This is really starting to hurt my soul lately.
I don’t have a magnet or sticker on my car. I’ve been called names that would make you sick. I live in the Redneck part of a Blue State between “Bumfuck” and “You’ve Got a Purdy Mawf”, California.
I’ve had some rather hairy scary encounters with some of these people who are going totally postal. Here’s a snippet of another type of postal encounters.
Read MoreFormer Ambassador Dan Simpson declared that the US has invaded Syria in an article he wrote for the Toledo Blade on October 19, 2005.
Is this the Iraq war’s equivalent of actions in Cambodia during the Vietnam war?
Simpson does not provide details. It had been widely reported on October 14, 2005 that coalition troops had clashed with Syrians on the border in order to stem the flow of possible insurgents from the country, but those reports do not include movements into Syria itself. Yet, Simpson’s words are definitive.
more below…
Read MoreCan Cheney be indicted and sent to jail? Yes. The question was decided back in the 1970’s, when it became clear that Vice-President Spiro Agnew was a tax-cheat and an extortionist/bribe-taker.
The U.S. attorney in Maryland, investigating illegal campaign contributions and kickbacks, had questioned Jerome Wolff, Agnew’s former aide. Wolff had kept verbatim accounts of meetings during which Agnew discussed raising funds from those who had received state contracts. Agnew swore that “it wasn’t shakedown stuff, it was merely going back to get support from those who had benefitted from the Administration.”
It was a bad time for the Nixon administration, as they were already trying to fend off the Watergate investigation.
:::flip:::
Read MoreBy Ray McGovern
(for my blog – Larry Johnson)
Indictments are expected to come down shortly as special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald completes the investigation originally precipitated by the outing of a C.I.A. officer under deep cover. In 21-plus months of digging and interviewing, Fitzpatrick and his able staff have been able to negotiate the intelligence/policy/politics labyrinth with considerable sophistication. In the process, they seem to have learned considerably more than they had bargained for. The investigation has long since morphed into size “extra-large,” which is the only size commensurate with the wrongdoing uncovered—not least, the fabrication and peddling of intelligence to “justify” a war of aggression.
……………………………….. Biography: Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He was a C.I.A. analyst for 27 years, and is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. |
The coming months are likely to see senior Bush administration officials frog marched out of the White House to be booked, unless the president moves swiftly to fire Fitzgerald—a distinct possibility. With so many forces at play, it is easy to lose perspective and context while plowing through the tons of information on this case. What follows is a retrospective and prospective, laced with some new facts and analysis aimed at helping us to focus on the forest once we have given due attention to the trees.
Background
In late May 2003, the Education for Peace in Iraq Center (EPIC) informed me that a former U.S. ambassador named Joseph Wilson would be sharing keynote duties with me at a large EPIC conference on June 14.
I was delighted—for two reasons. This was a chance to meet the “American hero” (per George H. W. Bush) who faced down Saddam Hussein, freeing hundreds of American and other hostages taken when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. More important, since Wilson had served as an ambassador in Africa, I thought he might be able to throw light on a question bedeviling me since May 6, when New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote an intriguing story about a mission to Niger by “a former U.S. ambassador to Africa.”
There Once Was an Ambassador in Niger…
 View more images of the fake Niger documents — from the Italian newspaper La Repubblica on July 16, 2003 — at Phaedo blog. |
According to Kristof, that mission was undertaken at the behest of Vice President Dick Cheney’s office to investigate a report that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger. The report was an entirely convenient “smoking gun.” Since Iraq lacked any nonmilitary use for such uranium, it had to be for a nuclear weapons program, if the report were true. Or so went the argument. The former ambassador sent to Niger had found no basis for the report, pulling the rug out from under the “intelligence” the administration had used during the previous fall to conjure up the “mushroom cloud” that intimidated Congress into authorizing war.
Kristof’s May 6 column had caused quite a stir in Washington. The only one to have totally missed the story was then-National Security Adviser and now Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (assuming she is to be taken at her word). Rice claimed that the information did not come to her attention until more than a month later. Right. (And the celebrated aluminum tubes were for nuclear enrichment—not artillery. Right.)
This ostensibly nuclear-related “evidence” was no mere sideshow; it went to the very core of the disingenuous justification for war. The Iraq-Niger report itself was particularly suspect. The uranium mined in Niger is very tightly controlled by a French-led international consortium, and the chances of circumventing or defeating the well established safeguards and procedures were seen as virtually nil. On March 7, Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, announced to the U.N. Security Council that the documents upon which the Iraq-Niger reporting was based were “not authentic.” Colin Powell swallowed hard but took it as well as could be expected under the circumstances. A few days later he conceded the point entirely—with neither apology nor embarrassment, as befits the world’s sole remaining superpower.
BELOW: The Sixteen Words … Do You Know the Ambassador? … Still Good Advice: Fire Cheney … Frog Marching ,,, Fire the Special Prosecutor? Shades of Watergate …
The United States is responsible for the conduct and the supervision of its soldiers. And it looks like the culture of the war, and the conduct of our soldiers, is a disgrace. Here is a photo from the burning of killed “enemy combatants” for public display.
From transcripts of the original Australian broadcast:
Reporter: At the top of the hills above the village the soldiers have taken the tactics of psychological warfare to a grotesque and disturbing extreme. US soldiers have set fire to the bodies of the two Taliban killed the night before. The burning of the corpses and the fact that they’ve been laid out facing Mecca is a deliberate desecration of Muslim beliefs.
Soldier: Wow, look at the blood coming out of the mouth on that one, fucking straight death metal.
Reporter: PsyOps specialist Sergeant Jim Baker then broadcast an inflammatory message over the loudspeakers in order to taunt and bait the enemy. Source
We are either bound by the rule of civilized law or we are not. When we invade other countries we have the absolute responsbility to do so (yes, I know that there’s a paradox here) in a civilized and lawful manner.
Cross posted at Political Porn
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