The Last Letter

A Message to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney From a Dying Veteran

To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
From: Tomas Young

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.

I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.

I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.

I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.

I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.

My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.

 http://www.truthdig.com/dig/item/the_last_letter_20130318/

#veterans #iraqwar #oil

current-events

The New Reality Of A Multipolar World

The Medvedev Doctrine and American Strategy

By George Friedman/Stratfor

The United States has been fighting a war in the Islamic world since 2001. Its main theaters of operation are in Afghanistan and Iraq, but its politico-military focus spreads throughout the Islamic world, from Mindanao to Morocco. The situation on Aug. 7, 2008, was as follows:

1. The war in Iraq was moving toward an acceptable but not optimal solution. The government in Baghdad was not pro-American, but neither was it an Iranian puppet, and that was the best that could be hoped for. The United States anticipated pulling out troops, but not in a disorderly fashion.
2. The war in Afghanistan was deteriorating for the United States and NATO forces. The Taliban was increasingly effective, and large areas of the country were falling to its control. Force in Afghanistan was insufficient, and any troops withdrawn from Iraq would have to be deployed to Afghanistan to stabilize the situation. Political conditions in neighboring Pakistan were deteriorating, and that deterioration inevitably affected Afghanistan.
3. The United States had been locked in a confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program, demanding that Tehran halt enrichment of uranium or face U.S. action. The United States had assembled a group of six countries (the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany) that agreed with the U.S. goal, was engaged in negotiations with Iran, and had agreed at some point to impose sanctions on Iran if Tehran failed to comply. The United States was also leaking stories about impending air attacks on Iran by Israel or the United States if Tehran didn’t abandon its enrichment program. The United States had the implicit agreement of the group of six not to sell arms to Tehran, creating a real sense of isolation in Iran.

In short, the United States remained heavily committed to a region stretching from Iraq to Pakistan, with main force committed to Iraq and Afghanistan, and the possibility of commitments to Pakistan (and above all to Iran) on the table. U.S. ground forces were stretched to the limit, and U.S. airpower, naval and land-based forces had to stand by for the possibility of an air campaign in Iran — regardless of whether the U.S. planned an attack, since the credibility of a bluff depended on the availability of force.

The situation in this region actually was improving, but the United States had to remain committed there. It was therefore no accident that the Russians invaded Georgia on Aug. 8 following a Georgian attack on South Ossetia. Forgetting the details of who did what to whom, the United States had created a massive window of opportunity for the Russians: For the foreseeable future, the United States had no significant forces to spare to deploy elsewhere in the world, nor the ability to sustain them in extended combat. Moreover, the United States was relying on Russian cooperation both against Iran and potentially in Afghanistan, where Moscow’s influence with some factions remains substantial. The United States needed the Russians and couldn’t block the Russians. Therefore, the Russians inevitably chose this moment to strike.

On Sunday, Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev in effect ran up the Jolly Roger. Whatever the United States thought it was dealing with in Russia, Medvedev made the Russian position very clear. He stated Russian foreign policy in five succinct points, which we can think of as the Medvedev Doctrine (and which we see fit to quote here):

• First, Russia recognizes the primacy of the fundamental principles of international law, which define the relations between civilized peoples. We will build our relations with other countries within the framework of these principles and this concept of international law.
• Second, the world should be multipolar. A single-pole world is unacceptable. Domination is something we cannot allow. We cannot accept a world order in which one country makes all the decisions, even as serious and influential a country as the United States of America. Such a world is unstable and threatened by conflict.
• Third, Russia does not want confrontation with any other country. Russia has no intention of isolating itself. We will develop friendly relations with Europe, the United States, and other countries, as much as is possible.
• Fourth, protecting the lives and dignity of our citizens, wherever they may be, is an unquestionable priority for our country. Our foreign policy decisions will be based on this need. We will also protect the interests of our business community abroad. It should be clear to all that we will respond to any aggressive acts committed against us.
• Finally, fifth, as is the case of other countries, there are regions in which Russia has privileged interests. These regions are home to countries with which we share special historical relations and are bound together as friends and good neighbors. We will pay particular attention to our work in these regions and build friendly ties with these countries, our close neighbors.

Medvedev concluded, “These are the principles I will follow in carrying out our foreign policy. As for the future, it depends not only on us but also on our friends and partners in the international community. They have a choice.”

The second point in this doctrine states that Russia does not accept the primacy of the United States in the international system. According to the third point, while Russia wants good relations with the United States and Europe, this depends on their behavior toward Russia and not just on Russia’s behavior. The fourth point states that Russia will protect the interests of Russians wherever they are — even if they live in the Baltic states or in Georgia, for example. This provides a doctrinal basis for intervention in such countries if Russia finds it necessary.

The fifth point is the critical one: “As is the case of other countries, there are regions in which Russia has privileged interests.” In other words, the Russians have special interests in the former Soviet Union and in friendly relations with these states. Intrusions by others into these regions that undermine pro-Russian regimes will be regarded as a threat to Russia’s “special interests.”

Thus, the Georgian conflict was not an isolated event — rather, Medvedev is saying that Russia is engaged in a general redefinition of the regional and global system. Locally, it would not be correct to say that Russia is trying to resurrect the Soviet Union or the Russian empire. It would be correct to say that Russia is creating a new structure of relations in the geography of its predecessors, with a new institutional structure with Moscow at its center. Globally, the Russians want to use this new regional power — and substantial Russian nuclear assets — to be part of a global system in which the United States loses its primacy.

These are ambitious goals, to say the least. But the Russians believe that the United States is off balance in the Islamic world and that there is an opportunity here, if they move quickly, to create a new reality before the United States is ready to respond. Europe has neither the military weight nor the will to actively resist Russia. Moreover, the Europeans are heavily dependent on Russian natural gas supplies over the coming years, and Russia can survive without selling it to them far better than the Europeans can survive without buying it. The Europeans are not a substantial factor in the equation, nor are they likely to become substantial.

This leaves the United States in an extremely difficult strategic position. The United States opposed the Soviet Union after 1945 not only for ideological reasons but also for geopolitical ones. If the Soviet Union had broken out of its encirclement and dominated all of Europe, the total economic power at its disposal, coupled with its population, would have allowed the Soviets to construct a navy that could challenge U.S. maritime hegemony and put the continental United States in jeopardy. It was U.S. policy during World Wars I and II and the Cold War to act militarily to prevent any power from dominating the Eurasian landmass. For the United States, this was the most important task throughout the 20th century.

The U.S.-jihadist war was waged in a strategic framework that assumed that the question of hegemony over Eurasia was closed. Germany’s defeat in World War II and the Soviet Union’s defeat in the Cold War meant that there was no claimant to Eurasia, and the United States was free to focus on what appeared to be the current priority — the defeat of radical Islamism. It appeared that the main threat to this strategy was the patience of the American public, not an attempt to resurrect a major Eurasian power.

The United States now faces a massive strategic dilemma, and it has limited military options against the Russians. It could choose a naval option, in which it would block the four Russian maritime outlets, the Sea of Japan and the Black, Baltic and Barents seas. The United States has ample military force with which to do this and could potentially do so without allied cooperation, which it would lack. It is extremely unlikely that the NATO council would unanimously support a blockade of Russia, which would be an act of war.

