Let Them Drink Solvent

At Jadriyah Dry Cleaners in Baghdad, there is a storeroom for clothes left behind by Iraqis who fled the country because of the war.

Faisal Waleed, 32, who runs the store, says that if the owners don't return, he will donate the clothing to the poor.

Marie Antoinette couldn't have found a more appalling "human interest" story.

The number of dry cleaners operating in Baghdad has dwindled since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 because many owners also left Iraq, Waleed says.

For those brave enough to stay, business has been good, in part because of the city's lack of reliable electricity and water service.

But USA TODAY has its quota to fill.

"People cannot wash their clothes at home anymore," Waleed says.

And the weekly does of "good news from Iraq" goes on ...

"Also, people's salaries are better now, so rich people don't want to make themselves tired washing their own clothes."

Confident of his business prospects, Waleed last month left his old job — where he had worked since he was 12 -- to open his own shop on a busy Baghdad street.

He and his business partner invested $50,000 in the new shop, which has seven industrial-size washing machines and dryers, a steam presser and other equipment.
...

"My old boss came here and threatened to kill me for leaving him and taking away his business," Waleed says. "But he was mainly angry because he loves me very much and raised me like a son."

And besides, after 20 years a guy should open up his own shop. Especially if he's only 32.

And if the electricity and water supply aren't so reliable, well then...

NH Dem Insider: 'Networks Should Dis-Invite Gravel'

Former New Hampshire Democratic Party chairwoman Kathy Sullivan says that for future debates, "the networks should politely dis-invite Mr. Gravel."

"He just detracts from the time from the other candidates," Sullivan said. "He's not a serious candidate."

Which debate was Kathy Sullivan watching? And who the MF is she to tell us that Mike Gravel isn't serious?

He's the most serious of the bunch, Kathy. Not nearly serious enough for me, but a damn sight more serious than any of the others.

Mike Gravel speaks for the majority of Democrats -- and the majority of Americans -- on the most important issue anyone ever gets to talk about on television.

His position on Iraq -- "Get out now, or go to prison" -- makes perfect sense. Likewise his contention that anyone who voted for the war is unfit for the presidency. If there's any reason to dis-invite Mike Gravel, it's because he has an affinity for human life.

But of course Kathy Sullivan can't say that. And neither can any of the other party hacks -- from either party.

They would rather be complicit in ongoing mass murder than part of the solution.

Guillotines are far too good for these people.

Dems Join Repubs In Stealing From Your Future To Finance The Killing Of People You've Never Even Met

The Democratic "leadership" in the Senate has once again sold out your future -- and the future of your children and grandchildren -- in favor of continuing the unprovoked slaughter of people who have never done anything to any of us. And, as you can see in the photo, some of them seem quite happy about it.

They are obviously content to give a lying mass-murderer another $95 billion of money we haven't even got, so he can continue the outrageous but still ongoing war crime in Iraq -- against the clearly expressed wishes of the majority of American voters, not to mention the remainder of humanity.

Chris Floyd has the details and some insightful commentary at his always-excellent site, Empire Burlesque. I urge you to click and read, but if you want the short version, this is close enough:

We will pay for this decision -- in dollars and in blood -- for generations to come (if we are lucky enough to survive that long). But our "elected" "representatives" don't seem to mind. After all, it's not their money. And it's not their blood.

As if we didn't already have enough reason to sharpen the guillotines.

Oh, No! Is That Our Head In The Bucket?

Who's been looking at my sidebar?

Imagine you see a man on his knees, arms outstretched, with his head resting on a wooden block. Ten feet above his head, the sharp edge of a guillotine blade hangs suspended. The blade is held back by a rope that is visibly frayed and weak. It appears the rope might snap at any moment, and the blade will descend to plunge through the man's neck. Blood will spurt over the platform on which the guillotine sits, and the man's head, brutally shorn of the rest of his body, will thud onto the darkened platform below, onto the wood stained with the blood from earlier victims. This scene has been enacted many times before.

It truly has. Perhaps he wasn't inspired by anything on this site particularly, and he certainly doesn't use the metaphor in the same way we use it here, but this frozen blogger heartily endorses Arthur Silber's "Living Under the Guillotine's Blade", of which I will give you just one more excerpt:

We have already destroyed Iraq, and we may yet destroy Iran and much of the Middle East. We may cause an international economic collapse, or severe economic dislocation at a minimum. We may see the final end of liberty here at home, and the installation of a dictatorship via a declaration of martial law.

And almost no one speaks of the incomprehensible catastrophes that lie in wait. Almost no one takes action to prevent even one of them. Our lives proceed as if nothing at all unusual is transpiring in our world, either abroad or at home. Occasionally, a few people shout warnings. They are almost entirely ignored.

The blade is suspended above us. With every moment that passes, the rope that holds it back frays and weakens still more.

Death hangs in the air.

We will not move.

Can you move?
Can you still move??

