Grumpasaurus.com

Timmah! edition

The 2006 election was defined by a) a repudiation of the war in Iraq and the current Iraq strategy, and b) widespread national victories for Democratic House, Senate, and gubernatorial candidates.

This week’s guests on MTP:
Joe Lieberman: pro war, “Independent”
John McCain: pro war, GOP

Welcome to the new media order, same as the old.

Yeah, I’m just hoovering from thinkprogress. Thanks, guys!

I know a lot people are apparently quite happy about the editorials that are about to appear in the [Military Branch] Times, but I ‘m not one of those.

An editorial set to appear on Monday — election eve — in the four leading newspapers for the military calls for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

The papers are the Army Times, Air Force Times, Navy Times and Marine Corps Times. They are published by the Military Times Media Group, a subsidiary of Gannett Co., Inc. President Bush said this week that he wanted Rumsfeld to serve out the next two years.

See, when I read this, I start thinking “military coup d’etat.” According to billmon, the [Branch] Times don’t do anything without the approval of the generals. And it seems to me that the Joint Chiefs (and even lower on the rung) are getting a taste for meddling in domestic politics. This is not a good sign for our democracy.

Missing soldier still being held

The U.S. military said on Thursday it believed an American soldier who was abducted in Baghdad 10 days ago is still being held by his captors.

Good thing the Bush administration allowed our military to be commanded by the Iraqi head of state and stop looking for the soldier.

Until the Bush administration, at least.

American soldiers rolled up their barbed-wire barricades and lifted a near siege of the largest Shiite Muslim enclave in Baghdad on Tuesday, heeding the orders of a Shiite-led Iraqi government whose assertion of sovereignty had Shiites celebrating in the streets.

The order by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to lift the week-old blockade of Sadr City was one of the most overt expressions of self-determination by Iraqi leaders in the 3 1/2 -year-old U.S. occupation. It followed two weeks of increasingly pointed exchanges between Iraqi and U.S. officials, as well as a video conference between Maliki and President Bush on Saturday.

The soldiers had sealed off Sadr city in pursuit of a kidnapped American soldier, and now, on the orders of a foreign national that pursuit is being called off. Excuse me? Is the US military now taking orders from a puppet head of state?

Of course they aren’t. What they are doing is taking orders from Bush-Cheny-Rumsfeld who told them to abandon an American soldier because of political considerations.

The move lifted a near siege that had stood at least since last Wednesday. U.S. military police imposed the blockade after the kidnapping of an American soldier of Iraqi descent. The soldier’s Iraqi in-laws said they believed he had been abducted by the Mahdi Army as he visited his wife at her home in the Karrada area of Baghdad, where U.S. military checkpoints were also removed as a result of Maliki’s action.

The crackdown on Sadr City had a second motive, U.S. officers said: the search for Abu Deraa, a man considered one of the most notorious death squad leaders. The soldier and Abu Deraa both were believed by the U.S. military to be in Sadr City.

Remember when the righties said that we could have won in Vietnam if not for the micromanaging of targets? Of the directives that came from DC to the operatives in the field? This is no different than McNamara, but even McNamara never abandoned an American soldier to a hostile force.

Looks like an interesting documentary re: the Dixie Chicks and the insanity fueled by the nutters when Natalie Maines said they were ashamed Bush was from Texas… which led to boycotts, protests, death threats, and “independent” radio stations refusing to play their songs.

The reaction from the jingoist nutballs was so incendiary, so ridiculous, so disproportionate to the innocuous comment by Maines, that it deserves a nice, long, objective look on the hows and the whys. I hope this documentary does that.

Note: NBC and CW Television (= UPN & WB) are refusing to air ads for the documentary. This after CNN and NPR refused to carry ads for Death of a President (the fake documentary about the assassination of W). Censorship, anyone? (and I’m being serious here, not in the fake “censorship”! way people who don’t understand censorship cry). Oh, and if you really want to get mad at the censorship in our country, observe how nearly every instance of refusal to carry ads by major media networks is for the benefit of the Bushevik administration.

