Category: Iraq

There are some things one never forgets. I’ll never forget my brief encounter with torture 40 years ago. Our patrol engaged some VC hidden in a tree-line and a firefight ensued. The tree-line held a small hamlet. Predictably the village people fled in our direction. They fled because they knew their village would most likely be shelled, strafed or bombed. It was.

Our Viet counterparts detained a young lady they suspected of being a VC, a nurse they claimed. We brought her back to our dilapidated compound where they bound her, stripped off her shirt and attached wires to her nipples and proceed to use a crank operated electrical device to shock her. Needless to say it was thoroughly disgusting. Through it all she refused to talk. I admired her courage. I don’t know where they sent her but I hope she survived.

In April 2004, Americans were stunned when CBS broadcast those now-notorious photographs from Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, showing hooded Iraqis stripped naked while U.S. soldiers stood by smiling. As this scandal grabbed headlines around the globe, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld insisted that the abuses were “perpetrated by a small number of U.S. military personnel”…

Originally posted on ePluribus Media.

The inability to hold those accountable for crimes committed with regard to Iraq — illegal detainment, torture, murder — is a major loophole that must be closed.  Redefining “torture” to exclude certain activities and calling those activities “enhanced interrogation techniques” doesn’t change what it is, nor does it alleviate the guilt or responsibility of those who have assisted and participated in it.

The biggest concern of the White House and the Republicans in Congress — and, indeed, at large — is that the public will finally reject their waffling and dissembly and ultimately hold them all accountable for what evil they have wrought.

They are right to be concerned.  

This morning on NPR’s Morning Edition they had this report:

Iraq Vets Charged with Murder of Fellow Soldier

A soldier who had survived two tours in Iraq and had been sent home after suffering traumatic brain injury was murdered in December in Colorado Springs near Fort Carson, Colo. Army Spc. Kevin Shields was killed, according to police, by three fellow soldiers who had served with him in Iraq.

From our friends at the Iraq Moratorium:

It’s a week until this month’s Iraq Moratorium on Friday, February 15.

Tuesday was what they called Super-Duper Tuesday, with presidential primaries and caucuses in two dozen states. The media covered it like a cross between the Super Bowl and some half-scripted “reality show.” But no matter how the talking heads and the candidates’ staffs try to spin things in some other direction, the fact remains that for us and for tens of millions of our fellow everyday Americans, the real issue is ending the war in Iraq.

An article in the San Jose Mercury News tells the story:

WASHINGTON – The Iraq war, conventional wisdom goes, has been eclipsed as the No. 1 issue of the presidential campaign. The housing crisis, credit crunch and overall economic woes top the list of voters’ concerns, recent polls show.

“But as the war nears two grim milestones – five years since the invasion and nearly 4,000 Americans killed – the question of what to do in Iraq is never far below the surface. In California, where polls show 42 percent of Republicans and 91 percent of Democrats oppose U.S. policy in Iraq, strong anti-war sentiment gives the issue staying

power…

The candidates sometimes avoid difficult questions about Iraq. The Democrats concede the surge improved security and don’t talk much about what they would do if violence increased during a withdrawal. Republicans talk often about “victory” over terrorists, but not about whether U.S. troops should try to suppress a messy civil war.

The war will be a major issue with distinct risks for both parties, predicted Jon Cohen, the director of the Washington Post’s polling. While a majority of Americans believe the war was a mistake, “there is much less settled opinion on how to go forward, so it’s a trickier issue for both sides,” he said.

There, in a nutshell, is why the Iraq Moratorium is so important. The people of this country want this war over with and we want it over with pronto. But 15 months after we voted in a new Congress to do the job, nothing has changed! It is crystal clear that nothing is going to change, unless and until we, the people, make sure it does.

February 15 is Moratorium Day #6. On the Iraq Moratorium website , you can check out what happened in January and look up events planned for this month in your area (and list new ones if an event you know about hasn’t been posted there yet.) You can also check out our growing list of individual actions you can take up in observation of the Moratorium.

For instance, a handful of churches in New England started ringing their bells at noon on the Third Friday of January. This month a bunch more are planning to do so. In October, veterans and others in Hobart, IN pioneered Mall Walks, wearing t-shirts protesting the war. By last month a half a dozen groups around the country took similar strolls through their local malls.

So consider this a little reminder:

Make your plans, now, to break your daily routine and take some action to end the war on the 15th.

Spread the word to friends, family and co-workers.

Post a short report on what you did, during the days after the Moratorium.