C-L-I-C-K
H-E-R-E-!-!

~~~

I have never asked for money for myself, mostly because I believe there are far worthier causes. Keeping Arthur Silber in full voice is one of them, IMVHO, and he needs a lot of help at the moment, so if you can possibly support any truth-tellers this month, please consider helping Arthur Silber.

And if you're not sure why, click here.

Thank you very much.

Five Out Of Seven: British Bomb Plotters Convicted And Sentenced To Life

A British jury has convicted five of the seven men who were accused of plotting to blow up ... something, anything! ... using the fertilizer which British police claim to have discovered in a rented storage unit and aluminum powder which they say they found in a cookie tin in the mastermind's back yard. The judge has sentenced the convicted men to life in prison.

And rightly so! The evidence was incredibly compelling!

The evidence that had been carefully collected during the fifteen months while the convicted terrorists were merely suspects under surveillance was supplemented with additional evidence developed during the two years between their March 2004 arrests and the beginning of their year-long trial.

This accumulated proof of their guilt was so compelling that the jury deliberated longer than any previous jury in British legal history. In fact they might still be deliberating over this potentially catastrophic plot had the judge not intervened during the deliberation to tell them he didn't require a unanimous verdict, because 11-1 or even 10-2 would be good enough.

The men convicted in this case are tied to both al-Q'aeda and the 7/7 London bombings of 2005, which as noted previously (here and elsewhere) were so fishy they could never be (and in fact never were) subjected to any sort of investigation. The connection involves Mohammed Sidique Khan, whom police say was the ringleader behind the 7/7 attacks.

One of the two so-called ringleaders of this so-called plot was Omar Khyam [top left in photo], who last September refused to continue testifying after his first two days on the stand, saying that his family in Pakistan had been threatened by agents of the Pakistani intelligence service ISI. Apparently the ISI didn't want the court to hear any more from Khyam, who had let it slip that he had been trained not by al-Q'aeda but by ISI.

Pakistan is supposedly America's greatest ally in the GWOT, but it's becoming more and more apparent that ISI is effectively the South Asia branch of CIA and is closely linked to the British intelligence service MI6. And this connection is a matter of considerable embarrassment to British authorities. Or else it would be an embarrassment if it were widely-known, and/or if the British authorities were in any sense interested in telling the truth.

The other so-called ringleader [bottom middle in photo] was Anthony Garcia, a Moroccan formerly known as Rahman Benouis who changed his name while looking for work as a model, hopeful that landing a gig would be easier with a Latin-sounding name than an Arabic-sounding one. Garcia also implicated Pakistan in his testimony and testified that he knew about the fertilizer but thought it was to be shipped to Pakistan.

Another suspect whose name has appeared briefly in this space was acquitted: Shujah Ud-Dir-Mahmood, who testified that he cried himself to sleep at terrorist training camp because he missed his mum. So apparently it doesn't always pay to be a tough-guy!

As for coverage of today's momentous event, the Times Online has the best possible headline, How police and MI5 foiled 'Britain's 9/11' and they also accept comments although they have not seen fit to post the comment I submitted. Funny thing, that. Apparently I got talking about the connection between Omar Khyam and ISI.

There is, however, the obligatory pre-emptive comment:

I'm waiting for the moonbats to start blaming Israel, Iraq, Bush or Blair or all of the above.

Colour me surprised on that one, eh what, old chap?

The "professional" coverage has been unsurprising in other ways as well, with the AP's David Stringer writing

A judge sentenced five men to life in prison today for plotting to bomb several targets in London -- including a popular nightclub, power plants and shopping mall...

as if they had been planning multiple simultaneous bombings, even though the official story -- and the one being reported almost everywhere else -- says they had talked about a lot of possibilites but hadn't selected a target. There has never been, to my knowledge, any hint that they may have been planning to bomb more than one target.

But that's a minor point, and could certainly have been an unintentional insinuation on Mr. Stringer's part. On the other hand, the fertilizer plot was certainly aromatic, according to the Times Online account, which follows the cash:

The fertiliser was taken to Access Storage near Heathrow. Khyam refused to answer questions about why he was paying £207 a month to store £90 worth of fertiliser.

It doesn't sound like good cash-flow management to me, but what the heck? More to the point, I wouldn't answer questions like that either, would you?

The 7/7 connection is bothersome to some people, especially family members of 7/7 victims, some of whom may see their relatives as victims of an intelligence failure. They are asking about the connection: If the terrorists convicted today were known associates of Mohammed Sidique Khan, and Mohammed Sidique Khan was the ringleader of the 7/7 attacks, and the terrorists convicted today were arrested in 2004, does that mean the 7/7 attacks were committed by a known terrorist who could have and should have been stopped long before he hurt anyone?

One might think this objection would lead to a proper investigation of 7/7, and indeed it well may do so, but this does not seem likely at the moment, as the British home secretary has already announced.

The idea that an investigation might suggest that they should have detained Mohammed Sidique Khan before 7/7 is the least of the British authorities' fears. In all likelihood you'll see them spin this into a security failure of some sort that can only be rectified through a further clampdown on civil liberties; in any event the first version of the official story of how the 7/7 bombers were overlooked has already been disseminated.

The Mohammed Sidique Khan angle might be used as the basis for a whitewash, but it says here that from the point of view of the British authorities, the biggest danger inherent in any potential 7/7 investigation lies in the difficulty of running such a thing -- whitewash or no -- without exposing all the rogue three-letter agencies. (Well, mostly letters; Would you believe letters plus the digits 5 and 6?)

Where was I? Ah yes, the rogue agencies. The big danger is the possibility of exposing the somewhat plausibly deniable ways in which these rogue agencies are tied together to produce "terror of global reach".

And the word "somewhat" is key here; it's the variable. Plausible deniability ain't what it used to be. Tracks that once were covered are now easily visible.

And if a real investigation of 7/7 were to occur, it could be explosive. All of a sudden, instead of asking "Shouldn't they have arrested Mohammed Sidique Khan a long time before 7/7?", people would be asking questions like "Why are we funding the same guys that we're supposedly fighting?"

It's been well and truly said that the UK and the USA are two cultures divided by a common language. But we're not completely severed. Surely we benefit from inherent parallelism and a human bridge.

The bridge in my view consists of people who understand both cultures (or at least certain aspects of them) well enough to speak to (and understand) people on both sides of the Atlantic. Think of a journalist who started out in Tennessee but now lives in London, for example. Or a blogger who writes about cricket and American politics. Of course there are many others...

The inherent parallelism is best displayed in the way we use vastly different words for so many common simple things. This is sometimes easier to understand by reference to a third (neutral) language, as in the following examples:

The British say "leader" where the Americans would say "headline" and the French would say "manchette".

Similarly the Brits say "petrol" where the Americans say "gas" and the French say "gazeau".

