Told Ya So

It’s not like we didn’t already know the Iraq War was all for oil or anything, and it's not like we haven't seen every other rationale go up in smoke (Saddam’s WMDs, al-Qaeda, “let’s fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here, yada yada). So this post won't be a shocker to anyone. But hey, wouldn’t it be funny if we could find out what really happened in Dick Cheney’s energy task force meetings?

Well, thank God the Brits can point us in the right direction:

Five months before the March 2003 invasion, Baroness Symons, then the Trade Minister, told BP that the Government believed British energy firms should be given a share of Iraq's enormous oil and gas reserves as a reward for Tony Blair's military commitment to US plans for regime change.

The papers show that Lady Symons agreed to lobby the Bush administration on BP's behalf because the oil giant feared it was being "locked out" of deals that Washington was quietly striking with US, French and Russian governments and their energy firms.

Minutes of a meeting with BP, Shell and BG (formerly British Gas) on 31 October 2002 read: "Baroness Symons agreed that it would be difficult to justify British companies losing out in Iraq in that way if the UK had itself been a conspicuous supporter of the US government throughout the crisis."

The minister then promised to "report back to the companies before Christmas" on her lobbying efforts.

The Foreign Office invited BP in on 6 November 2002 to talk about opportunities in Iraq "post regime change". Its minutes state: "Iraq is the big oil prospect. BP is desperate to get in there and anxious that political deals should not deny them the opportunity."

After another meeting, this one in October 2002, the Foreign Office's Middle East director at the time, Edward Chaplin, noted: "Shell and BP could not afford not to have a stake in [Iraq] for the sake of their long-term future... We were determined to get a fair slice of the action for UK companies in a post-Saddam Iraq."

Whereas BP was insisting in public that it had "no strategic interest" in Iraq, in private it told the Foreign Office that Iraq was "more important than anything we've seen for a long time".

BP was concerned that if Washington allowed TotalFinaElf's existing contact with Saddam Hussein to stand after the invasion it would make the French conglomerate the world's leading oil company. BP told the Government it was willing to take "big risks" to get a share of the Iraqi reserves, the second largest in the world.

Over 1,000 documents were obtained under Freedom of Information over five years by the oil campaigner Greg Muttitt. They reveal that at least five meetings were held between civil servants, ministers and BP and Shell in late 2002.

The 20-year contracts signed in the wake of the invasion were the largest in the history of the oil industry. They covered half of Iraq's reserves – 60 billion barrels of oil, bought up by companies such as BP and CNPC (China National Petroleum Company), whose joint consortium alone stands to make £403m ($658m) profit per year from the Rumaila field in southern Iraq.

You know, if this shit went on in the UK you can be damned sure it happened here in the United States.

Isn’t it peachy to know that well before the invasion of Iraq on the pretense of finding “weapons of mass destruction” and under the threat of “smoking guns becoming mushroom clouds,” behind the scenes oil companies were already divvying up the booty?

One, two, three, four, what the hell are we fighting for?

Oh yeah, and why do we still have tens of thousands of troops over there? Anyone?

And can you believe that no one has yet gone to jail for this? Thousands of American soldiers dead or maimed or mentally shattered, our budget sent into debt for a war that was never paid for, tens of thousands of Iraqi civillians dead or living as refugees, all for western greed.

And no one is in jail.

Yeah sure, they hate us for our freedoms. Right.

The Wingnut Welfare Gravy Train Rolls On

Judith Miller, once of the lofty New York Times, is now a correspondent for ... wait for it ... Newsmax. You know, the conservative rag peddling black helicopter conspiracy theories funded by Richard Mellon Scaife. It’s only slightly more credible than WingNut Daily -- but not much.

This news has prompted me to wonder what happened to the rest of the Iraq War boosters.

• Dick Cheney and Halliburton narrowly skirted bribery charges in Nigeria by forking over a cool $250 million the day before Christmas:

Meanwhile, the Nigerians still wanted a pound of flesh, and because it appears to be easy for a multibillion-dollar energy company like Halliburton to throw money at problems, that's what they seem to have done. Halliburton and KBR will pay $32.5 million to the Nigerian government and $2.5 million to the Nigerian lawyers, and release some frozen assets in a Swiss bank account to the Africans. Total payout: about $250 million.

In return, Cheney, Halliburton, and KBR can walk away from the situation, and the Nigerians get even more than the original $180 million from the former vice president's company.

Remember: Halliburton and KBR already pled guilty to those $180 million bribery charges in a U.S. court. I’m trying to wrap my head around the idea that someone is able to avoid jail time for bribing Nigerian officials with $180 million by .... paying Nigerian officials $250 million. Oh well, nothing to see here, move along folks ....

• Donald Rumsfeld is doing the rubber chicken circuit/book tour that is part of the Wingnut Wurlitzer. He (or, more likely, his publicist) has been teasing his pending memoir with coy Tweets which the neocons at the Wall Street Journal have been eating up like ice cream. When the book comes out it will be promoted heavily at conservative media outlets like, well, Newsmax, which frequently offers subscribers tomes such as this one at steep discounts. Neat how that works.

• John Bolton returned to his office at the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank, and in that capacity is spouting his nonsense on the Wingnut Wurlitzer. Serving just 16 months as United Nations ambassador -- too crazy even for Republicans like George Voinovich and John McCain, his nomination was filibustered and he was a recess appointment -- it seems the conservative media has found Bolton a useful stick to poke at the Obama Administration. His frequent criticism of things like the START treaty and defense spending cuts are dutifully reported across the Fox landscape. Falling upwards, indeed.

• The disgraced/disbarred Scooter Libby appears to have disappeared into a black hole, though with the new Valerie Plame flick soon to hit theaters, I’m sure someone will drag him out of his undisclosed location. The Wingnut Wurlitzer is always looking for fresh meat.

• Paul Wolfowitz always creeped me out. The whole comb-licking thing just made we want to throw up in my mouth. Forced to resign from the World Bank in 2007 after some serious ethics breaches were discovered, he has also joined his buddy John Bolton at the American Enterprise Institute as a “visiting scholar,” where at least one observer noted his lack of productivity. In his position he pens the occasional op-ed for papers like the London Times and Wall Street Journal, all part of the glorious Bush Administration Whitewash Campaign designed to protect the legacy of the most disastrous Administration in this country’s recent history.

If you’re detecting a pattern here, well, join the club. Conservatives through their “non-partisan (wink wink) think tanks” and established media outfits like Fox News and Newsmax are able to get their message out across the world. This is the Wingnut Welfare Gravy Train, where no fail is too big, no embarrassment too great, no policy too disastrous to keep the conservative family from closing ranks and enveloping their failed leaders in a warm, fuzzy embrace.

You can always go home again, if you’re a neocon wingnut (Scooter Libby being the sole exception). The American Enterprise Institute will give you a home and get your op-eds published in the Wall Street Journal, Investors Business Daily, London Times, New York Times, not to mention conservative outfits like the Weekly Standard. Your memoirs will be published and your name will be in the Rolodex of every Fox News booker. Your appearances on Hannity (and even the occasional network bobblehead show) are a given. This is how the legacy is protected, even promoted.

The right-wing has this established, well-funded infrastructure which assures the continued influence of people who by all rights should have been tossed away when they were discredited. I mean, you started a fucking war based on lies, misinformation, faulty intelligence. You were colossally wrong and people died and the national treasury was raided. We have spent and will spend trillions of dollars on your fuck-up. Some folks think you should be in jail; at the very least you should be kicked out of the club. But that’s not how it works in Wingnuttia.

