Understanding Judy Miller: Learning to read a magazine story
Her daddy ran with the mob. Where she learned her manners.
This is second in a series of posts about understanding the media. Magazine pieces are written slightly differently than news stories, in that they take time to gather and to be produced. The strict segregation of the newspaper newsroom doesn't exist in a magazine, so writers can write about many different things.
This piece on Judy Miller is written as a response by Times staffers against their boss's coddling of the most hated employee on the news staff. Make no mistake, Judy Miller is hated by her coworkers, which is rare in the incestuous, closely knit, no secrets world of the newsroom. I mean journalists sleep with each other, drink with each other and know each other's secrets. There is a general understanding that what goes on in the newsroom stays in the newsroom. For people to leap up and run down a collegue, and this goes into her professional ethics, is rare.
Former Chicago Trib columnist Bob Greene shagged many a young woman(some teenagers) to the utter disgust of his collegues. But even when his adultery was exposed, many of his coworkers, some of whom could not stand him, defended him. They defended his work, if not the man, and some defended the man. Other noted newsroom grumps like Jimmy Breslin, are never discussed negatively by their coworkers, even when they don't get along. People keep their shit in the newsroom.
Why are newsrooms so prone to exposing your life? Because even today, they are open workplaces. Have a girlfriend, everyone knows it. Have a fight with the wife, people hear it. Given the antics and egos of reporters, a lot of secrets have to be kept for social peace at work.
So when people talk about Judy Miller and her bed habits, there is powerful hate going on. I'll get into her mistakes later on.
Pulitzer Prize winner Judith Miller’s series of exclusives about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—courtesy of the now-notorious Ahmad Chalabi—helped the New York Times keep up with the competition and the Bush administration bolster the case for war. How the very same talents that caused her to get the story also caused her to get it wrong.
By Franklin Foer
Miller is a star, a diva. She wrote big stories, won big prizes. Long before her WMD articles ran, Miller had become a newsroom legend—and for reasons that had little to do with the stories that appeared beneath her byline. With her seemingly bottomless ambition—a pair of big feet that would stomp on colleagues in her way and even crunch a few bystanders—she cut a larger-than-life figure that lent itself to Paul Bunyan–esque retellings. Most of these stories aren’t kind. Of course, nobody said journalism was a country club. And her personality was immaterial while she was succeeding, winning a Pulitzer, warning the world about terrorism, bio-weapons, and Iraq’s war machine. But now, who she is, and why she prospered, makes for a revealing cautionary tale about the culture of American journalism
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What this does is set the reader up for a series of pretty brutal accusations
Installed amid colleagues—they were almost all men—who’d spent decades working their way up the paper’s food chain, Miller stood out immediately for her sharp elbows. While the culture of the paper assiduously practices omertà—what happens in the newsroom stays in the newsroom—Miller is cause for reporters to break the code of silence. An unusual number of her co-workers have gone out of their way to separate themselves and their paper from Miller. Few are brave enough to attach their names to the stories, but they all sound a similar refrain. “She’s a shit to the people she works with,” says one. “When I see her coming, my instinct is to go the other way,” says another. They recite her foibles and peccadilloes, from getting temporarily banned by the Times’ D.C. car service for her rudeness to throwing a fit over rearranged items on her desk. Defenders are few and far between. And even the staunchest ones often concede her faults. Bill Keller told me in an e-mail, “She has sharp elbows. She is possessive of her sources, and passionate about her stories, and a little obsessive. If you interview people who have worked with Sy Hersh, I’ll bet you’ll find some of the same complaints.”
Except for one thing, no one has EVER questioned Sy Hersh's ethics in serious way. The rudeness thing is a big deal. Journalists need people, both inside and outside to survive the Kremlin on the Hudson. Keller has to defend her, because she's still on his staff. But he's a tool.And many of her collegues will leave her to hang. She's like the salesman who butters up his clients and shits on the office staff. When trouble comes, they jump in on the pile. You hear not ONE word of defense from her coworkers. Not her former partners, not her peers on other papers.
Miller also racked up the sort of adventure tales that correspondents love to dispense after a dram or two of whiskey. She witnessed a hanging in Sudan, flew across Afghanistan in a rickety Northern Alliance helicopter held together in places by duct tape. “Judy is a smart, relentless, incredibly well-sourced, and fearless reporter,” says Keller. “It’s a little galling to watch her pursued by some of these armchair media ethicists who have never ventured into a war zone or earned the right to carry Judy’s laptop.”
That's not the problem. It's her peers deafening silence which should concern Keller. They will simply not defend her. Not just the people on the Times, but collegues like Robin Wright of the WaPo. If she was a decent person, she would have defenders
Long before Miller’s current difficulties, she was known at the paper for a different sin: rudeness, amplified by a legendary temper. Seth Faison, a foreign correspondent who has punched his ticket with the Times in China, tells the following story: In 1993, Miller had been billeted over to the Metro desk from her day job as a staff writer at the Times Magazine to help report on the World Trade Center bombing. Faison, a young Metro reporter, had left the office for jury duty. During his absence, Miller ensconced herself at his desk. “I had been at the Times for less than two years, and I’m not a very assertive person. And so I just said, ‘Judy, could I sit here?’ She said, ‘You have to go someplace else.’ ”
When Faison went to his editors, they did nothing to help him. “They held up their hands palm up, like, ‘I’m not going to touch this one.’ They didn’t want the wrath of Judy Miller.” And so for a week, without ever acknowledging Faison’s refugee status, Miller occupied his territory.
The epicenter of Miller-bashing is the Washington bureau. The phenomenon has a long history. During her tumultuous time as deputy bureau chief in the late eighties, she proposed reassigning many reporters out, to other bureaus and lesser posts. Adam Clymer, who served as the paper’s political editor, recalls, “She ran the bureau day to day, and that regime was probably the unhappiest in my experience.”
According to Clymer, she would call reporters and editors in the middle of the night to complain about stories. She found an unusual way to pass on others’ complaints as well. To listen to a daily feed from the afternoon story meeting in New York, she moved a squawk box onto her desk in the newsroom, where everyone else in the bureau could hear the feed, too. They could eavesdrop on top editors ripping into colleagues’ stories with vicious remarks obviously not intended for wide distribution.
Tact is a major tool in business success. Miller has none. In fact, her collegues and former collegues are lining up to stick a shiv in her because they feel wronged by her. Revenge is a dish best served cold and she's made enemies for over 25 years.
At a paper that prides itself on at least a veneer of collegiality, Miller’s reporting tactics often left jaws agape. According to two Times veterans, reporters at the Pentagon and on other beats have frequently found themselves calling their sources, only to be told, “I’ve already talked to Judy Miller.”
They charge her with forcing her bylines onto stories, staunchly arguing for the addition of her name after adding mere dribs and drabs of information. “She’s not afraid to get her byline by bigfooting. In fact, that’s how she gets many of them,” charges one of her colleagues.
But when there is trouble, it appears she’s more than happy to pass around the responsibility. One incident that still rankles happened last April, when Miller co-bylined a story with Douglas Jehl on the WMD search that included a quote from Amy Smithson, an analyst formerly at the Henry L. Stimson Center. A day after it appeared, the Times learned that the quote was deeply problematic. To begin with, it had been supplied to Miller in an e-mail that began, “Briefly and on background”—a condition that Miller had flatly broken by naming her source. Miller committed a further offense by paraphrasing the quote and distorting Smithson’s analysis. One person who viewed the e-mail says that it attributed views to Smithson that she clearly didn’t hold. An embarrassing correction ensued. And while the offense had been entirely Miller’s, there was nothing in the correction indicating Jehl’s innocence.
The bad feelings from these incidents have festered over time, and as problems have come to light with Miller’s reporting, her critics at the paper have eagerly piled on. Over the course of the past six months, Washington reporters have complained vociferously about Miller. They have been especially angry that Miller appears on Larry King Live and Paula Zahn Now to discuss Iraqi WMD. “There’s anger and embarrassment among the staff that Judy is still the voice of the Times on the subject,” says one reporter. In addition, some of these reporters have frankly told their editors that they will never share a byline with her. All this pressure has succeeded in forcing official reforms. The paper’s current policy is that any time Miller visits Washington, her editor Matthew Purdy must provide bureau chief Philip Taubman and his deputies with advance notice and explain her purpose for visiting. In January, the bureau officially deprived Miller of her desk. Although this was ostensibly done to make space, according to denizens of the bureau it had an intentional symbolic value, too. “It gave the bureau a way to move her out without saying it was moving her out,” says a reporter.
Stealing credit in a world of egomanics is a way to make enemies. Miller is not only sloppy, but makes enemies without regard. She acts as if the Times is there to serve her, not the other way around. You can do that if you suck up to the right people, but there is a limit to how long it will work. When it doesn't, it fails spectacularly.
Where Miller exhibited so much hostility to other reporters, she would be fawning and generous to her sources. “Judy treats her sources well, with a sense of loyalty. She’s an attentive and courteous person to them,” one Times reporter says. Her strength was that she viewed the relationships as more than transactional. Her sources were her friends.
According to some of her critics, they have occasionally been more than friends. In the early eighties, she shared a Georgetown house with her boyfriend, Wisconsin congressman Les Aspin—a rising star in the Democratic Party, who went on to become Bill Clinton’s first secretary of Defense. Aspin, many noted, had appeared a dozen times in Miller’s pieces, offering sage words about national security. Certain catty colleagues liked to read these stories aloud. Each time the phrase “Aspin said” appeared, a reporter would add, “rolling over in bed.” When Reagan nominated Richard Burt to be assistant secretary of State for European affairs, Jesse Helms and other right-wingers bludgeoned him for their relationship. “It would help [your chances for confirmation],” Orrin Hatch delicately wrote to Burt, “if you could lay to rest the rumors about Judith Miller’s articles on arms control appearing so soon after your own meetings with her. . . .”
The gossip about Miller’s romantic life was circulated most widely by a columnist writing in Spy magazine under the pseudonym J. J. Hunsecker. He chronicled her exploits, referring to her as “frisky deputy bureau chief Judith ‘Is that a banana in your pocket . . .?’ Miller.” As a commentator on the mores of the Times, Hunsecker lacked a certain subtlety. “Miller has been enriching the lives of high-level sources around Washington with her own very special brand of journalistic involvement,” the columnist sneered in 1988. But gradually, the allegations moved from innuendo to out-and-out rumormongering. The column reported, outlandishly, that President George H. W. Bush called his resident political genius, Lee Atwater, into his office “and informed him that it might be better if he ended his very special relationship with Miller.” Hunsecker was hardly credible. He could produce some howlers, and nothing he wrote could necessarily be believed. But the point wasn’t his information, but the way he obtained it. Colleagues within the Times had come to despise Miller so greatly that they apparently picked up the phone, called Spy, and dished their hearts out.
This isn't exactly the way I remember it. Miller's sex life was a joke in Spy, but they were not the only people complaining. Judy the Mattress was widely known around journalism circles, as were questions about her ethics. When Todd Purdum, bailed out his then girlfriend (now wife) Dee Dee Myers out of jail on a DUI charge, his editors were pissed he hadn't mentioned that he was dating the White House Press Secretary. They were not happy to see him leading her out of the MPD station on their morning news. Miller, otoh, was quoting her Congressman boyfriend in news stories. And this was 15 years ago. Miller was pounding mattresses for news, and none of her editors thought fit to call her on it.
She must have been awful for that kind of dishing to take place. It was the kind of thing which really hurt her reputation and it was done for spite. And the sad fact is that rumors about her bed hopping have not stopped. The Howie Kurtz story about MET Alpha drip with the same kind of unspoken allegations. She's hardly the only woman to sleep with the "wrong" people at the Times, but she made so many enemies that they felt no reason to keep her little secrets.
Last month, I traded e-mail with Eugene Pomeroy, a former National Guard soldier who is now working in Baghdad as a contractor for a security firm. During the war, Pomeroy served as the public-affairs officer for MET Alpha. This meant that he had one primary duty: to shepherd Judy Miller around Iraq. It wasn’t a particularly happy experience. In one e-mail to me, he joked, “As far as I can gather, not many people at Defense liked this woman, and the sense I got was that she wasn’t their problem anymore now that she was in Iraq. Maybe they were hoping that she’d step on a mine. I certainly was.”
Miller guarded her exclusive access with ferocity. When the Post’s Barton Gellman overlapped in MET Alpha for a day, Miller instructed its members not to talk to him.
According to Pomeroy, as well as an editor at the Times, Miller had helped negotiate her own embedding agreement with the Pentagon—an agreement so sensitive that, according to one Times editor, Rumsfeld himself signed off on it. Although she never fully acknowledged the specific terms of that arrangement in her articles, they were as stringent as any conditions imposed on any reporter in Iraq. “Any articles going out had to be, well, censored,” Pomeroy told me. “The mission contained some highly classified elements and people, what we dubbed the ‘Secret Squirrels,’ and their ‘sources and methods’ had to be protected and a war was about to start.” Before she filed her copy, it would be censored by a colonel who often read the article in his sleeping bag, clutching a small flashlight between his teeth. (When reporters attended tactical meetings with battlefield commanders, they faced similar restrictions.)
As Miller covered MET Alpha, it became increasingly clear that she had ceased to respect the boundaries between being an observer and a participant. And as an embedded reporter she went even further, several sources say. While traveling with MET Alpha, according to Pomeroy and one other witness, she wore a military uniform.
Up until Vietnam, this was standard practice. Reporters wore uniforms. For her to wear a full set of fatigues would be uncommon as hell these days, because it could get you shot. Miller had some kind of relationship with the unit's leaders, one so disturbing that serveral warrant and comissioned officers went to the rival Washington Post to complain. They knew that complaining about her actions could raise questions about their conduct and did it anyway.
