The Ones Who Fly Away from Omelas

"A Time to Break Silence"

2008-03-25T16:42:00.000-07:00

"Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

...Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

...Now there is little left to build on -- save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call fortified hamlets. The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these? Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These too are our brothers.

...I am as deeply concerned about our troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor.

...Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words:

"Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism."

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play.

The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war. "

-MLK JR, April 4, 1967. He was murdered 1 year later.

Iraq Veterans March for Peace After 5 Years

2008-03-19T21:21:00.000-07:00

The Dark and Ugly Side of Republican Promises....

2008-01-04T10:13:00.000-08:00

So today let's start out the new year by remembering fondly one of moonbat's success stories of the last: Moonbat takes on Idiot Private Security Force. As readers of the comments section know, moonbat forced the idiots to "alter" their "rules" to allow women to remove their high heels and thus avoid being screened by slobering 30 year old men. Why are we revisiting this happy episode? Our idiot private security force is back in the news: Video tape of sleeping security guards shakes nuclear industry. Armed guards sleeping on the job. What I love the most is that they are armed, even at the Museum where they screen people entering and exiting, they are armed. But TSA airport screeners are not armed. Even though it's considered appropriate for worse-trained and poorer performing guards of a museum in D.C. to be armed, let's not have armed guards in airports where terrorists might actually attack. In fact, as anyone who works there knows, even the presence of armed police officers is on the decline. But I digress from drooling over this latest outbreak of idiocy.

So Wackenhut's excuse is that they are being pressured to cut costs to the point where they can afford salaries for guards that only attract people who sleep on the job... after being forced to work regularly beyond the 60 work hour limit for nuclear facilities. Somehow though, I doubt any of this has included pay reductions for upper management. This interesting and obviously a private security firm plant blog post finds that in response to growing dissatisfaction with private security, in order to keep their contracts they were going to move away from a cost-plus business model. No for those of you who have been following moonbat's blogs on private security in Iraq, and Blackwater in particular, know that cost-plus is just a fancy word for "fleecing the taxpayer for tropical beach houses." Meanwhile, let's dig a little into the muck and find out more about Wackenhut's "security guards."

Wackenhut exists to kill you if you stop at a truck stop to have sex with your girlfriend. They are also trained to harrass veterans buying diet coke at another truck stop, but if you are a prostitute you are perfectly acceptible. And they area also suing SEIU claiming that union organizing is racketeering. And this is where you taxpayer dollars are going!!

7 Facts About the Dangerous Moonbat

2007-12-07T05:52:00.000-08:00

So today Omelas got tagged with a little chain-blog-comment. Well, it's the internet. You know it had to happen. Fitness for the Occasion. I'll drop the rules of the game next, but first I'll explain how I'm hijacking it. Part of what's happened to the word "liberal" is that we liberals don't define the story of why liberals choose to be so. Instead, the conservatives define it on a range of misguided, to thievery, to debauchery, always lacking of any fundamental values. If someone asked you what political goals you pursed, you could rattle off: reproductive rights, public education, free press, fair wages, human rights, environmental conservation. Almost a year ago, I was involved in a conversation with several liberal and conservative friends of mine, when we tried to work out definitions of the motivations of both political philosophies. What did the words "big government" mean? What is government for? What did we believe citizens were responsible for and capable of doing? When you strip out actual legislative differences, are we so distant from each other? Some conservatives love to just say, "we are fulfilling the plan of God." Here's how your moonbat defines "liberal:"

"I believe as a liberal that we can build a society and establish a government that encourages the best in people while hedging against the worst. I believe that just as we inherited from the common past, we become obligated to invest in the common future. I believe that just as we strive to be good people, we strive as a people to be a good nation. I believe that we as humans have the basic right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the guarantee of this is the proper pursuit of the governments formed by the people. I believe in a commitment towards society will produce the foundation and security upon which individual citizens may then build a good life."

So I'm sharing seven facts about the measure of me as a liberal:

1. I used to hate Starbucks. When conservatives started hating Starbucks and equating it with being yucky liberals to drink there, my eyes were suddenly opened to the virtues of Starbucks. I now love Starbucks.

2. I honestly think if you don't recycle you aren't good enough to be a liberal.

3. Conservatives are onto something when they try to ban books that introduce atheism, people having sex outside of marriage, and liberal values, or talk about other cultures. They are right, exposure will diminish their arguments that their opinions are best. However, I feel no pity for them and they will never win the battle of ideas. I am all for using book donations anywhere to increase the number of liberals. I remember reading all those Morgan the Unicorn stories. I no longer believe in unicorns, but I still believe there is no better good than kindness.

4. A man in a uniform turns me on. Oh, soldier boy!!

5. I remember the day I could no longer squash bugs and spiders. I was the only child my mother had who was unafraid. Even my brother was afraid. My sister brought me into the basement to squash a spider on the door going out into the backyard. He face was red with disgust. The huge wolf spider crouched down when I approached it. But it sat there, awaiting it's impending doom, trapped in the hope that the door would open instead and it could go back outside. Not human hope. I don't think they have human emotions. But spider hope, it's own version of faith in how the universe works and would deliver it from this strange exile. We looked at each other for a long time, and I opened the door instead.

6. I measure my life largely against my sister. When we all went to my mother's relatives in Massachusetts for Thanksgiving, I was sulking because I was sure she'd be in a skirt, and therefor she would be the better daughter. When my mother pointed out that she had not arrived with a skirt, I was still not satisfied. All of it is a deep cover for the fact that she has children and I do not. There are books and books of photographs of her babies all over the place, and I will never give anything to my family that produces as much delight as those babies. I want to have a baby. Psychologists aren't kidding when they talk about sibling rivalry.

7. I was raped seven years ago at a college party. Not the kind, at least, with a danger of pregnancy. I'd had a lot of coconut rum and went to crash on the bed of a friend. I woke up to find her boyfriend rutting top of me. She woke up to find me kicking him. She rolled over and started punching me in the head. I pretended to fall unconscious and she stopped. Her boyfriend remarked that he guessed that I didn't like what he was doing. She replied it was still not acceptable for me to kick him. They fell asleep. I crept out. The next day he told everyone I was a good time. She pretended like I didn't exist. I never told anyone the truth. And I'm a feminist. I couldn't trust people enough to go to class, to even go to the mess hall and eat. I flunked out. I drive new friends away before they can plot against me. Even to this day I experience vivid memory flashes from that night every time I go into a stranger's home.

I believe what we experience in our lives makes us moral actors. Who knows how many of the things that happen to us slowly build up to make us the liberal that we are today. None of what I have shared can be neatly dissected into little explanations of how they cause me to be a liberal. But in them is something important. Hospitality, kindness to people in pain, understanding the universe, and even a love of babies. Some injustice, yes. And some things odd or out of place. But human. And liberal.

Blogs I've tagged: Ketchup is a Vegetable and Stealth Badger.
They get the love because they are my only semi-regular comment-girlies.

A Lady Who Doesn't Need Diamonds or Pearls

2007-11-16T17:39:00.000-08:00

Blackwater Sniper Fells Three Iraqi Security Guards

2007-11-08T11:22:00.000-08:00

So today we find this delicious little scandal concerning our favorite mercenaries:

BAGHDAD -- Last Feb. 7, a sniper employed by Blackwater USA, the private security company, opened fire from the roof of the Iraqi Justice Ministry. The bullet tore through the head of a 23-year-old guard for the state-funded Iraqi Media Network, who was standing on a balcony across an open traffic circle. Another guard rushed to his colleague's side and was fatally shot in the neck. A third guard was found dead more than an hour later on the same balcony.

Eight people who responded to the shootings -- including media network and Justice Ministry guards and an Iraqi army commander -- and five network officials in the compound said none of the slain guards had fired on the Justice Ministry, where a U.S. diplomat was in a meeting. An Iraqi police report described the shootings as "an act of terrorism" and said Blackwater "caused the incident." The media network concluded that the guards were killed "without any provocation."

The U.S. government reached a different conclusion. Based on information from the Blackwater guards, who said they were fired upon, the State Department determined that the security team's actions "fell within approved rules governing the use of force," according to an official from the department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security. Neither U.S. Embassy officials nor Blackwater representatives interviewed witnesses or returned to the network, less than a quarter-mile from Baghdad's Green Zone, to investigate.

The incident shows how American officials responsible for overseeing the security company conducted only a cursory investigation when Blackwater guards opened fire. The shooting occurred more than seven months before the Sept. 16 incident in which Blackwater guards killed 17 civilians at another Baghdad traffic circle.

The Feb. 7 shootings convulsed the Iraqi Media Network, one of the prominent symbols of the new Iraq, in anger and recrimination.

U.S. officials and the security company, now known as Blackwater Worldwide, offered no compensation or apology to the victims' families, according to relatives of the guards and officials of the network, whose programming reaches 22 million Iraqis.

"It's really surprising that Blackwater is still out there killing people," Mohammed Jasim, the Iraqi Media Network's deputy director, said in an interview. "This company came to Iraq and was supposed to provide security. They didn't learn from their mistakes. They continued and continued. They continued killing."

Basically, State's justification was that Blackwater said they were fired upon, so that was the truth, and no investigation or evidence was required at all. Blackwater ducked charges in the Iraqi court because of Bremer's 2004 law granting them blanket immunity. And this wasn't just Blackwater shooting at civilian vehicles. The snipers fired from one government compound into another government compound, and they knew it too. The guards were guarding the state-owned and US-funded television station al-Iraqiya. Blackwater was told this by the Justice Department. And then, as the Iraqi guards, clearly in military camoflague and standing on guard towers with the Iraqi flag, in broad daylight no less, directed people away from parking at the TV station because they were worried about car bombs, Blackwater's mercenaries gunned them down in cold blood. And got away with murder.

Fans Show Love for the Writers' Strike

2007-11-07T14:08:00.000-08:00

So today we are going to spread around the brownie points in honor of the growing blogger support for the writers' guild strike. Also some love for those blogging to show their non-guild writer's support for the fight against studio greed. One blogger comments that a division between studios and the better writers may find those writers using the internet to sell direct to the fans and cut out the studios themselves. Interesting concept. Elsewhere, it's plain to people that the advent of webisodes aren't an advertisement for a show but just allow networks not to pay writers. And here's one blogger's letter in support of the strike to the AMPTP. Brownie points even for the hot Republican chicks who quote Ann Coulter.

The strike goes to the heart of respecting work again in this country. What the guild has been seeking in negotiations is "exceedingly reasonable" to Republicans who read up on the issue, and it's great to see there's some hope labor issues can be seen as nonpartisan. Even though the actors of the Office have shut down their show in support of the WGA by calling out sick, it's great to see the overwhelming support of their fans. We even have a mega-site now for all fans to show their love, so check it out!!

Time for the Writers of our Shows to Get Their Money

2007-11-05T11:08:00.000-08:00

So today marks Day One of the strike by the Writer's Guild of America. Although most studio executives are out there bragging they can hold out indefinately until the writers agree to be fleeced, I have to believe in the good fight. Everyone who appreciates the extraordinary stories brought to us through our favorite shows, and the truth brought to us by media outside of Faux News, should unite in support. The success of this strike will mean a world of difference to artists both inside the Guild and those aspiring to join them.

Blackwater Provides US Intelligence to Foreign Buyers

2007-11-04T08:52:00.000-08:00

So today we are going to contemplate the politics of using the word treason, especially when it gets so cleverly wrapped in the trapings of globalization. Blackwater developed it's own private intelligence agency and now hires out former CIA agents and their experience to the highest foreign bidder. And they admit point out that they are gleaning information from foreign contacts, developed by it's employees while they were in government service, which would be considered the treasonous exchange of state secrets to a foreign government if these foriegners took their information to a US embassy. The silent side of that logic is that capitalism permits the exchange of US classified information and state secrets to a foreign private individual for money. Shortly after 9-11 there was a lot of focus on the dangers to democracy posed by non-state actors. But it seems that instead of learning from history, conservative Republicans were falling in love with the concept of developing armed religious mercenary forces beyond the control of world government.

You learn in government service that it's not enough to avoid providing proof of wrong-doing, but you must also avoid the opportunity to do that wrong. It's not enough not to be caught having sex with a prostitute, you must also not be found in her hotel room with money in your hand. Here we have former CIA agents and other civil servants, building a shadow intelligence agency to collect intelligence they insist is only open source, after having spent a career developing skills focused on intelligence that was anything but publically available. What do they plan to provide intelligence analysis on? Their Global Fusion Center, staffed around the clock, searches for warnings on everything from terrorist plots on radical Islamic Web sites to possible political upheavals in Asia, [b]labor strikes[/b] in South America and Europe, and economic upheavals that could affect private enterprise. "We're not a private detective," former CIA's head of counterterrorism Cofer Black said. "We provide intelligence to our clients. It's not about taking pictures. It's business intelligence. We collect all information that's publicly available. This is a completely legal enterprise. We break no laws. We don't go anywhere near breaking laws. We don't have to."

America and Iraq have learned quite bloodly over the past few months that Blackwater doesn't believe that any laws apply to them at all, or should. If laws applied to Blackwater, as they have consistently argued in court, the ability of the Commander-in-Chief to wage war would be crippled, even while Blackwater was busy changing it's name from Blackwater USA to Blackwater Worldwide. Odd that Black insists that their intelligence operations don't involve pictures, while the live feed from al-Jazeera plays in the background and GoogleEarth is a common feature on computers across America. Yeah, who can blame the reader who swallows that one. But what is Black talking about in terms of gathering information from terrorist websites that's publically available. We happen to have had it out in public quite recently that the gathering of information from these sites uses technologies that provide illegal uses if they were used to hack say, information from Target's pharmacy records about whose getting emergency contraception. Even open source, we are talking about a global form of Operation CHAOS. Yes, the building of files on union activists and anti-war protestors in order to protect the interests of the highest bidder. Funded by conservative Republicans who are using your tax money.

How concerned should a democracy be considering that this intelligence is being fed into an organization with no alligence to the United States, and will consist of analysis of anyone who they have been paid to spy on. Such activities can be reasonably understood to include infiltration both of internet groups and face-to-face of anti-war and fair trade organizations, labor unions and human rights groups. A list of the children of labor rights organizers in Brazil and their schools and routes home. A method of concealing arms shipments from international inspection or even the law. The interrogation of democracy activists in Burma. The suppression of local activists protesting the corrupt regime in Nigeria and it's support by international oil companies. All of which are activities fundamentally in odds with the spread of democracy in the world and the idea of open societies.

Blackwater Smuggles an Illegal Kind of Silence into Iraq

2007-11-02T11:35:00.000-07:00

So today bloggers get to chow down on reports that Blackwater smuggled silencers into Iraq and other countries without the permission of the State Department. Yes, that means the kind of smuggling that's illegal. The particular issue seems to have arisen from the broader investigations of illegal arms smuggling being investigated by the BATF and the U.S. Attorney's Office in Raleigh, N.C. Experts are of course puzzeled as to why Blackwater would need silencers in escort missions for diplomats and kitchen equipment. While there's dim hope that trials brought by non-violent protesters arrested outside Blackwater's home camp will bring forth any paperwork, the effect of protesters against Blackwater has shown to produce a valuable freak-out effect in the war contractors. Meanwhile, two cars from the Blackwater massacre at Nisour Square are coming to the USA curtosy of the FBI. The labs at Quantico VA plan to use the cars to match bullets to bullet holes and create a virtual crime scene.

My dear readers can go here for an amusing story about Blackwater on vacation in Mexico... and drunk. Elsewhere, the story of Blackwater in New Orleans continues to find people who hadn't heard that the mercenaries were there. Not invited per se, they just showed up and insisted that Homeland Security pay them, which they did to a tune of $950 a day per hot gun. The math means that Blackwater made a sheer profit of $600 a day per bloke. Along those lines, Blackwater is trying to buy goodwill for a new Blackwater training camp in California by providing a tent city for those displaced by recent wildfires.

Meanwhile, CodePink punked Blackwater!! Read on:

Within minutes of Code Pink's emailing out a press conference invitation in the name of Blackwater's new Department of Corporate Integrity, Blackwater was on the phone to the Code Pink D.C. house. We hadn't sent them the invitation, but they got it right away, anyway.

“We're Blackwater and we don't know anything about this,” our confused caller said.

“Well if you're Blackwater, how come don't you know anything about this?...” a Code Pinker replied.

Code Pinkers stayed in character as Kitty Laver of Blackwater while our phones rang off the hook from Blackwater and the press, confused because the mercenary firm was claiming they didn't know anything about this and the press couldn't find any information on a Kitty Laver [aka Medea Benjamin]. A television network called us to schedule Blackwater president Eric Prince for their morning talk show. We accepted, and arranged for a friend to show up as Prince, but that appointment soon fell through, given the growing questions about this press conference. Through Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning, no one admitted we were not Blackwater, though the occasional irrepressible whoop of glee in the background might have raised suspicions. Code Pinkers planned the Wednesday press conference in three hours of late-night brainstorming Tuesday.

The next morning we headed over to the Phoenix Hotel, Medea and Des all in black as Kitty Laver and her assistant... We also had a “disgraced Blackwater employee” in an orange prisoner's jumpsuit, and his plain clothes guard. The rest of us wore white coveralls with (paper) Blackwater logos, logo hats, and white rubber gloves as we gathered in front of the hotel, while hefty security men in suits and ties blocked the hotel's entrance and watched us, unsmiling.

The press was gathered, waiting to find out who we really were. As we walked up, someone said, “Oh, it's Code Pink!” But we stayed in character.

Medea as Kitty explained that while Blackwater had not had corporate integrity before now, we were here to take on the task of cleaning up its tarnished image, starting with a generous gift to the disadvantaged of the next generation. As Des displayed some macho fighting man action toys bearing the fierce Blackwater logo, Kitty said the new corporate cleanup crew would be distributing them to disadvantaged youth in the city's homeless shelters during the holidays, “to help them on the road to growing up to be mercenaries themselves!”

The hilarity hardly dispells the growing public outrage over the grant of immunity to the Blackwater mercenaries who slaughtered unarmed civilians at Nisour Square in September. The exact wording of the immunity reads: "I understand this statement is being given in furtherance of an official administrative inquiry...I further understand that neither my statements nor any information or evidence gained by reason of my statements can be used against me in a criminal proceeding, except that if I knowingly and willfully provide false statements or information, I may be criminally prosecuted for that action under 18 United States Code, Section 1001." Which means that it allows them to be prosecuted for lying about killing innocent civilians in cold blood but not for the actual act of murder. If the FBI wants to make a case against the mercenaries, it will have to be based entirely on the forensic evidence of the scene and Iraqi testimony. Which means that they will be unable to point out that Blackwater lied on the character issue. Of course, if Blackwater presents the same pack of lies at trial, and are not convicted, they will be able to use that to escape being prosecuted for lying on those statements. The immunity is bushshit. Moonbat doesn't get immunity for the statements that she provides in her work as a government employee!!

Technorati Tags:
Blackwater, Code Pink, Iraq, war contractors, current events, moonbat

Grisley Body Counts Still Found in "Peaceful" Iraq

2007-10-29T05:28:00.000-07:00

So today we have numbers to add to the true total of deaths that General Petraeus should have reported to Congress in September after a grave of 15 female students was found in the al-Ehaimer area of Diyala Province, northeast of Baqubah, which is under the control of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Elsewhere in Diyala yesterday, a suicide bomber on a bicycle blew up 32 other police recruits at morning rollcall. 18 others were also injured, including a mother and her child. Other violent attacks occurred across Iraq, including a car bombing of a bus terminal in Kirkuk that killed 8 and wounded 25. Also in that city, armed men kidnapped the managing editor of the Turkmen magazine al-Akhaa, Qasim Muhammad Sari Kahiyah. You know he's going to die. A roadside bomb in Iskandariyah on Saturday, killed three 30 miles from Baghdad.

How much confidence can the Iraqis have in their central government if their Prime Minister might not even be able to toss Blackwater to the curb sometime this year? The death toll since the "success" of the surge was proclaimed in Washington certainly isn't reasuring. Last Wednesday, 25 died in bombings, including 9 police officers, in attacks that included a explosive-laden sewege truck. One killed two Iraqi soldiers and four civilians at an Iraqi army checkpoint, and another killed an Iraqi police cheif in Mosul. An Iraqi Sunni tribal leader and his son were gunned down west of Baghdad for recently siding with American troops. 2 civilians were killed in a bombing in Zaafaraniyah, a predominantly Shiite neighborhood in southeastern Baghdad. Shiite extremists are being changed to an increasing threat in classified campaign strategy for the Iraq, by Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, which covers the period through summer 2009. Not that it's news to us but, their plan also acknowledges that the U.S. military cannot guarantee a wholesale defeat of its enemies in Iraq, and instead is seeking "political accommodation" to persuade them to end the use of violence.

The Constant Moonbat

2007-10-26T08:19:00.000-07:00

Moonbat's spawned a John Edwards for President blog at The Constant Moonbat. The name plays off the title of John Le Carre's novel, the Constant Gardner.

Blackwater Just Wants to Spread the Love...

2007-10-25T11:28:00.000-07:00

So today Wired brings to light the story that Blackwater stole two airplanes from the Iraqi Air Force in 2005, according to the military who let that one slip to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Of course, which one of the C-130 air transports, SAMA-2000 light reconnaissance aircraft, Huey-2 helicopters and Mi-17 helicopters, is for now a secret, but Blackwater has until November 2nd to confess. Things look bleak for Blackwater, with the resignation of their paid lackey at State and the Iraqi government revoking Order 17. A lot to fit in with revamping its website, and the startling news that Blackwater USA will alter its name to Blackwater Worldwide. Guess patriotic jingoism is fading in fashion even for Republicans these days?

Blackwater found protesters recreating their Nisour Square Massacre outside their front door recently, complete with dead bodies for the police to cart away. Guess they must have been freaked out. So they vamped up their "love us like we love to pump innocent civies with lead" campaign, and sent out an email encouraging supporters to contact Congress. Yeah, oh I have a letter for Congress... and I'm going to sign it with a bloody hand print too.

"Cost efficiency of Blackwater — saving the US taxpayer millions of dollars so that the US Government doesn’t have to take troops from their missions or send more into harm's way."

Of course, it's a lie that mercenaries are cheaper than soldiers. The average Blackwater merc takes home $600 a day in Iraq. If you are a US soldier you get a lousy $83-$85, and if you're married you get $170. Just because Republicans love him the most of all our soldiers, General Petraeus gets $493 dollars a day. Feel the support for our troops?

Oh look, just as Blackwater rolls out it's new PR campaign, we have another "we don't work for Blackwater, we just want to have their babies" blog at BlackwaterBirds. Who is this? Oh, it's Standish, of course!! His sock puppet blog "Blackwater Facts" just happens to be linked to by... Blackwater USA!!. Their list of blogs includes also includes another "New" blog called Blackwaterreporting. Groomed over, of course, as Blackwaterreporting now conceals that it was registered to GoDaddy by an Internet brand advertising company. As far as results go, they suck. You, dear readers, can do better by helping Blackwater pick a new logo!!

Technorati Tags:
Blackwater, Blackwater Facts, war contractors, Iraq, politics, current events

Bush Holds Cocktail Hour to Raise War Funds

2007-10-23T11:29:00.000-07:00

So today we can only wish that were the truth as Bush demands we shell out $46 Billion More in War Funds. And he's demanding it by the end of the year. The rate Bush is going of course, his little foreign adventures are going to cost a total of $1 trillion dollars by the time his term is up. Yeah, that's more than the total of Vietnam and Korea. The total for this year alone in appropriations will be the highest year since the "War on Terror" began in 2001: $196.4 billion. As Pelosi points out, for the cost of 40 days in Iraq, we could provide health care to 10 million children for a year. Even though Bush insists the war contractors need the money to buy nonexistent troops Christmas trees and pudding, we know the Pentagon doesn't need a penny more until after February and the primary elections. Bush made his announcement at the White House while surrounded by the family of a dead Marine, and exorting Democrats to prove they support the troops. Political theater much? Does this family have granite countertops?

Meanwhile, with the border between Iraq and Turkey heating up, we are faced with yet another Bush lie: that by staying in Iraq we reduce the chances for regional war. Undoubtedly, the presence of US troops gives courage to Kurdish insurgents, who dart into Turkey and back out to Iraqi strongholds which are technically within US borders. The surge of refugees out of Iraq continues to destabalize the societies and governments of countries that surround it, placing an enormous economic and social strain on allies in the region. Relief from them is likely never to come, as Iraqis displaced by ethnic fighting become the new international Palestinians, forever holding an identity with a country to which they can never go home. And after all of the reconstruction efforts in Iraq, the aggregate of the lives of Iraqis is worse than before the invasion of 2003. Far from reducing terrorism, the one last goal clung to by the Bush administration, Iraq has become a proving ground for terrorism tactics, and the successes are exported to Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan.

What does Bush plan to do with this windfall if we give it to him? Get it stolen. Let's take a little peak into the $44.5 billion Iraqi reconstruction effort, and the auditing of just one $1.2 billion contract:

In a January audit of DynCorp's work under the INL contract, [auditors] found that the State Department paid $43.8 million for manufacturing and temporary storage of a residential camp that had never been used. The audit also questioned the State Department's payment of $36.4 million for weapons and equipment, including body armor, armored vehicles and communications equipment that couldn't be accounted for because "invoices were vague and there was no backup documentation." [Auditors] raised questions about INL's payment of business-class travel expenses for DynCorp officials. After INL questioned the charges, it said DynCorp re-paid $108,000. INL officials, according to Bowen's report, "have no confidence that the government has paid for only valid expenses under the contract."

Meanwhile, we find out that Blackwater ducks payroll taxes by calling it's employees "private contractors." Which might go a long way to explain why Blackwater takes no interest in their conduct. Who thinks Bush should get money to pay for this $H!T??!!

Republicans Open For Attacks Over Airline Security

2007-10-19T13:14:00.000-07:00

So let's be honest. The Republican side of the ticket statements to the American public that their support for the Iraq War and The Great Wall of Texas proves that they are keeping America safe. When the Democratic side of the ticket replies that by watching over civil liberties we are saving Americans from their government, we look like we think paper and lawsuits can protect people from ending up like those who jumped to their deaths out of the World Trade Center. And what we concentrate on now is not an effective counter to the 9-11 propaganda of the neo-cons. Lawsuits and civil liberties don't stop hijackers. And by keeping to such a strict form of attack of the "War on Terror," Democrats and liberals participate in the Republican strategy of using valid concerns over terrorism to push conservative agendas on spying and illegal immigrants. Years after the publishing of Lakoff's "Don't think of an elephant" we are no better at finding ways to define the argument that allow us to attack them at their weakest point.

