Treason

Tom Delay:

I think Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are getting very very close to treason…For the Majority Leader of the United States Senate in a time of war, with soldiers dying on the ground, announcing that we have lost the war, is very close to treasonous. I looked it up while we were driving over here, the definition of treason, it’s the betrayal of trust. I have never in my adult life, nor in my understanding of history, seen something so blatantly outrageous…I am blown away by this attitude of the Democrats. To me it’s just a hatred of Bush…The American people are gonna eventually be fed up with this.

How detached from reality do you have to be to not understand that 60% of the public are sick of Bush, hence the reason Democrats are in charge and emboldened to stand up to Bush’s war? How antithetical to the principles of a functional democracy is it to call those who disagree with the president treasonous? It’s like they’re on a mission lately to drive voters away from the GOP for at least one generation, but quite likely to completely obliterate the republican party forever.

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Army is juking the stats with injured soldiers

Salon drops another bombshell today:

The soldiers who were at Fort Irwin described a pitiful scene. “You had people out there with crutches and canes,” said an Army captain who was being considered for medical retirement himself because of serious back injuries sustained in a Humvee accident during a previous combat tour in Iraq. “Soldiers that apparently had no business being there were there,” another soldier wrote to Salon in an e-mail. “Pregnant females were sent to the National Training Center rotation” with the knowledge of Army leaders, she said.

One infantry sergeant with nearly 20 years in the Army who had already fought in Iraq broke his foot badly in a noncombat incident just before being sent to Fort Irwin. “I didn’t even get to put the cast on,” before going, he said with exasperation. He said doctors put something like an “open-toed soft shoe” on his foot and put him on a plane to California. “I’ve got the cast on now. I never even got a chance to see the [medical] specialist,” he claimed. The infantry sergeant said life in the desert was tough in his condition. “I was on Percocet. I couldn’t even concentrate. I hopped on a plane and hobbled around NTC on crutches,” he said. He added, “I saw people who were worse off than I am. I saw people with hurt backs and so on. I started to think, ‘Hey, I’m not so bad.'”

And it looks like we can thank the surge for this gross abuse of our injured soldiers:

Military experts point to the brigade’s readiness statistics, including “unit status reports” that carefully track personnel numbers and are sent up through the Army’s chain of command. “There are a number of factors used to establish whether a unit is mission-capable,” explained John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an independent organization that studies military and security issues. “One of them is the extent to which it is fully manned,” he said. Pike says he suspects the injured soldiers were camped out at Fort Irwin so that on paper, at least, “the unit would have a sufficient head count to be mission-capable.”

What more does it take? Why isn’t this country taking to the streets yet over this horseshit?

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The media hasn’t changed

Watch this clip of John Lennon being chastised by some arrogant bitch from the establishment media and you’ll see with perfect clarity how not a goddamned thing has changed in this country. Power to the powerful has been the motto of this nation for a long time. God help you if you if you actually believe that the people who make up this country should be afforded a voice in our own destiny.

[UPDATE]: Apparently the snobbish interviewer in this clip is Gloria Emerson. A quick glance over her resume and I have to admit that she has an impressive body of work and I’m sure was a valuable asset to the antiwar community. Unfortunately, this clip of her demonstrates the dismissive, patronizing attitude that seems to infect most elite journalists, regardless of their ideological stripe. It’s the same shit today, just listen to Dick Gregory attacking the blogosphere:

The message I hear from both clips is “leave it to the professional, you have no place expressing your opinion on such big important topics you ignorant proles”.

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Why doesn’t everybody know who Chalmers Johnson is?

After seeing an interview with Chalmer Johnson on Democracy Now last night, I dug up a pretty good clip of him on YouTube explaining in a fairly simple way how the mess in Iraq came to be. The fact that this sort of analysis has never been seen on a mainstream news outlet is the most obvious evidence that it has failed us in every possible way. You want to know the truth? You want to hear actual experts and bona fide historians discuss our current political context? Well then you probaby want YouTube, not CNN, MSNBC, or god forbid Faux News.

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Can Bush’s priorities be any clearer?

Via The American Prospect:

The real debate on Iraq begins with Congress’s consideration of the military budget. The president has requested almost three quarters of a trillion dollars to fund the military through September 30, 2008. More than $150 billion is earmarked for Iraq.