But while a blockade like this would certainly hurt the Russians, Russia is ultimately a land power. It is also capable of shipping and importing through third parties, meaning it could potentially acquire and ship key goods through European or Turkish ports (or Iranian ports, for that matter). The blockade option is thus more attractive on first glance than on deeper analysis.

More important, any overt U.S. action against Russia would result in counteractions. During the Cold War, the Soviets attacked American global interest not by sending Soviet troops, but by supporting regimes and factions with weapons and economic aid. Vietnam was the classic example: The Russians tied down 500,000 U.S. troops without placing major Russian forces at risk. Throughout the world, the Soviets implemented programs of subversion and aid to friendly regimes, forcing the United States either to accept pro-Soviet regimes, as with Cuba, or fight them at disproportionate cost.

In the present situation, the Russian response would strike at the heart of American strategy in the Islamic world. In the long run, the Russians have little interest in strengthening the Islamic world — but for the moment, they have substantial interest in maintaining American imbalance and sapping U.S. forces. The Russians have a long history of supporting Middle Eastern regimes with weapons shipments, and it is no accident that the first world leader they met with after invading Georgia was Syrian President Bashar al Assad. This was a clear signal that if the U.S. responded aggressively to Russia’s actions in Georgia, Moscow would ship a range of weapons to Syria — and far worse, to Iran. Indeed, Russia could conceivably send weapons to factions in Iraq that do not support the current regime, as well as to groups like Hezbollah. Moscow also could encourage the Iranians to withdraw their support for the Iraqi government and plunge Iraq back into conflict. Finally, Russia could ship weapons to the Taliban and work to further destabilize Pakistan.

At the moment, the United States faces the strategic problem that the Russians have options while the United States does not. Not only does the U.S. commitment of ground forces in the Islamic world leave the United States without strategic reserve, but the political arrangements under which these troops operate make them highly vulnerable to Russian manipulation — with few satisfactory U.S. counters.

The U.S. government is trying to think through how it can maintain its commitment in the Islamic world and resist the Russian reassertion of hegemony in the former Soviet Union. If the United States could very rapidly win its wars in the region, this would be possible. But the Russians are in a position to prolong these wars, and even without such agitation, the American ability to close off the conflicts is severely limited. The United States could massively increase the size of its army and make deployments into the Baltics, Ukraine and Central Asia to thwart Russian plans, but it would take years to build up these forces and the active cooperation of Europe to deploy them. Logistically, European support would be essential — but the Europeans in general, and the Germans in particular, have no appetite for this war. Expanding the U.S. Army is necessary, but it does not affect the current strategic reality.

This logistical issue might be manageable, but the real heart of this problem is not merely the deployment of U.S. forces in the Islamic world — it is the Russians’ ability to use weapons sales and covert means to deteriorate conditions dramatically. With active Russian hostility added to the current reality, the strategic situation in the Islamic world could rapidly spin out of control.

The United States is therefore trapped by its commitment to the Islamic world. It does not have sufficient forces to block Russian hegemony in the former Soviet Union, and if it tries to block the Russians with naval or air forces, it faces a dangerous riposte from the Russians in the Islamic world. If it does nothing, it creates a strategic threat that potentially towers over the threat in the Islamic world.

The United States now has to make a fundamental strategic decision. If it remains committed to its current strategy, it cannot respond to the Russians. If it does not respond to the Russians for five or 10 years, the world will look very much like it did from 1945 to 1992. There will be another Cold War at the very least, with a peer power much poorer than the United States but prepared to devote huge amounts of money to national defense.

There are four broad U.S. options:

1. Attempt to make a settlement with Iran that would guarantee the neutral stability of Iraq and permit the rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces there. Iran is the key here. The Iranians might also mistrust a re-emergent Russia, and while Tehran might be tempted to work with the Russians against the Americans, Iran might consider an arrangement with the United States — particularly if the United States refocuses its attentions elsewhere. On the upside, this would free the U.S. from Iraq. On the downside, the Iranians might not want —or honor — such a deal.
2. Enter into negotiations with the Russians, granting them the sphere of influence they want in the former Soviet Union in return for guarantees not to project Russian power into Europe proper. The Russians will be busy consolidating their position for years, giving the U.S. time to re-energize NATO. On the upside, this would free the United States to continue its war in the Islamic world. On the downside, it would create a framework for the re-emergence of a powerful Russian empire that would be as difficult to contain as the Soviet Union.
3. Refuse to engage the Russians and leave the problem to the Europeans. On the upside, this would allow the United States to continue war in the Islamic world and force the Europeans to act. On the downside, the Europeans are too divided, dependent on Russia and dispirited to resist the Russians. This strategy could speed up Russia’s re-emergence.
4. Rapidly disengage from Iraq, leaving a residual force there and in Afghanistan. The upside is that this creates a reserve force to reinforce the Baltics and Ukraine that might restrain Russia in the former Soviet Union. The downside is that it would create chaos in the Islamic world, threatening regimes that have sided with the United States and potentially reviving effective intercontinental terrorism. The trade-off is between a hegemonic threat from Eurasia and instability and a terror threat from the Islamic world.

We are pointing to very stark strategic choices. Continuing the war in the Islamic world has a much higher cost now than it did when it began, and Russia potentially poses a far greater threat to the United States than the Islamic world does. What might have been a rational policy in 2001 or 2003 has now turned into a very dangerous enterprise, because a hostile major power now has the option of making the U.S. position in the Middle East enormously more difficult.

If a U.S. settlement with Iran is impossible, and a diplomatic solution with the Russians that would keep them from taking a hegemonic position in the former Soviet Union cannot be reached, then the United States must consider rapidly abandoning its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and redeploying its forces to block Russian expansion. The threat posed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War was far graver than the threat posed now by the fragmented Islamic world. In the end, the nations there will cancel each other out, and militant organizations will be something the United States simply has to deal with. This is not an ideal solution by any means, but the clock appears to have run out on the American war in the Islamic world.

We do not expect the United States to take this option. It is difficult to abandon a conflict that has gone on this long when it is not yet crystal clear that the Russians will actually be a threat later. (It is far easier for an analyst to make such suggestions than it is for a president to act on them.) Instead, the United States will attempt to bridge the Russian situation with gestures and half measures.

Nevertheless, American national strategy is in crisis. The United States has insufficient power to cope with two threats and must choose between the two. Continuing the current strategy means choosing to deal with the Islamic threat rather than the Russian one, and that is reasonable only if the Islamic threat represents a greater danger to American interests than the Russian threat does. It is difficult to see how the chaos of the Islamic world will cohere to form a global threat. But it is not difficult to imagine a Russia guided by the Medvedev Doctrine rapidly becoming a global threat and a direct danger to American interests.

We expect no immediate change in American strategic deployments — and we expect this to be regretted later. However, given U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s trip to the Caucasus region, now would be the time to see some movement in U.S. foreign policy. If Cheney isn’t going to be talking to the Russians, he needs to be talking to the Iranians. Otherwise, he will be writing checks in the region that the U.S. is in no position to cash.