Think of Katrina and the debacle of emergency management. That's a point that remained valid because constant media attention has kept the issue about how a hurricane devestated an American city, and the Bush Administration failed in it's duties. But we have let the neo-cons define terror threats in terms of phone calls and illegal immigrants, both old debates around which hard concerta wire got laid decades ago between both Democrats and Republicans. While attention to both issues remains important, gaining an inch in either debate will require trench warfare and an immense spilling of loyal blood. Especially without a liberal President and a liberal veto proof majority in Congress, and at least a fair and moderate Supreme Court. But will the fear that the CIA is listening to your phone call to your mother on Sunday night bring voters to the polls? Not likely. The vast majority of American voters understand they aren't likely to be the political operatives that an abuse of power could target, in a return of Hoover-style surveillance. Most of us really aren't that interesting.

What was 9-11 about? It was a group of men, who were on terror watch-lists, had expired visas, had arroused concern by the FBI for their unusal interest in flying skills. It was a low-key, well-planned, easily repeatable attack and it was real. And the Republicans are doing everything they can to make people forget that, and get the American public to think of 9-11 in terms of rogue nuclear nations and weed coming in over the border with Mexico. Why are they so energized to do so? Just like Katrina exposing the farse that Bush had made of FEMA, it shouldn't take another 9-11 style attack on our country to expose what the Bush Administration has done with airline security. Especially, since if there is ever another attack, liberal concentration on lawsuits and potential government abuse will be the Republican ticket to ducking the blame. But right now, airline security is a weak juicy underbelly to the Republican mantra that they are the ones to protect Americans.

To point out how Democratic dialogue over 9-11 has wandered onto thin ice, here's a blog from Congressman Mike Honda from California. His concerns are certainly valid and commendable, and ensuring that people aren't arbitrarily targeted due to their religion is a worthwhile Democratic goal. However, as this has become the Democratic response to 9-11 and airline security, and focuses on a very small part of the American voting public, we are left open to attacks of weakness and pandering by neo-cons. While nothing we do on the issue of airport security is likely to bring over Republican voters, swing voters are going to look closely at the two sides, and they are going to consider the Republican argument stronger. Which is unfortunate because this is an issue over which the Republicans and neo-cons have left themselves wide wide open.

Let's start with this: Rates of Failure to Find Suicide Bomb Tests by TSA.

Yesterday, Representative Kirk from Illinois rose on the House floor during open comments to bring up this subject, calling for a reveiw of airport security involving congressional leaders and the upper management of TSA. This set up and review has been coming for a long time and it has nothing to do with improving airport security, but wrapping up a federal agency as a private contract and handing it out to Republican campaign contributors. The study itself is questionable, given that it compares two of the worse airports against an airport that has been the subject of intensified training. But more importantly, the review will include the upper management of TSA and given current SSI laws which prevent airport screeners from commenting frankly in public, it holds no hope of providing accountability or insight into what is going on in airport security. However, airport passengers have begun to notice that there are fewer screeners at airports than there used to be, and job searches show that TSA offers part-time employment instead of concentrating on a full-time and steady workforce. Without full union representation, and full union rights for airport screeners, the public and Congress will find the truth elusive.

All of this will go on despite the prime opportunity this represents to assail the Republican line that private contractors are the route to take with American government. For instance:

1. Private Contractos Mass Mails SSNs to Wrong People.

TSA spokeswoman Amy von Walter said the breach was "an administrative error, and the contractor has taken steps to ensure it's not repeated." Accenture, a contractor that handles TSA personnel, sent 1,195 documents to the wrong former employees during a recent mailing, according to a letter signed by Richard Whitford, TSA assistant administrator for human capital. The documents were standard forms that are sent to employees after they leave the government. The forms often list an employee's Social Security number, birth date and salary. It's unclear how many forms had that information.

2. Private Contractors Loose Hazardous Material Trucker Data on TWO laptops.

According to a letter the TSA sent to lawmakers on Oct. 12, the laptops—both of which belonged to a TSA contractor—contain names, addresses, birthdays, commercial driver's license numbers and, in some instances, Social Security numbers of the affected truckers.

3. Go back to the use of private contractors in the founding of TSA.

Those details are contained in a federal audit that calls into question $303 million of the $741 million spent to assess and hire airport passenger screeners for the newly created Transportation Security Administration after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The audit, along with interviews with people involved in the passenger-screener contract, paints a rare and detailed portrait of how officials at the fledgling agency lost control of the spending in the pell-mell rush to hire 60,000 screeners to meet a one-year congressional deadline.

The audit, performed by the Defense Contract Audit Agency at the TSA's behest, spotlights scores of expenses: $20-an-hour temporary workers billed to the government at $48 per hour, subcontractors who signed out $5,000 in cash at a time with no supporting documents, $377,273.75 in unsubstantiated long-distance phone calls, $514,201 to rent tents that flooded in a rainstorm, $4.4 million in "no show" fees for job candidates who did not appear for tests.

The audit faulted the prime contractor, NCS Pearson Inc., which was hired by the TSA to test, interview, fingerprint, medically evaluate and pre-certify the candidates. The audit said Pearson failed to properly justify costs and improperly awarded subcontracts without competitive bidding. The audit also said the company demonstrated a "lack of management or oversight of subcontractors."

One of the audit's key revelations is that a decision to move the hiring process from Pearson's 925 U.S. private assessment centers to 150 hotels and other meeting facilities added at least $343 million to the cost of the contract, according to an estimate by Pearson. The company said it was ordered to make the change by the TSA, which said it made the decision in collaboration with Pearson.

Here we find outselves on difficult ground. While the actual testing methods used cannot be disclosed, in order to find enough acceptable hirees in the part-time worker labor pool, physical requirement tests are rumored to have been eliminated. Also rumored is it's not uncommon for the hirees to enter their own personal data into the private contractor's database for their background checks, while overseen by one contractor. Undoubtably, the contractors get paid as if they enter the data.

There's a very good report on discussing private versus federal airport security by the General Accounting Office. If you want to really understand airport security though, read what is claimed is being done by TSA management, and then the next time you fly, ask the TSOs there if it's true or not. Look around and see what's happening beyond the fact that you can't take your water bottle.

There are other weak points to go after Republican mismanagement of our nations terrorism efforts. For instance, as noted in a Senate Commerce Committee by Missouri Democrat MacCaskill, there a great lapse in security at overseas repair stations for airlines in terms of background checks. There should be honest discussion about TSA's application of SSI rules to prevent any dissent or critcism escaping the agency, and also the absurd application leading to some confusion for the public. Honestly, this is one of those cases where SSI claims are bogus. International fliers may present handwritten passports, where the expiration dates and names are all entered by hand. Countless US states allow the renewal of driver's liscenses by mail, to the point where the person has considerably aged compared to their photograph. Even if states have reasons to not renew driver's id's in five year intervals, that doesn't mean that photo identification should not be undated. Photo identification, in the age of credit card and ID theft, is appropriate as a part of airport security, even though recent intensification in this area admittedly has been aimed at finding illegal immigrants.

Airline security as a way to come out on top of the Homeland Security debate between liberals and conservatives is ripe for the taking, but it's a window that won't be open for long. It should be our issue, and it can be. Reframing the debate, as Lakoff points out, gives us a real chance to show our strengths and values, instead of always being on the defensive. With our record of standing up for civil liberties to balance out a call for a renewed focus on airline security, positions us better in the public debate. Airline security is being able to quickly match names against watch lists, and see Al Gore's "Assault on Reason" if you don't understand how important that is. Six years after 9-11 and hundreds of millions of dollars later, it's not possible for the Bush Administration to do what credit card companies do all the time. It would be done if it hadn't been used as a way to make Republican war contractors rich. Airline security is bomb sniffing dogs to prevent frontal attacks on people waiting in ticket lines outside of security. Count how many you see on a busy morning the next time you fly. Airline security is the testing for explosive traces. Next time you fly, how many people are getting their heavy sneakers and boots tested? Their bookbags tested? Ask the airport screeners about their views of their jobs and what they spend their time doing. Ask for the truth and then write your senator and congressional representative.

9-11 involved strong and trained young men using small hand weapons to hijack airplanes and fundamentally change America and our politics. Yet years later, we still let warmongering neo-cons define the debate and set us up to take the blame if it happens the next time. If there is another 9-11, they plan to make us take the blame because we are weak and don't support the war in Iraq. They will trot out how many times they focused on homeland security and they will control the debate. If we let them. Homeland Security and counterterrorism at it's most basic is airport security, and it's time to sent the Republicans to remedial class.

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9-11, war on terror, homeland security, 2008 elections, liberal, moonbat, politics

Vote Edwards in Democracy for America Poll!!

2007-10-18T07:52:00.000-07:00

So today Republicans refused to vote for SCHIP on Capital Hill. A moment to reflect. Republicans sided with Bush even though he and their party pundits waged a horrible campaign full of deliberate misinformation, lies, and the slandering of a 12 year-old-boy and his family. Edwards released a statement that is spot on: Republicans should be made to pay a price at the polls.

Edwards dropped by the WaPost today to answer live questions from a few of the commentators there. He answered questions about health care and the No Child Left Behind Act, and about the excessive hype placed on standardized testing. As he points out: "You don't make a hog fatter by weighing' it."

I was pleased to see he had a ready answer for the likelihood that Republicans will campaign on tax cuts next year, despite the fact that Bush put us $9 trillion in the hole. Edwards went on to say he will point out to voters that Republicans mean to lower taxes on wealthy people, while Democrats lower taxes on working people. "If you believe we should finally value work, and not just wealth in America, you should vote for me."

In Iowa, the Edwards campaign announced today the formation of a Statewide Rural Advisory Committee, a wide group of leaders including first responders, business leaders, elected officials and agricultural leaders. One of it's most recognizable members is Denise O'Brien, an organic farmer and the founder of the Women, Food and Agriculture Network, was the Democratic nominee for secretary of agriculture last year. Earlier this month, Edwards was endorsed by Iowa's Monroe County Supervisor Denny Ryan. Representing rural interests played a part in more more key endorsements from the Georgian Democratic Party, including the former Governor.

The importance of rural voter outreach extends to more than just the presidential caucus, as MyDD points out, as Democratic votes increased in rural counties in both 2004 and 2006. "That was a big change from the 1990s, when rural voters swung significantly against the Democratic Party. I believe that John Edwards would be by far the best candidate in our field to continue this trend, which would hurt the GOP badly. I urge you to consider this: the presidential election is more than 50 statewide elections. It also coincides with 435 House races and thousands of races for the state legislature." Out of the states come our national leaders and our next presidential candidates.

Edwards also signed the Presidential Pledge to expand Americorps to expand service positions by 100,000. Speaking before the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, Edwards spoke about the need to return the production of our military's equipment to American soil, a point which I strongly support him. Edwards' also proposed a "Brownie's Law" which would require that those nominated as political appointees to federal agencies meet the same strict hiring requirements as a civil servant, and that they possess actual work experience for that position.

Another good policy point is that Edwards has proposed national cancer networks which would increase funding for cancer research at the National Institutes of Health, include specific research into what chemicals increase the likelihood of cancer, make more widely available home visits from nurses, and also called for an Internet clearinghouse for information about services that are available for families dealing with the disease.

Election data shows what happens when you match up each of the Democratic candidates against the Republicans: Edwards beats every Republican with a larger margin than either Clinton or Obama. Edwards is the only Democratic candidate with a significant lead against Republican front runner Rudy Giuliani. Edwards' out performance against Clinton and Obama in match ups with the Republicans are particularly is also significant in the key battleground states of Iowa, Missouri, and Ohio. We all know how important to a Democratic victory are voter margins in Ohio. As for swing voters, Edwards at this point demonstrates the greatest appeal among Democratic candidates to Independents, beating Giuliani by 13%. Obama wins Independents by 5% and Clinton wins them by 3% against Giuliani.

Vote for Edwards in the Democracy for America Poll!!!

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John Edwards, Democracy for America, current politics, poverty in america, breast cancer, education

Twelve Angry Soldiers and the Iraq We All Know

2007-10-16T10:58:00.000-07:00

12 Army Captains spoke out in public today on the 5 year anniversary of the authorization of force in Iraq and the fiasco that has been Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the thousand "Operations this or that" which have followed. Bush's administration and the vaunted neo-conservative movement which brought him to power failed to rebuild a capitalist, foreign-owned, democratic and pro-West puppet. While the military found Saddam in a hole in the desert, and the Iraqi judicial court found him guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death, we stayed in Iraq for the dreams of Wall Street.

Within months, our own brutal military tactics and the irresponsible outsourcing that allowed in mercenaries sparked the rise of a bloody insurgency. Bush winked and nodded while American contractors sailed off to the Caribbean with $9 billion in stolen Iraqi oil money we had been entrusted with by the U.N. And three thousand soldiers died, more than half from weapons constructed out of munitions the Bush administration failed to secure during the invasion, so sure the only dangerous thing to be found would be the still invisible WMD. (We'll find it on Nov. 1, 2008, wait and see!!)

U.S. forces, responsible for too many objectives and too much "battle space," are vulnerable targets. The sad inevitability of a protracted draw-down is further escalation of attacks -- on U.S. troops, civilian leaders and advisory teams. They would also no doubt get caught in the crossfire of the imminent Iraqi civil war.

Iraqi security forces would not be able to salvage the situation. Even if all the Iraqi military and police were properly trained, equipped and truly committed, their 346,000 personnel would be too few. As it is, Iraqi soldiers quit at will. The police are effectively controlled by militias. And, again, corruption is debilitating. U.S. tax dollars enrich self-serving generals and support the very elements that will battle each other after we're gone.

This is Operation Iraqi Freedom and the reality we experienced. This is what we tried to communicate up the chain of command. This is either what did not get passed on to our civilian leadership or what our civilian leaders chose to ignore. While our generals pursue a strategy dependent on peace breaking out, the Iraqis prepare for their war -- and our servicemen and women, and their families, continue to suffer.

There is one way we might be able to succeed in Iraq. To continue an operation of this intensity and duration, we would have to abandon our volunteer military for compulsory service. Short of that, our best option is to leave Iraq immediately. A scaled withdrawal will not prevent a civil war, and it will spend more blood and treasure on a losing proposition.

America, it has been five years. It's time to make a choice.

The Jawa Report claims the 12 Captains are actually anonymous WaPost staffers who paid the soldiers for the use of their names. Blackfive spins the usual "your opinion doesn't matter unless you served in the military" to "veterans are idiots." Interesting that Uncle Jimbo dodges the draft (lol) proposition by the Captains, with the emotional plea of "victory **(see conditions, updated and revised, subject to further pie-in-the-sky reevaluation)." The Captains also get smeared as dirt by FloppingAces, who are betraying better soldiers who had the guts to stay. One commenter on Confederate Yankee said that the only reason they were no longer on active duty was because they were losers. Looks like the Republican congressional leaders need to burn some midnight oil about not saying meanie things about our soldiers.

In the October 22 edition of Time Magazine, Samantha Powers notes the erosion of America as the world's superpower in an article noting Bush's complete inability to lead the world towards ending human rights violations and creating true democracy in Sudan and Burma, just as he claims he has been trying to do in Iraq.

"The U.S. has raised its voice on Darfur and Burma louder than any other country. George W. Bush has regularly denounced the Sudanese campaign of destruction as "genocide," Washington has spent $2.5 billion on humanitarian aid to keep Darfur's refugees alive, and the Administration has spearheaded creation of a 26,000-person, U.N.-led peacekeeping force. When the Burmese regime cracked down on protesters, it was Bush who used his appearance before the U.N. General Assembly to announce that the U.S. would freeze the assets of Burma's repressive leaders and deny them visas.

Yet when he urged "every civilized nation" to use its diplomatic and economic leverage to "stand up" to the regime, his appeal was largely ignored. Many countries acted as if they agreed with Burma's self-serving claim that the crackdown was simply an "internal matter." Not withstanding the U.S.'s $500 billion military budget and $13 trillion GDP, its summoning power has dwindled.

The inaction is partly backlash against the discredited American messenger. Torture, "black sites," extraordinary rendition and the bungled, bloody invasion and occupation of Iraq have all made U.S. human-rights appeals ring hollow."

America's time as the world's only super power began with one President Bush and ended tragically with the presidency of his son. Castro may even live see Bush pack it up and move out. What sort of world will we face in 2009, when the idea of a world safe for democracy has become a punchline, and communism finally eclipses us on the international scene? When the U.S. finally faces our $9 trillion debt, what sort of military will we be able to afford? And how many more genocides will we have to categorize and memorialize?

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bush, iraq war, darfur, genocide, politics

Blog Action Day: Eat Fish- Vote Democrat!!

2007-10-15T11:16:00.000-07:00

So today is a Blog Action Day for the Environment, and moonbat feels moved to talk about her own humble beginnings as an environmentalist. For many years as a child, I had always believed that the lake behind my house was a natural phenomenon, designed there to house fish and frogs. At some point I had to expand my mind to the idea that bulldozers and men had created a five acre pit, where legend had it that a pick-up truck got stuck in, and was abandoned to the waters. Leeches lived there, and a childhood project to transfer cattails to increase frog habitats still shores up one of the banks. Then one year I brainstormed the idea to do a science fair project on how the fish in the lake got along, using the same pet-store equipment my sister used to test her gold fish tank. Although she used tablets to adjust the water in the tank, surely the lake with it's grasses and algae could regulate and control it's own waters. I proved that in fact the lake had no natural ecosystem, ammounting to nothing more self-regulating than a puddle of muddy water. I won the Divisional Award.

Years I spent in subsequent projects trying to figure out why man-made lakes devolved into cesspools of poison while natural lakes sustain life. Over that time, the beautiful sunspots and small-mouth bass dissapeared from it's waters, and the populations of lawns around the lake exploded. Having no way to cheaply measure other forms of pollution in the run off, and being unable to use an increase in water flora to prove the lake could be given an ecosystem, I gave up in despair. The lake continues to grow brown, and I turned away from the life of a professional scientist towards an interest in labor ecomonics and politics. Still, I love to sit with a glass of wine and listen to the frogs on a summer's evening. Someday soon, they too will be gone. Year after year, the summer drough season grows. Twenty years ago it was the month of August. This year it lasted four months and the ethanol-destined corn crops failed. You could walk across the lake and not get the top of your head wet.

Today I live outside of the District of Columbia, and one of my favorite pastimes is to run along the public park trails of the local watershed. The boulders and shale ledges are stunning, the chipmunks defiant, the occasional red fox a delightful blur. But every so often I pass the signs that state the danger of stepping a foot into the waters or eating the fish. Next to them, children play and dogs drink, and parents teach children how to hook a worm. We say that we live in a society where people are free to choose their own reckless demises, but we fail as a people to ensure that each generation has the ability to judge correctly the dangers they face. I spent time last year campaigning against a toll highway, promoted by developers, which will bulldoze low-income communities to allow for greater traffic access to the metropolitan area. Sierra Club counter argued that the money spend on the road would be better spent on expanding the public Metro system in ways that linked the suburb work centers of the capital city, reducing both traffic congestion and air pollution. The air polliution of our cities gives you the same risk of chronic heart disease as living with a smoker. Still, people generally greated us with the expectation that the developers were going to make their lives easier, and that we were the unintelligent fruitcakes. Even though we would have saved them money.

The damages caused by permission to pollute that is pervasive in the Republican Party line are slowly coming to light. Chevron's refinery in Richmond, California, dumped more mercury and other pollutants into San Pablo Bay than allowed under its permits during half of the reporting periods in 2005. 57 percent of the 3,600 major facilities nationwide that must report to EPA exceeded their Clean Water Act permits at least once in 2005. The average violation was almost four times the legal limit of what can be dumped into waterways. 628 facilities violated their Clean Water Act permits for at least half of the monthly reporting periods, and 85 sites exceeded their permits during every reporting period. The pollutants include mercury, copper, selenium, coliform, chromium, zinc, nickle, nitrogen, and ammonia. All of this goes into our streams and rivers and oceans, into our food, and into us. Yet we have built the whole notion of our ecomony around the idea that if the litter is too small to see, we shouldn't hold the trashy person that spills it accountable. We stage a manhunt for someone with TB, but we don't hunt down executives who kill people by what they exhale into the air for profit.

John Edwards Endorsed as "Green " & "Pro-Union"

2007-10-14T10:39:00.000-07:00

So today John Edwards received an endorsement for President in 2008 by the environmental group Friends of the Earth Action. The group cited Edwards' pledges to institute carbon caps as early as 2010 with a cap-and-trade system, to work for a new climate treaty that includes developing countries, and his opposition to federal subsidies for new nuclear power plants. "For these reasons, we trust John Edwards to work for a healthy environment and fight for the rights of regular people in our country and around the world," commented Brent Blackwelder, the group's president. "After 7 years of the most destructive environmental president in modern history, we feel strongly that John Edwards is the candidate most likely to stand up to the powerful, corporate polluters and their lobbyists." Edwards' plan will reduce carbon emissions by 15% in 2020 and 80% by 2050, increase energy efficiency, and fund green energy technology through a greenhouse emissions permit system designed to raise $10 billion in funds. Edwards' plan also repeals all subsidies for Big Oil. That move, and charging industrial polluters for their "air litter" in order to fund a cleaner world for all of us, are what really draw me to the plan. Polluters should pay. Simple!

Let's take a moment along with Edwards and pass a cold beer to Al Gore:

"Congratulations to Al Gore. The Nobel Peace Prize rewards three decades of Vice President Gore's prescient and compelling -- and often lonely -- advocacy for the future of the Earth. His leadership stands in stunning contrast to the failure of the current administration to pursue policies that would reduce the harm of global warming.

"The Nobel Committee's recognition of Vice President Gore shines a bright light on the most inconvenient truth of all -- the selection of George Bush as president has endangered the peace and prosperity of the entire planet.

"Two terms later, Americans are ready for bold change, ready to be patriotic about something other than war and ready to take action to stop global warming before it's too late. The stakes are sky-high -- as Al Gore predicted, our Earth is in the balance."

Big support also for Edwards' Green Collar Jobs Initiative. His point is this, "We can turn the crisis of climate change into an opportunity for a new energy economy, right here in America. Now is the time to make sure that the economy of tomorrow is an all-aboard economy where nobody is left behind." The initiative would create 150,000 new jobs a year, with 50,000 of them specifically skilled labor jobs for the working poor. "His national 25 percent renewable electricity standard can reenergize America's manufacturing sector with increased demand for wind turbines, solar panels and biomass engines. His emphasis on distributed generation will drive consumers and businesses to new businesses that can market, install, and service on-site power production. To freeze our demand for electricity, workers will be needed to design, construct, weatherize and retrofit energy-efficient buildings and homes. Many of these jobs must be done locally." Why should this make the working poor vote for Edwards? Maybe because 640,000 workers were mass laid-off in the first few months of 2007, and one in every four American workers holds a low-wage job with few benefits and little hope for advancement. That's not liberal propaganda, that's Bush's Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Green Collar Jobs won't be a federal show either, for all of you who are now mouthing "big government." Block grants will unite small business, unions, community colleges, and high schools to create training programs that will give Americans the skills and knowledge needed to make this a success for America. Green Collar Jobs won't just create Wal-Mart disposable labor, but skilled workers with credentials through high schools and colleges. "Employers who hire Stepping Stone graduates and offer living wages and benefits will be eligible for existing Work Opportunity Tax Credits and given preference in public contracts." In part because of this, Edwards will also get the nod from SEIU-Iowa this afternoon, which is great news. SEIU's local endorsement will bar union supporters of Obama or Clinton from Chicago or New York from streaming into Iowa to campaign against Edwards, as stipulated under union rules. SEIU-California also endorses Edwards, and they will be able to volunteer in his campaign in Iowa. Sigh. Moonbat can only dream...

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John Edwards, politics, current affairs, economics, poverty, health insurance, homeland security, war on terror, Iraq, moonbat

John Edwards Unveils 'One Democracy' Initiative

2007-10-13T10:49:00.000-07:00

So today after work I switched off the rock stations over to CSPAN RADIO on the way to the public library, there of course to have a full two hours of blissful tax-payer funded internet access. Why the free? Or I should point out, I pay taxes, so why reduced to the free? Although I had a laptop, my poor baby fell mortally wounded to ad-ware over a year ago, and a federal employee's salary holds no room for even refurbishment. To my delight I recognized the voice of John Edwards, who yesterday held a town-hall meeting in New Hampshire. I admit to having spent the last few weeks feeling a bit uninspired about 2008, despite the overall outlook for Democrats and working stiffs like myself. Politics is a cruel addiction, providing neither cute animal team mascots or cheerleaders, or a never ending supply of muscled young men in sports-bars on a Saturday night. Especially when you don't have a million dollars squirreled away in your sock drawer. Edwards is right; we don't have elections, we have auctions.

"The American people are sick and tired of business as usual. Lobbyists and the special interests they represent are pouring millions of dollars into the system, corrupting our democracy and stopping the change we need dead in its tracks. With all the money flooding into politics, you'd think that instead of holding elections we were auctioning our leaders off to the highest bidders. Our founding fathers intended our government to do the will of the people, but regular people can't afford a voice in today's pay-to-play Washington.

"It's time to put an end to the special deals enjoyed by lobbyists and insiders at the expense of regular Americans. We must strengthen voting and campaign finance laws and curb the influence of campaign contributions from special interests, so that everyone has a voice in the political process and the people decide who leads this nation."

I'm tired of the hype that the measure of being American is dying in a foreign war. We used to have these two twin holidays as a people: Memorial Day and Labor Day. These holidays honored the two strengths of our citizens, both the defense and the work of democracy. Now, Labor Day is a holiday where shoppers get discounts and specials, and visit obscene levels of cruelty against the common worker stocking the shelf and cooking their meals because they have to wait in a line. Edwards was right to talk about the point of being American, instead of spending time talking about what he would do if only he had been elected instead of Bush. Whatever happens, January 2009 isn't going to look a whole lot like October 2007. What makes an American an American? What should be the purpose of our government, the pampering of the uber-jet-setters or the concerns of someone who would like public transportation to be available to the working poor?

A little math: For an hour's commute and errands, my gasoline bill is about $200 a month. So far this year, the upkeep of my car has included repairs at almost 2/3 of my whole 2006 federal tax bill, and way more than both state and local tax bills. There is a federal program that would cover the $170 a month cost for me to take the DC Metro and the Maryland commuter train to work. But.. the trains don't run on schedules geared for the working poor who need them most. They run on schedules built for the upper middle class: 6AM to 10PM, Monday through Friday. I work Saturday and Sunday, one of the lots of anyone whose working poor. Even then, the local Amtrak honors the government vouchers for those days. Even if I got a tax-cut of 25% of my tax rate now, that would still be only be about $1200. Which is gas for only half the year, if they don't rocket towards the sky yet again. If there was a train, I would save double the ammount in cash, before car maitenence. Why would I vote for a tax-cut again? In essense, the working poor don't need tax-cuts, we need good government spending on social programs.

The White House Intel Report blogged live on Edwards' speach:

I’m watching his New Hampshire speech right now. It’s live, it is a beautiful speech about Democracy, the American dream and moral leadership. The man stands for a lot of what I believe in and I can’t see why he isn’t one of the top two political players right now. After listening to all of the candidates, I really believe John Edwards is the best candidate to push forth the message of Democrats. Unlike Hillary Clinton, who many liberals believe has sold out, he is sticking to his Democratic roots, he is catering to “the people” and looking after the little guy rather than sucking up to the wealthy corporations.

