September 10th, 2007
Just more evidence that Rupert Murdoch’s Faux News is the propaganda arm of the republican party and of Bush’s White House, via TalkingPointsMemo.com:
It’s 9:13 PM (September 10, 2007). If you have a chance, flip on Fox News at least for a moment. It’s Gen. Petraeus’s (and Crocker’s) one hour “exclusive” with Brit Hume on Fox. The chyron actually reads “A Briefing for America.” And that’s really pretty much what it is. It’s another briefing. It’s not an interview. It’s a continuation of today’s bamboozlement but in prime time on Fox with the expected soft-ball questions and credulous analysis.
Late Update: The “exclusive” is also helpfully interspersed with commercials from the White House-organized pro-Iraq War astroturf group Freedom’s Watch.
Later Update: As around 9:45, Hume is walking Petraeus toward explaining how the Iraq War is really a “war against al Qaeda.” Petraeus is playing along.
UPDATE: TPM.com has a video clip up.
September 9th, 2007
By now you’re either convinced that Bush’s Iraq misadventure is the biggest cluster-fuck in US history, or you still cling to the illusion that Bush & Co. knew what they were doing when they decided to invade that country. Then again, there’s some evidence that Bush & Co. knew what they were doing when they decided to privatize the war effort. Of course, many of these private, no-bid, "cost-plus" contracts were given to Bush administration cronies and political supporters — such as Halliburton and others; and, now, with little in terms of reconstruction to show and billions of dollars later, we’re getting a better picture of how these private contractors have raped and pillaged the US Treasury.
Again, if you know what a cluster-fuck Bush’s Iraq misadventure has been from the start, then this article from Rolling Stone will only add fuel to your rage. The article describes in appalling detail the war profiteering by private contractors, and the utter lack of oversight by the Bush administration.
Here’s the opening of the article:
How is it done? How do you screw the taxpayer for millions, get away with it and then ride off into the sunset with one middle finger extended, the other wrapped around a chilled martini? Ask Earnest O. Robbins — he knows all about being a successful contractor in Iraq.
You start off as a well-connected bureaucrat: in this case, as an Air Force civil engineer, a post from which Robbins was responsible for overseeing 70,000 servicemen and contractors, with an annual budget of $8 billion. You serve with distinction for thirty-four years, becoming such a military all-star that the Air Force frequently sends you to the Hill to testify before Congress — until one day in the summer of 2003, when you retire to take a job as an executive for Parsons, a private construction company looking to do work in Iraq.
And the inevitable conclusion, after examing the evidence:
According to the most reliable estimates, we have doled out more than $500 billion for the war, as well as $44 billion for the Iraqi reconstruction effort. And what did America’s contractors give us for that money? They built big steaming shit piles, set brand-new trucks on fire, drove back and forth across the desert for no reason at all and dumped bags of nails in ditches. For the most part, nobody at home cared, because war on some level is always a waste. But what happened in Iraq went beyond inefficiency, beyond fraud even. This was about the business of government being corrupted by the profit motive to such an extraordinary degree that now we all have to wonder how we will ever be able to depend on the state to do its job in the future. If catastrophic failure is worth billions, where’s the incentive to deliver success? There’s no profit in patriotism, no cost-plus angle on common decency. Sixty years after America liberated Europe, those are just words, and words don’t pay the bills.
September 8th, 2007
Via HuffingtonPost.com, portrait of Marine Staff Stg. John Jones by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders:
You can visit the photographers site for more portraits.
August 12th, 2007
This is enough to break your heart…
Nine months old, underweight, malnourished, fatherless and half Sunni, half Shiite, she already had enough deadly handicaps growing up in Saydia, a battlefield suburb that has become one of the worst sectarian killing zones in Baghdad.
On July 25, a death squad shot her mother and uncle — each three times in the head — in their dilapidated half-finished squat. E.J.K.’s, in American military shorthand: extrajudicial killings.
[...]
Fatima is a Shiite name. (The Prophet Muhammad’s daughter Fatima married Ali, who Shiites believe should have led the Islamic world instead of the Sunni Caliphate.) But the widowed mother and uncle were Sunnis, and the baby had their surname, Jbouri.
Painful experience had already taught Major Yerkes that Sunnis would not be safe in the health care system because it is under the control of Shiites loyal to the Mahdi Army militia.
In the two months before Fatima’s discovery, the major had handed over three Sunni insurgents to Iraqi policemen for medical treatment, only for them to be killed on arrival at the hospital.
[...]
[Major Yerkes] was asked if he was content with Fatima’s happy ending.
“It’s not really happy yet, is it?” he said. “She is alive. We don’t know where she is going. Call me in a couple of months.”
May Fatima live long enough to see a peaceful Iraq one day.
August 8th, 2007
Via ThinkProgress.com…
Right-Winger Accuses Iraq Vet Of ‘Stabbing’ His ‘Fellow Men And Women In Uniform’ In The Back
During a debate on MSNBC’s Hardball this evening, retired Air Force Lt. Colonel Robert “Buzz” Patterson, a right-wing radio host, gratuitously attacked Iraq war veteran Jon Soltz, the chairman of VoteVets.org, exclaiming “I am so happy you’re not serving in Iraq right now, stabbing your fellow men and women in uniform like you do back in the states.”
Patterson claimed that Soltz didn’t know what he was talking about because he “didn’t get the memo” that “we’re fighting al Qaeda in Iraq.” “You know what, I don’t need the memo because I was in Iraq,” responded Soltz. “You read the newspaper, I was in Iraq. That’s the difference between you and I.”
Patterson muttered back that he had “been to Iraq too,” but Soltz laughed at his claim. “Are you talking about your rah-rah-sis-kum-bah cheerleader tours that the White House took you on or are you talking about as a soldier who took the country?”
Make sure to watch the video.
