“[I]n times of crisis it’s interesting that people don’t turn to the novel or say, ‘We should all go out to a movie,’ or ‘Ballet would help us.’ It’s always poetry. What we want to hear is a human voice speaking directly in our ear.”

Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate (2001-2003) speaking to the New York Times, as quoted in The Dead Beat by Marilyn Johnson

this diary is dedicated to all who suffer because of war and other disasters

we honor courage in all its forms

cross-posted at DailyKos, Booman Tribune, European Tribune,  My Left Wing, and TexasKos.

image and poem below the fold

An Iraqi resident helps a wounded man after a clash with Iraqi and British soldiers near the British helicopter crash site in Basra, 550 Km (341miles) south of Baghdad, May 6, 2006. A British military helicopter was shot down by a rocket in the southern Iraqi city of Basra on Saturday, Iraqi police said, and firefighters said they had found four charred bodies in the wreckage. The helicopter burst into flames on impact and a thick cloud of black smoke billowed into the air. Hundreds of youths quickly surrounded the area, yelling and pelting British troops cordoning off the crash site with rocks.
REUTERS/Wisam Ahmad

from Credible Information, 1999 – 2003
by Mark Pawlak

For Gary Trudeau

February 26, 2002

Asked whether he thought the controversy
surrounding the Office of Strategic Influence
has harmed the military’s credibility,
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld replied, `’I doubt it.
I hope not. If it has, we’ll rebuild it.”
Rumsfeld added that the military will in the future
continue to use information to its advantage
but will stick with deceiving only its enemies on the battlefield,
not the international media.
`’There’s a lot of things that we have to do,
and we will do those things,” he said.
“We’ll just do them in a different office.”

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