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| Name: | .. |
| Set
a Date to Pull Out
The danger is not that we will cut and run but that the Iraqis will insist that we get out.
By James Steinberg and Michael O'Hanlon |
| Name: | Presstitute |
| Name: | Alexandra |
| Re: | I deserve credit |
| Name: | Brave American Hero |
From the same New York Army National Guard unit that picked up escaped hostage Thomas Hamill comes word of a young soldier who killed 20 or more Iraqi insurgents when his patrol was ambushed on Easter Sunday. Spec. Timmy Haag of South Glens Falls, N.Y., made his remarkable display of courage and cool under fire as C Company, 2nd Battalion of the 108th Light Infantry was conducting a sweep of southern Samarra in open 5-ton trucks. The vehicles are so slow and high-riding that it borders on the criminal to transport soldiers on them into a known hot spot bristling with rocket-propelled grenades.
Troops nicknamed the trucks "RPG magnets," Staff Sgt. Troy Mechanick said on Friday.
The nickname proved tragically apt when the truck carrying Haag and 13 other members of his platoon was roughly 100 yards past a mosque flying the fedayeen flag. An RPG slammed into the left side, killing 21-year-old Pfc. Nathan Brown of South Glens Falls.
Many more might have died had Brown not taken the brunt of the blast. Two others were seriously wounded, including Mechanick, who was lifted to his feet by the concussion.
"It turned everything yellow and green, then everything goes slow," Mechanick recalled.
The grenade was followed by automatic weapons fire, and Mechanick tried to reach for his M-4 rifle. His left hand did not go where he commanded it and he realized his arm was hanging limp at his side, broken in four places. He reached with his right hand and saw the middle finger was dangling, all but severed.
"I said to myself, 'I don't need that to shoot,'" Mechanick recalled.
He managed to undo the safety and raise his rifle, but the weapon failed to fire.
"It was full of shrapnel," Mechanick said.
Mechanick turned to a wounded soldier and asked to use his weapon.
"His response was I'm crazy," Mechanick recalled. "My response was, 'No, I want to live.' ... Somebody called out, 'Nate's dead.' I called out, 'We've got to keep security up, or we'll all be dead.'"
Haag had begun returning fire with his SAW machine gun from the first moments after the blast.
"First thing he did was stand up on the driver's side," Mechanick recalled. "He saw a couple of enemy soldiers. He suppressed them, killing two or three immediately."
Haag turned to the passenger side and suppressed the fire coming from that direction. He and fellow soldier James MacDonald then clambered down and fought their way down the line of vehicles to notify their commander their truck had been hit.
"Small arms fire, AK-47 and RPG," Mechanick recalled "Haag's just running though it and as he's running he's shooting, killing people."
Haag and MacDonald passed four alleys, each of which had between six and 15 enemies armed with automatic weapons and RPGs. Haag is said to have shot them all.
"Timmy Haag was phenomenal," Mechanick said. "When the firefight happened, Timmy Haag was the man."
Haag and MacDonald dashed back to their truck. Haag emptied the last 200-round drum of his squad automatic weapon and clambered into a truck so high-riding the unit had welded on a ladder in the back. An RPG skipped off the road where he had been standing.
Haag grabbed another weapon as the line of a half-dozen vehicles began lumbering toward the nearest American outpost. Haag called out that he would cover the right side while another soldier covered the left.
Mechanick had numerous other wounds and he was pale and short of breath from the loss of blood. Haag kept calling to him and nudging him with his boot as he fired.
"He knew I was going to sleep, and if you go to sleep you don't ever wake up," Mechanick said. "He's shooting at the enemy, kicking me, shooting at the enemy, kicking me: 'Sgt. Mechanick, don't you go to sleep.' Shoot a couple of rounds. Kick me. 'Sgt. Mechanick, don't you go to sleep.'"
Two roadside bombs went off close enough to lift the truck off the ground. Haag spotted an Iraqi fleeing a courtyard, detonator still in hand. Haag cut the bomber in half and kept firing, by one estimate 1,500 rounds in all.
Mechanick clung to consciousness as the patrol reached the outpost, and he was flown out by helicopter. He was later told that Haag stayed on the truck with Brown, covering the body with a poncho and keeping a kind of honor guard.
Haag saw that Brown's American flag shoulder patch had been blown off. Haag retrieved it, cleaned it as best he could and handed it to Staff Sgt. Patrick Abrams.
Finally, Haag and Abrams gently lowered the fallen soldier from a vehicle that never should have been used to send them into harm's way. Mechanick later described Brown as "the perfect kid" and recalled that the Army promised when they headed for Iraq in February that they would be given armored vehicles.
"They lied to us," Mechanick said.
No armor guarantees protection, but even unarmored Humvees would have at least been low to the ground and fast. One detail did not escape Mechanick's attention as he lay at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, watching news reports of his company's May 2 encounter with Thomas Hamill.
"What was in the ? Five-tons," Mechanick said.
Mechanick is now back home, trying to adjust to a country that imagines itself not at war and hoping we will learn something from Brown's death. Haag is still in that place called The Sandbox, riding RPG magnets, known to be extraordinarily bright and a talented artist as well as a soldier whose courage would be called uncommon had he not so many brave s.
| Name: | Cpl. Gzxcaarkezx |
| To: | Individual |
| Re: | Outer Ward Picket |
Message:
This is a little place called EP-Selkirk 801-EC-C+H+O. Where you and what you smokin', dude?? This place is great! We haven't had a hostile contact in 38 Earth-years, and the dope, the music, and the lithe and luscious local females are fantastic!! We have about 75% Earth-gravity here, and what happens on the dance floors on this little jewel is beyond belief!
| Name: | Becky |
| To: | Hollywood and TV |
Message:
"Our country permits Hollywood to put almost anything in a movie and still call it PG-13. We permit television and computers to bring all manner of filth into our homes. We permit school children to be taught that homosexuality is an acceptable lifestyle. We allow Christianity and the teaching of Judeo-Christian values to be scrubbed from the public square. We allow our children be taught how to use condoms in school, rather than why to avoid sex. We let these things happen. They don't happen on their own. While hearings take place to examine the horrific behavior that took place in a military prison overseas, it's time to take a cold, hard look at the degradation in our own country -- and in our own homes." --Rebecca Hagelin
| Name: | Proud Father |
| To: | forum |
Message:
An open letter to some political partisans, especially certain politicians and people in the media: "I have a son who is an American soldier in Iraq...
I am not fooled, when you partisans spew propaganda that helps our enemies and harms our soldiers, then tell us you support our troops. I am not fooled, when you focus on, highlight, and exaggerate the negative things that happen in Iraq, while ignoring our positive accomplishments, then tell us you support our troops.
I am not fooled, when you focus attention on American soldiers killed and wounded in Iraq, to use these brave patriots as an anti-Iraq-war political football, then tell us you support our troops. I am not fooled, when you keep criticizing why and how we invaded Iraq -- that is done; our troops are there -- then tell us you support our troops. I am not fooled, when you engage in constant, carping criticism of what the U.S. has done and is doing in Iraq, then tell us you support our troops. com
I am not fooled, when you search for and trumpet to the world anything that will diminish respect for our soldiers and their leaders -- even when it endangers greatly their lives, then tell us you support our troops.
I am not fooled, when you tell our soldiers and the rest of us that they are stuck in a 'quagmire' and will suffer a Vietnam-type defeat, then tell us you support our troops.
I am not fooled, when you spout propaganda that undermines the morale of our soldiers and the American public and boosts the morale of our enemies, then tell us you support our troops. You are giving aid and comfort to our nation's deadly enemies! They know they cannot defeat us militarily in Iraq. However, you cause them to think they can win here politically by breaking our will, if they kill and wound enough of our soldiers. You despicable partisans! You are stimulating our enemies to attack our soldiers and the people working with them. The blood of many Americans and Iraqis is already on your hands. And your hands collect more blood every day!
You are determined to regain the political power you have lost, and you believe your presidential candidate and congressional candidates will win, if the U.S. fails in Iraq.