Another management problem was that Miller, like many in her profession, didn’t take well to editing. “Judy has never been shy about crawling over the heads of editors,” says one retired Times colleague. And Raines had crafted Judy’s assignment so that it became extremely easy for her to circumvent the desks. According to one of her editors, she worked stories for investigative one day, foreign the next, and the Washington bureau the day after. It was never clear who controlled or edited her. When one desk stymied her, she’d simply hustle over to another and pitch her story there. It was an editorial vacuum worsened by the absence of a top editor on the investigative unit, her nominal home. Between Doug Frantz’s departure for the Los Angeles Times in March 2003 and Matthew Purdy’s arrival in January 2004, Miller had almost no high-level supervision from editors with investigative experience.
Many editors I spoke to consider Miller to be such a high-maintenance, uncollegial writer that they’d rather not deal with her at all. One Times veteran says, “She considers us to be her minions.” The process of editing her sounds like an exercise in misery, requiring a constant subjection to her fits of anger; it draws editors into her interoffice disputes with other reporters. Another adds, “There’s only one editor who has had the skill, energy, and willingness to harness her energy—Stephen Engelberg.” But after Engelberg edited a series on Al Qaeda for which Miller and her unit won a Pulitzer in 2001, he left the paper, leaving Miller without the strong hand capable of directing and containing her zealousness. It was a perilous dynamic: By being so difficult, she became so much more vulnerable to journalistic sins than her more affable colleagues.
So why did it take so long to run an editor’s note? In the newsroom, there are several theories. The first, and least persuasive, is the Sulzberger factor. “There was always the sense, true or not, that she had a benefactor at the top,” says Seth Faison. When Miller joined the Times in the late seventies, she arrived in the Washington bureau at about the same time as Arthur Sulzberger Jr.—a recent college graduate getting hands-on experience in the shop floor of the family business. The D.C. office had only about half a dozen reporters under the age of 35, including Sulzberger, Miller, Steve Rattner, and Phil Taubman. They clung to one another
Judy worked the system to get what she wanted. The problem is that by doing so and bigfooting her way around the office, it left the paper open for a major mistake.
Ok, what's the missing part from this story? Miller's ties to the neo cons. It's way too easy to explain away the reputation destroying scandal by tossing blame on some squirrely behavior by Howell Raines or her sex life. She wrote a book with wingnut Laurie Mylroie in the 90's and was obviously close to the ruling junta at State DOD. The question you have to ask about Miller was if she was pushing a political agenda, regardless of the consequence.
Unlike what she may or may not do with her vagina and her large brown eyes, her politics being questioned is the WMD of journalism. No one cares, except on ethical grounds, if she fucked or fucks her sources. But to write politically biased stories is the greatest sin one could commit. Worse than making up stories, worse than getting things wrong. To accuse her of it is like accusing a CIA agent of treason. Even the implication is so serious, so deadly, that it is more likely to harm the accuser than than the accusee.
But there is real reason here to ask. Her reporting so relied on a few key sources, and she was given such access, that one has to wonder if this happened because they knew she wouldn't question their spin?
People outside the profession think reporters routinely have political biases. Nothing, and I mean nothing, could be further from the truth. Bias is the worst of the newsroom sins and one most people would be ashamed to be accused of. It is very easy to leave journalism and work in politics. I've done it, and it's common. But to stay as a reporter and to push an agenda is a very serious charge.
But Miller was SO wrong and so off base, that questioning her agenda is called for. She never even questioned how her sources kept coming up dry. Which most people would be angry as hell at. But MIller defended her reporting and her sources for a year. Even when it was clear that her work was wrong. Her editors have not even considered that she might have had an agenda in her reporting. Was it as simple as her plotting with Rummy? No. But since she shared a world view with these people, it was easy to stick with them and ignore the truth. And her editors have not even begun to ask her the hard questions they need to ask. Maybe they'll avoid it and let her go off to think tank land. But I seriously doubt Miller can withstand the emnity from her coworkers and the outside. At some point, before the end of the summer, she's going to have to get a job from her friends. Her actions, whether it was fucking warrant officers or being a useful fool for the neocons, have harmed the credibility of her employer beyond explaination. No one is going to protect her. She's made too many enemies for that.
It is only a matter of time before the question is raised why Miller kept her job for far worse sins than the mentally ill Jayson Blair was fired for. And if the questions come from the outside, the Times will have to worry about accusations of racism, no matter how well-deserved his firing was. And the Times black opponents have plenty of reason to go after them. What I don't think Bill Keller gets, and his bosses are blind to, is that journalists made a very nasty stink over Blair, some many black people felt was unfair. I don't, because I despise plagerists. But keeping Miller on is not just an internal or Washington problem. It affects the entire paper and they have to deal with it.
Selfish white people gather to protect their "rights"
Somalia - a libertarian paradise. No government, no laws, daily drug use.
Libetarians are like small children, unable to realize why they can't have their way. They have no idea of social responsibility, but they cloak it in freedom. I saw the convention of the assclowns on Saturday, and started to laugh. Three people, the sybarite bad movie producer Aaron Russo, radio talk show host and bad hair victim, Gary Nolan, and yet another "computer consultant" asshole, Michael Badnarik were campaigning for the nomination to run for President. All three of these people make Zell Miller look more like a noble civil servant than the rank opportunist he is.
Why? Beccause the libertarian platform is fundamentally and unalterably racist at it's core. Not the cross-burning, nigger lynching kind. If you had rolled up to their convention with the Stars and Bars and a cross, they would have beaten you silly. But just as there is more than one way to skin a cat, there's more than one way to be a racist.
What the libertarian policies would do is enshrine the status quo as law. No social mobility, no redress of grievences. Government would let the rich rule the poor without any chance of altering that.
So let's look at some of their bright ideas and deconstruct them.
Education
To transfer control of education from bureaucrats to parents and teachers and encourage alternatives to the public school monopoly, the Libertarian Party would:
* Support a true market in education -- one in which parents and students would not be stuck with a bad local school, because they could choose another.
* Implement measures such as tax credits so that parents will have the financial ability to choose among schools.
* Provide financial incentives for businesses to help fund schools and for individuals to support students other than their own children.
* Eliminate the U.S. Department of Education, which spends billions on education and educates no one. The growth of this agency and its numerous regulations is a major reason for runaway costs in American schools.
Ok, there is no evidence that a "market" for education works. France doesn't have one, China doesn't. And their people are literate. Americans have real problems with this. Tax credits only benefit the people who pay taxes. Businesses are businesses, not the government. They should run their businesses. If people choose to not educate others, what happens then? Do we do what they do in the Third World and charge for education? Or do people just become more ignorant.
What is lacking here is any sense of collective responsibility. We should all feel collective responsiblity for each other, and express that through government. We tried schools based on charity of others and 50 percent of America was illiterate. Libertarians are selfish, sheltered people. Poor people know the need for collective responsibility and collective action, which is what a government is. It isn't just designed to take your money.
Taxation
Since we believe that all persons are entitled to keep the fruits of their labor, we oppose all government activity that consists of the forcible collection of money or goods from individuals in violation of their individual rights. Specifically, we:
1. recognize the right of any individual to challenge the payment of taxes on moral, religious, legal, or constitutional grounds;
2. oppose all personal and corporate income taxation, including capital gains taxes;
3. support the repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment, and oppose any increase in existing tax rates and the imposition of any new taxes;
4. support the eventual repeal of all taxation; and
5. support a declaration of unconditional amnesty for all those individuals who have been convicted of, or who now stand accused of, tax resistance.
As an interim measure, all criminal and civil sanctions against tax evasion should be terminated immediately.
Like small children, they want to keep all their money. Build roads? No. Fund colleges? No. Do anything for the collective domestic tranquility of America? No. We pay taxes to have a civil society. To prevent banditry and starvation. Not just to waste money. Countries which can't collect taxes soon look like Somalia.
Unions and Collective Bargaining
We support the right of free persons to voluntarily establish, associate in, or not associate in, labor unions. An employer should have the right to recognize, or refuse to recognize, a union as the collective bargaining agent of some, or all, of its employees.
We oppose government interference in bargaining, such as compulsory arbitration or the imposition of an obligation to bargain. Therefore, we urge repeal of the National Labor Relations Act, and all state Right-to-Work Laws which prohibit employers from making voluntary contracts with unions. We oppose all government back-to-work orders as the imposition of a form of forced labor.
Government-mandated waiting periods for closure of factories or businesses hurt, rather than help, the wage-earner. We support all efforts to benefit workers, owners, and management by keeping government out of this area.
Workers and employers should have the right to organize secondary boycotts if they so choose. Nevertheless, boycotts or strikes do not justify the initiation of violence against other workers, employers, strike-breakers, and innocent bystanders.
These people forget that labor law was forged in blood. People died for the right to strike. The federal government intervened in labor disputes to prevent deaths, not just to interfere. The Roosevelt Administration had to become involved in labor disputes because the states were siccing the National Guard on non-violent strikers. Labor law comes from a brutal history of violence, which many of these folks do not realize.
Poverty and Unemployment
Government fiscal and monetary measures that artificially foster business expansion guarantee an eventual increase in unemployment rather than curtailing it. We call for the immediate cessation of such policies as well as any governmental attempts to affect employment levels.
We support repeal of all laws that impede the ability of any person to find employment, such as minimum wage laws, so-called "protective" labor legislation for women and children, governmental restrictions on the establishment of private day-care centers, and the National Labor Relations Act. We deplore government-fostered forced retirement, which robs the elderly of the right to work.
We seek the elimination of occupational licensure, which prevents human beings from working in whatever trade they wish. We call for the abolition of all federal, state, and local government agencies that restrict entry into any profession, such as education and law, or regulate its practice. No worker should be legally penalized for lack of certification, and no consumer should be legally restrained from hiring unlicensed individuals.
We oppose all government welfare, relief projects, and "aid to the poor" programs. All these government programs are invasive of privacy, paternalistic, demeaning, and inefficient. The proper source of help for such persons is the voluntary efforts of private groups and individuals.
Private charity failed in the 19th Century. Which is why the government got involved. Minimum wage is not some random idea, but forces employers to pay fair wages. It was one of the basic worker rights established. They have to be kidding about no licenses. I like my doctors to be licensed and my lawyers to have passed the bar. Maybe I'm funny that way, but these are not arbitrary requirements, but manditory ones for public safety and security.
Social Security
We favor replacing the current fraudulent, virtually bankrupt, government sponsored Social Security system with a private voluntary system. Pending that replacement, participation in Social Security should be made voluntary. Victims of the Social Security tax should have a claim against government property.
Social security is not insurance, it pays current benefits. It was never designed to be insurance. Once you make it voluntary, it converts into an insurance plan and becomes extremely expensive. If you make it voluntary, you ensure some folks would be living in penury, the system Social Security was designed to prevent.
Foreign Aid
We support the elimination of tax-supported military, economic, technical, and scientific aid to foreign governments or other organizations. We support the abolition of government underwriting of arms sales. We further support abolition of federal agencies that make American taxpayers guarantors of export-related loans, such as the Export-Import Bank and the Commodity Credit Corporation. We also oppose the participation of the U.S. government in international commodity circles which restrict production, limit technological innovation, and raise prices.
We call for the repeal of all prohibitions on individuals or firms contributing or selling goods and services to any foreign country or organization.
Americans give very little foreign aid compared with our allies, and much of it is spent on US goods and services. We also place onerous conditions on what we do give. We are not a particularly generous nation.
Most of the Libetarian ideas are selfish, which is why these ideas were so popular with computer people. As long as they were making money, they thought this was fine. Everyone could care for themselves. But when they were back in momma's basement and doing the 1-9 shift at Starbucks, they saw the idea of social responsibility in a very different light. All their anti-union tirades faded as they saw how their former bosses walked off with fortunes while they were sitting home on weekends too tired to do anything.
The effect of the Libertarian ideas would be to limit help to the poor to charity. The poor would no longer have the right of neutral decision making, but would have to jump through hoops to get services. They would become modern day serfs, relying on businesses to fund their schools, private organizations to help them in times of need and have no say in how these resources were used.
Government is not just the waster of money, but the arbiter of social justice. By having the decisions decided by neutral bodies, which is what government is, social justice can at least be attempted. When America let private individuals and charity run the show, you could be denied services for any number of reasons. Government cannot be so arbitrary. The reason we have civil rights is due to a government able to enforce them. Left up to the whims of individuals, black people would still be eating in colored only sections.
This is a profundly anti-democratic way of seeing the world. While the libertarians would get their guns and dope, they would leave millions to the whims of fortune and arbitrary treatment. It is a profound lack of faith in the ability and intellect of others. It is the perfect ideology for the arrogant and isolated. It is surburban selfishness.
When a local libertarian group handed out toy guns at the elementary school down the block, the local residents not only called them racist, but literally put the boot to their ass. Gunplay is no joke in my neighborhood, where the local knucklehead is occasionally shot in gang warfare or the police may gun down the innocent. These liberterians had no idea that the parents would want to kick their asses because there is a consequence for their action. Which might be the death of their child.
The libertarian thinks that HE or SHE can manage their own life to perfection, and that is not the case, Societies were formed because people need help to survive. It is a cooperative effort, not just proof you're smarter than other people.
I was surprised to see a sea of white people at the Libertarian convention, not a black or brown face in sight. It was the face of middle class, suburban complacency, who don't really want to live the consequences of their ideas. You don't get freedom with their ideas, you get Somalia. You get armed thugs, daily drug use and random violence as the order of the day. justice devolves into the whims of the powerful, not the rule of law.