I hope you’re not planning on taking many European vacations after you’re out of office, Dick.

Vice President Dick Cheney has confirmed that U.S. interrogators subjected captured senior al-Qaida suspects to a controversial interrogation technique called “water-boarding,” which creates a sensation of drowning.

Cheney indicated that the Bush administration doesn’t regard water-boarding as torture and allows the CIA to use it. “It’s a no-brainer for me,” Cheney said at one point in an interview.

Returning from Iraq

I returned home in October, 2005, and I went back to teaching in mid-November. Next my family, I missed my students and my classrooms the most during my 17 months away, so I was anxious to get back. I believed that I understood that the transition from Iraq to home would be awkward–after all, I spent a good portion of my 19 years serving with Vietnam vets–but I was confident that it wouldn’t be too bad. I was (am) older than many soldiers sent to Iraq, with a stable family and career; moreover, I didn’t see the worst of Iraq by any stretch of the imagination. I could surely manage any difficulties. What did I have to fear?

Shortly after I went back to work, I began having serious anxiety attacks. Getting out the door in the morning got harder and harder. I had trouble serious trouble being in crowds. Loud noises sent my heart rate through the roof, and I heard explosions in my sleep. I knew I was angry while I was still in Iraq, but I found I could barely contain myself on some occasions now that I was home (though, thankfully, never with students–that would have really scared me). As the weeks passed, it seemed to be getting worse rather than better; I wasn’t handling it well at all. By early December, I knew something was wrong.

Posts like this really show how lacking our country is in good post trauma psychological care. We have far to go in so many areas of medicine of course, but our lack of attention to and care for psychological issues is damnable. I hope more people speak up and I hope we are finally past the stigmas of psychological injuries being somehow less than physical, or signs of weakness.

This is a powerful and moving document, so I’m copying it in its entirety.

By Kevin Tillman
Editor’s note: Kevin Tillman joined the Army with his brother Pat in 2002, and they served together in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pat was killed in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004. Kevin, who was discharged in 2005, has written a powerful, must-read document.

It is Pat’s birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice… until we get out.

Much has happened since we handed over our voice:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.

Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.

Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them. Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few “bad apples” in the military.

Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a five-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet. It’s interesting that a soldier on his third or fourth tour should care about a drawing from a five-year-old; or a faded sticker on a car as his friends die around him; or an extra pad in a helmet, as if it will protect him when an IED throws his vehicle 50 feet into the air as his body comes apart and his skin melts to the seat.

Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.

Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.

Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started.

Somehow faking character, virtue and strength is tolerated.

Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.

Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.

Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.

Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.

Somehow torture is tolerated.

Somehow lying is tolerated.

Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense.

Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.

Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.

Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.

Somehow the most reasonable, trusted and respected country in the world has become one of the most irrational, belligerent, feared, and distrusted countries in the world.

Somehow being politically informed, diligent, and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance.

Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.

Somehow this is tolerated.

Somehow nobody is accountable for this.

In a democracy, the policy of the leaders is the policy of the people. So don’t be shocked when our grandkids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity. Most likely, they will come to know that “somehow” was nurtured by fear, insecurity and indifference, leaving the country vulnerable to unchecked, unchallenged parasites.

Luckily this country is still a democracy. People still have a voice. People still can take action. It can start after Pat’s birthday.

Brother and Friend of Pat Tillman,

Kevin Tillman

Am I the only one thinking that the November 5th date (2 days before our domestic elections) for the verdict is suspicious? Yeah, didn’t think so.

An Iraqi court trying Saddam Hussein for the killing of Shi’ite villagers in the 1980s could deliver a verdict on November 5, officials said, a ruling which could send the ousted leader to the gallows.

Bet you can’t guess what the outcome’s going to be!