If your anti-American propaganda contributes to the deaths of many Americans and Iraqis, that is a price you are willing to make them pay. You are pathetic and dangerous!" --Proud Father of a Decorated Army Officer serving in Iraq
| Name: | Don Feder |
| To: | forum |
Message:
What Hillary and other elitists... are saying is that anyone who disagrees with them -- who adheres to limited government, the free market, traditional morality and a strong foreign policy -- just doesn’t get it. The counterpart is that people with conservative values are wicked. So, either we’re too dumb to understand how depraved our positions are, or we’re motivated by malice. The Left, on the other hand, is genius personified. Clearly, considerable brain-power went into formulating the tenets of modern liberalism: Tax increases will fuel an economic boom. Reverse discrimination furthers racial harmony. Cutting defense and a foreign policy that convinces the bin Ladens of the world that we’re a bunch of wimps is the way to keep America safe. Handouts inculcate a work ethic. Gun control -- which disarms potential victims -- is the best way to fight crime. Attacking parental authority and facilitating family dissolution helps children. Condom distribution promotes responsibility among adolescents. Not drilling in the Artic Wildlife Refuge and the virtual abandonment of nuclear power contributes to energy self-sufficiency. Brilliant!... The Left sincerely believes that ordinary Americans are s -- unfortunates who are sorely in need of a keeper (big government) to bring us in out of the rain and keep us from drooling all over ourselves.
| Name: | HILLARY SUPPORTER |
Tue May 18, 9:08 AM ET
WASHINGTON, May 18 /U.S. Newswire/ -- The Clean Air Trust today is joining 10 United States senators (see note) in a legal brief protesting the Bush administration's illegal changes to new source review, a key part of the Clean Air Act.
This "friend of the court" brief focuses on the history of the law -- and points out that Congress gave older smokestack sources of pollution only a limited grace period" before the "existing sources' useful lives would force them to either upgrade or shutdown." The Bush administration has "illegally converted" that grace period "into an extended immunity" from the law, the brief points out.
It also notes that the law is clear about what constitutes a "modification" of an existing source of pollution: any physical change in, or change in the method of operation "which increases the amount of any air pollutant." The Bush changes, of course, would permit increased pollution.
The brief also points out that the Bush administration can't change the law through a regulation just because it doesn't like the law. As we know, the Bush administration has tried to change the law on behalf of its industry friends, but hasn't made a persuasive case to Congress.
The legal brief is available from the Clean Air Trust, 202-785-9625 or by e-mailing frank@cleanairtrust.org
NOTE: The court asked for the Trust's brief to be consolidated with that of the senators, who include Hillary Rodham Clinton (news - web sites) (D-N.Y.), Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), Jon S. Corzine (D-N.J.), James M. Jeffords (I-Vt.), Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.), John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), and Jack Reed (D-R.I.).
http://www.usnewswire.com/
| Name: | Brent Bozell |
| To: | forum |
| Re: | Muslim thugs arrested for Berg Beheading. Where's coverage? |
Message:
Our networks are good at broadcasting how we have stoked the outrage of the Arab world. But those same networks never used the butchering of our contractors in Fallujah to discuss how the Arab world has stoked our outrage. Our enemies get no media investigations, no media scrutiny... There is no feeding frenzy on anyone who has opposed the Iraq war... CBS used the Fallujah attacks on contractors for a more desperate political ploy: to portray Bush’s economy as sinking. Dan Rather asked: 'What drives American civilians to risk death in Iraq? In this economy, it may be, for some, the only job they can find.' But the Fallujah attacks were a two-day story at best... And now the networks are back on Iraq, babbling endlessly, passing moral judgment, touting their own moral authority. They have none. They tout the 'right to know' as they exploit the right to sensationalize and propagandize. In return, we get the right to lose the war.
| Name: | Fingers Finigan |
| To: | Dan Rather |
Message:
Then I'd allow you to regain your composure and choke you more. The high degree of satisfaction would determine how many chokes you deserve, you wretched piece of human debree! Other talking heads deserve a similar fate but you deserve special lengthy and multiple throttlings.
| Name: | News Hound |
Message:
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A North Korean missile shipment to Syria was halted
when a train collision in that Asian country destroyed the missile cargo and
killed about a dozen Syrian technicians.
U.S. officials confirmed a report in a Japanese daily newspaper that a train
explosion on April 22 killed about a dozen Syrian technicians near the Ryongchon
province in North Korea. The officials said the technicians were accompanying a
train car full of missile components and other equipment from a facility near
the Chinese border to a North Korea port.
A U.S. official said North Korean train cargo was also believed to have
contained tools for the production of ballistic missiles. North Korea has sold
Syria the extended-range Scud C and Scud D missiles, according to reports by
Middle East Newsline.
"The way it was supposed work was that the train car full of missiles and
components would have arrived at the port and some would have been shipped to
Syria while others would have been transported by air," an official said.
The explosion was said to have been caused by a collision of two trains. The
collision downed an electrical power line, the sparks from which detonated the
fuel from the train.
On May 4, the Tokyo-based Sankei Shimbun quoted a military source that
reported the death of the Syrian technicians. The newspaper said North Korean
military personnel, wearing protective suits, removed the vestiges of the
destroyed equipment meant for Syria.
The technicans were representatives of Syria's Center for Scientific
Research, which has been cited for helping develop that country's weapons of
mass destruction program. The technicians were said to have been trained in
North Korea to operate the equipment.
Sankei said the bodies of the Syrians were flown home by a Syrian aircraft,
which had arrived in Pyongyang to deliver aid supplies. The newspaper said North
Korean personnel were also killed in the explosion.
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| Name: | Black Sands |
U.S. TO LEAVE IRAQ JUNE 30, RETURN JULY 1
Bush Announces "Operation Iraqi Re-freedom"
In his weekly radio address, President George W. Bush announced that if the new Iraqi government asks the United States to leave Iraq on June 30 it will do so, but added that it will return to Iraq on July 1, one day later.
Mr. Bush expressed his hope that the U.S.'s one-day absence from Iraq would stir nostalgia for the coalition troops and cause a public groundswell of support for their re-occupation of the country.
Calling the U.S.'s planned July 1 re-invasion of Iraq "Operation Iraqi Re-freedom", Mr. Bush said the troops "return to the Middle Eastern nation would give the Iraqi people a unique chance to 'get it right this time.'"
"Last time we invaded, we were not greeted with flowers," Mr. Bush said. "There are operators standing by at 1-800-FLOWERS even as I speak."
The president also revealed that U.S. forces were currently re-erecting a statue of Saddam Hussein to be re-toppled upon their July 1 return.
In other developments in Iraq, Mr. Bush announced that as a goodwill gesture the U.S. would close Abu Ghraib prison and re-open it as a Wal-Mart. The president pointed out that the prison was an ideal candidate for such a conversion since it already has the facilities necessary to lock in its employees at night as well as an extensive ladies underwear department.
Mr. Bush concluded his radio address by confirming that he had asked Congress for $25 billion for Iraq and a books-on-tape version of the Geneva Conventions.
| Name: | ? |
| Name: | The Voice of Reason |
Message:
Nonsense Left Wing Extremist press release.
Lots of smoke but no fire from the left (again)
If it is illegal, take Bush to court!!!
Lots of BS from the left but no action.
| Name: | Just Say Yes! |
| Name: | The Voice of Reason |
Message:
That's about as funny (and relevant) as the doctored picture of Hillary.
| Name: | Last Visible Dog |
Gangacharan Rajput, a Congress party member, threatens to shoot himself if Sonia Gandhi backs out of becoming India's prime minister
| Name: | |
The one-vote defeat of an extension of unemployment benefits last week has sparked fear among Democrats that Republicans have developed a legislative model that will cast Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) repeatedly in a bad light before the election.
The extension needed 60 votes to pass in the Senate, and 12 Republicans made sure the final tally was 59-40, with only one absentee, presidential candidate Kerry
| Name: | Lost Post |
| Name: | Democrats are Free |
Senator Kerry - Where is your Apology for claiming Bush Misled About WMD's?
| Name: | John Kerry |
| Name: | American Patriot |
As a combat veteran of Viet Nam, I view John Kerry as a traitor to [I] ALL THAT IS GOOD, HONORABLE, TRUTHFUL and JUST! Kerry LIES to the American people when IT SUITS HIS PURPOSES; is a THIEF, STEALING TAXPAYER MONEY EVERY TIME HE ACCEPTS HIS US SENATORIAL PAY: he's missed every session of the US Senate since he's been campaigning for President (over a year--He really cares about his constituents, don't he?!?) and IS "ON RECORD, STATING HE WILL, if elected President, 'Get the permission of the United Nations BEFORE commiting US Troops to any action anywhere in the world!'" That is HIGH TREASON because it (1) Subordinates our national soverignty to an external power and (2) places our NATIONAL SECURITY IN GRAVE DANGER!