What libertarianism would do is freeze the society in its status quo. No racial, no social justice, just angry people relying on the whims of the powerful to do as they would. Government is the social leveller, without it, people would do as they chose, and in many cases, the weak would suffer and revert to serfdom.
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, May 30, 2004; Page A30
BAGHDAD -- The report of his death found Abdulsemi Janabi in a meeting. His cell phone chirped, and through her sobs his wife told him that a radio station had just reported that his head had been found in one part of Baghdad, his body in another.
Janabi, a dean at Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, assured his wife that he remained in one piece, safe and sound. He was on campus, sitting opposite a group of angry Shiite students demanding a prayer room and an office. In that moment, Janabi decided to take their demands more seriously.
Faced with the threatening broadcast and rumors that the students were supported by shadowy allies off campus, Janabi stopped going to work. His colleagues, who recounted the story, called his decision prudent in a city ruled by the law of the jungle for more than a year.
Violence, and the fear of it, defined everyday life in occupied Iraq long before the current insurgency. Ambushes, kidnappings and militias -- all the dangers lurking for Western visitors since last month -- emerged as dangers for many of Baghdad's 5 million residents shortly after the city fell in April 2003.
In the months that followed, while car bombs and attacks on U.S. forces grabbed the headlines, a relentless sense of insecurity eroded the patience of Iraqis, 92 percent of whom agreed that "freedom and democracy are meaningless without peace and security," according to a poll conducted in January for the Coalition Provisional Authority.
Much of the country has been badly destabilized by the recent surge in fighting aimed at forcing out U.S. troops. But Iraqis say that their society was already strained by the disorder that emerged whenever U.S. forces were not around -- a lawlessness largely unchecked by a U.S.-trained police force that many citizens regarded as ineffectual from the start.
"Is there any solution for this?" said Abu Fateh, cradling his gray head in his hands in a room crowded with friends of his nephew, a mechanic murdered in the Volkswagen repair shop the family runs across the street from their home. Ahmed died beside a co-worker in the kind of gangland killing that has become routine over the last year in a neighborhood in western Baghdad called Khadra.
The killers, who wielded German-made submachine guns and cleared out in seconds, seemed professional. The police did not. "They just came in their cars and watched from a distance," Fateh said.
The wonder is that any came at all. For months after a car bomb destroyed the district's police station in early November, an adjoining precinct deployed just 15 officers to the neighborhood, which has a population of 100,000 people.
"The police work sometimes. Sometimes they're tired," Ahmed Kadim Ibrahim, deputy interior minister, said on one of his last days on the job before heading to a position with Iraq's delegation to the United Nations. ("I need to learn politics," he explained.) Ibrahim spent a year working alongside U.S. overseers trying to build the national police force, which partially collapsed last month when some members joined insurgents and others simply surrendered the streets to men with guns.
"Three months ago you could see Iraqi police setting up checkpoints all over at night," he said. "Now, you cannot find them."
On paper, the force entered April at full strength: 70,000. But Coalition Provisional Authority figures show that fewer than 3,000 completed a two-month training course, and 55,000 were listed as "untrained."
"Police officers require long training," said Sameer Shaker Sumaidaie, Iraq's new interior minister. An effective force "cannot be produced by courses that take as long as boiling eggs."
Iraq is in near anarchy. Hell, 100 cops walked off the job today in Najaf, they don't have weapons or enough numbers to do the job. While the neocons ignore the absolute lawlessness in Iraq. Americans don't like living in violence ,why should Iraqis catch hell. Iraq is like some abatoir where no one controls anything. The cops cannot protect the citizens and the their ranks are completely penetraited by resistance members.
I think Memorial Day is making people look a lot harder at Iraq and its consequences. Despite the claim that things are going well in Iraq, a fantasy I feel honor bound to refute daily, the reality is nothing is going right. Not the war, not the reconstruction, not security. Our successes are few and far between.
The real question is how long will Iraqis tolerate this before reacting en masse?
I'm watching Tina Brown at the moment, because she's talking about Iraq. In the span of the previous 20 minutes, both 60 Minutes and Dateline ran heartbreaking stories on the dead from Iraq. I can decide which affected me more, the faces of the dead or the letters from the dead. Both were deeply emotional.
There are thousands of families which are suffering this Memorial Day, the relatives of the dead and the relatives of the injured.
They also dedicated the World War II memorial on Saturday, and the reaction was not the one you would have been led to expect from decades of war movies. One veteran said to an ABC reporter "I wouldn't come back here if you paid me. The memories were just too painful". Another, on NPR, broke down in tears as he remembered landing in Normandy at the age of 16. All he could remember was his friends who died that day. There was none of the fake lauditory crap so evident in Tom Brokaw's hagiographic work. It was just so painful for these men, and their memories at 80 were pretty sharp. We forget how young these men were in 1944, but most were teenagers or 20-21. Kids, no more or less.
When Dateline interviewed the mother of a dead 19 year old female soldier, it was the same sense of waste and loss. The idea is that 19 year old girls do not die in combat, but they do. At least in Iraq.
The 60 Minutes tribute had so many young faces, kids in prom tuxes and graduation gowns. A year or two ago, they were sitting in classes and serving fast food. Now, they were dead. Killed in Iraq in a war without point.
Bush has been quite this Memorial Day, showing up at the WWII Memorial, but saying nothing of comfort or sense to the people who's teenage children are either crippled for life or dead. Iraq is a pathetic mess as crooks decide to divide up the spoils of their loot. Allawi, Chalabi, it doesn't matter. They're all crooks and the Iraqi people hate them more than Saddam.
This seems to be all a waste, a sad, pointless waste.
This is a painful Memorial Day because we are not talking about the past, but the present and all we're getting from Bush is more of the same. More platitudes, more protecting the same exiles who lied to us so nakedly, more of the same failures. It is tiring to see and one can only hope that people realize that the war needs to end. No matter how tough we talk, Abu Ghraib was our Gettysburg. We lost the Iraq war because no Iraqi will ever trust us again unless we line their pockets.
Beer can Chicken is one of the great recipes of the grill. Unlike many barbecue recipes, this one produces awesome results from the oven. I live in an apartment and don't have regular access to a grill and to be honest, I'd rather fix steaks due to the time factor. This takes at least an hour to cook. And since it is Memorial Day weekend, those of you having parties and barbecues might want to toss this on the grill or in the oven. It's one I'd clip and keep myself.
Steven Raichlen, an expert barbecue cook, has the following recipe for beer can chicken:
Method:
Indirect grilling
Special Equipment:
1 1/2 cups mesquite chips, soaked in cold water to cover for 1 hour and drained
Ingredients
* 1 large whole chicken (4 to 5 pounds)
* 3 tablespoons Basic Rub for Barbecue or your favorite dry barbecue rub
* 1 can (12 ounces) beer
Directions
1. Remove and discard the fat just inside the body cavities of the chicken. Remove the package of giblets, and set aside for another use. Rinse the chicken, inside and out, under cold running water. then drain and blot dry, inside and out, with paper towels. Sprinkle 1 tablespoon of the rub inside the body and neck cavities, then rub another 1 tablespoon all over the skin of the bird. If you wish, rub another 1/2 tablespoon of the mixture between the flesh and skin. Cover and refrigerate the chicken while you preheat the grill.
2. Set up the grill for indirect grilling, placing a drip pan in the center. If using a charcoal grill, preheat it to medium. If using a gas grill, place all the wood chips in the smoker box and preheat the grill to high; then, when smoke appears, lower the heat to medium.
3. Pop the tab on the beer can. Using a "church key"-style can opener , make 6 or 7 holes in the top of the can. Pour out the top inch of beer, then spoon the remaining dry rub through the holes into the beer. Holding the chicken upright, with the opening of the body cavity down, insert the beer can into the cavity.
4. When ready to cook, if using charcoal, toss half the wood chips on the coals. Oil grill grate. Stand the chicken up in the center of the hot grate, over the drip pan. Spread out the legs to form a sort of tripod, to support the bird.
5. Cover the grill and cook the chicken, until fall-off-the-bone tender, 2 hours. If using charcoal, add 10 to 12 fresh coals per side and the remaining chips after 1 hour.
6. Using tongs, lift the bird to a cutting board or platter, holding a large metal spatula underneath the beer can for support. (Have the board or platter right next to the bird to make the move shorter. Be careful not to spill hot beer on yourself.) Let stand for 5 minutes before carving the meat off the upright carcass. (Toss the beer can out along with the carcass).
But some people disagree, like Chicago Trib columnist John Kass:
I'll help readers do it right, with my special secret Mediterranean ingredients, so they'll be the envy of their friends.
Steve wants you to toss wet hickory chips on the coals, to drive smoke into the chicken. This should properly be called "Hee Haw" Chicken or "Deliverance" Chicken.
Heavy wood smoke is perfect for ribs, turkey, brisket and pork shoulder but never for a delicate chicken. That's a chicken hate crime, Mr. Steve.
Obviously, Steve's chicken is for toothless rustics sipping jug whiskey, with hound dogs named Blue sleeping at their bare feet on a rickety porch, flies everywhere and some sullen, slow-witted adolescent squatting on a cool patch of dirt while picking malevolently on a banjo.
Do you want that image anywhere near your back-yard deck this weekend? Of course not. Instead, you want my gentle and sophisticated Kass' Beer Can Chicken™.
And it won't cost you $12.95. I'll give it to you for the price of this newspaper, just so Steve won't get it, that dern rip-off.
"Hey, he didn't rip you off," said my editor. "If I'm not mistaken, you ripped it off from the New York Times, and I know this because I gave you the article. So you probably ripped him off first."
Perhaps. But he didn't think of it first, either. It's a cheap philosophical argument, anyway. Joyously inserting an open can of beer deeply into the rump of a chicken and setting it on a covered grill is as American as jazz. Who can rip off jazz?
What really bothers me is that he's charging $12.95, and I'm not wetting my beak in the profits.
So without further whining, here's my free summer treat to you--how to properly make Kass' Beer Can Chicken™:
Set up your grill for the indirect method. On a gas grill, simply turn half the burners to medium, leaving the others off. On charcoal grills, place a disposable aluminum drip pan on the bottom grate. Pile the coals on either side. Light them. Then prepare the bird.
Use only a tender fryer (not a roaster). Remove the giblets; rinse the chicken with cold water. Throw a handful of salt in a bowl of cold water. Soak the chicken for about a half-hour. Rinse again. Pat dry.
Squeeze a lemon into the cavity and down the neck. Squeeze the juice of another lemon or two and one tablespoon of olive oil into a cup. Stir quickly and apply to the outside skin, sprinkling salt and pepper.
Open a beer can (not a bottle) and drink a quarter of it. Punch two small additional holes in the top of the can.
Put one teaspoon of Cavender's Greek Seasoning into the can. Cavender's, from an ancient Greek formula, is made in Arkansas. Sprinkle Cavender's all over the chicken. If you don't have Cavender's, use oregano, a dash of garlic powder, basil, thyme, salt, pepper and a little more oregano.
Insert the can of beer into the cavity all the way, without bending the can. The bottom of the can and the two legs serve as the base of a tripod, with the chicken sitting, upright, on the grate. Once the coals are ready, put the chicken on the top grate (on a charcoal grill). Put the cover on the grill.
Cooking time is between one hour and 15 minutes and an hour and a half. Once done, remove chicken from grill to cool. The best way to remove the can is to lift the chicken firmly with tongs, insert a long spoon down the neck and push the can out. Enjoy.
Since I saved you $12.95, do me a favor. Don't tell Steve.
Personally, I cook mine at 350 in the oven on my cast iron frying pan, so I can catch the juices and make a barbecue sauce or cook some potatoes in a hot cast Iron pan.
But no matter how you cook it, the juices stay in the bird, the fat drips down into the pan and leaves a lot of flavor. You know how chicken often sits if not in it's own juices, close enough to steam it. Which is why I like this in the oven. It's a good way to test the recipe before a barbecue.
Also, you can use Coke, white wine or any liquid instead of beer. I used a can of ginger ale because I was out early and you can't buy beer before 12 on Sunday in New York. But the liquid rises, the chicken is cooked upright, like a rotisserie without the skewers and you get the most tender chicken possible.
Pipeline to Haifa? Come on, you didn't really believe that.Sucker.
THE MANIPULATOR by JANE MAYER
Ahmad Chalabi pushed a tainted case for war. Can he survive the occupation
Paul Wolfowitz, who was one of the earliest and most outspoken proponents of an invasion of Iraq, and who has been friends with Chalabi for years, spoke of him with studied detachment at a recent congressional hearing. He praised the I.N.C.’s effectiveness in providing battlefield intelligence since the war began, but he said, “I think there’s quite a bit of street legend out there that somehow he is the favorite of the Defense Department, and we had some idea of installing him as the leader of Iraq.”
But a prominent State Department official told me that he saw numerous documents that had been prepared by the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, which devoted considerable effort to planning the war. The office was overseen by Douglas Feith. “Every list of Iraqis they wanted to work with for positions in the government of postwar Iraq included Chalabi and all of the members of his organization,” the State Department official said
This is the kind of revisionist history which would make David Irving proud. Who is he kidding. He pimped Chalabi harder than West Coast Autos remake the hoopties Xzibit drives in the shop on Pimp My Ride. He and the neocons wanted President Chalabi, because they believed their own bullshit.
