From Blogometer (a good daily resource by the way):
Each time this week we’ve visited Technorati, the popular blog search engine, the "Top Searches This Hour" feature has placed "Cindy Sheehan" at the very top. At one point this a.m., "Sheehan" was also #5. The Blogometer is trying to remember the last time this happened, but no person or event — not the fight over Terri Schiavo, not the 7/7 bombings — stands out.
No doubt because the State Department primarily deals with diplomacy, and the Bushies don’t do no pansy-ass diplomacy.
[Source]One month before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, three State Department bureau chiefs warned of “serious planning gaps for post-conflict public security and humanitarian assistance” in a secret memorandum prepared for a superior.
The State Department officials, who had been discussing the issues with top military officers at the Central Command, noted that the military was reluctant “to take on ‘policing’ roles” in Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The three officials warned that “a failure to address short-term public security and humanitarian assistance concerns could result in serious human rights abuses which would undermine an otherwise successful military campaign, and our reputation internationally.”
The Feb. 7, 2003, memo, addressed to Paula J. Dobriansky, undersecretary for democracy and global affairs, came at a time when the Pentagon was increasingly taking over control of post-invasion planning from the State Department. It reflected the growing tensions between State Department and Pentagon officials and their disparate assessments about the challenges looming in post-invasion Iraq.
Shitty post-war planning? File this under “Duh”.
But you would think that if the rationale for invading Iraq was to turn it into a democracy and/or humanitarian efforts, the Bush Administration would have paid attention to the State Department’s warnings. And it should cause you to wonder why the Bush Administration rushed into Iraq before the “gaps for post-conflict public security and humanitarian assistance” were filled. It probably got the same due attention as the August 6 PDB ("Yeah, whatever")
Anyway, this is a good story, not only because of this document, but also because of the other related documents recently made available under the FOIA. It’s telling in that it shows how relevant considerations from knowledgable people was virtually ignored in the Oval Office. It’s not that the Bush people got bad information; it’s that the Bush people ignored inconvenient information.
Under threat of a lawsuit, Pro-Life Wisconsin pulled a news release accusing HospiceCare of murder in removing the feeding tubes of severely injured Marine Staff Sgt. Chad Simon, but the group has not, as requested, issued a public apology or retraction.
***
Simon, 32, of Monona, was injured by a bomb in Iraq in November. The father of a 6-year-old son, Simon never recovered from his war injuries and his family followed the wishes laid out in his living will that he not be kept artificially alive with food and water if he became permanently incapacitated.
On July 20, the Dane County Circuit Court ordered Hospice to follow the directives of Chad’s surrogate decision-maker, wife, Regina Simon.
On Aug. 11, three days after Simon’s funeral, Pro-Life Wisconsin issued a news release condemning the removal of Simon’s feeding tube.
“Sgt. Simon was a victim of two different faces of the culture of death,” Hamill said in the news release. “He was certainly a victim of international terrorism, but he was also a victim of America’s rapidly decaying system of ‘hospice’ care. Sgt. Simon died of dehydration, not from any sort of brain injuries. Sgt. Simon was rendered handicapped by the bomb in Iraq, he was murdered by those who were in charge of his medical care.”
Hospice responded aggressively the next day.
“The content of your press release is per se defamatory and subjects both Pro-Life Wisconsin and Peggy Hamill to legal liability,” Hospice attorney Pitz wrote. “It is readily apparent from the press release that you intentionally have sought to falsely disparage Hospice."
Conservatives like to bitch and moan about how the media never reports the good things in Iraq. They claim it just proves media bias, but of course, we all know the real reason. To the extent that there ARE good things to report in Iraq, the media doesn’t report it because it’s too fucking dangerous for them to venture far from their hotel. Which itself indicates that Iraq isn’t a bed of roses.
Of course, the inability of reporters to eyewitness the real situation doesn’t mean that the situation is good. In fact, it could be far worse than actually reported by the mainstream media. Witness this (subscription required), a trip to the Bagdhad mortuary to look at something which the media giants fail to report:
"July was the bloodiest month in Baghdad’s modern history – in all, 1,100 bodies were brought to the city’s mortuary; executed for the most part, eviscerated, stabbed, bludgeoned, tortured to death. The figure is secret. We are not supposed to know that the Iraqi capital’s death toll last month was only 700 short of the total American fatalities in Iraq since April of 2003. Of the dead, 963 were men – many with their hands bound, their eyes taped and bullets in their heads – and 137 women. The statistics are as shameful as they are horrifying. For these are the men and women we supposedly came to “liberate” – and about whose fate we do not care.