Meanwhile, we’ve kicked Van Jones and Shirley Sherrod off Liberal Mountain for ... well, what, exactly? If these folks were conservatives their calendars would be full of speaking engagements, television appearances, and their op-eds would be in every influential newspaper in the English-speaking world. They’d be working on their memoirs and they’d have regular features in The New Republic and The Atlantic. But Google “Van Jones” and all you get are attacks from conservative blogs like Hot Air.

There simply is nothing comparable on the left to the Wingnut Wurlitzer. I don’t know why that is, except perhaps the perpetual myth about “liberal media” and so forth. I think this more than anything is the biggest challenge the left faces moving forward. And while I'm not the first to observe this, I can't for the life of me understand why no one has done anything about it. You can't win the argument if you can't even get your message out.

Mistakes Were Made

Remember when the Bush Administration fired Lawrence Lindsey for estimating the cost of regime change in Iraq at $200 billion? Ha ha that was so funny.

Today Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard’s Linda Blimes had to revise their $3 trillion war estimate. Upwards:

But today, as the United States ends combat in Iraq, it appears that our $3 trillion estimate (which accounted for both government expenses and the war's broader impact on the U.S. economy) was, if anything, too low. For example, the cost of diagnosing, treating and compensating disabled veterans has proved higher than we expected.

Moreover, two years on, it has become clear to us that our estimate did not capture what may have been the conflict's most sobering expenses: those in the category of "might have beens," or what economists call opportunity costs. For instance, many have wondered aloud whether, absent the Iraq invasion, we would still be stuck in Afghanistan. And this is not the only "what if" worth contemplating. We might also ask: If not for the war in Iraq, would oil prices have risen so rapidly? Would the federal debt be so high? Would the economic crisis have been so severe?

The answer to all four of these questions is probably no. The central lesson of economics is that resources -- including both money and attention -- are scarce. What was devoted to one theater, Iraq, was not available elsewhere.

The rest of the piece is equally depressing.

When you think of all the things that could have been done with that money -- healthcare, teachers hired, environmental restoration, infrastructure rebuilding, job training, scientific research, unemployment extensions -- all the stuff the Republicans are yammering about how we don’t have money to do these things and the free hand of the market should pay for them anyway! while wringing their hands over making our grandchildren pay for the stimulus! when in fact not one of those assholes said anything about our grandchildren paying for this stupid, useless war except CLAP LOUDER. It just turns my stomach, it really does.

But the worst part is that no one went to jail for this. No one’s career was destroyed for this mistake. Hell, there are rumors that John Bolton might run for president. People got rich off the taxpayer teat -- people like Erik Prince, such a nice Christian fellow -- and where is the call for accountability? *Crickets*

I simply don't understand why the nation is not rising up over the biggest national blunder in our history. We'll quite literally be paying for this mistake for a generation, on so many levels. And it's like the entire country is happily choosing to move along, think happy thoughts now, er, maybe not happy thoughts since we're all so depressingly broke but here's a great idea, let's blame the black man in the White House for all of our problems instead of having a come to Jesus moment about our national shame. How's that working for everybody?

I still cannot believe that we invaded a country for no reason and no one has paid for it. The biggest mistake of the Obama Administration was not devoting a little time and energy to a war inquiry like what they're doing in the UK right now, or a truth and reconciliation commission like they did in South Africa. To borrow President Obama's favorite phrase: make no mistake. The physical and psychic wounds of this colossal error run very, very deep. And by not channeling the grief and anger where it belongs, without giving us a chance for national healing, Obama has just heaped a whole bunch of grief and anger on himself.

And I have a special word to our glorious mainstream media. You folks so eager to cover every gathering of Teanuts who seem oh so worried about the national debt, not a one of them ever asks where Dick Armey was when our $3 trillion war was drummed up (originally opposing the war, Armey voted in favor of war authorization after Dick Cheney made him wet his pants.) Our prestigious national news media, so busy picking apart every little thing President Obama does, like what condiments he puts on his burgers and what beverages he drinks -- yet they can’t be bothered to ask how or why the last administration was allowed to bankrupt the nation and slaughter thousands of innocents.

Guess they’re too busy washing the blood off of their hands.

This Day In War

Twenty years ago today:

On August 2, 1990, Iraqi troops led by dictator Saddam Hussein invaded the oil-producing nation of Kuwait. Like Noriega in Panama, Hussein had been a US ally for nearly a decade. From 1980 to 1988, he had killed about 150,000 Iranians, in addition to at least 13,000 of his own citizens. Despite complaints from international human rights group, however, the Reagan and Bush administrations had treated Hussein as a valuable ally in the US confrontation with Iran. As late as July 25 - a week before the invasion of Kuwait - US Ambassador April Glaspie commiserated with Hussein over a "cheap and unjust" profile by ABC's Diane Sawyer, and wished for an "appearance in the media, even for five minutes," by Hussein that "would help explain Iraq to the American people."

Ah yes, good times:

Hey whatever happened to Rumsfeld, anyway?

Not long after, America was at war with Iraq -- our first great, glorious war against Saddam Hussein. Let’s rewind the tape and recall how Saddam was repositioned from BFF to Evildoer in the mind of the American public in just a few short months:

In fact, the most emotionally moving testimony on October 10 came from a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, known only by her first name of Nayirah. According to the Caucus, Nayirah's full name was being kept confidential to prevent Iraqi reprisals against her family in occupied Kuwait. Sobbing, she described what she had seen with her own eyes in a hospital in Kuwait City. Her written testimony was passed out in a media kit prepared by Citizens for a Free Kuwait. "I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital," Nayirah said. "While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where . . . babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die."

Three months passed between Nayirah's testimony and the start of the war. During those months, the story of babies torn from their incubators was repeated over and over again. President Bush told the story. It was recited as fact in Congressional testimony, on TV and radio talk shows, and at the UN Security Council. "Of all the accusations made against the dictator," MacArthur observed, "none had more impact on American public opinion than the one about Iraqi soldiers removing 312 babies from their incubators and leaving them to die on the cold hospital floors of Kuwait City."

At the Human Rights Caucus, however, Hill & Knowlton and Congressman Lantos had failed to reveal that Nayirah was a member of the Kuwaiti Royal Family. Her father, in fact, was Saud Nasir al-Sabah, Kuwait's Ambassador to the US, who sat listening in the hearing room during her testimony. The Caucus also failed to reveal that H&K vice-president Lauri Fitz-Pegado had coached Nayirah in what even the Kuwaitis' own investigators later confirmed was false testimony.

Hill & Knowlton is one of America’s oldest PR firms, responsible for countering scientific claims about tobacco’s adverse health effects and other corporate propaganda. In 1990 they represented the government of Kuwait (for more, see the "Citizens for a Free Kuwait” hoax.
)

That's pretty incredible client service for a PR firm: getting America to go to war for your client! I mean, how awesome is that?

And for arranging false testimony before Congress the PR firm of Hill & Knowlton received ... sanctions? A fine? A slap on the wrist? How about some government PR contracts? Ding ding ding! Thank you for playing!

Meanwhile, Lauri Fitz-Pegado served as one of the Obama campaign's foreign policy experts, though thankfully not for the Middle East. She is now a lobbyist for the Livingston Group. Her latest coup--pardon the pun:

In 2008, Fitz-Pegado was part of Livingston's team for the non-profit Council for a Democratic Iran, which paid the firm $300,000 in the third quarter of 2008 alone.