These examples are well-known, but fewer people understand that "7/7 Truth" means almost exactly the same as "9/11 Truth". The French have a word for that, too: "Guillotines!"

In light of all this additional but still mostly unreported information, it's difficult not to grant a special Spinner Du Jour award to the aforementioned AP scribe David Stringer, who took great pains to inform us that

Court-imposed restrictions to ensure the men had a fair trial prohibited reporters from revealing [their links to 7/7 and al-Q'aeda] until the case ended.

It's reassuring to know that this vital information was suppressed in order to uphold the value of a fair trial, not because it would have made the current British position (i.e. no-investigation-ever) even more untenable than it already is.

There are many unanswered questions and I cannot deal with all of them at the moment, although I will probably ask and answer more of them some day. For now, three quick ones:

1) Their bomb didn't go off, did it?

What bomb? They never built a bomb.

2) How much stiffer would their sentences have been if they had actually killed somebody?

That depends on who they killed. Ha ha ha.

3) If a fair trial was so important, why did the judge tell the jury he didn't need a unanimous verdict?

That's an absurd assinuation.

FOX Just Can't Stop Spinning, Even With Cricket

The World Cup final between Australia and Sri Lanka was scheduled to start at 9:30 this morning but it was raining in Bridgetown, Barbados, and they didn't even get the coin tossed until 10:00. And then a very strange thing happened.

In a one-day match such as this, each team bats once. They toss a coin to decide who bats first; if you win the toss, you choose. Normally the teams know whether they'd prefer to bat first or second. (I like to bat last, but there are two schools of thought on this.)

In bad weather, conditions are likely to deteriorate throughout the day, and there's a possibility of a rain-shortened match, so what to do if you win the toss becomes a whole different question. (I like to bat first if it's wet, but again there are two schools of thought.)

Things were so uncertain today that the online experts at Cricinfo were saying they weren't sure whether this would be a good toss to win or not.

Australia won the toss and chose to bat first.

FOX didn't show the coin toss live. Instead they went to their "experts" who "speculated" that if Australia won the toss they would choose to bat. And then they showed the coin toss, and what do you know? Their experts were right.

Funny how that worked out, isn't it?

Two weeks ago I gave "two thumbs up" to FOX for their online coverage of this tournament and suggested that perhaps they were trying to build credibility by doing a good job on sports, in order to make their "news" seem "believable".

Funny how that worked out, too. Isn't it? I think maybe they were trying a little bit too hard.

Batting first turned out to be a good idea, and Australia had the better team too. Adam Gilchrist [photo] scored a quick 149 and that didn't hurt the Aussie chances either. In truth, the outcome was never in doubt.

So Australia are celebrating, having gone undefeated in a tournament in which every other team lost at least three matches while winning the World Cup for an unprecedented third straight time.

Clearly the best team won. But of course this does not excuse Australia for its crimes against humanity, nor for its failure to oust (and guillotine) the outrageous war criminal John Howard, but that's another story.

As for FOX, if they'll spin about a little thing like the coin toss in a cricket game ...

Upcoming Moyers Report On Iraq Devastates The Lapdogs, But What Difference Will It Make?

With PBS under fire for airing a Richard Perle infomercial disguised as journalism, it's somewhat refreshing to know that Bill Moyers is not far behind.

Greg Mitchell at Editor & Publisher says a 'Devastating' Bill Moyers Probe of Press and Iraq is Coming This Week

The most powerful indictment of the news media for falling down in its duties in the run-up to the war in Iraq will appear next Wednesday, a 90-minute PBS broadcast called "Buying the War," which marks the return of "Bill Moyers Journal." E&P was sent a preview DVD and a draft transcript for the program this week.

While much of the evidence of the media's role as cheerleaders for the war presented here is not new, it is skillfully assembled, with many fresh quotes from interviews (with the likes of Tim Russert and Walter Pincus) along with numerous embarrassing examples of past statements by journalists and pundits that proved grossly misleading or wrong. Several prominent media figures, prodded by Moyers, admit the media failed miserably, though few take personal responsibility.

The war continues today, now in its fifth year, with the death toll for Americans and Iraqis rising again -- yet Moyers points out, "the press has yet to come to terms with its role in enabling the Bush Administration to go to war on false pretenses."

Among the few heroes of this devastating film are reporters with the Knight Ridder/McClatchy bureau in D.C. Tragically late, Walter Isaacson, who headed CNN, observes, "The people at Knight Ridder were calling the colonels and the lieutenants and the people in the CIA and finding out, you know, that the intelligence is not very good. We should've all been doing that."

Quite so, Mr. Isaacson. But not nearly enough. There are those among the blogging community who believe you should all be hanged for not doing that. I am not among them, as my regular readers all know.

At the close, Moyers mentions some of the chief proponents of the war who refused to speak to him for this program, including Thomas Friedman, Bill Kristol, Roger Ailes, Charles Krauthammer, Judith Miller, and William Safire.

Ahh! That's a wonderful short-list of other people for whom hanging would be way too generous.

But Dan Rather, the former CBS anchor, admits, "I don't think there is any excuse for, you know, my performance and the performance of the press in general in the roll up to the war…We didn't dig enough. And we shouldn't have been fooled in this way." Bob Simon, who had strong doubts about evidence for war, was asked by Moyers if he pushed any of the top brass at CBS to "dig deeper," and he replies, "No, in all honesty, with a thousand mea culpas….nope, I don't think we followed up on this."

Instead he covered the marketing of the war in a "softer" way, explaining to Moyers: "I think we all felt from the beginning that to deal with a subject as explosive as this, we should keep it, in a way, almost light – if that doesn't seem ridiculous."

Moyers replies: "Going to war, almost light."

Can't wait to see the clip. I hope the tone of Bill's voice makes "almost light" sound like "descpicable".

Walter Isaacson is pushed hard by Moyers and finally admits, "We didn't question our sources enough." But why? Isaacson notes there was "almost a patriotism police" after 9/11 and when the network showed civilian casualties it would get phone calls from advertisers and the administration and "big people in corporations were calling up and saying, 'You're being anti-American here.'"

Anti-American? Or anti-Bull Manure?

Yes, the media were bullied by the right-wing spin-police. As were we all. Some refused to succumb and wrote the truth even more furiously, even if it meant they had to take up blogging. Others tucked tail and took up bootlicking.

I know what I'd like to see happen to the bootlickers. And fortunately we have enough buckets to go around. But it's hard to see whether it would do much good. We're up against something huge and monstrous.

Moyers then mentions that Isaacson had sent a memo to staff, leaked to the Washington Post, in which he declared, "It seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan" and ordered them to balance any such images with reminders of 9/11.

Perverse? Let me tell you what's perverse:

Whether the official story is true or false, the fact remains that nobody has ever even claimed -- much less proven -- that the crimes of 9/11 were perpetrated by, planned by, inspired by, or even condoned by the dirt-poor civilians in Afghanistan who bore the brunt of the "collateral" damage that followed almost immediately in the wake of the attack. If it would have been perverse to mention the damage to civilians that our forces were causing, imagine what it would have meant had any major media told the obvious truth about 9/11 and the causes for war in Afghanistan!

