Tuesday, September 11, 2007


Six years to the day. Unbelievable! I read today in the Detroit Free Press a column by Leonard Pitts Jr., and it almost made me cry. As we all have shared the moment of rememberance today, I feel compelled to share this article. Follow the link and think of the last six years, and that horrifying day. http://freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070911/OPINION03/709110330/1068/OPINION

Betrayed us!

Was MoveOn.org's ad on General Petraeusover the top? I do not believe so. The right-wing of the Republican Party was outrage, which was no surprise, the guys over at http://www.itsfirstfriday.com/ really had their boxers in a bunch yesterday. The ad itself gave voice to 3.4 million menbers, and many other americans who have had enough of this war in Iraq. I am confident the General has all the credibilty, and competence to do the job in Iraq, however, when he became Bush's boy the credentials and competence got muddied. We were sure the initial draft was created by the White House as it was reported in the Washington Post. When you are in charge of an unpopular, your boss is George W. Bush, and when this White House even got Colin Powell to lie...we simply have a hard time believing you General.

Oddly, what we were not told of sectarian violence was the numbers of deaths varied. David Petraeus spoke of casualties in August were lower than in they were in July, but were higher than they were in June. Hmmm. The report also does not disclose the number of refugees around the globe. The following is taken from http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/

"Total number of Iraqi refugees
At least 2.2 million, with another 2 million displaced inside Iraq
Number of Iraqis fleeing each day
2,000
Number of Iraqi refugees in Jordan
750,000
Number of Iraqi refugees in Syria
Between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000
Number of Iraqi refugees accepted by the United States in 2007
190
Number of Iraqi refugees accepted by the U.S. who fled since 2003
less than 100
Number of Iraqis currently working for the US government according to State and Defense Department records.
118,000
Number of Iraqi translators killed according to L-3, the contractor that hires them for the US military
257"

So, if this many people are leaving, that in turn leaves less that can be killed. That is pretty simple math. Are achieving meaningful progress? No! General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker's answers were, as the protesters made clear with actual dogs and ponies, a dog and pony show. After watching c-span today as the two Bush boys continued the lies of this White House, and the General sadley became General Betray Us. It is a sad day when one of our decorated miltary leaders gets his career tainted by the Bush Crime Family, and we cannot believe him. His answers to Senators Warner, Feingold, Biden, Clinton, Obama, and McCain were incompent and lies. While, we continue on supporting our troops by fighting for their direction home, our mission in the bring them home now movement gets tougher. Take the General's reponse to Senator Warner's question of whether the war is making America safer...yes, he reponded "I don't know".

Friday, September 7, 2007

Iraq Vet arrested



Well, on September 6th, Iraq war veteran Adam Kokesh was arrested with a few other War Protesters. For what you may ask? For putting up posters the D.C. police claim did not fall uner the restrictions of the city ordinance. The protesters were using wheat paste, which for anyone who ever flyered for bands or protests, this is one of the most enviromentally friendly products that can be used. It seems the D.C. police are under the influence of the new mix drink called the Patreaus. Most bars do not serve it yet, as it is highly intoxicating. It has recenty become a favorite of Republicans. Well, it appears Adam Kokesh and other War protesters in town apparently could not get into the popular venue that serves them, and if you can beleive it, they soberly went ahead with their press conference to promote the Sept. 15 protest that coincides with the human version of the Patreaus who will continue to promote Bush's little war in Iraq. I guess with all the corruption in the GOP, whether it bribes,restrooms,fear tactics,hookers, and lies...it's all explainable now, they're drunk. Cheers!

Thursday, September 6, 2007

Because it's not on the front page of your paper

This is from http://www.salon.com/ by Sidney Blumenthal
I am not shocked or awed by this story, but it is worth the read, and proves our demand for impeachment of Bush and Cheney.

Sept. 6, 2007 On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam's inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.
Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed
WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD.
On April 23, 2006, CBS's "60 Minutes" interviewed Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA chief of clandestine operations for Europe, who disclosed that the agency had received documentary intelligence from Naji Sabri, Saddam's foreign minister, that Saddam did not have WMD. "We continued to validate him the whole way through," said Drumheller. "The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy."
Now two former senior CIA officers have confirmed Drumheller's account to me and provided the background to the story of how the information that might have stopped the invasion of Iraq was twisted in order to justify it. They described what Tenet said to Bush about the lack of WMD, and how Bush responded, and noted that Tenet never shared Sabri's intelligence with then Secretary of State
Colin Powell. According to the former officers, the intelligence was also never shared with the senior military planning the invasion, which required U.S. soldiers to receive medical shots against the ill effects of WMD and to wear protective uniforms in the desert.

