My girlfriend kept asking me this morning what this news was about Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize. I have to admit I was completely stunned when I watched the newscasts covering this story. For a guy who' s only been in office 9 months that's quite an astonishing feat! That puts him in some pretty rarefied company.

Now, I know these GOP Obama haters will be falling all over themselves today on the wing-nut media circuits claiming how Obama "apologizing" to the world is what won him this distinguished honor. For sure, Beck & Limbaugh & Hannity & O'Reilly are all "in studio" right now preparing the right swing smear spin on this shocking news! I would have paid good money to see the looks on their faces when they heard about this!

But frankly, I am willing to accept The Nobel Committee at its word when they say Mr. Obama was awarded this humble honor because: of the changes in the global mood that have occurred because of President Obama's calls for peace and international cooperation while admitting to initiatives that have not yet proven they will work, such as trying to reduce the world stock of nuclear arms, and mitigating American conflicts with Muslim nations and fighting climate control change.

Still, this has got to raise the war mongering hairs on the necks of a lot of Republicans and Neo-Cons. This Obama feller is becoming their biggest worstest nightmare ever! They must be asking, "can his ego even fit on Air Force One anymore?"

But Obama winning this highly coveted prize once again creates a stark comparison between his agenda and that of our former President - George W. Bush. Frankly, I rather liked Bush and his folksy expressions. But he left some really bad stuff behind him.

You could not find one single American who was against the US retaliating and bombing the crap out of Afghanistan in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11/01. Every American, regardless of political party, race, ethnicity, or philosophy supported Mr Bush as we set out to destroy The Taliban, capture Bin Laden, and eradicate Al Quaeda.

The problem is we have failed at all 3 - primarily because the Neo-Cons were never really interested in Afghanistan per se. They saw going into Afghanistan as a prelude to the real prize - Iraq! Today most Americans want us out of Afghanistan.

Here we are nearly nine years later, mired in what has degenerated into the longest war in US history. Nearly 5,000 of our brave troops have died for this nonsense. I keep asking myself: with all this Neo-Con love for wars and spreading "freedom" - how come the US military needs so many more troops? You would think they would've all signed up by now!

I often wonder what would have happened if Bush & the Neo-Cons had kept their eye on the ball and went into Afghanistan with "overwhelming force" as Powell and General Shenshecki advised? It's a bit ironic that Powell resigned and Shenshecki got fired. Would we still be there if we had followed that advice? Would we have captured Bin Laden? We will never know. But I do know that is what we should have tried to do from day one but we didn't and so here we are today.

I don't know if President Obama "deserves" The Nobel Peace Prize - that's not my line of work. But I do know that no more drastic picture could ever be painted when comparing the former and the current American administrations. I will never forget this day. Neither will Limbaugh, and the rest of the Obama hating media nuts!

So let's just sit back today, kick up our feet and enjoy the right wing Obama hating media nut-rage circus that is surely to unfold! Popcorn anyone?

Keith debunks the talking points memo put out by the Bush administration trying to rewrite his legacy.

EXCLUSIVE:

A joint venture between Royal Dutch Shell and Iraq's state-owned South Gas Co. could give Shell a 25-year monopoly on production and exports of natural gas in much of southern Iraq - the biggest foreign role in Iraq's oil and gas sector in four decades.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind joins us for part two of an interview on his new book, The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism. Suskind reports that in 2003 the White House ordered the CIA to forge and disseminate false intelligence documents linking al-Qaeda and Iraq. While much of the attention on the book has focused on the forged letter, Suskind also reveals that the Bush administration and the British government knew prior to the war that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. We also speak to Rep. John Conyers, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, which is investigating some of the explosive findings in Suskind's book.

[includes rush transcript]

A blockbuster new book from investigative journalist Ron Suskind adds another revelation to the growing canon demonstrating the lengths to which President Bush and members of his administration lied, misled and deceived the American people to pursue its invasion of Iraq.

In Iraq, some prisoners/detainees are kept in wooden crates known as "prisoner boxes," so I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the US Central Command asking for the following:

"Vanity Fair (Feb 2005 issue) has reported the existence of wood "prisoner boxes" being used by the US military in facilities in and around Baghdad. They are used to hold individual prisoners and detainees.

"I hereby request all photographs of these boxes, including empty boxes as well as boxes holding prisoners and detainees."

Around nine and a half months later, CentCom responded by sending the three photographs on this page.

You are seeing the photos exactly as they were sent to me - as black and white printouts on standard printer paper, with creases from being folded into thirds. Two of the photos are extremely blurry and pixelated.

Considering that the average summer temperature in Baghdad is 111 F, and that temps can easily go above 120 F [source], it's hard to imagine what it's like to be inside these boxes.

And then there's the other side...

AN ARTICLE OF IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH

INTRODUCED BY CONGRESSMAN DENNIS J. KUCINICH

JULY 10, 2008

Resolved, that President George W. Bush be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and that the following Article of Impeachment be exhibited to the United States Senate:

An Article of Impeachment exhibited by the House of Representatives of the United States of America in the name of itself and of the people of the United States of America, in maintenance and support of its impeachment against President George W. Bush for high crimes and misdemeanors.

ARTICLE ONE

DECEIVING CONGRESS WITH FABRICATED THREATS OF IRAQ WMDs TO FRAUDULENTLY OBTAIN SUPPORT FOR AN AUTHORIZATION OF THE USE OF MILITARY FORCE AGAINST IRAQ.

The Honorable John Conyers, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, is the keynote speaker at the National Lawyers Guild National Convention held October 31 - November 4 in Washington, D.C. The National Lawyers Guild on Friday unanimously and enthusiastically passed a resolution supporting the impeachment of Bush and Cheney.

Americans have had a long love affair with carbon burning (burning of vegetation, wood, coal, gas and oil). It can be estimated that about 1 million Americans die each year from carbon burning and related violence.

Decent Americans who believe that "all men are created equal and have an unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" and that "you cannot walk by on the other side" have an obligation to ACT, to do something as good citizens about this catastrophe befalling about 1 million of their countrymen every year. In doing so they can save themselves from carbon burning, Zionism and war - and also help save the world from the currently acute nuclear, greenhouse and poverty threats. I have indeed illustrated this article with my painting "Terra" (for further amplification of the image and the discussion see "War on Terra, Climate Criminals. "Terra" painting" : http://mwcnews.net/content/view/15671/42/ )

The breakdown of this carbon-burning, Zionism and imperialism-driven American Holocaust (with documentation) is as follows:

1. Smoking

Tobacco use is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States. Cigarette smoking causes an estimated 438,000 deaths, or about 1 of every 5 deaths, each year. This estimate includes approximately 38,000 deaths from second hand smoke exposure, and one must note that the death toll will go on for decades to come (see: http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/Factsheets/tobacco_related_mortality.htm ).

2. Particulate pollution

Back in 1991 it was estimated that 60,000 Americans died annually from particulate pollution from carbon burning (see: http://www.burningissues.org/tables/mortalitytable.html ). People with diabetes, heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis are at increased risk of death when they are exposed to particulate air pollution (soot).

A 2000 study looked at hospital discharges for people with these four types of diseases living in 34 cities between 1985 and 1999 and found that for an increase of 10 micrograms/per cubic meter of PM10 (10 micron diameter particulates) over two years, the risk of dying was increased by 32% for people with diabetes, 28% for people with COPD, 27% in people with congestive heart failure and 22% for people with inflammatory disease such as rheumatoid arthritis or lupus (see: http://www.burningissues.org/soot-death-risk-diseases.html ). However more recent European data (2005) (see: http://www.burningissues.org/bbc-2-2005air-pollution-dea.htm ) indicates that 310,000 people of the European Union (2005 population ) and 33,000 in the UK (2005 population 59.6 million) die each year from particulates, from which one can estimate that for the US (2005 population 300 million) about 300 x 33,000/59.6 = 166,000 Americans die each year from particulate pollutants.

3. Fossil fuel- and coal-based electricity generation

Pollutants from fossil fuel-based electricity generation (as carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, particulates, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, volatile organic components and heavy metals, notably mercury (Hg) ; see: http://dar.csiro.au/…/urbanpollution.html ) kill 170,000 people world-wide each year and cause about 49,000 [2006] "annual coal-based electricity deaths" in the US as compared to 72,000 "total annual fossil fuel-based electricity deaths"in the US (see: http://green-blog.org/2008/06/14/pollutants-from-coal-based-electricity-generation-kill-170000-people-annually/ ). Of course this category may overlap to some extent with that of the "deaths from particulates" item #2.

4. Motor vehicle accidents

Motor vehicle accidents killed 43,354 Americans in 2002 (see Center for Disease Control data: http://www.the-eggman.com/writings/death_stats.html ), noting that motor vehicles are overwhelmingly fossil fuel-dependent. Further, of the only about 15% of fuel burning energy that actually drives a car (the rest being lost as heat), for a 70 kg driver and a 2,000 kg vehicle, only 70/2,000 is used to transport the human being, the overall energy efficiency being 70 x 15%/2,000 = 0.5%. Public transport is vastly more efficient.

5. Domestic American deaths from US-backed Zionist colonization of the Middle East and US Oil Wars

According to outstanding American scholar Professor Noam Chomsky (2007) from the 63-Nobel-Laureate Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (see: http://www.monthlyreview.org/0607nc.htm ) : "The area of greatest concern is the Middle East. There is nothing novel about that. I often have to arrange talks years in advance. If I am asked for a title, I suggest "The Current Crisis in the Middle East." It has yet to fail. There's a good reason: the huge energy resources of the region were recognized by Washington sixty years ago as a "stupendous source of strategic power," the "strategically most important area of the world," and "one of the greatest material prizes in world history." Control over this stupendous prize has been a primary goal of U.S. policy ever since, and threats to it have naturally aroused enormous concern."

This primary goal of US foreign policy has been subverted by the Zionists to the point that outstanding Jewish American investor, philanthropist, Holocaust hero and Holocaust survivor George Soros has criticized the negative effects of the Israel Lobby on US interests (see: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20030 ). Thus Zionist policy has been, in harsh reality, conquest, invasion and domination whereas wiser counsel says that peace, equality and good relations represent a wiser, more humane and better course. According to George Soros (2007) : "I am not sufficiently engaged in Jewish affairs to be involved in the reform of AIPAC; but I must speak out in favor of the critical process that is at the heart of our open society. I believe that a much-needed self-examination of American policy in the Middle East has started in this country; but it can't make much headway as long as AIPAC retains powerful influence in both the Democratic and Republican parties. Some leaders of the Democratic Party have promised to bring about a change of direction but they cannot deliver on that promise until they are able to resist the dictates of AIPAC."

According to top UK MP Michael Meacher (a former Minister in the UK Blair Labor Government) in a must-read analysis entitled "This war on Terrorism is Bogus" (see: http://www.ukwatch.net/article/this_war_on_terrorism_is_bogus ) : "The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the "global war on terrorism" has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agenda – the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project. Is collusion in this myth and junior participation in this project really a proper aspiration for British foreign policy? If there was ever need to justify a more objective British stance, driven by our own independent goals, this whole depressing saga surely provides all the evidence needed for a radical change of course."

American scholars and military experts now seriously question the "official Bush version" of the 9/11 atrocity (see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/23294/42/ ) and 2 top Swiss professors, recently reported in the highest circulation Swiss newspaper "Blick", have given equal credence to the three major hypotheses for who was responsible for the 9/11 atrocity, specifically (1) Muslims in caves, (2) US complicity and (3) US responsibility for 9/11 (see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/22944/26/ ).

Indeed the former 7-year president of Italy, senator for life, intelligence intimate and law professor Francesco Cossiga, reported in a top Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera (2007) asserts that the US CIA and Israeli Mossad did 9/11 to enhance US and Zionist hegemony and that major intelligence agencies were well aware of this (see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/18569/26/ ).

At all events, the oil- abd carbon-burning-linked, US-backed Zionist colonization in the Middle East has cost the US taxpayer $3 trillion (see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/533/26/ ) and the Zionist-backed Bush War on Terror has cost a further $3 trillion in accrual cost for the Iraqi Genocide alone ( 2 million post-invasion excess deaths, 4.5 million refugees). 4,000 US servicemen have been in killed Iraq and 500 killed in Afghanistan (with 30,000 and about 2,500 wounded, respectively, and hundreds of thousands psychologically scarred) (see: http://icasualties.org/oif/ and http://icasualties.org/oef/ ).

According to 2001 Economics Nobel Laureate, Professor Joseph Stiglitz, the Iraq War has "bankrupted" America (see: http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2007/s2236161.htm ) with huge COST implications for preventing death through medical services and preventive medicine in metropolitan America. Thus it has been estimated that 20,000 under-5 year old American infants die avoidably each year http://mwcnews.net/content/view/7102/26/ ); 18,000 Americans die because they lack medical insurance; and according to the US Center for Disease Control in 2004 there were 2.4 million substantially addressable and potentially avoidable deaths of Americans from life style-related disease and violence (see: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/pubs/pubd/hestats/finaldeaths04/finaldeaths04_tables.pdf#2 ) – if 10% could have been saved annually through preventive medicine programs or expert medical intervention then that's 240,000 lines saved each year. .

Summary

An upper estimate from the above items #1-#5 (and ignoring overlaps) is that a deadly combination of Carbon burning, Zionism, Bushism and Mainstream media and political cowardice kills about 438,000 + 166,000 + 72,000 + 43,000 + 240,000 + 1,000 US soldiers = 960,000 or roughly 1 MILLION AMERICANS ANNUALLY.

And yet best American scientific advice from NASA's Dr Hansen and colleagues at NASA's GISS, New York, is to STOP carbon burning - to adopt a policy of "negative CO2 emissions " in response to the current Climate Emergency and to return the atmospheric CO2 from a current dangerous and deadly 385 ppm to no more than 350 ppm (see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/23119/42/ ).

And the UN Charter, International Laws, International Humanitarian Conventions, the American Declaration of Independence all declare in effect: that "all men are created equal and have an unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" and that invasion, occupation, devastation, dispossession, disempowerment and ethnic cleansing of foreign countries is utterly evil, racist and wrong.

Wake up Americans – save yourselves and in so doing save the World.

The Neocon Series is a Newsvine exclusive.

Sixteenth in a Series.

Old man yells at clouds....

McCain. 50 cm x 70 cm. Acrylic on Canvas. 2008. Dennis P. McCann, Paper Dragon Studios.

Previously in the Neocon Series:

Neocon Series: Rumsfeld. A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series: Cheney. A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series: Rice. A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series: Bush. A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series: Rove. A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series: Ashcroft. A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series: Ridge. A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series: Coulter. A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series:Wolfowitz: A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series: Chertoff: A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series: O'Reilly: A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series - Phase Two: Justify (September 11th).

Neocon Series - Phase Two: Invade

Neocon Series - Phase Two: Entrench

Neocon Series - Phase Two: Profit

ARTgallery: Get SmARTer Here!

FALLUJAH, Jun 12 (IPS) - Babies born in Fallujah are showing illnesses and deformities on a scale never seen before, doctors and residents say.

The new cases, and the number of deaths among children, have risen after "special weaponry" was used in the two massive bombing campaigns in Fallujah in 2004.

After denying it at first, the Pentagon admitted in November 2005 that white phosphorous, a restricted incendiary weapon, was used a year earlier in Fallujah.

Babies born in Fallujah are showing illnesses and deformities on a scale never seen before, doctors and residents say. The new cases, and the number of deaths among children, have risen after "special weaponry" was used in the two massive bombing campaigns in Fallujah in 2004.

After denying it at first, the Pentagon admitted in November 2005 that white phosphorous, a restricted incendiary weapon, was used a year earlier in Fallujah. In addition, depleted uranium (DU) munitions, which contain low-level radioactive waste, were used heavily in Fallujah. The Pentagon admits to having used 1,200 tonnes of DU in Iraq thus far.

...according to the most recent official figures, the United States is currently holding 27,000 secret prisoners around the world. So that means that 99 percent of these folk are not in Guantanamo Bay. Now they're in other prisons elsewhere. And as you mentioned, Bagram has 680. But there's a huge number of people being held in Iraq, and one of the intriguing aspects of this that doesn't get much reporting is that the US is bringing people into Iraq from elsewhere to hold them there, simply because that keeps rather annoying people like you, Amy—I mean the media—and also annoying people like me, lawyers, away from the prisoners so they can't get any sort of legal rights.

--Clive Stafford Smith, British attorney who represents more than fifty of the prisoners at Guantanamo, legal director of the UK charity Reprieve and author of Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side: Seeking Justice in Guantanamo Bay. He is testifying on Tuesday before the House Committee on Foreign Relations about Guantanamo Bay.

The epidemic of suicides among veterans of the Iraq war with PTSD continues. The latest that has surfaced involves a decorated vet who wrote about his PTSD for the Marine Corps Gazette-- and this week killed himself and his brother after a long police chase in Arizona.

The Neocon Series is a Newsvine exclusive.

Thirteenth in a Series.

Phase One of the Neocon series returns with the reptilian overlord of Neocon finance, Paul Wolfowitz.

Since there is nothing I could write about this guy that wouldn't result in me being on the wrong end of a lawsuit, I give you this excerpt from Wikipedia:

Paul Dundes Wolfowitz (born December 22, 1943) is currently a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, working on issues of international economic development, Africa and public-private partnerships.[6] On January 24, 2008, he was named chairman of a high-level advisory panel on arms control and disarmament at the State Department.[7] A former academic, diplomat, political and military strategist and policymaker, and former American government official, most recently, he served as president of the World Bank Group for two years. As U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense during the Presidency of George W. Bush, he was "a major architect of President Bush's Iraq policy and, within the Administration, its most passionate and compelling advocate" (Boyer 1).[8][9][10][11] He resigned as president of the World Bank Group as a result of an investigation by its board of executive directors, "ending a protracted and tumultuous battle over his stewardship, sparked by a promotion he arranged for his companion."[2][3]

Charming, huh?

Wolfowitz. 50 cm x 70 cm. Acrylic on Canvas. 2007. Dennis P. McCann, Paper Dragon Studios.

Previously in the Neocon Series:

Neocon Series: Rumsfeld. A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series: Cheney. A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series: Rice. A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series: Bush. A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series: Rove. A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series: Ashcroft. A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series: Ridge. A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series: Coulter. A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series - Phase Two: Justify (September 11th).

Neocon Series - Phase Two: Invade

Neocon Series - Phase Two: Entrench

Neocon Series - Phase Two: Profit

ARTgallery: Get SmARTer Here!

By Gareth Porter

Three weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld established an official military objective of not only removing Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime by force, but also overturning the regimes in Iran, Syria, and four other countries in the Middle East, according to a document quoted extensively by former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith in his recently published account of Iraq War decisions.

Feith's retelling further indicates that this aggressive U.S. aim of remaking the map of the Middle East by military force and the threat of force was supported explicitly by the country's top military leaders.

Feith's book, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, released in April, provides excerpts of a paper that Rumsfeld sent to President George W. Bush on September 30, 2001, calling for the administration to focus not on taking down Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, but rather on the aim of establishing "new regimes" in a series of states by "aiding local peoples to rid themselves of terrorists and to free themselves of regimes that support terrorism."

Quoting that document, Feith deletes the names of all of the states to be targeted except Afghanistan, inserting the phrase "some other states" in brackets. In a related Pentagon "campaign plan" document, the Taliban and Iraq are listed as "state regimes" against which "plans and operations" might be mounted, yet the names of four other states are blacked out "for security reasons."

In his 2003 book Winning Modern Wars, Gen. Wesley Clark, who commanded the NATO bombing campaign in the Kosovo War, recalled being told by a friend in the Pentagon in November 2001 that states that Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz wanted to take down included Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan, and Somalia.

Clark wrote that the list also included Lebanon, and now Feith reveals that Rumsfeld's paper called for getting "Syria out of Lebanon" as a major goal of U.S. policy.

*cough*

This four minute YouTube video explains why Bush must be Impeached. I found it to add to a comment thread but it is so good everyone should watch it.