The figures for this month cannot, of course, yet be calculated. But last Sunday, the mortuary received the bodies of 36 men and women, all killed by violence. By 8am on Monday, nine more human remains had been received. By midday, the figure had reached 25. “I consider this a quiet day,” one of the mortuary officials said to me as we stood close to the dead. So in just 36 hours – from dawn on Sunday to midday on Monday, 62 Baghdad civilians had been killed. No Western official, no Iraqi government minister, no civil servant, no press release from the authorities, no newspaper, mentioned this terrible statistic. The dead of Iraq – as they have from the beginning of our illegal invasion – were simply written out of the script. Officially they do not exist.
Thus there has been no disclosure of the fact that in July 2003 – three months after the invasion – 700 corpses were brought to the mortuary in Baghdad. In July of 2004, this rose to around 800. The mortuary records the violent death toll for June of this year as 879 – 764 of them male, 115 female. Of the men, 480 had been killed by firearms, along with 25 of the women. By comparison, equivalent figures for July 1997, 1998 and 1999 were all below 200. (…)
Mortuary officials have been appalled at the sadism visited on the victims. “We have many who have obviously been tortured – mostly men,” one said. “They have terrible burn marks on hands and feet and other parts of their bodies. Many have their hands fastened behind their backs with handcuffs and their eyes have been bound with Sellotape. Then they have been shot in the head – in the back of the head, the face, the eyes. These are executions.” While Saddam’s regime visited death by official execution upon its opponents, the scale of anarchy now existing in Baghdad, Mosul, Basra and other cities is unprecedented. “The July figures are the largest ever recorded in the history of the Baghdad Medical Institute,” a senior member of the management told The Independent.
It is clear that death squads are roaming the streets of a city which is supposed to be under the control of the US military and the American-supported, elected government of Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Never in recent history has such anarchy been let loose on the civilians of this city – yet the Western and Iraqi authorities show no interest in disclosing the details. The writing of the new constitution – or the failure to complete it – now occupies the time of Western diplomats and journalists. The dead, it seems, do not count. (…)
So many civilians are dying that the morgue has had to rely on volunteers from the holy city of Najaf to transport unidentified Shia Muslim dead to the central city’s large graveyard for burial, their plots donated by religious institutions. “In some of the bodies, we find American bullets,” a mortuary attendant told me. “But these could be American bullets fired by Iraqis. We don’t know who’s killing who – it’s not our job to find out, but civilians are killing each other. We had a body here the other day and the relatives said he had been murdered because he had been a Baathist in the old regime. Then they said that his brother had been killed three or four weeks back because he was a member of the religious Shia Dawa party which was the enemy of Saddam. But this is the real story – the killing of the people. I don’t want to die under a new constitution. I want security.”
One of the problems in cataloguing the daily death toll is that the official radio often declines to report explosions. On Monday, the thump of a bomb in the Karada district was never officially explained. Only yesterday was it discovered that a suicide bomber had walked into a popular café, the Emir, and blown himself up, killing two policemen. Another explosion, officially said to be caused by a mortar, turned out to be a mine set off beneath a pile of watermelons as a US patrol was passing. A civilian died. Again, there was no official account of these deaths. They were not recorded by the government nor by the occupying armies nor, of course, by the Western press. Like the bodies in the Baghdad city mortuary, they did not exist."
The roses they were supposed to throw at our feet are populating the cemetaries.
[Source]Staff Sgt. Jason Rivera, 26, a Marine recruiter in Pittsburgh, went to the home of a high school student who had expressed interest in joining the Marine Reserve to talk to his parents.
It was a large home in a well-to-do suburb north of the city. Two American flags adorned the yard. The prospect’s mom greeted him wearing an American flag T-shirt.
“I want you to know we support you,” she gushed.
Rivera soon reached the limits of her support.
“Military service isn’t for our son. It isn’t for our kind of people,” she told him.
Speaking of chickenhawks (and specifically, Ben the Virgin, a wanker in more ways than one), Sadly, No nails the issue:
This is the old “We’re at war!/ Well, it’s not like an actual war-war, exactly” trick in action. We’ll explore this trick in greater detail anon, but suffice to say that as soon as any notion of ‘sacrifice’ comes into things, the stick-wavers and scaremongers go stampeding for the exits, pleading personal choice and individual freedom, and forgetting all about the gigantic global emergency they were yelling about just two seconds before.