Related Special Topic Page

• The Russian Resurgence

Reprinted, by permission, from Stratfor



current-events

Happy Birthday, US of A

Caught in the crossfire in a fierce battle near the village of Al Faysaliyah,
Army medic Pfc. Joseph Dwyer carried an injured Iraqi boy to safety.

GI in Iconic Photo Dies of Overdose
July 03, 2008
Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer

PINEHURST -- Joseph Patrick Dwyer, a former Army medic who became famous after he was photographed helping a wounded Iraqi boy, died June 28 from an apparent overdose. He was 31.

In March 2003, then-Pfc. Dwyer became a symbol of heroism.

In the first week of the Iraq war, photographer Warren Zinn snapped a picture of Dwyer spiriting a half-naked, wounded Iraqi boy to a makeshift military hospital.

As quick as a shot, the photo traveled around the world on the front pages of newspapers and magazines. Dwyer, who was at first misidentified as Joseph DeWitt, became an instant celebrity. The photo of the grimacing boy cradled in the arms of a hustling soldier had mass appeal.

Dwyer, however, was uncomfortable in the spotlight. He tried to deflect the fame back onto his unit. He told reporters that he was part of a team that was trying to help wounded Iraqis that day.

"To be honest ... I was embarrassed by it," he told a reporter in 2005.

A few years later, he would be in the news again. But this time the coverage would be less flattering.

In October 2005, Dwyer was charged with discharging a firearm in a municipality, a misdemeanor, after a three-hour standoff with Texas police.

Dwyer, who suffered from post traumatic stress disorder, told a Newsday reporter that he was firing at imaginary Iraqis. He thought they were preparing to attack his apartment.

"I know I don't need to be carrying a weapon," Dwyer told Newsday in 2005 from a hospital where he was being treated for PTSD. "And I'm scared of going home without having one, even though I know probably nobody's going to attack me."

In the Newsday story, Dwyer and his friends also admitted that Dwyer abused inhalants.

Bottles of prescription pills and Dust-Off, an aerosol computer cleaner, were found near Dwyer when police entered his home Saturday, said Capt. Floyd Thomas of the Pinehurst Police Department.

Dwyer had called Sandhills Transportation on Saturday night to take him to the hospital after an apparent overdose, Thomas said. When the cab driver arrived, Dwyer was lying on the floor. Dwyer told the driver he could not get to the door, according to the police report.

The driver called police, who kicked in the door of the Longleaf Drive home at Dwyer's request.

"Help me, please," Dwyer told police through his front door. "I'm dying. Help me. I can't breathe."

After being loaded into an ambulance, medics performed CPR, according to the police report. He was pronounced dead at 7:48 p.m. at FirstHealth Moore Regional Hospital.


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In happier news, Bush has signed the new GI bill, which was included in the new Iraq war funding bill. The GI benefits were included despite the bitching of the Republicans about the cost.

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And this last, forwarded by a friend, George Carlin's take on our fair Republic:

"I came across this quote today in one of Amy Goodman's recent columns.

"It felt like a gift from George, through Amy, not because
it will make us laugh, but because it's so true and on our Fourths,
what is more meaningful than validation?"

"We were founded on a very basic double standard. This country was
founded by slave owners who wanted to be free. Am I right? A group of
slave owners who wanted to be free, so they killed a lot of white
English people in order to continue owning their black African people, so they could wipe out the rest of the red Indian people and move west and steal the rest of the land from the brown Mexican people, giving them a place to take off and drop their nuclear weapons on the yellow Japanese people. You know what the motto of this country ought to be?

"You give us a color, we'll wipe it out." - George Carlin

Ah, George. We hardly knew ye. May he rest in peace.


current-events

The Man Who Brainwashed America

Doggerel by Fido

Now that the New York Times seems to have found its cojones, it's probably time to drag out some old news which will go a long way to explaining why the American people have seemed to be shellshocked, and so reluctant to embrace the simple fact that they have been had.

There is an advertising agency in Washington, D.C. which holds a Top Secret clearance. The boss of that ad agency is a lifelong Democrat and has been deeply involved in politics on the national level for some time. He probably considers himself a patriot, inasmuch as receives millions of dollars in billing, principally from the CIA. Yeah, that CIA. And what does his crackerjack agency do for its daily bread?

Glad you asked. What they do is lie to the American people and the world about stuff like Ahmad Chalabi and WMD, feed lies to an uncritical Judith Miller, assist in regime change in places like Panama (remember Noriega, the drug king?) and basically engage in brainwashing on behalf of their client, the United States government.

The following transcript has been floating around the Internet since 2005, and it's about time it resurfaced, preferably on the front page of every newspaper and on every nightly news show in the country, but that ain't gonna happen by itself, so we'll start the ball rolling.

The Rendon agency that will be discussed was the goto outfit for the buildup to the Iraq war (as well as previous CIA shenanigans). I wrote about them at the time (2005), but had forgotten about them, as the distractions came so thick and fast for so long. James Bamford is the man who wrote the book on the NSA, The Puzzle Palace: Inside the National Security Agency, America's Most Secret Intelligence Organization

From 2005, Amy Goodman's Democracy Now interview with James Bamford: The Man Who Sold the War

So how did the Bush administration sell the war to the American public? Well, a new article in Rolling Stone magazine (December 1, 2005) examines just that. In it, investigative journalist James Bamford looks at the role of one of the most powerful public relations firms in Washington D.C in setting the stage for the Iraq war. The firm is the Rendon Group and it's founder and CEO is John Rendon – the former Executive Director of the Democratic National Committee.

AMY GOODMAN: James Bamford joins us in our Firehouse studio here in New York, the author of several books including the first one ever written about the National Security Agency called The Puzzle Palace: Inside America’s Most Secret Intelligence Organization. His latest book is A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies. We welcome you to Democracy Now!

JAMES BAMFORD: Thanks, Amy. I appreciate it.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s great to have you with us. Well, this piece in Rolling Stone is quite a read. Why don’t you start off by talking about a man in the Gulf of Thailand who was taking a lie detector test?

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, this took place in December of 2001. This was really the sort of opening shot of the propaganda war to get the United States into war. And the person being polygraphed was an Iraqi defector by the name of al-Haideri, and the Iraqi National Congress, the I.N.C., had brought him out of Iraq and brought him to Thailand primarily to expose him to the media and to try to get his story told. And what his story was was that Saddam Hussein had not only chemical and biological weapons but even nuclear weapons and precursors to nuclear weapons hidden in Iraq in various places. Some of the biological weapons were supposedly hidden under the main hospital in Baghdad, for example. So it was an amazing story.

And this was the—up until this time there was a lot of speculation in the press and in Congress and other places about what Saddam may have, what might have been left over from the Gulf War and so forth. But this was going to be the very first time that somebody could actually point to information as proof, having seen where these things were buried and so forth. So, the I.N.C., the Iraqi National Congress, which was led by Ahmed Chalabi, decided to call in two journalists to broadcast this information to the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Wait. First, the lie detector proved what?