If America goes to war with Iran I think we all know who we have to thank.

I think it’s important to remember that this shit has been going on for decades. Who’s pulling your strings, America? Why do you keep letting them?

Fiscal Phonies Revealed

Just repeating what I said yesterday, but when House "Blue Dog" Dems and Republicans approve billions for war on the Chinese credit card, you know damn well that talk about the budget deficit is just propaganda and empty rhetoric:

In the House vote, 148 Democrats and 160 Republicans backed the war spending, but 102 Democrats joined 12 Republicans in opposing the measure. Last year, 32 Democrats opposed a similar midyear spending bill. Among those voting against the bill on Tuesday was Representative David R. Obey, a Wisconsin Democrat and the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, the panel responsible for the measure.

Some of the Democratic opposition stemmed from the decision by party leaders to strip from the bill money that had been included in the original House version to help address the weak economy at home, including funds to help preserve teachers’ jobs. But some of those voting against it said they were influenced by the leaked documents, which highlight the American military’s struggles in Afghanistan and support claims that elements of Pakistan’s intelligence service were helping the Taliban.

And count me among the few voices saying it was right to strip funds for teachers and other projects from this bill. Dammit, liberals, are you really trying to tell me that you think it's okay to hold education and our economic recovery hostage to war spending? Are you kidding me? The argument that we need to fund the war so we can fund teacher pay is the worst sort of immoral bullshit policy debate anyone ever cooked up. No, no, no. You do not "sweeten" war spending. That is appalling.

Here's how they voted. Big shocker that phony local fiscal hawks like Zach Wamp, Marsha Blackburn, Jim Cooper and the rest voted Yes to spend $59 billion on wars while our schools crumble, our infrastructure is in disarray, unemployment remains widespread, state budgets are strapped, etc. etc. I mean, these are the same frauds who said we couldn't afford an extension of unemployment benefits during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression? Give me a break. You guys are worse than frauds: you're heartless and immoral. You'll pay for war but not food or education? You've lost any credibility where issues like the supposed "deficit crisis" are concerned. You just approved $59 billion that wasn't "budget neutral" to be pissed away in a sandhole on the other side of the world. And for what?

Am I the only one remembering when the healthcare bill had to be "budget neutral"? Why do wars never have to be "budget netural"? We're knocking on the door of 10 years in Afghanistan, people. A decade of war, costing us how many billions of dollars? Is it a trillion? This is, indeed, how empires fall. Study your history, people.

Of Tennessee's delegation, only Memphis Democrat Steve Cohen and Knoxville Republican John Duncan Jr. voted no on this farce. The rest of you guys, every last one of you, are frauds.

Everybody Loves Us, Nobody Hates Us

As Bill Maher pointed out Friday night, nothing displays the hypocrisy of the Tea Party movement more than their disconnect on defense spending. I think this is as much about ego as anything else. Most conservatives seem to feel like Merka is so crucial to global stability that without us, the planet would stop in its orbit.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not discounting our importance to global stability and all, but I think for a lot of conservatives such feelings are rooted in fantasies going back to World War II: you know, the whole “we bailed your asses out” thing. We love to think that the world loves us--nay, owes us--don’t we?

It’s sorta like how Florida’s Teanuts rallied to keep the government’s hands off their NASA jobs. I love the idea of NASA and space exploration, but let’s remember that for much of Baby Boom America, it was our space program which brought us a collective ego boost back when we were battling the Russkies for global domination bragging rights. A lot of these folks don’t care about science or space, they care that we have these gazillion-billion dollar phallic symbols telling the world to suck on this.

So little wonder news like this rarely gets prominent play in the U.S. media:

Mass rally in Japan against US base on Okinawa

Nearly 100,000 people have attended a rally in Japan's southern island of Okinawa demanding that a US military base be moved off the island.

Under a 2006 agreement with the US, the US Marines' Futenma base was to be moved from the centre to the coast.

But demonstrators want Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama to stick to an election pledge to remove it completely.

The row over the base has undermined relations between his centre-left Government and the US.

[...]

Japanese have long been resentful of the massive US base on the island, which is home to most of the 47,000 American troops based in Japan.

I’m sorry but why is it necessary for us to have 47,000 troops in Japan? Anyway, the Japanese government wants to move the base to the island of Tokunoshima, a place we don’t want to go. And they apparently don’t want us there, either. From April 19:

Tokunoshima residents rally against hosting Futenma

By ERIC JOHNSTON

At least 11,000 people gathered Sunday on Tokunoshima to protest a plan to move U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma from Okinawa to the island.

The rally, which had been planned for weeks and was expected to draw about 10,000 people, took place only a few days after it was reported that the U.S. had rejected Tokunoshima Island as a Futenma relocation site.

U.S. officials say moving Futenma's air operations to Tokunoshima, which is hundreds of kilometers away, would make it impossible to effectively conduct joint air, land and sea training with other marine units in Okinawa.

It’s important for Americans to remember that we are not beloved around the world, much as we wish it were true. So many were puzzled by the 9/11 attacks, and “why do they hate us” became a national mourning cry. We heard that tired Bush line about being hated “for our freedoms,” which is asinine, simplistic, even jingoistic.

We are not hated for our freedoms. We are hated for our power, for our dominance, for the way we muscle our way around the world. Japan was once our foe, now our ally, but even here 100,000 citizens have rallied to get our troops off their soil. And our news media, if they cover the event at all, will relegate the story to the small print and back pages. It certainly won’t dominate our national conversation, where we talk about Tea Parties and Sarah Palin’s e-mail and the White House’s Wall Street reform plan.

Why do we have 47,000 troops in Iraq Japan? Because we won a war 65 years ago.

I am reminded of this excellent column by author Mohsin Hamid from 2007. Do read the whole thing, but I wanted to call attention to this part:

Americans need to educate themselves, from elementary school onward, about what their country has done abroad. And they need to play a more active role in ensuring that what the United States does abroad is not merely in keeping with a foreign policy elite's sense of realpolitik but also with the American public's own sense of American values.

Right now we have troops in Afghanistan, still mopping up “the final campaign of the Cold War” which Americans only know about thanks to a Hollywood movie starring Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts.

In Baghdad we have built an embassy-slash-military-base the size of Vatican City. In 65 years, will we still be in Afghanistan? Will we still be in Iraq? Will Americans wonder why we have thousands of troops in these foreign lands, will the Iraqis be rallying in the streets in numbers as high as 100,000 to get us to leave?

Or will the American empire have crumbled under its own weight by then?

Inquiring Minds

We DFH’s are jealous of the Brits for a lot of things: their socialized medicine, their costume dramas like "Young Voctoria," their Iraq Inquiry.

Yes, Great Britian is investigating how it got lured into a war of choice in Iraq, examining such things as non-existent WMD’s, rumored 2002 deals with President Bush, and who knew what, when.

Apparently American sensibilities are far too delicate for such an inquiry; neither the Bush nor Obama administrations are interested in looking under that rock. Nothing to see here, just move along.

I think the need for an official inquiry into the justification for our war of choice were well expressed by Reg Keys, father of a British soldier killed in Iraq:

Reg Keys said the point of the entire process is to ensure that both the country, and its politicians learn a lesson.

"A British prime minister must never again be allowed to take us to war based on falsehoods and deceit in such a shambolic and catastrophic way," said Keys.