So I listened to the speach today, and without the benefits of notes (which at 65 mph on an interstate is a tad unwise), these are my impressions: The Federal TIPS program that I am a part of, which matches what I save if I put away 5% of my paycheck towards either a mortage or college, or as a form of disaster insurance, is a great idea for expanding into the working class. Who could not love this idea? Given that the resulting nest-egg will go into the economy in ways that will boost the American economy, while increased national savings should help keep down long term interest rates. (Yes, I'm reading Greenspan's book.) There will have to be national laws slapping down this payday lending industry and the resumption of usury practices by the credit lending industry. Television ads for political office as approved by the candidate will have to be divided equally between candidates. They encourage as much thought as a Kit-Kat bar commercial. Federal political office should not be influenced by lobby donations, and should require canadacies funded without K Street. Personal donations should be topped at $1,000. At that point, it's time to stop buying television ads and start talking to your friends and neighbors. That's how a democracy surives.

Oregon AFL-CIO President Tom Chamberlain recognized John Edwards as "A Blue Collar Candidate for a Blue Collar America!" MyDD blogger TomP applauds, noting that "And that is just what we need. For too long the rich have ruled our country, trampling our rights, and screwing workers right and left. No more. It's a damn good thing, because unless you are an owner, an investor of real money, not a 410K, but real money, we're all blue collar now. That's what Two America means." The AFL has a point that Edwards also echoed in New Hampshire. Unlike Clinton and Obama, Edwards beat the Red State party machine and got elected to the Senate. Democrats true blue to liberal ideas sell themselves and American short with the idea that what we need is a measurement of bank accounts in the Blue States. We do live in a Democracy, and as Edwards points out, there are liberals in Arkansas.

Technorati Tags:
John Edwards, politics, current affairs, economics, poverty, health insurance, homeland security, war on terror, Iraq, moonbat

Blackwater Faces a Cold, Cruel World Alone

2007-10-12T08:15:00.000-07:00

So today the military started dropping "I survived Blackwater" stories of there own. Utterly beyond belief that "former soldiers" could harbor such disrespect for their uniformed comrades in the age where looking at a soldier funny in the States is an act of treason. Of course, why shouldn't Blackwater be the lords and ordinary marines and army privates be the serfs? After all, Blackwater allows it's members to reach the true mark of acheivement for men in the modern age: a six-figure yearly salary and no responsibility to the Constitution.

Oct. 15, 2007 issue - The colonel was furious. "Can you believe it? They actually drew their weapons on U.S. soldiers." He was describing a 2006 car accident, in which an SUV full of Blackwater operatives had crashed into a U.S. Army Humvee on a street in Baghdad's Green Zone. The colonel, who was involved in a follow-up investigation and spoke on the condition he not be named, said the Blackwater guards disarmed the U.S. Army soldiers and made them lie on the ground at gunpoint until they could disentangle the SUV. His account was confirmed by the head of another private security company. Asked to address this and other allegations in this story, Blackwater spokesperson Anne Tyrrell said, "This type of gossip has led to many soap operas in the press."

...Unlike nearly everyone else who enters the Green Zone, said an American soldier who guards a gate, Blackwater gunmen refuse to stop and clear their weapons of live ammunition once inside. One military contractor, who spoke anonymously for fear of retribution in his industry, recounted the story of a Blackwater operative who answered a Marine officer's order to put his pistol on safety when entering a base post office by saying, "This is my safety," and wiggling his trigger finger in the air. "Their attitude was, 'We're f---ing security; we don't have to answer to anybody'."

Meanwhile, the "we swear we aren't Blackwater, we just want to have their babies" blog "Blackwater Facts" has chosen the tactic of defending Blackwater in it's legal troubles by labeling sueing Blackwater as a terrorist attack, and part of a vast conspiracy by the Al-Qaeda planners of 9-11. Hence, in it's attempts to smear the lawyers involved in the lawsuit, it posts a nice big picture of one of the hijacked jets flying into the World Trade Towers on 9-11. Blackwater Facts hasn't bothered to comment a word of course on what the military has to say about Nisour Square, despite claiming to have been formed to correct "misinformation in the media." What does Blackwater Facts therefor leave as established facts?

In the hours and days after the Nisoor Square shootings, the U.S. military sought to distance itself from Blackwater. Dozens of soldiers went door-to-door to seek out victims, offer condolence payments and stress that the military was not involved in the shootings, Tarsa and his soldiers said. Their actions underscore the long-standing tensions between the U.S. military and private security companies -- and the military's concerns that such shootings, and the lack of accountability for the private security industry, could undermine U.S. efforts to stabilize Iraq.

"It was absolutely tragic," said Maj. Gen. Joseph Fil, commander of the 1st Cavalry Division and the Army's top commander for Baghdad. "In the aftermath of these, everybody looks and says, 'It's the Americans.' And that's us. It's horrible timing. It's yet another challenge, another setback," he said.

The Washington Post on Thursday examined a storyboard of the soldiers' assessment that has been forwarded to senior U.S. military commanders, photos taken by aerial drones shortly after the shooting and sworn statements by two U.S. soldiers at the scene that day. The Post also reviewed photos taken by U.S. soldiers of the shootings' aftermath. These, along with interviews with four of Tarsa's soldiers who inspected the scene, revealed previously undisclosed details:

At least two cars, a black four-door taxi and a blue Volkswagen sedan, had their back windshields shot out, but their front windshields were intact, indicating they were shot while driving away from the square, according to the photos and soldiers. The Volkswagen, which crashed into a bus stand, had blood splattered on the inside of its front windshield and windows. One person was killed, soldiers said.

U.S. soldiers did not find any bullets that came from AK-47 assault rifles or BKC machine guns used by Iraqi policemen and soldiers. They found evidence of ammunition used in American-made weapons, including M4 rifle 5.56mm brass casings, M240B machine gun 7.62mm casings, M203 40mm grenade launcher casings, and stun-grenade dunnage, or packing.

A white sedan, carrying a doctor and her son, had not entered the Nisoor Square traffic circle, where the Blackwater vehicles had stopped, when it was fired upon, according to the aerial photos. News reports have said the guards shot at the car because they believed it approached them in a threatening manner.

"I was surprised at the caliber of weapon being used," said Capt. Don Cherry, 32. "My guys have 203s with nonlethal rounds we use as warning shots. It's a rubber ball that bounces off the windshield."

"I was upset this happened," Cherry said. "This was uncalled for."

Startling to learn that the US military uses rubber bullets to fire warning shots, but the conservative commentators among us will battle to the last breath to defend Blackwater's right to arbitrarily kill Iraqi civilians because they have a gut feeling that they are suicide bombers. The gut feeling supplied merely by the desire to be going faster through rush hour traffic in the capital city. So far, when you google "blackwater" in the blog links, the right is being silent on the fact that Blackwater and their CEO Prince have lied about coming under fire from the Iraqi police or insurgents, given that the only bullets fired were American. Tomorrow of course, they will claim that Blackwater got confused, and really it was the American military who was trying to kill Blackwater!

An Iraqi colonel walked up to Lt. Col. Mike Tarsa and described the Blackwater shooters as men in "tan uniforms, black helmets, and that flag," pointing at the U.S. flag on Tarsa's sleeve. The colonel added that he knew the U.S. military wasn't involved. Still, Tarsa dispatched his soldiers across their sector over the next few days.

"I wanted our guys to be on the ground, to look people in the eye, to listen to their anguish, listen to their outrage, to let them know we're going to help those people personally affected," Tarsa said.

"I was concerned about acts of vengeance and misinformation somehow indicating we were part of this event," he said. Tarsa spoke with community and tribal leaders.

"It was a very tense 24 hours," said Maj. David Shoupe, the battalion spokesman. "We didn't know which way it was going to go."

Blackwater quit the International Peace Operations Association, a lobbying and public-relations firm for private military companies, effective Oct. 10th. Blackwater stated that it intended to pursue other "other aspects and methods of industry outreach and
governance." The bite in Blackwater's tone got explained today in IPOA's official statement:

In recent weeks, IPOA was actively engaged with senior management at Blackwater USA, both through our Standards Committee and our Executive Committee, to ensure that they were fully compliant with the IPOA Code of Conduct. On October 8, 2007 the IPOA Executive Committee authorized the Standards Committee to initiate an independent review process of Blackwater USA to ascertain whether Blackwater USA's processes and procedures were fully sufficient to ensure compliance with the IPOA Code of Conduct.

All IPOA member companies are required to follow the IPOA Code of Conduct. The Code of Conduct is a set of ethical and professional guidelines for companies in the peace and stability operations industry. The Code stresses human rights, corporate ethics, International Humanitarian Law, transparency, accountability, and responsibility and professionalism in relationships with employees, clients, and partner companies.

Blackwater has scattered the Nisour murderers to the winds inside the US, while CBS reports that the FBI may be neglecting to investigate several of the vehicles targeted in the shootings. The bus which Blackwater shot up is still making it's regular rounds, bullet holes and shattered glass and all, while the white family car of the Iraqi woman doctor and her son still remains on the road to Nisour Square in a grisly monument.

Military analyst Col. (ret.) Steve Lyons told CBS .... there is little chance the US government will meet Iraqi demands either by severing all ties with Blackwater, which is by far the largest and most competent of the many security contractors in Iraq, or by turning over the gunmen responsible for the shooting. Even the Iraqi demand of $8 million in compensation for each of the victims is uncertain.

"These contractors are long gone," Lyons stated. "They're back in the United States. They've scattered, really, to the four winds. ... They're not going to get any money from those individuals."

Condi Rice floated the idea that the State Department's diplomatic security force assign observers to ride along with Blackwater. Presumably, they are supposed to be competent enough to judge Blackwater's conduct and having them join Blackwater will save us money, by allowing Blackwater to continue to replace them. Love the illogic here. State can't seem to end the torrid romance, and plans to hide Blackwater employees on the government payroll:

Under terms of the department’s Worldwide Personal Protective Security contract, which covers privately contracted guards for diplomats in Iraq, Blackwater, Dyncorp and Triple Canopy are the only three companies eligible to bid on specific task orders there.

If Blackwater goes, the slack almost certainly would have to be picked up by one or more other companies, which may require certifying other firms to bid, including non-U.S. ones, the officials said.

Of interest to the department is the possibility of standing up Iraqi companies with Iraqi employees to protect U.S. diplomats as local guards do for embassy staff in other countries, they said. That would bring the guards fully under the jurisdiction of Iraqi law but is not a short-term option given inadequate training facilities.

The Pentagon has been reluctant to provide security for diplomats but another alternative might be joint State-Defense department patrols. Yet another would be hiring Blackwater and other private guards as temporary U.S. government employees, the officials said.

A passenger walked by me at the airport with one of the Blackwater books, which suddenly renewed my faith in democracy. So I brought the subject of Blackwater up at work, us being federal employees engaged in protecting the nation from terrorists and all. One of my coworkers is an Iraqi veteran, who in his tour of duty crossed paths with Blackwater's mercenaries several times. "First off, they're not the shit," commented the reservist Srgt. "Everybody has a 'how Blackwater got ambushed' story, and they're a national shame. Blackwater makes the insurgency look like they are tactically capable. And they are mercenaries. Who does Blackwater answer to but Blackwater?"

Technorati Tags:
Blackwater, iraq war, 2008, war contractors, moonbat

Iraqi Victims Sue Blackwater for their Blood Money

2007-10-11T13:03:00.000-07:00

So today, that good old American urge to sue bastards has inspired the victims and families of victims of the Blackwater massacre in Nisour Square to file in federal court against the mercenary company and it's financiers. Seeing the delaying tactics used by Blackwater for all the other lawsuits against it, they are in for one hell of a ride. Blackwater's announced that it has no interest in paying even a single penny, because hey, depriving them of their blood money will harm Bush' ability to effectively fight terrorism around the world!!

The Nisoor Square lawsuit focuses on the alleged "recklessness" of the Blackwater security contractors and seeks to punish the company for its "mercenary" tactics in the war zone that have led to "repeated callous killings of innocents," according to a complaint.

"Blackwater created and fostered a culture of lawlessness amongst its employees, encouraging them to act in the company's financial interests at the expense of innocent human life," the 16-page complaint says. "This action seeks compensatory damages to compensate the injured and the families of those gunned down and killed."

Also today, the U.N. Assistance Mission to Iraq released it's biannual report. The pressure the Bush administration will use to conceal sectarian violence is quite obvious in the Iraqi government's reluctance to release statistics gathered by it's IPA constructed Health Ministry on civilian deaths. The report notes that between the period of April 1 to June 30, the UN could confirm through other sources that 88 Iraqi civilians had been killed by US air strikes as part of the US "troop surge" effort to increase security. One incident involved the deaths of seven elementary-aged students who died when helicopters bombed their school near the Iranian border. The report goes on to note several records of "killings carried out by privately hired contractors with security-related functions in support of U.S. government authorities." The UN urged the US to find ways to increase oversight and accountability of it's mercenary forces.

Technorati Tags:
Blackwater, iraq war, human rights, injustice, war contractors, moonbat

Blackwater Drunken War Games in Bahdad Hotel

2007-10-10T10:40:00.000-07:00

So today here's a story about Blackwater from a journalist who worked in Baghdad in the summer of 2003, staying at a hotel where Blackwater also housed some of it's mercenaries:

Over time, however, our Blackwater pals wore out their welcome. I can’t pinpoint when it happened. Was it one too many beer-drenched party that upset the Iraqi families who lived in neighboring homes? Was it the parade of young Iraqi prostitutes that crept out of their rooms when the sun rose? Was it when their speeding SUV convoys began cutting down any Iraqi with the misfortune to block their path?

Our own security adviser, an older Brit who sneered at what he considered Blackwater’s unprofessional behavior, was conducting his rounds late one night when he noticed shadowy figures lurking about the hotel. From his balcony, he later told me, he observed the fully armed, camouflaged men creeping around corners as if ready to attack. Alarmed, our guard took the safety lock off his weapon and prepared to fire.

Then he realized it was the Blackwater boys, apparently drunk and playing war games after dark. Our security adviser was livid and lodged complaints with the hotel. I don’t remember whether he also contacted Blackwater. In any case, this wasn’t the first time managers had received such gripes and the Blackwater team was kicked out.

Hannah Allam goes on to tell of frequent encounters with Blackwater around Baghdad, where they hasseled local Iraqi civilians. One Blackwater mercenary told her that he was there for the six-figure-income, and a chance to guard Victoria Secret models at the the lingerie company’s annual fashion show. Hannah goes on to relate her own tail of running into a mercenary-escorted convoy on the streets. The mercenaries sped up behind them and forced them off the road with the threats of their guns, before speeding off. Although neither she or her Iraqi friends have a clear memory of having seen the company's logo, they always referred to it as "Blackwater." Hannah has one last encounter to share, and this time it involved Blackwater:

A few months later, I was dropped off at the gates of the Green Zone to meet a security contractor friend who worked for a Blackwater rival. I sat in the car with my Iraqi driver, waiting for my American friend to show up and escort me into the Green Zone, when a convoy of SUVs suddenly blazed onto the scene. Gunners hung out the windows, shouting for the Iraqi civilians to “move!” An Iraqi man failed to get out of the way in time. My driver and I watched as the security guards fired a single shot through his windshield.

The convoy was gone by the time the Iraqi man’s car door opened. He stumbled out, clutching his bleeding chest, and collapsed on the street. Other Iraqis loaded the shooting victim into a car and left for the hospital just as my American friend showed up. My friend shared my outrage and made it his personal mission to track down the convoy and force the contractors to file an incident report.

Although her American friend helped her track down Blackwater accross the Green Zone, neither could work up the courage to actually confront them. They trailed them inside, where instead of going to report having shot an Iraqi civilian to death, the Blackwater mercenaries went straight for the salad bar.

Blackwater may be able to get away with murder in Iraq, but it is facing money problems here at home. Turns out, one of Hillary Clinton's key pollsters runs the PR company providing guidance to Blackwater in the weeks leading up to last week's congressional hearings. The Spokesmans-Review in Spokane reports that the shootings in Nisour Square have held up Blackwater's purchase of an Idaho police training company. Not all everything is gloomy however, as the "we swear we don't work for Blackwater blog "Blackwater Facts has run with the story about Blackwater's purchase of a 183-ft ship called the McArthur.

There's a Blackwater employee running for Congress. Although these plans were announced some time ago, Blackwater is displaying photographs of it at the annual Association of the U.S. Army (AUSA) meeting going on today. What can be done about Blackwater? About the corrosion of the authority of government where the powers of war can be bought by campaign contributors? So far, the only statement on any of the Democratic candidates websites is one on John Edwards.

Technorati Tags:
Blackwater, iraq war, 2008, war contractors, moonbat, john edwards

Blackwater Pursues Plans for Darfur's Civilians

2007-10-10T08:49:00.000-07:00

So today, Blackwater may not have been involved in killing innocent Iraqi civilians, but we find out that US taxpayers were still buying the bullets. While Blackwater kept itself busy scrapping off all of it's prominent company logos from it's convoy escort SUVs, Australian mercenaries gunned down two Christian women who were driving home from work. The mercenaries worked for Unity Resources Group, "a Dubai-based company founded by an Australian and registered in Singapore. The firm was employed by RTI International, a nonprofit organization that does governance work in Iraq on a contract for the U.S. Agency for International Development." Mercenaries in the last vehicle of the convoy opened fire on the white Oldsmobile and it's four passengers when the car pulled up in traffic behind them. Unity Resources claims that the shooters threw a signal flare at the Oldsmobile, and opened fire after the woman driver failed to increase distance with the convoy. The shootings was immediately reported to the Interior Ministry and Unity has expressed regret in public.

"A vehicle got close to them, and they opened fire on it randomly as if they were in the middle of a confrontation," said Ahmed Kadhim Hussein, a policeman at the scene. "You won't find a head. The brain is scattered on the ground."

He added: "I am shaking as I am trying to describe to you what happened. We are not able to eat. These were innocent people. Is it so natural for them to shoot innocent people?"

The Oldsmobile was shot first in the radiator as it passed a plumbing supply shop, employees said. The shooting continued and the car came to rest about 50 yards away, next to a yellow and white median curb marked by broken glass and blood.

"Probably they were not paying attention and they weren't able to stop right away," said one employee, who would not give his name.

The Oldsmobile, towed to a police station in Karrada, left little doubt how the women died. There were holes from at least 35 bullets that scarred the hood, punctured the windshield, popped tires and shattered three windows. Rivulets of blood ran down the driver's door.

The driver of the vehicle, 49-year-old Marony Ohanis, drove friends to and from work in order to make ends meet for her family after the death of her husband two years ago. Also killed: 30-year-old Geneva Jalal Entranic. A young boy in the back seat with another woman was shot in the arm, but is expected to recover. Unity Resources was involved in another fatal shooting in March 2006, where one of it's mercenaries killed an Australian resident of Baghdad at a security checkpoint. That incident was later settled with the Iraqi government. Unity Resources also operates in Pakistan, Sudan, Asia and Australia. For yesterday, 45 other people died in shootings and bombings in outbreaks of sectarian violence across Iraq. Among the dead of two car bombings in the oil-refinery town of Baiji were five Iraqi police officers. One of the car bombs went off in front of the house of the police chief, the other in front of the house of Samir Ibrahim, the area leader of the Awakening Council.

The Iraqi government had issued demands that the US severe all contracts with Blackwater in Iraq within six months and that the company pay $8 million in compensation to each of the families of those killed at Nisour Square. The Iraqi government also demands that US authorities hand over those Blackwater mercenaries involved in the shooting spree for prosecution in Iraqi courts. The Iraqi government intends to try them under criminal codes from 1969. The official Iraqi report also found that "Blackwater guards also had killed 21 Iraqi civilians and wounded 27 in previous shootings since it took over security for U.S. diplomats in Baghdad after the U.S. invasion." The US State Department has admitted that Blackwater has been involved in 56 shooting incidents this year alone.

Blackwater CEO Erik Prince worked the crowd at the Association of the US Army trade show today, pushing a warm and fuzzy version of Blackwater. In proposed service involved Blackwater's "Peace and Stability Operations Institute, which would provide armed forces to put down domestic insurgencies and rebellions as a way to prevent genocide. For instance, the civilians being massacred in Sudan are targeted because they support a rebellion against a cruel regime, fought by Sudanese rebel forces.

Blackwater would go in on the behalf of the brutal dictatorship, wipe out the rebels, and leave the local civilians completely undefended and under the same government-paid forces that are killing them. Who will, Blackwater reasons, suddenly feel restraint. And why shouldn't they want a piece of the pie. Naval Facilities Engineering Command currently has a $450 million dollar contract with Dyncorp to provide "global disaster response services." Read: point guns at civilians.

Technorati Tags:
Blackwater, iraq war, war profiteers, darfur, politics, moonbat

White House Terror Officials Feed Intel to Fox News

2007-10-09T12:39:00.000-07:00

So today we wake up to discover that the recent OBL video overshadowed by sordid tale of how it was acquired early by the Bush White House and then leaked to FOX NEWS. Two senior officials in Bush's Administration were given an emailed link around 10 a.m. to the video on a private intelligence company's website that monitors Islamic terrorists. Those two officials are White House counsel Fred F. Fielding and Michael Leiter, who holds the No. 2 job at the National Counterterrorism Center. The Search for International Terrorist Entities first contacted Fielding, and then emailed the link to Fielding and also to Leitner, at the suggestion of Joel Bagnal, deputy assistant to the president for homeland security. Fielding and Bagnal both told SITE that Bush's White House did not yet have a copy of OBL's video.

Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company's Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group's communications network.

"Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless," said Rita Katz, the firm's 44-year-old founder, who has garnered wide attention by publicizing statements and videos from extremist chat rooms and Web sites, while attracting controversy over the secrecy of SITE's methodology. Her firm provides intelligence about terrorist groups to a wide range of paying clients, including private firms and military and intelligence agencies from the United States and several other countries.

The precise source of the leak remains unknown. Government officials declined to be interviewed about the circumstances on the record, but they did not challenge Katz's version of events. They also said the incident had no effect on U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts and did not diminish the government's ability to anticipate attacks.

While acknowledging that SITE had achieved success, the officials said U.S. agencies have their own sophisticated means of watching al-Qaeda on the Web. "We have individuals in the right places dealing with all these issues, across all 16 intelligence agencies," said Ross Feinstein, spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

At first blush, we are faced with the idea that the Bush Administration is so extraordinarily sloppy with controlling sensitive information, that people began forwarding the emails sent to Feilding and Leitner at-will. As a federal employee, constantly trained in the handling of sensitive information and reminded by marks on every document and email, this innocent excitement seems implausible. Of course, this wouldn't be the first time that analysts in either the CIA or the DIA have used or misused intelligence in order to fight their constant turf battles. How alarming it is that Bush has created an entire security apparatus in order to fight terrorism and it's plagued at the top by people who just want to be the first to leak to their overlords at FOX NEWS.

Conservative bloggers are fighting the notion of a White House Intel Leak tooth and nail. One attempt involves stating that since the transcipts, which include a translation, were done on the 6th, the day before the link was provided to the White House, that is de facto proof that American intelligence had the video the day before... because only American intelligence could have done the translation. However, the Jawa Report is in (deliberate?) error. The "marks" are in fact SITE marks. You can discover that for yourself by hunting down the original posting of the "marks" on FOX NEWS... which shows the same document without the header chopped off. The header clearly shows the translation was downloaded off a SITE website and gives the address.

CounterterrorismBlog also corrects another one of The Jawa Reports inaccuracies, when it claimed that blogger Laura Mansfeild had the video. Laura Mansfeild only knew the video was coming, and released a link to another jihad video which came out the day before. The Jawa Report goes on to claim that it had the video, but check out their actual posting of the OBL video. The time stamp reads as posted By Dr. Rusty "John Doe" Shackleford at September 7, 2007 03:39 PM. That would be after the release on FOX NEWS. One amusing misquote of Jawa's "marks" claim further distorted the claim to the point that the marks proved ABC had the video and transcript on the 6th!!

Other conservative bloggers attempt to make hay with an ABC story on the video after latching onto the date marker for the article, which reads 9:23 AM. The Jawa Report's blog on the marks has found life as a source for this spin. At first blush, perhaps to those who didn't actually read the article, it would seem that ABC had the transcript previous to SITE's emails at 10 AM. However, when you get to the bottom of the article, you find the words "This post has been updated." Which means that the original story of the Blotter, talking about DHS statements on possible terrorist attacks against the US and New York City on 9-11, which you can extrapolate out of the text, was amended later to include the blurb that there was a new video. You would think that they would take this as a chance to scream about how the liberal media is just trying to discredit the DHS and US counterterrorism by making it seems as if the DHS got caught sleeping, but even a chance to scream "liberal media bias" gets sacrificed in the need to defend Bush.

Con-blogs resist document comparison between the ABC and FOX transcripts which leave little room for doubt that they are the same document, and work hard at insisting that ABC posted the video before FOX. The evidence against them would be the comment section for the Blotter's post. Surely, if ABC had posted the actual video at 9:23 as is being claimed, the comments would include references to the contents. Yet the comments contain no discussion of OBL's rant on the state of the mortgage industry in our country. And it is not until 3:37:45 PM that comments on the content of the video begin, including a count on the number of times OBL says "Wake Up."

Technorati Tags:
White House, Bush, terrorism, Al-Qaeda, moonbat, politics

Blackwater Attacked "Not Even By a Stone"

2007-10-08T14:30:00.000-07:00

So today the Iraqi government released it's report concluding that Blackwater fatally shot 17 people at Nisoor Square without provocation on September 16th. The Iraqi government also reports that the number injured in the shootings is 27. The spokesperson for the Iraqi government, Ali al-Dabbagh, stated that Blackwater's presence was in response to a bombing near a State Department convoy earlier a mile away, but that the convoy in the Square itself had been threatened "not even by a stone." Ali al-Dabbagh went on to classify the incident as "an intentional murder that needed to be called to account according to the law." The findings of the Iraqi government reflect similar after action reports filed by the US military, which responded to the scene. Meanwhile, the US Embassy announced today a shift in the goals of the joint US-Iraqi Commission towards establishing a blueprint with the intentions that there even are ways to ensure that US-employed mercenaries "do not endanger public safety."

Britan will have it's troop strength to 2,500 by next spring. Brown made his announcment to day to ward off calls from political opponents for a definate time-table on withdrawal, also stating that logistics staff would be redeployed to surrounding nations, and that Britain will not guarantee to Bush to keep troops in Iraq past the end of 2008. Brown also stated that security around the south of Basra would be passed to Iraqi security forces by the end of two months time, ending Britan's combat operations in Iraq. Elsewhere, Petraeus spent the day holding a conference continuing accusations that Iran is actively destablizing the security situation in Iraq. Petraeus commented to Reuters that, "They are responsible for providing the weapons, the training, the funding and in some cases the direction for operations that have indeed killed U.S. soldiers." However, his press conference provided no evidence or declassified intelligence to support his assertions. The Iranian embassy didn't bother to comment.