JAMES BAMFORD: Exactly. Before he actually called these people in to broadcast this information, obviously the C.I.A. had a big interest in this and the Pentagon had a big interest in this, so the C.I.A. flew a polygraph operator with his machine all the way over to Thailand, Pattaya, Thailand, which is south of Bangkok, and they went into a hotel room, they strapped up al-Haideri, and they asked him all these questions. And they went over and over for hours his allegations regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and they came away with charts that indicated he was deceptive, that he was lying, that this was not true. And they flew back to Washington and, presumably, assuming this was going to be the end of it. But that was information that was never made public. They didn’t broadcast that information. So what happened was the I.N.C. and Chalabi decided to take that bogus information that al-Haideri was giving and broadcast it around the world. So, they called in two journalists. One of the journalists was Judy Miller, who was given the worldwide print exclusive rights to the story.

AMY GOODMAN: And who called her in?

JAMES BAMFORD: Chalabi called her in. Chalabi asked her if she wanted to do the story, and she flew from Washington all the way over to Bangkok to interview al-Haideri.

AMY GOODMAN: Chalabi on the payroll of the C.I.A.?

JAMES BAMFORD: At this time, Chalabi was—he had been getting money from the C.I.A. up until the mid-1990s, and then he started getting money from the Pentagon after the C.I.A. failed to trust him any more. So, the other journalist that they called in was Paul Moran, who was a journalist working for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. And what makes this very interesting was how this came about. The people setting this up were members of the I.N.C. whose main goal all along from the very beginning was overthrowing Saddam Hussein anyway possible. And ironically, one of the people they called in, Paul Moran, had formerly worked for the I.N.C., and he had also worked for another company called the Rendon Group.

AMY GOODMAN: Hold it there. We have to break. When we come back, we’ll take a look at the Rendon Group. We are talking to investigative reporter James Bamford, author of A Pretext for War, has just written a piece in Rolling Stone called “The Man Who Sold the War.”

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is James Bamford. He’s written the piece in Rolling Stone magazine, “The Man Who Sold the War: Meet John Rendon, Bush’s General in the Propaganda War.” So, the Rendon Group and John Rendon.

JAMES BAMFORD: That’s right. The Rendon Group plays an important part in this, because it was the Rendon Group, who few people have heard about, that actually set up the I.N.C., the Iraqi National Congress, in the first place. In a very unusual move, the Bush administration, the first Bush administration, outsourced the propaganda for the war in Iraq basically to a private company.

AMY GOODMAN: Why?

JAMES BAMFORD: The reason they did it was because they specialize in this. The Rendon Group for years have been able to take information that the C.I.A. was trying to get across to the public and broadcast it. For example, they went back to Panama. Just before the U.S. action in Iraq in 1990, the Bush administration invaded Panama and ousted Manuel Noriega. Well, all along, the C.I.A. had a person they wanted to put in there to take Noriega’s place, a person by the name of Endara. And the C.I.A. outsourced to the Rendon Group the propaganda campaign to put Endara in there. So they took this person who was basically a lawyer, a businessman, and Rendon built him up into a presidential candidate, took him around Europe, introduced him to the Pope, and when his group was attacked, one of his vice presidents was attacked, a very bloody attack, it made the front page of newspapers all over the world, including Time magazine.

AMY GOODMAN: With the Rendon Group’s help getting that image out?

JAMES BAMFORD: Exactly, the Rendon Group is the public relations group that pushed all of that information out there.

AMY GOODMAN: John Rendon flying in a few minutes before the actual invasion took place, of Panama.

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, as the invasion took place, before the planes actually started attacking, John Rendon was in a plane about to land in Panama. So he was there right at the beginning, and he was there, too, right about the same time that his candidate, Endara, was sworn in as president. So he did such a good job in Panama in terms of regime change, getting the C.I.A.’s man into office, the Bush administration decided—the first Bush administration decided to use him to help do regime change in Iraq. And after the first Gulf War, the whole idea was to oust Saddam Hussein and put in Ahmed Chalabi as the leader. So, John Rendon, his company the Rendon Group, created an umbrella group known as the Iraqi National Congress.

AMY GOODMAN: He came up with the name?

JAMES BAMFORD: John Rendon came up with the name. He formed an organizational meeting in Vienna. He helped install Chalabi as the head of the group, and then the money was originally funneled from the C.I.A. through the Rendon Group, about $350,000 a month, to Chalabi.

AMY GOODMAN: Was this also for deniability, so it wouldn’t be the C.I.A. directly giving the money?

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, definitely. That’s one of the key reasons that they wanted to use a private company like the Rendon Group as a cutout. And they did that in Panama also. So it was a very convenient organization to turn to in order to help regime change. The C.I.A. could help in terms of the combat, overthrowing a foreign leader like Saddam Hussein, but in terms of building up the world propaganda, number one, hating Saddam Hussein, number two, loving Ahmed Chalabi, that was something that they had to outsource, and the Rendon Group had become specialists in that type of propaganda.

AMY GOODMAN: We are talking with investigative reporter, Jim Bamford, author of A Pretext for War. That’s his book. “The Man Who Sold the War” is the name of his article in Mother Jones. So let’s go back—

JAMES BAMFORD: In Rolling Stone.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, in Rolling Stone magazine. Let’s go back to Judith Miller and Paul Moran. One is a radio reporter who worked for the Rendon Group, and you could talk about that; and the other, Judith Miller, worked for The New York Times.

JAMES BAMFORD: That’s right. And how this comes full circle is that the Rendon Group created the I.N.C., put in Chalabi in there, and then now we have December of 2001, right after the September 11 attacks, and while the administration is gearing up to sort of get the public behind the administration in going into war in Iraq. So up until this time it had been all speculation about what had been going on in terms of Saddam’s use of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and now the I.N.C., the Iraqi National Congress, comes up with this defector who is telling this huge lie about where all of these weapons are being hidden.

AMY GOODMAN: And they know it’s a lie?

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, I don’t know when they knew it, but they certainly should have known it at some point, that the C.I.A. person who walked out of the room wasn’t smiling about all of the happy news he was hearing—

AMY GOODMAN: And the guy who did the lie detector test said, “He is not telling the truth.”

JAMES BAMFORD: That’s right, exactly, and it didn’t seem to make much difference, because they called in the press, and the two people that they called in, ironically one of them was Paul Moran who had formerly worked, not only for the I.N.C., but also for the Rendon Group. So you have a journalist who has the worldwide broadcast exclusive for this interview with this defector who is telling a lot of lies, who actually had formerly worked for the group putting this show on the road, and then they called in Judy Miller, who was going to be granted the worldwide print exclusives. And Judy Miller, in her own words in a memo she wrote to her bureau chief in Baghdad at one point, mentioned that for a decade Chalabi had been one of her key sources and that he was responsible for many of the front page stories on W.M.D. in The New York Times.

So, they called in these two very sympathetic journalists to broadcast this story, and it made huge news. It came out, I think it was December 20, 2001, and again it made a great impact, because this was the first time that an actual eyewitness was able to say that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons. So, this was a major milestone in the road to the war. And from then on, the I.N.C. began coming up with other defectors, and The New York Times and other organizations started promoting the war. But a lot of it had its origins with this first defector, al-Haideri.

AMY GOODMAN: James Bamford, Paul Moran died in Iraq.