You won't find the above headline anywhere else. Believe me, I've tried. Still, it's true. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 10, 2008, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made the following jaw-dropping statement:

"We were attacked from Afghanistan in 2001, and we are at war in Afghanistan today, in no small measure because of mistakes this government made--mistakes I among others made in the end game of the anti-Soviet war there some 20 years ago."
Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates

One of the things that I hate about the Army and find to be more than a bit mundane is going to the range and shooting. For me it seems the range is something that should be fun, but like any fun thing the Army finds a way to make it lame and dare I say boring. Sadly, I realize not all things are meant to be fun, but most Infantrymen love shooting and a lot of the ranges I have been on have taken any excitement you might think we would have and replaced it with a sterile and boring environment that sucks away any fun that could be had. Needless to say, even while deployed the Army still finds time to take us to the range. And as part of the welcome package for new units entering Iraq our battalion schedules range time. Unfortunately, my name was added to the manifest as a trainer/truck commander for the 2 hour jaunt across Baghdad to to the range.

The day started out worse than expected as I made my way to the "gun line" to find not only was no one on my crew anywhere to be found but I also had no keys to the vehicle I was assigned to. So when I tried to find out just what was going on I found no one truly knew what was going on. Luckily my Section Leader was on it and told me to go back to the tent and just chill until briefing time, he would square things away. So I made my way to chow and back to the tent to pack my "RON" (remain over night) bag and get ready for our day of fun in the sun at the range. Packing a hygiene kit, poncho liner, my trusty "combat" pillow, an iPod, and my Nintendo DS (longer battery life than my PSP), as well as my ammo and some other stuff for the mission.

Prior to the brief I finally received the keys to my vehicle. This is not something I was very thrilled with. Like a date I prefer getting to know the vehicle before I spend the night with it. But as we say in the Army I "drove on" with the mission. We loaded our gear, weapons, ammo and some water. Next we all set up our areas, I had the radios, navigation system and all the little parts of being a TC. This took a few minutes but I also found myself still not having a warm fuzzy about the unfamiliar vehicle. Because the driver and I where a little uncertain of the truck I told him to hit a switch that was in a different spot than in other trucks. We all found out with an explosion of white powder that the switch was actually the fire suppression system. Shocked and a bit upset about the situation and my bruised ego, I opened my window and made a mental note to myself about the switch. Live and learn I guess.

Other than some minor mistakes our trip to the range went pretty uneventful after the fire suppression incident. I showed them all the checkpoints and points of interest. Gave them a general idea of our job and the routes. And by the time we made it to our destination, I was ready to sleep. To my chagrin we found out that our CC (convoy commander) could not secure us tents for the short rest we would get. And although there was some room in a few tents the CC decided to play the old Army game of questioning the "manhood" of anyone who went to sleep in a tent. And stupid Sgt. Ballew being the "tough guy" he is decided to play his game back. Opening the trunk of our vehicle I moved all the equipment out of the way and took a short nap in the trunk until it was time to make our movement to the range complex.

Two hours of bad sleep and off we roll to the range. This is actually the best part of the day for me. We travel mostly at night so any chance I get to roll during the day is something I look forward to. The range is a combined range used by both Iraqi and US troops for all different types of weapons. Driving through I wave at all the IA (Iraqi Army) as they guard entrances and go about their daily work. I also admire the vastness of the desert, coming from the Midwest, this might be the last chance I get to see these sights. So I decided to take time to enjoy something I might never get an opportunity to see again. A short trip and a briefing later and we are at the range we are firing on. Thankfully, the unit we are training was the one who ran the range and although we helped them, we had much less to do than I anticipated. I also did not have to shoot on this range. And although I would not have minded firing. Unfortunately, I found out we had to wear body armor while firing. Knowing this I passed on shooting do to the fact I hate wearing body armor. And luckily the range went smoother than I expected so we made our way back to the FOB adjacent to the range, I decided to gun on the way back and give the gunner a rest and to get a better view of the desert.

Getting back to the tent area we still found no room and still playing the tough guy the CC decided to not push the tent issue. BY this time I was done with the tough guy act and was ready to get me a few good hours of sleep. So my Section leader decided to take it upon himself to have me drive him to the Mayor Cell to find somewhere for us to sleep. Sadly, even after going so far as to saying we had "Baby Jesus" in our convoy, we where turned away. The Fob was out of room and we where left to fend for ourselves. With no where to go we decided to snatch a few cots and to go sleep in an indirect fire (mortar) shelter. This was a good idea in theory, but in theory we never expected to be eaten alive by flies and gnats. So we did our best to squeeze as much sleep as possible in the shelter.

As the day turned into night we found ourselves prepping for our move out back to our Fob and the comfort of our tents. And other than a few incidents (a guy with explosive diarrhea in the back of an MRAP) things where pretty uneventful. Once again I decided to gun back. And as we all head back I think about the events of the past 2 days and laugh. In truth, I expected worse and found it to be almost enjoyable. Just more stories to tell when I get home. And even more laughs and maybe more to miss when it is all said and done.

For Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, vital to getting the edge in military service-oriented but war-weary Pennsylvania is figuring out how to pull U.S. forces out of Iraq without dragging the flag in the process.

Trailing in delegates, Clinton has staked her candidacy on a strong showing in Pennsylvania's April 22 primary. Obama has eroded Clinton's lead in several state polls and an upset could irrevocably damage her candidacy.

Both candidates promise to end the war, but in a state with a remarkable history of venerating military service, how that end should be achieved weighs heavily with many voters. Polling shows Democratic voters overwhelmingly disapprove of the war. What divides them is a quick withdrawal versus a longer drawdown of troops.

For many voters, the anger over the war that helped push five Pennsylvania GOP lawmakers out of office in 2006 has turned to almost a resigned acceptance that little will change quickly.

"It's much bigger than one person. Whoever gets to be president, I've been telling everybody, will have an uphill battle to climb," said Krista McKeon, 37, whose husband is with a Pennsylvania Army National Guard unit serving in Iraq.

Military service is commonplace in communities across the state. During World War II, one in seven U.S. war fighters was from Pennsylvania. The state sustained heavy casualties then, and later in Vietnam. Today, one in 10 residents is a veteran.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, 17,000 members of the 19,000-member Pennsylvania National Guard have deployed in support of the nation's war on terror. About 6,000 troops assigned to armories from Philadelphia to Erie have been alerted that they could be leaving for Iraq early next year in what would be the Pennsylvania Guard's largest Iraq deployment yet.

Service to country and patriotism are particularly evident in Allentown, about an hour's drive from Philadelphia. During the American Revolution, townspeople hid the Liberty Bell from the British in the still existing Zion's Reformed Church of Christ.

Each year, a group called the "Honorary First Defenders," named after area troops who were said to be the first to reach the U.S. Capitol in 1861 to protect it from Confederate forces, gathers to pay tribute to Allentown's only Medal of Honor recipient.

Sgt. Candice Gerber joined the Pennsylvania Guard in 2004 because she wanted to help with the war effort. She spent a year in Ramadi, Iraq, as a medic, where she saw young soldiers killed and maimed. Now she's torn about what should happen next.

"I don't really think we should call it a done deal and come home tomorrow morning, but I don't feel we should be there for the next 50 years either. ... We've lost so many, but if we come home now it's we've lost so many for what?" said Gerber, 30, as she sipped coffee in an Allentown cafe.

In a recent Quinnipiac University poll, 84 percent of likely Democratic voters in Pennsylvania said going to war in Iraq was the wrong thing to do. That's similar to Democrats nationally, but higher than the roughly two-thirds of all voters who say it was the wrong thing.

And, 58 percent of likely Pennsylvania Democrats said a timetable should be set for withdrawal, while nearly a third — 29 percent — said troops should be immediately withdrawn.

Clinton is perceived by Pennsylvania's conservative Democrats to have a more cautious, less liberal approach to withdrawing troops than Obama, and that could be a factor in why she's ahead in polls, said Clay Richards, a pollster with Quinnipiac. Both candidates support a phased withdrawal of troops.

"It's kind of a strange dichotomy that they are more skeptical about the war on one hand, and they question why we're there and what we're doing," Richards said. "But on the other hand, there's a built-in patriotism that is not found in other states to the degree that it exists in Pennsylvania."

Nearly 200 troops with ties to Pennsylvania have died in Iraq. More than a thousand troops have come home to Pennsylvania wounded, often to small towns where jobs are scarce.

McKeon, an unaffiliated voter who lives 15 miles north of Allentown in Nazareth, refuses to take down the weathered yellow ribbons tied to trees outside her house along a country road.

The night her husband, Capt. Keith McKeon, told their two daughters, ages 10 and 6, that he was headed to Iraq, the family cried. In the year since he's left, the tears haven't stopped as they worry about his safety. She said she figures her husband will likely be called to more deployments in the future.

"The status of Iraq right now is too vulnerable, it's too volatile. Whoever gets in, they decide they want to pull everybody out, that could be a little bit dangerous. All the hard work that these soldiers have done, I really worry that it would be in jeopardy," McKeon said, pausing. "I believe the candidates are intelligent enough to realize that."

Both candidates have held events in Pennsylvania focused on veterans. Clinton recently held a town-hall meeting with retired military officers in western Pennsylvania, telling them: "One candidate only says he'll end the war. And one candidate is ready, willing and able to end the war."

At nearly every stop on a recent Pennsylvania bus tour, Obama talked of his desire for a strong military and to take care of veterans. He frequently reminds voters that Clinton voted in 2002 to give President Bush the authority to use military force to oust Saddam Hussein.

That's not enough to win over Nathan Kline, 83, of Macungie, a retired Air Force major who flew more than 60 missions in World War II. What has resonated with Kline is Clinton's television ad in which a phone rings in the White House at 3 a.m. and Clinton answers the phone in a crisis.

"No matter how you cut it, he doesn't have the experience," Kline said of Obama. "He's young and his political life has been relatively short."

Gerald Smith, 26, a former Penn State University football player who recently moved to Allentown for a business opportunity, said it's a toss-up as to which candidate would be better at ending the war, but he plans to vote for Obama because he's a fresh voice and he's confident he'll have good military advisers.

Smith said he knows two people who fought in Iraq, and one was injured by shrapnel.

"You just hope that all these deaths that keep piling up is for some great reason that we will see sooner than later, something we can definitely look back and say this is why 4,000 people had to die for this. Hopefully it can be meaningful," Smith said. "And right now, it ain't looking too good."

____

On the Net:

Hillary Rodham Clinton's war stance: http://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/iraq/

Barack Obama's war stance: http://www.barackobama.com/issues/iraq/

Amid investigations into fatal shootings of civilians and allegations of tax violations, Blackwater USA's multimillion-dollar contract to protect diplomats in Baghdad has been renewed, the State Department said Friday.

A final decision about whether the private security company will keep the job is pending, the department said. Moyock, N.C.-based Blackwater is one of the largest private military contractors, receiving nearly $1.25 billion in federal business since 2000, according to a House committee estimate.

Blackwater provides security for diplomats in Baghdad, where the sprawling U.S. Embassy is headquartered. Its private guards act as bodyguards and armed drivers, escorting government officials when they go outside the fortified Green Zone.

Iraqis were outraged over a Sept. 16 shooting in which 17 Iraq civilians were killed in a Baghdad square. Blackwater said its guards were protecting diplomats under attack before they opened fire, but Iraqi investigators concluded the shooting was unprovoked.

An FBI probe began in November. Prosecutors want to know whether Blackwater contractors used excessive force or violated any laws.

The State Department's top security officer, Greg Starr, told reporters Friday that because the FBI is still investigating the shootings, there is no justification now to pull the contract when it comes due in May.

Blackwater has a five-year deal to provide personal protection for diplomats, and its contract is reauthorized each year. The decision announced Friday extends Blackwater's deal for the third year.

Prosecutors investigating the shootings have questioned more than 30 witnesses in the U.S. and in Iraq, but they have announced no conclusions. One possibility is that individual contractors could be indicted, another is that the company could be indicted, or the FBI could conclude that there was no crime.

The company is also the target of an unrelated investigation into whether its contractors smuggled weapons into Iraq. Lawmakers have called for an investigation into whether Blackwater violated tax laws by classifying employees as independent contractors. The company says the claim is groundless.

Starr said that Blackwater's contract could be pulled at some future point, depending on what the FBI and an internal State Department inquiry conclude. He would not predict whether that is likely, and he said he has no information about when the FBI might act.

Starr's predecessor, Richard Griffin, resigned just one day after a State Department study found serious lapses in the department's oversight of private guards.

After the September deaths, U.S. commanders in Iraq complained that they often do not know security firms are moving through their areas of responsibility until after a hostile incident has taken place.

At the end of October, Defense Secretary Robert Gates met with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and reached a general understanding that more military control was needed over security firms operating in the war zone.

The Pentagon and the State Department agreed in December to give the military in Iraq more control over Blackwater Worldwide and other private security contractors.

The agreement spells out rules, standards and guidelines for the use of private security contractors and says contractors will be accountable for criminal acts under U.S. law. That partly clarifies what happens if a contractor breaks the law, but it leaves the details to be worked out with Congress.

The State Department also installed new safeguards after the September shooting, including a requirement for additional monitoring of Blackwater convoys.

Rep. David Price, D-N.C., author of a House-passed bill that would subject all contractors to criminal liability, called the agreement "an important step toward improving transparency, management and accountability in security contracting."

"There is no question that it comes in response to significant congressional pressure ... but the agencies deserve credit for reading the writing on the wall and taking substantive steps to deal with a clear and critical problem," Price said.

___

Associated Press writer Matt Apuzzo contributed to this report.

Chairman John Conyers
House Judiciary Committee
U.S. House of Representatives
U.S. Congress
Washington, DC 20510

Dear Chairman Conyers:

Prominent Constitutional law experts believe President Bush has engaged in at least, five categories of repeated, defiant "high crimes and misdemeanors", which separately or together would allow Congress to subject the President to impeachment under Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution. The sworn oath of members of Congress is to uphold the Constitution. Failure of the members of Congress to pursue impeachment of President Bush is an affront to the founding fathers, the Constitution, and the people of the United States.

In addition to a criminal war of aggression in Iraq, in violation of our constitution, statutes and treaties, there are the arrests of thousands of Americans and their imprisonment without charges, the spying on Americans without juridical warrant, systematic torture, and the unprecedented wholesale, defiant signing statements declaring that the President, in his unbridled discretion, is the law.

Saddam Hussein's intelligence agency secretly financed a trip to Iraq for three U.S. lawmakers during the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.

The three anti-war Democrats made the trip in October 2002, while the Bush administration was trying to persuade Congress to authorize military action against Iraq. While traveling, they called for a diplomatic solution.

Prosecutors say that trip was arranged by Muthanna Al-Hanooti, a Michigan charity official, who was charged Wednesday with setting up the junket at the behest of Saddam's regime. Iraqi intelligence officials allegedly paid for the trip through an intermediary and rewarded Al-Hanooti with 2 million barrels of Iraqi oil.

The lawmakers are not named in the indictment but the dates correspond to a trip by Democratic Reps. Jim McDermott of Washington, David Bonior of Michigan and Mike Thompson of California. None was charged and Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said investigators "have no information whatsoever" any of them knew the trip was underwritten by Saddam.

"Obviously, we didn't know it at the time," McDermott spokesman Michael DeCesare said Wednesday. "The trip was to see the plight of the Iraqi children. That's the only reason we went."

Both McDermott and Thompson are popular among liberal voters in their reliably Democratic districts for their anti-war views. Bonior is no longer in Congress.

Thompson released a statement Wednesday saying the trip was approved by the State Department.

"Obviously, had there been any question at all regarding the sponsor of the trip or the funding, I would not have participated," he said.

During the trip, the lawmakers expressed skepticism about the Bush administration's claims that Saddam was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. Though such weapons ultimately were never found, the lawmakers drew criticism for their trip at the time.

Oklahoma Sen. Don Nickles, then the second-ranking Senate Republican, said the Democrats "sound somewhat like spokespersons for the Iraqi government." Seattle-area conservatives dubbed McDermott "Baghdad Jim" for the Iraq trip.

Al-Hanooti was arrested Tuesday night while returning to the U.S. from the Middle East, where he was looking for a job, his attorney, James Thomas, said. Al-Hanooti pleaded not guilty Wednesday to charges of conspiracy to act as an unregistered agent of a foreign government, illegally purchasing Iraqi oil and lying to authorities. He was being held on $100,000 bail.

Between 1999 and 2006, he worked on and off as a public relations coordinator for Life for Relief and Development, a charity formed after the first Gulf War to fund humanitarian work in Iraq. FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force agents raided the charity's headquarters in 2006 but charged nobody and allowed the agency to continue operating.

McDermott identified that charity as the group financing the Iraq trip. In House disclosure forms, he put the cost at $5,510. Thompson also understood the charity to be financing the trip, spokeswoman Anne Warden said.

Prosecutors said Al-Hanooti was responsible for monitoring Congress for the Iraqi Intelligence Service. From 1999 to 2002, he allegedly provided Saddam's government with a list of U.S. lawmakers he believed favored lifting economic sanctions against Iraq.

Thomas said Al-Hanooti would "vigorously defend" himself against the charges but he could not discuss the specifics of the case since he had seen none of the evidence.

Five years ago, the US government presented what it said was proof that Iraq harbored biological weapons. The information came from a source developed by German intelligence -- and it turned out to be disastrously wrong. But to this day, Germany denies any responsibility.

The New York Times offered a look back at the Iraq War in its March 16 "Week In Review" section that leaned heavily towards pro-war voices.

The Times explained to readers:
"To mark this week's fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the Op-Ed page asked nine experts on military and foreign affairs to reflect on their attitudes in the spring of 2003 and to comment on the one aspect of the war that most surprised them or that they wished they had considered in the prewar debate."

The "experts" who were asked to weigh in all more or less supporters of the Iraq War, most of whom evinced no regret about their errors. The neoconservative American Enterprise Institute provided three columnists: Richard Perle, Fred Kagan and Danielle Pletka, all of them among the strongest advocates for the invasion. The Times also gave space to the Brookings Institution's Kenneth Pollack, another strong supporter of the invasion.

Featured as well were former Iraq envoy L. Paul Bremer and Paul D. Eaton, a retired general who served as a trainer of the Iraqi military early in the war. Former Marine Nathaniel Fick of the Center for a New American Security, who took part in the invasion of Iraq as a platoon leader, also weighed in.

Another columnist was Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who served as an on-air defense analyst for ABC News. Cordesman often warned of planning or logistics problems with the invasion, but nonetheless suuported the Iraq War: "I endorse this war, but I do so with reluctance and considerable uncertainty," Cordesman declared in testimony prepared for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (2/12/03).

Lynndie England, the public face of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, told a German news magazine that she was sorry for appearing in photographs of detainees in the notorious Iraqi prison, and believes the scenes of torture and humiliation served as a powerful rallying point for anti-American insurgents.

In an interview with the weekly magazine Stern conducted in English and posted on its Web site Tuesday, England was both remorseful and unrepentant — and conceded that the published photos surely incensed insurgents in Iraq.

"I guess after the picture came out the insurgency picked up and Iraqis attacked the Americans and the British and they attacked in return and they were just killing each other. I felt bad about it ... no, I felt pissed off. If the media hadn't exposed the pictures to that extent, then thousands of lives would have been saved," she was quoted as saying.

Asked how she could blame the media for the controversy, she said it wasn't her who leaked the photos.

"Yeah, I took the photos but I didn't make it worldwide. Yes, I was in five or six pictures and I took some pictures, and those pictures were shameful and degrading to the Iraqis and to our government," she said, according to the report.

"And I feel sorry and wrong about what I did. But it would not have escalated to what it did all over the world if it wouldn't have been for someone leaking it to the media."

England, who was a private first class, was in several images taken in late 2003 by U.S. guards at Abu Ghraib. One showed her holding a naked prisoner on a leash, while in others she posed with a pyramid of naked detainees and pointed at the genitals of a prisoner while a cigarette hung from the corner of her mouth.

Asked by the magazine if what happened at Abu Ghraib was a scandal or something that happens during wartime, England said it was the latter.

"I'm saying that what we did happens in war. It just isn't documented," she was quoted as saying. "If it had been broken by the news without the pictures it wouldn't have been that big."

She told the magazine that there are other photographs that have not been released that contain more graphic images than those that were seen on television, in newspapers and on the Internet.

"You see the dogs biting the prisoners. Or you see bite marks from the dogs. You can see MPs (military police) holding down a prisoner so a medic can give him a shot," she said. "If those had been made public at the time, then the whole world would have looked at those and not at mine."