Despite the public outcry in both the US and Iraqi, despite the reports coming from both the (supposedly independent) Iraqi government and from out own military, conservative commentators still cling to a candle for Blackwater. Despite of course, the enormous government malefescence that Blackwater's contracts represent, which is surprising for the supposedly fiscally responsible Republican Party. Richard Novak published a commentary in the Washington Post today containing a glaring number of inaccuracies, especially concerning the events of the attack on a Blackwater-escorted convoy of kitchen equipment in Fallujah of 2004. For one, he boldly lies that those who attacked and killed Blackwater's mercenaries wore the uniforms of Iraqi national police officers, in an attempt of conservatives to make the shooting of any uniformed Iraqi always justifiable.

Novak goes on to boldly lie that the congressional hearings of last Tuesday had not been scheduled until after the September 16th shootings, when they were in fact scheduled early last year. Novak also goes on to accuse the lawyers of the families of the Blackwater mercenaries killed in Fallujah (and the families by extension) of being more interested in a big payout than justice. As to the question of the purpose of the hearings, Novak pushes the idea that Democrats have only the right to explore questions of the Iraq War which have occured since they took control of Congress in early 2007. Such assumption is rooted of course in the de facto assumption that Blackwater is as innocent now as Novak claims it was innocent of gross misconduct in the planning of the 2004 Fallujah convoy. Novak clings to Blackwater's innocence the way some wives cling to the innocence of their cheating spouses, even when the mistress shows up at the husbands birthday party trailing her bastard children.

Technorati Tags:
troop surge, Blackwater, iraq war, iran, current events, politics, moonbat, war contractors

Take Military Powers Away from Blackwater and ilk

2007-10-07T11:00:00.000-07:00

389 to 30 last week, the US House voted to extend coverage of the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act to cover mercenaries in the employ of the State Department, in a bill cosponsored by Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.). Schakowsky, who began pressuring for greater oversight of war contractors shortly after the invasion of Iraq, wrote into the bill provisions which would "require the Justice Department to disclose to Congress the number of complaints filed against contractors, the number of investigations it has initiated and the number of criminal cases it has opened, along with the results of those cases." The Illinois Democrat wrote a letter to Bush in April of 2006, asking him to explain how war contractors were held accountable for their conduct in Iraq. Since then, their numbers have increased from 25,000 to 150,000.

We don't look at the number of contractors who are engaged in military activities, we don't count the deaths of contractors. We think about 1,000 have died," but the numbers aren't official. "We don't really even scrutinize the cost," Schakowsky said.

Now she wants to go further and is drafting legislation to phase out the use of private contractors for military-like activities. "Not KP duty," Schakowsky emphasized. The Blackwater incident "helps pave the way for us to say, 'There are functions that are inherently governmental. Carrying weapons and engaging in strictly military-like activities should be done by people who are clearly accountable employees of the United States.' "

"The government has to have a monopoly on the use of force," she continued. "We have outsourced war to these people, and now we have to bring it back within the government."

Nine Iraqi civilians died in three seperate bombings across Baghdad early Sunday. One bombing targeted an Iraqi police patrol, one targeted a US military patrol, and one the Iranian embassy. All missed their targets and killed civilians instead. The work of the joint US-Iraqi Commission into the Sept. 16 shootings in Nisour Square began. Elsewhere, the US military launched a dawn raid and captured three Shiite milita fighters believed to have played a role in the May 29th abduction of four British mercenaries and a civilian computer expert. The US military still beleives the five to be alive.

Liberal bloggers fire back and forth the Los Angles Times op-ed peice "I survived Blackwater." Janessa Gans served as a US official in Baghdad for two years, and Blackwater provided her security. Gans recounts that indeed, pelting Iraqis with water bottles is a favorite past time of Blackwater mercenaries, and the harrowing speeds they observed driving in the streets. In one particular incident, the Blackwater SUV she was being ferried in, attempted to intimidate one vehicle carrying an older man, a woman, and several children. The Blackwater driver honked and motioned furiously that the slower vehicle should move out of the path of the SUV:

The kids in the back seat looked back in horror, mouths agape at the sight of the heavily armored Suburbans driven by large, armed men in dark sunglasses. The poor Iraqi driver frantically searched for a means of escape, but there was none. So the lead Blackwater vehicle smashed heedlessly into the car, pushing it into the barrier. We zoomed by too quickly to notice if anyone was hurt.

Until that point I had never mentioned anything to my drivers about their tactics, but this time I could not contain myself.

"Where do you all expect them to go?" I shrieked. "It was an old guy and a family, for goodness' sake. Was it necessary for them to destroy their poor old car?"

My driver responded impassively: "Ma'am, we've been trained to view anyone as a potential threat. You don't know who they might use as decoys or what the risks are. Terrorists could be disguised as anyone."

"Well, if they weren't terrorists before, they certainly are now!" I retorted. Sulking in my seat, I was stunned by the driver's indifference.

Another op-ed in the Washington Post outlines the arguement against outsourcing war at all. In the debate it's interesting to note that in his congressional testimony, Blackwater executive Erik Prince, when pressed for details of outsourcing's benefits, went from claiming cost-savings to pleading ignorance of his own company's profit margin. But oh, he makes about 800,000 than moonbat. Beyond the cash cow that needs to be pasturized, the contracting of the powers of war is a disaster for any democracy. Our politicians incur only private costs instead of facing public accountability. Blackwater operates in Iraq in situations where it deliberately sacrifices the US mission in order to acheive it's own goals, regardless of the consequences. And as we saw in Fallujah in 2004, private decisions have the effect of committing our generals to courses of action, taking away from our military key decision making powers in tactics and strategy. War is too important an issue for the survival of a democracy for us to allow people to buy that power.

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Blackwater, Iraq war, war, current events, politics, moonbat, liberal, war contractors

Murderer "Fired" by Blackwater Hired By Defense Department

2007-10-06T11:06:00.000-07:00

So today, while Prince's testimony before the House Oversight replays on CSPAN RADIO, we learn that Blackwater concealed the reason it terminated Andrew J. Moonen, enabling him to be hired as a mercenary for the Defense Department in Kuwait. Although Moonen's lawyer defends his client by pointing out that he apparently doesn't shoot Americans while drunk, the former paratrooper felt free to incur six traffic offenses since 2002, including driving on a suspended license. Moonen received an honorable discharge after serving with the 82nd Airborne from April 2002 until April 2005. His wife divorced him in December of 2004, but little else has been unearthed.

Moonen who?? The New York Times revealed him as the Blackwater mercenary who got drunk at a Christmas Party in the Green Zone last year, wandered through a checkpoint being manned by the Iraqis, and shot to death a guard there who challenged him. No wonder the Iraqis don't see the point in "standing up" if it means drunk Americans get to gun them down and flee the country. After he shot the Iraqi guard three times, he fled to a nearby guard shack run by Triple Canopy (a Blackwater rival). There, he lied about what happened, claimed he was being pursued by Iraqi insurgents, and denied he was drunk. Triple Canopy pried the gun out of his fumbling hands, and then passed him off to Blackwater. The rest is history...

Andrew J. Moonen returned to the United States within a few days of the incident, his attorney said, but in February he returned to Kuwait, working for Defense Department contractor Combat Support Associates (CSA), a company spokesman said.

Mooney worked for CSA from February to August of this year, spokesman Paul Gennaro said.

Because the State Department and Blackwater kept the incident quiet and out of Moonen's personnel records, CSA was unaware of the December incident when it hired Moonen.

According to Moonen's personnel record, the U.S. Army tried to call him back to service in April 2007, but canceled the request when they were notified he was overseas.

Two months?? You get your @$$ evacked for gunning down a friendly while you were toasted, and you somehow end up next door. Avoiding getting called back to active service and real combat, and a lack of alcohol plus supervision. Meanwhile, the Defense Department either has atrocious employment screening, or else they knew he was dismissed from Blackwater for at least the listed reason: "armed while drunk." Two months later, this is no bar to contracted work with the US government, to carry arms? And then one has to wonder, what did the Blackwater representative who got the background check call say to the Department of Defense, since it obviously didn't include a little "under the table" advice about Moonen's trigger finger. And then there is the honor and integrity of Blackwater itself, measured out by the utter silence in Moonen's personnel records with both the mercenary company and the State Department, on the events of December 2006. Nothing more damning than a blank page.

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Blackwater, war contractors, defense department, iraq war, politics, current events, moonbat

Blackwater Faulted By Military for Baghdad Carnage

2007-10-05T10:33:00.000-07:00

So today a senior US military official announced that reports from US soldiers present at the scene of the Nisoor Square shooting spree by Blackwater indicate that Blackwater was never fired on by insurgents and used excessive force in the incident. The total Blackwater killed is listed at 14 by Iraqi hospital records. Meanwhile, the Iraqi government revealed that the Blackwater convoy instigated another shooting a mere 150 meters after leaving the square, firing on five fleeing vehicles and killing another unarmed and innocent civilian. In response to its investigations, the US military has halted issuing weapons permits to mercenary companies through the DoD, holding the current level of such permits around 7,000.

"It was obviously excessive, it was obviously wrong," said the U.S. military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the incident remains the subject of several investigations. "The civilians that were fired upon, they didn't have any weapons to fire back at them. And none of the IP or any of the local security forces fired back at them," he added, using a military abbreviation for the Iraqi police. The Blackwater guards appeared to have fired grenade launchers in addition to machine guns, the official said.

The company has said its guards acted appropriately after being attacked. Blackwater Chairman Erik Prince, in previously unpublicized remarks prepared for delivery at a congressional hearing Tuesday, said the Blackwater guards "came under small-arms fire" and "returned fire at threatening targets."

Time for Congress to pass an amendment censuring Prince for lying to them and the American people. Time for American politicians to be serious about crime again, instead of flying murderers home first class and letting them loose on our streets. Defenders of Blackwater are quick to portray their mercenaries as former US soldiers (when they aren't former members of Columbian death squads), and to ask you who you want to defend you: Congressman Waxman or Prince. (Surely we have not come to the point in the US where we judge the integrity of a man by the size of his muscles?)One of them heads the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The other one heads a private army operating outside an oath of loyalty to the American people, but amassed on our shores. (Like the Madhi Army, say.) One stands for democratic traditions upon which America was founded and the other one isn't even a real American. One defends liberty and justice for all, and the other one wants to hold power over the streets of our cities without answering to the Constitution. And let's remember how they would exercise that power on the defenseless:

Mohammed Abdul Razzaq was driving into Nusoor Square with his sister, her three children and his 9-year-old son Ali at the same time the Blackwater team arrived.

"They gestured stop, so we all stopped," Razzaq said. "It's a secure area so we thought it will be the usual, we would stop for a bit as convoys pass. Shortly after that they opened heavy fire randomly at the cars with no exception."

"My son was sitting behind me," he said. "He was shot in the head and his brains were all over the back of the car."

Blackwater also lied to Democratic Rep. Waxman of the when it claimed that it could not release documents requested for current congressional investigations without State Department approval. But State Department spokesman Tom Casey revealed that State had already granted permission. Congress isn't the only one having difficulty investigating the Sept. 16th incidents. Blackwater has refused communication with the Iraqi government outside of the FBI's investigation, stating that it is under no legal compulsion to cooperate. Additionally, Blackwater's been giving the US military the cold shoulder:

U.S. soldiers have reviewed statements from eyewitnesses and video footage recorded at Nisoor Square, the official said. Members of a U.S. unit working with Iraqi police were present in the area at the time of the shootings. U.S. soldiers also helped ferry victims to hospitals.

Blackwater, whose primary task in Iraq is to protect U.S. diplomats, has been unwilling to share information about the incident with the U.S. military, the official said, adding that military officials went to Blackwater's compound in the Green Zone but were denied access to company managers.

So far, Blackwater's key public strategies have included lying about what happened, and stressing that their mercenaries are mostly former US soldiers, in an attempt to dilute what it means to actually have the uniform on. As the details out of Nisoor Square get more gruesome as each day passes, these tactics are likely to cause the military to seek more distance in public, as it has today. A desperate Blackwater just hired itself a Public Relations firm to save it's public image. Really. The company in question, Burson-Marsteller, represents such clients as the cigarette maker Philip Morris, nuclear power plants, and the makers of Botox. How fitting of course, since Botox is an toxic agent of war. Even juicier is that Robert Tappan, one of the executives in charge of the account, worked at the State Department as the deputy assistant secretary for public affairs, and he spent six months in Baghdad as director of strategic communications for the Coalition Provisional Authority under Bremer. Undoubtedly, guarded by Blackwater mercenaries.

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Blackwater, war contractors, Iraq war, current events, politics, liberal, moonbat

Blackwater Bloggers Plan to Hunt Down Liberals in USA

2007-10-04T14:33:00.000-07:00

Blackwater has the guns and money to go to any means to save it's hold on the taxpayers' teat. For example, the issue of coverage in blogs, or shall we say, the fine art of creating a blog to promote your own company. Blackwater Facts which claims that "We're supporters of Blackwater USA, the heroic private security company that has lost more than two dozen of its own men while protecting American diplomats, VIPs and others in Iraq, Afghanistan and around the world. We set up this blog shortly after the September 16, 2007 incident in which terrorists attacked an American diplomatic convoy near Baghdad, because we were fed up with all the misleading media coverage." Right under the blog archives which allow you to read the April 23, 2006 post written to promote the idea of employing Blackwater as international peacekeepers instead of the United Nations. (LIE) Whoever Standish was, his blogger identity was last altered this month. The name choice likely refers to Captain Miles Standish, who gets referred to excitedly as private security contractor, but in truth he was an English Knight, first retained as the military captain of the Plymouth Pilgrims, and once they reached Plymouth, elected as military captain of the colony, much in the way that we elect Sherriffs.

"Standish" also boosts the blog with a link to another blog he/they set up, "About Blackwater." Set up September 24, 2007, it's one post is basically a wholesale copyright infringement of Blackwater's entire "about" section on it's website. As "friendly links," Standish includes the International Peace Operations Association and a mirror blog BlackwaterReporting, which you can follow throught to the original blog, FairReporting. All careful to claim they have no affiliation with Blackwater, except IPOA. The curious nature of Standish differs from sheer idiocy because BlackwaterFacts is a poison of a different sort: blog branding. Namely, when either employees pretend to be independent bloggers who just admire their company, or the company hires a branding company to pretend to be harmless "we love" bloggers. Standish's post of 5:09 Wednesday afternoon attracted the attention of TMR. After some 40 taunts and jibs, the blogger finally confessed:

I am a contractor for Blackwater and they are the best emplyoer I have ever had. My family is well provided for and I live the life of adventure, and defend freedom. You liberals are spinless lackeys of Islamist terror, and anti-free market biasd toward the liberal. I get all my information from real blogs not left wing and Fox News. America, rest easy, support your troops AND Blackwater. I fear that if you don't you will be sorry.

THIS IS LIBERAL MEDIA BIAS CRAP, MADE UP TO AID THE ENEMY, NOT TRUE! LIBERALS, WHEN WE COME HOME, WE WILL HUNT DOWN THOSE WHO HURT THE USA!

Moonbat isn't exaggerating about how common it is to hear these things declared in the comment sections for "we love" Blackwater blogs. Often, comments are made referrencing a coming civil war where conservatives will hunt down and purge America of all liberals. You won't find the above quotes in the comments section of BlackwaterFacts anymore. After two hours of onslaught by muckraking bloggers, the BlackwaterFacts threw up comment moderation, and finally today errased all of it's self-confessional comments, and all comments made to it's blog yesterday. Although like most of the other "we love" Blackwater blogs out there, which can be traced to brand marketing firms through their ISP numbers, as a blogger.com creation, BlackwaterFacts gets some cover by a more low-brow approach. But the purpose of Blackwater facts becomes clear in the pages of it's own proflifferic blogging today, when it posts in self-congratulations for reaching the #1 of Google Blog Search for searches keyed to Blackwater. Or so it claims....

What people really are looking at isn't Google rank, by google blog search which ranks by relevance and date of the blog's posting. There is no number one slot, as it updates as each new entry is made. Even no name blogs can land the slot as the first blog in the search, if they were the newest blog published. When I began blogging today, Crooks and Liars had just bumped them off. And even now, they've been bumped off by a Media Matters for America story. An aside on the second story: In their coverage of the oversight hearings, USAToday and the LATimes both noted that Republicans united in defending Blackwater, but neither noted extensive campaign contributions by Blackwater executives or its founder, or the involvement of its founder with the conservative Council for National Policy, which supported Bush in his bid for the Presidency. I digress... So as soon as a new blog entry for "Blackwater" gets published by anyone with links, that new entry becomes the top of the heap. Sometimes it takes a little investigation and clicking on links, but you can catch a lot of people puffing up their own importance. Of course, as they love to remind you, they are bloggers with guns and they have plans for us liberals...

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Blackwater, current events, blogging, politics, liberal, moonbat, Iraq war

The Smoking Guns of Blackwater's Mercenaries

2007-10-04T09:52:00.000-07:00

So today the world has a view into the lives of five of the innocent people gunned down by Blackwater's mercenaries in Baghdad's Nisoor Square on September 16th. Construction workers had just finished painting flowers on the walls of the square following reconstruction after a truck bombing. A banner reading "Creators of Life are Always Victorious" fluttered in the noon breeze. Ali Khalil was a 54-year-old blacksmith and father of six children, and had felt safe enough in the capital to reopen his shop three days earlier. Osama Fadhil Abbas was a 40-year-old car dealer on business. Mehasin Muhsin Kadhum, a 46-year-old doctor, and her twenty-year-old son Ahmed Haitham, were returning home with college application forms for Kadhum's daughter. At 25, Mahdi Sahib supported his whole ten member family on his taxi driver's salary of $480 a month, and while he could not replace the broken windshield wipers of his taxi, continued to nurse the hope that he would one day save enough money to marry. Fifteen minutes later, as Blackwater sped away from the smoking scene, their murdered victims would range from grandfathers to wives to schoolgirls to an infant.

On that day, the Blackwater convoy was responding to a bombing near a State Department convoy about a mile away. As the Blackwater armored vehicles entered the square, a heavily guarded area near Baghdad's affluent Mansour neighborhood, Iraqi police officers moved to stop traffic.

Kadhum, the doctor, and her son Haitham, who were in the flow of cars the officers were trying to stop, didn't react quickly enough. A Blackwater guard fired, striking Haitham as he sat in the driver's seat, three witnesses said.

"The bullet went through the windshield and split his head open," recalled traffic police officer Sarhan Thiab. "His mother was holding him, screaming for help."

The car, which had an automatic transmission, kept rolling. Another officer, Ali Khalaf, tried to stop the vehicle as another spray of bullets killed Kadhum.

Thiab fled first, then Khalaf, followed by bullets that struck a traffic light pole, a billboard and their police guard post. Then the Blackwater guards escalated their firepower, engulfing the sedan in flames.

Osama died trying to flee from his truck when Blackwater turned their guns on it next. Khalil died within minutes of being brought to the hospital; when his wife arrived with bed sheets and water, she was sent to the morgue. Sahib died slowly over three hours from internal bleeding, while family members held his hands. The uncle of twenty-year-old Ahmed Haitham, had rushed to aid the shooting victims, and come upon Ahmed's and his mother's burned bodies in the hospital. He called Ahmed's father, who rushed to the Square, only to find the family's charred car missing it's license plate, but the number written next to it in the sand. Later in the hospital, Haitham Ahmed was able to recognize the bodies of his family by his wife's dental work and one of his son's shoes.

On the cab roof of Osama's white Volkswagon truck are bullet entry holes, with trajectories that indicate they came from fire from above. Although witnesses testify that Blackwater mercenaries fired out of their helicopters as people tried to flee for their lives, the company has denied this claim. Dr. Kadhum's white car still sits in Nisoor Square, and Haitham Ahmed is determined to see it remains there until there is justice for the deaths of his wife and son. Iraq's government has not responded to his inquiries.

"They have killed my beloveds. They were innocent," he lamented on Wednesday. "We don't have any contacts with any party, any side. We are all doctors."

"What I want is the law to prevail," he added. "I hope that this act will not go without punishment."

There were opportunities, he said, for his family to flee Iraq. But he and his wife believed in the promise of a new Iraq. "I feel pain when I see doctors leaving Iraq," he said.

His son was going to follow in his footsteps. In his third year of medical school, the soccer-loving, multilingual Ahmed planned to become a surgeon.

Now, he said, his two other children, Mariam, 18, and Haidar, 16, are concerned about his safety. "Enough of the pain, enough of death in Iraq."

Mariam was born in the last phases of the Iran-Iraq conflict. Her eyes filling with tears, she said she wanted to leave: "I was born in one war, I don't want to die in another."

Original plans for the FBI's investigation included Blackwater guards. It took a release to the press about these plans and pressure from Congress, and 24 hours, for the State Department to think it was wise to alter these arrangements so that the department's Diplomatic Security Services would be assigned to that task. The White House is meanwhile denouncing legislation passed by the House which would apply all regulations currently used to provide oversight and federal jurisdiction over Defense Department war contractors in Iraq, to those under contract with State, including Blackwater. The law in question is the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act. The bill passed 389-30. Via the Office of Budget Management is the claim that such equal jurisdiction in contracting would have "intolerable consequences for crucial and necessary national security activities and operations."

Questions continue to emerge on the conduct and operations of Blackwater on that day. Blackwater revamped it's website since the shooting, dropping press reports and news briefings, and reducing the publicly available information about it's company. However, you can still buy company apparel. The State Department's intial report on the Sept. 16th incident was written by a current Blackwater employee. Secretary of State Condollezza Rice exerted pressure on the Iraqi government to allow Blackwater to remain inside Iraq, creating the public perception that the government of Iraq cannot act with autonomy. Even the officials Blackwater guarded on September 16th highlight the need for impartial investigations:

A bomb exploded on the median of a road a few hundred yards away from the meeting, causing no injuries to the Americans, but prompting a fateful decision to evacuate. One American official who knew about the meeting cast doubt on the decision to move the diplomats out of a secure compound.

“It raises the first question of why didn’t they just stay in place, since they are safe in the compound,” the official said. “Usually the concept would be, if an I.E.D. detonates in the street, you would wait 15 to 30 minutes, until things calmed down,” he said, using the abbreviation for improvised explosive device.

But instead of waiting, a Blackwater convoy began carrying the diplomats south, toward the Green Zone. Because their route would pass through Nisour Square, another convoy drove there to block traffic and ensure that the diplomats would be able to pass.

CNN interviewed one of the Iraqi Police stationed at the Square, who stated that Blackwater threw water bottles at the police upon entering the Square and then proceeded to drive the wrong way around. The police officer Sarhan noticed that the guards looked nervous. When the traffic didn't immediately halt, the mercenaries opened fire with warning shots, and then began shooting vehicles. When Sarhan attempted to rescue Kadhum, after her son was shot dead in the driver's seat, he and another police officer were unable to halt the rolling car. Even in uniform, he too became a target:

"I wanted to get his mother out, but could not because she was holding her son tight and did not want to let him go," Sarhan said. "They immediately opened heavy fire at us."

"Each of their four vehicles opened heavy fire in all directions, they shot and killed everyone in cars facing them and people standing on the street," Sarhan said.

The shooting lasted about 20 minutes, he said.

"When it was over we were looking around and about 15 cars had been destroyed, the bodies of the killed were strewn on the pavements and road."

Sarhan said no one ever fired at the Blackwater team.

"They became the terrorists, not attacked by the terrorists," he said.

"I saw parts of the woman's head flying in front of me, blow up and then her entire body was charred," he said. "What do you expect my reaction to be? Are they protecting the country? No. If I had a weapon I would have shot at them."

War is ugly, that much is true. But this was not war, this was murder, done by a company operating for profit committing acts of barbarity for which our own uniformed soldiers will face an accounting for on the streets of Baghdad. For how much longer will we tolerate having a military and a foreign policy held hostage to the profit margins of neoconservatives, who would see the power to make war and peace shifted to an auction? How does having the readiness of our forces undermined to create overpaid positions for at-will war contractors further American security? What does it say about the future of democracy as a government about humans that we allow senseless bloodshed for the mere sake of convenience? Who should be held accountable for the descent of the "war of the willing" into the "war of the billing?" How long will the burned out car of a woman doctor sit on the side of the road?

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Blackwater, war contractors, Iraq war, current events, politics, moonbat, liberal

Blackwater is Another Term for Human Waste Water

2007-10-02T13:40:00.000-07:00

So today let us reveiw what it's like to give congressional oversight to a company that goes by a word for what you flush down the toliet.

Biggest bombshell of the day is the fact that there's no budgetary justification for employing war contractors to replace our military's soldiers after all. One Blackwater mercenary costs America more than $400,000 while his counterpart in the US military costs only $50,000 to $70,000. Astounding.... but that get's a little lost in the cauterwailing on the Republican side of the aisle over the idea that Blackwater needs its "conduct" examined by Congress. What do we find in these murky waters?

In one incident last Christmas Eve, [b]a drunken Blackwater contractor shot and killed a security guard for one of Iraq's vice presidents[/b], and the State Department allowed the contractor to leave Iraq, the report said.

In response to questions about the Christmas Eve shooting, Prince said that the employee was promptly fired and fined "multiple thousands of dollars" but that Blackwater did not have authority to take other punitive action.

"I'm not going to make any apologies for what he did," Prince said. "He clearly violated our policies." He said Blackwater acquired an airline ticket for the employee to return to the United States "by direction of the State Department."

Blackwater shelled out $15,000 to the family of the Iraqi guard, which the State Department handed off. The made the mercenary in question pay for his own airplane ticket and then withheld a bonus, but that does not constitute a "fine." Neatly, the bonus comes out a bit shy of what they paid to the family of the guard. You can bet that $15,000 didn't come out of Blackwater profits.

Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) said [b]the Justice Department has informed the committee that it is still investigating the Christmas shooting nine months later.[/b]

[b]Prince also was asked about an initial erroneous report that the Iraqi security guard had been shot by a drunken U.S. soldier, rather than a private contractor. Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) pointed to a Blackwater e-mail referring to the mistake and saying that "at least the ID of the shooter will take the heat off us."[/b]

Prince said Blackwater did not take any action to correct the account because it is prohibited by contract from engaging with the news media. "I don't believe that false story lasted in the media for more than a few hours," the Blackwater chief executive said.

He also disputed charges that Blackwater guards have killed innocent Iraqi civilians in reckless shootings while escorting convoys, but he said there have been "times when guys are using defensive force" to protect themselves or their convoys and could have killed civilians through "ricochets" or "traffic accidents."

So we have Prince testifying before Congress that never have Blackwater mercenaries ever pointed their weapons at an unarmed and innocent Iraqi and just killed them. The only civilians Blackwater mercenaries kill, are the Iraqis that they don't aim at. So I geuss they just define insurgents and terrorists as anyone they aim at? Hey- they may be better at fudging numbers than the White House.

Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio) said he was "a little saddened by this hearing" because Blackwater is a member of "our team." He said the committee "should not go to the extent of undermining Blackwater's ability to perform as our team."

But Rep. John J. Duncan Jr. (R-Tenn.), voicing rare GOP criticism of Blackwater at the hearing, observed that [b]Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, earns about $180,000 a year, less than half the salary of a Blackwater official in charge of a 34-member security team[/b].

The war in Iraq has produced some of the most "lavish" and "excessive" contracts in U.S. history, Duncan said. "Fiscal conservatives should feel no obligation to defend this kind of contracting. . . . In fact, fiscal conservatives should be the ones most horrified by this."

Time will tell if the Republicans send through an ammendment giving Petraeus a raise to the level of what a Blackwater official for a security team gets paid. You know, if they really valued his service. On the other hand, it's good to have clear to the world exactly what some Republican members of Congress place as the value of an innocent Iraqi life. Even lower than $15,000 it seems, if it's not worth even the slightest public embarressment for a Republican campaign contributor.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released preliminary information gleaned about Blackwater's conduct.

Blackwater security contractors in Iraq have been involved in at least 195 "escalation of force" incidents since early 2005, including several previously unreported killings of Iraqi civilians, according to a new congressional account of State Department and company documents.

In one of the killings, according to a State Department document, Blackwater personnel tried to cover up what had occurred and provided a false report. In another case, involving a Blackwater convoy's collision with 18 civilian vehicles, the firm accused its own personnel of lying about the event.

....In total, the documents indicate, Blackwater has terminated 122 employees under its State Department contract. According to Prince, the company currently has about 1,000 employees in Iraq.

...Based on more than 437 Blackwater documents and "a limited number of incident reports and documents from the State Department," the Democratic staff memo said, Blackwater personnel had participated in 195 incidents in which they discharged firearms, with Blackwater firing first in more than 80 percent of them. At least 16 Iraqi casualties resulted.

Another blogger over at Pissed On Politics worked on the numbers for Blackwater a little more. Blackwater charges Regency a baseline of $815 for a single mercenary and $1,075 a day for a senior manager. How much does Petraeus make a day? $493

Let's do a little more math. Not much, moonbat's honor. So if you have about 1,000 employees in Iraq, and you have to fire 122 of them for conduct reasons, that means 17% of your employees were a problem and got caught. Let's emphasize the "got caught" part. Is anyone going to try to say that the percentage of military personal we have had to prosecute for conduct in Iraq even approaches this horrifying number?

In a June 24, 2005, incident -- reported in a U.S. Embassy memo that was cited by the committee and obtained by The Washington Post -- a Blackwater security detail in the city of Hilla, south of Baghdad, shot a civilian man standing at the side of the street as the contractors drove by. "This is the case involving the PSD [personal security detail] who failed to report the shooting, covered it up, and subsequently were removed" from the city, an embassy security officer wrote in a July 1, 2005, report.

Everyone remember what Prince said about Blackwater mercenaries not shooting civilians intentionally? Oh, did our little Prince just lie? To Congress? No you see, anyone Blackwater mercenaries aim at is de facto a terrorist, even if they are unamred and walking down the street to the bakery. Prince fired the shooter not for murdering some guy in cold blood for fun, but for not filling out the paperwork afterwards.

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Blackwater, current events, blogging, politics, congress, moonbat, Iraq war

Bush Makes America Filthy On Your Dime

2007-09-30T11:29:00.000-07:00

So today we learn that under Shrub, the EPA is pursuing fewer criminal prosecutions against polluters. Surprised?

"The slower pace of enforcement mirrors a decline in resources for pursuing environmental wrongdoing. The EPA now employs 172 investigators in its Criminal Investigation Division, below the minimum of 200 agents required by the 1990 Pollution Prosecution Act, signed by President George H.W. Bush.

The actual number of investigators available at any time is even smaller, agents said, because they sometimes are diverted to other duties, such as service on EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson's eight-person security detail.

Johnson, President Bush's chief environmental regulator, foreshadowed a less confrontational approach toward enforcement when he served as the EPA's top deputy in late 2004. "The days of the guns and badges are over," Johnson told a group of farm producers in Georgia the day before Bush won reelection, according to a news account of the speech.

Prosecutors and agency employees blame the diversion of funds to the war on terror, but 9-11 or not, the funding was promised to banish before that Tuesday. And the result of not being convicted guilty of poisoning Americans?

The Justice Department in August also touted a plea bargain with IMC Shipping Co. that required the Singapore ship operator to pay $10 million in connection with a massive oil spill in 2004 that killed thousands of birds in Alaska's Maritime National Wildlife Refuge.

Prosecutors told the court they had enough evidence to indict the company for criminal negligence under the Clean Water Act and for making false statements early in the investigation. But the deal they reached called for guilty pleas to two counts of violating the Refuse Act and one violation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Prosecutors cited the company's cooperation for the leniency.

The decision to drop the negligence charges could be valuable to the company, which as a result remains eligible to seek reimbursement from a special government fund for $77 million of the more than $100 million it has spent cleaning up the spill.

The Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund -- administered by the U.S. Coast Guard and funded by a special oil tax -- can reimburse shippers for all cleanup costs not covered by insurance, but only if the incident does not involve gross negligence or willful misconduct.

Let's see what it costs to spill oil if you cut a plea bargin under Bush. Instead of paying the $100 million in clean up fees and the $10 million in fines, you pay $23 million in clean up costs and $10 million in fines. Which means that Bush just used your tax money to say a loyal oil company $77 million dollars. How sweet, he bought you an oil spill!!. Just another example of Republicans being responsible with money? As Barbie says, "math is hard!"

My wallet just said ouch!!

Technorati Tags:
EPA, oil industry, global warming, pollution, green, environment, save the earth, george w. bush

Evict Blackwater and Get Your End to the War

2007-09-29T11:53:00.000-07:00

So today five witnesses and one senior Iraqi police officer gave public testimony against Blackwater, attesting that the mercenaries opened fire without provocation in the September 16th shooting incident in Baghdad, which left at least eleven innocent civilians dead. Blackwater mercenaries involved claimed last Friday to ABC NEWS that they opened fire on a white car after if refused to give way to them in rush-hour traffic... even after they threw water bottles at it and gave the driver the finger. After an outraged Prime Minister Maliki announced his intention to hurl Blackwater out of his country, he was pressured by a phone call from Secretary of State Condollezza Rice. If Blackwater was gone the next day, the occupation would be shut down. Crying shame, really.

The horror continues... despite claims by representatives, Blackwater didn't kill those civilians in defense of any State Department officials. The timeline works like this: a car bomb went off near a place their "State" was visiting. Half an hour later, as they are leaving to go back to the Green Zone, Blackwater dispatches two other groups to help escort them back. TST-22, the first group of back-up finds the original group, and escorts them back to the Green Zone. TST-23, the second group gets "delayed," which given it's a group of men in SUVs read "lost and refused to stop for directions." TST-23 ends up in a crowded traffic circle, and gives in to a fit of bloody road-rage, then flees back to the Green Zone. TST-22 doubles back to provide protection for TST-23, and ends up in the traffic circle after they have left. At which point, TST-22 end up surrounded by a quick-reaction force from the Iraqi Army with it's large caliber machine guns. A US military QRF scrambled onto the scene to mediate before Blackwater got slaughtered, and TST-22 retreated to the Green Zone. You read me right, our "money-saving" mercenaries had to be rescued by the real deal. Yet another classic bail-out of a bad private investment scheme.

The State Department released a report yesterday detailing how in fact, Blackwater is quite trigger-happy.

"The officials said that Blackwater’s incident rate was at least twice that recorded by employees of DynCorp International and Triple Canopy, the two other United States-based security firms that have been contracted by the State Department to provide security for diplomats and other senior civilians in Iraq.

The State Department would not comment on most matters relating to Blackwater, citing the current investigation. But Sean McCormack, the department’s spokesman, said that of 1,800 escort missions by Blackwater this year, there had been “only a very small fraction, very small fraction, that have involved any sort of use of force.”

In 2005, DynCorp reported 32 shootings during about 3,200 convoy missions, and in 2006 that company reported 10 episodes during about 1,500 convoy missions. While comparable Blackwater statistics were not available, government officials said the firm’s rate per convoy mission was about twice DynCorp’s."

What is the State Department afraid of if it has to conceal this information? Accountability?

The Pentagon hurried to show their equal support for Blackwater with a $92 million dollar contract. The money goes to Blackwater's aviation subsidiary Presidental Airways... who killed three American soldiers by flying a helicopter into the side of a mountain. Right after one of the Blackwater pilots assured his passengers that "All we want is to avoid seeing rock at twelve o'clock" Yes, because you should give $92 million dollars to men who can't tell mountain from clear sky. Given the difference.

And despite the infusion of cash, there may be more blood in the water than people think. Just last Wednesday, "the North Carolina private military contractor canceled a $5.5 million deal to buy 1,800 acres of farmland near Fort Bragg, where it was going to set up a training ground for soldiers and corporate executives." Blackwater refused to officially comment to the press, of course. And in a little story from September 9th there's more innocent blood in Iraq that's on Blackwater's hands:

A clerk in the Iraqi customs office in Diyala province, she was in the capital to drop off and pick up paperwork at the central office near busy al Khilani Square, not far from the fortified Green Zone, where top U.S. and Iraqi officials live and work. U.S. officials often pass through the square in heavily guarded convoys on their way to other parts of Baghdad.

As Hussein walked out of the customs building, an embassy convoy of sport-utility vehicles drove through the intersection. Blackwater security guards, charged with protecting the diplomats, yelled at construction workers at an unfinished building to move back. Instead, the workers threw rocks. The guards, witnesses said, responded with gunfire, spraying the intersection with bullets.

Hussein, who was on the opposite side of the street from the construction site, fell to the ground, shot in the leg. As she struggled to her feet and took a step, eyewitnesses said, a Blackwater security guard trained his weapon on her and shot her multiple times. She died on the spot, and the customs documents she'd held in her arms fluttered down the street.

Before the shooting stopped, four other people were killed in what would be the beginning of eight days of violence that Iraqi officials say bolster their argument that Blackwater should be banned from working in Iraq.

So beyond a few dropping jaws, where is the liberal outrage? Rice was clear enough with her marching orders for people who want a change in Iraq. Get rid of Blackwater and it all comes tumbling down...

Technorati Tags:
Blackwater, Iraq, iraq war, moonbat, current events, war on terror, politics

Ending Poverty for the Average Federal Employee

2007-09-25T21:10:00.000-07:00

So today let's note a rather unusual book out there in the slew of presidential hopeful pulp-novelas: Ending Poverty in America: How to Restore the American Dream. The book contains only an essay by Democratic hopeful John Edwards, and the meat of the book at least isn't endless puffing about how he's going to fix everything that's wrong with you. Instead, it's a collection of essays by both liberals and conservatives, produced by the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity. These essays are scientifically based studies of the nature of poverty and both the successes and failures of recent American policy in creating a fair economy for all of us. The collection begins centered around a simple set of irrefutable statistics:

"In 2005, 37 million Americans- about 1 in 8 people- lived below the income poverty level, defined as $19,874 for a family of 4. Almost 13 million were children under 18... The income gap between the rich and poor is growing as well: in 2005 the top 20% of U.S. households received over half of all income, while the bottom 20% of households received only about 3% of total income. Wealth inequalities are also on the rise: in 2004 the top 1% of households by income held more than a third of all net worth and financial assets. Approximately 80% of stock is held by the top ten percent of wealthy households; the poorest 40% of households own less than 1% of all stocks... Over 46 million Americans (about 16% of the population) lacked health insurance coverage in 2005... over 27 million workers are employed with no health insurance."

What does a poverty statistic mean on a personal level? How accurate is this idea that passing over $19,874 will enable parents to care for two children? Heck, what about single young women working for the federal government to defend the nation against terrorism? Let's calculate the cost of living for one such employee: $9,600 Rent ($800 a month, 1 bedroom), $1,960 Food ($35 a week), $2400 Gas (1 hour commute), $740 Insurance USAA, $396 Work Parking Permit, $1,920 Retirement Savings, $1,440 Health Insurance Co-Pay, $140 Prescriptions (No Birth Control), $100 Emergency Room Co-Pay, $230 New Tires, $480 Cell Phone, $252 Internet Services, $60 Bank Fees, $370 Vet Bills for 1 Cat, $1,940 Car Repairs, $120 AAA, $60 (3 $20) Haircuts, $270 Plane ticket to see dying grandfather, $120 Contact Lenses, $180 Dentist plus x-rays, $380 Holiday Gifts (including Birthdays and Christmas). Not included: Thanksgiving Dinner, Booze, Christmas Tree, Easter Eggs, clothing of any kind, movie tickets, books or magazines, Starbucks, Halo 3, dating, make-up, cable television, laundry detergent. Yes, I need the Internet, as a college student. The cell phone serves as a stand in for a land line. Total Cost for 1 Year: $23,158.

Base Salary? $23,700. A cost of living adjustment raises the total to $27,100. After $3,523 in federal taxes and $813 in state taxes, take home pay would equal $22,764. Rumors on several job sites are that pay is $33,000 and that is not true. For those of you who are curious, the cost in salary and benefits of TSA for 2007 will cost $3.45 billion, at an approximate cost of $1.91 per passenger, and $1.65 per checked bag. The cost per passenger includes the cost of screening carry-on luggage. How interesting it would be to ask passengers how much they think it costs to screen them in terms of labor. The above recounting of expenses includes $26 in prescription co-pays for medication after needing four stitches for an on-the-job-injury, my second in as many years after surviving ten years in retail with a clean record.

Edward's book notes that "One in four people who work full-time, year round, still earn less than the amount of money needed to keep a family of four above the poverty threshold... The single parent with three children, working a full 40 hours a week for 52 weeks a year, must earn $9.55 an hour to stay at the poverty line." So basically what you have here is the cold hard economic fact that a fighting the war on terror won't even allow you to provide for yourself, let alone a spouse and two children, without massive government assistance or going without health insurance. And several of my coworkers follow the later track in order to come up with money for their families, betting against the odds that all of their medical needs can be solved with extra sleep and Tylenol. Times I have required medical care in the past year? Three times with my family practice and one emergency room visit after an allergic reaction to a steroid inhaler in the middle of the night. Not that I am completely innocent, I agree, having twice had overdraft charges of $34 dollars for a total of $68 in the past year.

The Congressional Budget Office reports that between 1979 and 2000, the income of the top 1% of Americans grew 184%. Top 5th grew 70%. The real income of the bottom 5th grew only 6%. Edwards's book notes that inter generational mobility has stagnated to the point that "it would take a poor family of four with two children approximately 9 to 10 generations- over 200 years- to achieve the income of the middle-income four-person family... A son whose father earns about $16,000 a year has only a 5% chance of earning over $55,000 per year." Meanwhile, the CBO has just released two estimates of the cost of staying in Iraq. For the favored Republican scenario of continued combat operations, the estimated cost is $25 billion per year. For the favored Democrat scenario of non-combat peace-keeping operations, the estimated cost is only $10 billion per year. Both scenarios use conservative estimates on the necessity to replace equipment and armor. Some one's going to have to pay for all of this, and sorry to you war-mongers out there, but this federal employee is running in the budgetary red.

More voices are speaking up about what our money has been buying us in Iraq: Foreign Policy's Terrorism Index.

"The outcome of the war in Iraq may now rest in large part on the success or failure of the so-called surge. Beginning in February, the White House sent an additional 28,000 U.S. troops to Baghdad in an effort to quell the violence there. Securing the capital with overwhelming force is a key component of the anti-insurgency plan developed by Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq and the military’s foremost expert on counterinsurgency tactics. It took until June for all the U.S. forces to be put in place, and the number of American troops in Iraq is now at its highest level since 2005. But is Petraeus’s plan working?

The index’s experts don’t think so. More than half say the surge is having a negative impact on U.S. national security, up 22 percentage points from just six months ago. This sentiment was shared across party lines, with 64 percent of conservative experts saying the surge is having either a negative impact or no impact at all. When the experts were asked to grade the government’s handling of the Iraq war, the news was even worse. They gave the overall effort in Iraq an average point score of just 2.9 on a 10-point scale. The government’s public diplomacy record was the only policy that scored lower.

These negative opinions may result in part from the experts’ apparent belief that, a decade from now, the world will still be reeling from the consequences of the war. Fifty-eight percent of the index’s experts say that in 10 years’ time, Sunni-Shiite tensions in the Middle East will have dramatically increased. Thirty-five percent believe that Arab dictators will have been discouraged from reforming. Just 5 percent, on the other hand, believe that al Qaeda will be weaker, whereas only 3 percent believe Iraq will be a beacon of democracy in the Middle East. If true, the surge, or any other tactical shift for that matter, was probably already too little, too late."

Americans need to get over their love affair with movie stars and cowboys as Presidents. Certainly doesn't make the world safer, or fairer, or more democratic. As a democrat, I want a renewed commitment to the ideals of democracy, towards compassion and justice. I want to see America renewed in the beauty that democracies are able to produce, in their bustling cities and the equal allocation of riches to it's people, the wealthy and the worker. Instead of tax breaks for corporations, I want workers to have the right to show each other their paychecks without getting fired. Instead of private mercenaries used to secure oil reserves, I want trained and armored US soldiers deployed to end on-going genocide. I want to be able to travel to my job on public transportation, I want utility companies brought under control, I want spammers put out of business. And I want the American Dream for myself, to be able to put away money for a new car and use my tuition to reduce my tax-burden even though I don't itemize.

I want a President who believes in the noble endeavor that democratic government was created to bring about in the world, instead of being pledged to destroy it in the name of private profit. John Edwards saves his remarks until everyone else at his Center has been given a chance to contribute, and he makes a point of including everyone's good ideas towards creating a wonderful future for America... both conservatives and liberals. And it's a good vision, about us as a people... a way to give up terror and war, in exchange for hope and peace.

"The American people understand that no one who works full-time should live in poverty... Let us set a national goal-the elimination of poverty in America in 30 years. It will not be easy, but I believe in the unlimited power of the American people to accomplish anything we set our hearts and minds to acheive. If we do not rest until poverty is history, it will be."

Technorati Tags:
John Edwards, politics, current affairs, economics, poverty, health insurance, homeland security, war on terror, Iraq, moonbat

Hidden Pentagon Conservatives Corrupt US Snipers

2007-09-24T13:36:00.000-07:00

So today we get more sordid details the the case of US snipers on trial for killing an Iraqi man out mowing his lawn. The facts of the case are that Spec. Jorge Sandoval and Staff Sgt. Michael Hensley stand accused by the military of shooting an innocent Iraqi out cutting grass with a rusty sickle, and then planting a spool of wire on his dead body to make the shooting look legitimate. Meanwhile, other snipers in the same unit, who face discipline for falling asleep while on a mission, have come forward to reveal the secret program they were recruited for by members of the Pentagon's Asymmetric Warfare Group. In January, these conservatives visited the snipers and passed out boxes of bait: ammunition, wire and explosives. The snipers were to litter the ground in a hostile area with these items, and shoot anyone who picked them up. Like someone annoyed that there was litter in the middle of the street.

"Baiting is putting an object out there that we know they will use, with the intention of destroying the enemy," Capt. Matthew P. Didier, the leader of an elite sniper scout platoon attached to the 1st Battalion of the 501st Infantry Regiment, said in a sworn statement. "Basically, we would put an item out there and watch it. If someone found the item, picked it up and attempted to leave with the item, we would engage the individual as I saw this as a sign they would use the item against U.S. Forces."

..."We don't discuss specific methods targeting enemy combatants," said Paul Boyce, an Army spokesman. "The accused are charged with murder and wrongfully placing weapons on the remains of Iraqi nationals. There are no classified programs that authorize the murder of local nationals and the use of 'drop weapons' to make killings appear legally justified."

It is unclear whether the program reached elsewhere in Iraq and how many people were killed through the baiting tactics.

Members of the sniper platoon have said they felt pressure from commanders to kill more insurgents because U.S. units in the area had taken heavy losses. The sniper unit -- dubbed "the painted demons" because of the use of tiger-stripe face paint -- often went on missions into hostile areas to intercept insurgents going to and from hidden weapons caches.

"It's our job out here to lay people down who are doing bad things," Spec. Joshua L. Michaud testified in Iraq in July, discussing the unit's numerous casualties. "I don't want to call it revenge, but we needed to find a way so that we could get the bad guys the right way and still maintain the right military things to do."

While neither Sandoval or Hensley themselves had been debriefed and included, of course they found out about the program in short order. They saw the white ammunition boxes go out with other snipers, and saw those snipers come in with "kills" of Iraqis who had possession of those items, to the great satisfaction of their commanders. Now of course, we find out where this bright idea devolves to, when you are all alone on a dark street of an Iraqi province, with commanders waiting back at camp for that kill count. Some rise above temptation and some become seduced... Increasingly, the best of our soldiers, such as these, are finding a way out of our military.

In short, we operate in a bewildering context of determined enemies and questionable allies, one where the balance of forces on the ground remains entirely unclear. (In the course of writing this article, this fact became all too clear: one of us, Staff Sergeant Murphy, an Army Ranger and reconnaissance team leader, was shot in the head during a "time-sensitive target acquisition mission" on Aug. 12; he is expected to survive and is being flown to a military hospital in the United States.) While we have the will and the resources to fight in this context, we are effectively hamstrung because realities on the ground require measures we will always refuse - namely, the widespread use of lethal and brutal force.

Given the situation, it is important not to assess security from an American-centered perspective. The ability of, say, American observers to safely walk down the streets of formerly violent towns is not a resounding indicator of security. What matters is the experience of the local citizenry and the future of our counterinsurgency. When we take this view, we see that a vast majority of Iraqis feel increasingly insecure and view us as an occupation force that has failed to produce normalcy after four years and is increasingly unlikely to do so as we continue to arm each warring side.

Technorati Tags:
Asymmetric Warfare Group, Pentagon, Iraq, war, current affairs, democracy, politics, moonbat

Open Call to Boycott China's "Genocide Olympics"

2007-09-20T10:05:00.000-07:00

So today we will take a cold-hearted look at the 63% of Americans who would boycott China over product saftey and the fact that they eat dogs and cats. Moonbat herself flirts off and on with doing her best to avoid buying in China over the plight of Tibet, in homage to the fact that reading Tibetan Buddhism has done wonders for her temper. Yet the time has come for a concerted and public, liberal and conservative, all-American push to boycott funding China through our purchases, policies, and misplaced attempts to protect "the free market." Somewhere along the line, we fought a near fourty year Cold War to halt the global expansion of communism and the totalitarian states which embraced it's doctrine. Our White House takes a different view towards "the red scourge" these days because "It's not appropriate to interfere in the private decisions of Americans..."

Capitalism funding the expansion of the communist police state, funding by the capitalistic greed of US investors and the Republican Party Leadership. Say it ain't so! And yet, we have the bewildering knowledge before us that under the name of fighing terrorism, China is openly reaping hedge fund investments on Wall Street, in new forms of public surveillance that will allow it to hunt down democratic protestors at it's leisure... and anyone who stops to watch. China faces no threat of terrorism, let's be clear. But China does find itself:

...subject to strikes of workers who don't get paid; to revolts over deadly environmental conditions; to religious activists who worship gods other than mammon and the state (the two that are officially sanctioned); to Web surfers enamored of a free exchange of ideas; to Tibetans seeking autonomy; and maybe, someday, to another outburst of Tiananmen Square-like, pro-democracy agitation.

An authoritarian government can never be sure how many of its citizens would relish its demise, which means the Chinese Communist Party has 1.3 billion potential targets for surveillance. Bradsher reports that 660 Chinese cities have begun installing high-tech surveillance systems. By one estimate, high-end surveillance will expand from a $500 million industry in 2003 to a $43 billion industry by 2010.

Of course, workers who don't get paid, people sickened by industrial pollutants, people who pray to foreign gods, liberal web-surfers, Iraqis seeking independence, and CodePink, are all foes of the White House as well. Perhaps it's not so unusual to find the Leader of the Free World playing footsie with the World Communist Regime. In the end, all radical Islamic terrorists have ever managed is to blow up a few buildings or airplanes. What could China do, when it's survelliance abilities we have paid for completely shut out our own CIA operatives and quash the last murmurs of democratic dissent? Given the spectacular web war launched against Estonia last spring that shut down its newspapers, banks, and government for days? Given that we are creating the worst border disaster of all with our open embrace of spammers and ad-ware programmers, who turn hordes of our own computers into digital zombie soldiers for sale? To the highest bidder? How can we defeat the enemy we arm to destroy us?

China's love for the world should be apparent, from their open funding of the genocidal regime of Sudan, to their conquest and brutal subjegation of the Tibetan people. China happens to be Sudan's largest oil customer. After the UN Security Council moved forward to with plans to deploy the largest peace-keeping force in the world to Darfur, China began it's manuverings to use it's suddenly enthusiasitc involvement to ward off high profile threats to boycott the 2008 Beijing Olympics. With this slight of hand, China continues it's own version of a Marshal Plan, buying into the regimes of other African nations, while the US remains bogged down in Iraq. China hurries its efforts to place it's troops inside Darfur before the rest of the UN peacekeeping force reaches Sudan. A force significantly larger than the few soldiers China has lent elsewhere, and likely they plan to outstay the UN.

And as for poor Tibet and her people? Richard Gere and the International Campaign for Tibet have called for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics, but received little press. China just finished a train right through the center of Tibet to it's old capital, linking it to the communist state in a way that claims permanent ownership even to satellites in space.

Sacrifice is hardly popular anymore unless it's happenstance or something you were going to do anyways. China's grip on the lowest segments of America's economy makes it a formidle political opponent, as proven through it's growing alliance with Wal-Mart. Yet how impossible? How close do how many people have to be to create a watershed affect? What outcome do we seek? The answer: Tibet must be free, democracy must become something more than a means to inrease oil exploration, democracies must never again become hostage to the economic production of communism police states. Moonbat started with shopping at Target for her nephew's birthday party, buying Crayola "MadeintheUSA" art supplies over RoseArt's "MadeinChina." A few minutes effort also produced a means to hang pictures using supertape also "MadeintheUSA." And organic chocolate grown in Belize and melted into bars in Italy. So good.

Democracy finds itself too weakened by the siren call of profits and revenue to take heed of the warning signs. China will use American investors to create the means to survey and control it's urban polulations in a way only a global dark age could end. The arguement that allowing China into the World Trade Organization to use economic advancement to induce democratic change will have been defeated, under the combined efforts of communism and it's new capitalist backers. Green Fertility gives a compelling argument to still boycott over China's own internal human rights abuses. Yet liberals need to find a way to light a fire under the entire of our country, and it will not be to the cause of foreign gods or Chinese food.

We have in our favor the deciding point: things with China have gotten to the point where either democracy will decide the future of humanity in the world... or we will continue to sell away every part of our inhereitance to the resurgence of communism. When last democracy contested with communism, the USSR fell. Now there is no open contest, and our greed may yet fire the eternal shine of China.