I applaud the 11 fellow veterans who are "outraged" at Kerry's misrepresenting them as "supporters of his campaign" in the picture taken while he was in Viet Nam. In 1971, it suited Kerry's needs to become an anti-war activist, siding with Hanoi Jane, and, in so doing, placed our American troops in Viet Nam, especially our POWs in the North, in GRAVE MORTAL DANGER! Did he care? NO! Now that we are "at war" with terrorism, he wants to be an "American hero of Viet Nam!" because it suits his current needs. May God ensure the re-election of President Bush who loves America, puts America first, loves the Lord and stands up for what is right, honorable and just!
| Name: | Chupacabris |
Kerry Chides Bush Over Record High Gas Prices
May 18, 7:00 AM (ET)
By Patricia Wilson
PORTLAND, Ore. (Reuters) - With the retail price of gasoline topping $2 a gallon for the first time, Democratic White House hopeful John Kerry on Tuesday chided President Bush for failing to offer hard-hit consumers any help.
The Massachusetts senator's Democratic colleagues plan to pressure the Bush administration to lower gas costs by demanding that up to 60 million barrels of crude oil be released from the nation's emergency stockpile, but Kerry said last week he would not tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR).
In remarks prepared for delivery to a roundtable discussion on economic opportunity in Portland, Kerry promised to provide relief by suspending filling the SPR, working more effectively with oil-producing nations and enacting simpler and cleaner national fuel strategies.
"Yesterday, gas prices soared to more than $2 a gallon, but this administration still has not done anything to help" Kerry said. "Their inaction is costing working Americans their jobs, their savings and the opportunity to get ahead."
The national average retail gasoline price is forecast to peak in June and remain high throughout the summer, according to the U.S. Energy Department. Higher fuel prices will be felt by motorists planning summer vacations, as well as airline passengers, trucking companies and others.
The White House has been criticized for taking crude oil off the market to fill the SPR even while the national retail price for gasoline soared. Over the past week, it jumped 7.6 cents a gallon to a record high of $2.017 a gallon on Monday.
Kerry said Oregon families had been particularly hard hit, paying $2.25 a gallon and adding $1,006 to their annual bills.
"We know we can do better and think bigger about the challenges we face," he said. "They don't seem to understand that higher costs in gas and health care and lost jobs effect your lives every day."
Bush and his Republican allies, who portray the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee as a chronic waffler and a fence-straddling political opportunist, said Kerry had supported higher gas prices at least 11 times in the Senate.
The United States is the world's biggest consumer of oil, using about 20 million barrels of oil and petroleum products each day. Imports account for 12 million barrels.
Bush, a former Texas oilman, has adamantly refused to tap the stockpile. He contends the oil should be saved for possible supply disruptions, not to control prices. Kerry has not laid the specific conditions under which he would release oil from the SPR.
The reserve, created by Congress in the mid-1970s after the Arab oil embargo, holds close to 660 million barrels. The administration wants 700 million barrels in it by next year.
After the Portland roundtable, Kerry planned to return to Washington. Along for the ride will be Howard Dean, a onetime rival in the race for the Democratic nomination.
The former Vermont governor, whose high-flying White House bid crash landed in February after he failed to win any of the early contests, helped draw about 4,000 people to a downtown rally for Kerry on Monday night.
"I think he can be helpful in a lot of places. He can energize a lot of folks," Kerry told reporters. He said he and Dean talked frequently and that one of his stepsons had traveled to Vermont to discuss strategy with the former candidate.
| Name: | troy |
| Name: | Red Maid |
| To: | stink in the air |
Message:
| Name: | Jim Henson |
| To: | Kermit the Frog |
| Re: | It aint easy bein green... |
Message:
So why aren't you voting for Nader?
| Name: | Bed Made |
| Name: | klop |
| Name: | The Evil One Must Go! |
| Re: | Regime Change...Sign the Petition! |
| Name: | Josê |
| To: | You |
| Name: | Jean |
| To: | Pride |
| Name: | Jean Leftcoss |
| Name: | John Kerry |
Message:
Great idea! I think I'll get another annulment and marry Warren Buffet. I need the money!
| Name: | Scotty |
| To: | Forum |
In studying the Bay of s, for example, Janis noted that the group around president John Kennedy made a series of assumptions that were fundamentally deluded - that Cubans would welcome the invasion and rise up against Fidel Castro and that the US could credibly deny involvement in the invasion, if necessary.
As in Iraq, many of those assumptions were based largely on the accounts of exiles and defectors, but the group dynamics involved in decision-making also played a key role in rallying the administration of the "best and the brightest" behind an adventure that proved disastrous, according to Janis.
A great deal more is known about group dynamics within the Bush administration foreign-policy apparatus today - as a result of leaks, memoirs and books, such as Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack and Jim Mann's Rise of the Vulcans - than was known at the time about the Kennedy administration.
And what is known suggests the existence of two major groups - an "in-group" of hawks whose captain is Vice President Cheney and which has had a decisive influence on President George W Bush himself, and an "out-group" of "realists" headed by Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage.
While the out-group, which ironically boasts men, including Powell, Armitage, retired generals Anthony Zinni and Brent Scowcroft, with real war experience, the in-group is dominated by individuals, particularly Cheney and virtually the entire civilian leadership of the Pentagon, who have none at all.
Hence the moniker "Chicken Hawks", defined as individuals who favor military solutions to political problems but who themselves avoided military service during wartime. Cheney, who received five different deferments from the military draft during the Vietnam War, famously told an interviewer once that he "had other priorities" in the 1960s than military service.
What also makes the in-group so remarkable is its very small size, the long history it has shared together, and its close personal relationships.
Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and Cheney, for example, worked together under Richard Nixon and have been the very best of friends ever since. Their neo-conservative aides and advisers, such as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, former Defense Policy Board (DPB) chairman Richard Perle, and DPB member Kenneth Adelman, likewise have been close for more than three decades and have personally mentored other top aides and advisers, such as Cheney's chief of staff, I Lewis Libby, Defense undersecretaries for policy and intelligence, Douglas Feith and Stephen Cambone, respectively, and Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, to name just a few.
The sense of kinship that unites the group is illustrated in part by a dinner hosted by Cheney shortly after US troops took Baghdad 13 months ago. The guests included Wolfowitz, Libby and Adelman; the atmosphere warm and celebratory as they recounted their defeat of the "realists". "Someone mentioned Powell, and there were chuckles around the table," Woodward noted. And then "they turned to Rumsfeld, the missing brother", and told affectionate stories about their past associations with the crusty Pentagon chief.
When Adelman said he had been surprised US troops had not yet found weapons of mass destruction (WMD), he was assured by Wolfowitz: "We'll find them," and by Cheney: "It's only been four days really. We'll find them."
Students of groupthink list a number of symptoms of the phenomenon that can lead the group into disaster, among them:
Believing in the group's inherent morality.
Sharing stereotypes, particularly of the enemy.
Examining few alternative or contingency plans for any action. Being highly selective in gathering information.
Avoiding expert opinion.
Protecting the group from negative views or information that would contradict their basic assumptions.
Having an illusion of invulnerability.
From what is now known about planning for Iraq, each of these factors obviously played a role, and they continue to inform US policy not only against perceived enemies, but even against "out" groups in the administration or in Congress. And, because the "in" group was so small, many of these characteristics were unusually pronounced.
The notion that the Chicken Hawks were morally superior, not just to Saddam Hussein or the "terrorists" or "Ba'athist dead-enders" whom they've been fighting since the war ended, extended even to the "realists", who were denounced in internal battles as "appeasers" or worse. As Cheney was recently quoted as declaring with regard to State Department proposals to engage North Korea, "We don't negotiate with evil; we defeat it."
Middle East experts at the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency were likewise scorned and excluded from both planning and the immediate aftermath of the invasion, while the creation in Feith's office of ad hoc intelligence analysis groups that "stovepiped" evidence of Iraqi WMD and ties to al-Qaeda was a classic illustration of selective intelligence gathering that would confirm pre-existing stereotypes.
Similarly, the total failure to prepare contingency plans to deal with looting, or even with the emergence of an insurgency against the occupation, displayed a confidence that turned out to be completely unwarranted. Likewise, former army chief of staff General Eric Shinseki's prediction that more than 200,000 troops would be needed to occupy Iraq in order to ensure security had not only to be rejected in order to protect the group from negative views; it had to be publicly ridiculed by Wolfowitz as "wildly off the mark".