American politicians aren't interested in learning any lessons, though. I suspect a lot of the information such an inquiry would generate here would be severely damaging to both parties, so they'd just as soon we anti-war folks put such silly thoughts out of our pretty little heads. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have never been publicly held to account for their war. It’s starting to look like they never will.

But I don't understand why the media hasn't jumped on board the calls for such an inquiry. Think of it, guys: all of the weeks of drama this would generate, a month's worth of Meet The Press panels featuring America's favorite torture mom, Liz Cheney--possibly even a chance for Judith Miller to reclaim a few rays of limelight. It would be the ultimate prime time drama.

Unless they think it would be too inconvenient for their own credibility.

But I still think the country needs a reckoning over Iraq. I don't get why that's yet another thing our cousins across the Atlantic get that Americans can only dream about.

Pocket Book Politics

Back when I was kid I remember seeing this poster everywhere:


The poster I remember was different, though. It was rainbow colored (but then, wasn’t everything when we were kids?) and the font looked like handwriting. In other words, it was a little more hippy-dippy, but the message was the same:

”It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the air force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.”

I have been thinking about this poster a lot lately, what with all the talk about escalating the war in Afghanistan and calls by some Democrats for a war tax. So imagine my surprise when I heard Bill Frist fearmonger about the healthcare bill thusly:

Frist expects the bill will bring a lot more uninsured Tennesseans into TennCare, the state’s Medicaid program. He says TennCare’s roles could swell by 30 percent over the next decade. The extra money for that will have to come from somewhere, and Frist says one likely cut is education.

“And it’s going to fall back in the laps of the governors – Governor Bredesen, but even more importantly the next governor, who is going to have to cut education, who is going to have to cut the police force, in order to pay for these increased expenses.”

Really? You know, I don’t remember Frist or any of his Bush Administration cronies--or, for that matter, any of the tea baggers--worrying about expenses when they crammed the Iraq War down our throats with their lies and deceptions about mushroom clouds and yellow cake uranium.

Nor do I remember any sudden jones for "fiscal responsibility" when we decided to go after the Taliban in Afghanistan. It’s fair to say one reason our government is in its current fiscal mess is due to trillion-dollar wars that were never put on the books but simply passed on to the next generation, while this generation helped themselves to some tax cuts.

Someone decided to throw a little par-tay and have the grandkids pay for it. Sorry kids, no healthcare for you! We're spending your inheritance on war instead. Take it up with Bill Frist, he's one of the former Senate leaders who thought this idea was just peachy.

Now, I’m going to dispute the whole “there will be cuts in education to pay for healthcare” premise anyway, since education is one of those things for which there are federal grants (including Recovery Funds), though I imagine as soon as the Recovery money stops Frist and his cohorts will shout “See! Told ya so!”

Anyway, the idea that we must choose between educating our kids and keeping them healthy is just so much bullshit. How about both? Why do we have to choose? Only a Republican would think it’s one or the other.

Again I ask: how come there is always money for war, never money for things like education and healthcare? One of the things that kills me about our discourse is how the media always couches the debate on healthcare and education as a fiscal argument. They bought the Republican talking point hook, line and sinker.

Our media asks, Can we afford this? I reply: My God, can we afford not to? But on issues of war, "can we afford this" is rarely asked. It's, ohmygawdwe'reallgonnadie. News flash: people are already dying from lack of healthcare in this country. Crazy, ain't it?

Does Bill Frist know how many kids in Tennessee don’t have health insurance? According to FamiliesUSA, it’s one out of every 13 kids (or was--before the economic downturn. It could be worse now). What good is education if kids are too sick to get to school?

How often do we hear war spending presented in fiscal terms like this? Rarely. Yet an additional 40,000 troops in Afghanistan is estimated to cost $40 billion a year. That’s in addition to what we are already spending on the war.

Another $40 billion. That’s $40 billion on top of the hundreds and hundreds of billions we’ve already spent there. We’ve already sank more money into blowing up two countries than we needed to fund healthcare reform and education.

Why is it when it comes to things like healthcare we quibble about the pennies and go to great lengths to make sure a bill is “budget neutral.” Why don’t our wars have to be “budget neutral”?

Why is a war of choice always viewed as a necessity, but necessities like healthcare and education are luxuries?

I’m tired of people like Bill Frist telling us we need to choose between educating our kids and keeping them healthy. That’s just wrong. We just need to shift our priorities.

It will be a great day when the country realizes we can’t afford these little, decades-long military adventures any more. Sorry but we’ve got kids to educate, and a populace to keep healthy, and senior citizens to care for. We have levees to shore up and an energy grid to repair.

If you want your little war, go have a bake sale.

That Touch of Merde

Our $700 million military base “embassy” in Baghdad still has a few problems, and we don’t just mean a leaky roof:

But according to a report issued last week by the State Department’s inspector general, the complex is a monument to shoddy work and incompetent oversight. Walls and walkways are cracking, sewage gas flows back into residences, wiring is substandard, fire protection systems are faulty and other safety provisions are not up to contract specifications.

The report says that construction “was significantly deficient in multiple areas” and may not meet safety codes. It called on the State Department to seek $132 million in damages from the main construction company, First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting, which received $470 million for work on the embassy.

[...]

The 57-page report details problems with water, wiring, design, automation, sewage, walls, ceilings, power generators, emergency safe areas and structural reinforcement to protect the embassy from earthquakes. It says that First Kuwaiti charged for $33 million worth of design services that were either incomplete or undocumented. Executives at First Kuwaiti did not respond to a request for comment.

Awkward! If First Kuwaiti GT&C doesn’t ring a bell, let me dig into the memory hole for you:

First Kuwaiti, as well as other Middle Eastern companies under U.S. contracts in Iraq, has been accused repeatedly of pressuring its workers to take jobs in war-torn Iraq against their wishes . Once there, those workers are said to have often endured pay of just dollars a day, lousy food, bad medical care, crammed housing and 12-hour work days, seven days a week. Some who have witnessed such brutal conditions liken it to modern-day slavery.

First Kuwaiti's general manager, Wadih al-Absi, calls such accusations lies. But the accusations come from workers in Nepal, the Philippines, former Halliburton supervisors and even those well acquainted with the company's upper management. None of these people know each other, but they have the same complaints of poor treatment and labor trafficking.

[...]

The contract for the U.S. embassy "was political," said one competitor. Why political? Because Kuwait was the only country bordering Iraq that was willing to allow the staging of land troops for the 2003 invasion, whisper other disgruntled contractors. The State Department intervened before on behalf of other Kuwaiti firms. After the invasion, the U.S. ambassador to Kuwait, Richard Jones, pressured Halliburton to buy overpriced fuel from the unknown Kuwaiti firm Altanmia Commercial Marketing Company, according to official documents. That fuel, intended for domestic use in Iraq, resulted in ongoing disputes about overcharges of possibly several hundred million dollars. Jones then returned to Washington to serve as the senior adviser and coordinator for Iraq at the State Department. He was in that position when First Kuwaiti was awarded the embassy contract.

I wrote about First Kuwaiti GT&C here, when the Bush Administration waived a law requiring open and competitive bidding to award the embassy contract to the firm. This is after it rejected a North Carolina firm, of course.

I wrote about it again when a criminal investigation into labor trafficking began.

It’s that touch of merde, Baghdad style. We basically gave the contract to a Kuwaiti firm in exchange for them letting us use their country to stage our war. And then they rip us off and use foreign slave labor to build our embassy. There’s so much irony swirling around this story I can’t stand it.