They do it literally every time. One moment, the War on Terror is like the fight against Hitler. The next, they’re all like, “I don’t see what my enlisting would accomplish,” and treating it like a televised sporting event where a citizen’s sole duty is to root for the home team. Then before you know it, they’re back to yelling that America is under attack, and we’re all literally going to die if we don’t boldly face the enemy.
Yup.
Sigh. I really dislike those people. You know who I am talking about. I’m talking about people out there arguing for tax cuts for the rich, and whose idea of "supporting the troops" is to put a yellow ribbon on their car, and that’s it. Those people and their faux patriotism annoy me.
And stuff like this is why. Grim at Freespeech.com made me aware of Operation Valor IT, a private effort to raise money so that soldiers who have been maimed and are convalescing can communicate with their loved ones. Grim says that there is a need for this, and you can believe him.
You may ask, as I did, why our government isn’t taking care of the needs of wounded soldiers. Or, for that matter, why they aren’t taking care of the needs of our active soldiers by providing adequate armor, etc. All good questions, and I share your outrage.
But before you gripe about Bush’s policies that lead to this outrage, help fix the problem. Then gripe, if you still feel like it. It beats the crap out of a yellow ribbon.
The British police.
It seems that the young Brazilian electrician who was shot because he was thought to be a terrorist subway bomber . . . (a) was not wearing a heavy jacket, (b) paused to pick up a newspaper on his way to the tube, (c) used his travelcard to pass the barrier, (d) did not run from the police (but ran to catch a train), (e) was not warned to stop by the police, and (f) was restrained before being shot several times in the head.
And the cops lied about it.
Wasn’t he worried that his vacation activities might send a frivolous signal at a time when he had put so many young Americans in harm’s way?
That wasn’t the son, believe it or not. It was the father – 15 years ago. I was in Kennebunkport then to cover the first President Bush’s frenetic attempts to relax while reporters were pressing him about how he could be taking a month to play around when he had started sending American troops to the Persian Gulf only three days before.
…
"I just don’t like taking questions on serious matters on my vacation," the usually good-natured Bush senior barked at reporters on the golf course. "So I hope you’ll understand if I, when I’m recreating, will recreate." His hot-tempered oldest son, who was golfing with his father that day, was even more irritated. "Hey! Hey!" W. snapped at reporters asking questions on the first tee. "Can’t you wait until we finish hitting, at least?"
Neo-cons like to imagine that the New Iraq is something akin to our own country’s historic period of 1787, when our constitution was ratified and a new democracy forged. But I’ve come to believe that the ethnic strife going on over there renders the U.S. Civil War (Iraqi style) a better analogy. Harold Myerson says the same thing:
It looks increasingly as if President Bush may have been off by 74 years in his assessment of Iraq. By deposing the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, Bush assumed he would bring Iraq to its 1787 moment — the crafting of a democratic constitution, the birth of a unified republic. Instead, he seems to have brought Iraq to the brink of its own 1861 — the moment of national dissolution.
No, I don’t mean that Iraq is on the verge of all-out civil war, though that’s a possibility that can’t be dismissed. But the nation does appear on the verge of a catastrophic failure to cohere. The more the National Assembly deliberates on the fundamentals of a new order, the larger the differences that divide the nation’s three sub-groups appear to be.
It’s not the small stuff that they’re sweating in Baghdad. They can’t agree on whether the new Iraq should be a federation, with a largely autonomous Shiite south and Kurdish north, or a more unified state, which the Sunnis prefer. They can’t agree on just how Islamic the new republic should be, and whether the leading Shiite clergy should be above the dictates of mere national law. They can’t agree on whether religious or state courts should hold sway in Shiite-dominated regions, or even the nation as a whole; they can’t agree on the rights of women. They can’t agree on the division of oil revenue among the three groups. They can’t agree on whether there should be a Kurdish right to secede enshrined in the constitution.
In short, they can’t agree on the fundamentals of what their new nation should be. And the more they deliberate, the less they agree on.
Mithras at Fables of the Reconstruction has been crunching the numbers:
As of this moment, Iraq Body Count says that between 23,589 and 26,705 Iraqi civilians have died since the United States invaded Iraq. Let’s average that out, even though their method for counting deaths is extremely conservative and there is, I think, good reason to believe that the actual number of dead is higher than their high estimate. The average is 25,147.