In his latest expose on the prisoner-abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, New Yorker correspondent Seymour Hersh noted that Rumsfeld's penchant for "secrecy and wishful thinking" - characteristics that also apply to groupthink - resulted in the Pentagon's failure to do anything about it or about the many other problems they have encountered.
And whenever Powell or Armitage tried to bring to the attention of the highest levels in the administration the growing concern about prisoner abuse, according to a source recently cited in the "Nelson Report", an insider Washington newsletter, they were forced to endure from the Chicken Hawks what an eyewitness source characterized as "around-the-table, coarse, vulgar, frat-boy bully remarks about what these tough guys would do if they ever got their hands on prisoners ..."
| Name: | Jean |
| To: | forum |
And through the weekend at least, the damage control worked pretty well. Virginia's Republican senator John Warner, chair of the Armed Services Committee but better known as Elizabeth Taylor's ex, has put himself on record supporting Rumsfeld. His committee has done nothing in its long and sorry history but play kiss-ass to the Pentagon. Warner, a former secretary of the navy who suddenly presents himself as a warrior statesman, is in fact just a typical mutt among lapdog Republicans. Under his stewardship, this sleepy panel has routinely given the Pentagon what it's asked for, and defense spending now amounts to half the entire federal budget. Rumsfeld thinks so highly of Warner that he didn't bother to tell the senator, at a briefing shortly before the torture photos got on the Web, that the scandal was about to break. On Meet the Press Sunday, Warner expressed an abiding admiration for Rumsfeld, calling him "a man of conscience."
To get an idea of how lame this committee is, consider 9-11. In the attacks that day, our entire national defense system collapsed. Rumsfeld, sitting in his Pentagon office, apparently didn't know a plane was headed for his building until it hit.
As for torture, pretty much everyone knows we torture prisoners in civilian and military jails. Of course we don't admit to it. As Bryan Whitman, Rumsfeld's spokesman, carefully put it, "The policies of the United States and the Defense Department are consistent, in that we do not permit activities or interrogation procedures that are torturous or cruel and that all the techniques that are approved for use are within the law." Whatever that means. As for specific techniques, like harnessing up a 70-year-old woman and riding her around or siccing a dog on a bound prisoner, Whitman told the press that security concerns prevented him from making a specific comment. When it comes to formal government policy, Bush and Rumsfeld have pretty much downplayed the Geneva Conventions, and as Senator Carl Levin noted at Thursday's hearing, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales had urged skirting the Geneva Conventions in the name of greater "flexibility." Newsweek reports that senior members of Congress received briefings that U.S. interrogators in Iraq and elsewhere did not feel themselves constrained by the Geneva Conventions.
The administration has been all over the map as to who is protected by the Geneva Conventions and who is not.
"However I make my decision, these detainees will be well treated," Bush was quoted as saying in January 2002. "We are not going to call them prisoners of war in either case, and the reason why is Al Qaeda is not a known military. These are killers, these are terrorists."
Victoria Clarke, the Pentagon spokeswoman at the time, added, "We are in very unconventional times. We're in a very unconventional war. So every aspect of it, including the Geneva Convention and how it might be applied, should be looked at with new eyes and new thoughts as to what we're experiencing right now."
In September 2002, the government's counter-terrorism coordinator, Cofer Black, reportedly told the Senate that interrogators had been given the green light in obtaining information. "This is a very highly classified area," The Age of Melbourne, Australia, quoted him as saying. "But I have to say to you, all you need to know: There was a before-9-11 and there was an after-9-11. After 9-11, the gloves came off."
| Name: | Scotty Weathermen |
| To: | Friends |
Then he played on his own military service, saying, "When I was in the navy, a captain always took responsibility. I will demand accountability for those who serve, and I will take responsibility for their actions. . . . As commander in chief, I will honor your commitment, and I will take responsibility for the bad as well as the good."
After his speech, according to the Los Angeles Times, Kerry said Rumsfeld should resign because of both his "miscalculation" on the war and the growing abuse scandal. "In this context, it compounds it," Kerry said. "It was the way it was handled, the lack of information to Congress . . . not dealing with it. . . . But look, this is . . . the frosting. I think Iraq and the miscalculation, and the overextension of the armed forces, and the entire way in which they rushed the nation to war . . . is a huge, historic miscalculation. And I thought he should have resigned then, period."
If Kerry were to speak out boldly like this, naysayers might well be reassured. And he would deny votes to Ralph Nader and the other third-wave candidates, who, according to the polls, as in 2000, again threaten a Democrat's chances.
| Name: | Me |
| To: | Jose |
| Name: | Swanky |
| Name: | The Voice of Reason |
Message:
minor figure = the people that actually committed the crimes.
| Name: | Hmm |
| Re: | Most Americans think the Clintons changed this country beyond recognition |
"If by some fluke this administration is elected for four more years, we will not recognize our country," Clinton told delegates at New York's state Democratic convention in Manhattan.
Calling President Bush's policies the product of "the most radical right-wing agenda" in recent memory, Clinton said that November's vote "may be the most important election any of us has seen in our entire lifetimes."
The former first lady addressed state Democrats who were gathered to nominate Sen. Chuck Schumer for a second term. But even Sen. Schumer had his sights on President Bush, accusing the White House of nominating "right-wing ideologues" to the federal bench and acting "like a bull in a china shop" on foreign policy, according to The Associated Press.
New York State Democratic conventions are tradionally vitriloic in tone.
| Name: | I hope the Left Wing Media and the Democrats are happy now |
I hope the Left Wing Media and the Democrats are happy now
ABU GHRAIB, Iraq — On the eve of the first court-martial in the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal, relatives of those still held at Abu Ghraib prison said Tuesday the only suitable punishment would be death -- illustrating the potential gap in expectations in the case. "If they actually committed such offenses, they should be executed," said Odai Ibrahim, 55, as he waited in a line with hundreds of other Iraqis to visit relatives at the prison on the western outskirts of Baghdad -- notorious as the site of executions and torture during Saddam Hussein's regime.
| Name: | Scotty |
| To: | necromancy of charlatans |
| Re: | John Kerry's tiger-like fury |
Message:
I saw Mr.Kerry out in ohio.He had great charm of manner, and a kind earnest simplicity wich deeply imprest me and those who met this great man.That night in ohio an audience celebrated the event with such wild enthusiasm, as we sang the national hymn.He just gave us a great oratory and set the mood for a democratic victory.
| Name: | Scotty |
| To: | Forum |
Message:
What a ghastly picture of iraq was painted by the press.Only here, back in civiliization where murder is a crime,do we begin to comprehend how little the world can understand what iraq has come to.
| Name: | American Voter |
| Name: | !@#$% |
9-11 Commission proves it is a Left Wing Joke
NEW YORK - The former police and fire chiefs who were lionized after the World Trade Center attack came under harsh criticism Tuesday from the Sept. 11 commission, with one member saying the departments' lack of cooperation was scandalous and "not worthy of the Boy Scouts."
You have to be kidding me. Some of these people died while running into burning buildings to save others. These people did everything they could - including DIE - to get people out of those towers. The audacity of this stinking, self-hating, blame-Americans panel!
| Name: | Just Say No |
| Re: | HILLARY DROID |
Message:
Never Argue With A Fool. Passers-By May Not Be Able To
Tell Who's Who
| Name: | Scotty |
| To: | Forum |
| Re: | The press is not free |
Message:
The image of motor lorries filled with armed soldiers dashing madly through the streets with utter disregard for lives of civilians is the picture I get from the press. I recognize it as an essentially evil, wantonly destructive, and cynically despotic thing.
| Name: | Scotty |
| To: | Forum |
Message:
I saw enormous throngs,including women and children, had turned out from pure curiosity to see Mr. Kerry. When I saw Mr.Kerry in action it was dramatic.I saw a movement wich has begun by slow and halting stages and is about to become a whirlwind of support for Mr.Kerry.
| Name: | Gay Marriage, Ma. |
| To: | Scotty |
| Re: | Senator John Kerry |
Message:
You rock!
| Name: | Scotty |
| To: | neuve chapelle teutonic pissant |
Message:
We need an efficient autocracy with the complete assent of the people!
| Name: | Scotty |
| To: | hacker |
Message:
You seem possest of firm ideas about devine right, and object in life with no atom of its power and glory diminished with shallow mind.
| Name: | The Rest of the Story |
WMD found in Iraq - Left Wing Media in full Black Out Mode
If America gets wise to this, the Democrats could be facing a blowout this fall
NEW YORK — Tests on an artillery shell that blew up in Iraq on Saturday confirm that it did contain an estimated three or four liters of the deadly nerve agent sarin (search), Defense Department officials told Fox News Tuesday.
| Name: | Scotty |
| To: | bush dynasty |
Message:
Poor rightwingers! The sacred republican monarchy has disappeared, the rightwing strongholds of reaction has been obliterated as if by a sponge, and agitators,but lately lurking in the dens and corners and dreading the sight of President KERRY! Funny...
| Name: | Scotty |
| To: | Fool Au Revoir ! |
Message:
In view of this popular excitment it has become evident that steps must be taken to secure the safety of Mr.Kerry and his family on the one hand, and on the other hand prevent rightwing agitation. We just need some equal co-operation mate. So sod off you little bugger.
| Name: | Democrats are Free |
The Democratic National Committee, which has seen rough cuts, is looking for some way to capitalize on the left-wing buzz over the film, either as a fundraising tool, or as a campaign weapon against President Bush.