Moyers also asserts that editors at the Panama City (Fla.) News-Herald received an order from above, "Do not use photos on Page 1A showing civilian casualties. Our sister paper has done so and received hundreds and hundreds of threatening emails."

Where are those threatening emails? We need them! Every one of them is evidence of terrorism, and the people who sent them should be hanging from the ceiling at Gitmo. So how's about a little justice here? How's about a little counter-terror??

Walter Pincus of the Washington Post explains that even at his paper reporters "do worry about sort of getting out ahead of something."

"Even"? Try "especially", Walter. The self-delusion evident here is pitiful and murderous. Sorry, Walter, but that's the truth. Threatening emails or not, that's the honest truth.

But Moyers gives credit to Charles J. Hanley of The Associated Press for trying, in vain, to draw more attention to United Nations inspectors failing to find WMD in early 2003.

If only Charles Hanley were the rule rather than the exception!

It was patently obvious that the United Nations inspectors weren't finding anything. But they were being aggressively discredited in the media. And rather than asking why this was happening, most reporters -- who above all should be skeptical and curious -- asked no questions at all.

And it goes on and on and on ...

The disgraceful press reaction to Colin Powell's presentation at the United Nations seems like something out of Monty Python, with one key British report cited by Powell being nothing more than a student's thesis, downloaded from the Web -- with the student later threatening to charge U.S. officials with "plagiarism."

Phil Donahue recalls that he was told he could not feature war dissenters alone on his MSNBC talk show and always had to have "two conservatives for every liberal." Moyers resurrects a leaked NBC memo about Donahue's firing that claimed he "presents a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war. At the same time our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity."

Moyers also throws some stats around: In the year before the invasion William Safire (who predicted a "quick war" with Iraqis cheering their liberators) wrote "a total of 27 opinion pieces fanning the sparks of war." The Washington Post carried at least 140 front-page stories in that same period making the administration's case for attack. In the six months leading to the invasion the Post would "editorialize in favor of the war at least 27 times."

Of the 414 Iraq stories broadcast on NBC, ABC and CBS nightly news in the six months before the war, almost all could be traced back to sources solely in the White House, Pentagon or State Dept., Moyers tells Russert, who offers no coherent reply.

But how could he offer any coherent reply? There were only two honest things left for Tim Russert to do. One would have been self-decapitation. But that would have taken courage. His other possible course would have been to fall to his knees and beg for mercy. And Russert needs mercy; he can not afford to pray for justice. But begging for mercy would have taken humility. By extension, we should not expect any coherent replies from any neocon anytime soon -- or ever.

The program closes on a sad note, with Moyers pointing out that "so many of the advocates and apologists for the war are still flourishing in the media." He then runs a pre-war clip of President Bush declaring, "We cannot wait for the final proof: the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." Then he explains: "The man who came up with it was Michael Gerson, President Bush's top speechwriter.

"He has left the White House and has been hired by the Washington Post as a columnist."

Enough, already.

Damn them all. Damn them all straight to Hell.

According to officials at the Guillotine Department, they could be on their way immediately.

So what are we waiting for?

9/11 Resuce Workers Screwed As Court Kills Suit Over Air Quality

As AP writer David B. Caruso reported Friday via TIME:

An appeals court ruling could spell trouble for New Yorkers suing the Environmental Protection Agency and its former chief for saying that sooty Lower Manhattan air was safe to breathe after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

A three judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declared this week that EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman and other agency officials can't be held constitutionally liable for making rosy declarations about air quality after the World Trade Center's destruction.

The opinion, written by the court's chief judge, Dennis Jacobs, said opening EPA workers up to lawsuits for giving out bad information during a crisis could have a catastrophic side effect.

'Officials might default to silence in the face of the public's urgent need for information,' Jacobs wrote.

There it is, in black and white. It's better for government officials to lie, and endanger the lives of thousands or even millions of people with bogus information, than to remain silent.

Who has been threatening Dennis Jacobs?

EPA spokeswoman Mary Mears called the decision 'positive,' but said she could not comment on its potential influence on other cases until it had been reviewed by the agency and Justice Department lawyers."

Positive.

It's positively treasonous, that's what's positive about it.

Positively despicable.

Positively emblematic of all the Bush administration stands for, and a great big "Screw You!" to all the people who helped dismantle the crime scene so the steel could be carted away and no investigation could take place and an endless limitless war on the rest of the world could be waged and the unelected criminal president and his unelected criminal vice president and lots of their friends could become even filthier richer while hundreds of thousands of people were killed and millions more suffered grievously.

The Crime of the Century is still unpunished. But the guillotines are waiting.

And we're gonna need them; because this is not a simple case of government officials speaking before the information was available, horrific as that would be. This is even worse:

In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center, the White House instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to give the public misleading information, telling New Yorkers it was safe to breathe when reliable information on air quality was not available.

That finding is included in a report released Friday by the Office of the Inspector General of the EPA. It noted that some of the agency's news releases in the weeks after the attack were softened before being released to the public: Reassuring information was added, while cautionary information was deleted.

And so on.

Bring on the buckets! Sharpen the blades! Let the heads roll!!

This nightmare is not going to end all by itself.

Larisa: 'Rove Determined To Strike In The US'

Larisa Alexandrovna has been away -- either on vacation [?!] or chasing a big story [!?] -- and we've certainly missed her. As regular readers of her blog already know, she's also been ill, and I'm sure I speak for a great many people when I wish her better health immediately.

The good news is: She's ba-a-a-a-ck!! Savagely funny and right-on-the-mark in her latest blog item:

"Karl Rove determined to strike in the US"

Karl Rove apparently has direct access to terrorists or at least their play book, because he knows something that even experts seem not to know: what the terrorists are thinking.

"We are foolish if we think we can turn away from this threat and draw inward, and they will not come," President Bush's chief political strategist told an audience of about 400 at the Mount Union Theater. "If we lose, they will follow," he said.

I think this advice should have been taken during the end of the Nixon era in which apparently our national nightmare had just begun. Had Nixon not been pardoned, then his little mob would have likely followed him to the slammer, including Mr. Rove. Instead, "they" have followed us for the last 30+ years. But I will ask again, and continue to ask, since no member of Congress appears to have this question on the tip of his or her tongue for some odd reason: why does a political hit man running campaigns have the highest level clearances?

