iraqi people were waiting for liberation. The reality is that we were invading Yugoslavia, 1943 and most of the country hating us.
The central problem is that we have no allies in Iraq. No Charles DeGaulle who was on our side. Instead, we had a shifty crook who most Iraqis will kill on sight. Without a base of support, no US occupation can last months, much less years. To be honest, I was surprised Sistani gave us a year. We will not get another one. I cringe when I hear Democratic politicians say we will need to be in Iraq for years. Because what legitimate government would allow us, the hated occupiers, to just set up bases there?
The British tried that game and were rewarded in 1941 with a Nazi-inspired rebellion.
The Democratic Party is in a bad position. They cannot say the obvious: we will be lucky to escape Iraq with our army. The American public still conflates the war on terror with Iraq and the reality is that the two are as related as lemurs and goldfish. So they say things, which if the Europeans didn't hate Bush with a passion usually reserved for mistresses, any EU MP would fall down laughing to refute. No, NATO isn't going to Iraq. No, the UN will not bail you out.
Then you get Biden as well as Howard Dean saying "we need arab troops on the ground."
Huh? Which ruler risks being overthrown by doing that? Egypt? Syria? Algeria? Morocco? Nope, nope, nope, nope. The Arabs are not going to join a fight being quickly tied to Israel's eternal war with the Palerstinians. Israel's assasination campaign has already had a blowback in Iraq. Those for mercenaries were killed inrevenge for the murder of Sheik Yassin. By endorsing Sharon's land theft for peace policy, even the Jordanians want nothing to do with Bush.
The new neocon theme "the other Arabs don't want democracy in Iraq" is nonsense. Arab states don't usually interfere in the internal machinations in other countries, except for the Saudi wahhbist imams, bringing madrassas to a country near you. They don't care how you run your counry as long as you control it.
Dean gets a lot of credit for being against the war, but his postwar solutions don't have much basis in current reality. Neither does John Kerry's.
The problem is security and we can't do anything to fix it. The Times says send more troops. Ok, where are they coming from? The National Guard Brigades will take six months to activate and become combat ready. And as a Times story so clearly notes, long deployments to combat sends Guard families into penury.
What no one says, and is self-evident, is that the US is missing it's Pakistani auxilliaries. We could use a couple of divisions of Pakistani troops to patrol the highways and Sadr City, but since Musharraf realized his head would be on a pike if he had agreed, they stayed home. We aren't misisng NATO, a few battalions of paras and mech infantry would be nice, but they won't change much. We need our Pakistani and Egyptian friends to kick in tens of thouands of troops. We had almost bribed the Indians into joining in and then that government realized that they were in trouble.
This constant expectation that The UN can make things right is also delusional. There is no evidence that the UN, any more than the US, can even be secured in Iraq, or that Iraqis want them there. While Sistani may trust them, to some degree, others may not be so willing.
Too many Democrats endorse the war aims without understanding what they truly entail. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) said on CNN that we have to "crack that nut" Fallujah, or it would be "a symbol to the Islamic world". Well, you can't crack anything with a one to one ratio of troops and that is what we have with the Marines in Fallujah. To too many Democrats, it's all about making Bush's policy work, when there is no way it can ever work. Killing more women and children is no solution and no matter what lies the Marines tell, they will kill more women and children unless they evacuate the entire city,
It's nausiating seeing all the hype fortaking on the resistance, as if they are a few bandits and not whole battalions of the Iraqi Army. They're attacking in platoon and company strength for God's sake. I'm tired of people mouthing the platitudes that "we can beat them." "They're not a military problem". So why haven't they been beaten? Why haven't the ammo dumps been blown up? They cut the highway to Baghdad. Sounds like a military problem to me.
Now, a year later, you want to add more troops? A year of combat experience and training for the resistance? With our Iraqi forces nearly useless in combat?
The Democrats are checkmated by Bush's faux-Western resolve. What he says sounds great to many people who do not follow the news daily. He sounds like he's in charge. In reality, he's a babbling idiot scaring no one. But to call him on that plays into the GOP's hands. The Iraqis have taken everything we've thrown at them and not quit. Bush, who is sure briefed differently, pretends to America that there is both a point to this war and it has something to do with protecting America. That we are fighting Saddam groupies.
In my ideal world, the Dems would challenge Bush, claim he's losing the war and decide to end it so we can reenforce Afghanistan. But that's electoral suicide until we are truly embarassed in Iraq. The sad fact is that pictures of coffins and 100 dead will not change mids.
You would think our ready acceptance of cease-fires would be a hint. But until we lose a company in an ambush or see thousands of Sadr City residents flooding into the Green Zone with weapons or some other horrific disaster, no one will speak the truth, which is that we have already lost Iraq, It only matters how we leave it.