"The film is supposed to be out in the fall, so we can't do a DVD distribution of it in time to help us," says a DNC fundraiser. "Instead they are looking at setting up big-tent showings of the film around America, kind of like old-style drive-ins or something to raise money and awareness for the film."
Before committing to any support for the film that might aid it financially, the DNC is holding off to see what the general U.S. reaction is to the movie. Already there is some nervousness.
Reports from people who have seen the film in Cannes, where it premiered on Monday, indicated that Moore's film had scenes that showed U.S. military personnel abusing Iraqi prisoners. It isn't clear when the video was shot, but might indicate that Moore had knowledge of the events currently making headlines, but chose to keep them under wraps to better promote his film.
"Or else he was using military personnel for his own purposes," says a Pentagon official. "Either way, it's despicable."
| Name: | !! |
Left Eye’s View
NRO
May 18, 2004
John O'Sullivan
In World War II, a passer-by, lost in London's main official thoroughfare of Whitehall, stopped a military officer and asked him which side the Defense Department was on. The officer thought for a moment and then said: "Well, it's hard to be sure, but our side, I hope."
In the last week the coverage of Iraq by the U.S. media has exhibited at least four separate failings:
1. Selective Agonizing.
Ever since the Abu Ghraib photographs emerged, the media has shown them on every possible occasion, accompanied by reports and editorials on America's shame and the world's revulsion. That is fine by me. The photographs are shocking evidence of shocking behavior — Jerry Springer meets Saddam Hussein — and we should be ashamed they occurred under American auspices But they are not the only story in the world.
Objectively considered, the U.N.'s "Oil-for-Food" scandal is a far bigger story, implicating not one international statesman but about two dozen, and involving not the abuse of suspected terrorists but the starvation of children.
Interestingly, the media has been happy to forget it entirely in all their excitement over Abu Ghraib.
Then again, worse rape and brutality than those displayed in Abu Ghraib are known to occur daily in America's prisons without arousing any media interest at all. Indeed, the newspapers sometimes join D.A.'s in calling for crooked CEO's to be sentenced to ten year's hard sodomy. Maybe these jocular remarks about homosexual rape were among the influences that led the Abu Ghraib guards to abuse their victims. Big mistake.
This gloating sadism is only a joke when suspected Republicans are the likely victims.
And the photographs of prisoner abuse are not remotely as shocking as the pictures of Nicholas Berg being beheaded by Islamist terrorists.
You might imagine that the beheading of an innocent American would be replayed endlessly on the networks and the front pages. But the media suddenly discovered taste. The Berg murder was briskly reported and then confined to the memory hole. And the media hunt for Rumsfeld — that Berg's beheading had briefly interrupted — resumed in full cry.
As a Spanish writer commented this week: "Tears are shed only from the left eye."
2. Taking Dictation from Terror.
Before we leave Berg, we should note that a vast number of news outlets reported as a fact that he was murdered "in retaliation for" the Abu Ghraib abuses. That was the terrorists' own justification, of course: They shrewdly judged that the American and Western media would eagerly publish the headlines they had dictated. And they were right. For the "retaliation" explanation transfers the blame for Berg's death from the actual murderers onto George W. Bush and the U.S. As the sharp-eyed Australian blogger, Tim Blair, pointed out, however, the terrorists abducted Berg about two weeks before the Abu Ghraib scandal surfaced.
Was that abduction in retaliation for something else? Or were they simply gifted with astonishing foresight? Incidentally, the media's behavior in this case — in addition to being bone-headedly biased — is a rare genuine example of "blaming the victim." But not a single editor seems to have been restrained by the fact.
3. Willing Gullibility. Two newspapers — the Daily Mirror in Britain and the Boston Globe in the U.S. — have published fake photographs of British and American soldiers abusing prisoners.
In the British case the fakes were quickly detected once they had been published, and in the American case, they had been detected before the Globe published them. Neither the media's vaunted "skepticism" nor simple fact-checking on the internet were employed in either case by the papers. The fakes were, in the old Fleet Street joke, "too good to check." There was a rush to misjudgment.
As Mark Steyn argued in the Chicago Sun-Times on Sunday, the journalists wanted to believe that they were real because they hunger to discredit the Anglo-American intervention in Iraq.
Indeed, they still want to believe that the fakes were real — the disgraced Mirror editor claimed to have told the truth on the day the fraud was conclusively established. And since he was fired, he has become a heroic figure in British journalistic circles hostile to Blair and the war. He may be a liar, they feel, but he's our liar. Or as they would probably put it, the "truth about Iraq" is more important than the facts. You know, at a deeper level.
4. Galloping Inferentialism.
The media's main interest in the Abu Ghraib scandal over the last week — what postmodernists call its principal "narrative" — has been its pursuit of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as an accessory to torture before the fact. Some reports have been, in effect, prosecution briefs for the theory that he either knew about or (better still) actually authorized the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American guards. And since the evidence for this theory is scanty, to say the least, reporters employ the highly dubious technique of building inference upon inference to make the case.
Take, as an example, the widely republished Washington Post report asking "Was Abuse Ordered?" This begins with the case of a Syrian jihadist who was subjected to intense pressures to instill fear into him so that he would give up intelligence data for the fight against the Iraqi insurgents. It then speculates that because a military intelligence officer was involved in this interrogation, this "suggests a wider circle of involvement in aggressive and potentially abusive" techniques by senior officers. It goes on to argue that the Abu Ghraib "abuses could have been an outgrowth of harsh treatment" techniques authorized by the Pentagon. And it finally postulates that "although no direct links have been found between the documented abuses and orders from Washington, Pentagon officials...say that the hunt for [intelligence] data...was coordinated during this period by Undersecretary of Defense Stephen Cambone...long one of the closest aides to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The coincidence in timing...."
Let us review the evidence in this trial by inference. It "suggests" that "potentially" abusive techniques were used that "could have been an outgrowth" of methods that cannot be "directly linked" to Rumsfeld unless the "coincidence" that his aide was in charge of collecting intelligence at the time is the smoking gun.
In opposition to this towering inferno of inferences, there is an actual fact: the statement of one of the abuser guards that the higher-ups would have stopped the abuses if they had known of them. And as the old maxim goes, an ounce of fact is worth a ton of inferences.
5. Hunting the Snark (or Criminalizing Antiterrorism.) What makes this journalistic pursuit of Rumsfeld all the more suspect is that even if all these inferences were borne out by later evidence, they would not convict the Defense secretary of any known crime or misdemeanor. He would have authorized harsh techniques, not in themselves abusive but only potentially so, that others wrongly took to be permission to humiliate and abuse prisoners under their control. There is no crime in that — nor even any major error. Senior Pentagon officials knew that the harsh interrogation techniques they did authorize — for instance, hooding prisoners, interrupting their sleep over several days, and exposing them to cold temperatures — were open to abuse. That is why they stipulated very precisely what the techniques should be — not allowing any physical brutality or sexual humiliation. Why they limited the use of such techniques to those few cases where crucial intelligence was likely to be gained. And why they insisted on the prior permission of the senior U.S. general in Iraq for their use.
Of course, most editors and reporters probably take the view that inflicting even this limited and supervised stress to frighten suspects is impermissible. A Washington Post editorial, for instance, argued that no intelligence gain could possibly compensate for the national embarrassment of having a U.S. secretary of State publicly defend such techniques before the international community.