England was released in March 2007 after serving half her 36-month sentence. She was convicted of six counts involving prisoner mistreatment.

England said she is living with her parents in Fort Ashby, W.Va., along with her son, Carter, whose father is Charles Graner Jr., the reputed ringleader of those who took the pictures. They were both members of the 372nd Military Police Company based in western Maryland.

Eleven U.S. soldiers were convicted of crimes at the prison near Baghdad. Graner received the harshest sentence, a 10-year prison term.

___

On the Net:

Interview: http://tinyurl.com/22grxw

Muslim prisoners held in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison were submerged in water-filled garbage cans with ice or put naked under cold showers in near-freezing rooms until they went into shock, Sgt. Javal Davis, who served with the 372nd Military Police Company there, has told a national magazine.

Another soldier that had been stationed at Abu Ghraib, M.P. Sabrina Harman---who gained dubious fame for making a thumbs-up sign posing over the body of a prisoner she believed tortured to death---said the U.S. had imprisoned "women and children" on Tier 1B, including one child was as young as ten.

Sometime soon, the U.S. military will suffer the 4,000th death of the war in Iraq.

When the 1,000th American died in September 2004, the insurgency was just gaining steam. The 2,000th death came as Iraq held its first elections in decades, in October 2005. The U.S. announced its 3,000th loss on the last day of 2006, at the end of a year rocked by sectarian violence.

The 4,000th death will come with the war further out of the public eye, and replaced by other topics on the front burner of the U.S. presidential campaigns.

Analysts say the 4,000 dead, while an arbitrary marker, could inject the war debate back into the campaign season, particularly with the war's fifth anniversary on Thursday. Or, with overall violence lower in Iraq, the milestone could pass with far less public discussion than in past years.

Last year was the deadliest for American troops in Iraq, with 901 troops killed. As of Sunday, at least 3,988 Americans have died in Iraq.

James Carafano, a military analyst with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said that the decline in violence since 30,000 troops were sent into Iraq last summer has been more important in the public's eye.

"Americans are not casualty averse. They are failure averse," Carafano said. "They were unhappy with the lack of progress and spiraling violence. That is why you have seen public support rebound after it was clear the surge was working."

The number killed in Iraq is far less than in other modern American wars. In Vietnam, the U.S. lost on average about 4,850 troops a year from 1963-75. In the Korean war, from 1950-53, the U.S. lost about 12,300 soldiers a year.

A 2006 Duke University study found that it was 100 times as likely that an American knew one of the 292,000 Americans killed in World War II than someone today would know a service member slain in Iraq.

Soldiers and analysts alike say the impact of the deaths in Iraq has been largely lost on many Americans who have no personal connection to the war.

"It's still a war that hasn't involved a draft or an increase in taxes," said Jon Alterman, who heads the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "This is a war that most Americans continue to feel they don't have to make sacrifices for."

Alterman said that while the Iraq war has not played as big of a role in the campaigns as once expected, the confluence of 4,000 slain troops, the fifth anniversary and the crucial Pennsylvania Democratic primary could push the war back to the forefront.

"It may be that stacking three things together refocuses the debate," he said. "Or it may be that people are simply tired of the war, tired of talking about it and are wanting to think of something else."

Carafano said that the public's seeming indifference to casualty figures is the rule — not the exception — for most wars America has been in.

"In war and everything else Americans get energized when they are touched in a personal way. In most wars, not just Iraq, that does not happen," he said.

Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey said during a recent speech at the Council of Foreign Relations in New York that the situation for U.S. soldiers in Iraq is "infinitely better" now that during 2006, when Americans were losing the equivalent of a battalion — about 600 to 1,000 soldiers — a month to deaths and injuries.

But McCaffrey said the U.S. military is being drained of its energy and morale because of the slow pace of training that will allow more Iraqi soldiers to take over the fight. American soldiers, he said, are "becoming increasingly unsure about the position they've been placed in."

What that position is will largely be determined by who wins the presidency in November.

"The military is very conscious of the long-term costs of the war," Alterman said. "But we have a civilian-led military and it is for the civilians to decide when we fight and how we fight. As much as the military is conscious of the costs of continuing to fight, they are also aware it isn't their decision whether to stop or not."

WASHINGTON — Adm. William J. Fallon, the top American commander in the Middle East whose views on Iran and other issues have seemed to put him at odds with the Bush administration, is retiring early, the Pentagon said Tuesday afternoon.

The retirement of Admiral Fallon, 63, who only a year ago became the first Navy man to be named the commander of the United States Central Command, was announced by his civilian boss, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who said that he accepted the admiral's request to retire "with reluctance and regret."

A US military study officially acknowledged for the first time yesterday that Saddam Hussein had no direct ties to al-Qaida, undercutting the Bush administration's central case for war with Iraq.

The Pentagon canceled a planned briefing on the study and scrapped plans to post its findings on the internet, ABC news reported. Unclassified copies of the study would be sent to interested individuals in the mail, military officials told the network.

Another Pentagon official told ABC that initial press reports on the study made it "too politically sensitive".

Full text of the Pentagon report

As the man responsible for the health and strength of the U.S. military, Pentagon chief Robert Gates is increasingly finding himself between the devil and the deep blue sea.

On the one hand, there's the devil in his Iraq-obsessed boss, President George W. Bush, who clearly opposes any move that could risk what gains have been made in curbing sectarian violence and establishing a semblance of stability over the past six months.

So when Bush's commander on the ground, Gen. David Petraeus, insists that reducing U.S. troop strength in Iraq below 130,000 could jeopardize whatever chances remain of snatching "victory" from defeat there, Gates, who had previously favored reducing U.S. troops in Iraq to as few as 100,000 by the end of this year, is forced to defer. He did just that Monday when, after meeting Petraeus in Baghdad, he announced for the first time that he supported a "pause" in the ongoing drawdown when pre-surge levels are reached in July.

On the other hand, there's the deep blue sea in the rapidly growing conviction among top military officers and the national security establishment in general that U.S. ground forces are already dangerously overstretched and that retaining 130,000 troops in Iraq is simply not sustainable.

Indeed, those top military officers, notably Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen and Army Chief Gen. George Casey, have become increasingly vocal in recent weeks about their concern that Iraq is systematically transforming the U.S. military into what one expert, former Navy commander Harlan Ullman, called "a 'hollow force' reminiscent of the post-Vietnam War."

"If this is happening ... should we be faced with the choice of staying in Iraq with 130,000 or so troops or eviscerating our military?" asked Ullman, who developed the "shock and awe" strategy during his tenure as professor of strategy at the National War College, in his weekly column in the Washington Times last week. "Do we put the future of Iraq ahead of the future of our armed forces?"

That point is being made with growing intensity by the Pentagon brass, albeit it somewhat more diplomatically. "Our service members, in particular our ground forces and their families, are under significant strain," Mullen said last week, stressing that current 15-month deployments of U.S. soldiers and marines are "too long" and must be reduced to 12 months as a matter of urgency. "The well is deep, but it is not infinite," he warned.

Even his normally reticent predecessor, former Joint Chiefs Chairman and Secretary of State Colin Powell, who worked closely with Gates during the George H.W. Bush administration, felt compelled to weigh in. In a television interview, he warned that even pre-surge troop levels "can't be kept up indefinitely."

They at least had a doctor on hand, and the rule that a confession from someone who believed they were dying did not apply.

It would seem that a "thorough report and analysis" by the RAND Corporation concerning post "war" Iraq previously suppressed by the DOD has been obtained by the New York Times. The report outlines failures and suggests corrections. Those to whom the failure(s) have been attributed, have attempted to keep these findings under wraps.

"If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror."

Mitt Romney concession speech.

Let's get a few things straight here Mitt... I'm a Democrat and I support Mr. Obama. I'm also an American who wore a uniform (proudly) for twenty two years and served in the first war against Iraq. You sir, just said that I'm a party to surrendering my country to the terrorists. You have no idea how much that pissed me off. Right now our country is divided, and blanket statements that denigrate and belittle a large part of our citizenry as cowards who would "surrender" our country to the terrorists, does nothing to further our common goal of protecting America from those who would attack us.

Thanks to the missteps and failings of those who've held the reigns these past seven years, we have much to do in the fight against terrorism. Afghanistan is far from being secured from terrorist threats, Pakistan is a gathering threat, and Iraq is a quagmire that has no end in sight. I would add that Iraq has cost us dearly in treasure and lives, has bogged our military down in a role (an occupation force) they were never intended to assume, and has caused great harm to our status as leaders of the free world. It has divided our country much as the Vietnam war did a generation ago. What we need right now are suggestions, solutions, and an honest dialog on the most prudent course of action in this fight against those who would harm us. What we don't need is more of the same asinine vitriolic rhetoric that got us where we are today.


You sir, are worse than the coward you make us out to be... You use the fight against terrorism as a club to beat those who disagree with your party... as a spiteful campaign slogan to rally your conservative base.... you sir, would use the lives of 4000 brave Americans as a political football for the good of your party.

Mr. Romney, as an American, you disgust me beyond words. For nothing more than political gain, you've accused me of cowardice and surrender. After much thought and careful deliberation, my response to you sir is f*ck you and the horse that rode you off into the sunset!

Yours truly, with as much disrespect as I can humanly muster,

Master Sergeant Jim Dent USAF (ret.)

On September 11, 2001 we were told that everything changed. It was suddenly a different world and now Americans needed to think differently.

We were at war with a vicious new enemy and the Most Wanted Man in the World was the leader of this evil threat, Osama Bin Laden.

Never mind the fact that the world's mightiest military power was caught with it's pants down, not a single fighter plane scrambled as the Twin Towers stood burning.

Then again, we didn't have a Department of Homeland Security in 2001 or emergency response in place. Who could have guessed the Pentagon or Washington might be targets?

Maybe if we had been collecting shampoo bottles at the airport that day the Pentagon might never been hit. But it was hit and we were made to know that the evil doers would pay. Or our Emergency Management would have been at the ready like they were when New Orleans was hit by Katrina.

Our leaders swore to follow these terrorists, to the Gates of Hell was it? They vowed to seek Justice, to avenge this horrible killing of 3,000 innocents and this event that transformed the world.

But we didn't go after the ones who did this, nor the Saudis and Fed Banks for the funds. We didn't save the evidence from the crime scene and to this day we are not able to have an open discussion in the media about it.

The only place we've seen aggressiveness is in Congress coming after our tax dollars and our rights. They have given up the due process of law, started domestic spying, violated the Geneva conventions, condoned torture and destroyed evidence.

It may be hard to believe that we started all this to bring killers to justice. Congress didn't have time to consider Executive crimes for Impeachment.

In fairness they are busy, busy, busy, with a record setting 90 days in session to spend our tax dollars at the rate of $275 million per day for the war alone. Wow at that rate you practically need to burn it.

I wonder how many foreclosed mortgages that is equal to, or how many weapons of slow destruction. Is that the right term to use, because we are fighting against weapons of mass destruction. It is hard to know what the proper terminology would be when Washington supplies the weapons and pays for the killing.

It must be that we are getting our money's worth out of that since we have money to keep it going. It is worth homeless veterans and orphaned children, the destruction of all the historical treasures and of course don't forget the Iraqi people. Not that we could remember their losses like we do the 3,000 from September 11 but the 700,000 Iraqis killed and 4 million refugees are a price that Washington will pay for our freedom.

Our Freedom that has cost $486,677,816,146, that all needs to be put into appropriations bills and then they need to add earmarks. No wonder there's no time to see what's happening to the wounded at Walter Reed and elsewhere, more than 60,000 wounded the kind we see.

But the price is good, it is fair and it is just because we had an attack against Americans and what we have to do is fight back. But we did not search for long before the FBI closed its unit tracking Bin Laden.

Not a problem our Intelligence thinks, well pretty sure, he's hiding somewhere between Pakistan or Afghanistan or a cave or a bunker. What we do know for the record is he seems has access to hair color and video equipment so he can check in when Americans are ready to go to the polls.

"Don't forget these people watch our elections", Hillary was quick to remind us the other night. "Look at Brown with the threats in the UK, the very first day he took office. The day the President is sworn in, they better be ready to defend us with experience." What I want to know is, if she knows what to do, what's wrong with doing something in the Senate?

Is there really anything the President can do in the Oval Office, except to give the order to launch a massive attack? It isn't as if they strap on their six gun and duel for us. So what do they do, or what will they do, or what have any even promised?

Oh they all have experience, they all have plans, Stay The Course on tough Defense, but make lots of changes in how Washington works. Of course we are at war in Afghanistan, people tend to forget that. It hardly ever comes up in discussion and as we approach the election I really hope we get to hear some debate talking point about it.

Our troops have been fighting a war on terror there and every year there's a new bumper crop of opium. It's a really good thing we aren't fighting our war on drugs there or the increasing exports, of record strength opium harvests, might make it seem like the whole effort is a failure.

Afghan farmers increased opium production 34 percent in 2007 and last year produced 93 percent of the world's opium, the main ingredient in heroin. Its export value was estimated at $4 billion. That's almost good enough to be a listed as a corporation. If not they can grow the business, get some distributors and sell that at a bigger mark up, through retailers closer to the customers.

Maybe Congress could get off cheaper if it takes just two weeks of the war cost to buy all of it. Then say another day's worth of spending to ship it to a warehouse, or even use the FEMA trailers to store it. You might say they are moldy now but we know if we give it to Congress to keep, eventually they will destroy it.

The candidates tell us that we are a special breed we Americans, and our rightness will always prevail; we are the best people on the planet and we have the record to show for it. Americans are the hardest working and the most caring people on the earth, who else could carry a war tab like that? On top of it all, look at how much compassion there is, every time there is any kind of disaster, Americans reach into our pockets.

We don't count on the government to do everything you know, they have bigger issues to take care of. We need leaders with experience to tell us we're good. They have the skill and the leadership to fund this kind of destruction. Spend, spend, spend $275 million per day just for Iraq and that's not even counting the money for so many other special interests and subsidies. Isn't it clear now why Washington can't do it alone and there are 65 lobbyists for every Member of Congress.

It frees them up to fund raise and to stump because there are Islamo-Fascists to kill. Kill them there so we don't need to kill them here that's the logic, right? It must be a mighty fierce enemy, because after years and years of using our weapons of something that's not mass destruction, we have an endless war we're fighting.

But what we do have is patrols and guards and canine units, all around the New York Stock Exchange. There's no way that the Islamo-Facists will get near our biggest assets our corporations. Unless that is all our money is gone and our companies beg them to come in, to buy us!!

As most on newsvine knows I am currently serving my second tour in Iraq. And I come to newsvine as a bit of an escape. And yet I see a war here between the left and right. I also see the two sides constantly bickering and browbeating about who's side "supports the troops" more. Or more importantly which side doesn't "support the troops" I myself find it ridicules. And in truth, I don't really see any point in this argument. I guarantee if a person looks hard enough they will find someone who allegedly don't "support the troops". So where am I going with this?

First off, I am not here in Iraq because anyone made me. I volunteered because I feel it is the right thing to do. I volunteered because as long as my "brothers and sisters" are here fighting I feel it is my obligation to serve also. I volunteered because what kind of person would I be to stay back while other troops and civilians are in harms way. We are not heroes here. Yes there are many heroic acts, but in no way is war heroic. As I have written on more than one occasion only a mad man would wish for war. But sometimes I feel war is inevitable, that I would rather be here than my children or grandchildren. I also feel no need to blame the war on any one person or party, because to me both parties are equally responsible. Both parties voted for the war, both parties continue to fight amongst themselves on how to solve this important issue.

Next, I don't really think one side actually supports the troops any more than the other. It is just pathetic that the argument is being made. Yes there are extremist on both sides that say and do stupid @!$%#. And in truth I can't spend my time here worrying or stressing about everybody who says and does thing that might be deemed anti-troop. Yes, I get pissed at times. I am human and not perfect, but I am here in hopes of helping in a small way to keep the freedoms that we all take for granted, and maybe help the people of Iraq have a better life than in the past.

Lastly, I am not here to argue whether or not the war is right. I see it this way I have a lot more to worry about than whether or not the war is right or wrong. I also not here to say don't protest or whatever you might do to "support the troops". The truth is it doesn't really even matter me if you support the troops or not. I mean honestly We are here so you can have these beliefs. We are here whether you support us or not so feel free to do as you want. But please try not to pretend your side cares more than the other because in truth both sides are the same.

One of Iraq's most powerful Shiite political and religious figures on Friday issued a stunning call for the government to set aside differences with Sunni Muslim politicians and entice them back to help lead the country.

The appeal by Ammar al-Hakim, the son and heir-apparent to the head of Iraq's main Shiite political bloc, sharply increased pressure on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to bring Sunni factions back into the fold as part of Washington-backed efforts at sectarian reconciliation.

It also could push al-Maliki's government to accelerate steps to integrate armed Sunni groups that have joined the fight against al-Qaida in Iraq and other extremists. The United States has credited the so-called "Awakening Councils" with helping uproot insurgents and has urged Iraq's Shiite leadership to reward the new Sunni allies with security force posts.

The Awakening Councils have played a role in a major U.S. offensive launched this week, an operation that included one of the most intense airstrikes of the war.

A top U.S. commander said Thursday's bombing blitz south of Baghdad destroyed extremists' "defensive belts" and allowed American soldiers to push into areas where they have not been in years.

The United States is also counting on political support from al-Hakim and his father, Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council — the country's pre-eminent Shiite political grouping.

The elder al-Hakim, who has been a close ally to the United States since the 2003 invasion, has been diagnosed with lung cancer and underwent chemotherapy last year in Iran, where he spent years in exile during Saddam Hussein's rule.

Ammar al-Hakim, a moderate Shiite like his father, has taken an increasingly vocal role as his father has undergone medical care.

"I hope that the government will take all needed measures to secure" the return of key Sunni political groups, Ammar al-Hakim said from the pulpit of the Buratha mosque. The main Sunni political organization — the Accordance Front — and the secular Iraqi List left the government after disputes over al-Maliki's leadership.

But in a bid to address both sides of Iraq's Sunni-Shiite sectarian split, al-Hakim also said al-Maliki needs to reach out to "our brothers" in two Shiite parties that are deeply at odds with the prime minister. One is the religious Fadhilah party and the other is the powerful movement led by cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Rival Shiite groups have waged increasingly bloody power struggles for pre-eminence in oil-rich southern Iraq.

"Our strength is in our unity. The bigger the circle of participation, the stronger we will be in solving our problems and making progress," al-Hakim said.

As violence falls in Iraq, politics and reconciliation efforts push to the front. The United States introduced 30,000 additional troops into Iraq by the middle of last year with the objective of calming raging violence so the al-Maliki government could gain breathing space to foster common ground among the majority Shiite, Sunnis and Kurds.

But there is little public evidence that al-Maliki has or is inclined to use the increasingly peaceful environment to move ahead politically.

Al-Hakim's pointed words Friday echoed frustration being voiced by many in Iraq and the United States over what appears to be foot-dragging by al-Maliki and the country's fractured parliament to adopt reforms aimed at bridging sectarian rifts.

"I call on lawmakers to speed the passage of key legislation. There can be no more delays," he said, referring to measures on sharing Iraq's oil wealth, regional elections and the return of Saddam-era figures to the government.

A U.S.-led military offensive, meanwhile, sought to reclaim control of former insurgent-held areas around Baghdad.

In the massive raid south of the capital, two B1-B bombers and four F-16 fighter jets dropped 48 precision-guided bombs on 47 targets, U.S. Air Force Col. Peter Donnelly, commander of the 18th Expeditionary Air Support Operations Group, told reporters.

The targets consisted mainly of weapons caches and powerful roadside bombs buried deep underground — key defensive elements for al-Qaida in Iraq insurgents, said Donnelly and Army Col. Terry Ferrell, commander of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division.

Extremists were believed to have controlled Arab Jabour, a Sunni district lined with citrus groves, but Ferrell said "the predominant number" have now fled to the southwest since his troops' operations began.

"We're moving into areas where coalition forces have not been in months or years in some cases," Ferrell told reporters via a video link, adding that insurgents "had established a deliberate defensive belt to deny our movement in the area."

Ferrell said the southwest is "where we take this fight to next. It is all about fighting the enemy where the enemy wants to go."

As U.S. and Iraqi ground forces move through areas to push out insurgents, Ferrell said members of the Awakening Council movement will be relied upon to stabilize the region and maintain security.