That question is easy to answer, at least from the point of view of those who want the political hit man to have the highest level clearances: Because knowledge is power. It's really that simple.

The more difficult question, the one Larisa is surely asking, is: Why do we allow it?

And the answer to that one, I believe, was best articulated by Joseph Heller, when asked about all the interwoven themes of his novel Catch-22. Heller interrupted the question, saying there was only one theme:

They can do anything that we can't prevent them from doing.

Once again it really is that simple.

What can we do to prevent it? That's why they do it.

As for the question of how Karl Rove knows what the terrorists intend to do, I was wondering the same thing about John McCain a few days ago when he made essentially the same statement, and three possibilities came to mind:

1) He's clairvoyant.
2) He's bluffing.
3) He's in cahoots with the terrorists.

Let's look at this with dispassionate logic: If we dismiss the possibility of clairvoyance, the only available options amount to treason in one way or another. In other words, either he's bluffing -- threatening terrorism for political advantage -- or else ... well we don't want to think about that, do we?

Seriously: What difference does it make? The statements made by Rove, McCain, Cheney and Bush (among others) -- not just recently but continuously since 9/11, and especially whenever they feel threatened -- amount to an ultimatum: a threat of terrorist action against the United States in the event that Congress, reflecting the will of the American people, forces an end to this war-of-choice, which (apparently we were supposed to forget) was started deliberately on the strength of a pack of carefully constructed lies and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of advertising.

But we haven't forgotten. And we really can dismiss the possibility of clairvoyance. Because if Bush, Cheney, Rove et al. are clairvoyant, 9/11 would never have happened unless they wanted it to.

Therefore we know exactly what these threats represent: a protection racket of the vilest sort:

Give us full control of your country -- the budget, the legal system, the military, the works! -- or else you will be attacked by terrorists -- again!

And so. The treason is obvious. The Guillotine Department is standing by. What are we waiting for?

Bush To Congress: 'Wash The Car, Will Ya?'

Yesterday Toronto's Globe and Mail ran a story by Tenile Bonoguore under the curious headline "Bush makes impassioned plea for war cash".

Your partially frozen scribbler, having seen untold reams of nonsense from the shrubbery during the past six years, performed a Visual Spoonerism and read it as

"Bush makes impassioned plea for Car Wash"

... which, when you think about it, makes just about as much sense as what he did say.

U.S. President George W. Bush issued an impassioned plea to Congress on Monday for emergency cash to boost efforts in the Middle East.

In an emotive speech, Mr. Bush said the consequences of failure in Iraq “would be death and destruction in Iraq” and in the United States.

And how would he know? He is most responsible for the death and destruction currently happening to Iraq and the United States, and he has rarely told us the truth about anything. We should believe him now?

“Congress needs to put partisanship on hold. Send me an emergency spending bill that I can sign that gives our troops the support they need and gives the commanders the tools they need to complete this mission,” Mr. Bush said.

Congress needs to stop listening whenever the self-made commander-in-chief tells them what to do.

And OOPS! Did you notice what else happened?

The call came on the same day that England distanced itself from Mr. Bush's “war on terror” mantra.

British International Development Secretary Hilary Benn rejected the phrase “war on terror” while speaking at the Centre for International Co-operation think tank in New York.

Chris Floyd has a good post on this aspect of the nonsense, which I do hope you will read. For our purposes here, sufficient to note Mr. Benn's reasoning:

“In the U.K., we do not use the phrase ‘war on terror' because we can't win by military means alone, and because this isn't us against one organized enemy with a clear identity and coherent set of objectives,” he said.

“What these (terrorist) groups want is to force their individual and narrow values on others, without dialogue, without debate, through violence. And by letting them feel part of something bigger, we give them strength.”

The contrast between this partially reasonable view of the situation and the view held by the White House is so stark that an establishment wire service can't help but mention it. As in:

But that is far removed from the picture Mr. Bush painted from the White House, where he referred to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and warned of dire consequences if Congress does not issue him a bigger war chest.

It's about time we took all this September 11 stuff seriously, isn't it? It's time for a real investigation, because finding out who did it is the only way we're ever gonna be safe. In addition, it's well past time for the so-called "dire consequences" that the president is always talking about.

The Guillotine Department is standing by. But in the meantime, we still have a problem.

Surrounded by families of veterans, Mr. Bush sought to set expectations for his meeting this Wednesday with congressional leaders of both parties.

Surrounded by pro-war families of pro-war veterans, no doubt: giving the silent and absolutely incorrect impression that these people represent the only type of veteran and the only type of family that can be found. We all know better, of course.

But that doesn't stop the bullying.

In particular, he sought to put pressure on Democratic lawmakers to fund the war without trying to limit or wind down the military mission.

“I understand Republicans and Democrats in Washington have differences over the best course in Iraq,” Mr. Bush said. “That's healthy. That's normal, and we should debate those differences. But our troops should not be caught in the middle.

But we know from years of experience that he doesn't want to debate anything at all. Not that any debate is really necessary.

This entire matter could be resolved quite simply. The troops wouldn't be caught in the middle of anything if they were back home.

“I'm looking forward to the meeting. I hope the Democratic leadership will drop its unreasonable demand for a precipitous withdrawal.”

Repeatedly referring to the troops in Iraq, Mr. Bush said the Democrats were passing “unacceptable bills” that put money into domestic programs instead of into the overseas war effort.

“We owe it to a future generation of Americans to help secure peace,” he said, adding that enemies “could just as easily come here to kill us.”

Right. Sure. Absolutely. Because peace as in absence of war would not be possible if the invaders as in hated occupying army would leave. Because it would be just as easy for Iraqis to come here and kill us here as it is for them to kill our soldiers there, in their own country, in their own neighborhoods!

Because ... What the heck does Bush think we are, total idiots? Well he'll be right if we don't notice this next bit:

Both the U.S. House and Senate have passed bills to fund the war and start drawing troops home. They are expected this to week to begin negotiating a final version to send to Mr. Bush.

He has pledged to veto it if it is not stripped of the provisions that he opposes.

And that's the dead giveaway right there. If he doesn't like anything about it, he will veto it -- even though he could simply nullify the clauses he doesn't like with a simple signing statement, and despite the fact that he needs the money right away ... or so he says!

It's like the guy goes into a bank and says to the mortgage officer, "Look, I need a ton of money and I need it so badly that if you don't let me dictate every single aspect of the mortgage agreement I am gonna walk out of here and never come back."

How believable is that? And how urgent is it, really? In my mind it ranks right up there with an impassioned plea to hose off the family car.

Tom Toles: Out Of Arrows

No more arrows? Then it must be time for the guillotines!

