George Will Vs. The GOP On Defense

Feb 10th, 2012

A few days ago, conservative columnist George Will penned a withering critique of current Republican messaging on defense. He begins with nothing less than a rebuke of the entire Iraq misadventure:

"Hours — not months, not weeks, hours — after the last U.S. troops left Iraq, vicious political factionalism and sectarian violence intensified. Many Republicans say Barack Obama's withdrawal — accompanied by his administration's foolish praise of Iraq's "stability" — has jeopardized what has been achieved there. But if it cannot survive a sunrise without fraying, how much of an achievement was it?

Few things so embitter a nation as squandered valor; hence Americans, with much valor spent there, want Iraq to master its fissures. But with America in the second decade of its longest war, the probable Republican nominee is promising to extend it indefinitely." EMPHASIS OURS

In fact, all of the GOP contenders (with the exception of Ron Paul) are now in a mad dash to outdo one another in promising more wars, longer wars and bigger wars. The situation is out of hand and these positions are dramatically at odds with the will of the people.

War Criminal Squirms

Oct 7th, 2011

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had a helluva time dealing with al-Jazeera's Abderrahim Foukara this week.

Via Mediaite:

"Foukara asked Rumsfeld to elaborate on how he saw the policies in Iraq, namely, whether he felt "responsible for the killing of innocent Iraqis." The mere formulation of the question resulted in much crosstalk, with Rumsfeld arguing that Foukara’s assertions were "fundamentally false" and asking him whether he "want[s] to yell or do you want to do an interview?" Foukara attempted to rephrase his question: "Do you think the numbers of US troops that you went into Iraq with did absolve you from the responsibility of tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis killed by the coalition and those criminals you talked about?" He implored Rumsfeld to "give me a straight answer."

Tweet Of The Year Nominee

Sept 30th, 2011

Talk about telling it like it is... A major HT to @OsborneInk

It's Still Torture

May 6th, 2011

Yesterday, I reposted an old column as a little push back against the outright liars and revisionists from the Bush era who are hyping the "torture got Osama" meme. It's totally unsurprising that FOX is parroting their talking points and repeating their falsehoods.



Andrew Sullivan kept up the pressure as he has been for some time with an analysis of why it's so important to the torturers to defend themselves now:

"So let us be very clear. The war criminal Dick Cheney presided over the worst lapse in national security since Pearl Harbor, resulting in the deaths of more than 3,000 people. This rank incompetent failed to get bin Laden at Tora Bora, and then dragged the US on false pretenses into a war in Iraq, empowering Iran's dictatorship, and killing another 5,000 more Americans on a wild goose chase. He presided over the deaths of more than 8,000 Americans, and tens of thousands of Iraqis during his criminally incompetent years in office.

On the other hand, the man who abolished torture as soon as he took office, Barack Obama, captured and killed Osama bin Laden, and captured a massive trove of intelligence, more than two years later. No Americans died in the operation.

What on earth are we debating? How have these delusional maniacs managed to even get us onto this turf? Because they have to. Because when the full truth of these past years are fully in focus, they will be revealed as some of the greatest criminals ever to have wielded power in America."

And We Can't Say ANYTHING

Feb 31st, 2011

Abuse by U.S. Forces Abu Ghraib 2003

There was a time when reportage like this from Raw Story about a puppet-state could legitimately be met very differently by the U.S. Government. Not anymore. Now that we have become what we beheld, what can we say? 

"BAGHDAD — Security forces linked to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki are operating a "secret detention site" and elite teams are torturing detainees at a separate facility, Human Rights Watch charged on Tuesday.

The New York-based watchdog's claims come a week after the Los Angeles Times reported some detainees at a prison in the Iraqi capital's heavily fortified Green Zone had been abused and held without charge for up to two years, charges Baghdad denies."

The So-Called Liberal Media

Dec 29th, 2010

Here is a tale of two videos. Well, one video really. It is shown in two different ways and to very, very different ends. It is but a single example of our major news organization's complicity in keeping the public uniformed. It is also typical. The first media embed is from CBS News coverage of a few seconds from the helicopter gunship recording that put Wikileaks on the map. Watch please...



