this diary is dedicated to all who suffer because of war

we love and support our troops, just as we love and support the Iraqi people – without exception, or precondition, or judgment

we have no sympathy for the devil

two images and poem below the fold

Benjamin Weidemann, center, brother of fallen U.S. Army Sgt. Michael Weidemann, is tearful moments after being presented with the U.S. flag during burial services, in Portsmouth, R.I., Friday, Nov. 10, 2006. Sgt. Weidemann was killed while on patrol in the area of Anbar province, in Iraq, when an improvised explosive device blew up near his vehicle in late October.
(AP Photo/Steven Senne)


The funeral of an unidentified body in the holy city of Najaf, central Iraq. US military leaders are making their own reassessment of the course in Iraq, the top US military officer said, signaling major changes ahead with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s departure
(AFP/Qassam Zein)

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from Desolation Row
by Bob Dylan

Now at midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do
Then they bring them to the factory
Where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row

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The bar for crimes against humanity is very low, if we use the trials of Nazis after World War II as a measure. Otto Dietrich? Vile as he was, he never actually killed anyone – he was just a propagandist for Hitler, a Tony Snow, if you will. He got seven years. Johannes Stark? Just a scientist who wanted to rid his field of “Jewish physics” in favor of that which served the state. He got four years of hard labor. Karl Doenitz? Commander in Chief of the German Navy, convicted of “planning, initiating, and waging wars of aggression,” or, more commonly, crimes against peace. He was sentenced to ten years at Spandau Prison.

None of these men created a policy of torture, although surely their actions aided and abetted torture. None of them allowed crime to run rampant in areas Germany conquered, although surely others did. There are many names we could pull out of the Nuremberg files who were far more active in the Final Solution and for direct crimes than any of the men mentioned above. They weren’t small fry, either. Dietrich was Hitler’s confidante, Doenitz the Fuhrer’s hand-picked successor. And we wouldn’t have prevented the arrest, trial, and conviction of a single one of them.

The point of this comparison is not that Donald Rumsfeld is worse than the Nazis, although, to be sure, his acts are worse than those of some Nazis. The point here is that our collective humanity, our national conscience, our individual sense of ourselves as citizens, demands that we declare criminals to be criminals, and that they be punished accordingly.

from Time to Arrest Donald Rumsfeld, by The Rude Pundit

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