That is certainly arguable. And in general governments should not carry out acts they are unprepared to defend in public. But is it wholly and always persuasive? Suppose, for instance, that inflicting psychological stress and instilling fear into a terrorist suspect seemed likely to help prevent the beheading of another innocent American like Nick Berg? Or to avert another catastrophe such as September 11? Or even to halt a nuclear attack on an American city? Would we not feel that in such cases the end of saving lives justified the means of inflicting psychological stress?
These are serious moral questions — and serious practical questions when the U.S. is waging a war on terror. They cannot be wished away by pious references to the Geneva Convention. And the media's attempt to transform serious consideration of these painful dilemmas into a gung-ho criminal prosecution of Rumsfeld is both a partisan disgrace and a shameful evasion of difficult realities.
Let us finally examine the tally sheet. Selective agonizing, taking dictation from terror, willing gullibility, galloping inferentialism, and criminalizing anti-terrorism — not a short list of media failings for a single week. And when all the mistakes are on the side of opposing the liberation of Iraq, and none of the mistakes favor the U.S. or Britain or Bush or Blair, it tells you something. Namely, which side they're on. Or "tears are shed only from the left eye."
| Name: | Scotty |
Message:
You are the foulest of men,the shame of your mum.Go inscribing ribald remarks on some other forum...
| Name: | HILLARY SUPPORTER |
By VERENA DOBNIK Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK -- About 35,000 people who worked at ground zero still face health problems from the dust and debris, but government is not offering enough help to those who risked their lives for others, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton told new doctors who graduated on Friday.
The Democratic senator from New York received an honorary doctorate from Mount Sinai Medical School, where she gave the commencement speech.
"The problems associated with air quality in lower Manhattan illustrate a major flaw in our health tracking system," she told several hundred freshly hooded health professionals gathered at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall, some receiving their M.D. degrees and others their Ph.D. in medical research.
On Sept. 11, 2001, the senator said, rescue workers and volunteers rushed to the collapsing World Trade Center towers, never stopping to think of the possible problems they might suffer from the dust and debris.
"Today, they continue to suffer from the health effects of that selfless act," she told the graduates.
In 2002, she said, she fought to procure the $12 million needed to establish the World Trade Center Worker and Volunteer Medical Screening Program, with the help of health professionals from Mount Sinai who also had offered their expertise in the aftermath of the terrorist attack.
That funding helped cover examinations for about 7,500 people. But the senator said there are as many as 35,000 people in all who are still at risk because of their work at ground zero, and caring for them requires more resources and funding.
The lack of a proper response to the problems of those exposed to the air in lower Manhattan reflects a flawed national health system, she said. Studies of chronic diseases such as the respiratory problems suffered by ground zero workers, or illnesses such as cancer, have not been tracked across the country so as to identify the risks and take action to prevent them.
"To deal with 21st century problems, we first need a 21st century health care system," Clinton said.
At the push of a computer button, she said, a doctor should be able to receive the latest scientific articles along with a patient's chart, or be able to prescribe a medicine and send it to the pharmacy.
"But often, while the technology exists, the systems are not in place to do these simple things," Clinton said. "The link between our environment and our health is one that we need to better understand, so that we can know the damage we do, not just to the trees in the forest, but to the children in our homes."
She asked the graduates, while they put in long hours in hospitals and labs to start their careers, to "remember to stay involved in public life and remember your civic duty. We need your voice in the dialogue."
That includes voting, said Clinton, who has added voter registration to the capabilities of her Web site.
On the Net:
Voter registration: http://www.friendsofhillary.com Copyright © 2004, The Associated Press
| Name: | HILLARY SUPPORTER |
BY ANNE Q. HOY WASHINGTON BUREAU
May 17, 2004
WASHINGTON -- Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton last week threw the words of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz back at him: his forecast about how Iraqi oil revenues would cover reconstruction costs in Iraq, his projections on force levels in Iraq.
Clinton, a New York Democrat and member of the Armed Services Committee, told Wolfowitz that his earlier statements were off the mark. "Mr. Secretary, you come before this committee ... having seriously undermined your credibility," she said Thursday.
At an earlier hearing on Tuesday, Clinton homed in on a central issue in the prison scandal at the Abu Ghraib facility near Baghdad as the Armed Services panel continued its probe into the abuse of Iraqi captives by U.S. forces.
The moments stand as perhaps Clinton's most watched since joining the Armed Services Committee last January - the first New York senator to do so. But Clinton has toiled away on the panel, doing her homework and attending hearings, members say.
In most forums, Clinton, a former first lady and an expected future presidential aspirant, is the center of attention. But on the Armed Service Committee with its 25 members - a quarter of the Senate - she is just one of its members.
Clinton ranks second from the bottom in Democratic seniority, followed only by Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.). This means that she must pose her questions when hearings are nearly over.
She took on Wolfowitz, the Pentagon's second-ranking civilian, only after a parade of members had done the same. He defended the number of troops in Iraq, stressing that such determinations are made by the Pentagon's military and not political leaders.
It is as dangerous, he said, to put too many troops in the field, as it is too few. "We're trying to get the numbers right," he said. "We are working closely, military and civilian."
At Tuesday's hearing, Clinton wanted to know whether Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of all U.S. troops in Iraq, ordered a change in "tactical" command at the Abu Ghraib prison based on any recommendation of Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the former commander at Guantanamo Bay.
The subtext of Clinton's questioning was President George W. Bush's decision two years ago to exempt Taliban and al-Qaida terrorists from the protections of the Geneva Conventions, the 1949 accords governing the treatment of prisoners in times of war. Bush did direct that such prisoners be treated "consistent with" the international rules.
Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, the Army's chief of staff, told Clinton he thought Sanchez had a far different motive in putting military intelligence in charge at the prison. He said Sanchez was determined to beef up protections and living conditions for U.S. troops at the facility.
Alexander dismissed the view "that Gen. Miller said these nefarious things that caused this [the abuse scandal] to happen."
The posture Clinton has assumed on the panel is not unlike that taken in the Senate overall: she wants to be an equal among many, aides said.
"She doesn't act like she's any different than the rest of them," said a top aide to a Republican on the panel. "They don't treat her any differently."
Clinton's committee work has allowed her to meet with military brass. With the 10th Mountain Division based at Fort Drum and the Army's premier academy at West Point she has made the Army a particular focus. She has worked to funnel millions in Defense spending to New York facilities and companies.
Clinton's trip to Afghanistan and Iraq with Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), another panel member, last November also came as part of her committee work.
She has won the praise of Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), the committee chairman, and surprised military leaders for her support of military programs.
Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.
| Name: | Scotty |
Message:
It has long been a commonplace to predict that the war for oil would bring great politacal changes in america. But they were believed to be now in sight on a vaster scale than anybody had dare to prophesy.The old rightwing order is breaking up unders mens eye's.More and more openly men are saying that king craft, with the statesmen which served it, had written its own doom.
| Name: | Red White and Blue American |
Message:
Your English is as bad as your lack of insight. May I suggest the correct way to construct this sentence..."But they were now believed to be in sight on a scale more vast than anyone dare to prophesy."
You're probably an English teacher who can't be fired because of the NEA.
| Name: | Hillary Supporter |
| To: | ET |
Message:
I demand that this post removed from the forum asap. Get a life you sicko!
| Name: | Destry Rozanski |
| To: | Editor |
Message:
I see the rightwing is loosing another debate and resorts to childish crap.
| Name: | Paul Crespo |
| Re: | The media's double standard on Iraq prison abuse |
Even the shocking videotape of the barbaric beheading last week in Iraq of American Nick Berg, by Islamic uber-terrorist Abu Musaf al Zarqawi (in his own words, responding to our photographic barrage of self-incrimination), apparently was not enough to sideline the obsessive national self-flagellation over this issue.
While the inappropriate acts of a relatively small number of our troops merit coverage, they also need to be placed in context and perspective. We should continue to investigate and punish those guilty of any real crimes in Iraq, but it is also now well past time to end this media-fuelled feeding frenzy and get a grip on reality.
Most of the mainstream press stopped airing images of the planes striking the World Trade Center and the Twin Towers collapsing just days after Sept. 11 because the constant imagery had become overdone and was “upsetting.” Images of victims falling to their deaths were never shown. Most American media, such as CBS, also refused to air the Berg beheading video, clips or images from it because they were “too gruesome.”
It seems that these same media believe that obscene images that undermine our war effort and are guaranteed to enrage and inflame the passions of our fanatical enemies need to be published ad naseum, but photos and footage that vividly demonstrate the brutality of the medieval enemies we fight should be censored.