It was those Sunni fighters, Ferrell said, who largely provided the intelligence that allowed U.S. forces to locate the targets destroyed in Thursday's bombing.

Despite the massive size of the airstrikes, Donnelly said that — to the military's knowledge — no civilians were killed. That could not immediately be independently confirmed. He added that the targeting of three targets was called off because unmanned surveillance planes showed civilians in those areas.

Donnelly said it wasn't yet known how many insurgents were killed in the attacks.

But Mustapha Kamil Shibeeb al-Jibouri, leader of Arab Jabour's Awakening Council, said the airstrikes killed at least 21 al-Qaida militants including a group leader.

"Their bodies are still in the area. They have not been evacuated yet," he told The Associated Press.

Separately, the military announced that Faleh Mansour Hussain, the Sunni chairman of the Yarmouk Neighborhood Council in Baghdad, was killed in a car bombing Tuesday.

"Attacks on civilians like this are done by those who are trying to prevent the peace and stability Iraqi citizens deserve," said military spokesman Maj. J. Frank Garcia.

___

Associated Press Writers Bradley Brooks and Sameer N. Yacoub contributed to this report.

Iraq's anti-corruption board revealed on Saturday that there were five million Iraqi orphans as reported by official government statistics, urging the government, parliament, and NGOs to act re parentless children.

I have never been much of a war video game kind of person. I know there are some "kick ass" war games out there. Games that keep you at the edge of your seat fighting who ever the chosen enemy of the game is. But in truth, I feel the fighting is just part of the game, there should be all the in between parts that make soldiers truly shudder. The stuff that really drives the soldiers crazy. So without further ado my ideas to add to any game about Iraq

Mobilization

One of the @!$%#tiest parts of our deployment is the train up to go. Imagine if you would a part of the game where actually have to go and qualify on weapons, practice movement techniques, or just sit around reading off Army doctrine while boring every soldier within earshot. Or going out and doing training missions where you have no chance of winning, and the grader thinks it awesome to see you lose. Also imagine if you do not pass any or all of these situations you get to hang out and do it all over again. Sounds fun and motivating at the same time. What better way to get would be video gaming soldier (VGS) to appreciate their weapon of choice than to make them have to practice with it until they are truly sick of seeing it. This will not only make it more realistic but might help this VGS learn it isn't all about shooting the enemy. Now I am sure there are games that have these features, but in these games I am sure the features are not as mundane or as mind numbing as they are in real life. Let's strive for realism please.

Waiting in lines

Another reason the games aren't realistic is the fact that there are no lines. No lines for chow, PX, to get shots, take a shower, to get your gear or hell to even get that beloved weapon of choice. Waiting in line is one of the things that needs to be added to these games. What they could do is make mini games within the games where you wait in a line to get something, and depending on certain actions while in line will depend on your sanity during your next mission. Why is waiting in line so bad? Well most of the time you are in line with someone you really don't like. Who will tell stories that you don't really want to or need to hear. Not only are these stories boring but they all seem to be variations of one base story you have heard a hundred times before. So another idea is to make the load screen some pimply face Private or loudmouth Major telling a story so stupid and unbelievable that you go mad waiting to get started with the next mission, and make these load screen incredibly long.

Death by Power point (Aka Briefings)

Briefings are another thing that is sorely missing from these games. No not the cool briefings that give missions and objectives. No I am talking about the other types, things like your 15th Suicide brief or 29th Sexual Harassment brief or your 100th Rules of Engagement brief. Hell, you name it I am sure we can brief it. Not only do we make these briefs with the most boring speakers but if you don't sign the sign in roster you don't go to do your mission until you have finished this brief again. So here is the idea, pack yourself in a hot auditorium with very little sleep, with three hundred dudes telling the same story, *see Waiting in lines for this idea. While waiting for the speaker to figure out what is wrong with the microphone or the power point display. All the while trying to figure out who the hell has the sign in roster so you won't have to sit here again. Not only this, but try to stay awake or risk getting caught by some loudmouth leader who loves dropping dimes on soldiers to make up for being a douche bag. Game designers are smart I am almost certain they can find a way to add this to any game. If this was added I think VGS would more than appreciate getting his ass handed to him by the enemy for the 15th time.

Hiding from leadership

I hate to say this but an Officer or a Non commissioned Officer can be a soldiers worst enemy. There is a saying "there is nothing worse than an Officer with some time on his hands". Most soldiers to include me enjoy as much free time as possible. But there is one thing that always deters our free time, it is leadership. For some reason they think it is motivating for a soldier to clean a "@!$%#ter" or to read the soldiers manual for the 75th time. I mean most of these leaders act like they where never a regular soldier. And that for some reason personal time is out of the question So my idea with this is to make more mini games. The idea for these games is to hide from leadership. To look for things to do that make you look busy while you are actually doing nothing. We in the Army call this "shamming". And if for some reason the "sham" is not up to snuff then you have to think of a good story to get you in the clear. Whether the stories work depend on the rank of the person you are telling it too. This could also help the VGS understand the rank structure and who in leadership to avoid.

There are tons of other Mini games we could add, to make the VGS realize that the military is not just about killing the enemy with a vast array of weaponry. I think it would do everyone a lot of good to realize there is a lot more boredom than excitement. And all I can say is thank goodness for that. So if any would be game designer is reading this feel free to drop me an email for more ideas. Thanks to all that have read this article and a have a good day.

The U.S. military paid a Florida company nearly $32 million to build barracks and offices for Iraqi army units even though nothing was ever built, Pentagon investigators reported.

The project had to be abandoned because the Iraqi Defense Ministry couldn't obtain rights to the land where the headquarters were to be built, according to a report released this month by the Defense Department's Office of Inspector General. Contracting records show the buildings would have housed one brigade and three battalions of the Iraqi military in Ramadi, a hotbed of the Sunni Muslim insurgency and capital of Anbar province.

Still, the Air Force agency overseeing the project paid contractor Ellis Environmental Group $31.9 million of the $34.2 million obligated for the project, the report said.

Exclusive: Report Shows Vehicles, Machine Guns And More Meant For Iraqi Forces Unaccounted For

This story was written and reported by Laura Strickler of the CBS News Investigative Unit.

Tractor trailers, tank recovery vehicles, crates of machine guns and rocket propelled grenades are just a sampling of more than $1 billion in unaccounted for military equipment and services provided to the Iraqi security forces, according to a new report issued today by the Pentagon Inspector General and obtained exclusively by the CBS News investigative unit. Auditors for the Inspector General reviewed equipment contracts totaling $643 million but could only find an audit trail for $83 million.

United States war veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are planning to testify about war crimes they have committed or personally witnessed in Washington DC this March. Liam Madden, a former Marine and a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, fears that the Iraq war is not fully covered because of the danger to reporters in covering it.

The Iraq Veterans Against the War say that incidence like the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the massacre of an entire Iraqi family in Haditha are not isolated incidents, but rather part of a pattern of "an increasingly bloody occupation."

The event will be named "Winter Soldier", after a similar 1971 event held by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

John Pilger: "Remembrance Day was marred by the unacknowledged deaths in Iraq - a genocide that threatens to outstrip the horrors of Rwanda in the numbers killed and displaced ... holocaust denial"

Comment: post-invasion excess violent and non-violent deaths in Occupied Iraq total 1.5-2.0 million; post-invasion under-5 infant deaths total 0.6 million; 1990-2003 excess deaths total 1.9 million; 1990-2003 under-5 infant deaths total 1.2 million; refugees total 4 million (see: "United State Terrorism. 8 million deaths & media holocaust denial": http://mwcnews.net/content/view/17139/42/ ).

Frank Grevil has been hospitalized after falling from the balcony of his 4th floor Copenhagen apartment. The former military intelligence major was sentenced to four months in prison after leaking documents on Saddam Hussein's alleged WMDs.

11 o'clock this Sunday morning Frank Grevil was found unconscious in front of his Copenhagen home. He is currently hospitalized at 'The Kingdom', Denmarks largest hospital. No details on his condition has been revealed but he is said to be likely to survive. Police suspect he must have accidentally fallen from his balcony and have found no evidence of a crime. So reports Danish media today (Politiken.dk / Frank Grevil hasteindlagt efter fald fra 3. sal, Avisen.dk / Frank Grevil indlagt efter fald fra 3. sal).

The 47 years old chemical engineer and Russian language expert is a controversial figure in the Danish debate on the Iraq war. February 2004 he leaked classified documents on the intelligence of Saddam Hussein's military capabilities that significantly differed from the information given in parliament by recently re-elected minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen. After this he lost his job for a prison term. The journalists who printed the story in Berlingske Tidende were also sued by the state but acquitted.

Recently an EU expert on biological warfare was quoted "I feared I'd end up dead in the woods like Dr Kelly" in the British Daily Mail (Daily Mail / 'I feared I'd end up dead in the woods like Dr Kelly,' says biological warfare expert who criticised Britain and U.S.) referring to former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq Dr David Kelly who died under mysterious circumstances.

Held for 18 months without charge Mr Hussein is guilty of Doing Journalism in Anbar province Iraq.

The Pentagon says additional evidence has come to light proving Bilal Hussein is a "terrorist media operative" who infiltrated the news agency.

The US media Ranked 50 for freedom in the world just before Bulgaria, haS been activly increasing the level of censorship in the USA this year. The main target of this censorship has been the internet. The mist common way of censoring has now become a sustained effort to make sure that the information never makes it to the web, or onto American TV at all.

Michael Shank

The Democratic presidential candidates have been salivating for a situation like Pakistan to come along the campaign trail. Eternally looking soft on security and stuck with no road map for Iraq and Afghanistan, Pakistan offers the candidates an opportunity to brandish new security strategies. With President Pervez Musharraf's violent crackdown on opposition parties, human rights organizations, media, lawyers, and the general populace, they have the perfect opportunity to posture. Trouble is, however, with Democratic White House hopefuls Obama, Biden, Clinton, and Edwards slating new strategies for Pakistan: they all have got their analysis flat wrong.

Illinois Senator Barack Obama, to his credit, was first out of the misguided gate long before Musharraf derailed all semblance of civility. Still spinning from fellow candidate and New York Senator Hillary Clinton's jab at his offer to dialogue with adversaries (too naïve and inexperienced, she said) Obama countered Clinton's criticism by swinging hard at Pakistan . In an about-face—to appear hard, not soft, on security—the plan was simple: move from the wrong battlefield, i.e. Iraq , to the right battlefield, i.e. Pakistan . If actionable intelligence exists on high-value terrorist targets, said Obama, then U.S. strikes will follow, regardless of cooperation from Islamabad . Eagerness got the better of Obama on this one, though, as foreign policy wonks from Washington to Waziristan cited this as utterly ill-advisable and wrong-headed.

Almost from the moment the Nisour Square shootings happened, the State Department has taken actions that give the impression of trying to cover up the incident. The department's initial report on the shooting was drafted by a Blackwater contractor on official US government stationery. The FBI was not dispatched to investigate the case until two weeks after the shootings, meaning that the initial investigation was in the hands of a non-law enforcement agency, the State Department, that just happens to be Blackwater's employer.

Last month, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni told assembled world leaders at the United Nations that the time had come to take action against Iran. "None disagrees," she said, "that Iran denies the Holocaust and speaks openly of its desire to wipe a member state - mine - off the map. And none disagrees that, in violation of Security Council resolutions, it is actively pursuing the means to achieve this end. Too many see the danger but walk idly by - hoping that someone else will take care of it. ... It is time for the United Nations, and the states of the world, to live up to their promise of never again. To say enough is enough, to act now and to defend their basic values."[1]

Yet, later the same month, we are informed by Haaretz, (frequently described as "the New York Times of Israel"),
that the same Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni had said a few months earlier, in a series of closed discussions, that in her opinion "Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel." Haaretz reported that "Livni also criticized the exaggerated use that [Israeli] Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is making of the issue of the Iranian bomb, claiming that he is attempting to rally the public around him by playing on its most basic fears."[2]

What are we to make of such a self-contradiction, such perfect hypocrisy?

In the middle of a made-up country in its eighth decade, a terror war broke out. The nation almost bled out and died.

The larger country had always been divided. Some years before, an ill-prepared national army fought an inconclusive war across its southern border. Parts of the nation openly flirted with secession, for nothing really held this nation together. The weak central government was the artificial construct of pieces of paper drawn up by schemers and get-rich-quick artists. The individual states clung to their own powers: loyalty was not to the nation, but to factions.

Faced with intractable divisions within the society, the politicians and the army proved useless to stop the ensuing train wreck. Suicidal maniacs tried to bring an end to perceived injustice, other suicidal maniacs rose up to defend the status quo ante, and each claimed God was on his side. The central government was riddled with spies, nobody could be trusted. Refugees fled to all corners of the country, neighbor fought neighbor: warlords took control of whole towns. Hideous and inventive atrocity was the order of the day, mayhem and looting.

After the war to the south, the wretched national army had largely faded away, its leaders retired. Attempts had been made to resurrect the army in the face of these sectarian divisions, but there was no military solution to the problems faced by this society. The underlying faults could only be repaired in the nation's capital, but the same sectarian divisions paralyzed and enraged everyone.

As the partisan legislators roared threats and imprecations at each other, the terrorists grew bolder and more vicious. The war would spread, in fits and starts, dividing the entire country, and leading to a five year civil war. The war would end near where it began, the last sullen terrorists fading back into society, un-prosecuted.

Iraq? No, Kansas and Missouri.

The Origins.

In our era, the phrase "terrorism" has become the synonym for what was once called guerrilla warfare. The word "guerrilla" emerged from Napoleon's wars in Spain, where bands of Spanish partisans attacked the French in the early 1800s. In the USA, it went by many terms: bushwhacker, partheyganger, guerrilleros and partisans. Jayhawker was an especially pungent term: a mythical bird said to be a cross between a blue jay and a sparrow hawk. I will refer to the phenomenon as terrorism. Mao Zedong, who wrote the bible on terrorism, said "The strategy is to pit one man against ten, but the tactic is to pit ten men against one."

Mao's summation of terrorism comes these four lines, a paraphrase of Sun Tzu:

'When the enemy advances, we retreat;
When the enemy camps, we harass;
When the enemy tires, we attack;
When the enemy retreats, we pursue.'

The Stage is Set

As every eighth grader is taught, the American Civil War opens with the firing on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, but that's simplistic enough to be wrong.

Between 1854 and 1858, Bleeding Kansas was the Civil War in prototype. The Founding Fathers dodged the issue of slavery, leaving the matter to each state, letting the issue rot and fester: their greatest failure was not to abolish the "peculiar institution" of chattel slavery. At the Constitutional Convention, Button Gwinnett of Georgia, the second signatory to the Declaration of Independence which said "all men are created equal" threatened to scuttle the Constitution if slavery were abolished.

America was then an experiment, as Iraq is now. Nobody really expected the experiment to last. The Constitution does not make us a "Nation", it made us into thirteen independent states. Those who backed secession used the phrase "States' Rights", but the issue of States' Rights was far larger than slavery. During the War of 1812, New England openly flirted with the British enemy, calling it "Mr. Madison's War", and even invested in British interests against the American cause. Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire simply refused to send troops. New Jersey was always grumbling, and often threatened to secede. Jefferson and Madison secretly authored the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 and 99, which said states could nullify acts of Congress. The Hartford Convention of 1814 ominously approved of the doctrine of nullification.

Terrorism was an established technique: the Revolutionary War had been largely fought by terrorists, and civilians were the usual targets. Most of the casualties of the Revolutionary War were civilians. Following the Civil War, the Tories were evicted en masse and sent to Canada.

Thomas Sumter, for whom Fort Sumter was named, fought an exceedingly dirty war against the British cavalryman Banastre Tarleton. The phrase "Tarleton's Quarter" means "no quarter". Sumter and Tarleton fought murderously across the South, and Tarleton's name has gone down in history as the most barbarous opponent we ever faced in the Revolutionary War. Sumter would give his name to the opening salvo of the Civil War, and his reputation to the States' Rights issue. Thomas Sumter recruited men to the Revolutionary War, promising a bounty in slaves captured from the Loyalists. We have the original documents.

The stage was set and lit: the curtains went up. Only the actors needed to appear.

Upsetting the Apple Cart

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 upset the untidy apple cart of American politics, balanced between Slave and Free States by the Missouri Compromise. Kansas would be admitted as a slave state, Nebraska as a Free State. Both sides were openly determined to gain Kansas by what became known as squatter sovereignty: abolitionists moved into Kansas, assisted by the abolitionist New England Emigrant Aid Company, founding Lawrence, Kansas, of which more shall be said in time.

The preacher Henry Ward Beecher armed these abolitionist settlers with Sharp's repeating rifle, also known as Beecher's Bibles. When we see Islam funding the terrorist efforts of Iraq's religious entities, let us not forget Beecher, a great hero in his own day, and the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Lincoln, upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe remarked "So you're the little lady who started this war." Lincoln was only half-right. Her brother Henry lit the fire. When Fort Sumter was retaken at the end of the Civil War, Henry Ward Beecher was the main speaker upon that occasion.

The State's Rights advocates were furious. They had compromised on Nebraska. Missouri, already a slave state, tried to send a few thousand settlers into Kansas. Few went. But with them came the Border Ruffians, a pro-slavery militia recruited by David Rice Atchison, a hugely popular senator from Missouri. He founded the town of Atchison Kansas as a pro-slavery outpost. During his time in the Senate, Atchison ensured the Trans-Continental Railroad went through his eponymous town. Atchison's gamble had failed: Beecher's settlers quickly outnumbered the pro-slavery settlers and Kansas was admitted as a Free State in 1861.

Despite the uproar, almost no slaves were ever taken to Kansas, and the settlers were too poor to own any. A slave cost twice as much as a good horse, and could only be put to profitable use in the plantation economies. The issue wasn't slavery but States' Rights, an ugly amalgam of racism and xenophobia fanned to a flame by outside interests. The North was no less racist than the South. As in Iraq, there were no good guys in Bleeding Kansas, and the issues there aren't the particulars of Sunni or Shiite theology, nor yet Kurdish sovereignty. Iraq is as the United States was: a constitution without a country. Arsonists secretly carry the torch of regional and partisan grievances: they light fires where they can.

Missouri was as ugly a fight as Kansas. Jay Winik in his book April 1865, tell us:

Throughout the Civil War, Missouri was labeled "the war of 10,000 nasty incidents", but it was much more than that. On one level, it was the very embodiment of the Civil War itself: a conflict-ridden slave state that didn't secede, a state deeply divided in loyalties, a state with an ill-formed identity. On yet another level, as it descended into full-scale guerrilla war, Missouri became a very different creature altogether, less a reflection of what the Civil War was, but what it was to become. It became a killing field.

Missouri also produced the most bloodthirsty guerrillas of the war. Topping the list was William Clarke Quantrill, a handsome, blue-eyed twenty-four-year-old former Ohio schoolteacher. A close second was Bloody Bill Anderson, whose father was murdered by Unionists and whose sister was killed in a Kansas City Union prison disaster. Among their disciples were young men destined for later notoriety: Frank and Jesse James, and Coleman Younger. And there were countless other lesser but no less notorious lights.

In early 1862, Quantrill and his band of bushwhackers launched a series of strikes into Kansas that all but paralyzed the state. Then in 1863, the revenge-minded Quantrill set his sights on a new target: Lawrence, Kansas. One would be hard-pressed to find a place more thoroughly despised by Quantrill and his comrades than Lawrence. It functioned as a Free-Soil citadel during the 1850s, then as a haven for runaway slaves, and during the war as a headquarters to the Redlegs, a band of hated Unionist guerrillas. Early in the morning of August 21, Quantrill and his 400 bushwhackers, including Frank James and Coleman Younger struck. At 5 AM Quantrill and his men silently made their way into town. Then the killing began. With a triumphant yell, Quantrill began shouting "Kill, Kill! Lawrence must be thoroughly cleansed… Kill! Kill!" For the next few hours, his fierce and sweaty long-haired men, unwashed and unshaven, rumbled up and down the streets of Lawrence, looting stores, shops, saloons and houses. They systematically rounded up every man they encountered and then torched the town. By day's end, the deed was done. The city lay in ashes: 200 homes were burned to the ground. Over 150 innocent civilians, all men and young boys had been murdered in cold blood."