Did you see the obvious war crime caught on tape? Neither did most people who watched good old "liberal" CBS for information on the release of the video.

Now, please watch the second video...



The CBS coverage is questionable in the extreme. The highly respected Namir Noor Eldeen is not mentioned by name. There is no mention that the American soldiers mis-identified a 10" camera lens as an RPG-7, an item roughly 3 feet longer when unloaded. There is no mention that the soldiers involved lied and stipulated that it was a "battle" with insurgents. There is no mention that there were children on the scene when the helicopter gunships engaged a second time in an attempt to kill the wounded (a war crime under Common Article 3 of The Geneva Conventions) and those who attempted to provide them assistance (a war crime under Common Articles 9, 12 and 15 of The Geneva Conventions).

The money quote from the network's 90 second story:
"Now it appears from the tape that at least some of those hit on the ground were unarmed, but a journalist who was in the general area that same days says it is important for all of us to remember it was a hectic, violent and uneasy day."

Excuse me? The second wave of unprovoked fire wounded rescuers and two children almost killing them. It is as clear a record of a war crime that we have seen here at home from our Iraq misadventure. Yet, CBS chose to carry the water for our military in it's attempts to cover up the incident and diminish public anger.

The network should be ashamed. To be fair, guys like Murrow and Cronkite wouldn't be caught dead working for them now. And that's the way it is.

At Home And Abroad

Dec 22nd, 2010

Josh Stieber's Principled Stand

Dec 22nd, 2010

Writing in Slate, Kathryn Schulz interviews 22 year old Iraq War Veteran turned Conscientious Objector Josh Stieber. It is a dramatic window into the soul of a young man who has experienced first hand the difference between our purported values and our actions. I can't recommend more highly that everyone reads this.

"After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a 13-year-old kid named Josh Stieber vowed that as soon as he was old enough, he would join the military. His goal: to help protect his country and spread its values of freedom and democracy around the world. With the war still on when he graduated from high school, Stieber enlisted in 2006 and was deployed to Baghdad in 2007. A devout Christian and a staunch political conservative, Stieber became troubled by the gap between the values he was told the military embodied and those he experienced on the ground. Partway through his deployment, he realized that his perspective had changed so drastically that he would rather go to prison than remain in the military. Instead, he learned about, applied for, and obtained Conscientious Objector status."

From the interview...

"Was there a tipping point when you realized you had to get out?

One night, I was guarding a prisoner with a friend of mine, a guy I had gone to church with before we had deployed. So we're sitting there and my friend starts making threatening statements about what he wants to do to the prisoner. It wasn't too uncommon to abuse prisoners, but I didn't feel like it was right, so I asked my friend about the American ideals that we grew up hearing about. I said, "Why would you do that to this guy? Isn't one of the values that we were raised with is that somebody's innocent until proven guilty?" My friend said, "No, this guy is Iraqi, he's part of the problem, he's guilty, and here's what I want to do to him." That wasn't unusual. It had gotten to the point where most people blamed the entire Iraqi population and said that if they would just fix their own country, we could go home.

I thought back to all the stuff I'd heard sitting next to this guy in church, and I asked him, "Well, even if he is guilty, what about the idea of loving our enemies and returning evil with good and turning the other cheek? How do you reconcile all those teachings?" My friend said, "I think that Jesus would have turned his cheek once or twice but he never would have let anyone punk him around." Hearing him say it that way just made it sound so ridiculous. Here we supposedly had faith in this guy who very clearly was punked around, and ended up living and dying with sacrificial love. From then on, I really had to face the fact that I couldn't have it both ways. Either I was going to try to find this inward reality where sacrificial love was possible for a higher goal, or I was going to let self-defense be my ultimate value."

The War You Don't See

Dec 19th, 2010

Below is the first portion of John Pilger's The War You Don't See. It is a gut-wrenching indictment of the failure of modern journalism and it's complicity in permawar.