If there’s a more perfect metaphor for our entire Iraq misadventure I’d love to see it.

Why Does The Republican Party Hate America?

The Bush Administration-crafted Iraqi Constitution called for single-payer healthcare:

Article 31 reads:

"First: Every citizen has the right to health care. The State shall maintain public health and provide the means of prevention and treatment by building different types of hospitals and health institutions.

“Second: Individuals and entities have the right to build hospitals, clinics, or private health care centers under the supervision of the State, and this shall be regulated by law."

There are other health care guarantees, including special provisions for children, the elderly, and the handicapped elsewhere in the 43-page document.

Under force of arms, President Bush imposed his particular idea of democracy on a people not asking for it - perhaps a noble undertaking in one context and a criminal violation of international law in another. Bush's followers are proud of the Iraqi Constitution, a model for the world, they told us.

So, according to the American political right-wing, government-guaranteed health care is good for Iraqis, but not good for us. Not good for you. They decry even a limited public option for you, but gleefully imposed upon the Iraqis what they label here as "socialism," with much Democratic Party member support.

Writer Mark Dorlester calls this Republican hypocrisy. More importantly, I see it as an admission by those involved in crafting the Iraq Constitution that they agree with the principle of single-payer healthcare. They see it as good for citizens, good for building a stable democracy, right for a government to be involved in providing healthcare for its citizenry. They didn't see it as inherently evil or damaging to a developing democracy's government or economy.

But they don’t think it’s right for us. Right for Iraq, but not for us.

Why would that be? That would be a question to ask. If it's not going to turn into Fascism, Socialism, economy-destroying evil in a democracy as sensitive as Iraq's, why would it do so here?

Dorlester also points to the $864 billion we’ve spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The total is more than (or, in the worst case, equal to) the funding required to guarantee minimally decent health care here.

In other words, the most senior members of the Republican establishment - and some Democrats like Max Baucus (D-MT) - have gladly spent more taxpayer funds to ensure health care as a Constitutional right in Iraq than they are willing to spend to give you any level of guaranteed coverage.

[...]

It would seem that U. S. citizens might find out if their Representative and/or Senators have supported or voted to fund the war in Iraq. If so, do they support health care as a civil right for you?

If the answers to those questions are "yes" and "no," respectively, you might consider less hypocritical representation.

Interesting thought.

How Times Change

It’s very, very interesting to me what things spark outrage in our country today. And it’s curious which of these outrages are considered news stories by the national media, which of these stories develop into full-blown cable news hissy fits, and which ones bring out the torch-and-pitchfork crowds.

It wasn’t too long ago that the Pentagon banned photos of flag-draped coffins returning home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, back in 2004 the Republican-controlled Senate defeated a Democratic bill which would have allowed the Pentagon to show pictures of flag-draped coffins. From the memory hole:

Some Republicans, including Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, complained that Democrats were trying to score election-year points with the effort. Mr. Grassley noted that the policy had been in place since the first Bush administration, in 1991. ''This policy has been in place for 13 years,'' he said. ''Nobody has raised a complaint about it until now.''

In April 2004, military contractor Tami Silico and her husband were fired from Maytag Aircraft after taking pictures of flag-draped coffins on their way home from Kuwait. I always wondered how that picture came to the media’s attention. Simple: it was given directly to the Seattle Times by Tami and her friend Amy Katz (I urge everyone to read Poynter’s piece on the entire photo affair).

Liberals were accused of exploiting dead soldiers for political gain, our patriotism and support of the troops was questioned, and it was a full-tilt hissy fit.

I have to wonder: if that photo had been sent to the Associated Press, would it have been published?

It should be noted that under the Obama Administration, the Pentagon has reversed that policy, provided the families of the fallen agree (Michelle Malkin called the change "selective transparency”.)

Here's another one: It was only a few years ago that conservatives were in full hissy-fit mode over Ted Koppel’s “The Fallen” episode of Nightline, in which Koppel read the names of all U.S. soliders killed in the line of duty in Iraq. There was mass hysteria from the right; even Sinclair Broadcasting refused to air it.

Does anyone remember that? It really wasn’t all that long ago.

So I’m just curious why no one seems to care that this week the Associated Press published a photo of a dying U.S. Marine in Afghanistan.

Over the objections of the soldier’s family.

If pictures of flag-draped coffins and reading the names of war dead while showing their pictures in full-dress uniform was so objectionable when Bush was president, why isn’t a picture of a bloodied and dying Marine sparking outrage in right-wing circles now that Obama is president?

Who decides these things? Is there some Office of National Outrage, some Right Wing Hissy Fit Board where they decide which story will become the prevailing narrative of the day and which will not?

This past week we were in full torch-and-pitchfork mode over President Obama’s speech to schoolkids, which struck me as wholly manufactured and really quite silly. The Associated Press, which never went out of its way to show readers the human cost of war when Bush was president, seemed to jump at the opportunity to display a rather gruesome photo of an actual dying soldier, over the family's objections:

"We understand Mr. Bernard's anguish. We believe this image is part of the history of this war. The story and photos are in themselves a respectful treatment and recognition of sacrifice," said AP senior managing editor John Daniszewski.

I'm curious where all of these photos were when we were being given rah-rah, yellow-ribbon-magnet, support-the-troops pep talks when Bush was president.

And I'm curious where all of the right wing outrage is about this particular image, when images far more benign were enough to spark protests, blackouts, boycotts, and firings.

It's all very curious to me.

Ooops! Our Bad!

Did any major media outlets pull themselves away from feasting on the Michael Jackson/Mark Sanford corpses long enough to mention this?

The documents also confirm previous reports that Saddam falsely allowed the world to believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction - the main U.S. rationale behind the war - because he feared revealing his weakness to Iran, the hostile neighbor he considered a bigger threat than the U.S.

Whoopsie daisy! Turns out we didn’t need to wage that war after all. Gosh I hate it when that happens! Oh well! Sorry for all the dead civilians and dead soldiers and, you know, trillions of dollars in debt!

You know, the public record is full to overflowing with Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, John Bolton and the rest of the neocons telling us why it was imperative we take out the threat that was Saddam Hussein. None of these assclowns have ever been held accountable for this disaster; instead, they are still getting columns in national newspapers and quoted as “experts” on cable news.

So, in honor of July Fourth, I ask the mainstream media to say: no more.

Please, for the good of the nation, for the love of all that is holy, let these people slink quietly away from the public stage and back into their holes. Unless, of course, you’re covering their trials.

Every single one of them lacks any shred of credibility. Therefore, any media outlet that quotes them, publishes their columns, or puts them on the air lacks credibility, too. This is an undeniable fact, and frankly I’m sick of the national media acting as if nothing happened. As if the corrupt neocon cabal didn’t lead us into a costly, immoral war that killed thousands of Americans and over a hundred thousand Iraqis. Move along, nothing to see here.

I don’t ever want to see another column by any one of these idiots in any newspaper. And yes that means you, Washington Post, not exactly a bastion of credibility yourself these days: no more op-eds from John Bolton telling us we need to attack Iran or ZOMG we’re all gonna dieeee!! Clearly he’s a crackpot. Please quit giving him ink. It’s like trotting the crazy uncle out to the town square so everyone can laugh and point. It’s really not a very nice thing to do.