JAMES BAMFORD: One of the biggest and most tragic ironies of the entire war was the fact that this journalist, Paul Moran, who had formerly worked for both the I.N.C. and the Rendon Group and then broadcast—had the worldwide broadcast rights for this story about al-Haideri, which helped push the U.S. into war with Iraq—into invading Iraq; Paul Moran actually became the very first journalist killed in the war. He was in northern Iraq, and a car bomb exploded very close to him, and he was killed instantly. I think it was within two or three days of the beginning of the war. So, it was a very tragic irony that Paul Moran, who helped generate some of the early publicity for the war ended up being one of the first people killed in the war.

AMY GOODMAN: John Rendon went to his funeral in Australia?

JAMES BAMFORD: Yes, the Rendon Group really went to a lot of trouble and expense to really create a lot of memorials for Paul Moran. John Rendon flew to the funeral in Australia. They had a memorial service for him in Washington. They had another larger memorial service for him in London, where Rendon and Paul Moran first began working around 1990. So, it was a very big tragedy, and it was a tragedy for the Rendon Group, who had relied on Paul Moran for many, many years.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the I.O.T.F., what it stands for and the Information War Room?

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, the Information Operation Task Force was set up by the Pentagon, because, if you read some of the Pentagon documents that are coming out in the last few years, they wanted to turn information into a major weapon to use during a war. They realized with the internet and with the explosion of information technology around the world that getting a message out is extremely important. It’s especially important in a case like this where we weren’t attacked by Iraq. This wasn’t a case of the United States defending itself against an attack. So, we had to—the United States had to go on a propaganda war in order to convince the world that this preemptive invasion had legitimacy. So, in order to do that the Pentagon created a number of organizations to help promote this information around the world, and the Information Operation Task Force was one of those, and the Rendon Group played an extremely important role in that. And one of the key objectives of the Rendon Group in this aspect was to analyze media all over the world. John Rendon, in my interview with him, and it was the first interview I think he’s ever granted, or at least within probably twenty years—

AMY GOODMAN: And why did he grant it to you?

JAMES BAMFORD: You’re going to have to ask him. I don’t ask questions. I just am very happy when somebody does agree to be interviewed. So he—and one of the ironic aspects of John Rendon is you have somebody here who started out as basically an anti-war activist. He went to work for the George McGovern campaign, actually ran the Maine operation, the operation up in Maine, for George McGovern. So you have a person who started out as an anti-war activist and a lifelong Democrat, head of the Democratic National Committee, Executive Director of the D.N.C., and here he is the chief of propaganda for the Bush administration in their war with Iraq. So it was a very interesting progression, and when I interviewed him, he said he’s still never voted for a Republican, he still votes Democratic, and he donated money to the Democratic Party not long ago.

So now what his role is, is as chief of propaganda and as that, the Pentagon has been using him a great deal to analyze information around the world. Rendon told me that they analyze something like 143 newspapers and a lot of broadcast media around the world and that he prides himself on being able to get to policy makers information on what news organizations all over the world are going to do six hours before they actually do it. And that way, the Pentagon can prepare a response or some kind of rebuttal to whatever may be coming on a news organization hours in advance.

AMY GOODMAN: You write, James Bamford, “A key weapon, according to the documents, was Rendon’s proprietary state-of-the-art news-wire collection system called ‘Livewire,’ which takes real-time news-wire services as they’re filed, before they’re on the internet, before CNN can read them on the air, and 24 hours before they appear in the morning papers, and sorts them by key word. The system provides the most current real time access to news and information available to private or public organizations. The top target that the Pentagon assigned to Rendon was the Al-Jazeera television network. The contract called for the Rendon Group to undertake a massive media mapping campaign against the news organization.” Why, what did they do?

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, it’s a very interesting area, this media mapping. And basically, what it is, is they were directed to take a close look at the actual reporters who were reporting the news and analyze them. What is their slant? What is their bias? What is the background for these people? What makes that very worrisome is that there was another group that was set up by the Pentagon, Office of Strategic Influence, and that was eventually closed down, but one of the things—

AMY GOODMAN: Forced to because it became public?

JAMES BAMFORD: That’s right, when it became knowledge, and one of the aspects was that they were going to plant phony stories in news organizations around the world, and when you plant a phony story in a news organization anywhere in the world today, I mean, it’s immediately accessible to people in the United States. So, it would have had a very bad blowback effect.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, I remember when Rumsfeld closed it. He said, ‘Yeah, we may change the name, but it doesn’t mean we have to stop doing what we are doing.’

Continue reading "The Man Who Sold the Iraq War: John Rendon, Bush’s General in the Propaganda War"

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

current-events

Get ready for the resource wars

Time is running out for us all.

We live in a dangerous moment of history. Irony of ironies, Americans in the near future may be conscripted en mass into the armed forces as America declares resource wars on the rest of the world in order to escape the consequences of the two Iraq wars, which now include a second Great Depression (breaking news).

If you're now scratching your head pondering what I'm talking about, consider Obama's or Clinton's refusal to state unequivocally that we will pull ALL of our troops out of the Middle East now. While the invasion of Iraq was in part at the instigation of the neoconservative cabal in their support of the racist policies of the Zionists (fundamentalists) of Eretz Israel, for the Eastern elite who rule us (and the oil cowboys of the Southwest) it was always about the oil. Cheap oil, easy-to-get sweet crude oil, a resource that is about to get real scarce all too soon. The phenomenon is call "Peak Oil."

Peak Oil has been a fact of life for some time, as even Dick Cheney cops to. And while it sounds good to the American public that we went into Iraq to remove a terrible dictator, it really doesn't sit well with Joe Q Public that our fair Republic often throws its weight around for purely economic and selfish reasons.

In all fairness, if the subject of Peak Oil were spoken of more honestly by the oil conglomerates and the politicians, Americans at large might have a better idea of the seriousness of the issue and plan accordingly. They might even stop buying 4-ton Hummers and Cadillac Escalades that get 10 MPG. But they have been coddled and spoon-fed the fairy tale of a glorious consumerist future - mostly involving huge SUVs and endless highways to a perfect suburbia - for so long that there's little room left in their greedy ignorant heads for the real world, a world rapidly running out of easy-to-get cheap oil. Not to mention that for the most part, most Americans don't even know that the rest of the world exists, except as a "resource."

But not everybody is an idiot or uninformed, and that includes Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. They both know that the end of cheap oil is upon us, and it behooves America to hang on to all the oil-producing territories that we can, for as long as we can, and also to grab all the new oil territories we can, the sooner the better. Russia's Vladimir Putin knows that, too, which is why we're starting to see headlines like the following in the foreign press - but not the US press, because there is no such thing as an end to cheap oil in the dreamland of the American mainstream media.

Climate change may spark conflict with Russia, EU told
Alert over scramble for control of energy resources in the Arctic
Ian Traynor in Brussels
The Guardian, Monday March 10 2008

European governments have been told to plan for an era of conflict over energy resources, with global warming likely to trigger a dangerous contest between Russia and the west for the vast mineral riches of the Arctic.

A report from the EU's top two foreign policy officials to the 27 heads of government gathering in Brussels for a summit this week warns that "significant potential conflicts" are likely in the decades ahead as a result of "intensified competition over access to, and control over, energy resources".

[...]