Sowing the Seeds of Fascism in America

There was nothing more inflammatory in my first book, about the 1994 invasion and occupation of Haiti, than my assertion that Special Operations was a hotbed of racism and reaction. “Hideous Dream – A Soldier’s Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti” (Soft Skull Press, 2000) was my personal account of that operation, and I was explicit not only about the significant number of white supremacists in Special Operations but how the attitudes of these extremists connected with the less explicit white male supremacy of white patriarchal American society and defined, in some respects, the attitude taken by U.S. occupation forces in Haiti toward the Haitian population.

The resistance to this allegation was particularly fierce, and not merely from those inside the Special Operations “community,” whose outrage was more public-relations stagecraft than anything else. There was outrage from people who hadn’t a moment of actual experience in the military at all. This is an affront to something sacred in the public imaginary of a thoroughly militarized United States: that we are an international beacon of civilized virtue, and that our military is the masculine epitome of that virtue standing between our suburban security and the dark chaos of the Outside. Questioning the mystique of the armed forces is tantamount to lunacy at best and treason at worst.

It’s a great article and well worth your time. I’ve previously argued that we’re already living in a fascist state (there’s a movie too, and that post could use an update in the post-Minuteman world). Rather than focus on endpoint analysis, Goff’s article goes over much the same ground, but also addresses some root causes responsible for making that fascism acceptable. A how-did-we-get-here look (or, pedantically, a look at how some key elements for the establishment of a fascist state are already normative values in American society). All this from someone who was SpecOps for many years.

Much of the article focuses on the neonazis in the military – and how the invasion of Iraq has accelerated our military’s destruction from within by neonazis – but there are asides to Straussian ideology, master-race impulses, gender issues, and the like. This is more of a precis for a journal article, but in internet terms, it’s a tome. Go read it.

and plays fiddle while the Constitution burns

A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.

The estimate, produced by interviewing residents during a random sampling of households throughout the country, is far higher than ones produced by other groups, including Iraq’s government.

It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group.

The surveyors said they found a steady increase in mortality since the invasion, with a steeper rise in the last year that appears to reflect a worsening of violence as reported by the U.S. military, the news media and civilian groups. In the year ending in June, the team calculated Iraq’s mortality rate to be roughly four times what it was the year before the war.

Of the total 655,000 estimated “excess deaths,” 601,000 resulted from violence and the rest from disease and other causes, according to the study. This is about 500 unexpected violent deaths per day throughout the country.

I’ve been sitting on this because I don’t know quite what to say. The total deaths caused by our country in an illegal, elective war of invasion, brought about by the lies and bloodthirsty sociopathy of a small number of chickenhawks is beyond my powers of comprehension.

Maybe this will help. Iraq had approximately the population of California. Due to our invasion of Iraq we have wiped out the equivalent of most of San Francisco, or all of Anaheim and Bakersfield. Or Sacramento and Fremont.

All of those people are dead because of us. Because of Bush. Impeachment is an insufficient remedy, but it is at least a step towards justice.

Oh, and the story? It was carried on page A12 of the WaPo. A-12, people, so that the valuable front page real estate could carry things like a warning of the demise of handwriting. What liberal media?

Well, North Korea has nukes. The miserable failure‘s bluff was called and we’re about to see a general rearmament of Asia (particularly Japan), almost entirely due to the failure of the Bush administration. As JMM puts it

All diplomatic niceties aside, President Bush’s idea was that the North Koreans would respond better to threats than Clinton’s mix of carrots and sticks.

Then in the winter of 2002-3, as the US was preparing to invade Iraq, the North called Bush’s bluff. And the president folded. Abjectly, utterly, even hilariously if the consequences weren’t so grave and vast.

Threats are a potent force if you’re willing to follow through on them. But he wasn’t. The plutonium production plant, which had been shuttered since 1994, got unshuttered. And the bomb that exploded tonight was, if I understand this correctly, almost certainly the product of that plutonium uncorked almost four years ago.