The War On Gore: A Special Report From Robert Parry

Robert Parry has written a thorough case study of one of the sorriest tales in the history of American "journalism", called "U.S. News Media's 'War on Gore'". Like all Parry's best work, there's a lot to it.

It starts like this:

When historians sort out what happened to the United States at the start of the 21st Century, one of the mysteries may be why the national press corps ganged up like school-yard bullies against a well-qualified Democratic presidential candidate while giving his dimwitted Republican opponent virtually a free pass.

Or maybe it won't be a mystery at all. Maybe it will be transparently obvious why the corporate press ganged up on a well-qualified candidate who just happened to be not only Democratic but also environmentalist.

You just never know, do you?

How could major news organizations, like The New York Times and The Washington Post, have behaved so irresponsibly as to spread falsehoods and exaggerations to tear down then-Vice President Al Gore – ironically while the newspapers were berating him for supposedly lying and exaggerating?

In a modern information age, these historians might ask, how could an apocryphal quote like Gore claiming to have “invented the Internet” been allowed to define a leading political figure much as the made-up quote “let them eat cake” was exploited by French propagandists to undermine Marie Antoinette two centuries earlier?

Why did the U.S. news media continue ridiculing Gore in 2002 when he was one of the most prominent Americans to warn that George W. Bush’s radical policy of preemptive war was leading the nation into a disaster in Iraq?

These all amount to different ways of wording the same question: Why does the media favor Bush over Gore?

Arguably, those violations of journalistic principles at leading U.S. news organizations, in applying double standards to Gore and Bush, altered the course of American history and put the nation on a very dangerous road.

In my opinion it is not arguable in any way, shape or form. The media gave George W. Bush a free ride with all the trappings, and took potshots at Al Gore at every possible opportunity. It was obvious, it was malicious, it was deliberate, and at least part of it was very carefully orchestrated!

The evidence Parry recounts is stronger than the conclusions he draws. For instance,

In December 1999, for instance, the news media generated dozens of stories about Gore's supposed claim that he discovered the Love Canal toxic waste dump. "I was the one that started it all," he was quoted as saying. This "gaffe" then was used to recycle other situations in which Gore allegedly exaggerated his role or, as some writers put it, told "bold-faced lies."

One of these lies involved "Love Story"; another concerned the Internet. Parry documents the development of these and some others. The stories were widely circulated.

But behind these examples of Gore's "lies" was some very sloppy journalism.

That's a very generous way to describe it, in my opinion. Some would say Al Gore was ambushed.

The Love Canal flap started when The Washington Post and The New York Times misquoted Gore on a key point and cropped out the context of another sentence to give readers a false impression of what he meant.

The error was then exploited by national Republicans and amplified endlessly by the rest of the news media, even after the Post and Times grudgingly filed corrections.

Almost as remarkable, though, is how the two newspapers finally agreed to run corrections. They were effectively shamed into doing so by high school students in New Hampshire and by an Internet site called The Daily Howler, edited by a stand-up comic named Bob Somerby.

It really is remarkable. The Love Canal is a toxic waste nightmare in Niagara Falls, NY, where the Army and private chemical producers buried countless drums of the world's most deadly chemistry. The underground time-bomb ticked for about 30 years before it went off; shortly thereafter, Love Canal became the first such nightmare to receive national (and even global) attention. I could do an entire post on its history, and maybe some day I will.

The Love Canal quote controversy began on Nov. 30, 1999, when Gore was speaking to a group of high school students in Concord, N.H. He was exhorting the students to reject cynicism and to recognize that individual citizens can effect important changes.

As an example, he cited a high school girl from Toone, Tenn., a town that had experienced problems with toxic waste. She brought the issue to the attention of Gore's congressional office in the late 1970s.

"I called for a congressional investigation and a hearing," Gore told the students. "I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. Had the first hearing on that issue, and Toone, Tennessee – that was the one that you didn't hear of. But that was the one that started it all."

After the hearings, Gore said, "we passed a major national law to clean up hazardous dump sites. And we had new efforts to stop the practices that ended up poisoning water around the country. We've still got work to do. But we made a huge difference. And it all happened because one high school student got involved."

As Parry points out, the context is clear. Love Canal was well-known -- even outside the US -- but Toone was not. At all. And yet,

What sparked his interest in the toxic-waste issue was the situation in Toone – "that was the one that you didn't hear of. But that was the one that started it all."

After learning about the Toone situation, Gore looked for other examples and "found" a similar case at Love Canal. He was not claiming to have been the first one to discover Love Canal, which already had been evacuated. He simply needed other case studies for the hearings.

The next day, The Washington Post stripped Gore's comments of their context and gave them a negative twist.

"Gore boasted about his efforts in Congress 20 years ago to publicize the dangers of toxic waste," the Post reported. "'I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal,' he said, referring to the Niagara homes evacuated in August 1978 because of chemical contamination. 'I had the first hearing on this issue.' … Gore said his efforts made a lasting impact. 'I was the one that started it all,' he said." [Washington Post, Dec. 1, 1999]

The New York Times ran a slightly less contentious story with the same false quote: "I was the one that started it all."

Where did the false quote come from? Did these two huge newspapers simply print this preposterous statement without even checking to see whether this was what the man said? Apparently so. And it gets worse.

The Republican National Committee spotted Gore's alleged boast and was quick to fax around its own take. "Al Gore is simply unbelievable – in the most literal sense of that term," declared Republican National Committee Chairman Jim Nicholson. "It's a pattern of phoniness – and it would be funny if it weren't also a little scary."

Au contraire! This example of so-called journalism would be funny if it weren't absolutely terrifying!

The GOP release then doctored Gore's quote a bit more. After all, it would be grammatically incorrect to have said, "I was the one that started it all." So, the Republican handout fixed Gore's grammar to say, "I was the one who started it all."

In just one day, the key quote had transformed from "that was the one that started it all" to "I was the one that started it all" to "I was the one who started it all."

In just one day...

The national pundit shows quickly picked up the story of Gore's new “exaggeration.”

"Let's talk about the 'love' factor here," chortled Chris Matthews of CNBC's Hardball. "Here's the guy who said he was the character Ryan O'Neal was based on in ‘Love Story.’ … It seems to me … he's now the guy who created the Love Canal [case]. I mean, isn't this getting ridiculous? … Isn't it getting to be delusionary?"

Matthews turned to his baffled guest, Lois Gibbs, the Love Canal resident who is widely credited with bringing the issue to public attention. She sounded confused about why Gore would claim credit for discovering Love Canal, but defended Gore's hard work on the issue.

"I actually think he's done a great job," Gibbs said. "I mean, he really did work, when nobody else was working, on trying to define what the hazards were in this country and how to clean it up and helping with the Superfund and other legislation." [CNBC's Hardball, Dec. 1, 1999]