The officials single out the impact of the thawing Arctic and its emergence as a potential flashpoint of rival claims, pointing to the Kremlin's grab for the Arctic last year when President Vladimir Putin hailed as heroes a team of scientists who planted a Russian flag on the Arctic seabed.

Developments in the Arctic had "potential consequences for international stability and European security interests".[i.e., resource wars]

"The rapid melting of the polar ice caps, in particular the Arctic, is opening up new waterways and international trade routes," the report notes. "The increased accessibility of the enormous hydrocarbon resources in the Arctic region is changing the geostrategic dynamics of the region."

The report also stresses the volatility of the regions that hold large mineral deposits and predicts greater destabilisation in central Asia and the Middle East as a result of global warming

This "scramble for resources" and the warnings of conflicts from government agencies put the lie to the arguments of the deniers of global warming, inasmuch as there would be no scramble if the resources - oil - were still plentiful elsewhere.

Cheap oil is indeed running out but global warming is affording an opportunity for a race for resources in previously inaccessible regions. The greed of stock-jobbers and our mindless preoccupation with McMansions in suburbs that can only be accessed by giant, luxury trucks masquerading as family vehicles have blown apart the economic stability of the markets of the world. Americans are pigs who can't stop eating, consuming fully half of the world's resources while the average Third World person lives on less than a dollar a day. George Kennan is considered to be the most important foreign policy analyst of the last century; as the architect of the Cold War policy of containment of the USSR, he put it in no uncertain terms:

"We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population . . . In this situation we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security."[1]

These are soft and weasely words, but words that point to inevitable resource wars, unless we stop our gluttonous energy consumption now.

The warming climate and the end of cheap oil is a recipe for a bloody future for everybody, and we have no one but ourselves to blame.

Happy motoring, indeed.

------------------------------

[1] George F. Kennan, "PPS/23: Review of Current Trends in U.S. Foreign Policy." First published in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, Vol. 1, 509-529, it has been reprinted in Thomas H. Entzold and John Lewis Gaddis, eds., Documents on American Policy and Strategy, 1945-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press), 226-28; the quoted passage is at 226-27.

current-events

Charting the Bush legacy of lies

Here's a handy little chart graphically showing just how badly the Shrub and his minions have screwed this country since they stole the reins of government.

Click on image for larger view.

Tip o'the hat to ThinkProgress.org


current-events

The writing on the latrine wall

Photographer Peter Agtmael photographed graffiti on the bathroom wall at a major traffic point for U.S. troops, the Al Salem Air Force Base in Kuwait.

There's more at BagNewsNotes.



current-events

I Love A Man In A Uniform

General David Howard Petraeus

By now everyone who spends any time at all on the Internet knows that the right-wing blogosphere is screaming that MoveOn.org labeled General David Petraeus a "traitor" in a recent New York Times advert.

In fact, they did no such thing, as can be seen by reading the ad itself, here (pdf). Bear in mind that MoveOn.org is no fan of military men, while, we - and I include my many military veteran readers - are either ambivalent or else downright supportive of a dude in a sharp-looking uniform such as the general, or even (God help us) that lying punk Lt Col Oliver North.

Meanwhile, reports are popping up - rather belatedly, one might righteously think - that the good general might not be the right guy for the job in Iraq after all; in fact, he's being painted by some as a "sycophant" and, um, an "ass-licker," and a "chickensh*t." These reports are somewhat shaky, however, being suspiciously vague as to their sources.

Well, far be it from me to refer to a commissioned officer with a bad word, but as a veteran, I can recall more than one instance of a higher rank being referred to derogatorily. (But really, is there any other way for a righteous grunt to refer to a superior officer, at least in private?) In any case, I think it's more than fair to say that Petraeus is no General Grant; more of a McClellan, if you will.

Which is to say, to hell with the uniform, the PhD, the book on counterinsurgency warfare; the fact is Petraeus isn't doing shit in Iraq. The state of our occupation of Iraq sucks, big time. Every independent study of the Iraq situation strongly disagrees with the general. See here, here, and here.

Before I go, a little dose of (un)common sense might be in order:

“Having admitted, however, that the odds of a military success in Iraq are almost impossibly long, Chaos Hawks nonetheless insist that the U.S. military needs to stay in Iraq for the foreseeable future. Why? Because if we leave the entire Middle East will become a bloodbath. Sunni and Shiite will engage in mutual genocide, oil fields will go up in flames, fundamentalist parties will take over, and al-Qaeda will have a safe haven bigger than the entire continent of Europe.

“Needless to say, this is nonsense. Israel has fought war after war in the Middle East. Result: no regional conflagration. Iran and Iraq fought one of the bloodiest wars of the second half the 20th century. Result: no regional conflagration. The Soviets fought in Afghanistan and then withdrew. No regional conflagration. The U.S. fought the Gulf War and then left. No regional conflagration. Algeria fought an internal civil war for a decade. No regional conflagration.

“So where does this bogeyman come from? Hard to say. Probably a deep-seated unwillingness to confront the fact that the United States can’t really influence a course of events we originally set in motion. But Iraq is already fighting a civil war, and that civil war will continue whether we stay or go. If we go it will likely become more intense, but also shorter lived. The eventual result, however, will almost certainly be the same: a de facto independent Kurdistan in the north and a Shiite theocracy in the south. The rest of the Middle East will, as usual, watch events unfold without doing much of anything about them, and will accept the inevitable results. The U.S., for its part, will remain in the north to protect Kurdistan, in the east in Afghanistan, in the west in the Mediterranean, and in the south in its bases in the Gulf. We’ll hardly be absent from the region.

“I think it’s worthwhile for proponents of withdrawal to be honest about the likely aftermath of pulling out: an intensified civil war that will take the lives of tens of thousands and end in the installation, at least in the short-term, of an Iran-friendly theocracy. This is obviously not a happy outcome, but neither is it the catastrophe the Chaos Hawks peddle. The alternative is to babysit the civil war with American troops, spilling blood and treasure along the way, without truly affecting the course of events in any substantial measure."

Have a nice day. (And keep your powder dry.)


current-events

Am I crazy, or just very, very angry?

The Shrub is going to come on the TV here in just a few and tell me how great it is to be an American. I couldn’t agree more. It’s great to come home from your second part-time job at the Wal-Mart to a house full of ignorant, doped-up kids, only to turn on the news to watch another piece of American infrastructure drop into a river, taking several fellow taxpayers with it.

It’s just swell to learn that the bastards in Congress passed another ratification of the Shrub’s demon vision of Iran as a terrorist state, declaring them “murderers, ” while American Blackwater contractors machine gun Iraqi citizens with impunity and we learn that not only are we supplying guns and ammo to the Sunnis, we’re giving weapons to the Shi’ias , too, thus ensuring that both sides have lots of armament for their upcoming full-out civil war.

Meanwhile here at home, a reporter on assignment for Britain's largest newspaper (the UK Guardian) was deported after spending 26 hours in lockup in an undisclosed location for failing to have a journalist visa, per the US Patriot (sic) Act. If this is how we treat our friends, you can just imagine how we treat people we don’t like.