The sad fact is that Iraq is an immoral war fought for reasons bordering on fantasy. A particularly American fantasy, where we ignore history, the conduct of our troops (who gunned down four kids in a routinely miserable display of fire discipline), and wonder why the Iraqis do not see what good people we are. It is utterly ridiculous for John Kerry to say we can stay in Iraq for years, a position hardly different than the anti-war Howard Dean often annunciated. We broke it, we fix it is not a policy. It is not an explaination for 700 dead Americans. It is, most importantly, not going to work.
We need to get out of Iraq before we are kicked out of Iraq and then start over.
April 4 began as a routine day in the slum. A 19-man patrol in four Humvees was escorting three Iraqi "honey wagons" on their rounds collecting sewage. Platoon leader Sgt. Shane Aguero noticed one unusual thing, though. "People were throwing more rocks than usual at the trucks and at our gunners. Our work crews were threatened at each stop. At the last place about 400 people said [to the workers] "˜if you come back we'll kill you.'" All three drivers hauled their cargo to the disposal site, dumped it and quit on the spot.
Next the patrol encountered a number of armed men in a mosque and told them the weapons would have to be confiscated. The militants refused, and the Humvees moved on after some muddled negotiations about how the weapons would be turned in at a future date. Around 5:40 p.m., the patrol rolled past the Sadr Bureau, headquarters for the political wing of his organization. Aguero noticed at least 200 men out front who "quickly ran away when we arrived. Another 15 or 20 people outside were waving their hands at us"”but to say "˜stay away'? Or to say hello? We couldn't tell". A block later, the soldiers heard a few rounds of small arms fire. "We couldn't tell where it came from, it was just three to five rounds," says Sgt. Jerry Swope of Austin, Texas, who was in the last vehicle, "we figured it was a lone gunman."
Aguero decided to try to detain the shooter. But as they tried to determine the source of the gunfire, suddenly more gunmen joined in from street-level and form second-story balconies. "We began to engage the enemy, then got back in our vehicles and headed north," he says. Sudden, Aguero found his unit heading into a Mad Max gauntlet of burning tires and road obstacles of every imaginable description: concrete blocks, metal market stalls, air conditioners, scrap metal, truck axles, even refrigerators. The burning debris put out so much choking black smoke that visibility was down to 300 meters.
The street had become "a 300-meter-long kill zone," recalls Aguero. The vehicles swerved and ran onto sidewalks, rolling on the rims of flat tires, as gunmen kept up the barrage of bullets. Suddenly Sgt. Yihjyh Chen, gunner in the lead truck, collapsed after taking a hit. The Iraqi translator in his vehicle began administering first aid. Another soldier was shot, and began bleeding from the mouth. Then two of the Humvees became disabled. Aguero yelled at one driver to gun the engine to get his Humvee moving. That's when the engine literally fell out. It was time to bail. As they'd been drilled to do, the soldiers set out to strip the disabled vehicles of sensitive items and to "Zee off the radio""”to ensure critical communications codes and equipment don't fall into enemy hands.
Now the problem was how to secure everyone in just two Humvees. "I said, "˜Okay, take that alley 250 meters to the left," recalls Aguero. The two still-functioning vehicles pulled next to a three-story building, one facing forward and the other in the opposite direction. Aguero led the remaining soldiers on foot to the door, kicked it down, secured four startled Iraqi men in one room, and set up machine-gun positions on the roof. ("The Iraqis were scared," says Aguero. But not entirely hostile. "when it was over they tried to give us water," recalls Swope.)
All the while, gunmen kept up a battery of small-arms fire. Swope stayed with his vehicle to keep communications open to the battalion and the quick reaction force. Aguero ran up and down the stairs, checking the defensive positions on the roof and in the street. By this time, Iraqi militants were in the adjacent alley, lobbing grenades. One detonated a few feet from Aguero, peppering him with shrapnel and deafening him temporarily in one ear. Over the radio, Swope heard that the first quick-reaction force (QRF) sent to assist them had been ambushed two streets away. "That's when we realized the uprising was citywide," says Swope, "And we were going to be there awhile." (In all, Swope stayed in the alley, manning his radio, for three nerve-wracking hours.)
The gunfight had erupted just fifteen minutes after Volesky formally took command. "It was in my box," he says. The radio was alive with details of the engagement. "Contact! Contact! ...we're taking fire, heavy fire." From the camp other soldiers could easily hear explosions, and they saw the ominous arcs of tracer fire on the horizon. One of the quick reaction forces rolled out of Camp Eagle about at 2200 hours with Humvees, Bradleys and a couple big LMTV trucks. A civil-affairs team was part of the force. "We knew a big engagement was on," recalls Capt. Jeff Embree. Casualties had already begun to pour into Camp Eagle, soldiers moaning and bleeding in a truck driving noisily on its rims. Embree, who was in the last Humvee of the 18-vehicle convoy, says "we could see the tracer fire, there was a mess of traffic on the radio."
As the story notes, there are 2.5 million people in Sadr City. If 10 percent decide the US should leave, there is nothing we could do to stay.
It is a miracle only 12 soldiers got killed this day. If Bush has decided to move into Najaf, daily firefights in Sadr City will be common.