Technorati Tags:
Made in China, globalization, communism, Darfur, Free Tibet, Genocide Olympics, politics, current affairs, moonbat

Blackwater Kills Infant Girl "Insurgent" to Protect US

2007-09-19T14:39:00.000-07:00

So today we will explore the most recent disgrace the Bush Administration has set up country up to suffer in Iraq. Blackwater lashed out at rush-hour traffic in Baghdad with a deadly hail of bullets last Sunday, and the Iraqi government is leading a heroic, yet likely doomed, attempt to oust the mercenary firm from its (supposedly) sovereign soil. After seeing their State Department barrel up to a busy traffic circle, Iraqi police officers stepped out into traffic to attempt to clear a path. When they failed to do so quickly enough, Blackwater’s mercenaries open fired on a car with young parents and their infant daughter, killing all three. They then continued to straff construction workers, a bus full of school girls, other fleeing commuters, and shot to death one of the Iraqi police officers. At some point, Blackwater’s helicopters joined in the shooting spree that is reported to have lasted twenty minutes and initially killed eleven. Survivors continue to die of their wounds in local hospitals, and the death toll rises. Blackwater released claims that the young parents and their baby girl were insurgents and had opened fire first.

"We will not tolerate the killing of our citizens in cold blood," al-Maliki told reporters. "The work of this company has been stopped in order to know the reasons."

Al-Maliki said the shootings had generated such "widespread anger and hatred" that it would be "in everyone's interest if the embassy used another company while the company is suspended."

Blackwater spokeswoman Anne E. Tyrrell said in a statement late Monday that its employees acted "lawfully and appropriately" in response to an armed attack against a State Department convoy.

"The `civilians' reportedly fired upon by Blackwater professionals were in fact armed enemies and Blackwater personnel returned defensive fire," she said. "Blackwater regrets any loss of life but this convoy was violently attacked by armed insurgents, not civilians, and our people did their job to defend human life."

…The Interior Ministry had said Monday it had lifted Blackwater's license and ordered its 1,000 employees to leave the country. The next day, Iraqi officials said Blackwater's operations were merely suspended pending an investigation. ….

"It's going to turn the world upside down," said retired Marine Lt. Col. Bill Cowan, an independent military analyst and the co-chairman of WVC3 Group, a security consulting firm. "You can bet the U.S. embassy is doing backflips right now pressuring the Iraqis not to revoke their license."

CODEPINK held a protest in DC against Blackwater on Wednesday, in front of the International Peace Operations Association, the lobbying group which presses the interests of mercenary companies like Blackwater to Republican lawmakers. For a little back ground, view a self-made Blackwater pilot video to grasp how they define themselves.

The New York Times relays that the Iraqis refute Blackwater's claim that its personel were ambushed. The Iraqi government’s initial report, though unverified, says that Blackwater personnel "were not ambushed ... but instead fired at a car when it did not heed a policeman's call to stop, killing a couple and their infant." CNN interviewed several of the Iraqi survivors: "As we turned back they opened fire on all cars from behind. The bullets are in my back. Withing two minutes teh helicopters arrived. They started firing randomly at citizens. No one fired at Blackwater. They were not attacked by gunman. They were not targeted." Other Iraqis report hearing explosions and gun-fire, but no one except Blackwater actually saw any insurgents open fire on the State Department motorcade. That would include the surviving Iraqi police officer who had stepped out in traffic to clear their path.

None of the US employed mercenaries, Blackwater or not, have ever been prosecuted for any of the shootings clearly done by them, even when their targets clearly were not insurgents:

"[There] have been several fatal shootings involving Blackwater guards including one last Christmas Eve [reported by the Wall Street Journal] when a drunk Blackwater employee walking in the Green Zone reportedly fatally shot an Iraqi guard for Vice President Adel Abdul Mehdi. Spend any time hanging out with private security contractors in Iraq and invariably everybody has a favorite Blackwater story. A few weeks ago, a British security contractor showed me a bullet hole on the windshield of his armored Chevy Suburban. He said it happened one evening when Blackwater guards shot at him while he was driving in the Green Zone. "While they were armed and shooting in the Green Zone remains the mystery to me," he says. "But frankly, nothing surprises me about them anymore. I'm just glad I had bulletproof glass"."

Blackwater totals of contracts with the Department of State run $678 million since 2003. Private contractors still enjoy total immunity to prosecution under Iraqi Law, and none have been prosecuted inside the United States for incidents that occurred in Iraq. Blackwater currently fights litigation by the families of several of it’s employees killed in Fallujah in 2004, contesting that any allowance to sue their company directly hinders the ability of the President as Commander-in-Chief to engage in combat operations in Iraq. The State Department exempts Blackwater from needing an Iraqi Ministry Liscense, although such requirements are included in Defense Department contracts. Blackwater remains exempt from being tracked and monitored by US military commanders, from the procedures for reporting shooting incidents that apply to US patrols, or from operating under offensive weaponry restrictions that apply to US soldiers.

"The Iraqis despised them, because they were untouchable," said Matthew Degn, who recently returned from Baghdad after serving as senior American adviser to the Interior Ministry. "They were above the law." Degn said Blackwater's armed Little Bird helicopters often buzzed the Interior Ministry's roof, "almost like they were saying, 'Look, we can fly anywhere we want.' "
…Blackwater's conduct at times inflamed tensions inside the Interior Ministry, Degn said. On May 24, Degn was evacuated from the building after an armed standoff between Interior Ministry commandos and Blackwater guards, who had shot and killed an Iraqi driver outside the gates. U.S. and Iraqi officials feared the incident might lead to retaliatory attacks against Americans.

After shooting the unarmed Iraqi driver, Blackwater’s mercenaries found itself surrounded by Interior Ministry commandos with AK-47 assault rifles, but refused to identify themselves. A passing US military convoy attempted to mediate, but eventually a State Department official was called upon to negotiate the return of Blackwater’s employees to the Green Zone.

Later, both Blackwater and the State Department initially denied that the shooting occurred. The company and agency officials then confirmed that the incident had taken place but defended the guards, saying they had followed the rules on the use of force. The State Department said it planned a thorough investigation. Four months later, no results have been announced.

Despite irregularities in Blackwater’s contracts which permit the company a pyramid scheme to make profit off of the State Department, by including profit in it’s contracts twice, and so that the second calculation of profit is calculated off the contract’s total including the first calculation of profit, the Republican lawmakers and Bush officals continue to shield and favor their company. Guess to whose election campaigns Blackwater renders donations, effectively allowing Republicans to fund their politics through tax-payer’s money?

If you don’t understand how the supposedly frugal Republican Party can swallow this, look here for a key insight. You will not find Blackwater’s culpability for the deaths of its mercenaries in Fallujah in 2004 given an accurate recounting, and there will be no mention of unarmored bright red SUV, inferior weaponry, too few men for such a patrol, a lack of experience training as a team, or the fact that they were escorting trucks to pick up pots and pans. All of the truth of how those men were sacrificed by a greedy corporation to increase it's profit margin must be buried to preserve the neo-con world view, where only liberals are capable of sin:

Despite popular belief, contractors are professionals that are held accountable for their actions. Our nation should not resort to criticizing their service, as they fulfill a portion of the war process to the best of their ability. Maybe instead we should reevaluate the circumstance of the media in war time. Just perhaps the veterans of war know better how to conduct operations than politicians, journalists, and peace activists. This is precisely why a high level of attention is given to the prior military service of presidential candidates, because if elected they will serve the role of Commander in Chief.

When the situation’s structure is scrutinized, what one will find at the base is the left and liberal media so opposed to the war in Iraq they will pursue any means necessary to discredit it. The cycle of anti-war activist attacks has proven itself over and over again, as attempts are made to vilify President Bush, his Republican backing, private military companies, the United States Military, and often the United States. They continue to make out America as the national bully, acting only to weaken our democracy from within.

Yes, your eyes do not deceive you. According to this proposal, if Blackwater wants to wander through traffic in Baghdad shooting up school buses full of girls, we must clap and cheer to show we are good patriots and understand our place. We the people are too ignorant to render judgments on issues like war and peace, and should just shut up. When we scrutinize the public uproar over this situation, what we really find is the basic assumption on the part of the liberal media and the American Left that our soldiers should have been doing this duty instead of mercenaries, since they are the real and true professionals, and know what conduct is due their uniforms.

Immediately following Sunday’s incident, Blackwater revoked clearance for any travel out of the Green Zone, which despite four years of occupation and a “troop surge,” requires heavily-armed escort. Yet our politicians should not so easily give into calls that Blackwater must be forgiven in the name of the greater good and the “War on Terror.” Here we look at an astounding opportunity to cut away a major determent to our military’s ability to function in a time of war; reliance on silent partners motivated by profit. No blind eye should be turned to the fact that the operating procedures for private security contractors were written by Lawrence T. Peter, director of the 50- member Private Security Company Association of Iraq. In a blatant conflict of interest, the Pentagon's Defense Reconstruction Support Office employs Peters to consult on it’s issuance of contracts to the members of his organization.

We on the Left wait to see if the Iraq government passes the test to it's people of not actually being a puppet of the Bush Administration, and whether or not Pelosi can seize this opportunity to force a real policy change in Iraq. Blackwater remains silent on the incident via it's website press releases. To the press, Blackwater reportedly describes Sunday's shootings as "Blackwater professionals heroically defended Americans in a war zone.” A Blackwater contractor told the conservative Washington Times: "They will hem and haw, then money will exchange hands and it will go away."

Technorati Tags:
Blackwater, troop surge, Iraq, withdrawal, politics, current affairs, moonbat

MoveOn Haters Require the Suspension of Disbelief

2007-09-14T08:31:00.000-07:00

So today C-SPAN took a stream of callers on that phony ginned-up artificial manufactured vat-grown faux-controversy over Move-On's "General Betray Us" ad. Moonbat found herself chewing the steering wheel when none of the Democratic callers could stay focused on the statistics, but at least the Republicans were amusing enough to use Petraeus' report as a justification to nuke Baghdad. Guiliani's frogs hop about promoting his own, closer to the front page, denouncement of Hillary Clinton, for not being a spokesperson for MoveOn, so that she can hurt her own campaign by being stupid enough to give into his demands to apologize for the ad. MSNBC's political analyist Joe Watkins claims on television that MoveOn's ad contained only the words "General Betray Us?" and a mug shot of General Petraeus, so outrageously taken of his unflattering side. And oh yes... TalkLeft's call for liberals to denounce MoveOn has been reposted to raise advertising revenue.

Con-blogs whipped themselves into hysteria over the idea that MoveOn got a $167,000 full page-ad for only $65,000. "This is tantamount to an endorsement in my opinion. If THE preeminent paper in the nation is willing to go so far as endorse this deplorable and mindless behavior, then "baby killers" shouted in the streets can't be far off." (Beware the ad-ware that downloads off this site!) Heck, it's even McCarthyism to demand accountability, not for your political affiliation anymore, but testimony you're going to give to Congress. McCarthyism? MoveOn must be calling Petraeus a communist, oh my!

BlackFive takes the cake by filing a very sad complaint with the Federal Elections Commission. "I sold political advertising ...during the 2006 elections. We were informed that there could be absolutely no discounts to the rate card prices for political or advocacy advertising ...to stop the paper from favoring one viewpoint over another. It seems evident that if the reports are true, the NY Times has favored MoveOn by offering a huge discount to them for political advocacy advertising." Blackfive and it's dear readers seem unaware that the New York Times is available online, where spokeswoman Catherine J. Mathis explains how political advocacy groups can save a little green by running ads on ""standby." Wait.. it get's better!!

Who backs up the NYTimes against Blackfive but Freedom Watch. “The New York Times representative explained to us that we could run a standby rate ad for $65,000, but we could not pick the date or placement of the ad.” Freedom Watch expresses the doubt that MoveOn would have the political savvy to leak it's own ad once the NYT phoned them before putting the paper to bed.. but who cares about sour grapes? Perhaps it's even too little to point out Blackfive's selective revision of the English language when UncleJimbo "defines" betray... as "to deliver or expose to an enemy by treachery or disloyalty: Benedict Arnold betrayed his country." Now, clicking on the link provided we find something beyond such an elementary understanding of our language:

1. to deliver or expose to an enemy by treachery or disloyalty: Benedict Arnold betrayed his country.
2. to be unfaithful in guarding, maintaining, or fulfilling: to betray a trust.
3. to disappoint the hopes or expectations of; be disloyal to: to betray one's friends.
4. to reveal or disclose in violation of confidence: to betray a secret.
5. to reveal unconsciously (something one would preferably conceal): Her nervousness betrays her insecurity.
6. to show or exhibit; reveal; disclose: an unfeeling remark that betrays his lack of concern.
7. to deceive, misguide, or corrupt: a young lawyer betrayed by political ambitions into irreparable folly.
8. to seduce and desert.

Moonbat discovered that not a single one attempted to actually defend Petraeus' redefinition of determining who is or is not a terrorist by how they pump you with lead. In fact, poor reading skills led Newsbusters to claim MoveOn cited Iraq sectarian death statistics wrong. MoveOn's Ad stated "For example, death by car bombs don't count." Newsbusters quoted the NewYorkTimes incorrectly to refute that statement:

Victims from car bombs are treated as sectarian casualties if the attack appears to be directed at a sectarian or ethnic group ....Casualties that result from fighting between groups, like the Mahdi Army and the Badr Corps, however, are not classified as sectarian, as they are the result of clashes between two Shiite organizations. But victims of all car bomb attacks and Shiite and Sunni infighting are included in the overall civilian casualty count.

Key parts they misread are in bold. Car bombings that strike open market places in cities, or random buses, or police stations, or Coalition military personnel are not counted. Only the overall civilian count, which General Petraeus did not use, includes all deaths by car bombs. Unless a car bomb strikes a mosque or an isolated tribe, that car bombing has been excluded as an indication of the continued insurgency. The difference made means de facto, MoveOn is right.

Giuliani forgets Aesop's parable about the little yappy dog who tries to bite two steaks at once and looses both, aiming poorly at MoveOn and Hillary at the same time. At least he's not as sad as Thompson, whose words of wisdom are that veterans are stupider than youngsters who he doesn't trust to drink beer. McCain perhaps does him better by saying Hillary can prove she's a man's-man by not showing she understands something as hard as math. Moonbat will let her dear readers be the decider.

Interesting to see if this fantasy love-affair between MoveOn and Hillary Clinton will become the stuff of pop legend. Beyond conservatives insisting that any elite with a PhD or who has been called a Great Leader by a magazine deserves having their reputation defended by a congressional resolution, Hillary Clinton's full testimony gets hacked into unrecognizable tidbits which she "huffed" when she pointed dared grill the General over the point that to accept his report as accurate, several other recent independent reports must be dismissed wholesale. Clinton even went out of her way to point out that no one should expect Petraeus to have to answer for the years of Bush's policy, to be a spokesperson for everything that came before him. Sheesh. Giuliani dearly would love Americans to be so uncultured as to equate the phrase "the willing suspension of disbelief" with deliberate falsehood... but no, we is more learned than that, yes?

While the surge strategy gets hashed to pieces, at least the BBC got around to asking the Iraqi people what they thought of the surge:

"The United States has increased the number of its forces in Baghdad and surrounding provinces in the past six months. Please tell me if you think this increase of forces has made it better, worse, or had no effect?"

"How long do you think US and other Coalition forces should remain in Iraq?"

"Some 47% of respondents now back an immediate withdrawal, compared with 35% in February. The poll also shows dwindling support for troops remaining in the country, even in support of the Iraqi government and security forces. Only 10% of those surveyed favor coalition forces remaining for that purpose."

Con-blogs better batten down the hatches, pile up the Pepsi, and hook up that pee-bag: MoveOn Moves On to presidential shrubbery on September 17th. "Before the surge, George Bush had 130,000 troops stuck in Iraq," says the narrator of the new ad. "Americans had elected a new Congress to bring them home. Instead, Bush sent 30,000 more troops. Now he's making a big deal about you guessed it . . . pulling out 30,000. So, next year, there will still be 130,000 troops stuck in Iraq. George Bush. A Betrayal of Trust." 130,000 + 30,000 - 30,000 = 130,000 Which means the surge got us right back to start. But wait, I suppose that's more math moonbat shouldn't worry her cute little curls over??

Technorati Tags:
General Petraeus, troop surge, Iraq, Move On, withdrawal, politics, current affairs, moonbat

Passengers Fail to Observe 9-11 Moment of Silence

2007-09-11T10:43:00.000-07:00

So today, the vast majority of Americans seem to have chickened out on flying, count that towards what you will: no one believes Petraeus, people have noticed how many Al-Q terrorist cells keep getting arrested trying to make explosives, rainy weather. Those few who trickled through airports local to moonbat overwhelmingly booked flights without realizing what date they were picking, or else flew for business, because heck, gotta make that buck. Several offical attempts were made to observe moments of silence when the first World Trade Center was struck, as passengers rolled their eyes and continued to take off their shoes. Moonbat found herself off eating lentil soup and completely missed the correct time. Headquarters provided nifty little posters for everyone to sign stating that they remembered the reason why they came to work. As a mark of low morale, no one signed.

En route to and from defending the nation from Osama bin Laden, and to and from the one intelligence class at her college there's been enough student interest in to run, moonbat has been listening to tidbits of Petraeus' "I swear I wrote this despite that the White House rewrites everyone else's testimony, but I hid mine in my underwear drawer and Cheyne would never think to look there" testimony. So sectarian violence is down 45% since last December and 80% in Baghdad alone... as long as you don't include car bombs, Diyala province and anyone shot anywhere else than the back of the head. What are we to do with a General who defines the difference between a terrorist and a criminal by how they shoot you?? Under the spit and polish, the truth remains that the surge has failed. Sectarian violence remains above levels in 2004, 2005, and 2006. Ducking under one month in the last twelve by spinning numbers is political manuevering unexpected from General Betray Us.

People should read the ad before swallowing the inevitable attempts at Republican spin and give MoveOn a fair chance. A difference remains between calling someone a traitor for voicing dissapproval of their President's policy and the commendable act of saying the General has no clothes. When numbers given as Congressional testimony are misleading and false, a General who speaks them betrays the trust of the public, and that act is not removed from moral outrage just because even moonbat favors a few of his overall ideas. Nor should Democrats feel the need to return MoveOn's money. You'd think con-blogs would assume Petraeus had any skin at all.

Six years later.... our military tetters on the edge of an abyss and meets it's recuitment goals only by large cash payments. We still can't translate most of our intercepted SIGINT. Our country got milked by almost $60 billion in wasted contracting dollars by Republican election donors pretending to "work" in Iraq. Electricity production in Baghdad remains 2 hours a day. The Taliban are just about as popular as ever in Afghanistan. Al-Q's mobile terrorist training camps still churn out bomb-makers from international schools in Pakistan. China spends it's time on a Marshal Plan for Africa. Osama bin Laden finds the time to die his beard and follow the real estate mortage crisis in the United States. What has the Republican party done for you lately??

Going Down for the War on Terror

2007-09-07T12:49:00.000-07:00

So today moonbat has appeared to rant about how America is loosing the war on terror. Flat out, we must be dead last. As Bush could have been dead a few days ago, when Osama Bin Laden snuck through two security checkpoints at the APEC summit in Australia. Interestingly enough, the international security community is being allowed to huffingly brush off the incident, in reality a bunch of comedians from an Aussie t.v. show "The Chaser," as proof about how "the incident fully vindicated the strength of the events security." And we, the public, seem content to let this one side, despite the fact that real terrorists, who think the same zany way as comedians do, could have easily incinerated the "leader of the capitalist world" almost six years to the anniversary of 9-11. Perhaps the next Director of National Intelligence should be selected from the writer's staff of Saturday Night Live.. as an improvement...

Elsewhere than Iraq, the real war on terror spills over into new battlegrounds, as Al-Q continues to be left relatively unmolested by the US military. White German citizens converted to Islam traveled to PAKISTAN, where they trained in camps last year run by the Islamic Jihad Union, a Central Asian group affiliated with al-Qaeda. Young white men, not Arabs or Persians or Indians or Africans, to all of you who object to airline security so much because, by the gods, you are white.

In June, the Taliban circulated a DVD among local journalists in Pakistan that purported to show a training camp graduation ceremony. Among the 250 graduates were more than a dozen white-skinned young men. One Taliban figure in the video was identified as the leader of a small group of German recruits, according to a copy of the video viewed by a Washington Post correspondent.

Wait, who are these Taliban?? Oh, they still run a whole lot of this country we supposedly have liberated from radical Islamic forces, Afghanistan, where we are now also loosing the war against international heroin. Nothing beats an Administration that can loose two wars in the same country at the same time.

Germany's arrests arrive hard on the heels of the arrests of an unrelated Islamic terrorist cell in Denmark. Two isolated cells, both of which had acquired materials to begin cooking explosives. Cheery.

The Muslims arrested ranged from 19 to 29 years old. They came from Afghan, Pakistani, Somali and Turkish backgrounds and six were Danish citizens, Scharf said.

Mmmm... why aren't they Iraqi, do you suppose? No Iranians?

Moonbat lies awake at night often thinking about terrorism. No big surprise considering that unlike a lot of hot-air baffoons, her job entails preventing them from killing innocent Americans should all those intelligence and police operatives fail to discover and stop them in time. But the time has passed for sleepless nights. The time has come for laughter. The time of employing comedians in the ranks of our intelligence agencies, and in our congressional committees has arrived. Comedians understand the mind of a terrorist. Obviously, we can't rely on the Republicans anymore. The life of our President is clearly at stake.

Moonbat Takes On Idiot Private Security Force

2007-08-29T16:12:00.000-07:00

So today found moonbat off to do her volunteer work at her favorite Museum, all up in her girlie clothes and girlie heels. Of course, just beyond the front door lies the private security force and their little amateur screening area, which impresses a real Transportation Security Officer not in the least bit. One key difference between TSA and this gaggle of guards, is that unlike an airport there is no same-gender screening, which means that they have a group of 30-40 year old men waiting around to screen women who set off the alarm because they were high heels. As moonbat prefers and has done for the past two years, she yanked hers off and tossed them on the x-ray belt. One of the male officers immediately jumped forward and insisted that she had to wear them through the walk-through metal detector.

Oh yeah? There might be glass. Really? Now, if all passengers who fly on airplanes are required to remove their shoes to pass through airport security at the decision of the Department of Homeland Security, one can reasonably conclude that there are no realistic legal or saftey concerns, especially since liability rests with the Museum and not the security force. So why the eager insistance? Well... moonbat could trip. What, into your waiting arms? So, moonbat insists on a supervisor, and after it becomes apparent that no one else will be allowed to enter until one is summoned, behold, when it was insisted that none were in the building, one can be found. After listening to the presented case, and looking at the growing line of scowling visitors, the supervisor relents.

Moonbat prances shoe-free through the walk-through metal detector. She slings her now x-rayed purse up onto her shoulder and begins to put on her heels. Supervisor insists that she come with him because he is going to have to file an incident report about her behavior, so that her supervisor can councel her on cooperating with security in the future. Sure. Glad to put things on paper. Not a problem. Moonbat reaches for her other heel.

Oh no, that won't do. Even though so many concerns were sighted to prevent moonbat from removing her heels for screening, it suddenly is okay for her to walk through the museum in bare feet.... because the supervisor seizes moonbat via her purse and attempt to haul her physically across the museum whilst she puts her other heel back on her foot. Oh now it was on. A good measure of steel in "take your hands off me" and he let go, all full of apologies, and made a quick retreat to his office. Another guard waddled up and with almost 300 lbs of authority told me there was no need to have an "attitude" and took down moonbat's information on a napkin. Moonbat found great amusement in forcing a choice between allowed to use her cell phone in the security area to listen to her voicemail (which even TSA allows) and being able to give the extention of her boss. Hah! So the guard had to waddle back off to look up the correct number. Now of course, for moonbat's chance to file a grievance. Only after twice insisting that complaint forms be provided for her, were such forms produced, and she was assured she could fill them out at her station and drop them off on her way out of the Museum later. Likely there was some hope moonbat would cool off and forget. Fat chance!!

Flew through the paperwork, scanned off a copy for her dear readers and also for the head cheese, and pranced right back down to drop them off. Of course, the real sticker is that this will likely result in absolutely no discipline measures against the guard, or any productive change in screening policies, like same gender or the right to remove your heels. Though people might love to whine and complain about the security screening procedures for airports done by TSA, few consider the alternatives of using private security firms to whom politicians have to curry favor in order to get campaign contributions. If Lockheed Martin did airport screening, you can be assured that your local Congressmen could never afford to investigate any real offense that occurred... but since it's all in house, it's safe to wack away at any infraction on the part of TSA. So for all those of you who like to complain that you got screened because the wire in your bra set off the walk-through metal detector, imagine instead of a female screener, an eager 30-year-old and 6 ft tall slobering hulk. And oh, yes, moonbat always wears her Victoria Secret... even today. Cheers!!

Technorati Tags:
liberal, democrat, washington DC, security, privatization, big government, congress, homeland security, TSA, moonbat

Israel Turns Back on Holocaust and God

2007-08-19T13:31:00.000-07:00

So today Israel placed the goat on the endangered species list, that's how many burnt sacrafices God shall now require to cleanse the bloody hands of it's people. Israel announced today the expulsion of all refugees from the killing feilds of Darfur, back across the Egyptian border, from whence they shall be returned to Sudan. The Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center disparages them as "economic refugees;" the Egyptian government prosecutes those captured fleeing into Israel as Israeli infiltrators and sentences them to prison. Israeli law itself denies any asylum to citizens of enemy nations, and the mostly Muslim Sudan maintains no diplomatic ties to Israel. Where now do we find the voice of Holocaust survivors? Where are those outraged that the world turned aside Jewish refugees fleeing certain death in Germany when Germany declared itself an enemy to the world?

Israel proceeds to deport 1,160 odd souls to their doom, to gun and machete and rape. Would it do so perhaps if Sudan had ordered gas chambers from the Chinese instead of lush palaces? Let moonbat put this in context: the US accepted 52,835 refugees in 2004, of that 4,291 from Sudan, the same year that Israel whines it had to shelter and feed... FIVE!! For decades we Americans have built memorials and demonstrated contrition for turning aside desperate and pleading European Jews, for denying visas and all compassion. Israel seems hell bent on the slaughter of these innocent to return them to their persecutors, instead of even so much as just booking them on a cruise ship and shipping them abroad. Has the compassion due Israel over the sins of the world in those recent dark hours of it's Holocaust expired?

Although one may find alternative opinions inside of Isael, the majority elected it's current government that follows this path, and it's government acts without fear of a distabilizing rebuke. Meanwhile, conservatives in America angle to undermine the idea of a world responsibility to prevent genocide, such as the ever charming Ann Coulter:

"These people can't even wrap up genocide. We've been hearing about this slaughter in Darfur forever -- and they still haven't finished. The aggressors are moving like termites across that country. It's like genocide by committee. Who's running this holocaust in Darfur, FEMA?"