…

Thus escalated the vicious cycle of retaliation and revenge. For the next six weeks, Quantrill and the partisans skirmished. Yet despite a massive sweep through the woodlands of western Missouri by Federal cavalrymen, Quantrill escaped. He and his men knew the countryside personally, and friends and relatives provided them with shelter, fresh horses and timely warning in case of pursuit… even the Confederate generals were dismayed at the wanton carnage. Noted one high-ranking military man in Richmond, "they recognize the life of a man less than you would that of a dog killing a sheep."

…

At one point, a desperate Union, unsure of how to deal with the guerrillas, went as far as consulting Francis Lieber, the famous legal scholar. Lieber's message was hardly reassuring. While distinguishing between "regular and irregular partisans", he grimly likened the guerrilla war to the Thirty Years' War and the religious wars in France. And he coined a most ominous phrase: "Where guerrillas flourish", he noted, they create "a slaughterfield."

These paragraphs above constitute the longest contiguous quote from another author in all my years of writing. They border on a violation of the Code of Honor for Newsvine, but I cannot state it any better than Jay Winik, whose book April 1865 I cannot recommend highly enough, though in truth it is not a perfect book. For those who wish to learn more of the American Civil War, other authors such as Bruce Catton cover the subject in more detail. What we now face in Iraq is an equally horrific guerrilla war. Winik goes on to describe the indescribable, of torture, disemboweling, slow hangings, the setting of neighbor against neighbor, the existential terror of never knowing who the enemy was. In revenge for Quantrill, Union General Union General Thomas Ewing, Jr. issued the infamous General Order 11, evicting all residents, regardless of loyalty, from their farms south of the Missouri. We see it all in Iraq today.

The Beginning of the End

The gist of Winik's argument, passim, is this: the Civil War did not have to end as it did. It could have gone on as a terror war for many decades more. Other scholars of the Civil War argue otherwise: the South was devastated, far beyond any ability to support a lengthy opposition. In the South, one in five people died. In the North, one in twelve died. Sherman's March through the south was no less a wanton act of terror warfare than Quantrill's massacre of Lawrence. By the time the Civil War entered April of 1865, both sides feared the war's degeneration into irregular warfare. Jefferson Davis had authorized the use of irregular warfare after the fall of Richmond. To their lasting credit, the Confederate generals revolted against this order.

In March of 1865, Lincoln held a secret meeting aboard the River Queen at City Point, and set the tone for the end of the war, telling his commanders to let the South "down easy".

We all know of what happened at Appomattox Courthouse, of Lee's courtliness, of Grant's generous and humane terms of surrender. Fewer know of the surrender of Johnston to Sherman at the Bennett farmhouse on April 26th, 1865. Johnston had given Sherman a pasting at Lookout Mountain, Sherman was, and still widely is viewed as Satan incarnate in the South. My own ancestors' homes in South Carolina were burned by Sherman's troops. Yet Sherman was more kindly in victory to Johnston than Grant was to Lee. To their dying day, Johnston and Sherman admired each other: Johnston would write to Sherman: "The enlarged patriotism exhibited in your orders reconciles me to what I have previously regarded as the misfortune of my life, that of having to encounter you in the field."

Robert E. Lee, then paroled to Richmond, urged the South to put down its arms. When word of Lee's position reached the far corners of the Confederacy, even the most ruthless of Confederate generals, Nathan Bedford Forrest, who would go on to found the Ku Klux Klan, finally stacked arms and stood his troops down. Iraq will be no different, I hope and pray. Lincoln did not view the River Queen doctrine as a post-war doctrine: he saw it as a technique of war itself. As Kansas had been set afire by the arsonists of partisan madness, Lincoln's River Queen doctrine would put out those fires.

With Lincoln's assassination, much of the goodwill evaporated, and Reconstruction was a nasty, bitter episode in American history. We have never seen a secessionist movement again, but the bitterness of Yankee and Rebel is still a distant echo in the minds of many to this day.

A New Beginning

It was the simple decency of fighting men who preserved the Union, and gave us our country back, not as it was, but a new nation whole and entire. It will be the same decency within Iraq's fighting men who will give them back their country. The current sectarian violence will never be fully undone, but it may heal in time, and it will be the Lords of War, not the Feckless Politicians of Iraq who will put an end to it.

Historians cannot afford to indulge in the luxury of what I call Woulda Coulda Shoulda, postulating what might have been different had history followed a different path. Sorting out what really happened is enough of a task, paring away the facts from the myths. Yet Bleeding Kansas and the American Civil War have much to teach us in present times. We have blundered horribly in our attempts to create a More Perfect Union in Iraq: that union was never our mandate. Iraq's unity is an uncertain thing at best, as was our own constitutional union of 1787. Iraq's Constitution, like our own pre-Civil War constitution, has swept huge and intractable issues under the rug, and they will not go away. Iraq's current troubles may be more contiguous with Bleeding Kansas than the Civil War in total: they may only be the opening overture to a larger conflict.

The South looked to Lee as its guiding light: when a Virginia father berated his son for taking the loyalty oath to the Union, calling him a disgrace to the family, the son replied "but General Lee has urged us to do so". "Well," replied the father, "if General Lee says so, then that puts the matter very differently". We cannot underestimate the consequences of Grant's generosity or Lee's nobility, nor yet Lincoln's River Queen Doctrine, or the heart-wringing closing words of his Second Inaugural:

With malice toward none, with charity for all,
with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right,
let us strive on to finish the work we are in,
to bind up the nation's wounds,
to care for him who shall have borne the battle
and for his widow and his orphan,
to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace
among ourselves and with all nations.

Conclusion

Will our current involvement in Iraq be merely the Union troopers chasing Quantrill's terrorists around Missouri, or will it be the greatness of Grant and Sherman, Lee and Johnston?

The generals have yet to appear in Iraq. They will not appear until we leave. The current players are the scheming politicians: Iraq's army has not yet matured to produce men capable of concluding a peace. We see only the Quantrills and their like. There seems to be a distinct shortage of Great Men, and the odds of Iraq's unification under a tin horn dictator, or more likely a military junta are good. The real struggle for Iraq has only just begun.

Yet while we still indulge malice in our hearts and remain so callously in the wrong, we will never finish the work that is Iraq. There will be no lasting peace if it is not first a just peace, and it must begin with us.

Under a 1975 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) the USA guaranteed all Israel's oil needs in the event of a crisis. This Memorandum of Understanding is quietly renewed every five years. It commits U.S. taxpayers to maintain a strategic U.S. reserve for Israel, equivalent to $3 billion in 2002 dollars. Special legislation was enacted to exempt Israel from restrictions on oil exports from the USA. Moreover, the U.S. government agreed to divert oil from the USA, even if this causes domestic shortages. The U.S. government also guaranteed delivery of oil in U.S. tankers if commercial shippers become unable or unwilling to carry oil from the USA to Israel.

Thousands of people called for a swift end to the war in Iraq as they marched through downtown on Saturday, chanting and carrying signs that read: "Wall Street Gets Rich, Iraqis and GIs Die" or "Drop Tuition Not Bombs."

The streets were filled with thousands as labor union members, anti-war activists, clergy and others rallied near City Hall before marching to Dolores Park.

As part of the demonstration, protesters fell on Market Street as part of a "die in" to commemorate the thousands of American soldiers and Iraqi citizens who have died since the conflict began in March 2003.

The protest was the largest in a series of war protests taking place in New York, Los Angeles and other U.S. cities, organizers said.

No official head count was available. Organizers of the event estimated about 30,000 people participated in San Francisco. It appeared that more than 10,000 people attended the march.

"I got the sense that many people were at a demonstration for the first time," said Sarah Sloan, one of the event's organizers. "That's something that's really changed. People have realized the right thing to do is to take to the streets."

In the shadow of the National Constitution Center and Independence Hall in Philadelphia, a few hundred protesters ranging from grade school-aged children to senior citizens called on President Bush to end funding for the war and bring troops home.

Marchers who braved severe wet weather during the walk of more than 30 blocks were met by people lining the sidewalks and clutching a long yellow ribbon over the final blocks before Independence Mall. There, the rally opened with songs and prayers by descendants of Lenape Indians.

"Our signs are limp from the rain and the ground is soggy, but out spirits are high," said Bal Pinguel, of the American Friends Service Committee, one of the national sponsors of the event. "The high price we are paying is the more than 3,800 troops who have been killed in the war in Iraq."

Vince Robbins, 51, of Mount Holly, N.J., said there needed to be more rallies and more outrage.

"Where's the outcry? Where's the horror that almost 4,000 Americans have died in a foreign country that we invaded?" Robbins said. "I'm almost as angry at the American people as I am the president. I think Americans have become apathetic and placid about the whole thing."

In New York, among the thousands marching down Broadway was a man carrying cardboard peace doves. Some others dressed as prisoners, wearing the bright orange garb of Guantanamo Bay inmates and pushing a person in a cage.

Chicago police said about 5,000 people marched through city streets to protest the war.

Police spokeswoman JoAnn Taylor said three protesters were arrested before the march started. They face charges including resisting arrest, failure to obey a police officer, criminal damage to property and aggravated battery to a police officer.

In Seattle, thousands of marchers were led by a small group of Iraq war veterans.

At Occidental Park, where the protesters rallied after the march, the American Friends Service Committee displayed scores of combat boots, one pair for each U.S. solider killed in Iraq.

___

Associated Press writer Bob Lentz in Philadelphia contributed to this report.

Canadian editor interviews legendary anti-war American hero Dr Daniel Ellsberg (of Pentagon Papers fame) about the prospects for war or peace and our obligation to stand up for decency, peace and Humanity.

Key quote from great American Dr Daniel Ellsberg: " I wish, by the way that we could count on Europeans, and world publics and leaders elsewhere, all over the world, India, China, Russia, Western Europe, anywhere, to keep us from attacking Iran. I don't see it happening. I don't see them using their influence, whatever influence they have, to prevent this, any more than I see Democrats or Republics in Congress, or major parts of our own public doing this.

So this passivity and very selective or misplaced concern—I am speaking of course not only of Iran and Iraq but, for example, of nuclear threats and global climate change and radical inequalities--has to change if humans are to survive, or more narrowly if civilization is to survive. I think it is possible that we will find a way to survive honorably in that sense; and to keep from extinguishing most other species along with us, i.e. to avoid all-out nuclear war.

I think it is not a large chance. I think the odds are against us, actually. But there is still every reason to try and to do our best."

Reader comment: "Wow. So this is what deep, abiding, American integrity looks like. Profoundly inspiring."

Weapons expert Dr David Kelly was assassinated, an MP claims today.

Campaigning politician Norman Baker believes Dr Kelly, who exposed the Government's "sexed-up" Iraq dossier, was killed to stop him making further revelations about the lies that took Britain to war.

He says the murderers may have been anti-Saddam Iraqis, and suggests the crime was covered up by elements within the British establishment to prevent a diplomatic crisis.

In a sweeping indictment of the four-year effort in Iraq, the former top commander of American forces there called the Bush administration's handling of the war "incompetent" and said the result was "a nightmare with no end in sight.

Newsvine is proud to recognize the work done by Synthesis, in relation to the suspension (and possible expulsion) of the private security company, Blackwater USA, from Iraq. Synthesis was able to scoop mainstream media by a healthy margin, by diligently and continuously following the developments in Iraq. His articles are well-researched, he regularly cites his sources and his contributions to Newsvine are hereby recognized by making him the 13th recipient of the Random Act of Vineness award. Synthesis' work shows that any person has the power and potential to break stories by being patient, analyzing carefully and publishing responsibly.

Nominations from his fellow Newsviners:

Synthesis wrote a story detailing the situation about State Department and a private security force (now confirmed as Blackwater) and posted it on Sunday evening (11:34pm CDT). Reuters and AP broke the specifics several hours later (Mon Sep 17, 2007 6:57pm EDT). Synthesis, via his sources, was able to name Blackwater before it became widely known.

Newsvine Staff,

I'm not sure how to go about this, but I would love to see Synthesis get the RAV for his story about Blackwater last night, which is much better researched than anything we've gotten from the AP and the other mainstream media sources, and he also beat them to the story by over six hours. He has also written many other articles that were excellent and well researched, like his article abut the CIA last month, and his excellent article about the political shenanigans at the Bohemian Grove in the Bay Area earlier in August. I nominate him for the RAV because I think he represents what Newsvine is all about. Please consider this seriously. Thank you.

Though Synthesis humbly underplayed the importance of his scoop, we at Newsvine are honored to have writers of his caliber, and would like to publicly recognize his efforts and talent. Congratulations, Synthesis.

This an article about daily life for a soldier in Iraq at least in my neck of the woods. Unlike what many think or the way the news and some prominent politicians put it, it is not a living hell. Yes, it does sucks being here, but hell it isn't. I like to say it is kind of like being in prison, wait strike that, let's try house arrest instead. Unless on missions we stay within the base camp which is pretty much like a small city. We have a chow hall, shower, running water, both hot and cold, phone banks, Internet access if we own a laptop, stores, and even Burger King and Taco Bell and most importantly at least for me A/C. Are all base camps this way? Unfortunately not, some are newer, smaller, and lack some of the things we are fortunate enough to have here ie... Burger King, Taco Bell, and Internet access.

So when not on missions we pretty much spend the day trying to pass the time. Some spend hours on end on laptops, chatting with family and friends. Others read books, watch movies, play video games, work out, or just sleep the time away. Other than constant but very inaccurate indirect fire, life when not on missions is pretty boring. And, although many are pretty bummed about this, we are not allowed to drink. There is no alcohol allowed and we are tested for drugs randomly monthly. So fortunately (or unfortunately depending on who you talk too) most stay pretty sober while here. And although is very stressful here, it is nothing an average trained soldier can't handle. Truth, is we have harder times in basic training and training at our mobilization sites. What so many tend to forget is we are trained for this from day one in the military. Our job is to go to combat when our country needs us, and as long as you keep that in your mindset you can handle a deployment to Iraq.

For the most part we spend our times waiting to roll out of the gate on missions. We are not allowed to roll freely through out Iraq,(this is in stark contrast to when I was here in '03 where we could roll out at our leisure). So unless on a mission we have no contact with any civilian Iraqi, unless we get a chance to talk with the interpreters. Not all troops get to leave the wire though some stay inside the wire 24/7 without ever leaving the gate. This I cannot imagine. I guess we are just crazy but going outside the wire makes us happy. No not because the thrill, or because we get a chance to fight. No it is more about getting out and seeing places we don't see everyday, chance at seeing a world we have never seen before. And although it is dangerous it is worth it to escape for a few hours or days.

Most importantly try to remember that Iraq is still a dangerous place. War is a horrible thing and only the insane think other wise. So whether you stay in the base camp or go outside the wire you must constantly be prepared for the worst. With the enemy adapting and becoming even more cunning our lives are continuously in jeopardy. That being said a soldier cannot live his/her life in fear worrying about the next attack. You just drive on, stay alert, and do your job with honor and pride.

Lastly I would like to thank Jerry (oldfogey) for his question. I hope I answered it for you. Thanks buddy.

The report was written out of the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security, the folks who hired Blackwater to provide security for US diplomats in Iraq. But it turns out that the State Department employee who interviewed the Blackwater folks and wrote the report, Darren Hanner ... well, he wasn't a State Department employee. He was another contractor from Blackwater.

So yes, you've got that right. We've now reached what can only be called the alpha and the omega of contracting accountability breakdown ridiculousness. We're outsourcing our investigations of Blackwater to Blackwater.

Saddam Hussein offered to step down and go into exile one month before the invasion of Iraq, it was claimed last night.
Fearing defeat, Saddam was prepared to go peacefully in return for £500million ($1billion).
The extraordinary offer was revealed yesterday in a transcript of talks in February 2003 between George Bush and the then Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar at the President's Texas ranch.
The White House refused to comment on the report last night.

A Pentagon group has encouraged some U.S. military snipers in Iraq to target suspected insurgents by scattering pieces of "bait," such as detonation cords, plastic explosives and ammunition, and then killing Iraqis who pick up the items, according to military court documents.

The classified program was described in investigative documents related to recently filed murder charges against three snipers who are accused of planting evidence on Iraqis they killed.

09/05/07 "IPS News" -- - Death squads from the Ministry of Interior posing as Iraqi police are killing more people than ever in the capital, emerging evidence shows.

The death toll is high - in all 1,536 bodies were brought to the Baghdad morgue in September. The health ministry announced last month that it will build two new morgues in Baghdad to take their capacity to 250 bodies a day.

ADRIAN HAMILTON

One explanation for President Bush's rant against Iran last week, following his extraordinary speech comparing Iraq with Vietnam the week before, is that the pressure is finally getting to him. Presidential history, from Woodrow Wilson to Ronald Reagan by way of FDR, is replete with presidents who on grounds of failing powers shouldn't really have been allowed to go on. Besieged by events, cast down by the opinion polls, isolated by the loss of his closest advisers, it would not be surprising if this particular president was now losing it.

It's unnerving for the rest of the world, of course, as Bush's finger is still on the nuclear button, raising the terrifying prospect that his vision of nuclear holocaust in the Middle East could be set off not by Tehran but the U.S. president himself launching an attack on Iran, which then involved Israel with all its nuclear weaponry. It's unlikely, I know, but it's not something that can absolutely be ruled out, given the way the White House is now ramping up the confrontation with Iran.

The more likely explanation for Bush's increasingly apocalyptic tone, however, is in some ways more worrying. It is that all eyes in Washington are now exclusively directed to the domestic audience with the added sting that the White House is under the control of a president who does not need to seek re-election and has the will to go down like a western hero, all guns blazing.

Raising the specter of Vietnam to an audience of veterans as Bush did clothes him in a patriotic flag, alongside those on the right who have always believed that Vietnam was a self-inflicted defeat, not a disastrous war from the start.

When you bring in Iran, you enter even more fertile territory for a president trying to paint himself as a lone ranger and paint his opponents into a corner. There may be few in the U.S., and even fewer now in Congress, who want the U.S. to launch a new Middle East invasion after the disaster of the last, but most Americans believe Iran is a threat to world peace, intent on developing nuclear weapons and ripe for regime change. Playing the Iran card wrong-foots your opponents (look at the problems Barack Obama got into when he urged direct talks with Tehran) and (theoretically) garners domestic support in reaction to foreign threat.

As Congress prepares to receive reports on Iraq from General David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and readies for a debate on George W. Bush's latest funding request of $50 billion for the Iraq war, the performance of the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has become a central and contentious issue. But according to the working draft of a secret document prepared by the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, the Maliki government has failed in one significant area: corruption. Maliki's government is "not capable of even rudimentary enforcement of anticorruption laws," the report says, and, perhaps worse, the report notes that Maliki's office has impeded investigations of fraud and crime within the government.

The draft--over 70 pages long--was obtained by The Nation, and it reviews the work (or attempted work) of the Commission on Public Integrity (CPI), an independent Iraqi institution, and other anticorruption agencies within the Iraqi government. Labeled "SENSITIVE BUT UNCLASSIFIED/Not for distribution to personnel outside of the US Embassy in Baghdad," the study details a situation in which there is little, if any, prosecution of government theft and sleaze. Moreover, it concludes that corruption is "the norm in many ministries."

The report depicts the Iraqi government as riddled with corruption and criminals--and beyond the reach of anticorruption investigators. It also maintains that the extensive corruption within the Iraqi government has strategic consequences by decreasing public support for the U.S.-backed government and by providing a source of funding for Iraqi insurgents and militias.

The report, which was drafted by a team of U.S. embassy officials, surveys the various Iraqi ministries. "The Ministry of Interior is seen by Iraqis as untouchable by the anticorruption enforcement infrastructure of Iraq," it says. "Corruption investigations in Ministry of Defense are judged to be ineffectual." The study reports that the Ministry of Trade is "widely recognized as a troubled ministry" and that of 196 corruption complaints involving this ministry merely eight have made it to court, with only one person convicted.

The Ministry of Health, according to the report, "is a sore point; corruption is actually affecting its ability to deliver services and threatens the support of the government." Investigations involving the Ministry of Oil have been manipulated, the study says, and the "CPI and the [Inspector General of the ministry] are completely ill-equipped to handle oil theft cases." There is no accurate accounting of oil production and transportation within the ministry, the report explains, because organized crime groups are stealing oil "for the benefit of militias/insurgents, corrupt public officials and foreign buyers."

