The Re Collection

Greg Palast has the dirt:
Bush Didn’t Bungle Iraq, You Fools
THE MISSION WAS INDEED ACCCOMPLISHED

And you know, it’s so obvious, we should have known all along…

Courtesy of Think Progress, an appalling list of the lies, attrocities and greed that is the Bush Adminstration.

Bill in Portland Maine notes a very special anniversary

It’s always yellow. Sunshine yellow. Blinding sundress yellow. Canary yellow. Yellow Elephant yellow. Or as I like to call it…pee-your-pants yellow.

Did you know that there are colors besides yellow? It’s true. There’s “Blue,” which is GUARDED (general risk of terror attacks). And there’s “Green,” which is LOW (low risk of terror attacks). But right now we’re at “Yellow,” which is ELEVATED (significant risk of terror attacks). And, except for a brief moment when we stuck our collective toe into “Orange,” which is HIGH (high risk of terrorist attacks with a 30% chance of showers), we’ve been at yellow every day since the system was put in place.

Chug! Chug! Chug! Tooot! Tooot!

This morning I caught part of Richard Dreyfuss giving a kick-ass speech to the National Press Club (which doesn’t have the transcript available for non-members).

I have it on good authority that Dreyfuss is a pompous jerk to, say, people like wait staff at posh LA eateries who grow up to be event promoters in Florida. But, if I might take the liberty of speaking on behalf of all service personnel everywhere: all forgiven, now, for this speech, which was an impassioned plea for understanding, accountability and for saving this nation before it is too late.

He should run for president; unlike the other actor who did so, he was once on the Hollywood A-list.

There are causes worth fighting for even if you know that you will lose,” Dreyfuss said during a speech at the National Press Club. “Unless you are willing to accept torture as part of a normal American political lexicon, unless you are willing to accept that leaving the Geneva Convention is fine and dandy, if you accept the expansion of wiretapping as business as usual, the only way to express this now is to embrace the difficult and perhaps embarrassing process of impeachment.

If any reader knows where the full transcript of this speech might be accessed, please let me know.

Jeanne of Body and Soul exposes yet another disgusting example of the immaturity — and counter-effectiveness — of the little boys who are running things in this country. Just pathetic. And 39% of people in this country think they are just the keenist kids on the playground.

There was Plame-gate. There was Abu Graib. There was Downing Street. There was Katrina. There was illegal spying.

But some astute people think that the shot Dick Cheney took at a pen-raised quail on Saturday — that landed in a companion’s face — is going to the be the story that comes to epitomize the Bush-Cheney administration as, truly, in every sense of the words, “The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight”.

It’s because this story is a perfect metaphor for this administration’s foreign and domestic policy. It says everything you need to know about Dick Cheney personally, and the way this entire administration operates.

And the press does this all the time: they run with little things that display flaws in character: Al Gore’s “Internet” quote to highlight his weakness for exaggeration; Kerry’s “Voted for it before I voted against it” to highlight his weakness for equivocation.

In this case, we have Cheney and the entire Bush Administration foreign and domestic policy in a nutshell. Especially in Iraq and Katrina.

Read the whole thing for maximux satisfaction.

If I wasn’t already committed to going to Oklahoma next week, I’d probably go to this geeky extravaganza.

“We don’t need no stinkin’ intelligence!”

In evaluating the danger that non-state terrorists represent, and in assessing the danger that a potentially nuclear Iran might constitute, commentators often utilize the “rational actor” concept as a means of analysis. They usually argue that non-state terrorists are especially dangerous because they are not constrained by the same “rational” factors that tend to inhibit state actors. And many commentators now use the same kind of argument about the allegedly “unacceptable” threat represented by a nuclear Iran: Iran’s leader is crazy, they say. It’s impossible to predict what he’ll do. The kinds of restraints that affect “normal” people are inoperative in his case.

So I have a question. In view of everything we know about what the Bush administration was told about Iraq, and considering the endless warnings they received about every aspect of an invasion and its aftermath — all of which they entirely disregarded and completely failed to plan for in advance — and noting that all of this is confirmed by new evidence almost daily, with this WaPo story being only the latest example, who exactly is it who’s not behaving like a “rational actor”?