By the way, New Orleans is still a mess and the Shrub just vetoed the idea of a 5 cent tax on gasoline to pay for repairing America’s bridges, and he still wants another $80 billion to continue fucking up Iraq. In breaking news we learn that the Japanese just fired up their presses and printed a trillion (with a “T”) yen to prop up the failing (and getting worse) American real estate market.

Congress – and the idiots in the White House – could take some pointers from the Chinese, where the guy in charge of inspecting Mattel toys for the American market committed suicide after it was discovered that those toys were covered with poisonous lead paint.

So how’s your day been?

current-events

The myth of Congressional Democrats' helplessness

The Democratic presidential candidates had a big debate last week but I didn't watch it. I mean, Who cares? I knew that they would try to weasel out of their shitty vote on the war funding, and that most of them would say what they did in fact say: "Hey, we tried to end the war, but Bush vetoed it, and now we're stuck."

What a bunch of tripe. This shit isn't rocket science, Gentle Readers. This here vid from YouTube lays it out pretty simply.






current-events

Why We Fight, Part II

Advanced Energetics Increase Shareholder Value





Double digits!!

current-events

Why Congress caved to Bush

I don't like Patrick Buchanan very much. In fact I despise him, but the guy knows enough to call a spade a spade. Why did the Democrats in Congress stab their constituency in the back? Pat lays it out in no uncertain terms.

Why Congress caved to Bush

By Patrick J. Buchanan

05/25/07 "WorldNetDaily" -- -- The anti-war Democrats are crying betrayal – and justifiably so.

For a Democratic Congress is now voting to fully fund the war in Iraq, as demanded by President Bush, and without any timetable for a U.S. troop withdrawal. Bush got his $100 billion, then magnanimously agreed to let Democrats keep the $20 billion in pork they stuffed into the bill – to soothe the pain of their sellout of the party base.

Remarkable. If the Republican rout of 2006 said anything, it was that America had lost faith in the Bush-Rumsfeld conduct of the war and wanted Democrats to lead the country out.

Yet, today, there are more U.S. troops in Iraq than when the Democrats won. More are on the way. And with the surge and retention of troops in Iraq beyond normal tours, there should be a record number of U.S. troops in country by year's end.

Why did the Democrats capitulate?

Because they lack the courage of their convictions. Because they fear the consequences if they put their anti-war beliefs into practice. Because they are afraid if they defund the war and force President Bush to withdraw U.S. troops, the calamity he predicts will come to pass and they will be held accountable for losing Iraq and the strategic disaster that might well ensue.

Democrats are an intimidated party. The reasons are historical. They were shredded by Nixon and Joe McCarthy for FDR's surrenders to Stalin at Tehran and Yalta, for losing China to Mao's hordes, for the "no-win war" in Korea, for being "soft on communism."

The best and the brightest – JFK's New Frontiersmen – were held responsible for plunging us into Vietnam and proving incapable of winning the war. A Democratic Congress cut off aid to Saigon in 1975, ceding Southeast Asia to Hanoi and bringing on the genocide of Pol Pot.

Democrats know they are distrusted on national security. They fear that if they defund this war and bring on a Saigon ending in the Green Zone, it will be a generation before they are trusted with national power. And power is what the party is all about.

Yet, not only does the situation in Iraq appear increasingly grim, with rising U.S. and Iraqi casualties, other shoes are about to drop that will reverberate throughout the region.

Support for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, with his war in Lebanon a debacle and his leadership denounced by a commission he appointed, is in single digits. Waiting in the wings is Likud super-hawk "Bibi" Netanyahu, the most popular politician in Israel, who compares today to Munich 1938 and equates Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with Hitler.

If and when Bibi comes to power, he will use every stratagem to provoke us into attacking "Hitler."

Also drumming for war on Iran are the floundering neocons and the Israeli lobby. Under orders from the lobby, Nancy Pelosi stripped from a House bill a stipulation that Bush must come to Congress for authorization before launching an attack on Iran.

With Democratic contenders reciting the mantra "All options are on the table," and Iran defying U.N. sanctions, pursuing nuclear enrichment and detaining U.S. citizens, Bush has a blank check to launch a third war.

Lebanon is ablaze. Gaza is ablaze. The Afghan war is not going well. The Taliban have a privileged sanctuary. The NATO allies grow weary.

In Pakistan, the most dangerous country on earth – one bullet away from an Islamic republic with atom bombs – our erstwhile ally, President Musharraf, is caught in a political crisis over his ouster of the chief justice.

Presidents Musharraf in Islamabad, Kharzi in Kabul and Siniora in Beirut, and Prime Minister Maliki in Baghdad, sit on shaky thrones. No one knows what follows their fall. But it is hard to see how it would not be crippling for America's position.

With such volatility in this crucial region of the world, with such uncertainty, it is easy to see why Democrats prefer to be the "dummy" at the bridge table and let Bush play the hand.

The congressional Democrats are cynical, but they are not stupid. If the surge works and U.S. troops are being withdrawn by fall 2008, they do not want it said of them that they "cut and ran" when the going got tough, that they played Chamberlain to Bush's Churchill.

And if the war is going badly in 2008, they know that the American people, in repudiating the party of Bush and Cheney, have no other choice than the party of Hillary and Pelosi and Harry Reid.

That is why congressional Democrats are surely saying privately of the angry anti-war left what has often been said by the Beltway Republican elite of the right: "Don't worry about them. They have nowhere else to go."

And that is why the anti-war left was thrown under the bus.

Copyright 1997-2007 - WorldNetDaily.com Inc.

current-events

Memorial Day 2007

Three thousand, four hundred fifty four dead US soldiers in the Iraq occupation, and counting...

This president has lied to us from the beginning, and he continues to lie to us about the Iraq occupation. When he asks for the opinion of his generals, they tell it like it is and they get fired for it. But the truth will out, as seen here, in this letter from a former ground commander in Iraq.


General Eaton's Letter to President Bush on Veto May 1, 2007

President George W. Bush
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President,

Today, in your veto message regarding the bipartisan legislation just passed on Operation Iraqi Freedom, you asserted that you so decided because you listen to your commanders on the ground.

Respectfully, as your former commander on the ground, your administration did not listen to our best advice. In fact, a number of my fellow Generals were forced out of their jobs, because they did not tell you what you wanted to hear -- most notably General Eric Shinseki, whose foresight regarding troop levels was advice you rejected, at our troops' peril.

The legislation you vetoed today represented a course of action that is long overdue. This war can no longer be won by the military alone. We must bring to bear the entire array of national power - military, diplomatic and economic. The situation demands a surge in diplomacy, and pressure on the Iraqi government to fix its internal affairs. Further, the Army and Marine Corps are on the verge of breaking - or have been broken already - by the length and intensity of this war. This tempo is not sustainable - and you have failed to grow the ground forces to meet national security needs. We must begin the process of bringing troops home, and repairing and growing our military, if we are ever to have a combat-ready force for the long war on terror ahead of us.

The bill you rejected today sets benchmarks for success that the Iraqis would have to meet, and puts us on a course to redeploy our troops. It stresses the need for sending troops into battle only when they are rested, trained and equipped. In my view, and in the view of many others in the military that I know, that is the best course of action for our security.