For many the summer vacation was less enjoyable than the month long holiday the Congress took on the heels of voting their own pay raise.

But today Congress shows up to work again. The problems they left have grown and so has the taxation without representation for the hundreds of millions who do not see representative government in Washington..

For troops stationed in Iraq, there is never really a day off. Half a world away from their lives and their loved ones they suffer in untold ways. From the hardships and horrors of a war to the reality of losing life and limb round the clock..

Here at home there fate rests with the Congress who have the obligation to oversee spending and keep the balance of powers balanced.

The economy is ailing, as badly as the infrastructure, yet money pours like water into the pockets of contractors, spilling over with excesses, waste and fraud.

Without adequate Congressional oversight, our tax dollars continue to fund a war for which there was no justification and which still has no end in sight.

Now that Congress is back in Washington they will be asked to give the President more money for this war. That's our money that is tossed away like leaves in the wind.

They will vote on the President's request for continued funding of the war. The last suggested amount of the War continuation cost was $142 billion.

But reports have been circulating suggesting that President Bush will probably ask for an additional $50 billion, for a total of more than $190 billion dollars!

Congress has failed miserably in oversight, spending and acting with the will of the people. Enough is enough!

Congress is not required to give President Bush one dime for the war. Congress isn't even obligated to to bring the President's request to a vote.

Congress can also put restrictions on any monies they hand out. Congress can demand withdrawal timelines and other conditions on any funding in order to force an end to the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

Congress is supposed to work for us. In an effort to remind them of their job, representing the will of the people, anti-war groups have been encouraging individuals to make today the day to call Congress and remind them who they answer to and what it is we want.

We want the war to end. We want Congress to hear that loud and clear, so today is unofficially Call Congress Day.

For those who cross my path often, the Capitol Switchboard number 202-224-3121 along with a suggestion to call the MoC is nothing new. It's important for them to hear you, to hear all of us but especially today as they return from their holidays with their ears filled with sand.

There is power in numbers and with enough calls to Congress to welcome them back and remind them of their obligation to Representative Government we may make some real progress.

As always, if you do call be polite with the folks who answer the phone, they just answer phones. State the point as simply as possible, I'm a constituent who wants the war to end and the funding power of Congress to make it happen.

Welcome them back with the voice of the people loud enough to hear. This Government of the People is ours to fight for. Fighting for Democracy has long been stated as a noble American value

Fighting for ours to hold to the principles we cherish as Patriots is essential.

Raise your voices Americans. Welcome Congress back to find a Nation that cares and is watching. Pick up the phone.

So claims the Pentagon. Must be true, right? The President says it... hell, McClatchy News Service ran this headline yesterday.... "Combat deaths in Iraq decline; reasons aren't clear." The Chicago Tribune even jumped on the bandwagon yesterday... "U.S. combat deaths drop by HALF during 'surge'." Sweet Jesus... thats the best damn news I've heard in over four years... the only problem is it just ain't true...

I've been taking a hiatus from Newsvine these past three months, but after reading those two articles yesterday, I have to vent somehow... so here I am.

I'm reminded of the 2000 Presidential debates when schrub accused Gore of using "fuzzy math." Well, it don't get much fuzzier than this.
Let's put some perspective on the figures being flaunted by our fearless leaders... First, the whole world runs in cycles. You know, like spring, summer, fall and winter. This affects us all in ways that are hard to explain, but they affect us none the less. The war in Iraq is no exception. Since it began, American deaths have always been lower in the summer months than any other. It's friggin hot there in the summer! Hell, even the Iraq politicians take time off during the summer. Our very own Congress takes August off, after all, it's hot!

Think the war is any different? Think again. As you can see from the graph, deaths fluctuate by seasons... even terrorists are less active when it's hot.
In June 2006, 54 American soldiers were killed in combat (not total deaths, just the combat related ones). In June of this year, during the "surge," we had 89 combat deaths. July last year saw 35 of our troops killed in combat, July this year was 68 combat deaths. August last year claimed 55 lives due to combat. Last month we lost 56.

Now, explain to me how the Pentagon, shrub, or any other idiot can claim that combat deaths have declined.... or as the Chicago tribune claimed, been cut in half... And while your pondering that dilemma, explain to me why the MSM is buying this "fuzzy math" hook line and sinker. Have they learned nothing from the past five years....

ThinkProgress is now banned from the U.S. military network in Baghdad.

Recently, an avid ThinkProgress reader — a U.S. soldier serving his second tour in Iraq — wrote to us and said that he can no longer access ThinkProgress.org.

President Bush is expected to hear deep concerns Friday from top Pentagon generals about continuing the military buildup in Iraq, as yet another grim independent report emerges finding lack of progress in the conflict.

Iraq was to be the main topic at a meeting scheduled so Bush could hear assessments from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Two independent assessments already have been previewed this week — the latest finding that Iraq's national police are so corrupt and tainted by sectarianism that the corps should be scrapped and replaced with a smaller force.

An independent commission established by Congress to study Iraq's security forces will recommend starting over and reshaping the troubled 25,000-member police organization with a more elite force, a defense official said Friday. He said the report was more positive about progress being made by the Iraqi army.

The report from a commission headed by the former commander of U.S. troops in Europe, retired Gen. James Jones, is to be presented to Congress next week but was briefed to Gates and other officials this week, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the report has not been publicly released.

The Iraqi National Police, a paramilitary organization run by the Interior Ministry, has long been feared and distrusted by the Iraqi people and is considered the weak link in the Iraqi security system. Many of its early senior officers were veterans of the Badr Brigade, the Iranian-backed Shiite militia formed in Iran from among Shiite refugees who had fled Saddam Hussein's rule.

The U.S. has been working to weed out corrupt members, taking whole police units out of service and retraining them, as well as removing a number of commanders.

The report on Iraqi forces follows circulation of a draft report by the auditing arm of Congress that found the Iraqi government has failed to meet political and security goals. A third report — by the nation's intelligence agencies last week — found there has been some progress, but that violence remains high, the Iraqi government will become more precarious over the next six to 12 months and its security forces have not improved enough to operate without outside help.

Training and equipping an Iraqi Army, police force and border corps is key to handing over responsibility for Iraq's security and bringing U.S. troops home. Commanders have said they hoped to have a 390,000 security forces trained by the end of this year, but that they are not yet capable enough in some areas for the U.S. to reduce its troop levels.

Bush's Friday meeting with generals is likely to include an assessment on the long-term impact on U.S. forces of maintaining a heavy troop presence in Iraq in 2008 and beyond. There are more than 160,000 Americans in Iraq, up from around 130,000 before the escalation Bush ordered in January.

The Army and the Marine Corps have shouldered most of the burden in Iraq, creating strains that service leaders fear could hurt their recruiting as well as their preparedness for other military emergencies. The Joint Chiefs, however, were not expected to urge Bush to withdraw from Iraq entirely as many Democrats want.

Maj. Gen. Richard Sherlock, director of operational planning for the Joint Chiefs, told reporters that Friday's meeting in a secure conference room known as "the tank" would be the Joint Chiefs' opportunity to "provide the president with their unvarnished recommendations and their assessments of current operations" — in particular the situation in Iraq.

It did not appear that the session was intended to work out a consensus military view on how long Bush should maintain the U.S. troop buildup in Iraq or how soon to transition to Iraqi control of security.

Bush in recent public statements has suggested he intends to stick to his Iraq strategy for now.

Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said this week that Gates wanted to ensure that all senior military leaders had an opportunity to express their individual views on Iraq to the president, without feeling the need to present a consensus view.

Bush was to hear advice from Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs; Adm. William Fallon, the senior commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East; and the top commanders in Baghdad.

The Pentagon meeting takes place as an independent assessment of the war from the Government Accountability Office has concluded that Iraq has made little political progress in recent months despite the influx of U.S. troops the president ordered earlier this year.

In a draft report circulated this week, the GAO concluded that at least 13 of the 18 political and security goals for the Iraqi government have not been met. Administration officials on Thursday objected to several of the findings and dismissed the report as unrealistically harsh because it assigned pass-or-fail grades to each benchmark, with little nuance.

Officials also appeared to dismiss the separate report on Iraqi security forces Friday.

"We're not giving up on the Iraqi National Police," said Morrell.

"We have said all along that the Army is growing into a very professional, dedicated force and that there is still work to be done with the police," said Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman.

Jones briefs Congress next week on his assessment of the Iraqi security forces, and Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, testify the week of Sept. 10.

Bush will deliver his own progress report by Sept. 15.

This year's U.S. troop buildup has succeeded in bringing violence in Baghdad down from peak levels, but the death toll from sectarian attacks around the country is running nearly double the pace from a year ago.

Some of the recent bloodshed appears the result of militant fighters drifting into parts of northern Iraq, where they have fled after U.S.-led offensives. Baghdad, however, still accounts for slightly more than half of all war-related killings — the same percentage as a year ago, according to figures compiled by The Associated Press.

The tallies and trends offer a sobering snapshot after an additional 30,000 U.S. troops began campaigns in February to regain control of the Baghdad area. It also highlights one of the major themes expected in next month's Iraq progress report to Congress: some military headway, but extremist factions are far from broken.

In street-level terms, it means life for average Iraqis appears to be even more perilous and unpredictable.

The AP tracking includes Iraqi civilians, government officials, police and security forces killed in attacks such as gunfights and bombings, which are frequently blamed on Sunni suicide strikes. It also includes execution-style killings — largely the work of Shiite death squads.

The figures are considered a minimum based on AP reporting. The actual numbers are likely higher, as many killings go unreported or uncounted. Insurgent deaths are not a part of the Iraqi count.

The findings include:

— Iraq is suffering about double the number of war-related deaths throughout the country compared with last year — an average daily toll of 33 in 2006, and 62 so far this year.

— Nearly 1,000 more people have been killed in violence across Iraq in the first eight months of this year than in all of 2006. So far this year, about 14,800 people have died in war-related attacks and sectarian murders. AP reporting accounted for 13,811 deaths in 2006. The United Nations and other sources placed the 2006 toll far higher.

— Baghdad has gone from representing 76 percent of all civilian and police war-related deaths in Iraq in January to 52 percent in July, bringing it back to the same spot it was roughly a year ago.

_According to the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization, the number of displaced Iraqis has more than doubled since the start of the year, from 447,337 on Jan. 1 to 1.14 million on July 31.

However, Brig. Gen. Richard Sherlock, deputy director for operational planning for the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff, said violence in Iraq "has continued to decline and is at the lowest level since June 2006."

He offered no statistics to back his claim, but in a briefing with reporters at the Pentagon on Friday he warned insurgents might try intensify attacks in Iraq to coincide with three milestones: the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks in the U.S., the beginning of Ramadan and the report to Congress.

The U.S. military did not get all the additional American forces into Iraq until June 15, so it would be premature to draw a final statistical picture of the effect of the added troops.

But initial calculations validate fears that the Baghdad crackdown would push militants into districts north of the capital, including Diyala province where U.S. force and Iraqi soldiers have conducted major operation to clear its main city, Baqouba, of al-Qaida in Iraq fighters.

In July, the AP figures show 35 percent of all war-related killings occurred in northern provinces. The figure one year ago was 22 percent.

The final death count for August also will likely be further oriented to the north after the savage Aug. 14 attack by suspected al-Qaida truck bombers near the Syrian border in Ninevah province. At least 500 villagers from the Yazidi sect were killed in the deadliest civilian attack of the war.

In the first months of this year, many extremists fled to Baghdad and regions to the north after Sunni tribesmen in Anbar, the sprawling desert province west of the capital, turned on their erstwhile al-Qaida allies.

Anthony Cordesman, an Iraq expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said many militants are trying to hang onto footholds in central Iraq.

"Most of the force shifts are still in the Baghdad ring and Diyala," he said in a recent interview, predicting more spectacular attacks in the days leading to next month's report to Congress by U.S. commander Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker.

"Will it lead to more bloody attacks as they try to exploit the American political debate? Yes."

Nora Bensahel, a military analyst at the Rand Corp., said that northern Iraq had become increasingly destabilized over the past few months.

The insurgents have made a "concerted effort to concentrate attacks in other parts of the country," Bensahel said, in part to escape the increased U.S. troop presence in Baghdad and in part to give the impression that no place in Iraq is safe.

Mostly, she said, the insurgents have shifted their focus to the Baghdad suburbs, but they are particularly keen to undermine the notion that northern Iraq is a "success story" for Washington and its key Iraqi partners — including the Kurds who have maintained a near-autonomous state in the north since the early 1990s.

Staging attacks in the north "has a symbolic effect," she said.

And beyond that, Bensahel said the tactic puts the United States in a difficult situation.

"There isn't an ability to move north in any significant numbers without abandoning Baghdad" — a change in strategy that Washington is not prepared to make, she said.

But a huge problem also looms in the south, the center of Shiite political and spiritual influence and the site of Iraq's main oil fields.

There are daily gunbattles between the Mahdi Army militia — loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr — and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, the powerhouse Shiite political party that controls most of the bureaucracy and police forces in southern Iraq.

This month, the governors of two southern provinces loyal to the Supreme Islamic Council were killed in roadside bombings.

The clashes are expected to grow more intense as Britain draws downs its forces in southern Iraq over the coming months. The effect of the shrinking British presence is already being felt, said Cordesman in an assessment released Aug. 22.

"The end result was to turn the four provinces in southeastern Iraq over to feuding Shiite factions whose actions were mixed with corruption, extortion and links to criminal activities," he wrote.

And there are increasing signs that whole regions of the south are inclined to seek increased autonomy from the center — moves that many Iraqis fear could lead to partition of the country.

In Najaf — the spiritual heart for Shiites around the world — the provincial spokesman, Ahmed Deibel, told AP early this month that the gas turbine generator there had been removed from the national electricity grid. The unilateral action has contributed to several nationwide power blackouts.

He said the provincial plant produced 50 megawatts, while the province needed at least 200 megawatts.

"What we produce is not enough even for us. We disconnected it from the national grid (Aug. 1) because the people in Baghdad were getting too much, leaving little electricity for Najaf," he said.

The No. 2 U.S. commander, Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, has also expressed fears of a big insurgent attack in the final days before the report to Congress, but also claimed the offensives have shaken militant fighters in Baghdad and environs.

"Due to the constant pressure and depletion of their leadership, extremists have been pushed out of many population centers and are on the move, seeking other places to operate within the country," Odierno said last week.

"As a result, we are now in pursuit of al-Qaida and other extremist elements, and we'll continue to aggressively target their shrinking areas of influence," he said.

"Over the coming weeks, we plan to conduct quick-strike raids against remaining extremist sanctuaries and staging areas," Odierno said.

Although anyone with a lick of sense has assumed that that report to be made in September would be heavily influenced by the Bush administration, it's confirmed in this article in today's LA Times, titled "Top general may propose pullbacks." The article is full of interesting tidbits about what General Petraeus might or might not recommend in September, the telling portion is located on the second page, here:

Administration and military officials acknowledge that the September report will not show any significant progress on the political benchmarks laid out by Congress. How to deal in the report with the lack of national reconciliation between Iraq's warring sects has created some tension within the White House.

Despite Bush's repeated statements that the report will reflect evaluations by Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, administration officials said it would actually be written by the White House, with inputs from officials throughout the government.

And though Petraeus and Crocker will present their recommendations on Capitol Hill, legislation passed by Congress leaves it to the president to decide how to interpret the report's data.

So, the report won't show any significant political progress (even though the stated purpose of Bush's escalation was to "create the conditions" in which political progress could be made), but it will be written by the Bush administration, who will then proceed to interpret the report's data and make determinations regarding further action based on that interpretation. Anyone else see anything wrong with this picture?

There is an odd blessing that comes to any who spend time in a critical care situation. It is a place where earth's angels dwell and there is no doubt when you watch a life in their hands, it is so.

By stepping across the threshold of an ICU, you enter a realm where heart and soul and mind become one.

Opinion and belief are all subservient to the questions of what is known, what is unknown and how best to proceed, with all available skill, knowledge and tools, to save a life.

Each and every soul delivered into the ICU hands, is treated with equal effort and care to achieve one goal, save the life. The frantic, worried entourage that each patient brings to keep watch and pray, is one more extraordinary demand on the limits of giving for those devoted to saving lives every day.

They ask nothing of those who show up at their door to be saved, but "How can we help?" We who are helpless wait.

No one sits beside a stranger in the family room and asks, "What God do you pray to. What political party do you support? Is your title, your house and your income bigger than mine? "

In the world of the life savers everything becomes an issue of the lives hanging in the balance. Everyone is the same in the hope and pain magnified by acknowledgment of being powerless and many of us can find our better selves there.

If you are lucky some of that will go with you when you leave.

Admittedly it is easy to lose as petty irritations and the predictable monotony of daily life let us slip into a comfort with the idea that the next minute will go as routinely as the one passed.

We begin to lose sight of what is a real problem or what the real point at the heart of the discussion really is.

In the ICU is is simply the single focus of what specific steps are done to save a life.

On the other side are the threats to survival. Here in America disease grows by epidemic proportions. Our savings are spent to drop bombs and soak herbicides on vast swaths of the planet and toxic waste and resource plundering proceeds at breakneck speed.

We build bridges to nowhere, to feed a machine in Washington that has declared wars on drugs and terror, poverty and world hunger. The hallmark of every effort is widespread death and failure.

I believe in the Commandment, "thou shalt not kill" and don't think it should go along with a footnote. But politically it does. We as Americans have watched as killing is rationalized by political claims whose value elude me.

Years into a bloodbath in the Middle East, with the numbers of refugees, wounded and killed soaring into the million column, facing numbers that evoke terms that ignite the nastiest charges and basest exchanges. Those emotions boil over into a froth where we lose sight of the ones who are actual lives reflected in the numbers.

It they are not numbers; they are lives, what about the high numbers of the casualties who are innocents? What can I think?.

Each day, peaceful men, women and children wake to the horrors and violence of war, death, destruction, illness and starvation, paid for by American taxpayers. With Congress' recent vote for an additional $100 billion in war spending, the total spent or allocated for the Iraq War alone rises to nearly half a trillion dollars.

What things could we not afford before the war, that are costs so token in nature as to pale in comparison to the totals immediately available for destruction? Open the spigots and let the contractor funds gush, Congress has no shortage when the question is finding the money for weapons of war.

Whether it is researching the coups in the CIA archives or looking at Iraq today, there are those in Washington who at some point, had to decide that the deaths were worth the cost in lives and property. At some point individuals concluded these costs were worth the offensive actions.

It had to be accepted by those who call themselves policy makers, that selecting the course set an acceptable basis for the death and destruction. It could only begin because it was justified by something.

That's the part that eludes me. What are the good reasons that my Congress uses when they look in the mirror to say today these avoidable deaths will occur because some greater aim is served. These people are being paid by me to act in my name and each day they believe they are justified to kill some random number of innocents, en route to a better what? What is it that justifies the deaths?

On a very basic level, there should be a list of at least ten good reasons why we are killing so many innocents including women and children. Ten Commandments serve as the core of our proclaimed National values. To break those should generate at least ten good reasons why.

If, "every life is precious", is really part of our National belief system the avoidable deaths whose blood is shed by Congress should not be excused as a natural by product of war.

That's a cop out that avoids the question of why the war is justified knowing the price. If there is a high price paid for good reason, damn it tell me the good reasons. I want to know the good reasons to have something to wrap my mind around because to my eyes there are none

Congress uses in my name and with my money as an American. I may not be able to stop the killing but they owe us a reasoned account for why we shalt kill and fund it.

The defense of life claims, tied to Federal spending, prohibit even one frozen embryo from being destroyed. So high is the moral righteousness and admonishments that the first embryo lost will set us on the "slippery slope" that undermines our values for life, we must feel obligated to defend our respect for life.

Fine. What then becomes the justification for destroying the living? Some one tell me the good reasons, thou shalt not kill, doesn't apply to the acts of Congress. What makes the killing defensible? Over one million dead should get a list of top reasons to point to and say, this is why.

In a hidden corner of Rome's busy Fiumicino Airport, police dug quietly through a traveler's checked baggage, looking for smuggled drugs. What they found instead was a catalog of weapons, a clue to something bigger.

Their discovery led anti-Mafia investigators down a monthslong trail of telephone and e-mail intercepts, into the midst of a huge black-market transaction, as Iraqi and Italian partners haggled over shipping more than 100,000 Russian-made automatic weapons into the bloodbath of Iraq.