The CIA World Factbook says that the population of Iraq as of July 2005 was 26,074,906. At the same time, the population of the United States was 295,734,134.
So, if someone invaded the United States and the same proportion of the civilian population had died as a result, the number of people killed would be 285,210.
285,210.
Or think of it this way: on September 11, 2,986 people died. The equivalent of what has happened in Iraq is the equivalent of September 11th repeated 95 times.
Late to the party and need resources on what this Plamegate thing is all about? Visit The Left Coaster.
Pyongyang, August 16 (KCNA) — Leader Kim Jong Il Tuesday received Joo Dong Mun, president of the Washington Times Corporation, on a visit to Pyongyang. On the occasion the president offered his congratulations to Kim Jong Il on the 60th anniversary of Korea’s liberation.
Kim Jong Il welcomed the Pyongyang visit of the president, had a cordial talk with him and posed for a photograph with him
Now, just put your thinking cap on. Imagine if the President of the New York Times corporation visited Kim Jong Il and offered congratulations. The conservative pundits would go ballistic. but since it is the President of the conservative rag known as The Washington Times . . .
Chirp, chirp.
A few months ago, I blogged about a Fourth Circuit opinion which ruled against a woman who challenged her local government’s practice of beginning meetings with an invocation of a monotheistic God. The Fourth Circuit stupidly said that the practice did not violate the Establishment Clause because, to put it bluntly, only monotheism is protected by the Establishment Clause. (I couldn’t find those words in the First Amendment, can you?)
Anyway, all is not lost:
Woman wins lawsuit over prayers in council meetings; wants fees paid
GREAT FALLS, South Carolina (AP) — A small South Carolina town is facing a hefty legal bill after losing a battle over whether it should stop using Jesus Christ’s name in prayers before council meetings.
The U.S. Supreme Court refused in June to hear the Great Falls’ appeal of a lower court ruling over the prayers.
Now Darla Wynne wants Great Falls to pay her more than $65,000 to cover legal bills. A judge is expected to rule on the matter within the next two months.
Wynne, who describes herself as a Wiccan priestess, sued Great Falls in 2001, saying the town violated the separation between church and state by using the name Jesus Christ in prayers because it promoted one religion, Christianity, over the another.
The money is not covered by insurance, and it is unclear where the town of about 2,200 residents would get the cash. The amount is about 7 percent of its annual budget.
Someone buy that witch a cigar broom.
Courtesy of The Green Knight, here’s a picture of another grieving Mom:
Green Knight adds:
…this man went to his death voluntarily and heroically. He was an adult when he did it.
Apparently, according to the modern pro-war right, most of which thinks it’s Christian, his mom shouldn’t have been unhappy about it.
Green Knight, with apologies to Cenk Uyger ("What Fox News Channel Would Have Done to Rosa Parks"), then adds "What Fox News Would Have Done to the Virgin Mary":
O’Reilly: "Mary has for a long time aligned herself with the most radical elements on the left, calling for socialist redistribution of wealth and the overthrow of the government. She is an anti-Roman traitor, simple as that."
Hannity: “Could the Virgin Mary be angling for a Senate run? What does she have to gain from her public show of grief? Coming up next, the incredible story of how this woman might be deceiving the whole Empire!”
Limbaugh: “We have just found information that, after being told that her son was about God’s business, the Virgin Mary sometimes thought he was out of his mind. Ah-ha! A flip-flopper!"
Malkin: “I think I speak for Jesus’ entire family when I say that they are so embarrassed by his mother who is making a public spectacle of herself.”
O’Reilly: “To question the government of Imperial Judea and implicitly the entire Roman Empire has to be considered treasonous. These people are criminals, simple criminals. It’s ridiculous that they think they don’t have to live by the same rules as the rest of us.”
Coulter: “The Virgin Mary is a whore! She was pregnant before she was even married!”
Blitzer: “Simon Peter, can you confirm whether Mary has in fact questioned her son’s ministry in the past? Do you think this makes her a flip-flopper? If she has been so inconsistent on this, how can we trust her on anything?”
O’Reilly: “Unbelievable, just unbelievable. Ridiculous!”
Hannity: “Incredible!”
In Unison: “Flip-flopper! Flip-flopper! Flip-flopper!”
Oh, Green Knight. You get the prize.