This is why the standard objections to the likelihood of U.S. military action against Iran are of highly questionable persuasiveness: they assume that this administration is behaving rationally. Is it? Consider the evidence, and reach your own conclusion.

Educators face blowback for protesting Iraq war in schools

Just over three years ago, as the nation readied for war with Iraq, elementary school teacher Deb Mayer stood in front of her class and uttered the word that would get her blacklisted from her profession.

It was a word that got her deemed “unpatriotic” by an angry parent. A word that led to her termination from the Bloomington, Indiana school district. A word that got her labeled as a potential sex offender and ruined her chances of finding work elsewhere.

That word was “peace.”

From soj at Booman Tribune

What nobody talked about was all the other DSP programs, numbers 2-999. The ones that are not strictly focused on international calls. I’m talking about programs like data mining browser and search engine usage (DSP2), surveillance of peace and anti-war groups (DSP3), data mining emails (DSP4), using JPEN and other “total information awareness” type databases (DSP5), using computers to data mine domestic phone calls (DSP6), passing along NSA information on Americans (illegal) to other agencies like the FBI (DSP7), etc.

The Senate hearings were interesting, that’s for sure, but they were largely useless. Gonzales was there to talk about DSP1 and only DSP1 and since it involves people reasonably believed to be Al-Qaeda terrorists, the Congress is going to do nothing about it. The American people don’t care if the government is spying on Al-Qaeda (even in America), in fact they support it wholeheartedly. I finally figured out why the administration is stumping on the issue - it’s because they’re only talking about DSP1 and it sounds great. Who could really be opposed to spying on “known” terrorists?

DSP1 is just one tiny “tool” used by the administration and it is by far the most acceptable one to the American people. When the New York Times revealed that there were DSP’s, the administration focused on DSP1 and only on DSP1 and framed it in such a way that only petty sticklers to the law could object. This is a war after all!

Meanwhile, some senior Republicans are wagging their finger over the affair, but nothing will come of it. Unless further leaks occur with even more aggregious law-breaking — like something involving sex. With few if any exceptions, they will uphold the king’s perogative.

“What Have We Done?”, a question that will ever haunt those who have gone to Iraq on our behalf, due to the greed and corruption of this administration. This story from Electronic Iraq includes fantastic quotes from the vets who now work for peace, including Camilo Mejia, a truly heroic human being that I am proud to know.

It’s pretty pathetic when former intel officers have to explain in detail to the world something as obvious as the fact that it’s a bad thing to expose the identity of a spy, but apparently that’s what it’s come to.

I never thought I’d be rooting for the CIA — see my earlier post on this as a reminder of just what the CIA is all about — but it the agency is half as pissed off at Bushco as I am, then I’d say the neocons may soon be begging Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald to lock them up for their own personal safety.

Maxspeak warns about throwing around the accusation”treason” too lightly, and he’s right. But then he says something else worth remembering as this tangled web continues to unwind:

[…] the CIA doesn’t deserve any good housekeeping seal of approval. Its personnel have committed numerous crimes over the decades. These crimes have been in furtherance of an underlying foreign policy directed at destroying or marginalizing secular liberal and radical social movements in the developing world. The weakness of these movements today explains in great part the prominence of Islamic fundamentalism, not to mention an assortment of autocratic, kleptomaniacal regimes. The latter we call our friends, part of the freedom movement, defined as any government willing to play ball with any current lunatic undertakings of the U.S. government. Of course, sometimes they go bad and require U.S. military invasions to set things right.

[…]

A new survey shows that, 7-1, Republicans think that the US and its allies should respond to the London terrorist attacks with military force (one might wonder where to bomb, but one GOP Rep. has the answer to that).

Since its been rather clearly demonstrated that our show of military force in Iraq has only furthered the operations of the terrorists, leading to the death of too many Americans and untold innocent civilians, I’m just asking.