I'm here to tell you Lois Gibbs is absolutely credible about Love Canal. I could tell you stories. But not now. Maybe later.

While the national media was excoriating Gore, the Concord students [who knew first-hand that Gore had been misquoted] were learning more than they had expected about how media and politics work in modern America.

For days, the students pressed for a correction from The Washington Post and The New York Times. But the prestige papers balked, insisting that the error was insignificant.

"The part that bugs me is the way they nit pick," said Tara Baker, a Concord High junior. "[But] they should at least get it right." [AP, Dec. 14, 1999]

When the David Letterman show made Love Canal the jumping off point for a joke list: "Top 10 Achievements Claimed by Al Gore," the students responded with a press release entitled "Top 10 Reasons Why Many Concord High Students Feel Betrayed by Some of the Media Coverage of Al Gore's Visit to Their School." [Boston Globe, Dec. 26, 1999]

The Web site, The Daily Howler, also was hectoring what it termed a "grumbling editor" at the Post to correct the error.

So The Washington Post and the New York Times were forced to print corrections, but they still didn't get the story right!

Finally, on Dec. 7, a week after Gore's comment, the Post published a partial correction, tucked away as the last item in a corrections box. But the Post still misled readers about what Gore actually said.

The Post correction read: "In fact, Gore said, 'That was the one that started it all,' referring to the congressional hearings on the subject that he called."

The revision fit with the Post's insistence that the two quotes meant pretty much the same thing, but again, the newspaper was distorting Gore's clear intent by attaching "that" to the wrong antecedent. From the full quote, it's obvious the "that" refers to the Toone toxic waste case, not to Gore's hearings.

Three days later, The New York Times followed suit with a correction of its own, but again without fully explaining Gore's position. "They fixed how they misquoted him, but they didn't tell the whole story," commented Lindsey Roy, another Concord High junior.

On and on it goes. Read all about it. Read more about the Love Canal lie, the Internet lie, the "Love Story" lie, and more. Read about how all these lies were woven together into an entirely fictional narrative, one that some in the "news" media felt "obliged" to tell.

The Post's Ceci Connolly even defended her inaccurate rendition of Gore's quote as something of a journalistic duty. "We have an obligation to our readers to alert them [that] this [Gore's false boasting] continues to be something of a habit," she said. [AP, Dec. 14, 1999]

Meanwhile they were packaging a mean-spirited dry-drunk half-witted warmonger -- who had already admitted in public that he would attack Iraq if he could -- as a "compassionate conservative" who wanted to conduct a "humble foreign policy".

Bob Parry can use the word "arguable" if he wants, but that doesn't mean I have to.

If the media had told the truth about the two candidates, the 2000 election would never have been close enough to steal. Period.

Thus was our birthright stolen from us.

What are we gonna do about it?



We've got plenty of guillotines.

We've got plenty of buckets.

What are we waiting for?

Surge In Iraq May Last Longer Than Originally Announced

According to David S. Cloud and Michael R. Gordon in the International Herald Tribune, Additional U.S. troops in Iraq may need to stay until 2008

... or beyond ...

The day-to-day commander of American forces in Iraq has recommended that the heightened American troop levels in Iraq be extended through February 2008, military officials said.

That's what they are saying now. Watch what they say in February of 2008.

The confidential recommendation by the commander, Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, reflects the military's new counterinsurgency doctrine, which puts a premium on sustained efforts to win over a wary population.

"Sustained?" Sustained all the way till almost a year from now? Such wordplay would make me laugh were it not so tragic. But there's nothing funny about this bloody extension of a monstrous war crime.

The last of the five additional combat brigades being sent to Iraq as part of what the White House calls a surge of force will not arrive and begin operations in Iraq until June.

The current schedule calls for American troop numbers in Iraq to begin declining by September unless additional units are sent and more are held over.

So let's get this straight. The troops of the surge won't all get there until June -- this is the slowest surge in history -- and our military's new counterinsurgency doctrine puts a premium on sustained efforts, so the slowest of the surge troops may have to sustain their efforts for a whole eight months!

... IF we can swing it:

Any extension of the troop buildup would add to the strain on army and marine forces that are already stressed from years of continuous deployments, and would leave fewer troops available to respond to unanticipated crises.
...
If the Bush administration did decide to extend the troop increase, the pressures on the army would become particularly acute in November, when several army combat brigades are scheduled to leave Iraq.

Decisions must be made soon, army officials say, to identify potential replacement units or extensions.

A Pentagon official said that if the surge was extended, the army would be forced by the end of the year to send back to Iraq units that have spent less than one year at home...

So there's the rub. Or one of 'em, anyway.

The big problem, of course, is that we don't belong in Iraq in the first place. Iraq had never attacked us; it never even posed a significant threat. The Iraqi people lived under a brutal dictator -- but so what? People in countries all over the world live under brutal dictators. Is the proper role of the United States to invade all these countries and overthrow their brutal dictators? Of course not. The irony alone would be insupportable, because so many of these brutal dictators are currently in power -- as was Saddam Hussein -- thanks to overt and/or clandestine support from the United States.

But as a propaganda ploy, the surge may be the best idea yet. Rather than talking about how the administration deliberately fabricated the "intelligence" and other lies it felt were necessary to start this war; rather than talking about the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been spent trying to sell these lies to the American people; rather than talking about the thousands of dead American troops and the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians who would be alive today if not for the unprovoked invasion and the illegal occupation that followed; rather than talking about who set up the sectarian death squads that now range freely in Iraq, death squads established in a deliberate attempt to destabilize Iraqi society; rather than talking about the tens of thousands of innocent people who have been arrested, tortured, and in many cases killed -- since we supposedly rid Iraq of its brutal torturers; rather than talking about the long-term effects of depleted uranium, the Pentagon's favorite munition, which just happens to cause cancer and birth defects; rather than talking about the trillions of dollars worth of oil that lie under Iraq's hot, dry, and now radioactive sand, or of the oil law the Americans are trying to force on Iraq, which would give control of all that oil to the foreign energy companies; rather than talking about the companies that are making the most money from this war, and the people who connect those companies to the policy-making (and war-making) center of the US government; rather than all of this, rather than any of it, in most cases, the debate tends to swirl around questions such as how many additional troops constitute a proper "surge", and how many months a proper surge should last.

What we should be talking about, of course, is how to get the mass murderers out of the White House and into holes in the ground.

Have I mentioned guillotines lately?



They truly do not deserve to be IMPEACHed!

Shrub Taps Dole To Head Vet Med Probe