As someone who served this nation for decades, I have the utmost respect for the office you hold. However, as a man of conscience, I could not sit idly by as you told the American people today that your veto was based on the recommendations of military men. Your administration ignored the advice of our military's finest minds before, and I see no evidence that you are listening to them now.

I urge you to reconsider your position, and work with Congress to pass a bill that achieves the goals laid out above.

Respectfully,
Major General Paul D. Eaton, USA, Retired

Major General Paul Eaton is a retired United States Army General and former Office of Security Transition Commanding General. He was in charge of training the Iraqi military from 2003 to 2004. Eaton was commissioned upon graduation from the U.S. Military Academy in 1972. He is fluent in French, receiving a Master of Arts from Middlebury College in French Grammar and Civilization.

Eaton's awards and decorations include the Distinguished Service Medal, Defense Superior Service Medal, Legion of Merit (with 3 Oak Leaf Clusters), Meritorious Service Medal (with 2 Oak Leaf Clusters), Army Commendation Medal (with 2 Oak Leaf Clusters), Army Achievement Medal, Expert Infantryman Badge, Parachutist Badge, Ranger Tab, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Identification Badge.

Also: Year Four: Simply the Worst

current-events

Olbermann says it straight: Dems betray country

I have been livid since I heard that the House Democrats have folded in the face of Bush's threat of a veto over his war funding reauthorization and can't speak or write without sputtering, so I'll let Keith Olbermann do it for me:

Few men or women elected in our history—whether executive or legislative, state or national—have been sent into office with a mandate more obvious, nor instructions more clear:

Get us out of Iraq.

Yet after six months of preparation and execution—half a year gathering the strands of public support; translating into action, the collective will of the nearly 70 percent of Americans who reject this War of Lies, the Democrats have managed only this:

• The Democratic leadership has surrendered to a president—if not the worst president, then easily the most selfish, in our history—who happily blackmails his own people, and uses his own military personnel as hostages to his asinine demand, that the Democrats “give the troops their money”;
• The Democratic leadership has agreed to finance the deaths of Americans in a war that has only reduced the security of Americans;
• The Democratic leadership has given Mr. Bush all that he wanted, with the only caveat being, not merely meaningless symbolism about benchmarks for the Iraqi government, but optional meaningless symbolism about benchmarks for the Iraqi government.
• The Democratic leadership has, in sum, claimed a compromise with the Administration, in which the only things truly compromised, are the trust of the voters, the ethics of the Democrats, and the lives of our brave, and doomed, friends, and family, in Iraq.
  

For the whole video (7 minutes plus) click on the image above.

current-events

Being in Iraq can shrink your brain

Ah, this is not good news. This newsflash from Military.com tells us of a government-funded study 's just released report stating that veterans of the first Gulf war are suffering from shrunken brains.

Veterans Exhibit Brain Differences

Week of May 14, 2007

Veterans of the first Gulf War who developed numerous health complaints have areas of the brain that are measurably smaller than those of healthier vets, according to a new study. The results of the U.S. government-funded study provide some of the first hard evidence that veterans from the 1990 to 1991 conflict are suffering from a real neurological illness, researchers say. The findings are preliminary and do not confirm that wartime exposures changed the veterans' brains, only that differences exist.

Notice the disclaimer: "the findings are preliminary"... like it's only been 16 freaking years.

current-events

Angel returns to the war

US soldiers on convoy security detail

Our little buddy Angel went off to the war on Wednesday (he's 24 and a private in the National Guard). He'll be spending about two months in retraining before they ship his Guard unit back to Iraq. Originally, his unit was headed for Kuwait, to a previous assignment- convoy security - but a last minute change of plans (sound familiar?) changed the orders to Baghdad. Yup. He's headed for the meatgrinder.

This is not Angel's first deployment and may not be his last if things remain the way they are, what with no benchmarks or any reasonable guidelines other than "victory."

I asked Angel about that victory stuff, and he responded, "The only thing that matters to me is keeping my buddies' asses covered. That's it."

I quipped, "Yes, indeed, the sweet smell of victory in the morning: the odor of your buddy's 'safe ass'." Angel didn't laugh.

Angel is pretty computer savvy - in fact, he helped me build this very computer that I am blogging on right now - so we are looking forward to hearing from him about conditions on the ground. He cautions against any kind of realtime communications, however. He informs me that the powers-that-be have clamped down pretty hard on blogging from the zone, but he says he'll do what he can.

I told him to keep his head down, and he said, "Yeah, that's what they all say."

Good luck, Angel.

current-events

It's still about the oil

US soldier guards Iraqi oil facility

Well, let's see how we're doing there in ol' Iraq.

Hmm, it doesn't look good. General Pretaeus is saying that "there is no military solution"; then he condradicts himself and says, "As citizens feel safer, conditions will be set for the resumption and improvement of basic services."

Duh, how does he figure that citizens will "feel safer"? From what I read, 50,000 Iraqis a month are fleeing the country, as I have previously pointed out. Among those leaving Iraq are the blue-collar technicians who used to run the "basic services." At this rate, there won't be anybody left in the country to vote for the new, unified, and harmonious government, much less "improve" what's left of a country and oil industry in freaking ruins.

President Bush continues - against every standard of sane or reasoned thinking - to hope against hope for some kind of victory in Iraq, any victory, even going so far as to grudgingly start talking about "benchmarks."

However, let's make one thing perfectly clear: the only benchmark that really counts for Bush and his neo-con cabal (and plenty of Democrats are secretly in agreement with these thugs) is the "oil law," and remember, when push comes to shove - fuck "victory" - it's still all about the oil.

current-events

Tenet cries into his beer

The International Herald Tribune has obtained a copy of George Tenet's new book, "At the Center of the Storm," due out Monday. In it, Tenet unleashes his frustration at what he perceived as shabby treatment by the folks in the White House.

He pours a lot of vitriol over the figurative heads of the administration, and in no uncertain terms, although he never directly criticizes the president by name. Also, he whines just a little too much that he was a "patsy." (And him a grown man ...)

Anyhoo, some random quotes:

"There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat," Tenet writes in a devastating judgment that is likely to be debated for many years.

Nor, he adds, "was there ever a significant discussion" about the possibility of containing Iraq without an invasion.

Tenet admits that he made his famous "slam dunk" remark about the evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But he argues that the quote was taken out of context and that it had little impact on Bush's decision to go to war. He also makes clear his bitter view that the administration made him a scapegoat for the Iraq war.

Tenet described with sarcasm watching an episode of "Meet the Press" last September in which Cheney twice referred to Tenet's "slam dunk" remark as the basis for the decision to go to war.

"I remember watching and thinking, 'As if you needed me to say 'slam dunk' to convince you to go to war with Iraq,'" Tenet writes.

He also expresses skepticism about whether the increase in troops in Iraq will prove successful. "It may have worked more than three years ago," he wrote. "My fear is that sectarian violence in Iraq has taken on a life of its own and that U.S. forces are becoming more and more irrelevant to the management of that violence."

As violence in Iraq spiraled, beginning in late 2003, Tenet writes, "rather than acknowledge responsibility, the administration's message was: Don't blame us. George Tenet and the CIA got us into this mess."

There's more at: Tenent Denounces Cheney