No more Dick Cheney on the TV, please. Again, another psychodoodle crackpot, who profited handsomely from the war he forced on the country that was completely unnecessary. He should not be regarded as an expert in anything save unspeakable evil. Time was, we put people like that in jail. Nowadays it’s all, “bygones!”

Wolf Blitzer and the rest of you idiots at CNN, when will you learn that Paul Wolfowitz is not a credible source? I don’t see you calling up people like Cindy Sheehan and asking her opinion on the situation in Iran. Why would you ask Wolfowitz? He has been wrong about everything! Why are voices for war so much more compelling to you than voices for peace? You are as complicit in the war machine as the neocon shills.

Is this some massive mainstream media CYA-ing in an effort to cover for the way they helped march America into an unnecessary war? You think we don't notice these things?

And yet you have the nerve to wonder why your circulation is faltering, your ratings are dropping, your listenership is down. You think the internet is the problem? Er, no. Not even close.

It is absolutely inconceivable to me that the architects of the Iraq war will never have their accountability moment. It’s like everyone hopes we can just move on. Well, no. That just won’t work. We can't pretend this didn't happen. It is immoral to pretend it didn't happen. America needs her accountability moment. America needs reconciliation, and this will not happen without confession. If, as the right wingers always tell us, we are a "Christian nation" then we should confess our sins.

Something for you tea baggers to think about.

God bless America? Not until we first ask God to forgive America.

Monday Is Mission Accomplished Day

Not that fake Misison Accomplished Day either, the one where President Bush strutted around an aircraft carrier. No, Monday is the day ExxonMobil, Chevron and the rest have been waiting for:

BAGHDAD — When Iraq puts development rights to some of its largest oil fields up for auction to foreign companies on Monday, the bidding will be a watershed moment, representing the first chance for petroleum giants like ExxonMobil to tap into the resources of a country they were kicked out of almost 40 years ago.

[...]

The oil companies are also somewhat disgruntled, being forced to compete for 20-year service contracts and not the more lucrative production sharing agreements they would prefer. Such agreements would allow them to share directly in the profits from oil production, rather than getting fixed fees.

In other words, they wanted something akin to the deal the Americans wrote for them exactly one year ago:

In their role as advisers to the Iraqi Oil Ministry, American government lawyers and private-sector consultants provided template contracts and detailed suggestions on drafting the contracts, advisers and a senior State Department official said.

That deal was withdrawn as it stoked outrage not only among Americans but in Iraq as well. As I wrote at the time, it was a little fishy that the contracts were awarded to the very same companies Saddam Hussein had kicked out of the country when he took power in the 1970s. You can’t really talk about “the central front in the war on terror” and “breeding Democracy in the Middle East” and all that other hogwash when you’re literally writing the contracts restoring foreign oil companies to their former status before the dictator you just deposed took power. At the time, the New York Times called it

a twist of corporate history for some of the world’s largest companies, [that] all four oil majors that had lost their concessions in Iraq are now back.

Oh, liberal media! You are adorable! A mere twist of corporate history, the turn of the karmic wheel. Just luck!

Sheesh.

Anyway, as Bill Maher said at last night’s Ryman show, “if you’re going to invade a country for oil, at least get some damn oil!” So, Mission Accomplished.

That said, I do not want to hear any more whining from conservatives about the recently-passed American Clean Energy and Security Act (aka, “cap-and-trade” or the Climate Bill) as being a job crushing, tax-increasing boondoggle.

Don’t you even start with me about this being a “carbon tax” -- what do you think the Iraq War has been? The one that cost $700 billion in direct costs, is estimated to cost $1 trillion before all’s said and done, has killed thousands of Americans, wounded thousands more, destroyed our credibility on the world stage, and divided the country, all to maintain the status quo of an oil-based economy. How long will we be paying that bill, do you think?

Congressmen Jim Cooper and Bart Gordon get my thanks for voting to pass the climate bill, though other so-called “Democrats” in Tennessee didn’t have the courage (yes, Lincoln Davis and John Tanner, I’m looking at you. For shame!)

Lamar Alexander voted for the Iraq War, the bloodiest carbon tax this country has ever enacted. Bob Corker has indicated he at least understands the issues of climate change but he’s trying to prove his conservative bonafides, so I don’t hold out much hope for him supporting a bill that has generated ire from the tea-bag crowd. But he’s been known to surprise me.

All of which means to say: when we're talking about energy policy, let's not forget what the Iraq War was about.

Don’t Look Under That Rock, America

An idea from the good folks at Sadly, No:

Why has Obama extended the Iraq occupation timeline? Why is he surging troops in Afghanistan? Why won’t he shut down Cold War relic bases in Germany and elsewhere?

Possibly because of strategic considerations. Possibly because he’s a tool of the military-industrial complex. But also possibly - and nobody ever seems to mention this - because he doesn’t want to dump a quarter of a million Americans on an economy that won’t hire them.

I have to say, that same thought has occurred to me as well.

But I also thought that the $12 billion a month we are spending in Iraq could be better used here at home. Make levees, not war, yada yada. And we really need some levees, people. Do we need an Iraq War? But then idiots like Marsha Blackburn and Sarah Palin start screaming “socialism” every time a penny of government money is spent on people and communities, not corporations. So, there's that.

I’m still waiting for that “national conversation” about the Iraq War. We’ve danced around it plenty, we’ve talked about whether torture is torture when we do it, or if it’s only torture when other people do it to us. We’ve had 9/11 invoked, a lot. We’ve never talked about what the Iraq War is costing us, not just fiscally but socially and morally. We’ve never talked about our permanent war economy. Every time we start to have that conversation it gets shut down, and those who want to discuss it are written off as crackpots.

Interesting.

Guess we don’t want to look under that rock.

Dance, Dickie Boy, Dance

Follow the changing storyline. If you can!

Dick Cheney, September 14, 1992:

The bottom line question for me was: How many additional American lives is Saddam Hussein worth? The answer: not very damn many.

Dick Cheney, Sept. 16, 2001:

MR. RUSSERT: Do we have any evidence linking Saddam Hussein or Iraqis to this operation?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: No.

Dick Cheney, Aug. 26, 2002:

Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us. And there is no doubt that his aggressive regional ambitions will lead him into future confrontations with his neighbors -- confrontations that will involve both the weapons he has today, and the ones he will continue to develop with his oil wealth.

Dick Cheney, September 14, 2003:

MR. RUSSERT: But is there a connection?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: We don’t know. You and I talked about this two years ago. I can remember you asking me this question just a few days after the original attack. At the time I said no, we didn’t have any evidence of that. Subsequent to that, we’ve learned a couple of things. We learned more and more that there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda that stretched back through most of the decade of the ’90s, that it involved training, for example, on BW and CW, that al-Qaeda sent personnel to Baghdad to get trained on the systems that are involved. The Iraqis providing bomb-making expertise and advice to the al-Qaeda organization.

Dick Cheney, January 9, 2004:

We know for example from interrogating detainees in Guantanamo [ED's NOTE: THAT MEANS TORTURE] that al Qaida sent individuals to Baghdad to be trained in C.W. and B.W. technology, chemical and biological weapons technology. These are all matters that are there for anybody who wants to look at it. A lot of it has been declassified. More, I'm sure, will be declassified in the future, and my expectation would be as we get the time. We haven't really had the time yet to pore through all those records in Baghdad. We'll find ample evidence confirming the link, that is the connection if you will between al Qaida and the Iraqi intelligence services. They have worked together on a number of occasions.