In its article announcing the decider's decision to use ancient elephant insider former Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole to stop further discussion of look into a long-term scandal sudden crisis involving ill and injured vets all over the country at Walter Reed Army Hospital, TIME Magazine quotes the cruel and unusual little chimperor thus:

"We have a moral obligation to provide the best possible care and treatment to the men and women who served our country," Bush said in a speech to the American Legion. "They deserve it and they're going to get it."

Huh? How are they gonna get it?

Are we supposed to believe Bush all of a sudden cares about moral obligation?

Are we supposed to believe Bush all of a sudden cares about providing the best possible care and treatment to the men and women who served our country?

Of course we have a moral obligation and of course they deserve it. But they're not gonna get it! And everybody knows it! So what's with the spectacle?

What did the audience at the Legion hear?

Bush said an interagency task force of seven Cabinet secretaries, led by Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson, would be convened to determine what can be done immediately to improve veterans' care.

How typical! Not only of Bush but also of the entire political philosophy which he and his administration have come to represent.

After full-spectrum abuse of the military for his entire unelected tenure in office, the chimperor empanels a committee of experts to determine what can be "done" to solve the problem "immediately".

What did the Legion audience think of this?

Did they applaud? Shame on them if they did.

The article doesn't say, but it does say this:

"I'm concerned about the fact that when they come back they don't get the full treatment they deserve," Bush said. His appointment of Dole and Shalala was greeted with applause.

Here's an example of the sort of framing that almost starts to thaw me out:

The review came in the wake of disclosures of shoddy outpatient health care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, one of the nation's premier facilities for treating veterans wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. "I am concerned as you are about the conditions of Walter Reed Army Medical Center," the president said.

To me, the obvious response is "Yeah, sure!!" and the obvious question is: If Walter Reed is one of the nation's permier facilities and its conditions are of concern to someone as callous as the wicked little fool who inhabits the Oval Office, what does this say about the system as a whole? Did anyone ask him that? Apparently not.

How can a "journalist" write news and background in such a way as to hide the obvious questions? See above.

Are there any true Conservatives or true Republicans here who still support this madness? If so, please make an appointment at the guillotine section on your way home this evening.

Bush Urges His Private Death Squad To Speed Up The Slow Rush To War With Iran

Dafna Linzer of the Washington Post reports:
Troops Authorized to Kill Iranian Operatives in Iraq

The Bush administration has authorized the U.S. military to kill or capture Iranian operatives inside Iraq as part of an aggressive new strategy to weaken Tehran's influence across the Middle East and compel it to give up its nuclear program, according to government and counterterrorism officials with direct knowledge of the effort.
...
In Iraq, U.S. troops now have the authority to target any member of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, as well as officers of its intelligence services believed to be working with Iraqi militias. [...] Bush administration officials have been urging top military commanders to exercise the authority.

The wide-ranging plan has several influential skeptics in the intelligence community, at the State Department and at the Defense Department who said that they worry it could push the growing conflict between Tehran and Washington into the center of a chaotic Iraq war.

Or -- on the contrary -- they might be intended to provoke a reaction which could then be used as a pretext for war with Iran.

Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque noticed that the Iranians who are being attacked in Iraq are in the country at the request of the government -- the government supported by the USA -- and as he says in Death and Dishonor: Bush's New Assassination Order, this leaves no doubt:

The purpose of the order is to provoke Iran into some action that can be trumpeted as a casus belli for the Bush Faction's long-planned war against Iran.

What Bush has done with this order is to turn the American military into his own private death squad. It is an act of breathtaking dishonor, of unspeakable moral filth. That this pathetic little man and the jumped-up thugs around him – especially the hulking, smirking, lying coward Dick Cheney – are allowed to show their faces among civilized people, much less exercise power over a mighty nation, remains an unfathomable mystery...and a source of deep shame for all Americans.

Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane of Raw Story have been collecting the history of our long slow rush to war. In Escalation of US Iran military planning part of six-year Administration push, they write:

The escalation of US military planning on Iran is only the latest chess move in a six-year push within the Bush Administration to attack Iran
...
While Iran was named a part of President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” in 2002, efforts to ignite a confrontation with Iran date back long before the post-9/11 war on terror. Presently, the Administration is trumpeting claims that Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon than the CIA’s own analysis shows and positing Iranian influence in Iraq’s insurgency, but efforts to destabilize Iran have been conducted covertly for years, often using members of Congress or non-government actors in a way reminiscent of the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal.

There's much more good new reporting at Raw from Larisa and Muriel, including a timeline, The Build Up To Iran, which details -- step by deliberate bloodthirsty step -- exactly how our rogue administration has brought us to the very brink of war with a country which has done nothing to us or any of our people. Every step of the timeline is documented by references to mainstream news sources, so it will be invaluable for batting away wingnuts, but whether it will cut much ice against the professional mass-murderers who now run our country remains to be seen.

What is Bush thinking?

Stephen P. Pizzo at Atlantic Free Press calls it another game of Texas Hold-em and says:

He's not putting his own children's lives at risk, but OPK – Other People's Kids. [...] As long as he can keep feeding fresh troops into Iraq his project cannot be proven a failure. If Bush can just keep borrowing other people's kids to place at risk, and rolling over – renewing — his Iraq policy for just two more years, he's home free. It's another Texas “win/win” in which the perp gets away and the American people pay the price.

Pizzo is writing about banking scams and Iraq, but I believe the same demented keep-it-rolling philosophy is also driving the administration's policies in Iran, the Middle East, and the whole so-called War on so-called Terror.

In a nutshell: It's not their money being poured into Iraq, and it's not their blood either, but they and their moneyed base reap the profits.

It's not all about money, of course; to a certain extent it's also about power. But it's also about responsibility, and the avoidance thereof.

They simply can't stop now; they're in too-dangerous waters. If they stopped making war and allowed the truth to be revealed -- the truth about the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the truth about upcoming wars with Iran and likely Syria, the truth about 9/11, the truth about the so-called the War on Terror -- their final shred of legitimacy would vanish in an instant, and the so-called president and all his war-profiteering cronies -- the "have-mores" he likes to call his "base" -- would be one small step from the guillotines.



Am I dreaming? Of course I am. But at least it's a pleasant dream.

One small step for a few vicious men, and one giant leap for mankind.