As the secretive, $40 million deal neared completion, Italian authorities moved in, making arrests and breaking it up. But key questions remain unanswered.

For one thing, The Associated Press has learned that Iraqi government officials were involved in the deal, apparently without the knowledge of the U.S. Baghdad command — a departure from the usual pattern of U.S.-overseen arms purchases.

Why these officials resorted to "black" channels and where the weapons were headed is unclear.

The purchase would merely have been the most spectacular example of how Iraq has become a magnet for arms traffickers and a place of vanishing weapons stockpiles and uncontrolled gun markets since the 2003 U.S. invasion and the onset of civil war.

Some guns the U.S. bought for Iraq's police and army are unaccounted for, possibly fallen into the hands of insurgents or sectarian militias. Meanwhile, the planned replacement of the army's AK-47s with U.S.-made M-16s may throw more assault rifles onto the black market. And the weapons free-for-all apparently is spilling over borders: Turkey and Iran complain U.S.-supplied guns are flowing from Iraq to anti-government militants on their soil.

Iraqi middlemen in the Italian deal, in intercepted e-mails, claimed the arrangement had official American approval. A U.S. spokesman in Baghdad denied that.

"Iraqi officials did not make MNSTC-I aware that they were making purchases," Lt. Col. Daniel Williams of the Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq (MNSTC-I), which oversees arming and training of the Iraqi police and army, told the AP.

Operation Parabellum, the investigation led by Dario Razzi, anti-Mafia prosecutor in this central Italian city, began in 2005 as a routine investigation into drug trafficking by organized-crime figures, branched out into an inquiry into arms dealing with Libya, and then widened to Iraq.

Court documents obtained by the AP show that Razzi's break came early last year when police monitoring one of the drug suspects covertly opened his luggage as he left on a flight to Libya. Instead of the expected drugs, they found helmets, bulletproof vests and the weapons catalog.

Tapping telephones, monitoring e-mails, Razzi's investigators followed the trail to a group of Italian businessmen, otherwise unrelated to the drug probe, who were working to sell arms to Libya and, by late 2006, to Iraq as well, through offshore companies they set up in Malta and Cyprus.

Four Italians have been arrested and are awaiting court indictment for allegedly creating a criminal association and alleged arms trafficking — trading in weapons without a government license. A fifth Italian is being sought in Africa. In addition, 13 other Italians were arrested on drug charges.

In the documents, Razzi describes it as "strange" that the U.S.-supported Iraqi government would seek such weapons via the black market.

Investigators say the prospect of an Iraq deal was raised last November, when an Iraqi-owned trading firm e-mailed Massimo Bettinotti, 39, owner of the Malta-based MIR Ltd., about whether MIR could supply 100,000 AK-47 assault rifles and 10,000 machine guns "to the Iraqi Interior Ministry," adding that "this deal is approved by America and Iraq."

The go-between — the Al-Handal General Trading Co. in Dubai — apparently had communicated with Bettinotti earlier about buying night visors and had been told MIR could also procure weapons.

Al-Handal has figured in questionable dealings before, having been identified by U.S. investigators three years ago as a "front company" in Iraq's Oil-for-Food scandal.

The Interior Ministry's need at that point for such a massive weapons shipment is unclear. The U.S. training command had already reported it would arm all Interior Ministry police by the end of 2006 through its own three-year-old program, which as of July 26 has bought 701,000 weapons for the Iraqi army and police with $237 million in U.S. government funds.

Negotiations on the deal progressed quickly in e-mail exchanges between the Italians and Iraqi middlemen of the al-Handal company and its parent al-Thuraya Group. But at times the discussion turned murky and nervous.

The Iraqis alternately indicated the Interior Ministry or "security ministries" would be the end users. At one point, a worried Bettinotti e-mailed, "We prefer to speak about this deal face to face and not by e-mail."

The Italians sent several offers of various types and quantities of rifles, with photos included. The negotiating focused on the source of the weapons: The Iraqi middlemen said their buyer insisted they be Russian-made, but the Italians wanted to sell AK-47s made in China, where they had better contacts.

"We are in a hurry with this deal," an impatient Waleed Noori al-Handal, Jordan-based general manager of the Iraqi firm, wrote the Italians on Nov. 13 in one of the e-mails seen by AP.

He added, in apparent allusion to the shipment's clandestine nature, "You mustn't worry if it's a problem to import these goods directly into Iraq. We can bring the product to another country and then transfer it to Iraq."

By December, the Italians, having found a Bulgarian broker, were offering Russian-made goods: 50,000 AKM rifles, an improved version of the AK-47; 50,000 AKMS rifles, the same gun with folding stock; and 5,000 PKM machine guns.

The Iraqis quibbled over the asking price, $39.7 million, but seemed satisfied. The Italians were set for a $6.6 million profit, the court documents show, and were already discussing air transport for the weapons. At this point prosecutor Razzi acted, seeking an arrest warrant from a Perugia court.

"The negotiation with Iraq is developing very quickly," he wrote the judge.

On Feb. 12, in seven locations across Italy, police arrested the 17 men, including the four alleged arms traffickers: Bettinotti; Gianluca Squarzolo, 39, the man whose luggage had yielded the original clue; Ermete Moretti, 55, and Serafino Rossi, 64. If convicted, they could be sentenced to up to 12 years in prison.

The at-large fifth man, Vittorio Dordi, 42, was believed to be in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he apparently is involved in the diamond trade. Italian authorities were seeking information on him from the African country.

In the parallel Libya case, the Italians allegedly paid two Libyan Defense Ministry officials about $500,000 in kickbacks to speed that transaction for Chinese-made assault rifles. It isn't known whether such bribes were a factor in the Iraq deal. No Libyans or Iraqis are known to have been detained in connection with the cases.

Al-Handal's operations have caught investigators' notice before. In 1996-2003, the company was involved as a broker in the kickback scandal known as Oil for Food, the CIA says.

In that program, Iraq under U.N. economic sanctions bought food and other necessities with U.N.-supervised oil revenues. Foreign companies, often through intermediaries, surreptitiously kicked back payments to officials of Saddam Hussein's Iraqi government in exchange for such supply contracts.

Those Iraqi middlemen also engaged in "misrepresenting the origin or final destination of goods," said the 2004 report of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group, which investigated both Iraq's defunct advanced weapons programs and Oil for Food.

That report also alleged that during this period Al-Handal General Trading, from its bases in Dubai and Jordan, secretly moved unspecified "equipment" into Iraq that was forbidden by the U.N. sanctions.

Reached at his office in Amman, Jordan, Waleed Noori al-Handal denied the family firm had done anything wrong in the Italian arms case.

"We don't have anything to hide," he told the AP.

Citing the names of "friends" in top U.S. military ranks in Iraq, al-Handal said his company has fulfilled scores of supply and service contracts for the U.S. occupation. Asked why he claimed U.S. approval for the abortive Italian weapons purchase, he said he had a document from the U.S. Army "that says, 'We allow al-Thuraya Group to do all kinds of business.'"

In Baghdad, the Interior Ministry wouldn't discuss the AK-47 transaction on the record. But a senior ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the matter's sensitivity, acknowledged it had sought the weapons through al-Handal.

Asked about the irregular channels used, he said the ministry "doesn't ask the supplier how these weapons are obtained."

Although this official refused to discuss details, he said "most" of the 105,000 weapons were meant for police in Iraq's western province of Anbar. That statement raised questions, however, since Pentagon reports list only 161,000 trained police across all 18 of Iraq's provinces, and say the ministry has been issued 169,280 AK-47s, 167,789 pistols and 16,398 machine guns for them and 28,000 border police.

A July 26 Pentagon report said 20,847 other AK-47s purchased for the Interior Ministry have not yet been delivered. Iraqi officials complain that the U.S. supply of equipment, from bullets to uniforms, has been slow.

A Pentagon report in June may have touched on another possible destination for weapons obtained via secretive channels, noting that "militia infiltration of local police remains a significant problem." Shiite Muslim militias in Iraq's civil war have long been known to find cover and weapons within the Interior Ministry.

In fact, in a further sign of poor controls on the flow of arms into Iraq, a July 31 audit report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office said the U.S. command's books don't contain records on 190,000 AK-47s and other weapons, more than half those issued in 2004-2005 to Iraqi forces. This makes it difficult to trace weapons that may be passed on to militias or insurgents.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, has described the Interior Ministry's accounting of police equipment as unreliable.

Here in Italy, Razzi expressed puzzlement at the Iraqi officials' circumvention of U.S. supply routes.

"It seems strange that a pro-Western government, supported by the U.S. Army and other NATO countries on its own territory, would seek Russian or Chinese weapons through questionable channels," the anti-Mafia prosecutor wrote in seeking the arrest warrant that short-circuited the complex deal.

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger looks forward to the arrival of Bill Clinton in London where an "audience" with him will cost up to £799 a head. In examining Clinton's liberal credentials and comparing them to George W. Bush's record, Pilger illuminates what Hillary Clinton might offer America and the world as the first female president.

By John Pilger

08/09/07 "ICH" -- --On 14 August, you are invited to "an audience" with Bill Clinton in London. You have a choice. You can attend the "breakfast and speech" or the "brunch buffet and speech". These will take place in the white elephantine Millennium Dome, where a place in the "Kings' Row" will cost you £799. Last year, Clinton made more than £5m granting "audiences". Not only the usual corporate types attend. A few years ago, I watched a conga line of writers, journalists, publishers and others of liberal reputation shuffling towards his grotesquely paid presence at the Guardian Hay Festival.

The Clinton scam is symptomatic of the death of liberalism – not its narcissistic, war-loving wing ("humanitarian intervention"), which is ascendant, but the liberalism that speaks against crimes committed in its name, while extending rungs of the economic ladder to those below. It was Clinton's promotion of the former and crushing of the latter that so inspired new Labour's "project". Clinton, not Bush, was Cool Britannia's true Mafia godfather. Keen observers of Tony Blair will recall that during one of his many farewell speeches, the sociopath did a weird impersonation of Clinton's head wiggle.

Clinton is able to make a shedload a money because he is contrasted with the despised Bush as the flawed good guy who did his best for the world and brought economic boom to the US – the fabled American dream no less. Both notions are finely spun lies. What Clinton and Blair have most in common is that they are the most violent leaders of their countries in the modern era; that includes Bush. Consider Clinton's true record.

In 1993, he pursued George H W Bush's invasion of Somalia. He invaded Haiti in 1994. He bombed Bosnia in 1995 and Serbia in 1999. In 1998, he bombed Afghanistan; and, at the height of his Monica Lewinsky troubles, he momentarily diverted the headline writers to a major "terrorist target" in Sudan that he ordered destroyed with an onslaught of missiles. It turned out to be sub-Saharan Africa's largest pharmaceutical plant, the only source of chloroquine, the treatment for malaria, and other drugs that were lifelines to hundreds of thousands. As a result, wrote Jonathan Belke, then of the Near East Foundation, "tens of thousands of people – many of them children – have suffered and died from malaria, tuberculosis and other treatable diseases".

Long before Shock and Awe, Clinton was destroying and killing in Iraq. Under the lawless pretence of a "no-fly zone", he oversaw the longest allied aerial bombardment since the Second World War. This was hardly reported. At the same time, he imposed and tightened a Washington-led economic siege estimated to have killed a million civilians. "We think the price is worth it," said his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, in an exquisite moment of honesty.

Iraq is in the throes of its worst political crisis since the fall of Saddam Hussein with the new democratic system, based on national consensus among its ethnic and sectarian groups, appearing dangerously close to collapsing, say several politicians and analysts.

I was making my usual rounds of Newsvine this morning (read: quickly scanning multiple stories, looking for opportunities for frivolous and snarky comments) when I came across this article:

Who is your hero?

A few people on the thread mentioned that soldiers and marines were their heroes and I was reminded that one of our own, Rob Ballew, is in Iraq at this moment. Rob was one of the very first people on my friends list and, as many of you know, is a genuinely nice guy. I say we get together as a community and attempt to lift his spirits with one of our famous "GiftPacky's" (patent pending: winsomecowboy)! It doesn't have to be elaborate; comic books, CDs, games...hell, any gift is nice in a war zone!

I need help with this....does anyone have a contact number or an idea how to reach him (without letting the cat out of the bag)? Any ideas or suggestions will be appreciated.

Note: If anyone uses this thread for a @!$%#ing political diatribe (right- or left-wing), I will delete them.

There is every reason to be enthusiastic about U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold's decision to ask the Senate to consider a pair of censure resolutions condemning the President, Vice President and other administration officials for misconduct relating to the war in Iraq and for their repeated assaults on the rule of law.

Indeed, as the movement to impeach Bush and Cheney attracts more support with each passing day, Feingold's resolutions should be seen as evidence that the essential American principle of presidential accountability is finally being put back on the table by responsible members of Congress.

Feingold is renewing and extending a call for censure that that the Wisconsin Democrat initially made in March, 2006. The senator now proposes one resolution censuring the president, the vice president and their aides for overstating the case that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, particularly nuclear weapons, and falsely implying a relationship with al Qaeda and links to 9/11; for failing to plan for the civil conflict and humanitarian problems that the intelligence community predicted; for over-stretching the Army, Marine Corps and Guard with prolonged deployments and for justifying U.S. military involvement in Iraq by repeatedly distorting the situation on the ground there. A second resolution would censure the administration for approving the illegal NSA warrantless wiretapping program, for promoting extreme policies on torture, the Geneva Conventions, and detainees at Guantanamo; and for refusing to recognize legitimate congressional oversight into the improper firings of U.S. Attorneys.

Feingold, a Constitutional scholar, is well aware that these misdeeds of the George Bush, Dick Cheney and their minions fall, as the senator has suggested, "right in the strike zone of the concept of high crimes and misdemeanors." He has frequently suggested that he "would not rule out any form of accountability," including an impeachment inquiry beginning with proper investigation and hearings.

But, as a senator, Feingold cannot initiate an impeachment.

The founders, wisely, rested that power with members of the U.S. House.

Wow, this is an inspiring special segment for all Patriots who have swallowed enough from the tyrannical regime of Chicken Hawk, George W. Bush.

Bush's latest choice of scapegoat — Hillary Clinton — boggles the mind

Special Comment - By Keith Olbermann

It is one of the great, dark, evil lessons, of history. A country — a government — a military machine — can screw up a war seven ways to Sunday. It can get thousands of its people killed. It can risk the safety of its citizens. It can destroy the fabric of its nation. But as long as it can identify a scapegoat, it can regain or even gain power.

Statistics tell the story: Air Force and Navy aircraft dropped 437 bombs and missiles in Iraq in the first six months of 2007, a fivefold increase over the 86 used in the first half of 2006, and three times more than in the second half of 2006, according to Air Force data. In June, bombs dropped at a rate of more than five a day.

ABC News breaks with the mainstream media's attempts to hide the war from the US public, and provides a look at our angry, tired, and frustrated soldiers as they go about their dangerous duties in Baghdad. From treating bomb victims young and old, to raiding the houses of innocent people, to watching a group of their fellow soldiers die in a burning vehicle, to killing the driver of a car that doesn't stop under orders, in a sane world, this video would shut up even the most deluded fantasist about our "progress" in Iraq. Is the mainstream media finally attempting to do their job?

...Soon after they arrived an explosion hit and an Iraqi soldier and several neighbors, including children, were hit.

The U.S. soldiers set up a first aid station and provided medical assistance in what was a typical day for the troops.

"I challenge anybody in Congress to do my rotation," said Spc. Michael Vassell of Apache Company. "They don't have to do anything, they just come hang out with me and go home at the times I go home, and come stay here 15 months with me."

..."Because we have people up there in Congress with the brain of a 2-year-old who don't know what they are doing -- they don't experience it. I challenge the president or anyone who has us for 15 months to ride alongside me," Vassell said. "I [would] do another 15 months if he comes out here and rides along with me every day for 15 months. I'll do 15 more months. They don't even have to pay me extra."

Apache Company was sent to Iraq in June 2006 for a 12-month rotation which has since been extended to a 15-month tour.

BAGHDAD: A key adviser to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki accused U.S. forces Saturday of human rights violations, embarassing the government and cooperating with "gangs of killers" in its campaign against al-Qaida in Iraq.

Legislator Hassan al-Suneid also told The Associated Press that al-Maliki has problems with the top U.S. commander Gen. David Petraeus, who works along a "purely American vision."

Al-Suneid said the U.S. strategy "is to arm whoever is against al-Qaida at a time when there are gangs against al-Qaida that kill. These are gangs of killers."

He was referring to U.S. overtures to Sunni groups in Anbar and Diyala, encouraging former insurgents to join the fight against al-Qaida in Iraq.

"There are disagreements that the strategy that Petraeus is following might succeed in confronting al-Qaida in the early period but it will leave Iraq an armed nation, an armed society and militias," said al-Suneid, a Shiite and a member of the Security and Defense Committee in parliament.

A Marine corporal testifying in a court-martial said Marines in his unit began routinely beating Iraqis after officers ordered them to "crank up the violence level."

Cpl. Saul H. Lopezromo testified Saturday at the murder trial of Cpl. Trent D. Thomas.

"We were told to crank up the violence level," said Lopezromo, testifying for the defense.

When a juror asked for further explanation, Lopezromo said: "We beat people, sir."

Within weeks of allegedly being scolded, seven Marines and a Navy corpsman went out late one night to find and kill a suspected insurgent in the village of Hamandiya near the Abu Ghraib prison. The Marines and corpsman were from 2nd Platoon, Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Regiment.

Lopezromo said the suspected insurgent was known to his neighbors as the "prince of jihad," and had been arrested several times and later released by the Iraqi legal system.

Unable to find him, the Marines and corpsman dragged another man from his house, fatally shot him, and then planted an AK-47 assault rifle near the body to make it appear he had been killed in a shootout, according to court testimony.

Four Marines and the corpsman, initially charged with murder in the April 2006 killing, have pleaded guilty to reduced charges and been given jail sentences ranging from 10 months to eight years. Thomas, 25, from St. Louis, pleaded guilty but withdrew his plea and is the first defendant to go to court-martial.

Lopezromo, who was not part of the squad on its late-night mission, said he saw nothing wrong with what Thomas did.

"I don't see it as an execution, sir," he told the judge. "I see it as killing the enemy."

He said Marines consider all Iraqi men part of the insurgency.

Lopezromo and two other Marines were charged in August with assaulting an Iraqi two weeks before the killing that led to charges against Thomas and the others. Charges against all three were later dropped.

Thomas' attorneys have said he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury from his combat duty in Fallouja in 2004. They have argued that Thomas believed he was following a lawful order to get tougher with suspected insurgents.

Prosecution witnesses testified that Thomas shot the 52-year-old man at point-blank range after he had already been shot by other Marines and was lying on the ground.

Lopezromo said a procedure called "dead-checking" was routine. If Marines entered a house where a man was wounded, instead of checking to see whether he needed medical aid, they shot him to make sure he was dead, he testified.

"If somebody is worth shooting once, they're worth shooting twice," he said.

The jury is composed of three officers and six enlisted personnel, all of whom have served in Iraq. The trial was set to resume Monday.

By Bob Herbert --With no end yet in sight for the long dark night of the Iraq war, The Nation magazine is coming out this week with an article that goes into great and disturbing detail about the brutal treatment of Iraqi civilians by some U.S. soldiers and marines.

The article does not focus on the handful of atrocities that have gotten substantial press coverage, like the massacre in Haditha in November 2005. Instead, based on interviews conducted on the record with dozens of American combat veterans of the war, the authors address what they describe as frequent acts of violence in which U.S. forces have abused or killed Iraqi civilians - men, women and children - with impunity.

The combination of recklessness, wantonly destructive behavior born of panic and deliberate acts of cold-blooded violence by G.I.'s are believed to have cost the lives of thousands of innocent Iraqis, the article says. The soldiers interviewed said they believed that only a minority of U.S. troops engaged in objectionable behavior, but the toll of their actions has been huge.

The article describes soldiers and marines frustrated and fearful in an alien environment in which the enemy hides among civilians and uses acts of terror as the primary tactic. "The mounting frustration of fighting an elusive enemy and the devastating effects of roadside bombs, with their steady toll of American dead and wounded, led many troops to declare an open war on all Iraqis," said the authors, Chris Hedges, a former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, and Laila al-Arian.