Dick Cheney, Jan. 21, 2004:

"I continue to believe — I think there's overwhelming evidence that there was a connection between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government. I'm very confident that there was an established relationship there."

Dick Cheney, June 2004:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Vice President Dick Cheney said Thursday the evidence is "overwhelming" that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, and he said media reports suggesting that the 9/11 commission has reached a contradictory conclusion were "irresponsible."

Dick Cheney, Sept. 10, 2006:

MR. RUSSERT: Then why, in the lead-up to the war, was there the constant linkage between Iraq and al-Qaeda?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: That’s a different issue. Now, there’s a question of whether or not al-Qaeda, or whether or not Iraq was involved in 9/11. There’s a separate—apart from that’s the issue of whether or not there was a historic relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda. The basis for that is probably best captured in George Tenet’s testimony before the Senate Intel Commission, an open session, where he said specifically that there was a pattern of relationship that went back at least a decade between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

MR. RUSSERT: But the president said they were working in concert, giving the strong suggestion to the American people that they were involved in September 11th.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: No. There are, there are two totally different propositions here, and people have consistently tried to confuse them. And it’s important, I think—there’s a third proposition, as well, too, and that is Iraq’s traditional position as a strong sponsor of terror.

Dick Cheney, April 6, 2007:

Cheney contended that al-Qaeda was operating in Iraq before the March 2003 invasion led by U.S. forces and that terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was leading the Iraqi branch of al-Qaeda. Others in al-Qaeda planned the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"He took up residence there before we ever launched into Iraq, organized the al-Qaeda operations inside Iraq before we even arrived on the scene and then, of course, led the charge for Iraq until we killed him last June," Cheney told radio host Rush Limbaugh during an interview. "As I say, they were present before we invaded Iraq."

Dick Cheney, March 2008:

"This long-term struggle became urgent on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. That day we clearly saw that dangers can gather far from our own shores and find us right there at home," said Cheney, who was accompanied by his wife, Lynne, and their daughter, Elizabeth.

"So the United States made a decision: to hunt down the evil of terrorism and kill it where it grows, to hold the supporters of terror to account and to confront regimes that harbor terrorists and threaten the peace," Cheney said. "Understanding all the dangers of this new era, we have no intention of abandoning our friends or allowing this country of 170,000 square miles to become a staging area for further attacks against Americans."

Dick Cheney, May 2009:

We had the anthrax attack from an unknown source. We had the training camps of Afghanistan, and dictators like Saddam Hussein with known ties to Mideast terrorists.

Dick Cheney, June 2, 2009:

“On the question of whether or not Iraq was involved in 9/11, there was never any evidence to prove that,” Cheney said during an interview Monday night with Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren.

I’m so glad we got that cleared up.

Look, I don’t know why liberal blogs are feeling like Cheney has been caught in some kind of “gotcha” moment here.

The problem is that Cheney has always said that Iraq was a state sponsor of terror, so whether Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11 or not didn’t matter because he was still dangerous. But what the national conversation has always been about is whether Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. When the country readied for war in Iraq, when we invaded Iraq, when we lost our blood and treasure in Iraq, it was always understood that this was in retaliation for 9/11.

Cheney has repeatedly said that Saddam as a "state sponsor of terror" and "Saddam as involved in 9/11 attacks" are two totally separate issues and that "people have consistently tried to confuse them." Gee, I wonder why that is. Maybe because the Bush Administration wanted the two to be confused, perhaps? I mean, come on, already.

I have no doubt that Cheney, President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and the rest were purposely being ambiguous on this point, and the media was too gah-gah over the swell of manhood stuffed into flightsuits that they played along. Now that it looks like some indictments might be in order and an Administration’s legacy is at stake, Cheney and co. want to have it both ways, to say look, we never said there was a definitive connection between Saddam and 9/11. That may be technically true but you sure as hell implied it, and you did so on purpose so you could take out your oil rival in the Middle East. And the media played right along.

The Iraq War has always been about the money and Republican power hoarding. Hell, most if not all wars are always about the money and power hoarding. But this one has been brazenly, openly, shamefully about the money and maintaining a Republican majority. You can see the loudest rhetoric linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11 came before the 2004 and 2006 elections. If you read the transcripts carefully, especially Cheney’s Sept. 10, 2006 appearance on Meet The Press, it becomes patently obvious. Cheney is dancing on the head of a pin in this MTP appearance, (and I always thought Tim Russert did superb job of grilling Cheney in this particular interview), and even he seems to be having trouble balancing his arguments.

The Horror of Abu Ghraib, Revisited

The Abu Ghraib photos President Obama has suppressed allegedly show prisoners being sexually violated by U.S. troops

At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.

Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.

Another apparently shows a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts.

Detail of the content emerged from Major General Antonio Taguba, the former army officer who conducted an inquiry into the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq.

Allegations of rape and abuse were included in his 2004 report but the fact there were photographs was never revealed. He has now confirmed their existence in an interview with the Daily Telegraph.

The graphic nature of some of the images may explain the US President’s attempts to block the release of an estimated 2,000 photographs from prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan despite an earlier promise to allow them to be published.

Maj Gen Taguba, who retired in January 2007, said he supported the President’s decision, adding: “These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency.

“I am not sure what purpose their release would serve other than a legal one and the consequence would be to imperil our troops, the only protectors of our foreign policy, when we most need them, and British troops who are trying to build security in Afghanistan.

“The mere description of these pictures is horrendous enough, take my word for it.”

Will there be no end to the horror that is the Iraq War, the insanity of our misguided exercise there, the fact that everything we've touched has turned to shit? Will no one be held accountable for this black spot on our country's name?

And from the Memory Hole, Rush Limbaugh’s justification of the Abu Ghraib abuses, saying troops were “just blowing off steam”:

"This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation, and we're going to ruin people's lives over it, and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You [ever] heard of need to blow some steam off?"

Not like this, buddy. Not like this.

War Is Over!!!

According to right-wing pundits, that is. For example:

• Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, April 17, 2009:

The Obama administration is spending money like none other in peacetime history.

• Andrew Biggs, American Enterprise Institute, April 15, 2009:

This new spending, dedicated to healthcare, energy, education, and other areas, is 14 percent above the 19.9 percent average during the Bush years and higher than any peacetime presidential administration in U.S. history.

• Diana Furchtgott-Roth , Hudson Institute, March 26, 2009:

On Tuesday, Mr. Obama said that “this budget is inseparable from recovery, because it lays the foundation for secure and lasting prosperity.” In fact, what it does is lay the foundation for unprecedented levels of peacetime deficits and government spending. That’s not an "investment" that the American people need to make.

• Karl Rove, Feb. 12, 2009:

The bill he signs will create a raft of new programs and be the biggest peacetime spending increase in American history, which will give us larger deficits and create pressure to raise taxes.

• Wall Street Journal Op-Ed, January 8, 2009:

The looming red ink is unlike anything in U.S. peacetime history.

[...]

Yet somehow none of those same voices are objecting now that the government is spending its way into deficits that are so large they dwarf any during peacetime in U.S. history.

Want more? There’s lots.

Funny that a bunch of conservative hawks who were so anxious to drag this nation into war six years ago, then pilloried Democrats for not sufficiently supporting the troops at every politically convenient turn, are now so quick to forget that America is still engaged in not one but TWO wars.

Hello?