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Peter Galbraith, a former Ambassador to Croatia and a human-rights activist, who has long supported Chalabi’s efforts to depose Saddam, suggested that if the Administration was unhappy with the outcome in Iraq it had only itself to blame. “Chalabi is one of the smartest people I know,” he told me. As Galbraith put it, Chalabi “figured out in the eighties that the road to Baghdad ran through Washington. He cultivated whom he needed to know. If he didn’t get what he wanted from State, he went to Capitol Hill. It’s a sign of being effective. It’s not his fault that his strategy succeeded. It’s not his fault that the Bush Administration believed everything he said. Should they have? Of course not. They should have looked critically. He’s not a liar; he believed the information he was purveying, and part of it was valuable. But his goal was to get the U.S. to invade Iraq.”
Isn't thsi the same man who wants to dividen Iraq and screw the Sunnis? Ah, many things are now clear. Chalabi isn't only a liar, he's a thief and killer of American troops, who he clearly could not give a damn about as long as he wins. This is not effective, it is the butchery of American troops, Clearly, Galbraith considers American soldiers lesser human beings than his friends the Kurds and Chalabi. The consequences of his lies fill hospitals and cemetaries.
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Wolfowitz was particularly taken with Chalabi, an American friend of Chalabi’s said. “Chalabi really charmed him. He told me they are both intellectuals. Paul is a bit of a dreamer.” To Wolfowitz, Chalabi must have seemed an ideal opposition figure. “He just thought, This is cool—he says all the right stuff about democracy and human rights. I wonder if we can’t roll Saddam, just the way we did the Soviets,” the friend said.
We what the Soviets? Uh, no. They collpsed from their own rot and we didn't have to occupy Moscow to do it. Sucker Wolfowitz forgot one thing, people say a lot of shit, it's what they do which matters.
..............
When the Bush Administration took office, in 2001, neoconservatives such as Wolfowitz and Perle were restored to power. Brooke told me that in February of that year Wolfowitz called him late one night and promised that this time Saddam would be deposed. Brooke said that Wolfowitz told him he was so committed to this goal that he would resign if he couldn’t accomplish it. (Wolfowitz called this account “nonsense.”)
Why? It sounds like something he would say. It also makes him sound like a spendthirft with American lives. I wonder if anyone will ask him how does it feel to have helped kill 800 Americans to establish the Islamic Republic of Iraq, a number he couldn't even remember last time they asked him on the Hill
.................
In an unusual arrangement, two months before the invasion began, the chief correspondent for the Times, Patrick E. Tyler, who was in charge of overseeing the paper’s war coverage, hired Chalabi’s niece, Sarah Khalil, to be the paper’s office manager in Kuwait. Chalabi had long been a source for Tyler. Chalabi’s daughter Tamara, who was in Kuwait at the time, told me that Khalil helped her father’s efforts while she was working for the Times.
In early April, 2003, Chalabi was stranded in the desert shortly after U.S. forces airlifted him and several hundred followers into southern Iraq, leaving them without adequate water, food, or transportation. Once again, the assistance of the U.S. military had backfired. Chalabi used a satellite phone to call Khalil for help. According to Tamara, Khalil commandeered money from I.N.C. funds and rounded up a convoy of S.U.V.s, which she herself led across the border into Iraq.
Tyler told me that he hadn’t known that Khalil had helped Chalabi get into southern Iraq. He added that Khalil had a background in journalism, and that Chalabi hadn’t been a factor in the war when he hired her. “We were covering a war, not Chalabi,” he said. The Times dismissed Khalil on May 20, 2003, when word of her employment reached editors in New York. During the five months that Khalil was employed, Tyler published nine pieces that mentioned Chalabi. When asked about Khalil’s rescue of Chalabi, William Schmidt, an associate managing editor of the Times, said, “The Times is not aware of any such story, or whether it happened. If so, it was out of bounds.”
Is he fucking kidding? First, hiring Chalabi's niece was so wrong it wasn't funny. First question is: was he shagging her? Second question is: was this a payoff to Chalabi? Why would you hire a source's relative, who then took days off to rescue her uncle. Tyler's claim of ignorance is a joke. The only question is his relationship with this woman and why he would hire her to be office manager for the Times Beirut Kuwait bureau, a relationship so out of bounds, New York ordered her fired. The fact that the Times didn't know of her activities, and her days off, is either fishy or stupid. You really have to ask if Tyler hired his girlfriend and then covered for he with his bosses. After all, she was apparently close to Uncle Ahmad, the American killer, and her job as office manager allowed him to possibly know exactly what the Times planned to cover and what Chalabi needed to feed them to promote his quest to be the next king of Iraq.
..................
For many years, Chalabi has been openly collegial with reformist leaders in Iran, such as President Mohammad Khatami, with whom he met last November, in Tehran. He has also admitted to meeting with the head of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security. Immediately before the invasion of Iraq, Chalabi was living in a gated villa in Tehran that he had persuaded the U.S. to purchase as a satellite branch of the I.N.C.
What the fuck? We did what? Bought him a motherfucking villa in Tehran? You have to be kidding. This is the kind of thing must have Iranian intelligence laughing their asses off. We buy Chalabi a villa in Iran. My God, that is just dumbfounding. It leaves me speechless, no stunned. No, speechless, dumbfounded and stunned. How could DOD be so fucking stupid. They buy this clown his reltirement villa. I'm sure his Iranian paymasters are amused. And there are neocons who still defend him? Jesus. Do these people need a bridge in Brooklyn? There's one for sale, cheap, only $340K a month for the maitenence.
Mayer's article is required reading to understand Chalabi and the US. It hits all the high points and provides new insights. The New Yorker has done what the Times has not, examine the US occupation in Iraq and how it happened. They will be loaded with National Magazine Awards for their reporting (the Pulitzer is only for daily newspapers, drama and history).
The furor began on May 16 when Colwell, an East Bay artist, made an addition to his monthlong showing at Haigh's gallery on Powell Street. Angered by the pictures he saw of Iraqi prisoners being abused, he created a black and white painting depicting three hooded and naked men undergoing electric shock torture by American soldiers. Colwell, who took down his paintings Saturday, declined to comment.
Two days after the painting went up, Haigh arrived at her gallery to find broken glass, eggs and trash strewn outside her storefront. Haigh also began receiving the first of about 200 angry voicemails, e-mails and death threats.
A week ago, a man walked into the gallery and spit in Haigh's face. On Tuesday, Haigh decided to temporarily close the gallery and began to consider giving up on her dream of owning an art gallery. Just two days later, another man knocked on the door of the gallery and then punched Haigh in the face, knocking her out, breaking her nose and causing a concussion.
It's more than Haigh ever imagined. She opened the studio 1 1/2 years ago, hoping to display the works of important and possibly controversial modern artists.
"I enjoyed listening to people's different opinions on what they saw," said Haigh, a mother of two. "That was part of the joy of having a gallery."
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"When this can happen in the middle of North Beach in San Francisco, where people always expressed themselves, it means Iraq is not the only place being occupied," said Daniel Macchiarini, a North Beach gallery owner himself. "But this is an act of desperation. The people who attack like this, their ideas have failed."
On Saturday, Haigh's supporters tried to remind her of the joy in owning a gallery in North Beach, long a haunt for counterculture poets and artists.
I am outraged by this.
First, US troops tortured these people and saying so is the truth, not a slander or fiction. It happened.
Second, where are the police? The mayor of SF was brave when he had to hand out some now useless marriage licenses to same sex couples, but this woman is violently attacked by cowards in the most liberal city in America and she doesn't merit police protection? It's obvious that she's been the vicitim of harassment and violent assault and from this story, there is a deafening official silence. Which is intolerable. SF is supposed to be the least likely city, for this kind of thuggery. And it is thuggery, pure and simple.
I think, in New York, the police would be outside the gallery and looking for suspects. After the mayor denounced a painting n the Brooklyn Museum, people were arrested for attempting to deface it.
Third, any man who could walk up to a woman and punch her in the face belongs in jail. If he was so brave, he could enlist at any time and walk around Iraq or Afghanistan, where courage is always needed. He didn't show anything but the rankest sort of cowardice. As did the man who spit in her face. What utterly gutless, shameful cowards. Did they think they were proving their manhood by doing this? Or defending America?
Daniel Macchiarini is right. People do this kind of despicable shit out of desperation, not out of conviction. They are afraid of the truth and have to resort to violence to make their point. However, the city of San Francisco should make every effort to jail these cowards. Anything less is an abdication of the responsibility as government officials and Americans.
Ok, all of you know how to read a newspaper story, but I think many of you don't know how they're constructed.
So I'll explain the process of news gathering, then we'll go through a Washington Post story.
First, the reporter goes to work, checks their e-mail, then calls their regular sources. In some cases, it's a press spokesman or PR person, sometimes a direct worker. Reporters usually have a few stories juggling at once.
So, they check what is knows as an assignment desk to see what the editors expect. Some days, they'll have to cover a conference or a meeting, some days they'll have to work their sources. Which means pester them.
Sources can be anyone, but in most of the stories discussed on the blogs, they're usually, mid and upper-level bureaucrats in Washington. Washington is a special case, and very different than journalism elsewhere. In any other place, being socially close to a source is discouraged, but in Washington access is everything. It is common to spend social time with the people you cover in Washington. Social status and proximity matter in Washington journalism. Not that most reporters get those invites, only those covering politics and the major federal agencies can play, Health reporters stay home.
Anonymous sources are used in stories for two reasons, to protect a source from retribution and to float a trial balloon a story about a controversal proposal.
Reporters are honored bound to protect their sources,even at the cost of going to jail. Which is why you won't see Robert Noval reveal his source in the Plame case. Traditions are not always comfortable or easy to live with, and this is one of them. Just because many people think Novak is wrong, the right to protect sources is a cornerstone of a free press.
A news story goes through several stages. The first is the reporter. In many cases, the original story looks nothing like what runs in the paper the next day. First, a reporter usually has to finish their story by a set time, called a deadline. This allows the story to go into editing at the copy desk. Daily newspaper journalism is divided into reporters and copy editors. Usually being on then desk is a quicker route to promotion, while being a reporter is the route to some public fame and book contracts.
Copy editors fact check each story and jmay substancially rewrite what is handed in. The fact is that people good at digging up facts can be mediocre writers. Which is why unedited copy NEVER leaves the newspaper. But if you ever see it, it can be stunningly bad. Copy editors clean up the writing, correct the spelling, add in facts and any extra material. They also work with the designers to decide what theb story will look like in the paper. They also write the headlines and generally clean things up.
The section editors read the stories, decide their placement, final length (copy can be trimmed from the bottom) and design. The senior editors for their section (each seperate section has a senior editor) then read the copy which goes into the paper. The senior staff of the newspaper may read a selection of the stories, but only intevene in the most serious stories. They also settle disputes over space and which stories run on the front page. At a large, national paper, like the Washington Post or LA Times, the city desk, national desk and foriegn desk all fight for space in the front of the paper. There is a limited number of inches in print and all these different desks want that space. The editors settle it. Local stories get cut for national and foreign news in these papers, even though they have seperate Metro/local sections.
However, reporters have to pitch their stories to their editors and many stories will never run because the editors are not interested in them. Weeks, months, even years will go by before some of these stories can run, if at all.
The most prestigious jobs on a newspaper is to cover the White House or to be a columnist. Second best is to be a foreign correspondent, then national reporter, then city hall, then the sate house. State capitals are usually boring. The best reporters in these jobs command the most space for their work.
Editorial is the name for all of the newspaper's news sections. Everything else is called business. The two sides of the newspaper are regarded as seperate entities, with limited influence on each other.
OK, now let's look at a story from today's Washington Post
By Mike Allen and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, May 29, 2004; Page A16
Mike Allen is a White House reporter, while Robin Wright is Judy Miller's rival and widely respected, unlike Miller, for her work on the Middle East, which she has covered for 20+ years. She's not seen as carrying water for any particu;ar cause
The Bush administration appeared to be caught off guard and somewhat confused yesterday after the Iraqi Governing Council nominated a physician with longtime CIA ties as the post-occupation prime minister. Officials in Washington scrambled to respond after the Iraqis took the public lead in a process that was supposed to be run by a U.N. envoy.
The Administration is at least one high powered source within the White House , Defense or State Department.
In a telephone conversation at 2:30 p.m., a senior U.S. official involved in Iraq policy sounded uncertain about whether Ayad Allawi would head Iraq's interim government after the United States transfers limited authority on June 30.
The confusion could be coming from Defense, because State is now running the show, It is likely that this is Powell's Deputy Richardf Armitage, who have long been unhappy with aspects of Iraq policy..
"We may or may not have heard the last word on the prime minister," the official said. "You have to put a lot of pieces together first."
This also hints at inteference and unhappiness with the CIA's boy Allawi stepping over his cousin Chalabi. Remember, the INC is DoD's baby, the INA, Allawi's group, is State's and the CIA's baby.
A senior administration official in Baghdad said that L. Paul Bremer, the civilian U.S. administrator, and Robert D. Blackwill, the U.S. presidential envoy to Iraq, knew about the impending selection on Thursday. But officials in Baghdad feared a leak and told few officials in Washington. Some members of Bush's war cabinet knew where the process was heading but were surprised by the timing of the council's decision.
This clearly points to defense as the source of this story, even nthoufh
The administration's statements were reserved because the United States did not want to appear to be driving the process, officials said, especially because of the country's past ties with Allawi.
The confusion extended to the United Nations in New York, where chief spokesman Fred Eckhard at first said that the U.N. envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, had been in the room for the selection by the U.S.-appointed council but then later corrected himself to say that Brahimi had not been there.
This indicates Kofi Annan, UN General Secretary, is not happy with the process. He sends a signal that the process is confused and the UN is not to blame for it
"It's not how we expected it to happen," Eckhard told Reuters.