Instead, said the former officials, the information was distorted in a report written to fit the preconception that Saddam did have WMD programs. That false and restructured report was passed to Richard Dearlove, chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), who briefed Prime Minister Tony Blair on it as validation of the cause for war.
Secretary of State Powell, in preparation for his presentation of evidence of Saddam's WMD to the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, spent days at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., and had Tenet sit directly behind him as a sign of credibility. But Tenet, according to the sources, never told Powell about existing intelligence that there were no WMD, and Powell's speech was later revealed to be a series of falsehoods.
Both the French intelligence service and the CIA paid Sabri hundreds of thousands of dollars (at least $200,000 in the case of the CIA) to give them documents on Saddam's WMD programs. "The information detailed that Saddam may have wished to have a program, that his engineers had told him they could build a nuclear weapon within two years if they had fissile material, which they didn't, and that they had no chemical or biological weapons," one of the former CIA officers told me.
On the eve of Sabri's appearance at the United Nations in September 2002 to present Saddam's case, the officer in charge of this operation met in New York with a "cutout" who had debriefed Sabri for the CIA. Then the officer flew to Washington, where he met with CIA deputy director John McLaughlin, who was "excited" about the report. Nonetheless, McLaughlin expressed his reservations. He said that Sabri's information was at odds with "our best source." That source was code-named "Curveball," later exposed as a fabricator, con man and former Iraqi taxi driver posing as a chemical engineer.
The next day, Sept. 18, Tenet briefed Bush on Sabri. "Tenet told me he briefed the president personally," said one of the former CIA officers. According to Tenet, Bush's response was to call the information "the same old thing." Bush insisted it was simply what Saddam wanted him to think. "The president had no interest in the intelligence," said the CIA officer. The other officer said, "Bush didn't give a fuck about the intelligence. He had his mind made up."
But the CIA officers working on the Sabri case kept collecting information. "We checked on everything he told us." French intelligence eavesdropped on his telephone conversations and shared them with the CIA. These taps "validated" Sabri's claims, according to one of the CIA officers. The officers brought this material to the attention of the newly formed Iraqi Operations Group within the CIA. But those in charge of the IOG were on a mission to prove that Saddam did have WMD and would not give credit to anything that came from the French. "They kept saying the French were trying to undermine the war," said one of the CIA officers.


The officers continued to insist on the significance of Sabri's information, but one of Tenet's deputies told them, "You haven't figured this out yet. This isn't about intelligence. It's about regime change."
The CIA officers on the case awaited the report they had submitted on Sabri to be circulated back to them, but they never received it. They learned later that a new report had been written. "It was written by someone in the agency, but unclear who or where, it was so tightly controlled. They knew what would please the
White House. They knew what the king wanted," one of the officers told me.
That report contained a false preamble stating that Saddam was "aggressively and covertly developing" nuclear weapons and that he already possessed chemical and biological weapons. "Totally out of whack," said one of the CIA officers. "The first [para]graph of an intelligence report is the most important and most read and colors the rest of the report." He pointed out that the case officer who wrote the initial report had not written the preamble and the new memo. "That's not what the original memo said."
The report with the misleading introduction was given to Dearlove of MI6, who briefed the prime minister. "They were given a scaled-down version of the report," said one of the CIA officers. "It was a summary given for liaison, with the sourcing taken out. They showed the British the statement Saddam was pursuing an aggressive program, and rewrote the report to attempt to support that statement. It was insidious. Blair bought it." "Blair was duped," said the other CIA officer. "He was shown the altered report."
The information provided by Sabri was considered so sensitive that it was never shown to those who assembled the NIE on Iraqi WMD. Later revealed to be utterly wrong, the NIE read: "We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade."

Monday, September 3, 2007

Remember when we didn't need George Bush or China?

Remember the days when childhood toys were only thought of as sibling weaponry? Or the fear you did not have that George W. Bush would become President? Well, let me tell ya, those days are gone? Peter Werbe had this interesting piece from McClatchy News http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/19070.html

This is sick, and now leads to the idea of the almighty dollar is worth more than American citizens. I mean, c'mon, this is a no brainer! NAFTA and CAFTA have left us wide open. Mr. Bush's little escapade in Iraq has isolated us, and privleged to more hatred from the rest of the world. He claims we must bring Democrazy to the Iraqis, and to protect Americas interests? George! American's have children that are safer from terrorists than toys right now! This is Capitalism at it's finest. I am not against profit, I am however against the potential cost one is willing to pay for it. Lives, limbs, and brains of our troops? The health of a child's future? Slave labor in the name of $$? Hell no! This is a human race, not a race to the finish.

Saturday, September 1, 2007

The week in review

This has been a rough week for President Bush and I assume he's getting lonely in the Oval office. Monday we learned of the coming departure of Attorney Torture Boy Alberto Gonzales. This was long overdue, the author of of the torture memos, the illegal eavesdropping program, the firing of 8 U.S. Attorneys for political reasons, and the continued lying to Congress certainly should of been enough. I will however, applaud Mr. Bush's loyalty, it is admirable. I question though, when do you let friends get in the way of your country's integrity and honor? Look for the Honorable Sen. Pat Leahy to nail down exactly what Gonzales and Bush were up to.

Then we had the story of the week, Senator Larry Craig's bathroom incident in Minneapolis. His plea of guilty to misdemeanor charges of lewd and disorderly conduct after being arrested by an undercover officer proved the hypocrisy of the Republican party. Senator Craig's signals under the stall wall of hand gestures, foot tapping, and peering through the door led to his arrest and as of today likely his resignation. I have a few issues here, one, if you vote against laws that help the gay community feel safe against hate crimes, vote against civil unions and gay marriage, vote against gays in the military, then you are a hypocrite if you are in fact gay. Second, I am as liberal as they come, and could care a less if you prefer the same sex. I do however believe a sitting U.S. Senator should know that lewd behavior in public restrooms puts you in a very not so "family values" position. How many parents travel with their children and allow them to use a public restroom to witness that? Well, the list gets longer for the Republicrits to find Jesus, ask for forgivness, and prove the Democratic majority to be the party of values and diversity. Mr. Craig, just come out, you will feel better, and your retired life could full of Cher records remixed by some young stud. For more of the Republican's version of "family values" visit, www.republicansexoffenders.com .

Next, the announcement of Mr. Tony Snow"job" will leave the prestigious position of White House Press Secretary. Seriously, I do hope his helath is ok, perhaps he will have the class of Lance Armstrong and Elizabeth Edwards and provide hope and courage to cancer victims around the globe. Mr. Snow cited his departure as a financial decision...WHAT? You mean to tell me we are not paying him enough?

Anyway, theres the week, and for laughs see my previous post on Mr. Craig's coming out, set to song.

Larry Craig coming out, set to song

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