It's also uncanny how the word “peacetime” shows up in relation to any discussion of the Obama budget .... almost as if these right-wing pundits were working off the same crib-sheet. Gee, ya think? My money says this came straight off the Republican leadership’s desk.

Here’s a thought for the conservative thinkers out there. We could save more than $10 billion a month if we pulled put of Iraq and Afghanistan now. Let’s call their bluff on this, shall we? A week and a half ago Obama requested $83.4 billion more for the wars, which is supposed to last us another eight months. If you're so hot for fiscal belt-tightening, well, I think I just found a big pile of money that we could save.

President Bush never put his war spending in the budget. He hid it under the peanut shell called “emergency supplemental appropriations.” Again, this is another dishonest right-wing ploy designed to reinforce the stereotype that Democrats are “big spenders” whereas Republicans are supposedly fiscally responsible. Hilarious.

Reality is a lot different, of course, but in the world of manufactured Republican talking points, the only “truth” that matters is what sticks in the American subconscious. And that's why we keep seeing the word "peacetime" thrown about in relation to the Obama budget, as if we still didn't have a couple hundred thousand troops deployed overseas. As if we're comparing Obama's budget to, you know, Reagan's. It's the height of dishonesty.

You guys really think this is going to work? You think we're that stupid?

Do You Know What Today Is?

It’s not just Feel Good Friday.

It’s not just the first day of spring. It’s not just the birthdays of Rosie O’Donnell, Matthew Broderick or Kevin Federline.

It is the sixth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, an event which has gone unrecognized by pretty much everybody save lefty bloggers. Even the New York Times has let the day go unmentioned (though to be fair they published a picture from an anti-war protest yesterday).

For those who have forgotten:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. and coalition forces launched missiles and bombs at targets in Iraq as Thursday morning dawned in Baghdad, including a "decapitation attack" aimed at Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and other top members of the country's leadership.

President Bush announced the start of the military campaign against Iraq shortly afterward in a televised address from the White House.

"American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger," Bush said.

Administration sources said the decision to strike came after a nearly four-hour meeting in the Oval Office in which CIA Director George Tenet and Pentagon officials told Bush they could lose the "target of opportunity" if they didn't act quickly; Bush then gave the green light.

That’s not all he gave them. He also gave them Medals of Freedom--about as obscene as AIG executives giving themselves $165 million in bonuses today.

I think back to this day six years ago and all I can feel is a deep shame--and I was one of the ones stridently opposed to the war. I remember seeing “shock and awe” on the television, the Baghdad night sky illuminated by bombs and rockets. I felt sick, because I knew it was all wrong. For one thing, the media was enjoying it far too much.

I remember the breathless excitement of embedded reporters covering the invasion as if it were a trip to Disney World. They had fancy new lingo like “decapitation attack” to go with their fancy new flak jackets and helmets.

Stuff like this:

In fact, I'm afraid that whatever I cover as a reporter in the future will never match the adrenaline-induced, heart-in-my-throat sense of anticipation that I felt while embedded with the U.S. Marines on their march from Kuwait to Baghdad. And I suspect it will be very rare that I feel so close to the center of a story of this magnitude.

Of course, it’s hard to have perspective when you’re so close to the center. Maybe we'd have had less fawning news coverage had the embeds not been living out little boy fantasies of being the romantic war correspondent.

And I realize this isn't entirely fair. Plenty of journalists did their jobs courageously and admirably, despite extraordinarily difficult circumstances.

Yesterday, Editor & Publisher dug into the pre-war memory hole and came up with some interesting nuggets of their own:

It was fascinating to re-read Judith Miller previewing how we would go about locating those WMDs she was so sure Saddam possessed. And Thomas Friedman stating again that he backed the war but (I did not recall this) also hitting Bush hard for not gaining enough allies or doing the right diplomatic work. The Times' editorial also criticized Bush on this but, unlike Friedman, opposed war at that time. Plus: the complete text of Bush's final pre-war speech to the nation, where he gave Saddam and his kids 48 hours to get out of Dodge -- and repeated the false claims that the Iraqi ruler had WMD and helped al-Qaeda.

You may find this amusing, from the Times' Jim Rutenberg: "Yesterday, the Media Research Center, a conservative group, released a report criticizing ABC News for what it called liberal bias. The group said ABC News was the worst 'offender' among the networks for 'channeling Iraqi propaganda,' 'sanitizing radical protesters' and 'championing France and the U.N. over the U.S.'''

On the other hand: There was Paul Krugman.

In his regular column, he hit nearly every nail on the head in predicting what would follow. Yet consider the scorn he has had to endure from so many in the years since, who got it nearly 100% wrong.

Interestingly, those who got it nearly 100% wrong are still, for the most part, writing columns and appearing on television.

There are a few exceptions. Judith Miller, who single-handedly did more to drive America to war than any journalist this side of Fox News, was last seen on television fighting construction of a CVS drugstore in Sag Habor. But all of the rest of the pundits, columnists and opinion makers who applauded the war still have their jobs, some of them even got promotions.

Those who criticized the media’s enthusiastic war boosterism--folks like Ashleigh Banfield and Phil Donohue--have disappeared from our TV screens.


And six years later, we’re still at war. I know it’s kinda hard to tell and all, since news bureaus packed up their gear and left Iraq once the news started turning bad. I’m sure everyone would just as soon we forget all about it, but see, there’s still a large number of troops over there, six years down the pike. Only yesterday the Army announced it would stop its "stop-loss” program, but all anyone on the TV news could talk about was AIG. I know, it’s hard to walk and chew gum at the same time, it really is. You folks at MSNBC and CNN have my sympathies.

So here we are, six years later, still embroiled in a war that was supposed to be over in months.

I just thought it was worth mentioning.

Bush Giving Freedom Medals To Iraq War Buddies

[UPDATE]:

Just found out on Countdown that this is likely the reason the Obama family was forced to seek lodging in a hotel: John Howard is the one staying at Blair House, traditional residence of president-elects and their families before their inauguration.

I'm sure no one could have anticipated scheduling this medal ceremony for January 13 would have interfered with something else important happening in the middle of the month. Sheesh.

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Oh goodie, another BS ceremony President Bush can preside over:

Blair gets US medal as era ends

The award by President Bush of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Tony Blair marks not only the close alliance between the two men but the end of an era of British-American relations.

The former British prime minister will receive his medal, the highest civilian honour given by the United States, at the White House on 13 January.

Also receiving the medal will be the former Australian prime minister John Howard and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe - also allies in Mr Bush's "war on terror" and the war in Iraq.

Whew it just doesn’t get more pathetic than that. A week before the inauguration of President-elect Obama, Mr. Bush seems bound and determined to stage one last piece of kabuki theater for the handful of remaining sycophants and supporters who still believe the Iraq War was a splendid idea.

From the Memory Hole, here are some other Iraq War players who got their Medal of Freedom:






Good times, good times.

If Only We Had A War Of Our Own They Could Cover

MediaBistro reports the cable news media is dispatching reporters to the Israel-Gaza border.

Meanwhile, over in Iraq:

TV News Winds Down Operations on Iraq War

Quietly, as the United States presidential election and its aftermath have dominated the news, America’s three broadcast network news divisions have stopped sending full-time correspondents to Iraq.

“The war has gone on longer than a lot of news organizations’ ability or appetite to cover it,” said Jane Arraf, a former Baghdad bureau chief for CNN who has remained in Iraq as a contract reporter for The Christian Science Monitor.

Time for a new war I guess. The old one was a ratings dud.