So, the Abu Ghraib “scandal” still sadly continues to dominate our news coverage. In one week alone, the Washington Post published 33 headline stories on the Iraq prison incidents, while the New York Times pumped out 23 similar stories. Neither Nick Berg’s murder or the earlier murders and mutilations of our contactors in Fallujah, received anything like this amount of coverage. In contrast, very little has been written of the long history of beheadings by Islamic terrorists.
And even when the press did report on Berg’s beheading it often did so in ways that minimized its impact, or provided some sort of moral equivalency with the prison abuse.
Referring to the two incidents, one USA Today front page headline read: “Brutality intensifies in Iraq.” How absurd. The fact is that brutality is increasing on the part of the terrorists, not Americans. While these Islamic nihilists are savagely murdering Americans in cold blood on video, our troops are being investigated and tried for much less serious crimes that occurred months ago and have since been stopped.
Not surprisingly, Massachusetts Democrat Senator Ted Kennedy and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry could not keep themselves from shamelessly turning this overblown scandal into a partisan political weapon and an indictment of America’s entire Iraq policy.
In the Senate, three days after Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s May 7 testimony, Kennedy recklessly snorted: “Shamefully, we now learn that Saddam’s torture chambers opened under new management -- US management.” Apparently to Kennedy, a dozen terrorist inmates stripped naked with female underpants on their heads equates to the thousands of Saddam’s former prisoners now missing body parts like ears, tongues and hands, or the 400,000 buried in mass graves, many having been run through wood shredders feet first while still alive.
Meanwhile Kerry, eerily reminiscent of his blame-America statements during his anti-war glory days in the 1970s, added: “What happened [at Abu Ghraib]…comes out of how we went there in the first place, an attitude that comes out of America’s overall arrogance as policy.” To him a few misguided and ill-trained reservists mistreating hardened terrorists in an overcrowded Iraqi prison are somehow a direct product of America’s fundamentally flawed nature.
Thankfully, other Democrats, such as Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman have responded much more responsibly. In an Op-Ed in the May 14 Wall Street Journal Lieberman stated that “The beheading of Nick Berg … made it painfully clear how little our enemies value life. Prison abuse must not blur the enormous moral differences between us and those we fight in Iraq, and in the world-wide war on terrorism.”
The jihadists and Saddam loyalists we are fighting do not follow the Geneva Conventions, nor do they care about humiliating prisoners. Instead, they gleefully slaughter them like animals. While their barbaric actions do not condone any wrong behavior on our part, we need a reality check. Our fight is just. The vast majority of our soldiers are decent, courageous and virtuous, and this continuing public self-incrimination only aids our enemies and hurts our troops.
As Lieberman added: “We cannot allow the prison scandal in Iraq to diminish our own American sense of national honor and purpose, or further erode support for our just and necessary cause in Iraq…The misdeeds of a few do not alter the character of our nation or the honor of the many who serve in our – and the world’s – defense every day.”
From Senator Lieberman's lips to the media's ears.
| Name: | Matt Welch |
| Re: | Why are the architects of Kosovo so down on Gulf War II? |
The Bubble of American Supremacy: Correcting the Misuse of American Power, by George Soros, New York: Public Affairs, 207 pages
Winning Modern Wars: Iraq, Terrorism, and the American Empire, by Wesley K. Clark, New York: Public Affairs, 218 pages
Of all the historical precedents that paved the way for President George W. Bush’s war against Iraq, the most directly relevant was Bill Clinton’s 1999 bombing of the rump Yugoslavia.
Like Gulf War II, the 78-day NATO air campaign in Kosovo was waged without the explicit authorization of the United Nations. (Of the two, the Iraq war had much more of a U.N. mandate, through Resolution 1441, which gave Iraq a "final opportunity" -- one it did not take -- to comply fully with all previous Security Council resolutions or else face "serious consequences.") Like Iraq, Yugoslavia was a sovereign country that was bombed into submission for essentially internal infractions. Both wars were expressions of American exasperation at European impotence in the face of dictatorial slaughter. Slobodan Milosevic, like Saddam Hussein, was described as a modern-day Adolf Hitler, eager to practice genocide against minority tribes while scrambling for horrible weapons to menace peaceful neighbors. Supporters of both wars frequently invoked the Munich Agreement of 1938, in which the West appeased Hitler rather than defend allied Czechoslovakia. Opponents of both wars warned that the target countries were colonially conceived multi-ethnic basket cases not conducive to postwar democratization. And the United States led the fight against both dictators despite urgent warnings from antiwar activists and multilateralism enthusiasts that each new bomb would lower the threshold for waging modern war. Kosovo made Iraq possible.
So it is of pressing interest to see what the architects of Kosovo, and its predecessor campaign in Bosnia, have to say about Bush’s controversial war. As luck would have it, there are recent books from three key Yugoslavia warriors: Madeleine Albright, the Munich-haunted Czechoslovak émigré who was the most influential anti-Milosevic hawk in Clinton’s cabinet; George Soros, the Munich-haunted Hungarian émigré and billionaire philanthropist who was among the earliest and most influential nongovernmental voices to urge military action against Serb nationalists; and Wesley Clark, the retired supreme allied commander of NATO who directed the Kosovo War. Since Clark was one of the top four Democratic candidates for president, and Soros has redirected his considerable energy and at least $15 million to effect "regime change" in the United States, their distinction between Kosovo and Iraq arguably looms as the defining foreign policy difference between Democrats and Republicans in 2004. And for those of us who supported Clinton’s Wilsonianism but not Bush’s, these books should help answer two questions we really ought to be asking ourselves: Is our support for America’s activist role dependent on high moral principle, or is it tethered to partisan politics? And did we lower the bar for military intervention?
lbright’s Madam Secretary, a surprisingly intimate and detail-rich memoir, does the best job of laying out the philosophical groundwork for why Clinton suddenly reversed three years of muddling policy by getting violent with Milosevic in 1995. After four years of watching horrendous, evocative images of civilian slaughter and concentration camps on the European continent, Clinton was, she says, finally persuaded by the insistent voices around him whose lives had been directly mangled by Munich.
"When I was still a little girl," Albright writes in the preface, "my family was driven from its home twice, first by Fascists, then by Communists. While in office I was able to fight against ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, a country where I had lived as a child."
That kind of jarring juxtaposition of the personal and political runs throughout the book, making the story of Albright’s U.S. government service look like a Czech wish fulfillment fantasy. It also illustrates how the administration’s tilt toward Central Europe -- the White House was influenced also by Polish-born Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman John Shalikashvili and by the president’s close relationship with Vaclav Havel -- focused attention on that part of the world, rather than on more genocidal hot spots such as Rwanda.
"In one of his books," Albright writes, her diplomat father Josef Korbel "quoted the Czechoslovak patriarch, Tomas Masaryk: ‘Love of one’s neighbor, of the nation, and of humanity imposes upon everyone the obligation to defend oneself and to resist evil constantly, at all times, and in all things.’ For me that obligation was triggered by the campaigns of brutality launched by Serb President Slobodan Milosevic."
Albright, who was U.N. ambassador in Clinton’s first term and secretary of state in the second, has spent a lifetime focused on the former East Bloc. She wrote her undergraduate honors thesis on Czechoslovakia’s postwar period, enrolled in graduate Soviet studies under Polish émigré Zbigniew Brzezinski, wrote her dissertation on the Prague Spring, won a Woodrow Wilson fellowship to document the Solidarity uprising in Poland, and was hired for her first government job by son-of-Polish-immigrants Ed Muskie. She describes her relationship with Havel as "one of the most precious friendships of my life" (the two have vacationed together in Bermuda) and confesses "mixed feelings" at turning down his suggestion to succeed him as Czech president. Famously, she discovered soon after being sworn in as secretary of state that she was Jewish, and that three of her Czech grandparents had been killed in concentration camps. As she was fond of telling State Department reporters, "Munich is my mindset."
Problem is, Munich has been the mind-set of just about every other administration in recent history, from Bush II back to Harry Truman, regardless of analogical accuracy. The ghost of Neville Chamberlain has been exhumed to justify American interventions in Korea, Iraq (twice), a ragbag of Third World hellholes, and Vietnam. Albright’s contemporaneous reaction to the Vietnam War neatly illustrates the limitations of letting Munich do the thinking for you: "For a long time it didn’t occur to me to question [it]," she says.