So the President talked a good game, the North Koreans called his bluff and he folded. And since then, for all intents and purposes, and all the atmospherics to the contrary, he and his administration have done essentially nothing.
…
Talking tough is great if you can make it stick and back it up; it is always and necessarily cleaner and less compromising than sitting down and dealing with bad actors. Talking tough and then folding your cards doesn’t just show weakness it invites contempt. And that is what we have here.

What’s Bush’s legacy? Arrogance and incompetence. Authoritarianism and the destruction of the American Empire (and, possibly, “America”). Failure, cowardice, and lies. Death, destruction, and corruption. That is going to be his legacy.

And by cowardice, I’m not just talking about his going AWOL in a time of war. No, I’m talking specifically about North Korea here.

The US Government has announced that it will release $95m to North Korea as part of an agreement to replace the Stalinist country’s own nuclear programme, which the US suspected was being misused.
Under the 1994 Agreed Framework an international consortium is building two proliferation-proof nuclear reactors and providing fuel oil for North Korea while the reactors are being built.

In releasing the funding, President George W Bush waived the Framework’s requirement that North Korea allow inspectors to ensure it has not hidden away any weapons-grade plutonium from the original reactors.

President Bush argued that the decision was “vital to the national security interests of the United States”.

Of course, I fully expect Bush’s failure in North Korea to be used as his reasoning for why we should attack Iran. Start the Time Until Bush Uses North Korea as Justification countdown!

Foley? Who’s that?

According to Lieut. Mike Kafka, a spokesman at the headquarters of the Second Fleet, based in Norfolk, Virginia, the Eisenhower Strike Group, bristling with Tomahawk cruise missiles, has received orders to depart the United States in a little over a week. Other official sources in the public affairs office of the Navy Department at the Pentagon confirm that this powerful armada is scheduled to arrive off the coast of Iran on or around October 21.

The Eisenhower had been in port at the Naval Station Norfolk for several years for refurbishing and refueling of its nuclear reactor; it had not been scheduled to depart for a new duty station until at least a month later, and possibly not till next spring. Family members, before the orders, had moved into the area and had until then expected to be with their sailor-spouses and parents in Virginia for some time yet. First word of the early dispatch of the “Ike Strike” group to the Persian Gulf region came from several angry officers on the ships involved, who contacted antiwar critics like retired Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner and complained that they were being sent to attack Iran without any order from the Congress.

I know I’ve written about this before. A bunch. No, really. Tons. Anyway…

I find it hard to believe that this adminstration would blow away the remaining illusions that we are a constitutional republic. I find it hard to believe that they think this is a good idea. I find it hard to believe that they think attacking Iran shortly before the November elections would help their chances (via the inevitable surge in support for the administration that happens with any military action… in addition to vote rigging, electoral fraud, and voter intimidation of course).

But every time I think they’ve reached the pinnacle (nadir?) of their mendacious amorality and sociopathy, they surprise me.

So I’m guessing an airstrike on Isfahan using low-yield nuclear bombs is going to occur on or about 22 October. This will sandblast the cobwebs off of the image of America as anything other than a rogue banana republic, cement the elimination of “America” the ideal, … and will receive absolutely no significant reaction from the sheeple (tm, someone else) of this country.

I have a friend who thinks that there will be riots in the streets and impeachments. I told him he’s living in a world that no longer exists.

Man, I hope I’m wrong.

Packs a pretty powerful punch!

My favs are the page one:

and the zombie:

Then again, I totally have a thing for repurposed propaganda posters. YMMV.

U.S. Senate majority leader calls for efforts to bring Taliban into Afghan government

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Monday that the Afghan guerrilla war can never be won militarily and called for efforts to bring the Taliban and their supporters into the Afghan government.

The Tennessee Republican said he had learned from briefings that Taliban fighters were too numerous and had too much popular support to be defeated by military means.

Theory: they’re trying to quiet Afghanistan down for their crazy fucking attack on Iran. Looks like Britain’s in on it too.

If the Dems had any kind of message machine at all – and were viciously partisan – they’d be over every media outlet in the country pointing out the “cut and runners” currently in charge of our government.