Bush Holds Cocktail Hour to Raise War Funds

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??!!

Going Down for the War on Terror

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.

Israel Turns Back on Holocaust and God

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.

Military Draws Iron Veil Over Combat in Iraq

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."



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Let's Withdraw From Iraq Down to Real Soldiers

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.

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