Coulter contiues on to memorably suggest that successful reconstruction occurs only after bombing the population into quivering terror, but I digress. Meanwhile, despite the earlier expounding of the 2/3 successful intervention rate of the UN compared to 1/2 by the United States, as reported by the Rand Corporation, conservatives continue to labor under the delusion that the UN has a worse record than the US. (An old refrain.) Conservatives seem to be hatching an incubated campaign-egg-tactic which crossbreds general ignorance of the immense work on human rights issues done worldwide by liberals, with the worn image of the compassionate conservative. Despite that Amnesty International has focused on the country since 1995, and MS Woman of the Year 2004 Samantha Powers berated Congress for turning a blind eye, commentators speak of conservatives speaking words against Darfur as the advent of a new era of global human rights. Others move to blur the vast difference between occupation and humanitarian intervention. Enough to camoflage a complete lack of progress on Darfur by a conservative led Congress and a compassionate-conservative President? For the sake of the innocents in the killing fields of Darfur- let's pray not.

If you don't feel outrage, you're not frakking paying attention.

Iraq Makes the Case for Big Government

2007-08-12T13:05:00.000-07:00

So employee appreciation day brought a letter from the head cheese lauding how much we at TSA are "appreciated"... and an increase in employee parking fees with less than a week before the increase goes into effect by automatic withdrawal. More money for a private contractor for whom works a wonderful driver who litterally had the nerve to squash me with the bus door because we weren't loading fast enough. And more part-time employees should swell our ranks soon and take away our weekend hours, just to make us even more enthusiastic about defending the nation from terrorism. For those of you outside of the retail world, from which our cheese takes inspiration, Wal-Mart's brilliant innovation means you hire tons of people part-time, which means if you need them for a little extra, you still don't pay overtime. And also of course, they pay more and you pay less for their benefits. Of course, people who don't get hired full-time are the dregs of the barrel, tend not to show up for work, apply themselves, take their oath as a federal employee seriously, and oh... quit!!

Where's the money? Oh the front page of the WaPost covered how Bush shelled out 548 million over the past three years to two British private mercenary companies to protect the Army Corp of Engineers in Iraq. $200 million over budget!! The average payout per merc per month under these contracts has been $15,000. More than twice what any of the Iraq veterans I work with got paid when they were over there for far more dangerous work. The military claims that this indicates they are saving money, and that the plan to save even more money by consolidating two of the current Green Zone contracts into one, reducing the monthly cost from $18 million to $11 million. One of the companies lost in the first round of bidding and has twice held up the contract award (and the savings) by filing protest lawsuits against the government (costing more money just for the suit, and also because the DoD had to re-eliminate that company). Where are the Republicans who are supposed to be out howling that these people are aiding and abetting the enemy? Spending campaign contributions?

The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, reported earlier this month that the Defense Dept. has recovered about $2 billion since 2001 from all outside contractors and government procurement officials accused of dishonesty or mismanagement, but the GAO didn't isolate those working in Iraq.

Is your guess that comes curtosy of DailyKos? Oh no- that's BusinessWeek. A year ago. Best known for the deaths of four of it's wayward employees in Fallujah, Blackwater employes about 1,000 in Iraq for $800 million in government contracts. Do 1,000 soldiers cost $800 million? $800 million of your taxpayer dollars of course, as Iraq oil production remains below pre-2003 invasion levels. To buy what, exactly?

Months ago, Bush's administration initiated and then ceased a failed attempt to increase border security by merely requiring everyone who flies into the country to have a valid passport. The core of the administration's failure remains that it created an unfunded mandate, by coming up with a simple idea and then refusing to hire the needed government employees. Imagine what all that fraud would have bought in military terms for our troops in Iraq. Just look to Bush's latest immigration idea, unfunded soundbite mandates to be paid for by small businesses, at least until they figure out that none of it comes with oh... only border agents to enfore the new rules. Who ah.. stay on the border. Get the picture? Perhaps key to a great deal of this administration's failures has been the overwhelming value it places on campaign contributors and the golden calf of small government, and how much it undervalues those patriots who raise their hand and swear to sweat for their country for peanuts.

Coulter Raises Money for Liberals

2007-06-28T15:17:00.000-07:00

So moonbat made her first donation for the 2008 Presidential campaign in the middle of a lightening storm as deer stampeded by in a panic. Literally. As thunderstorm warnings flashed across the bottom of the television program about bad weather devestating American cities, a text message popped up on my cell phone reading: "Elizabeth Edwards took on Ann Coulter on Hardball. Hear it Now! So I texted the code back and listened to Coulter get told she's no kind of role model for kids who want to get involved in politics. True enough. Even my conservative friends consider her one of those groomed barking dogs people carry around in a gaudy purse. Of course, poison still kills even though her words taste bad for the hate. What kills are all the lies.

Look here one the fact-check verdict on Slander: Liberal Lies about the American Right, and right here for another one and another. Verdict's not good. Even the Columbia Journalism Review finds it hard too choke down her level of "accuracy." Spinsainity takes apart both Slander and a following book, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Even Time Magazine's lukewarm attempt to save itself from the fires by defending her as intelligently inspired falls flat. One lie in Slander takes the cake: Coulter claims that the New York Times failed to cover the tragic death of Dale Earnhardt at a Sunday race due to liberal bias for two days, when they ran a front page story on his death the very next day. The story Coulter then quotes completely misrepresents the heartfelt tribute of southern-born Rick Bragg as being a contemptuous sneer by a northern liberal. Lie by ommission and flat out lie.

I must confess most conservatives I talk to have too many braincells to have ever bought and read one of Coulter's books, but those I know who do tend to be young, can't remember much of what she wrote, and tend to me more affected by her ability to be skinny. Real skinny. Really really really... Anyway, they tend to not be the sort who look at her footnotes in order to figure out that ah... she lies. A lot. Most of the time. And their infatuation remains the very problem of the publishing industry and late night talk shows giving her a podium when they know she's an intellectual fraud, the ultimate dumb blonde. Because they then love us despite what she tells them to believe, rendering them unable to see us as moral creatures. And that is the first step by which liberals are dehumanized by a shrill-barking blonde.

Technorati Tags:
John Edwards, Elizabeth Edwards, Ann Coulter, liberal, conservative, moonbat, lies, slander, treason, plagerism, Dale Earnhardt, New York Times, journalism, politics, war

Military Draws Iron Veil Over Combat in Iraq

2007-05-14T19:24:00.000-07:00

So today the Pentagon pulled the plug on soldiers posting hand cam shots of combat in Iraq by using free access through Defense Department computers. If soldiers find the cash to shill out, they can continue to upload through private Internet cafes. For as long as they remain open on military bases, one imagines. However, access to such cafes remains limited to the large forward operating bases, the very ones that the new new new new newest strategy seeks to disband, for bases much smaller and Internet-free. American soldiers in Iraq are banned from youtube.com, pandora.com, photobucket.com, myspace.com, live365.com, hi5.com, metacafe.com, mtv.com, ifilm.com, blackplanet.com, stupidvideos.com and filecabi.com.

Officials claim the measure is necessary because even in the fifth year of occupation, the American military's Internet access still sucks, and that it's in no way a massive block of footage that shows that anything in Iraq sucks. Meanwhile, the Defense Department plans to continue to upload it's own footage onto those sites showing more a positive "boots on the ground" perspective.

Stars and Stripes runs the WaPost story as "Pentagon limits troops' web access" at the top of its news cycle, and at the bottom the story "soldiers face punishment over blogs."

"Soldiers will be punished if they publicly reveal sensitive information, such as troop movements, planned raids, travel itineraries of senior leaders, or photographs of casualties, new technology or other material that could compromise their location."

Also running is a news story on a new incentives program to try to get officers to not get the hell out. One imagines there are no plans to throw in free Dells with free wireless access.

Everyone's scrambling to spin the story, but a soldier's perspective cuts the cake. Noted down as horrendous sensationalism are mere lines reporting the measure at all, and the AP gets denounced for hiding all the relevant facts of the story by using the means of actually reporting them. No one believes anything they read in the MSM because of all that liberal bias, so of course the most diabolical way to hide the facts are to actually report them. Then the AP is slammed because there is no possible way to report all the facts in the same sentence at once, and so merely having to report any one fact before any other fact is liberal bias.

Human speech is liberal bias, and it's all the AP's fault. Why don't they teach these things in school eh? Speaking of school, take your average public college, thousands of students in dormitories, and the ability to handle all those social lives and JSTOR at the same time. Ah the wonder of the modern information age.

Perhaps the military's new motto really is "what happens in Iraq, stays in Iraq."

Technorati Tags:
Iraq, internet, war, war on terror, global jihad, troop surge, pentagon, military, youtube

Circuit City Fires Good Workers, Goes to NASCAR

2007-05-05T18:28:00.000-07:00

So today moonbat joins a boycott of a store she's too poor on a federal employee's salary to shop at: Circuit City, which fired 3,400 higher salaried customer service employees to hire zero-experience lowballs. Circuit City thinks it deserves a pass because it learned something from the AttorneyGate and was honest about the firings, and didn't try to say they were all canned because they had poor performance. Of course, that means they were fired for the opposite... being good, hard-working and loyal employees who had earned raises over their years at the company. Which of course means that to survive in retail, we must instill in our children the virtues of laziness, dishonesty and insolence. Customers report whether they have joined the small boycott or not, but no where in the whole story do the executives say, look, we know things are bad and we took a paycut to make it a universal burden. Nope.

Not to say that heads haven't rolled... or fled the axe, which ever may yet prove the case. Chief Financial Officer Michael Foss bailed for PETCO on Feb. 23, only 15 days after Circuit City announced that it would be depending on him to "work on improving productivity and identifying new growth opportunities" as part of their restructuring plan that closed 70 stores in Canada. Feb.8th also saw the announcement that Chief Merchandising Officer Douglas Moore had left after 17 years, a development seen by a Goldman Sachs analyst as the "least favorable development" since the company's recent turnaround had shown promise. Circuit City expects $85 million to $105 million in expenses from store closings, including about $40 to $60 in "goodwill impairment." Circuit City expects that firing these proven 3,400 employees for "discount versions" will save an estimated $110 million by the end of fiscal year 2008. Meanwhile, Circuit City spent an undisclosed ammount of money sponsoring NASCAR races this last Friday. At which, no doubt, company executives who live in Virginia, had a good time.

Technorati Tags:
economics, liberal, conservative, retail, working poor, canada

Texas Republican Hides 'Stench' Behind Patriotism

2007-05-03T23:00:00.000-07:00

Moonbat enjoyed having voted for Steny Hoyer last fall, especially since he gave a royal thrashing to Texas Republican Lamar Smith, that aired this morning on CSPAN. Sweet!! At contention was Hate Crimes Bill 1592, which would "provide Federal assistance to States, local jurisdictions, and Indian tribes to prosecute hate crimes." Lamar Smith expounded at length that we as a society should expand the hate crimes bill to protect current and former members of the military, and when given the opportunity to have that ammendment added, objected to his own ammendment, my beloved southern gentleman took that skinny stick of a man out in front of the podium and the cameras and turned his good name into ground chuck roast. Out of the Judiciary Committee went 1592, on to passage through the work of 212 fine-looking Democrats. Do Hoyer proud and go visit these 14 Cowards about their likewise "stench." Oh Hoyer, if only you were a few years younger.

The New Republic runs down why the Republican Party's so-called "objections" to the bill don't hold water:

Christian Right groups claim that the bill will prevent Tony Perkins from gay-bashing every Sunday. That's doubtful. The National Review argues that "[T]here is no evidence that local law enforcement has a special need for federal resources to help it combat hate crimes." That's not true. Republicans complain that the bill wouldn't protect senior citizens and members of the military. But when John Conyers offered to add those protections to the bill, the GOP refused. NR, again, says that it could "open the door to legal punishment for harboring incorrect thoughts." That doesn't seem right, either: The bill pretty clearly states that a defendant's past statements or associations can't be used as evidence unless they "specifically relate to the offense."

Also noted that it's unsurprising Bush threatens a veto, given he believes hate crimes don't exist.

A curious conservative reaction, found via the American Renissance newsfeed. The AP story in snippets and then come the comments: "The real reason for “hate crimes” laws are to take white people’s ability to organize away from them. If white people can no longer even discuss, the effect that non-white’s have on their communities, then their ability to organize politically will no longer exist. Also, if a white person has to think twice about defending him/herself from a non-white on the street, this will keep white people in a state of fear, that will make them very easy to manage politically." {Some advice on how to prove a Jew is faking a hate crime.} How can this nation ever identify itself and fair when it singles out specific people for special protection? I get more and more disgusted by these politicians every day. I find myself starting to agree more and more with this nation’s enemies. Did I read that? "Hate Crime Bills" increase recruitment for Al-Qaeda? And I thought I had read it all.

Technorati Tags:
Steny Hoyer, Lamar Smith, liberal, conservative, congress, hate crimes, racism, feminism

Lessons of the Matrix for "the War on Terror"

2007-05-02T14:50:00.000-07:00

So today moonbat shall expound on how Osama bin Laden uses The Matrix (1999) to plot his global jihad and recruit otherwise luckless young people to go blow themselves to pieces in foreign countries. You see, it's one thing to declare war on the United States, fast food and the Jerry Springer Show, and quite another to have a clue. Now, OBL got schooled in the usual Saudi customs and road construction, yet neither provide a road map for how to organize a global network of terror without potential recruits laughing in your face and going back to the Arab version of moonshine. And then OBL got his lucky break: a movie came out in America. A movie about a young man waking up to the corrupt system that keeps his true nature a prisoner and the soulless machines whose power must be challenged and whose citadels can be destroyed. That evil liberal Hollywood; don't those directors ever think about how their movies could be emboldening the enemy? So OBL hops on Ebay and snags a pirated copy from a Chinese seller, leaves some positive feedback and an exhortation to read the Koran, and throws a bag of black market Pop-Secret popcorn in the microwave. And Morpheus expounds to him all the secrets of how to recruit idiot young men:

The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it....What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad... What is the Matrix? Control.

If there's anything young people want it's to be the ones in control, to be outside the system, to be above the powers that be. And all that Morpheus tells Neo, all that he promises Neo he will become if he swallows the Red Pill, that my dear readers, that's what OBL tells his recruits into Al-Q. Step outside the system, your actions are for a higher cause, accept no boundaries and no limitations, you will find glory. Of course, not everyone can be the chosen one, even if you tell everyone that they will be the chosen one. Running a terrorist cell in a Western Country, staying under the radar, and reaching your target do take at least a few braincells, and not all your "Neos" have enough to suffice? So you have to get rid of them, and what better form of euthanasia than someone else's occupation? Like... an occupation by a certain Western Country in an Arab land. Iraq. You hardly need persuade your not-quite graduates to the worthiness of their target, since from a distance everything American looks the same.

Moonbat found cause to desire pills for several hours herself today, listening to the debate on the floor of the House in Congress. Republicans denied funding for the troops, of course. Republican after Republican took to the floor, not to admit that 4 previous surges have failed, not to admit that they spent years hiding the total cost of the Iraq War in six other supplemental funding bills, but to insist they were right about investing in an endless war for the mere sake that such a pursuit is fundamental to being American. Meanwhile, the total cost of the Iraq War soon shall surpass $500 billion. Calculate out how many millions and hour that is. And how much did moonbat contribute in taxes for 2007? $3,900. Did moonbat literally pay for a nanosecond of our occupation in Iraq? For the dry erase markers used by defense contractors to teach Iraqi Security Forces to yell "Drop your weapons!!" .. in English? If I insist I would rather have paid for something besides dry erase, of course, that would be emboldening the enemy. Not that they don't laugh about dry erase markers already...

Back to the Matrix. So OBL got the point clean off, that the heart of the movement should have an ethereal city away from the war with the "West" and should strike by slipping in and out of the false world, removing recruits and eliminating targets. Show recruits that the false world can be used to defeat it's own masters, and that by having secret knowledge and faith, an individual could become stronger than the weapons of war, and transcend them, even if only in death. The glamorous image of the warrior that the villains fail to see, touch or stop, destroying even those central artifices of power which reason holds as impenetrable. Shut down the system built to ignore you and your anger at it, again and again and again.

Of course "Zion" is not Iraq. The point of having a "Zion" is so that no matter where you fight you cannot be defeated, your source of fighters will not be lost, your flag is never in jeopardy. Yet out on that House floor, the Republican Party tried to cling to a world without computers, a world without cellphones, a world without globalization. A world where war is a seige of a castle, or a capital, or a country. And as always, appearances for appearances sake. The pure wish that if everything looks good, then everything is good. That the presence of American troops on every street corner in Iraq stops training camps from being set up in Pakistan-when it does not. That the existence of the Green Zone prevents Islamic extremists from a hostile takeover of other countries- when it did not. Republicans hiss and spit over Beruit and Somalia, and neglect to mention that when al-Q assisted the radical Islamic takeover of Somalia last year... the Republicans left that to Ethiopia. Oh yes, but we can't have a second Somalia, they plead. Don't they mean a third?

So long as we humor Bush and his elephant friends by calling this a "war on terror," the longer we remain caught in that loosing equation of energy expenditures that Morphous demonstrated to Neo: takes twice as much energy to swing and miss, as it does to swing and hit. No matter how many "Al-Qaeda operatives" go down in Iraq, the West always misses Al-Q. Anytime Al-Q carries out a terrorist attack on a Western target, they strike us. How can they loose? As long as you can't hit Morpheus, and he can hit you, he always wins. And instead of seeing this, the Republicans lower their heads and flail away at a target that remains always out of reach, only to get blind-sided time and again. Four other times, four other surges, all promised to work. Meanwhile, the monstrous appeal of being at war against an evil enemy keeps debate over not getting our fanny whomped time and again constrained to the classical idea of war: battlefields, generals, tanks, soldiers. But like Morpheus, OBL pursues targets not in the "desert of the real," but in the false cities of the Matrix, in the West.

Democrats like the shine of the term "war on terror," that much is true. Obama and Clinton remain on very romantic terms with GWOT, and so far, only Edwards perceives the relationship might be a little.. limiting. "I also think it suggests that there's a fixed enemy that we can defeat with just a military campaign. I just don't think that's true." Not true in Britain, where investigative work uncovered and stopped a 2003 Al-Q bombing plot and just netted 5 life imprisonments. No weapons of mass destruction were found, however, just plant food. Such a point finds itself hard to be understood. Democrats everywhere who seek to broaden efforts to combat international terrorist networks will be accused of trying to abandon the use of military force and being irresponsible. And people do understand what our "war on terror" means; it's something for which no one has to be responsible. A broad catch-phrase for whatever your chosen politician advocates, from sound environmental policies to the highway robbery that gets itself called cost-plus defense contracting. Want funding? It's for the "war on terror." Don't support tax cuts for the rich? By golly- you must be one of those terrorists!!

War remains the ultimate defense, even ones of last resort and even pre-emptive ones. You find war an appealing choice because you were lazy or too proud to deal with the five thousand things that led up to the war itself. You never will hear conservatives admit they should have listened when liberal American call for intervention in Afghanistan and the ousting of the Taliban... in 1997. Never. You will hear continued Republican refusal to intervene in Darfur (including Bush's "I really mean I might think about doing something about you" speech to Sudan) used by the Republicans to support as many surges as it takes to surpress an insurgency in a country where everyone and his brother has a weapons cache. From old Iraqi Army munitions depos. Which Bush and his cronies failed to secure. Too busy printing up that "Mission Accomplished" banner, eh? As long as we see this only as a war, all we focus on as a nation is the art of war. Not homeland security, not airline security, not international security. Not the black market, not passports and visas, not how much plant food Muhammad is buying on Aisle 5. Not of course, all the future Timothy McVeighs out there either. But I digress.

Giuliani's idea that a Democratic President would mean a return to pre-9/11 mentalities on the reach of global jihad is more than "plain wrong" as Edwards replied, it's plain hysteria. Guiliani remains the kind of politician who believes there are no cockroaches if you stamp on all the ones you see. That sort of mentality leads to the idea that if you make war on the Al-Qaeda network you can see, there is no other network in the world. While the U.S. made war on Al-Q in Afghanistan, and later after the fall of Saddam and the entry of Grand Viceroy Bremer, in Iraq, Al-Qaeda merrily trained the bombers of the "Operation Crevice" intercepted 2003 plot and the successful 2005 "7/7" bombing of our allies, in London. Two years of occupying Iraq failed to prevent, by some form of magic, the ability of Al-Qaeda to target and strike a Western City. Perhaps that is why the Republican Party stood up on the floor of Congress today and declared that "Europe was lost."

Moonbat gets it. Iraq we can't loose, but our Allies can fall to the enemy. What does a dusty little desert country have that our time-honored and true Allies don't? Oh wait, we didn't go into Iraq for oil. So it must be goat meat!!

Whatever we are there for, the pentagon has made a few moves to keep America from ever ever knowing. Opinions about
the surge perhaps:

Rajiv Chandrasekaran: Based on what I read and the soldiers with whom I communicate, it's my view that military personnel in Iraq are deeply divided over whether the "surge" will work. There seems to be far more support among officers, even junior officers, than there is among enlisted personnel. That may well be because enlisted personnel are often the ones at the greatest risk over there because they are the ones running convoys, going on patrols, etc. They also are able to see how Iraqis on the street level relate to them and whether the presence of additional U.S. forces is changing Iraqi attitudes.

The reporter in question would be the author of "Imperial Life in the Emerald City." Reporters may soon be our only source of info out of Iraq, whatever your stripe, besides the rare Iraqi blogger. On April 19th the U.S. Army issued a directive prohibiting all unauthorized blogging or personal e-mail, including one imagines, anything criticizing your CO or anything NC-17 for the wife.

Army Regulation 530--1: Operations Security (OPSEC) (.pdf) restricts more than just blogs, however. Previous editions of the rules asked Army personnel to "consult with their immediate supervisor" before posting a document "that might contain sensitive and/or critical information in a public forum." The new version, in contrast, requires "an OPSEC review prior to publishing" anything -- from "web log (blog) postings" to comments on Internet message boards, from resumes to letters home.

No resumes? No Monster.com? A ploy to increase retention, by limiting job-hunting? Not all bloggers always went unscathed before, though now anyone seems fair game for telling the truth. Of course, while this may be the final nail in the coffin for combat blogging, there's little talk about this "emboldening the enemy." Only that it would cut down on PR for the U.S. military, keep the real glory of war and the success stories from getting through the MSM and countering the bleak accounts given by the anti-war crowd of misery and death. Of course, all of OBL's little Neos won't be fooled into thinking that just because they've gone silent, there's been a withdrawal of the American military....

Neo: I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid... afraid of us. You're afraid of change. I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell how it's going to begin. I'm going to hang up this phone, and then show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world without you. A world without rules or controls, borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you.

Technorati Tags:
Bush, Iraq, troop surge, war, war on terror, global jihad, matrix, osama bin laden, afghanistan, homeland security

Counterinsurgency in the American Military

2007-04-27T22:06:00.000-07:00

So fine the line between bravery and domestic counterinsurgency when one ventures an opinion on the American military's conduct in Iraq. Especially if you accuse your boss generals of 'intellectual and moral failures.' Yet, a young and snappy Lt. Col. Paul "Beergoggles" Yingling roars to the world about 'a failure in generalship' in the American Forces Journal. "Beergoggles" fails to be uncivilized enough to name names, so the gossip's pretty mild, and well-warmed over by several New-York Times Bestsellers. Yingling snarks at these "tell-all books" where generals speak of private concerns they failed to speak of publically before the invasion. The author of one of the said tell-alls, Thomas Ricks of 'Fiasco', wrote the glowing WaPost coverage of Yingling's expose. The main of the Lt. Col.'s beef begins:

"For the second time in a generation, the United States faces the prospect of defeat at the hands of an insurgency. In April 1975, the U.S. fled the Republic of Vietnam, abandoning our allies to their fate at the hands of North Vietnamese communists. In 2007, Iraq's grave and deteriorating condition offers diminishing hope for an American victory and portends risk of an even wider and more destructive regional war.

These debacles are not attributable to individual failures, but rather to a crisis in an entire institution: America's general officer corps. America's generals have failed to prepare our armed forces for war and advise civilian authorities on the application of force to achieve the aims of policy. The argument that follows consists of three elements. First, generals have a responsibility to society to provide policymakers with a correct estimate of strategic probabilities. Second, America's generals in Vietnam and Iraq failed to perform this responsibility. Third, remedying the crisis in American generalship requires the intervention of Congress."

Does it surprise you to learn that Yingling graduated from the University of Chicago with a Master of Arts in Political Science?

....After failing to visualize the conditions of combat in Iraq, America's generals failed to adapt to the demands of counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency theory prescribes providing continuous security to the population. However, for most of the war American forces in Iraq have been concentrated on large forward-operating bases, isolated from the Iraqi people and focused on capturing or killing insurgents. Counterinsurgency theory requires strengthening the capability of host-nation institutions to provide security and other essential services to the population. America's generals treated efforts to create transition teams to develop local security forces and provincial reconstruction teams to improve essential services as afterthoughts, never providing the quantity or quality of personnel necessary for success....

"....The need for intelligent, creative and courageous general officers is self-evident. An understanding of the larger aspects of war is essential to great generalship. However, a survey of Army three- and four-star generals shows that only 25 percent hold advanced degrees from civilian institutions in the social sciences or humanities. Counterinsurgency theory holds that proficiency in foreign languages is essential to success, yet only one in four of the Army's senior generals speaks another language. While the physical courage of America's generals is not in doubt, there is less certainty regarding their moral courage. In almost surreal language, professional military men blame their recent lack of candor on the intimidating management style of their civilian masters. Now that the public is immediately concerned with the crisis in Iraq, some of our generals are finding their voices. They may have waited too long."

Yingling plugs "Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife" by one John Nagl and On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War," by Col. Harry Summers. In November of 2006, Yingling cowrote with Nagl an essay New Rules for New Enemies in... Armed Forces Journal. Within they argue:

"To win the Long War, the Army must develop a more adaptive organizational culture. To create such a culture, the Army must change its focus from a centralized, specialized focus on major conventional wars to a more decentralized and less specialized focus on full-spectrum operations. This shift in organizational culture cannot occur within existing organizations — indeed these organizations can be an impediment to change. The best way to change the organizational culture of the Army is to change the pathways for professional advancement within the officer corps. The Army will become more adaptive only when being adaptive offers the surest path to promotion."