By day's end, Brahimi and Bremer had both endorsed Allawi, and a senior U.S. official in Baghdad said without equivocation that Allawi will take office.
One of the working assumptions among senior foreign policy officials in the Bush administration had been that Iraq's new prime minister, the most important of the 30 jobs to be filled, would not come from the Governing Council. None of the 25 council members, all handpicked by the U.S.-led coalition, has rallied significant popular support, according to several public opinion surveys over the past few months.
State was left holding the bag
In an attempt to ensure that the new government would enjoy a degree of legitimacy in the eyes of Iraq's 25 million people, U.S. officials also thought they needed to find someone who would not be seen as a surrogate of the United States -- representing a "clean break from the occupation," as a diplomat from a coalition country said. Allawi is among those with close U.S. ties, including to the U.S. intelligence community.
State is saying they have nothing to do with this. This could be the result of a deal between DOD and CIA. But State is saying "he's not our boy."
During his speech Monday on the future of Iraq, Special envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, is now consulting with a broad spectrum of Iraqis to determine the composition of this interim government," Bush said in Carlisle, Pa. "The special envoy intends to put forward the names of interim government officials this week."
Seems someone jumped the line
Four hours after the council's vote, Bush said during a Rose Garden ceremony that the United States was prepared to "transfer complete and full sovereignty to an Iraqi government that will be picked by Mr. Brahimi of the United Nations."
That was not how the selection emerged. The Associated Press moved its bulletin from Baghdad at 8:26 a.m. Eastern time, saying: "The Governing Council has unanimously endorsed Iyad Allawi to become Iraq's new prime minister." Reuters followed at 8:41 a.m.: "IYAD ALLAWI CHOSEN AS IRAQI PRIME MINISTER -- AIDE TO ALLAWI."
Shortly after 10 a.m., White House press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters: "Mr. Brahimi is the one who will make the determinations about who the representatives are on the interim government."
The White House, caught flatfooted, after shifting towards State's view, was sandbagged. So now they blame the UN
Now, to the average reader, who doesn't know about sourcing or attribution, they may think this is another case of White House inepdtitude, but in reality, it's about another day in the war between State and DOD and State, the White House and the UN were caught flat. Now, ask yourself who is missing from this story?
Every news story has people who are included and people who are missing. Who is the one person who should have had a handle on this and seems not to? Condi Rice. The NSA was not quoted, nor were her people, unless it was to say "we had no clue". State is wildly unhappy about the choice, but sends the wrong signal in saying he can be replaced. The whole discomfort with this comes from State's mistrust of the IGC. This is why there are National Security Advisors. This story also suggests gameplaying by the GOPCPA, where little conservatives leak stories to their patrons.
Every story has missing people as well as those who speak, and the guess and it is a guess, that Condi and the White House were not informed of this until it was too late./
So, why wouldn'r Iraqis trust me, a former CIA puppet, to run their country.
This is ridiculous. Here I was, ready to relax, watch Ashley Judd jump around in her panties on Fox, and I read about the totally screwed up selection process. Iyad Allawi, head of the Iraqi National Accord, a former Baathist and a CIA/MI6 rentboy, is now PM. You don't have to wear a tin foil hat to realize this guy is dead. They blew up Sergio DeMello, one of the Hakims, and Shia pilgrims. How Allawi expects to stay alive is beyond me.
Usually, like Noriega, they hide their CIA ties. This guy, besides coming from the hated Chalabi family, worked for the CIA and MI6. You don't have to be Sadr to think this stinks on ice. The Brahimi "agreement" seems like a US hustle to me. So they couldn't get Chalabi in the job, so they get his cousin. Not that Iraqis are that stupid, they know a hustle when they see one, So they will try their level best to blow him away, probably via semtex car bomb.
What's the big mistake? They picked someone from the hated IGC. Iraqis hate these exiles who came back to scoop up the country while their kids fought the wars and suffered under the sanctions. These people cannot be given credibility by the US, UN or EU. By picking an exile, especially one greedy, desperate or stupid enough to take the job, is reenforcing failure. They could have picked a worse US puppet, but that's unlikely.
Laura Rozen a Washington-based national security reporter, wrote that Chalabi was caught by a "European intelligence agency" read GCHQ, the British NSA, passing methods and sources of signal intelligence to Iraq.
Jonathan Pollard is still in jail for doing the same thing for Israel. John Walker is serving life for this. Handing over signals intelligence is one way to go to jail forever. It is the US gold standard.and they get very upset when it goes into other people's hands. Especially Iranian hands. The worst intelligence failures in the US were signal intelligence.
You cannot get more serious than an accusation of trading signals intelligence. And that means someone in DOD is a traitor. It's treason to even discuss sources and methods, so how did a foreign national without the SCI ( above Top Secret, Secure Compartimentalized Intelligence) required to discuss such a subject be able to pass them on to Iran? Someone,and I mean a ranking civilian, passed them on and the list who can get that kind of thing is real small, a hundred people or so, outside NSA. The reason they cut him off so fast was the proven allegation he revealed the gold standard of US secrets.
There is no way that Chalabi could have gotten that info without someone high in DOD giving them to him. Doing so was treason. Not in the Bob Novak way, but real, go to jail for life treason. It would be a massive intelligence failure if this is true. Chalabi should have never hd access to this informtion. Whoever gave it to him betrayed the United States.
This has been irritating nme for a while. There is absolutely no clamor for the Olympics coming to New York, none. It's an invention of the real estate industry and politicians. No one who really cares about New York wants this expensive monstrosity of an event here.
First, the Jets Stadium will face massive opposition from the locals. The new stadium will be built over the Penn Rail Yards on a gigantic platform. This boondoggle will expand the Carlo Gambino Javits convention center. Cablevision, a long time New York villian, has joined the side of the angels with their A Better New York website.
Let me explain the geography of New York, first. The subway lines end on Eight Avenue, the new stadium would be on 11th Avenue. Right now, most of what is on 11th Avenue on the 30's and 40's is a mix of light industrial, garages, stip clubs and car dealerships. There is no real reason to go to the far west side now. The Jets, who by common sense, should build their stadium in Queens and not Manhattan, would draw thousands of cars from Long Island, where the fan base is. If you've ever been to the Meadowlands after an event, you can imagine the godawful pollution which would follow.
The way New York is, expect massive lawsuits and an economic review. People were stunned that this plan has gotten as far as it did.
The Olympics is a pipedream. The planned sites in Queens will all draw lawsuits from local residents siting everything in the book. In fact, this kind of construction will draw a massive legal reaction from ever litigious New Yorkers. The pollution, the crowding, and the vanity use of state and city funds...well, if the IOC is stupid enough to give the city the Olympics, they can enjoy the lawsuits which will follow. Because the only people who want this is the Real Estate lobby.
Nobody wants to pay for these giveaways or care about a subsidized new Jets stadium. Not when kids don't have gym abd libraries close early.
CNN got it wrong, Al Qaeda is working for the President's reelection.
Yesterday, CNN's Justice Deparment correspondent, Kelli Arena, said the following:
[Kelli] ARENA: Neither John Kerry nor the president has said troops pulled out of Iraq any time soon. But there is some speculation that al Qaeda believes it has a better chance of winning in Iraq if John Kerry is in the White House.
BEN VENZKE, INTELCENTER: Al Qaeda feels that Bush is, even despite casualties, right or wrong for staying there is going to stay much longer than possibly what they might hope a Democratic administration would.
Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I know Kelli Arena. We worked on the NYU student newspaper in the 80's, and while I haven't seen her in 15 years, I can state that she's neither stupid nor evil and I seriously doubt a tool of the GOP. She wasn't a close friend or anything, but she was a reasonable person when I worked with her.
However,many of the e-mails people have been reporducing on Kos and Atrios attack her personally and not the fact that what she said was misleading. She didn't say AQ was on Team Kerry, this idiot Venzke did. All she did was report what he said. Which is her job.
And that's the problem. Just because she said something you disagree with, and I think the comment is not only stupid, but wrong, savaging her, calling her an idiot and generally implying she's taking her marching orders from Karl Rove is ineffective. How would you react if your e-mail box was filled with invective as her's is today? You'd probably either get really angry or blow it off. What you would NOT do is take it seriously.
What you have to understand is that reporters have very thin skins. I can tell you that Arena and her bosses are both surprised by the reaction and have discounted most of them. Just like they discount the wingnuts when they run pictures of Abu Ghraib.
There is a way to complain to the news media and one which will nearly always get their attention, and it's not an invective filled letter, which might make you feel better, but will surely be deleted and ignored.
1) Be polite
Journalists are people and really, really thin skinned. If you insult them, they stop listening. Not all do, but most get their backs up like an alley cat. So when you write to criticize, don't say they worship at the alter of Karl Rove or John Kerry. Mention coverage that they've done which you've liked. Address them in a way that will get them to listen. Anyone on TV or in a major newspaper gets a lot of nasty mail, some from unhinged cranks and chronic masturbators.
2) Don't accuse them, directly, of political bias
Most journalists take pride in their objectivity. Once you say they're biased, they stop listening. If you think there is a genuine issue of bias, write to their editors, not the reporter. Your goal is to point out an error, not question their professional integrity, unless you have a reason to.
3) Leave out the invective
Once you accuse them of working for the GOP, you lose the battle. Simple as that. They're people, they made a mistake, and you're pointing it out, not questioning them like a prosecutor.
4) Make your point with facts
A good letter to write to CNN is not how Arena screwed up, but the lack of balance in quoting this Venzke guy without balance. That's the sin here. This guy can think what he want and say what he wants. The problem is a lack of balance. Arena needed to quote someone else rejecting his wacky and disproven theory. After all, AQ was on Team Bush since March. Don't accuse her of his words. Ask where the other viewpoint is.
5) Do some research
Find out who the editors are. Not just the President of CNN News Gathering, but the direct supervisors are in Washington and their bosses and CC your letter to all of them. Once a letter is CC'd, they are far more likely to deal with it. You can always delete one e-mail, but five going into the right boxes may get action.
The goal here is to deal with the coverage and the lack of balance, not insult journalists who report stupid comments from wackos. The issue is getting the other side represented, not merely heaping invective on people.
BLUE SPRINGS, Mo. - Almost half of a $273,000 grant awarded in 2002 to fight the Goth culture in Blue Springs has been returned because of a lack of interest — and the absence of a real problem.
Blue Springs received the grant two years ago from the Youth Outreach Unit, money the city and U.S. Rep. Sam Graves trumpeted proudly as a way to fight a perceived Goth problem.
But $132,000 of the grant was returned because officials never found much of a problem with the Goth culture, which some students called a fad that most people eventually outgrow.
Slightly more than $118,000 of the money was earmarked for therapy, assessment and case management, and the plans also included a series of town meetings to discuss the issue.
"It never happened because referring someone for looking, acting Goth is not a concept that ever got imbedded in people's heads," project manager Allyce Ford said of the therapy proposal.
Jesus. Are they talking about those mopy motherfuckers who listen to shit like the Smiths and Bauhaus? Goths, unless Alaric is leading them, are pretty fucking harmless. They use up a lot of dark make up, black dye and might be Wiccans or something. But for $132K, they should have been laying RPG ambushes or kidnapping dogs for sacrifice.But in my experience, they're passive, smart kids. Not a threat to the community, like the high school football team.
This is the stupidest fucking thing I've read all week.
BLAME CBS?
PAT Boone says he'll never watch CBS again because "60 Minutes II" aired images of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse. The squeaky-clean crooner claims that showing those pictures has made the U.S. more of a target than ever. "For me, CBS has become 'the enemy within,' and I hope never to watch the network again," Boone wrote in a letter to conservative NewsMax.com. Boone the famously bland singer who was once criticized for singing cleaned-up versions of songs made popular by black singers (he changed Fats Domino's "Ain't That a Shame" to "Isn't That a Shame") goes on to say: "I think most Americans ought to reflect on the results of their irresponsible and unpatriotic behavior and perhaps narrow their viewing options by one network. The next time America or Americans suffer at the hands of terrorists, thank CBS."
No, Pat, I intend to blame the terrorists, not CBS. How dare you call CBS the "enemy within" as if they're the one running around raping people. I know guys like you don't read the Constitution, but Freedom of the Press is exactly that. I know you think you're some kind of patriot, but you're the worst kind of traitor, one who would condone torture and abuse in the name of the United States. Isn't it bad enough that 800 Americans have died for Bush's folly? Did we really have to shame the country as well? When we torture, Pat, we betray everything this country stands for.
The enemies of America are those who use dogs and rape to shame this country., not the ones who expose their nefarious deeds. Patriotism is not some blind tunnel where questions are not allowed. True patriots, like the ones who founded this country, would never accept such mindlessness.
The irresponsible and unpatriotic behavior, one Americans will pay for with their lives, is not Bob Simon's, but the leadership of the Pentagon which justified this abominable act. If you were a true patriot, you would than God we live in a country where such crimes by the government can be reported and investigated. You would be glad CBS ran that story and showed that all Americans do not condone such barbaric acts. That's what a true patriot would do.
The failures of Miller and the Times' reporting on Iraq are far greater sins than those of the paper's disgraced Jayson Blair. While the newspaper's management cast Blair into outer darkness after his deceptions, Miller and other reporters who contributed to sending America into a war have been shielded from full scrutiny. The Times plays an unequaled role in the national discourse, and when it publishes a front-page piece about aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds, that story very quickly runs away from home to live on its own. The day after Miller's tubes narrative showed up, Andrea Mitchell of NBC News went on national TV to proclaim, "They were the kind of tubes that could only be used in a centrifuge to make nuclear fuel." Norah O'Donnell had already told the network's viewers the day before of the "alarming disclosure," and the New York Times wire service distributed Miller's report to dozens of papers across the landscape. Invariably, they gave it prominence. Sadly, the sons and daughters of America were sent marching off to war wearing the boots of a well-told and widely disseminated lie.