We have already spent $350 billion there, so the president’s proposal pushes our Iraqi costs close to the half trillion mark. At the same time, he is demanding a $100 billion cut in health care funding, falling most heavily on poor children, while he maintains his $200 billion annual tax cut, channeled mostly to millionaires.

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Generals threaten resignation over Iran

I rarely just swipe posts wholesale, but this needs as much exposure as possible Via Dailykos:

US generals ‘will quit’ if Bush orders Iran attack

Some of America’s most senior military commanders are prepared to resign if the White House orders a military strike against Iran, according to highly placed defence and intelligence sources.

Tension in the Gulf region has raised fears that an attack on Iran is becoming increasingly likely before President George Bush leaves office. The Sunday Times has learnt that up to five generals and admirals are willing to resign rather than approve what they consider would be a reckless attack.

“There are four or five generals and admirals we know of who would resign if Bush ordered an attack on Iran,” a source with close ties to British intelligence said. “There is simply no stomach for it in the Pentagon, and a lot of people question whether such an attack would be effective or even possible.”

A British defence source confirmed that there were deep misgivings inside the Pentagon about a military strike. “All the generals are perfectly clear that they don’t have the military capacity to take Iran on in any meaningful fashion. Nobody wants to do it and it would be a matter of conscience for them.

“There are enough people who feel this would be an error of judgment too far for there to be resignations.”

A generals’ revolt on such a scale would be unprecedented.

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James Madison

H/T to 1loneranger:

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people…. [There is also an] inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and … degeneracy of manners and of morals…. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

-James Madison

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Iran Attack Imminent?

From an article in The New Statesman via this diary over at Daily Kos:

American military operations for a major conventional war with Iran could be implemented any day. They extend far beyond targeting suspect WMD facilities and will enable President Bush to destroy Iran’s military, political and economic infrastructure overnight using conventional weapons.

Here’s where I find the possibility of an imminent attack to be very real. Consider the following, China is heavily involved with Iran in terms of oil. Now consider that any attack on Iran will rely heavily on the navy to conduct bombings of this expanded set of military targets. Bearing those two facts in mind, here’s what troubles me from the about this:

The admiral picked by President Bush to oversee his new strategy for Iraq testified yesterday that he does not know much about the plan that the administration says will determine whether the U.S. wins the war.

“I have not gotten into the detail of these plans,” Adm. William J. Fallon told the Senate Armed Services Committee, adding that he has been concentrating on his current job as head of the U.S. Pacific Command…

The admiral, whose expertise centers on sea power and diplomacy in dealing with China, said he will leave the Iraq battle decisions to Army Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, who leaves for Baghdad this week as the top U.S. commander in Iraq. The admiral appeared before the panel for confirmation hearings on his appointment to lead the U.S. Central Command.

So to summarize, the admiral chosen by Bush to oversee Iraq has very little to say about Iraq, but he seems like just the man you’d want in charge if you were going to be attacking Iran. Hmmmm.

UPDATE: More on Admiral Fallon & the China connnectionhere and here.

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Not Another 9/11 Conspiracy Theory

This film, 9/11 Press for Truth, is no conspiracy theory, it’s an indictment of our media for not taking the time to assemble the pieces. Nowhere in this piece do the filmmakers make any unsubstantiated claims or indulge in wild speculation. All this video does is what our media should be doing, which is merely ASKING QUESTIONS and threading together concrete information.

If you’re typically skeptical of stuff like this, then we have that in common. I’ve seen Loose Change and I didn’t find it very compelling–too many loose ends and tenuous conclusions. What makes this documentary stand out to me is the fact that very little of the information in it was a surprise to me. It relies almost entirely on mainstream news sources and interviews. If you only watch one damn clip I post on this blog, watch this.

Hat Tip to jeremiasx.

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Worse than Vietnam

Glenn Greenwald’s recent piece on General Odom’s smackdown of flimsy neocon arguments got me digging around YouTube for clips of the man and I came across this one. The Dems need to get Odom out front and center of the debate on Iraq and start adopting his strong, nonapologetic opposition of the nightmare that is Iraq.

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