Moonbat thinks Beergoggles wants a promotion, eh? John Nagl was on the writing team that produced the Army's new Counterinsurgency Field Manual. Who also wrote that? Petraeus!! Who got a Teddy Award from Time Magazine last December for his leadership in encouraging institutional change in the Army towards effective counterinsurgency tactics at the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center (CAC) in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Guess who also spent that year assigned to Fort Leavenworth? "Beergoggles!!" Who in turn got interviewed by the Combat Studies Institute, a military think tank run by Petraeus' CAC. {The CSI gets described as an 'academic department' of the CAC by this private contractor, who creates "virtual staff tours" to help train officers about Iraq, but I digress.} Oh, Yingling's 2006 interview:

"The thing the Army institutionally is still struggling to learn is that the most important thing we do in counterinsurgency is building host nation institutions-building security forces, building local government capacity- and yet all our organizations are designed around thelear important line of operations: combat operations. There is a real danger in over-determination based on the organization's design. There's the old saying, "If you give a man a hammer, he sees every problem as a nail." Similarly, if you give a unit tanks and Bradleys, they see every promblem as a movement to contact. That's an oversimplification, but it is a problem. I've now had two combat tours where I was involved in developing ISF and I've been to every Army school you can go to as an officer, and no one has ever talked to me about that challenge. No one has ever given me classes on how to do that...

....The institutional Army.. has not caught up in either professional education or organizational design with the challenges of counterinsurgency. So as I go into battalion command, I'm going to focus my troops on those tasks and give them the mental models that will allow them to anticipate those problems and solve them. (That he has just learned from... Petraeus. You guessed it!) Eventually the institutional Army will catch up and they'll get that stuff into schools and there will be MTOE positions for security force development and civil-military operations; but until that day I think individual commanders will have to solve that problem on their own, because when we get into theater we certainly have to solve it...

...I do think that having organic to our institutions the ability to develop intelligence- to collect on our friends, if you will; to be able to find our friends- is extremely important. Because once you find your friends, finding the enemy is very easy. In a city of 200,000, there are people who know who's complicit with the insurgency. So I guess if I had to condense this into a pithy little bullet it would be: don't train on finding the enemy; train on finding your friends and they will help you find your enemy."

WaPost's Thomas Ricks, author of Fiasco and Yingling's shining write-up for his expose, interveiwed Yingling on this very subject, later in November of 2006, Flaws Cited in Efforts to Train Iraqi Forces: where Yingling again gets a chance to showcase how much he has learned at Fort Leavenworth.

"Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, a staff officer with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Iraq in 2005 and 2006 who worked with Iraqi units, came away thinking that the Army fundamentally is not geared to the task of helping the advisory effort.

"The thing the Army institutionally is still struggling to learn is that the most important thing we do in counterinsurgency is building host-nation institutions," he told the interviewers, "yet all our organizations are designed around the least important line of operations: combat operations."

Yingling came to a broader conclusion. He recommended an entirely different orientation in Iraq, both for trainers and for regular U.S. units. "Don't train on finding the enemy," he said. "Train on finding your friends, and they will help you find your enemy. . . . Once you find your friends, finding the enemy is easy."

SmallWarsJournal blogged to promote Yingling's expose, stating that "In this morning’s Washington Post Tom Ricks reports on an Armed Forces Journal article that should be required reading for anyone who cares about our nation’s capability to successfully prosecute the LONG WAR." Their About page states that Small Wars Journal is a private site. It is run by Small Wars Journal, LLC, a private company formed in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Its principals are Dave Dilegge (Editor-in-Chief) and Bill Nagle (Publisher). SWJ in turn gets listed as an item of particular interest on the official Marine website, Small Wars Center of Excellence. But that probably has nothing to do with Petraeus helping the Marines with their own version of a counterinsurgency manual. Surprising the flack Yingling's getting from con-bloggers of all stripes, eh?

Yingling popped up in The Wall Street Journal's December 2006 article Despite $168B Budget, Army Still Faces Cash Crunch:

"At Fort Hood, the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, which returned from Iraq in March and will go back in fall 2007, is already worried about time to prepare. The regiment will spend most of the winter receiving new soldiers, fielding new equipment and learning to use it. The regiment left most of its tanks and Humvees in Iraq for follow-on units.

That means troops won't have much time to train for other critical tasks. Junior leaders need to know everything from how to assess a water plant to the tribal politics of the area where they are deploying, says Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, the unit's deputy commander. They must know enough Arabic to interact with locals.

"It is incredibly frustrating for combat veterans to return to Iraq for the third time with only minimal training on the skills we know are essential, like language, culture, intelligence and local security force development" Col. Yingling says. "Army units don't fail to train on these tasks because we're stupid or lazy; we fail because we don't have the time to do it right"."

An article in which we hear something familiar:

"Junior officers know that success in these wars is about a lot more than killing the enemy. It depends on providing security for the people, finding friends and fixing infrastructure," says Maj. John Prior, who served as a company commander in Baghdad. "A lot of senior officers just don't get it."

And again Yingling (as in Rick's Nov. 2006) gets tapped for the last say:

Some question how quickly the Army will be able to shift its thinking. "All our organizations are designed around the least important line of operations in these fights -- combat operations," says Col. Yingling. "If you spend your whole career in tanks, you tend to see the solution to every problem as a tank."

Yingling cut his teeth on counterinsurgency PR way back in 2004, in an official Army article called Training the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps. Here with Julian Urquidez, Yingling presents an 8-step training program for Iraqis, which they developed and implemented in Iraq. {I digress again: Julian Urquidez ran the 'Honolulu Marathon in Iraq' this year in 4:05:16. Useless trivia, hooray!} Yingling's been working on his counterinsurgency credentials for far too long not to be getting any credit. What do I mean?

Paul Yingling's Wikipedia entry currently stands in stunning dissarray, containing factual errors and conservative bias as regards Yingling's supposed political opinions on continued U.S. involvement in Iraq: assumed as against. In Paul Yingling's "Also See" section, a link exists to Ehren Watada, who is "also against the Iraq War" and to Ann Wright, who is incorrectly described as having resigned from the U.S. Army in protest of the invasion of Iraq. No external links exist to any military writings of Yingling's other than his current expose. The Masters in Political Science mentioned; not mentioned would be his education at the Command and General Staff College and the School of Advanced Military Studies... at the same time as General Petraeus resided there, expounding about the neccessity of counterinsurgency training and institutional change in the Army. Not mentioned also: Tal Afar. Yingling gets quoted in March 2007 for his part in the successful elimination of the insurgency in Tal Afar, just before he publishes his expose. Someone passed his number on to the reporter. President Bush praised Yingling for his conduct in Tal Afar. Of course, who listens to Bush. Heh.

Now moonbat ponders the worth of Yingling's counterinsurgency operations. Hook himself to Petraeus' rising star and if Petraeus shines in Iraq and continues up that ladder of promotions, so will "Beergoggles." Inch too far out, and those boss generals who Petraeus stands to dethrone use you for target practice. Work this spin wrong, and have your name tarnished too much for future quotations for journalists. Will this growing domestic counterinsurgency succeed or will the old Army regime remain dominant over it's military institutions. Bush promises by the Fall we will know which side shall fall.

Technorati Tags:
war on terror, Iraq, Petraeus, Paul Yingling, troop surge, Bush, Wikipedia, conservative, liberal, counterinsurgency, Combat Studies Institute, american military, moonbat

Let's Withdraw From Iraq Down to Real Soldiers

2007-04-15T21:24:00.000-07:00

So today someone actually struck up a political conversation with your favorite moonbat. At work. This may be a first. And it was even international politics, even if it was just about Iraq. Now I live in a Democratic state where it's a rare Republican who supports the troop surge with any language stronger than "can we please not talk about politics today?" So it's no big surprise that the Iraq veterans I work with are.. gasp... Democrats and think withdrawal is spot on. One of them felt like venting a bit, at length, about an article which otherwise would have gone unnoticed, about those American mercenaries- oh sorry, private security contractors, in Iraq. There's nothing that annoyed my veteran friend than the subject of someone who got paid about 100% more than himself with his own tax dollars, payable today, April 15th.

And you know, my good veteran has a point. How have we gotten to the point in our love affair with all things privately contracted that Rambo gets paid more than GI Joe when they ride on the same convoy and guard the same checkpoint? How have we gotten to the point when we think all of these mercenaries are free, and accept that so many of our soldiers are on food stamps? For those who snarl that people spit on soldiers, isn't this ... worse? Here you have guys getting paid $600 a day to drive around as guards, even for Bremer himself, and my good veteran doesn't make enough in the reserves to keep his cellphone turned on 6 months out of twelve. Isn't how much you value a soldier measured by how much you value his service on payday? Or just parade day?

Moonbat became highly irked with Petraeus over this particular issue given that he likes mercenaries even when they are 'compromised.'

"Beyond that, tens of thousands of ministry security forces and tens of thousands of civilian (often third country) contracted guard forces protect key sites in Baghdad (including, for example, the US Embassy, MNSTC-I HQs, the Ministry of Oil, etc.) that MNF-I and the Iraqi government would otherwise have to detail soldiers or police to protect. These forces, again, number in the tens of thousands – and although by no means all are of high capability and some are undoubtedly compromised, they do secure hundreds of sites that otherwise would require coalition or Iraqi military or police forces."

Why does that make accountability sound like an accounting hat-trick?

How about we add a string to this supplemental bill to withdraw foreign mercenaries from Iraq- especially if they happen to be American or be employed by America. And oh we have them there and we have almost no control:

"In November of 2005 a disgruntled Aegis ex-employee posted a so-called "trophy video" on the Internet depicting Aegis contractors—Tim Spicer's men—shooting at Iraqis in civilian cars. In one sequence, the Aegis team opens fire with an automatic weapon at an approaching silver Mercedes. The Mercedes rams a taxi, sending the taxi's occupants running. In another sequence, an Aegis employee fires at a white sedan, running it off the road. Elvis Presley's "Mystery Train" provides the soundtrack. Aegis subsequently conducted an investigation and concluded that the actions represented "legitimate operations" undertaken in compliance with the rules of engagement. Aegis argued further that the video was "taken out of context" and noted that there was no evidence that civilians had been killed. The Pentagon looked into the video and declined to take further steps.

According to a February 2006 Government Accountability Office report, there were approximately 48,000 private military contractors in Iraq, employed by 181 different companies. There may now be many more. These are the kinds of people Tim Spicer and Aegis are supposed to coordinate. The bulk of the military contractors are American and British, with a sprinkling of other nationalities. Formal oversight is lax, to put it mildly. Many are retired from elite units such as the British Special Air Service or the U.S. Special Forces. According to a report in The Economist, a former British official who now heads a trade association for private military companies estimates that mercenaries are Britain's largest export to Iraq. Not food, medicine, or construction material—mercenaries."

So it's remarkably idiocy for the spokesman for the United States Central Command to reply to the armed joyrides of our mercenaries, saying "This is not a Centcom issue. It's whoever was running that contract. We're fighting a war here." Did someone spend too much time watching March Madness and miss that we have a new strategy in Iraq?? Time to withdraw the mercenaries from Iraq, and make a lot of soldiers happy on payday. Too bad Bush and his cronies would rather enrich their friends than actually support our troops.

Technorati Tags:
Iraq, troop surge, Bush, Middle East, liberal, conservative, democrat, republican, war on terror, Iraq War

McCain Takes Photos, Leaves Bloodshed In Iraq

2007-04-05T07:07:00.000-07:00

So just a few merry months ago everyone figured McCain the front runner for the Republican ticket in 2008. Till he took a little saunter in a market in Baghdad to try to fake progress in the troop surge in Iraq. McCain held a photo-op in which he mishandled the press and dodged questions on a possible invasion of Iran. McCain smiled big for the American audience and said, "things are getting better in Iraq." The next day, 21 Shia market-workers from that same market were kidnapped, tortured and murdered by Sunni insurgents provoked by his little stunt. Snipers also made an appearance to show how impressed they were with this particular candidate. McCain's definition of "improvement" entails a whole 4% drop in civilian deaths, although the insurgents should feel free to kill as many Iraqi police as they desire. America surely can find a military contractor somewhere to train more.

McCain lies about these very numbers in a conference call with con-bloggers. "One of the key elements which has given us dramatic hope is the amount of dead bodies they’re finding in the streets each morning. It’s down from 100 to as much as about 20 each day. That’s still horrible, but it’s a sign of progress." McCain also remarks on the Democratic Congress's push for a withdrawal date, that "if they want to cut off funding - fine!"

McCain defended his shopping trip with Petraeus in an op-ed to the WaPo:

"For the first time, our delegation was able to drive, not use helicopters, from the airport to downtown Baghdad.....Today the market still faces occasional sniper attacks, but it is safer than it used to be. One innovation of the new strategy is closing markets to vehicles, thereby precluding car bombs that kill so many and garner so much media attention....The new political-military strategy is beginning to show results. But most Americans are not aware because much of the media are not reporting it or devote far more attention to car bombs and mortar attacks that reveal little about the strategic direction of the war. I am not saying that bad news should not be reported or that horrific terrorist attacks are not newsworthy. But news coverage should also include evidence of progress....This is not a moment for partisan gamesmanship or for one-sided reporting."

Ah... the old, if there isn't good news, it's because the evil liberal media oppresses the good news. No good news must be a lie. Heh. For someone who claims Americans aren't getting the full picture, funny that McCain leaves out his chaperons for the day: 100 infantry soldiers, 3 Blackhawks, 2 Apache gunships and 1 bullet-proof vest. Who can say that constitutes "walking freely" through the market with a straight face?

McCain admits that he lied to Wolf Blitzer that "General Petraeus goes out there almost every day in an unarmed Humvee" after he himself tooled around Baghdad in Petraeus' armored Humvees. McCain remarks that obviously there are no unarmored Humvees, as if anyone who had believed that statement was a fool, and then absolves himself by saying: "I’m trying to make the point over and over and over again that we are making progress."

McCain then linked his presidential bid to the success of the surge strategy in Iraq. Curious. Having done so, McCain then argues for patience, as the surge will take longer than Pelosi's September 2008 end to combat funds. So McCain predicts the surge will work by October '08? November 1st, 2008? Just in time to swoop him into the White House. Now that doesn't leave much of a margin for error, and certainly, should Petraeus retire early due to stomach ulcers, McCain ends up having run for two years as the champion of failure. Nowhere will you find that McCain defines what success in Iraq will look like, aside from the complete destruction of Al-Qaeda, which can be achieved in Iraq even though the U.S. military failed in that mission in Afghanistan. Sure.

Trying to look presidential after the debacle of his press conference last week, McCain gave an extended remix of his op-ed at the VMI:

I just returned from my fifth visit to Iraq. Unlike the veterans here today, I risked nothing more threatening than a hostile press corps. And my only mission was to inform my opinions with facts. We still face many difficult challenges in Iraq. That is undeniable. But we have also made, in recent weeks, measurable progress in establishing security in Baghdad and fighting al Qaeda in Anbar province.

McCain risked nothing, because the Marines who swept the market before he arrived, and the 100 infantry soldiers in a giant ring around him, they risked it all for him. Onward. Do we really want a President who decides how the situation really is and then selects those facts that support his opinion and disregards those that do not help him out? Given that such a very mindset is regarded as how the intelligence community erroneously concluded that Saddam had WMD in the first place? Yikes. Do we want a President so openly contemptuous of the American public that he chides politicians who might "take advantage of the public’s frustration" as if we were drunk women on a date whose honor was a stake. Do we?

McCain just can't help lying again, or else he's completely off his rocker:

Before I left for Iraq, I watched with regret as the House of Representatives voted to deny our troops the support necessary to carry out their new mission.....Responsible political leaders — statesmen — do not add to the burdens our troops carry. That is what Democrats, intentionally or not, have done by failing to provide them with the resources necessary to succeed in their mission. Everyday that passes without the necessary funds appropriated to sustain our troops, our chances of success in Iraq dwindle and our military readiness declines further. We have sent the best Americans among us to fight in Iraq, at the least, we must give them the tools they need to do their job.

McCain... McCain... McCain... that would be your party that has them over there right now without the tools they need to do their job. This is an emergency supplemental spending bill, which means, it's like a moneygram to the irresponsible college kid who spent his textbook money on pizza. Yeah, Bush screwed up for 4 long years, but he was your party's candidate and you were part of the majority, and you've already wasted hundreds of billions groping around in the dark. The 2007 bill passed, and the money's there for the taking, but oh my gods... Petraeus only has a year to show us what he's got. Yeah, if he's your sunshine boy there McCain, you'd think you'd show a little love. But all Petraeus gets from McCain is doubt and backpedaling. Bush asked for one more chance. No backing out now.

Technorati Tags:
Bush, Iraq, McCain, war, Iran, war on terror, politics, 2008, republican party, democratic party

'Air Traffickers' Can Carry Cocaine, Just No Guns

2007-04-04T13:39:00.000-07:00

So today's gridlock giggle comes via a White House Press Conference where Bush floated a new anti-terrorism initiative that should please just about everybody. Passengers no longer will be screened getting onto airlines, only drug traffickers. As long as the drug traffickers don't have any weapons on them and submit to the inconvienence of a search, they can bring as much contraband as they can pack into the regulation size carry-on. Drug traffickers in turn promise to no longer use the boarder between Mexico and the real America, tropping across the lawns and flower beds of all the citizens in those border states. Together, we all is safer when we all is safer. Bush really means this:

"We do everything we can here at the homeland to protect us. That's why I've got a Homeland Security Department. That's why we are inconveniencing air traffickers, to make sure nobody is carrying weapons on airplanes. "

Bush also confesses that he's apparently lost $70 billion in the White House, which should make for a really great egg hunt this year. Said money was the bridge fund for the Iraq War passed by Congress last fall, which contained more than enough money for operations for the surge. Since Bush lost the money, and the last-quarter of the Pentagon's fiscal budget has equally vanished into thin air, that's the real reason we need that emergency supplimental funding in the first place. So with a whole lot of money still "available" on the books, no wonder Congress went home to spend Easter with their families and left Bush standing there with his hand held out like a dork. Might be that or the fact that the Republican-led Congress of 2006 took till June last year to approve the last 'emergency' supplimental funding bill. So if Democrats don't do it two months faster they are lazy pack-mules??

Truth is, Democrats are in fact lazy when you measure 2007 vintage pork with what the Republicans call PORK. The aforementioned 2006 'emergency' supplemental bill: $20 billion in Gulf Coast Hurricane Recovery, $2.3 billion for bird-flu, $2 billion to chase lettuce-pickers, and $500 million for the agri-industry. The 2005 vintage: $104 million for watershed projects (mostly Utah), $70 million to former Soviet satellites struggling to be democratic over a decade later, and a measly $24 million for the Forest Service. The real gossip to be had concerns Bush's charge that Pelosi bought votes: the $3.4 billion in the 2007 bill got inserted long before timetables and benchmarks. Democrats are apparently so lazy that people decide what their votes are going to be bought with before the Democrats figure out they need to buy votes. Hilarious. Meanwhile having gone from tens of billions in pork to a mere few billions, Pelosi has once again shown Congress how to cut a fine looking figure. Give her a show on BRAVO.

Technorati Tags:
Bush, Iraq, Congress, security, homeland security, war on terror, politics, immigration, liberal, democratic party

TalkLeft Learns to Say "Yes, Mistress!!"

2007-03-30T16:41:00.000-07:00

So today marks the day when moonbat addresses an unfortunate incident when she was addressed as "SIR." Given gender and a stunning photo of my lavish red hair, this was very wrong, wasn't it??

TalkLeft: Yes, Mistress.

Let's choose a "safe word" for today. I know, that self-described "service" for busy progressives who want their own voice heard inside the legislative and electoral progress in an age of big money... Move On.

So, why is the anti-war movement so sick at heart? Why do the turn outs to the marches and rallies still suck even after a few thousand pairs of feet are argued one way or another? 2% turnout of a city so liberal the Democratic winner of the primary for Mayor orders his stationary the next day with city funds is piss poor. Especially since the march got infusions from around the country. Where was this majority of the country that disapproves of the Iraq War and elected a Democratic Congress, and why does nobody talk about Iraq?

"Now that this atrocity has moved into its fifth year, I don't overhear any street-corner, café, or waiting-room debate about what is being done in my name and yours. Of course, the war and endless war are the main topics when I'm with my friends and fellow members of the different peace organizations....Perhaps, soon, more and more of our young will awaken, throw off that blanket of apathy, examine the crimes committed by this administration against the people of Iraq and the people of the United States, and emerge as defenders of justice who will not allow the peace baton to ever be dropped again."

But it's not the anti-war movement's fault!! Oh no. Never let that cross your mind. Despite the fact that at the Pentagon, the only way they came up with that crowd was to give microphone time to causes that had nothing to do with Iraq. Like immigrants. Save the cheap lettuce, and all, but you are standing outside the Pentagon. Despite the fact that they spent more time denouncing the crimes of the Democratic Party than they actually spent denouncing the Iraq War of the polices of Bush. Despite the fact that so many of the protesters showed up to put pressure on the elected members of their government while waving the face of Hugo Chavez. But don't say it's the anti-war movement's fault they couldn't come up with the numbers to actually surround the Pentagon.

The anti-war movement explains that the Iraq War is the liberal anti-Iraq War voting public's fault: they have an imperial mindset, the fact that a majority of Americans don't support a phased redeployment is kept from them, and they've been duped into believing that the only way they can fight injustice is to shop. You see:

Let's remember, by the way, that, unlike mainstream Democratic "withdrawal" plans, the American public is talking about actually leaving Iraq, as in that old, straightforward slogan of the Vietnam era: Out now! In other words, there is a hardly noted but growing gap -- call it, in Vietnam-era-speak, a "credibility gap" -- between the Washington consensus and what the American people believe should be done when it comes to Iraq.

What I love about the anti-war movement is the whole "planting the seeds of your own destruction part." Yes, after cutting your teeth on movements to tell a whole lot of people what they can and can't do (save the rain forest, save the whales, dolphin-free tuna, stop violence against women, yadda yadda), you are told that all your skills are imperialistic. Right. Yes, because if you follow the links the anti-war movement provides to prove that the American public no longer backs the Iraq War, you find out that the answer to the question "Which of the following comes closest to your view? The U.S. should immediately begin to withdraw all its troops from Iraq. The U.S. should withdraw all its troops from Iraq within a year. The U.S. should keep its troops in Iraq as long as is needed to turn control over to the Iraqi government." is not something the anti-war movement wants to have anyone talk about. The numbers? Oh yeah. Only 21% support an immediate withdrawal, 37% in one year, 39% to stay as long as necessary for peace, 4% unsure. RightAnd I sure have noticed all the "spend your money here" payment links at the bottom of the only anti-war emails moonbat is privileged to receive. Right.

Heh. Right. If ill people need it explained to them that it's stupid to quote sources that disprove your own agenda, then yeah, that makes you an "idiot." The cameras of FOX News and the blogs of the gung-ho are just waiting to use such idiocy to feed the process of internal sectarian strife in the land of liberal, so that all out civil war will justify their having to remain in occupation until the job is done and liberals have stopped shedding each other's blood and learned to live in peace and share their toys. And back to Iraq.

Technorati Tags:
MoveOn, TalkLeft, anti-war, Iraq, politics, liberal, conservative, Bush, moonbat

War of the Worlds v. Global War on Terror

2007-03-30T11:39:00.000-07:00

So Martians provide the best view as "completely neutral observer(s)" in deciding between Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Charles Krauthammer's blog on the question: "which is the real war?? Afghanistan remains a failed state ruled by heroin warlords riding ponies with black market weapons seven years after the U.S. dethroned the still-around-and-coming-back-in-style Taliban. Iraq remains a hotbed of Sunni insurgency and Shia paybacks, and is far and away more populated of the two. Charlie is right about one thing though... ask your Martian: Which is the more important battle? He would not even understand why you are asking the question. Iraq certain has more blood-bags per acre and it's a hell of a lot easier to bury your spaceships under the sand for a millennium of waiting to arise and chow down. Cheery.

So let's not ask then. That leaves us with the question as to why Afghanistan remains more important in the conflict of ending Al-Q style operations. Afghanistan... Al-Q training camps... Propaganda aside Charlie, Al-Q isn't in the business of running states and hasn't the infrastructure to take over Iraq. Al-Q lived in Sudan and Afghanistan because they were failed states, and so there was no dominant army to feel challenged by their armed operations. Or possess the ability to evict them. "Strategic realities" point to any failed state in which Al-Q should find sanctuary and a place to train. The only "centrality" Iraq possesses is that as an unresolved and non-uniformed conflict where eager recruits either prove their merit or get turned into dogchow. Al-Q isn't in Iraq for the view.

Fast comes the accusation that liberals point to Afghanistan because they don't have the spine needed for a real fight:

It is useful to the Democrats to claim that Afghanistan is important (to Al-Qaeda) to cover themselves when the claim is made their all a bunch of wimps when it comes to fighting a war to its conclusion.

Oh yes, because... the Republicans fought the War in Afghanistan to a conclusion? Oh wait... Bush and his cohorts proved too ditsy to fight that war to it's conclusion, and NATO had to step in and prop that war up. How are things going?

A UN Security Council report released mid-March said the number of insurgency related incidents in January 2007 was double that of the same month last year.

Meanwhile, the Taliban returns to some of it's favorite government functions by hanging men accused of being NATO spies.

What lies beyond refute is that the days of the 'war on terror' are numbered. The Republicans love the line that "we fight them over there so that we won't have to fight them here" and love to smirk in front of television cameras that since we went to Iraq, there hasn't been a terrorist attack here. Does that mean if there is one, Republicans will suddenly support withdrawal? What about the two years between 9-11 and the invasion of Iraq? And why are the Republicans suddenly abandoning the international community and it's own allies in the "coalition of the willing" who have suffered Al-Q attacks despite the occupation of Iraq? Now those are some questions that beg answers. As for calling this the "war on terror:"

Democrats allegedly saw anti-terrorism as police work. The Bush administration, by contrast, would unleash the military. Lurking behind this dichotomy was the assumption that jihadist terrorists were mainly creatures of their state sponsors. If the real threat was not terrorist networks but governments, then of course war, rather than crime, was the correct prism.

We invaded Afghanistan because they were the state sponsor of Al-Q and 9-11, or as close to that definition as anyone is going to get. Of course, that gets brushed aside as soon as conservatives seek to justify the Iraq War in terms of Al-Q. This definition is indeed doomed, since one can hardly place Iraq as the state sponsor, for all that Al-Q uses it's cities and roads as one big jungle gym. So many conservatives leap to label Iran or Syria as the new state sponsor of Al-Q, despite the sheer ridiculousness that either would share power or esteem with that dirty and homeless private army.

Ever yet ditsy, the focus of the Bush Administration has drifted away from viewing the defeat of Al-Q in Iraq as the primary focus of the occupation and to preventing the ascendancy of Iran. No longer do we remain in Iraq to contain the possibility of Al-Q taking over it's oil fields, which was laughable from the start. Now the focus of the "war on terror" is poised to become a war against a natural foe of Al-Q, despite the will and growing friendship between the Tehran and the supposedly-free one in Baghdad. Sometimes democracy gives you something you don't want: the will of the majority. Time to put this so-called "war on terror" out on the curb. And trade reactionary grandizements for progressive policy. Here comes 2008.

Technorati Tags:
war on terror, Iraq, Iran, Al-Qaeda, terrorism, GWOT, Bush, democrat, liberal, conservative, Iraq War