Of course, Judy Miller and the Times are not the only journalists to be taken by Ahmed Chalabi. Jim Hoagland, a columnist at the Washington Post, has also written of his long association with the exile. But no one was so fooled as Miller and her paper.
Russ Baker, who has written critically of Miller for the Nation, places profound blame at the feet of the reporter and her paper. "I am convinced there would not have been a war without Judy Miller," he said.
The introspection and analysis of America's rush to war with Iraq have turned into a race among the ruins. Few people doubt any longer that the agencies of the U.S. government did not properly perform. No institution, however, either public or private, has violated the trust of its vast constituency as profoundly as the New York Times.
There is, of course, a deeper question here than Judy Miller's bad reporting. Miller, long known for doing her best reporting on her back, is a supreme newsroom politician. The fact that she's still employed by the Times, and the fact they didn't use her name, indicates that she still has some pull in the newsroom. Anyone else would have been canned.
A lot of newly found critics on the left seem to think that the media is centrally controlled or the consolidation of the media plays some massive role in this. However, conglomorates care about one thing: the bottom line. If it makes money, you can do what you want, say what you want, act how you want. Viacom doesn't stand by Howard Stern because they like strippers. He brings in a billion a year in ad revenue. They could have cared less about the war as long as they made money.
The same with reporting. A lot of what happens in the newsroom is a dynamic of office politics. Judy Miller is the entre into upper Washington society for many of the editors. She's the one who goes on their arm to the big parties. She knows everyone and where the dirt is buried. Maureen Dowd is a much less reliable social partner, with her snarky comments and relatively moralistic world view. Miller, otoh, has been known for fucking her sources, a matter of journalistic debate for 20 years. Her ethics, personal and professional, have been questioned for as long as I can remember.
That, short of writing fiction on the news pages, is probably the worst thing you can accuse a journalist of. It's one thing to date someone you've interviewed, it's another to fuck people you rely on for stories. Miller's been accused of this for years. Her lack of professional distance has probably ruined what is left of her career. The blowback from these charges, that she helped manipulate the US into war, are so serious that the Times will not be able to protect her for long.
But Judy Miller is only one of many, many people who shirked their responsibility to cover Iraq failrly.
What I think turned the tide was not 9/11, because no one could reasonably object to hunting down Osama, but the Beltway Sniper. The shootings last year scared Metro DC to the core. Reporters and their families were scared in a very personal, very intimate way. It was up close terrorism and it scared many of them. The idea that Saddam had all these magic weapons which could kill Americans, which was a joke at the time for rational people scared the crap out of a lot of people. They accepted Bush's arguments based on fear.
No one wants to believe the president is a liar. No on wanted to believe Bush was as venal and evil as he has turned out to be. Even the Guardian was pro-war. They focused on the evil of Saddam and not what came next, which was known as early as December, 2002. Of all the major US and UK papers, only the Independent was seriously anti-war (and thus accurate) in theirn coverage. The Guardian ran a lot of stories which, while doubting Saddam's capability, also bolstered the claims of the exiles, especially in their opinion pages.
It's important to remember this, because the weight of the bad reporting is falling just on a few newspapers, and it's far more widespread than that. It wasn't just the Times, but nearly every major newspaper in both the US and UK which, if they didn't endorse the war, accepted the claims of the exiles, if not the US government, with scant questioning. The Guardian ran a long piece on what Iraqi exiles, especially pro-war exiles thought , with scant opinion coverage of experts who disagreed.
Few people, outside of Robert Fisk in the Independent, seperated evil Saddam from chaotic Iraq. Ken Pollack's The Threatening Storm set the intellectual basis for war, neatly glossing over Saddam's strategic challenges and making the case for overthrowing him, under some conditions. Conditions which were not met before the war. There were no stories about how Iraq had strategic and moral challenges with or without Saddam. No one looked past Iraq as Saddam's creation and as a set of other logistical challenges. Iraq was Saddam and not a country.
The US media, as well as the Democratic Party, made an assumption which a lot of people have not realized, they assumed the President would not lie about national security. This was a reasonable assumption for every other President, but not for Bush. But no one realized how politically driven and ideological the White House was. They took it on faith that Chalabi and his patrons were telling some version of the truth.
Given that, and the cudgle of patriotism, most accurate reporting, including think tank reports, foreign media, and NGO reports, didn't get much coverage outside the blogosphere and a few columnists. The mainstream media refused to believe the war in Iraq was mismanaged. Even when US soldiers expressed open disdain for the Secretary of Defense on camera, most of the media wrote it off to homesickness. Not a totally mismanged logistical system, which to this day has parents raising money for their kids in Iraq so they can get radios and armor.
The US media failed, not because they wrote uncritical stories about the war, given the political tenor of the times, that was the likely outcome. The failure of the media comes in the aftermath of the war. When it was clear that the GOPCPA was the new NKVD, driven by politics, few stories asked who was staffing our new colonial service and what they were up to. Many of the stories have shown less enterprise than local city hall reporters. The finances of the reconstruction have received far less coverage than the fighting, despite its long-term importance.
Despite ample evidence that the reconstruction was corrupt, only NPR's Marketplace has done the long form journalism needed to explain this.
The other major gap in US coverage has been the behavior of the US troops in Iraq. Abu Ghraib is the final stop in a chain of abuse which has left civilians dead, robbed and probably raped. The raids into homes have left a long chain of bitterness among Iraqis. Abu Ghraib is just poison into the wound. Yet, there is ample evidence that US troops lack fire discpline and routinely disrespect Iraqis as a matter of course. This doesn't make the US papers, even though it is widely discussed elsewhere. So Americans are left mystified as to why hostages are taken and others are burned alive and hung from bridges.
This is not the kind of thing which is politically popular, but is necessary to understand why Iraqis refuse to support the occupation, which they don't, and haven't.
The American media is only now, slowly, beginning to understand, how badly they did their jobs. However, they still have to do a lot more than finally firing Mattress Judy and writing off her malfeasance as a singluar act.
Take a good look. As soon as Blair is forced from office, these members of the Paras will be going home
This will be short and painless. Print it out and hand it to your few remaining friends who support the war.
1) There is no internal political support for either the IGC or the UN version of an occupational government
The UN rep picking the new head of Vichy Iraq was enraged when someone from the GOPCPA leaked his name. The guy, realizing that the resistance would kill him like a dog via car bomb, promptly refused the job. The fact is that the only representative Iraqi leadership are religious leaders. Brahimi wanted to pick a technocrat, but no matter how you say it, it's still spelled P-e-t-a-i-n, and we all know how he wound up. Not that it matters. Without a heads up from Sistani and the Sunni clerics, the guy is going to be killed by the resistance, Al Qaeda or the US (by accident, of course)
The Kurds, with 20 percent of the population, are now demanding the Presidency or Vice Presidency, which is sure to send Sadr and his Sunni allies into a rage. The Kurds took part in the fighting at Fallujah, and many, many Iraqis are none to happy with their countrymen.
2) Splitting Iraq is vastly unpopular with most Iraqis
While Peter Galbraith has been running around on the behest of his Kurdish allies, calling for "a loose confederation", which would let the Kurds destroy the territorial integrity of Iraq, while doing their own thing (smuggling, disrupting neighboring nations), Phebe Marr, one of the few actual Iraq historians in the US, gave him the smackdown on Nightline last week. The simple fact is that the Kurds will face a massive Turkish invasion if they get what they want. They also forget how ALL Iraqis opposed the Turks joining the occupation force.
This new "splitting Iraq" meme is really based in an ignorance of Iraq's economy. Without access to the income from the southern oil fields, the rest of Iraq will go bankrupt. You can't leave the Sunnis without income and splitting Iraq would turn it into a Middle Bank, with poor people with guns fighting their neighbors.
Besides the fact that it would be a violation of international law, it's just a very stupid idea based on our perceptions of Iraq and not reality.
3) Our allies are not coming to help us
As the German Ambassador to the US said so plainly on CNN, how would NATO help the occupation? The Iraqis will kill Germans just like they kill Poles, British and until recently, the Spanish. There is no clamor for NATO to occupy Iraq.Iraqs aren;t s aying, Germany save us. Besides, there aren;t the votes to deploy troop[s in these Parliaments. International occupation is just adding targets for the resistance.
4)The iraqis have made a choice:to undermine the occupation
The fact is that anyone working for the occupation faces intimidation or death. This isn't the consensus of a few people, but widely supported by average Iraqis. Someone has to be talking to the resistance. That resistance is widespread, with people in every corner of the GOPCPA. One of the fundamental mistakes of the US was to assume, despite all available evidence, Iraqis supported the occupation. SIistani could have sent thousands into the police and military with one word. So when Bush says "the Iraqis have to stand for freedom" he ignores the reality that most Iraqis are content to watch Americans die without lifting a finger to help.
5) Reconstruction is a corrupt, poorly managed nightmare
The GOPCPA cannot maintain anything in Iraq. Instead of hiring reconstruction experts from NGO's, they hired from the Heritage Foundation's reject list. People who were ideologically sound were hired over the competant and trained. People like Michael Ledeen's daughter, Simone, were given the task of rebuilding Iraq's economy. Imagine the reaction of highly educated, Harvard, Oxford and Sorbonne trained Iraqi economists, when they could get into the Green Zone, dealing with these idiot children. By sending the pure, loyal and untrained, they told the Iraqis they were not serious people. The neocons were allowed to turn Iraq into their playground, and test their wacky theories. Meanwhile Iraqi oil facilities have been attacked 54 times since the occupation started.
Rumors of overcharging and kickback litter the news on a near daily basis. Halliburton has been accused of running empty trailers to get paid from the US government. Even so, the lack of security which is endemic in Iraq makes reconstruction a nightmare.
6) No security means nothing can get done
Even reporters have to travel with "security consultants" to do their stories. Baghdad is effectively cut off from the rest of the country. The road net is insecure and remains that way, at best. The fact is that the US doesn't have the troops to secure the roads, and will not get any. This is the kind of job our Pakistani auxillaries would have done, but since their intervention would immediately launch a civil war in Pakistan, it's not going to happen. We're about to send two training units to Iraq, we're so short of troops. The 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, the OPFOR unit at Ft. Irwin, is being sent to Iraq. Now, you don't have to be a nuclear physicist or a military strategist to see how dangerous this is. The 11th ACR is the unit other units need to train in combat proficiency. Sending them to Iraq is a sign of pure desperation. Other units cannot train effectively if the 11th ACR is in Iraq, hunting guerrillas.
The US's reliance on Iraqi security forces is really a reliance on a force which will ultimately fail. They have no commitment to the government and no support within the wider community. We can Iraqimize the force, but if Sistani issues a fatwa, who do you think they will support? The US and Iraqi Vichy governments? Or their clerics?
In short, Bush's strategy is failing, and none of this relies on the abject hatred caused by our actions at Abu Ghraib. That just makes any US plan in Iraq unsustainable. The IGC hasn't been asking questions about kicking US forces out of Iraq for their health. No Iraqi government could ever be considered legitimate if it allowed the US to establish bases there. That's a political non-starter as much as shipping oil to Haifa. The Army thinks they'll be there five year, but in reality, five months is a stretch. We don't have the men and NATO is going to decline to lend us a hand, no matter what they say in Congress. The US has to leave Iraq at some point and that point will be sooner rather than later. We are at the early stages of the Abu Ghraib scandal and in the end, it will so discredit US policy that we'll have to flee the country.
Rat-exterminating Manuel Rodriguez, dubbed M-Rod by W. 109th St. neighbors, displays trophy.
Rat batter Rodriguez shows off his killer stance...
...then strikes.
Meet Manuel Rodriguez: handyman by day, self-appointed rat-whacker by night.
Rodriguez has quickly become an urban folk hero by prowling his upper West Side street with a homemade bat, which he used to smash a career-best 15 rodents Sunday night.
"When I see them coming, I get into position," said Rodriguez, 53, clutching his custom-carved pine plank, crouching low. "I can't miss."
M-Rod, as some call him, is a one-man murderers' row.
His field of dreams is not a house built by some guy named Ruth but the strip of concrete bordered by trash cans and piled-high garbage bags in front of his apartment building, on W. 109th St. and Amsterdam Ave.
"I can hit seven - maybe nine - rats a night in front of my building alone," the Dominican immigrant said, cradling his club as cumbia love ballads wafted from the apartment next door. "Over three days, I kill at least 21. Easy."
At a time when the city is at war with rats, Rodriguez is an unsung soldier. Complaints soared 29%, to 19,358, during the 2003 fiscal year, prompting a crackdown by City Hall.
Rodriguez's night job starts after he puts in an eight-hour shift as a handyman, six days a week, at a homeless shelter. He returns to the basement apartment he shares with his wife, Justina, and their 13-year-old daughter, Adaiana, and showers, puts on a cotton shirt and baseball cap and hits the streets.
First, he hunts for planks from neighborhood garbage. The ideal bat is about 3 feet long and 4 inches wide. Then, he painstakingly whittles each one a 10-inch handle with a kitchen knife, and waits till dark.
"Last night I cracked two bats, so I always have to find more," he explained.
Rodriguez's rat-smashing season begins when the temperature soars and the garbage out front begins to boil with life
....................
The man deserves a medal," said Alan Eiland, 40, a business information analyst and father of two. "Now, I hope he moves on to these damned pigeons."