When I was a teenager, and not allowed to swear or ever express any negativity at home, in my pent-up rage at just about everything, I developed a mega-curse I would rattle off whenever I got the opportunity. It was private, since I knew even then that it was kind of an embarrassing juvenile amalgram of every bad word an overprotected suburban teenybopper might know in the late sixties. However, it got ingrained, and even though I went on to have a better than average swear-word vocabulary, I still find “God-dammit-to-fucking-shit” coming out of my mouth — all one word, in one quick breath — when I am particularly pissed off about some outrage or injustice.

So that’s what I said when I read this.

Steve Soto at The Left Coaster:

Pentagon Report On Guantanamo Destroys The “Few Bad Apples” Defense

A just-released Pentagon report […] shows that the tactics used at Abu Ghraib weren’t isolated to that facility, but in fact were field-tested months earlier at Guantanamo with Rumsfeld’s and Alberto Gonzales’s support. So we have confirmation that the tactics that Major General Geoffrey Miller instituted against Iraqi civilians at Abu Ghraib were in fact first put into use months before as standard Bush Administration operating procedure.

We knew that, but thanks, Rummy and friends, for finally putting out the truth on the matter .. a little late, and of course “announced” as quietly as possible.

But Steve concludes:

Look, it is one thing in the aftermath of 9/11 to use such tactics against Taliban and suspected Al Qaeda operatives as an outgrowth of the Afghanistan war and our anti-terror efforts. It is another thing altogether to think that those same tactics are morally and legally transferable for use against Iraqi civilians during an occupation.

I could not disagree more.

(more…)

Amazing letter to the editor in today’s Oklahoman. (Not the usual uninformed anti-liberal rant, which in itself is notable.)

Volunteer force is floundering

Having served in the military recently, I believe I can shed some light on the questions posed by William R. Melton (Your Views, July 10). He wonders if our fighting men can maintain good morale and continue to fight under these conditions. They can’t. The morale of our enlisted men is already low. Most of the young enlisted men who do the majority of the fighting are tired of the lies from this administration. They know they are not defending America’s freedom; instead, they are wrapped up in a personal vendetta gone bad.

Will the volunteer force crash and burn? It already has! I would never allow one of my children or other family members to volunteer to serve in the military under its current leadership. I’d try to talk anyone out of volunteering to serve in an organization that’s governed recklessly and based on fiction.

Michael Marsh, Oklahoma City

BTW, Oklahoman editors: I think you mean “foundering.”

128,000 Iraqi civilian casualties

An Iraqi humanitarian organization is reporting that 128,000 Iraqis have been killed since the U.S. invasion began in March 2003.

[…]

55 percent of those killed have been women and children aged 12 and under.

[…]

The 128,000 figure only includes those whose relatives have been informed of their deaths and does not include those were abducted, assassinated or simply disappeared.

Hussein was a brutal tyrant and killed many of his own people. But did he, with nothing but evil intent, kill at the pace that the US is managing, supposedly with the best interests of the Iraqis as our motivation.

I doubt it.

Ed Harriman of the London Review of Books examines the flow of money into and out of Iraq since the US invasion. It’s a long tale of incompetency, malfeasance and greed. The Cliff Notes version: money was — and is — so mismanaged that in essence, US taxpayers (and Iraqi reconstruction money originally from the Oil for Food program) built and sustain the insurgency.

But don’t forget: Republicans are good with money.

I watched a hearing (conducted only by Democrats) on C-SPAN addressing the ways in which Halliburton and its subsidiaries are bilking the American taxpayer, while abusing service members. Really almost too vile to believe: one former foodworker said freshness-date expired, and even scrapnal-tainted food was fed to the soldiers.

Halliburton’s Iraq deals described as contract abuse - Yahoo! News
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A top U.S. Army procurement official said on Monday Halliburton’s deals in
Iraq were the worst example of contract abuse she had seen as
Pentagon auditors flagged over $1 billion of potential overcharges by the Texas-based firm.

Michael at Americablog expresses the universal cry of the left as we watch the US decay from the inside.

How can anyone take the US seriously when it claims its fighting for freedom and democracy? Bush supports a military coup in Venezuela because he finds the democratically elected leader annoying? Our allies in the Middle East are Saudia Arabia (the number one financial backer of terrorism around the world) and Pakistan (the number one spreader of nuclear weapon material and know-how)? And now UZBEKISTAN?