Evil is never in short supply, regrettably, and choosing which Hitler to confront is a complicated business, especially when you have the most powerful military in the history of the planet and the rest of the world obsesses about your strength. Albright’s approach to this dilemma was embodied in her famous comment to then-Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell in 1995: "What are you saving this superb military for, Colin, if we can’t use it?" She consistently lobbied for the use of force -- threatening invasion of Haiti, bombing Milosevic to the negotiating table, levying and tightening sanctions all around the globe. When military adventures went awry, as in Somalia, the "firepower was insufficient." The failure to intervene in Rwanda? "My deepest regret." Did Albright worry much that an ever-more-activist America might encourage unhealthy dependency, sow global resentment, and create unholy temptation in the White House? Something close to the opposite: "For all the power of the United States," she laments at one point, "we were not able to dictate events."
A person so committed to combating dictators with American might -- without U.N. approval, if need be -- could be expected to support the ouster of Saddam Hussein, and so she does, albeit with caveats. In a book that takes pains to avoid criticizing any current or former secretaries of state, Albright admits to "many doubts about the Bush administration’s diplomatic timing, tactics, rationales, and postwar plans in the months before and after the 2003 war."
So the great Albright/neocon split comes down to Bush’s style more than his substance. This is largely the message communicated by George Soros, the wealthy hedge fund operator and philanthropist, who has in recent years become a surprisingly harsh critic of the same global capitalism and American-led democratization he had long championed (and profited from). "One of the reasons I was so opposed to the invasion of Iraq," Soros writes in his brisk little polemic, The Bubble of American Supremacy, "was that the action was liable to give nation building a bad name."
Soros is arguably the world’s greatest private-sector nation builder. His charities, centered mostly in the former communist world, have disbursed nearly $5 billion during the last two decades, on initiatives ranging from keeping 35,000 top Russian scientists financially solvent during the 1990s, to founding a Central European University in Budapest, to providing fresh drinking water to besieged Sarajevo. His cosmopolitan organizations are openly opposed to most things authoritarian, including several of their host governments. "My foundations contributed to democratic regime change in Slovakia in 1998, Croatia in 1999, and Yugoslavia in 2000, mobilizing civil society to get rid of Vladimir Meciar, Franko Tudjman, and Slobodan Milosevic, respectively," he brags. Just before the book’s publication, he could have added Georgia and Eduard Shevardnadze to that list.
So what’s wrong with regime change in Iraq, whose dictator made the democratically elected (and defeated) Vladimir Meciar look like Thomas Jefferson? Soros’ explanation is almost laughably tortured: "When the weapons of mass destruction could not be found, President Bush fell back on the justification of liberating Iraq from a heinous dictator and introducing democracy. That is indeed a noble cause, which could have justified the invasion if the president had made a case for it. But that was not the case that President Bush had presented to Congress, and presumably, Congress would not have endorsed it."
Later, "noble cause" notwithstanding, Soros compares Iraq unfavorably to Vietnam, rues that "it could have been avoided," and then announces that "admittedly, Saddam was a heinous tyrant and it was a good thing to get rid of him" -- and that’s just on a single page. A page later, he laments that the United States, because of overextension in Iraq, "has been reluctant to get engaged in Liberia, causing unnecessary suffering." To be only slightly unfair, Soros seems to oppose toppling tyrants only when it is Bush’s White House doing the dirty work.
Why? Because the president has embraced the doctrine of military pre-emption, allowed some members of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century to have positions of influence on foreign policy, and noisily mocked multilateralism in favor of case-by-case bilateral arrangements, thereby making the rest of the world, including longtime allies, nervous and surly.
The criticism is valid enough, and Albright shares it, though to a less vitriolic degree. (Soros decries "Bush’s rabid unilateralism," while Albright worries diplomatically that "the great institutions forged by the trans-Atlantic partnership that saved freedom in the twentieth century are in jeopardy" and "must be rescued and revitalized if that blessing is to survive the twenty-first.")
But both fail to acknowledge that the democratizing idealism of Bush administration officials such as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz is in fact suspiciously similar to their own nosy Wilsonianism. They do not ponder whether aggressive Democratic interventionism made Bush’s Republican (and therefore less palatable) version more possible. To the contrary: Soros even writes an entire chapter on how to overcome that annoying obstacle of "sovereignty" when meddling in the affairs of tyrants. He and Albright both skate over the fact that, in Kosovo especially, their pro-war and anti-U.N. arguments could be cut and pasted into Cheney’s talking points on Iraq.
"I believe we were justified in intervening in Kosovo without U.N. authorization, and we would have done better if we had relied on NATO and not the United Nations in Bosnia," Soros writes. "But unilateral action that goes against international public opinion cannot be justified, and it can endanger our national security by turning the world against us." Unfortunately, Soros does not explain how we might quantify this "international public opinion," or come up with a Plan B when the world is acting particularly daft. If European public opinion had won the day in March 1999, Soros’ Kosovo war never would have been fought.
The most coherent argument against Bush’s Iraq policy comes from a perhaps surprising source, given his much-publicized campaign flip-flops on the issue: Wesley Clark. Winning Modern Wars, though a clumsily written and awkwardly structured book (one part crisp military description of the Kosovo war, one part foreign policy argument, then an unconvincing tacked-on chapter about domestic policy issues), nonetheless drives home and supports a few simple, pragmatic points. "The Bush administration’s focus on Iraq had thus far weakened our counterterrorist efforts, diverting attention, resources, and leadership, alienating allied supporters, and serving as a rallying point for anyone wishing harm to the United States and Americans," Clark writes.
Bilateralism costs much more in time, money, and lives than multilateralism; terrorism’s "root cause" (which Clark laudably defines as "the extreme Wahhabist ideology and funding from Saudi Arabia") has been unaddressed; intelligence has been recklessly warped for political purposes; the military is stretched perilously thin. "U.S. foreign policy had become dangerously dependent on its military," Clark writes. (Much of the book is written in this annoying past tense.) "The armed forces were practically the only effective play in the U.S. repertoire."
Clark looks back fondly on the "new strain of idealism in U.S. foreign policy" during the Clinton era, when the interventions and peacekeeping operations were aligned, he contends, with the noblest of American values. "But 2001 marked a profound departure," he warns. "The Bush administration acted unambiguously to put a more unilateralist, balance-of-power stamp on U.S. foreign policy."
Like Soros, Clark is alarmed, not heartened, that a Wolfowitz-flavored Wilsonianism was grafted onto the Kissinger-style balance-of-power approach after September 11. "Overnight, U.S. foreign policy became not only unilateralist but moralistic, intensely patriotic, and assertive...intimating the New American Empire."
Somewhere within these ominous warnings, a small but tangible Democratic foreign policy distinction begins to emerge. Munich is the mind-set, but not if it prevents us from confronting still more little Hitlers. It’s not the invasion, it’s the motivation. Selective use of unilateralism and even pre-emptive military action is OK; just don’t be rude about it.
This characterization may sound flippant, but the divisions are real. There is genuine concern over in the Democratic aisle that America’s plummeting reputation abroad is a source of danger in and of itself, and will continue to drive military costs skyward while perhaps encouraging more terrorism, not less. Bush’s irritable, realpolitik, man-to-man bilateralism, in which Saudi princes he’s known for years get treated with more respect than the less intimate but nonetheless elected leaders of Europe, is the kind of hubris that suggests impending collapse -- in Soros’ theory, a burst "bubble" of American prominence. As Clark darkly muses, "Somewhere in the rising U.S. budget deficits, the balance-of-payments current accounts deficits, and the growing resentment of the United States abroad, there may be a ‘tipping point.’"
Unless the more sober Democrats come to the rescue, of course. But what, really, would they do differently? Most recent American presidents, regardless of party, have campaigned on domestic issues and a more "humble" foreign policy, then governed much like the global cop they replaced. The loyal opposition (Republicans in the late ’90s, Democrats now) has to be dragged into supporting a war or major troop deployment, while the commander-in-chief can be counted on to invoke Munich and warn against isolationism. The difference? One party talks up the virtues of multilateralism, while the other talks it down.
That distinction may be enough to earn my vote in November, but as tangible philosophical differences go it ranks somewhere not far above splitting a hair. If the most vexing foreign policy issue we face is that American supremacy is indeed a bubble inflated by military assertiveness -- and that’s the big if -- then playing nice with international institutions is about as structurally significant as applying a new shade of lipstick on a very old .
| Name: | George's New Hat |
| Name: | ???? huh ????? |
| To: | Banana cox and cable lovers |