You won't see this in New York and Company brochures or on Friends, but one of the happier aspects of life in Fun City is rodents. Lots of rodents. Who show up everywhere. They're in every corner of the city. They come out at different spots and snack on garbage.
This man, who like many New Yorkers, gets into a solitary quest to improve their corner of the city, has taken rat extermination to a new level. Instead of bait and poison, he goes medieval on their asses. No fancy poisons, just a bat and a healthy swing.
I'm not for old fashioned rat hunting myself, but if Mr. Rodriguez wants to take it up as a hobby, well, it's the kind of civic mindnesses which would go unmentioned elsewhere. This is the kind of rugged individualism which should not go unmentioned. No whining to politicians, no crying to the papers, just a man, wood and steely determiniation.
New York is one of those places where being strange is perfectly permissable. A guy comes home from work, starts to kill rats and gets in the paper. No one considers him a rat-killing freak, but a civic-minded New Yorker. Look at how big that rat is. I thin k it kind of needs killing myself. More luck to Mr. Rodriguez in his rat killing exploits.
Handover, schmandover, it doesn't matter, the Islamic Republic of Iraq is on the way
This man is a crook. A big, fucking, American-killing crook. The blood of thousands of Americans are on his hands.
Let's get one thing straight. Just one, and it is really simple. Not as simple as bread and butter or as straightforward as remembering your anniversary. But it is clear, sharp and finite: Ahmed Chalabi could have NEVER run Iraq.
Richard Perle and the rest of the neocons are truly ignorant men. You couldn't trust them to run a gas station, much less foreign policy. They pick a man who hadn't lived in Iraq until last year to champion. They were going to shove him into power, no matter what, not realizing that it was never going to happen.
The guy doesn't even have the character of Saddam, who at least did his own killing. Chalabi tried to manuver his way into power with an especially shitty con game. He told people, for quotation, that he would establish a pipeline to Haifa. That would be the same as running for governor of California and saying you wanted to open the US-Mexico border and encourage Mexicans to come north. An idea which wouldn't play in East LA, much less Orange County.
That one statement would be his death warrant in any Middle East country, where hating Jews is national policy. But to Iraqis, it marked him as Vidkun Quisling come back to life. Jim Hoagland in the WaPo today said we failed in not establishing a provisional government in Iraq. With who in charge? Chalabi? That would have started a civil war on the spot. Jesus, these people don't get it. Reality is not their fantasies. If it were, my sex life would make Hugh Hefner writhe in envy.
Chalabi has the delusions of a leader, but even if he wasn't an American-killing crook, he would have been tossed aside by far harder people than him. The generals would have taken his shit for a few days and then killed him like Mussolini. Days, not weeks or months.
The expectation that an exile could come back to Iraq and be accepted was a fantasy. The fact that most Iraqis hate him is hardly a surprise. His family fled when the Hashemites fell in 1958. What does he know about modern Iraq? The only reason this vermin has been allowed to exist is because he has powerful, gullible friends.
I'm too pissed to list the steps the US took with this assclown, but I will say this: at no point was this man close to credible. He was distrusted by everyone who dealt with his scheming ass. He wasn't in Iraq for a week before someone tried to kill him.
What is even more stunning is this: Sistani is no democrat. He wants elections so that can count the votes and place his people in charge, in a fair, democratic and shia majority way. We're hunting down Sadr to make it easier for him to impose his version of the Islamic Republic lite. Chalabi never, ever had a chance to jump the line and impose Vichy Iraq.
Why didn't these educated men heed the words of Machiavelli on exiles:
HOW DANGEROUS IT IS TO BELIEVE EXILES
And it does not appear to me to be foreign to this subject to discuss among other matters how dangerous a thing it is to believe those who have been driven out of their country, these being matters that are acted upon each day by those who govern States; and I am especially able to demonstrate this by a memorable example given by T. Livius in his history, even though it may be outside his subject.
When Alexander the Great crossed with his army into Asia, Alexander of Epirus, his brother-in-law and uncle, came with his forces into Italy, having been called there by the exiled Lucanians, who had given him the hope that he could through their means occupy all that province.
Whence he, upon their faith and hope, having come into Italy, was killed by them, because they had been promised a return to their Country by the Citizens if they would kill him. It ought to be considered, therefore, how vain are the faith and promises of those who find themselves deprived of their country
For, as to their faith, it has to be borne in mind that anytime they can return to their country by other means than yours, they will leave you and look to the other, notwithstanding whatever promises they had made you. As to their vain hopes and promises, such is the extreme desire in them to return home, that they naturally believe many things that are false and add many others by art, so that between those they believe and those they say they believe, they fill you with hope, so that relying on them you will incur expenses in vain, or you undertake an enterprise in which you ruin yourself.
The previously mentioned example of Alexander is enough for me, but in addition, that of Themistocles, the Athenian, who, having been declared a rebel, fled to Darius in Asia, where he promised him so much if he should want to assault Greece, that Darius turned to that enterprise. Themistocles, not being able to observe these promises, he poisoned himself, either from shame or from fear of punishment. And if this error was made by Themistocles, a most excellent man, it ought to be considered how much more those men err who, because of less virtu, allow themselves to be drawn by their desires and passions.
A Prince, therefore, ought to go slowly in undertaking an enterprise upon the representations of an exile, for most of the times he will be left either with shame or very grave injury. And as the taking of towns rarely succeeds by deceit or by intelligence others within may have, it does not appear outside the subject to discuss it in the following chapter, adding some account of how many ways the Romans acquired them.
If this doesn't describe Chalabi's activities to a T, nothing does, will or can.
The contents of a note that was smuggled out of the prison were so shocking that, at first, Amal Kadham Swadi and the other Iraqi women lawyers who had been trying to gain access to the jail found them hard to believe. It claimed that US guards had been raping women detainees. Several of the women were now pregnant, it added. The women had been forced to strip naked in front of men, it said.
Swadi, one of seven female lawyers now representing women detainees in Abu Ghraib, began to piece together a picture of systemic abuse and torture perpetrated by US guards against Iraqi women held in detention without charge. This was not only true of Abu Ghraib, she discovered, but was, as she put it, “happening all across Iraq”. In November 2003, Swadi visited a woman detainee at a US military base at al-Kharkh, a former police compound in Baghdad. “She was the only woman who would talk about her case. She was crying. She told us she had been raped,” Swadi says. “Several American soldiers had raped her. She had tried to fight them off and they had hurt her arm. She showed us the stitches. She told us, ‘We have daughters and husbands. For God's sake don't tell anyone about this.’” During Swadi’s visit to Abu Ghraib in March, one of the prisoners told her that she had been forced to undress in front of US soldiers. “The Iraqi translator turned his head in embarrassment,” she said.
The Taguba inquiry has corroborated the contents of the letter smuggled out of Abu Ghraib by a woman known only as "Noor". The enquiry found the letter to be entirely in line with the activities going on within the prison. While most of the focus since the scandal broke three weeks ago has been on the abuse of men, and on their sexual humiliation in front of US women soldiers, there is now incontrovertible proof that women detainees have also been abused. Among the 1,800 digital photographs taken by US guards inside Abu Ghraib there are, according to Taguba's report, images of a US military policeman “having sex” with an Iraqi woman. Taguba discovered that guards have also videotaped and photographed naked female detainees. Bush refused to release other photographs of Iraqi women forced at gunpoint to bare their breasts (although Congress were shown them) - ostensibly to prevent attacks on US soldiers in Iraq. However in reality this is merely to prevent further domestic embarrassment.
Earlier this month it emerged that an Iraqi woman in her 70s had been harnessed and ridden like a donkey at Abu Ghraib and another coalition detention centre after being arrested last July. UK Labour MP Ann Clwyd, who investigated the case and found it to be true, said, “She was held for about six weeks without charge. During that time she was insulted and told she was a donkey.”
Several women are housed in solitary confinement, within cells 2.5m long by 1.5m wide. There remain extremely troubling questions as to why these women came to be classified as “security detainees” - a term invented by the Crusaders to justify the indefinite detention of prisoners without charge or legal access, as part of the war on terror. According to Swadi, who managed to visit Abu Ghraib in late March, the allegations against the women are "absurd". "One of them is supposed to be the mistress of the former director of the Mukhabarat. In fact, she's a widow who used to own a small shop. She also worked as a taxi driver, ferrying children to and from kindergarten. If she really had a relationship with the director of the Mukhabarat, she would scarcely be running a kiosk. These are baseless charges," she adds angrily. "She is the only person who can provide for her children." The women appear to have been arrested - not because of anything they have done, but merely because of who they are married to, and their potential intelligence value. US officials have previously acknowledged detaining Iraqi women in the hope of convincing male relatives to provide information; when US soldiers raid a house and fail to find a male suspect, they will frequently take away his wife or daughter instead.
The horrific abuses that are taking place in the prisons of Iraq have come to symbolise the horrific nature of the Iraqi crusade in general. The brutality of the six military personal, that happened to get caught out, is the logical continuum of the occupation.
So when the Iraqis take over next month, this will all get better, right?
Helloooo, sailor!
Every year, Fleet Week brings a gaggle of oversexed seamen to New York City. Are they desperate enough to lust after wax statues of J.Lo and Julia?
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By Rebecca Traister
May 26, 2004 | It's Fleet Week here in New York City, the annual lead-up to the Memorial Day holiday, when dashing seafarers from the Navy and Coast Guard disembark on Gotham's shores to let down their hair, see the sights -- and get themselves laid! It's a tradition that has been memorialized in movies like "On the Town" (from before Fleet Week was an officially designated event) and, more recently, the "Sex and the City" episode in which all the characters but Carrie flashed their ta-tas for our brave Men in White.
Fleet Week includes a bunch of patriotic and super-manly activities: wreath-layings and 21-gun salutes, fast jet planes and arm wrestling, lots of historic frigates clogging the harbor, and that weird apotheosis of phallic power where big boats spray impressive jets of water all over the Hudson. But that's just the official stuff. Unofficially, it's due to be a banner week at dance clubs and strip clubs, as the Navy and Coast Guard's contingent of straight men get their chance at sexual release after months of being cooped up together.
So what's a girl to think when she opens up the special Fleet Week section of the New York Post on Monday and finds a full-page ad for Madame Tussaud's wax museum that makes the place look a celebrity call-girl service for necrophiliacs?...... To the right of the image are the words "Madame Tussauds: An Interactive Experience." And below, the invitation, "While You're In Town ... Come Check Out the Hotties: J-Lo, Madonna, Julia Roberts, Elle McPherson and more. Beyonce Arrives 5/26/04." At the bottom of the invitation is a coupon for $3 off admission to the museum.
The message seemed clear enough. In a mind-blowing embodiment of the objectification of women, Madame Tussaud's seemed to be offering sailors who were perhaps not lucky enough to score flesh-and-blood booty a chance to dry-hump celebrity wax figures.
"No, no, no, nooooo! Not at all!" exclaimed a museum spokeswoman when contacted about the implication of the ad's text and image. "He's not feeling her up! He's whispering in her ear!
Uh, not quite. Having friends who own bars in New York City, i can assure you that ANY straight woman looking to get laid will find a bunch of sailors and Marines more than willing to fuck you silly. As will any even moderately attractive gay man.
First, most of the sailors can't afford Manhattan's strip joints. Sure, the officers can, but then they have to wear civvies or go in large groups and they're not getting any play from strippers who left home to avoid these guys.
Second, a lot of the sailors can't get into bars Usually, a military ID is a free entry pass into a bar. Owners usually let the kids, and many are a year out of high school, drink. But there are a lot of places which check ID's and say no.
For some reason, the West Village's biggest gay bars will be packed this week. Some say it's close to the Piers where the ships dock, personally, I think the guys are crusing for blowjobs. There's nothing like a man in uniform. It seems to work out well, the kids get drunk, the guys get hot young men, and everyone forgets it ever happened.
Third, these kids are kids. Many would crap their pants in a place like Scores. Places like the Giuliani Mall at Times Square (most New Yorkers hate the place after Giuliani stole it from us and sold it to corporate America) will be filled with digital camera picture taking sailors and Marines. These kids come from the heartland and joined the Navy specifically to travel. So when they hit New York City, they are happy as a pig in shit to be here. They walk around in groups, stare at the buildings, take photos to send home to mom.and the wife. Despite the image, many of these kids are still figuring out sex and are no Don Juans.
When you talk to these kids, especially in uniform, they are, for lack of a better word, sweet. They're overwhelmed to be in New York, they love the place, it's kind of sensory overload for kids who never left Kansas or West Virginia. I met a kid from Oklahoma once who couldn't stop talking about how great New York was. And we met this sailor who had a bad crush on his female shipmate, and just like in college, she was more interested in going home with my friend. In an act of (rare) kindness, he decided to not take her home. Besides the fact that she was all of 19, all three of these kids were, as I said to my friend "man, if you take her home, you might as well put a gun in that kid's hand, because he's gonna kill himself." Nice kid, a Mormon from out West who was drinking a Coke ( a no-no, but he was living a little), but he had it so bad for this girl, it was touching.
The thing about places like Madam Tussauds is that it will be packed with sailors. People with local family will go, women will go, guys who like being married and faithful will fill up these places. While strip clubs will be packed, it's more likely that more sailors and Marines will visit the Toys 'R Us in Times Square than Scores or the new clubs along 11th Avenue. After all, you can't send a lapdance home to your three year old.
I've seen sailors and Marines drool over women in bars, sometimes it works, sometimes not. But there's a lot more to Fleet Week than just trying to get laid. For many, it's their first and maybe last trip to a big city and like tourists avywhere, they're going to enjoy the city, sober as well as drunk.