Give a buck (or more) to keep this project growing. If everyone who takes part in a Moratorium action every month gave one dollar, it would be enough to sustain the effort and build on our success, which includes more than 600 events since September.

What are you doing on February 15?

WTF are this Gang Of Criminals, Thieves, War Mongers, War Profitteers, Twisted Ideologies, that this Country REFUSES doing anything about, Thinking?

Veterans not entitled to mental health care, U.S. lawyers argue

They took Complete Advantage over an Extremely Tragic Event, that they should have Stopped in it’s Tracks, Unless, if they paid one little iota to the Intelligence given to them, and Invaded a Country, Destroyed and Killed, that had Absolutely Nothing To Do With the Extremely Tragic Event, 9/11!

So many Lies in justification, when one would fall another would quickly rise, from their spin meisters, So Many Lies!

John McCain saw his shadow this morning, and you know what that means.

100 more years of war in Iraq.

Or maybe 10,000 years.*

Who cares who won the Democratic beauty contest in Florida?  Well, Clinton supporters, of course. What the returns indicate is that if there had been no campaign anywhere in the country, Hillary Clinton would have won easily.  But we knew that. (That’s why we have campaigns, and not just polls.)

Here’s the worst news:

From the WashPost blog, The Trail:

Early network exit polls out of Florida show the economy is the breakaway issue, with nearly half of GOP voters and more than half of Democrats calling it the nation’s top concern…  

Among Republicans:

Top issue: economy 47%, terrorism 19%, immigration 17%, Iraq 13%

Among Democrats:

Top issue: economy 55%, Iraq 25%, health care 17%

Why would that be?

Proving that John McCain is a total lunatic when it comes to foreign policy, he is now calling for more wars. And not only that, he had this to say:

Presidential candidate John McCain shocked observers on Sunday when he told a crowd of supporters, “There’s going to be other wars. … I’m sorry to tell you, there’s going to be other wars. We will never surrender but there will be other wars.”

Which horrified Pat Buchanan:

“That’s one of the things that makes me very nervous about him,” Buchanan went on. “There’s no doubt John McCain is going to be a war president. … His whole career is wrapped up in the military, national security. He’s in Putin’s face, he’s threatening the Iranians, we’re going to be in Iraq a hundred years.”

“So when he says more war,” Scarborough commented, “he is promising you, if he gets in the White House, we’ll not only be fighting this war but starting new wars. Is that what conservative Republicans want?

“I don’t say he’s starting them,” Buchanan answered. “He expects more wars. … I think he’s talking straight, because if you take a look at the McCain foreign policy, he is in everybody’s face. Did you see Thad Cochran’s comment when he endorsed Romney? He said, look, John McCain is a bellicose, red-faced, angry guy, who constantly explodes.”

Just as John McCain is positioning himself as a frontrunner and stealing the thunder from Ron Paul by appealing to those Republicans who think the war was mismanaged, he comes up with this howler. And although Buchanan tries to put the best face on his remarks by saying that McCain would not start them, that does not mean anything.

When Bush gives his state of the union address in a few days, he will probably talk about Iraq and the “surge”, but he probably won’t mention Fallujah.

In 2004 Fallujah, Iraq, a city of 600,000 persons was attacked by the US after a handful of mercenaries from the firm Blackwater were killed while transporting refrigerator supplies to a military base.  There was a news blackout about the siege, but there were reports of many civilian deaths and the use of illegal weapons by the US.

Now,three years later, the situation in Fallujah is still bleak. A correspondent for the Independent entered the city and reported for the paper.  He must be a long term resident, because the city is still under siege. There are 27 checkpoints along the road to Fallujah making it the most difficult city to enter in the world.

There are two kinds of history going on in the Cave of the Moonbat tonight: that of an ancient Southwest Asian superpower, and the historiography of historioranting itself.  I’ve been doing this pretty-much-weekly history thing for nigh on two years, and with my impending anniversary, I figured now’s as good a time as any to go back into the scrolls and update some of those first History for Kossacks – the ones that didn’t have any pictures (nor, for that matter, many commenters), were less than half as long as a contemporary HfK, and predate even the word I now use to describe the manner in which I seek to tell tales of the human experience.

So join me, if you will, for a redux of the very first HfK series – a proto-historiorant on Persia, land of the Aryans, now updated to fit the format that evolved in its wake.  In addition to new maps, pics, and stage-setting for the impending Islamic invasion in Part II, it never hurts to take a refresher on a land whose history seems to include every major historical figure in the ancient Middle Eastern world, from Alexander to Zoroaster.