Jeff Englehart, a 26-year-old Army specialist from Grand Junction, Colo., said in the article: "I guess while I was there, the general attitude was a dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi. You know, so what?"

Interesting that the President has chosen to link the war to September 11, 2001 in these words, especially in view of the fact that the American forces have done the lion's share of the bombing.

BAGHDAD, July 12 — In rebuffing calls to bring troops home from Iraq, President Bush on Thursday employed a stark and ominous defense. "The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq," he said, "were the ones who attacked us in America on September the 11th, and that's why what happens in Iraq matters to the security here at home."

This is an irate rant and best for those who enjoy a bit of steam coming out of the ears!!

There's an AP story floating around tonight that Hustler publisher Larry Flint is offering $1,000,000 for evidence of sexploits on Members of Congress.

"We've got 20-some investigations that all look good," Flynt said during a news conference at his Beverly Hills office.

"We have got some high-ranking Republican and Democratic members of the Senate and the House," he told reporters. "If I get just a couple of those phonies out of there, maybe it will be a step forward."

Flynt provided no names or details about the investigations. His comments conflicted with a press release issued by the magazine that put the number of investigations at "several."

Vitter, meanwhile, stayed out of sight Wednesday. For a second straight day, the Louisiana Republican was a no-show in the Capitol, missing votes on Iraq policy and leaving colleagues unsure of his whereabouts or his return.

On Tuesday he missed a committee hearing and a lunch for GOP senators attended by Vice President Dick Cheney.

"I wouldn't be surprised if he's gone all week," said Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C.

There's a bizarre irony to the King of Porn as the White Knight of Democracy, finally finding an issue of wrong doing in a regime so riddled with crimes that have not been raised to a level of widespread public view and putting focus on their failings.

There's an outrageous perversion of values as the criminal negligence that has led to the massacre of hundreds of thousands of innocents, perhaps millions if we include the preventable deaths reported by WHO and Unicef, that have gone as blips on the radars of MSM and the passion raised for the crimes of private infidelity.

The body count that is laid at the feet of this Congress is surely mega millions; but what may hoist them on their pious pitarb and put the Nation of Righteous values in a tither, is what folks are doing with their private parts, in private. Or maybe that's the MSM whose own criminal complacency can't acknowledge any evil but carnal acts. It is a warped value system indeed.

Frankly I could care less what any consenting adults choose to do in their free time and that includes the Members of Congress. I believe it is no one's business what we do with our bodies and I'd like them to keep their noses in the spending details before going about poking them into my private life but that's hardly the way it is.

But in between campaign fund raising events and junkets these pillars of morality have to make an occasional appearance at the Capitol. It's the place they are supposed to work and the job they have failed so miserably at doing. The place that has blood and money pouring out at a fatal rate.

Congress- the place pumping up the pockets of war profiteers, who man the boards of the think tanks, and weapons makers, who have concluded nothing, but that we don't know what to do with the massacre of innocents in Iraq. The most wanted criminal for the events of 9/11 is not only at large but dropped from the agenda.

With all that the Congress should rightfully be horrified to claim as their work, we now have Vitter AWOL because he's embarrassed he got nailed dipping his pen. He had no problems preaching values and he was a hypocritical liar about his own sex life and so he's not coming to work from embarrassment. Embarrassment? Who gets off for that? Anyone get to ditch key meetings cause you feel stupid?

This is the fiber of our Con-me Con-gress, these are the fleecy tender feelings they get to soothe for themselves. As others suffer and die by the hour, every hour and day Congress fails to stop the crimes. They can make the talk show circuit and hold their heads high, when a massacre is ongoing and Executive crimes are destroying the Constitution. They seek refuge in spin and talking points, but a marital dalliance is justification to be AWOL from the war votes. I want to hold Congress in Contempt!!

Suck it up Vitter, you just voted yourself a pay raise and took a vacation on a 90 day a year work schedule. Troops in Iraq get shell shock and re-up tour after tour, year after year when most never dreamed of being in a war. Their kids, their families suffer and like Libby, ego bruising is too much for the Chicken Hawks for themselves. They bravely preach of hard work as they take recess holidays and wait to "evaluate the Surge" and success while their skin in the game is on the stock options.

They are not losing. On the contrary, their stocks are riding high!! The DOW Jones is soaring and fortunes of traders are at higher highs than ever. It is the folks with nothing but their lives to give who are losing.

It is the folks working two jobs without insurance who are suffering. It is the families of wounded returning to Building 18 at Walter Reed with VIP Board of Directors and %$#@ for care. Vitter thinks his humiliation is a justifiable reason to go AWOL. I say lock him in a flogging thing on the Capitol steps and let me go jeer at him. I'd like to get most of them out there for a dunking

A scared soldier gets locked up for disappearing and has to face his fears and Vitter doesn't even need to face his job for embarrassment??

Where's the rest of the Congress to demand Vitter show up and do his job?? Awol morally as well. Go get the Capitol Police to find the cowardly SOB and sit him in his seat on the Hill. He had no problem %$#@ the hookers or the taxpayers, he had a pair big enough to strut around and proclaim moral values for the Nation. Let him get some and get into the air conditioned Capitol and do the job he's over paid to do.

It is obvious we don't have a Nation of laws and leaders; we have a bunch of egotistical crooks and liars who are so filled with hypocrisies, so deluded by their think tank talking points they believe their own %$#@. They're so comfortable with the corporate, lap dog media, pandering to the ad base, that the only crime worth reporting has titillating details and that's the first thing they run from in a chamber with more blood on it's hands than God knows what terrorists ever did.

It's criminal and heartbreaking to see our great Nation debased to a band of pedophiles, crooks and liars without the backbone to stand up and stop the slaughter in Iraq and the rape of our National resources including our Treasury. In the saddest of all ironies the truth that may finally break the stranglehold is the Hustler who at least has the integrity to put his name on the smut and deliver the goods that folks pay for at a fair price, quid pro quo. For the President quid pro quo is demanding aides refuse to testify and be held in contempt of Congress. For Congress ruffling their feathers and hurting their feelings is beyond what we should ask them to endure.

There's a moral dilemma here. Who is doing the real hustling? Who's the scum?? Who's the fair dealer? Who's had more than enough?

By Layla Anwar

Have you ever felt numb? Like a paralytic numbness?

I put the receiver down, stared at the wall, beyond the wall and saw yet another wall, and more walls...
Unable to move, unable to take a step forward, a step back. I was stuck in that spot for what seemed to be forever.
I felt the warmth of the cigarette, its heat, getting closer to my fingertips, almost burning me.
I guess the thought of being burnt took me out of this trance like state...that state of being walled in.

Some of you may recall that I already have 2 relatives who had been kidnapped and are now imprisoned in "Detention centers".

Kamel, 60 plus, is still in American "custody". He is sick and we have no news except that he is still alive...at least we hope so.

Omar, 19 years old, also detained by the Americans. Seems he has been transferred from American hands in Baghdad and moved to Southern Iraq.
When we enquired about him, they said that he is in a military hospital getting treatment in Southern Iraq.

That is very strange indeed. Bear in mind that Southern Iraq prisons are run by the sectarian militias from Iran and neither them nor the Americans actually provide any medical treatments in "hospitals".
How long will he be there? What is he suffering from? Is it possible to visit him?
None provides us with any answers.

I personally believe that Omar is dead. I believe that Omar has been killed. Possibly under torture...most probably under torture.

A few weeks back, Salam, another relative was kidnapped and badly battered, bashed up. I have already relayed her story in my previous post "Scream Quietly".

The Neocon Series is a Newsvine exclusive.

Twelfth in a Series.

Phase One of the Neocon series returns with your favorite right-wing pundit, and mine, the Mistress of Propaganda herself, Ann Coulter.

Until now, Phase one of the Neocon Series has focused on members of the Bush Administration.

So why has Coulter been added to this collection of miscreants public servants? After all, she's not a member of the PNAC, or the Bush administration...

Come on! Did you really think I would give her a pass?

She's the self-appointed guardian of all that is right. The Undersecretary for the Ministry of Propaganda and Disinformation, waging a war against the dreaded Librul menace for God, Country and George W. Bush, which in her mind, is apparently the same thing.

Coulter. 50 cm x 70 cm. Acrylic on Canvas. 2007. Dennis P. McCann, Paper Dragon Studios.

To view a larger image, click here.

Previously in the Neocon Series:

Neocon Series: Rumsfeld. A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series: Cheney. A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series: Rice. A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series: Bush. A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series: Rove. A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series: Ashcroft. A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series: Ridge. A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series - Phase Two: Justify (September 11th).

Neocon Series - Phase Two: Invade

Neocon Series - Phase Two: Entrench

Neocon Series - Phase Two: Profit

View larger images:

Rumsfeld | Cheney | Rice | Bush | Rove | Ashcroft | Ridge | Coulter | Justify | Invade | Entrench | Profit

ARTgallery: Get SmARTer Here!

The new issue of Rolling Stone is on the news stands. The online version should be around on the 28th but I'd help them pay their bills by picking one up in print anyway, besides it's going to be the hottest thing you touch this summer.

What a phenomenal job they did of laying bare the true cost of oil, the beneficiaries of the Corporate Welfare system which has accelerated over the last six years and the ultimate truth that it has become a matter of saving ourselves. No love is lost noting that Bush alone clings to every failed notion and policy in the face of overwhelming evidence.

For the remaining few who, may still not see, the true criminal nature of Cheney's office, there is the lie by lie, investigative report by Tim Dickinson, titled Six Years of Deceit, which erases all doubt. He meticulously and clearly outlines the revolving door using White House documents available as part of FOIA releases.

There's a special focus given to the Climate Cabal that have rewritten the science reports, gagged the regulatory agency scientists and declared war on facts that run contrary to their profit motives. For many of us it hardly comes as news, but the comprehensive detailing of who did what when is a wonderful timeline of the Petroleum Association reign in the West wing.

To their credit the Rolling Stone editors didn't just highlight the problems, they offer realistic means to resolve those in a piece written by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kennedy has long been active in environmental protection efforts and is rarely if ever featured in the MSM. As a voice of change he outlines the many ways that the Governors, Mayors and business leaders are finding solutions that help the environment and the bottom line profitability.

Kennedy's article leaves little doubt that the biggest impediment to a brighter future lies with a corrupt government sector which is the last vestige of denial on global warming as it's fortunes are tied to a corporate welfare model that is on the verge of collapse.

Overall, the June 28 issue will leave you feeling empowered in addition to getting a better handle on just how few benefit from perpetuating the myths and problems. In the end it makes the case that it's nothing more than the will to save ourselves we need to find and that will is accelerating despite the spin from the White House and Petroleum Board representatives choking innovation and reform.

British and American collusion in the pillaging of Iraq's heritage is a scandal that will outlive any passing conflict

Simon Jenkins
Friday June 8, 2007
The Guardian

Fly into the American air base of Tallil outside Nasiriya in central Iraq and the flight path is over the great ziggurat of Ur, reputedly the earliest city on earth. Seen from the base in the desert haze or the sand-filled gloom of dusk, the structure is indistinguishable from the mounds of fuel dumps, stores and hangars. Ur is safe within the base compound. But its walls are pockmarked with wartime shrapnel and a blockhouse is being built over an adjacent archaeological site. When the head of Iraq's supposedly sovereign board of antiquities and heritage, Abbas al-Hussaini, tried to inspect the site recently, the Americans refused him access to his own most important monument.

Yesterday Hussaini reported to the British Museum on his struggles to protect his work in a state of anarchy. It was a heart breaking presentation. Under Saddam you were likely to be tortured and shot if you let someone steal an antiquity; in today's Iraq you are likely to be tortured and shot if you don't. The tragic fate of the national museum in Baghdad in April 2003 was as if federal troops had invaded New York city, sacked the police and told the criminal community that the Metropolitan was at their disposal. The local tank commander was told specifically not to protect the museum for a full two weeks after the invasion. Even the Nazis protected the Louvre.

Shockingly, this item was on a FOX website.

CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. — A Marine assigned to take photos of the 24 Iraqi civilians killed in Haditha testified Thursday that he was later ordered to destroy the images.

Staff Sgt. Justin Laughner was called as a witness at a preliminary hearing for Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, one of four officers charged with dereliction of duty for failing to investigate the Nov. 19, 2005 deaths.

Testifying under immunity, Laughner said Lt. Andrew Grayson told him to delete the photos so they would not be part of a statement being prepared for top-ranking officers and a Time magazine reporter. Laughner said he felt the order amounted to obstruction of justice but that he complied and later lied when asked whether any pictures had been taken.

Grayson, who has also been charged, faces a preliminary hearing on June 18.

"It was wrong," Laughner said. "Somebody was asking for them, and we're not going to give them to them? It's not right, but I didn't say anything."

Although Laughner deleted the pictures from his computer, the images remained on his digital camera and are now part of the biggest criminal case against U.S. troops in the war in Iraq.

By Paul Craig Roberts

06/07/08 "ICH' -- --- American soldiers have been fighting and dying in Iraq since 2003, and Americans do not know why.

All the reasons President Bush gave us for his war are false. Bush said he invaded Iraq "to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein's support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people."

We now know that these were false claims. Disinformation about Iraq was produced by a special unit within the Pentagon run by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith. The unit operated outside the normal intelligence channels of the CIA and DIA. Its purpose was to create false intelligence to enable Bush to initiate war with Iraq.

Did President Bush know that the claims put into his speeches by his speechwriters was false?

Who instructed Bush's speechwriters to incorporate known lies into the President's speeches?

Why did Vice President Cheney, the Secretary of State, the National Security Advisor, and the Secretary of Defense all lie to the American people and to the entire world?

What is the real agenda?

Paul Craig Roberts wrote the Kemp-Roth bill and was assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was associate editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and contributing editor of National Review. He is author or co-author of eight books, including The Supply-Side Revolution (Harvard University Press). He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon chair in political economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and senior research fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He has contributed to numerous scholarly journals and testified before Congress on 30 occasions. He has been awarded the U.S. Treasury's Meritorious Service Award and the French Legion of Honor. He was a reviewer for the Journal of Political Economy under editor Robert Mundell

June 1 is the 227th anniversary of the birth of Carl von Clausewitz, the influential Prussian military theorist and historian. Clausewitz is best known for writing in his book, On War, "War is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means."

These words come to mind whenever I hear conservative enthusiasts for the Iraq occupation complain about political interference with military operations. They don't understand the most basic fact of war: it is a government program. So why aren't people who claim to be suspicious of other government programs suspicious of war? I can see only two reasons, neither of them flattering: power lust or nationalistic zeal.

Many of us grow up believing that government reflects the will of the people. But skeptics know better. Government has assumed more and more control over private life not because the people demanded it, but because power-seekers and privilege-seekers sought outlets for their ambitions. They then propagandized the public until a sufficient number of people came to believe government control was good for them. ("Public" education has been remarkably effective in this regard.)

The story is similar with war. Politicians start wars for political reasons. They may seek to control resources or a foreign population. Or they may want to secure existing interests that could be at risk without war. The military is a means to political ends.

Insurgents linked to al-Qaida issued a video Monday claiming they killed all three U.S. soldiers captured in an ambush last month. "They were alive and then dead," a voice said during a sequence of images that included the military IDs of two Americans still missing.

The nearly 11-minute video by an al-Qaida front group, the Islamic State of Iraq, offered no proof that the soldiers were killed and buried. The U.S. military insisted the massive manhunt south of Baghdad will go on.

"We condemn the tactics used by these terrorists, and are using all means available to pursue those responsible," said Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, the chief military spokesman in Baghdad. "We continue to search and hope that our two missing soldiers will be found alive and in good health."

The video, posted on a militant Web site, included grainy black-and-white footage said to have been taken during the May 12 pre-dawn ambush. It also showed credit cards, money and other personal items the militants called "booty." A headline said: "Bush is the reason of the loss of your POWs."

The video was likely a show of strength by al-Qaida-linked militants, who find themselves increasingly engaged in violent battles against more moderate Sunni insurgents in Iraq.

Jon Alterman, the Middle East program director for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the insurgents could have many other reasons for releasing the video.

"It could be an effort to stop U.S. efforts to find them. It could be an effort to lighten up the pressure. It could be an effort to sow confusion," he said. "It certainly doesn't seem like anything definitive."

Regardless of the soldiers' status, the footage was the latest setback for the U.S. military as it seeks to quell the sectarian violence raging in Iraq. Military officials also acknowledged Monday that U.S.-led forces have control of fewer than one-third of Baghdad's neighborhoods despite thousands of extra troops nearly four months into a security crackdown — an assessment that came as the U.S. death toll approached 3,500, with at least 15 American troops reported killed in the first three days of June.

Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, a military spokesman for Baghdad operations, confirmed a status report completed in May found that American and Iraqi forces were able to "protect the population" and "maintain physical influence over" only 146 of the 457 Baghdad neighborhoods, while troops have either not begun operations aimed at rooting out insurgents or still face "resistance" in the others.

The report appeared to be the first comprehensive analysis of the progress of the operation that began Feb. 14. Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, is due to report in September on whether the current troop increase is working amid a fierce debate in Washington over whether President Bush should begin withdrawing American forces.

But Bleichwehl stressed that the assessment, first reported by The New York Times, did not mean a lack of progress and said the setbacks were largely because of the need to return to some areas that had previously been cleared, as well as problems with the availability and reliability of Iraqi police.

"It's way too early to try and project what Baghdad will look like in September," he said in a telephone interview.

U.S. officials also pointed out that they have warned from the beginning that it would not be easy to pacify Baghdad and did not expect to see serious progress until autumn.

"We have stated all along that this was going to be harder before it gets easier," military spokesman Lt. Col. Christopher Garver said. "It's going to be a tough fight over the summer, and the plan is just in its beginning stages."

Iraqi authorities reported at least 15 people killed Monday in eight bombings, shootings and other incidents. In addition, at least 47 bodies were discovered nationwide, apparent victims of sectarian or political killings; they included 28 bullet-ridden bodies in Baghdad, most handcuffed, blindfolded and showing signs of torture

The Bush administration, which has ordered some 30,000 extra American troops to Baghdad and surrounding areas as part of the security crackdown, has warned that the buildup will result in more U.S. casualties as American soldiers increasingly come into contact with enemy forces and concentrate on the streets of Baghdad and remote outposts.

The three U.S. soldiers were abducted as they were participating in an operation to watch for insurgents placing roadside bombs on a dangerous road near Mahmoudiya, about 20 miles south of Baghdad. The militants breached the concertina wire surrounding the stationary outpost composed of two Humvees, killing four other American troops and an Iraqi.

The Islamic State of Iraq issued Web statements shortly after the attack claiming responsibility and warning the Americans to call off the hunt "if you want their safety."

A body found in the Euphrates River on May 23, 11 days after the attack, was identified by the U.S. military as Pfc. Joseph Anzack Jr., 20, of Torrance, Calif.

Spc. Alex R. Jimenez, 25, of Lawrence, Mass., and of Pvt. Byron W. Fouty, 19, of Waterford, Mich., remain missing.

Monday's video clip, made available to The Associated Press by the Washington-based SITE Institute, offered close-ups of two identification cards for Jimenez and Fouty, but did not show the soldiers.

The video also showed footage of three masked and black-clad men in a forest standing around an easel displaying a sketch of the area, apparently mapping out the attack plan. "I have urged you to bring me American prisoners," said one of the men, whose name was not given but was identified as a leader.

"The Americans sent 4,000 soldiers looking for them," an unidentified voice said on the video, which featured the logo of the media production house of the Islamic State of Iraq. "They were alive and then dead."

The voiceover blamed their deaths on "the American Army and their leaders, who do not care for the feelings of the soldiers' mothers."

"And as you refused to deliver the bodies of our killed people, we will not deliver the bodies of your dead, and their end will be beneath the ground, Allah willing," the voice said.

Fouty's stepfather, Gordon Dibler, said relatives and family friends will continue believing he is alive.

"It's actually been hopeful for me that these items are being displayed," Dibler told reporters during a news conference in Oxford, Mich. "I hope that those who hold him understand that he is just a boy, becoming a man."

___

Associated Press writers Corey Williams in Detroit and Anna Johnson and Maamoun Youssef in Cairo, Egypt, contributed to this report.