Over the last year this newspaper has shone the bright light of hindsight on decisions that led the United States into Iraq. We have examined the failings of American and allied intelligence, especially on the issue of Iraq's weapons and possible Iraqi connections to international terrorists. We have studied the allegations of official gullibility and hype. It is past time we turned the same light on ourselves.
In doing so — reviewing hundreds of articles written during the prelude to war and into the early stages of the occupation — we found an enormous amount of journalism that we are proud of. In most cases, what we reported was an accurate reflection of the state of our knowledge at the time, much of it painstakingly extracted from intelligence agencies that were themselves dependent on sketchy information. And where those articles included incomplete information or pointed in a wrong direction, they were later overtaken by more and stronger information. That is how news coverage normally unfolds.
But we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged — or failed to emerge.
The problematic articles varied in authorship and subject matter, but many shared a common feature. They depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on "regime change" in Iraq, people whose credibility has come under increasing public debate in recent weeks. (The most prominent of the anti-Saddam campaigners, Ahmad Chalabi, has been named as an occasional source in Times articles since at least 1991, and has introduced reporters to other exiles. He became a favorite of hard-liners within the Bush administration and a paid broker of information from Iraqi exiles, until his payments were cut off last week.) Complicating matters for journalists, the accounts of these exiles were often eagerly confirmed by United States officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq. Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources. So did many news organizations — in particular, this one.
Some critics of our coverage during that time have focused blame on individual reporters. Our examination, however, indicates that the problem was more complicated. Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper. Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted. Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all
Blah, blah, blah. The fact is that Judy Miller and Michael Gordon wrote 12 stories which are now completely discredited. What's even worse is that Howard Kurtz wrote a long piece on Judy's little adventure with the 75th Materials Exploitation Group, implying strongly she was screwing one of the unit's senior warrant officers. All the Times did was act huffy and seem pissed that Kurtz, who had members of the unit contact him, wrote it up.
So instead of apologizing, who's going to be fired. Their coverage of Iraq wasn't only wrong, but bested by the WaPo. After all, it was Anthony Shadid who won the Pulitzer for his excellent coverage. And now the Times is humilated in print by their own admission. Miller, long known as well, a slut who slept with sources, should have been kept on a short leash. Look, journalists are almost as horny as cops, so I don't express shock at Miller's fucking habits. But it's been known for 20 years that she would fuck sources, or grow extremely close to them. Now, their rival paper runs a story allegding she was up to her old antics and the Times acts like this is gossip. Uh, Miller was wrong, she was asshole tight with Chalabi, which many people thought was a crook. Was she shagging him? Who knows? It's bad enough she was allegedly shagging a married warrent officer whom she covered. But what was even worse was that she was wrong. Not a little wrong, either.
To be fair, Gordon's reporting was nothing to write home about, either. He may or may not have been screwing sources, but he sure was played like a mark. What's even worse is that the two combined their skills to be even more wrong.
How long can you be questioned about your ethics, personal and professional, make your employer a laughing stock, and still keep your job. Isn't time for Gordon and Miller to be fired for incompetence?
President Bush embarasses himself before an educated, intelligent audience
The fact is that last night's speech before the Army War College was laced with irony. As he outlined his five roads to hell plan before America's most educated managerial class, most of the audience woud have probably flunked their peers for such a half-assed plan. You couldn't get a decent grade with such plan at either the Army War College or the Naval War College, where unlike Harvard Business School, you can't buy your way in or expect gentlemen C's.
Bush 's plan is not a plan, but the same old hopes and dreams Bush and the neocons have had for a year. I can't imagine why Bush doesn't realize that his Iraq plan is a faliure, not only to professional diplomats, but with the American public. The poll numbers are showing people think he's failing.
ANALYSIS
By Robin Wright and Mike Allen
Updated: 7:55 a.m. ET May 25, 2004
With only five weeks before the transition in Iraq and five months before the U.S. elections, President Bush last night called for more patience, more time, more resources and more support to transform troubled Iraq.
But Bush did not provide the midcourse correction that even some Republicans had called for in the face of increasingly macabre violence in recent weeks -- from the assassination of the president of Iraq's Governing Council and controversy over dozens killed by U.S. warplanes at a purported wedding party to the grisly beheading of an American civilian.
Nor did Bush try to answer some of the looming questions that have triggered growing skepticism and anxiety at home and abroad about the final U.S. costs, the final length of stay for U.S. troops, or what the terms will be for a final U.S. exit from Iraq. After promising "concrete steps," the White House basically repackaged stalled U.S. policy as a five-step plan.
"Our terrorist enemies have a vision that guides and explains all their varied acts of murder," Bush said. "They seek to impose Taliban-like rule, country by country, across the greater Middle East." He asserted that extremists now see Iraq as "the central front in the war on terror."
Still, the questions left unanswered last night could continue to make the administration vulnerable to criticism. "The more explicit and precise, the better. A lot of rhetoric without altering the substance will not do," said Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, who has been critical of the Bush administration's foreign policy. "What's involved is basically American credibility."
The president's soothing recitation of policy particulars offered few benchmarks or specifics on the most sensitive issues, such as the relationship between the Iraqi government to be installed July 1 and the U.S.-led coalition troops that are scheduled to remain in Iraq to provide basic security -- and what happens if Iraqis do not want foreign forces to launch new offensives. That issue underscores the potential controversies even after the occupation ends.
Bush is not altering course, but trying harder to do the same shit on a different day. These Iraqis, who he expects to betray 5,000 years of history to fight with us, seem to be more interested in watching US troops die, as they curse us for Abu Ghraib. Insteead of spending some time talking about leadership and Abu Ghraib, to an audience who might have appreciated it, he talked about a plan which wasn't working, isn't working and cannot work.
His insistance that if he just explains it better that it will negate what we see on TV may hold some amusement, for those without family serving or working in Iraq, but otherwise is delusional.
Let's take a look at Factsheet #4 from the CPA's website,
Fact Sheet #4: Reconstruction
• Since the liberation of Iraq, the Coalition has completed over 20,000 individual reconstruction projects worth billions of dollars.
• These projects have employed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis building and renovating schools, orphanages and medical clinics; roads, bridges and dams. Iraqis from Dohuk to Basra have worked on these projects and millions have benefited from them.
• Thousands of additional projects will be financed by over 19 billion dollars from America. Already Coalition officials are meeting with provincial and municipal leaders to hear their priorities.
• The Coalition will be accelerating these projects everywhere in country and we expect that they will create over a million and a half jobs over the next year.
• The Coalition will give priority to Iraqi firms whenever possible in order to create as many opportunities for Iraqis as possible.
• To date, the firms working on these projects have given contracts to several hundred Iraqi firms.
• Coalition military commanders and Coalition offices around the country will have an additional $500 million to spend on reconstruction projects which can be quickly completed, like fixing roads or schools, and which will provide jobs for Iraqis.
Well, let's add in a few facts:
First, rebuilding the main electricity plants in Iraq have been stopped since the companies doing it ran home because it was too dangerous, as the Globe and Mail reports.
The electricity projects were severely hampered by the wave of violence and kidnapping that began last month. Hundreds of Russian workers fled the electricity plants, and two major contractors (Siemens and General Electric Co.) suspended or reduced their work.
Raki Raheem Mustafa, director of the main electricity plant in southern Baghdad, had planned to finish the rebuilding of four units by June 10. But supplies were disrupted by the violence, and 38 of his 103 Russian technicians abandoned the plant. Mr. Mustafa now expects that the four units won't be repaired until late July. He predicts Baghdad will get only 16 hours of electricity a day this summer — far less than the full 24-hour-a-day electricity that had been planned.
"We promised the people that we would improve their electricity," Mr. Mustafa said. "When these delays happen, it makes me very upset."
Mr. Nash acknowledged that electricity shortages will remain in Iraq for some time, but he argued that this is because of rising demand as the Iraqi economy revives. The number of air conditioners in Baghdad, for example, has doubled in the past year.
In the next phase of reconstruction, the U.S. will put its emphasis on health, education and water supply.
Second, the Instutite for Global Security's Iraq Pipeline Watch lists 54 different sabotage attacks on Iraq's oil facilities since the beginning of the occupation, five this month alone
50. May 8 - bomb 35 miles (56 km) south of Basra damaged an 18-foot section of one of two pipelines running from Basra to the Faw peninsula on the Gulf. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Spokesman Steve Wright said oil exports from the Basra and Khor al-Amaya offshore southern terminals, through which about 90% of Iraq's oil exports flow, were stopped as a result: "Pumping has stopped. They attacked in the vicinity where the manifold goes into the sea." According to Iraqi officials exports were still flowing from Basra albeit at a reduced rate of 1.2 million barrels per day (bpd) compared with 1.6 million bpd prior to the attack as oil from the damaged pipeline is flowing through the parallel pipeline. Ali Nasr al-Rubaie, director of the main port terminal said exports had been halved following the attack: "We have dropped from an average of 80,000 barrels per hour to 40,000 barrels per hour."
51. May 8 - attack on oil pipeline taking crude northwards from the country’s southern oilfields at point 25 miles (40 km) south of Baghdad, oil ministry spokesman Assem Jihad said on Saturday, noting it would take several days to start pumping oil again.
52. May 9 - blast near a strategic oil pipeline network linking north and south Iraq, by the town of Musayyib, about 56 miles (90 km) south of Baghdad. Unclear what caused the explosion or whether the pipeline itself was damaged.
53. May 13 - rocket landed in a gas plant at the Daura oil refinery in Baghdad, injured a worker and caused a fire.
54. May 24 - explosion badly damaged the Northern pipeline at around 7pm local time on a section between the Kirkuk oilfields and the Dibis pumping installations. A security official of Iraq's Northern Oil Company, Juma Ahmad, said pumping had to be stopped to fight the fire. Another security official for Northern Oil, Issam Muhammad, said while the fire had been put out it would take 12 days to repair the damage.
.
But one could sum this up with a simple phrase: poor security.
Several private contractors and coalition reconstruction supervisors said work is picking up now after the wave of violence that began in April, but fewer sounded optimistic that Iraqis would see any sweeping improvements in their country by June 30. While CPA officials inside the heavily guarded Green Zone offer reassurances that construction continues apace, Baghdad businessmen know different.
Bandits recently killed two of Dhia al Aftan's drivers, halting important shipments of raw materials. Sabotage on electrical lines ended work at his brick factory, but he still pays salaries to 100 employees so they won't burn the place down. The roads are too dangerous, he said, for him to check on his wheat crop or his Pepsi plant.
The prosperous company started by his grandfather is losing millions, he said with a sigh. Just as he wound down his speech, collapsed in a plush chair and prepared to light a cigarette, an American helicopter roared past his window.
"Can you hear this? My children are sleeping!" he yelled. "I put my hand in the Americans' hands. Can you believe it? I honestly thought they were coming to rebuild my country."
"We can't get people to come for love nor money," said Allan Richardson, the CEO of Iraqna, an Egyptian-owned company with a two-year contract from the coalition to provide cell-phone service in central Iraq. "It's a mobile-phone network, right? But it's Baghdad - people aren't mobile. They're too afraid to go anywhere."
More than 30 employees of Halliburton, which has 24,000 workers and subcontractors in the Middle East, have been killed. The U.S. Agency for International Development, which oversees some reconstruction projects, lost about 10 percent of its non-Iraqi workers when they fled in April. Sabotage and bombings have forced giant firms such as Siemens AG, Bechtel and General Electric to suspend important water and electricity projects.
"The world has been made aware of the threat in Iraq to civilian contractors supporting the troops and Iraqis only recently," Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall wrote in an e-mail responding to questions from Knight Ridder. "Our employees were prepared from Day 1 with the knowledge of the danger and the price that they could pay for their work in Iraq."
Steve Susens, a spokesman for the coalition's Program Management Office, which oversees the allocation of $18 billion in rebuilding funds, said money is finally flowing and projects are on deadline.
"Right now we've been spending $75 million a week, but we're rapidly approaching a time when we'll be spending about $75 million a day," Susens said. "We're still on pace."
The Al Janabi Group, among Iraq's oldest and wealthiest family-run companies, was one of the first local businesses to win high-stakes reconstruction contracts. Ali al Kayyat, the commercial manager, said the company was supposed to build a Home Depot in Baghdad, one of many big projects stalled by security problems. Kayyat said al Janabi has $3 million tied up in reconstruction, but "we could offer $100 million if the security improved."
"We're trying to make so many offers to foreign companies to show them how we're progressing," he said. "The problem is, we're not."
Bush's speech was a lie. The educated audience, all with at least a masters in a civilian field, like oh, international relations, knew it was a lie. But one can't wear a uniform and boo the president, much less call him a liar. One hopes Bush knew he was lying. Because if he thinks Iraq is progressing, that would be a far worse indictment than mere lying.
His constantly patronising call for Iraqis to "fight for freedom" with a country who tolerates the rape of teenage boys as an interrogation technique shows how out of touch he is with reality. The man lacks any real empathy or understanding outside his world of Jeebus and fundamentalist Christianity.. If he did, he might understand thatb he's asking the impossible. Abu Ghraib taints everything now, working with Iraqis,getting allies, everything. What NATO allies not now in Iraq are going to join the torturers of Abu Ghraib? How can the Europeans not feel vindicated after seeing the mess which is now Iraq? Why would they join us there?
The UN is not going to commit forces to be killed as occupiers, nor is NATO coming to save us. There just isn't the political support in Europe or the Arab countries to do so. A year, a disasterous year into this mess, few people realize that not only are we losing in Iraq, but our allies cannot help us, even if they wanted to.
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 subj
