Memorial Day ‘Companion’
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Here it is Friday before the famous Memorial Day weekend — once the party-igniting start to a summer of beer and chicks in halter tops — but now it’s on to $4 a gallon gas and a world shattered by shit-heads in power.
One of the most pointed writers/performers is Garrison Keillor, of “A Prairie Home Companion” fame, who crafted a real look at Memorial Day, very-aptly titled, “Mutterings Over The Graves of Soldiers.”
From salon.com:
- The Current Occupant tossed Nazis into a speech last week, something he rarely does since it only reminds people of Dick Cheney. He likened those who would negotiate with terrorists to those who tried to appease the Nazis, an awkward comparison, since Nazis were self-defined and wore the swastika proudly, and terrorists are anybody we nominate to be terrorists, who may include terrorists, people who know terrorists, people named Terry, or people with wrists. One reason Guantánamo is kept top-secret is so you and I won’t know how many innocent people have been locked up there and how little the bureaucracy cares about innocence, which might remind people of the Nazis.
…
The war on terror, to most people, is a lame joke, and Republicans who’ve been embedded in Washington too long are now finding that the word “terrorism” has lost its tread. This multitrillion-dollar war is going to wind down, one way or another. The Occupant will hand it off to the next president, who can then negotiate with people who know people who know terrorists and work out a way to extricate our people from the desert.
If a Democrat does it, it will be appeasement, and if a Republican does it, it will go down as a courageous act of statesmanship, but one way or another, it will be done.
…
Meanwhile it’s almost Memorial Day and here is a vet on television talking hopefully about his dream of making a good life who has been horribly burned and grafted back together, his head looks like a candle stub with a mouth and blinking eyes. Your heart goes out to the brave young man. And what choice does he have other than to be brave? It’s either that or the life of a potato. But who did this to him?
On Memorial Day we’ll hear about men who gave their lives for their country, but many lives were not given, they were taken, and taken stupidly and carelessly. And there has been great public piety about those men and their “sacrifice” on the part of politicians who blithely sacrificed them.
– Garrison Keillor, salon.com/opinion/Keillor, (5/21/08)
Read Keillor’s entire piece, either at salon (which can be troublesome to log onto) or at antiwar.com, where we found it.
Memorial Day will never feel the same even after the last eight years have ended.
A General Cluster of ‘Malign Influence’
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As chin-strap, ramrod-retro, surge-happy US Army Gen. David Petraeus slips through his Senate confirmation hearings this morning, Iraq is slipping further into the surreal.
Last month, Decider George picked Petraeus out of a crowd, a total stranger, (ironic sarcasm, we have you know!) and then nominated him to replace Navy Adm. William J. Fallon as chief of U.S. Central Command.
Although this so-called Central Command covers a lot of bad-ass, screwed-up Middle Eastern areas like Iraq and Afghanistan, company headquarters is in Tamp, Fla.
Fallon quit earlier this year because Decider George’s Iran policy was “becoming a distraction.”
One wonders at Petraeus’ eyes — brown, has to be the color brown — because the man is so-filled up to the eyeballs with shit!
A bit of his testimony:
- “The withdrawal of over one-quarter of our combat power from Iraq will significantly reshape the battlefield. Our goal is to thin out our presence, not simply withdraw from areas, to ensure we help the ISF hold the security gains we have achieved together and set the conditions for additional progress,” Petraeus said.
“A period of 45 days will enable us to reposture our forces, if needed, evaluate the effect of required adjustments, and avoid premature judgments about the impact of these changes. After this period of consolidation and evaluation, we can then complete an informed assessment and make appropriate recommendations.”
– CNN, cnn.com/2008/politics, (5/22/08)
What the heck?
And what is reposture?
In all the babble, the procrastination continues. Last fall, US troops strength crested at about 165.000, that was during the incredibly successful “surge,” and someGIs have since left (a bunch, 3,000 and more, to Afghanistan) and now that level might be cut.
The big question is when…
Forty-five days starting from what date?
And how long is this period when Petraeus and his good shadow, Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, have “complete an informed assessment and make appropriate recommendations”?
The putting-off of the putting off.
The Associated Press obtained a copy of a 46-question-and-answer document submitted before Petraeus testified.
And that old Iran policy thing came up — Iran is the black-heart ingredient against peace in the whole, entire Middle East.
- When asked by the Senate panel whether a lengthy deployment in Iraq only strengthens Iran’s influence in the region, Petraeus responded that the opposite was true. It “has the potential to counter malign Iranian influence against the government of Iraq, build common cause in the region and expose the extent of malign Iranian activities to the world,” he wrote.
The “extent of malign activities…”
Then what about this:
- WASHINGTON — The U.S. military, in a shift, has postponed the release of a report detailing allegations of Iranian support for Iraqi insurgents, according to people familiar with the matter.The military had initially planned to publicize the report several weeks ago but instead turned the dossier over to the Iraqi government, these people said. The Iraqis are using the information to pressure Tehran to curb the flow of Iranian weaponry and explosives into Iraq, these people said.
…
“The timing of the brief…on Iranian interference has yet to be nailed down, but we anticipate briefing sometime in the future,” said Rear Adm. Patrick Driscoll. Adm. Driscoll said there were “lots of reasons” for the delay but declined further comment.
Another military official said in an interview that the report could be delayed significantly, noting that it was “in the hands of the [Iraqi central government].”
– Yochi J. Dreazen, online.wsj.com/article, (5/21/08)
Was the good general questioned about all this civilian-killing/Quran-targeting shit?
Early news stories on Petraeus’ hearing indicated none of this was discussed:
- BAIJI, Iraq — A U.S. helicopter airstrike on Wednesday night killed eight civilians, including two children, north of Baghdad, police officials said on Thursday.
Colonel Mudhher al-Qaisi, police chief in the town of Baiji, said the attack was on a group of shepherds in a vehicle in a farming area.
Relatives said some of those killed were fleeing on foot after the U.S. military arrived in the area.
“This is a criminal act. It will make the relations between Iraqi citizens and the U.S. forces tense. This will negatively affect security improvements,” Qaisi told Reuters.
– Sabah al-Bazee, Reuters, (5/22/08)
Even as US military commanders continued to dampen red-hot reaction to a US sniper using a copy of the Koran for target practice, Iraqi police are full of questions about another US operation earlier Wednesday in which 11 people were killed.
The US military reported 11 militants died, but police and several residents said at least some of the dead were civilians killed by U.S. snipers.
Including a journalist:
- BAGHDAD — An Iraqi television station accused U.S. troops on Thursday of shooting dead one of its cameramen as he walked to his Baghdad home.
Colleagues of Wisam Ali Ouda at the Afaq television channel said he was among 11 people killed by U.S. soldiers in eastern Baghdad’s Obaidi district on Wednesday morning.
The U.S. military has said its troops shot dead 11 militants, but police and several residents said at least some of the dead were civilians killed by U.S. snipers.
“Wisam was one of our most prominent cameramen. His killers have no values or humanity,” the station’s director, Mohammed Thiab al-Baidhani, said. “We will loudly condemn those who kill journalists.”
A spokesman for the U.S. military in Baghdad, Lieutenant-Colonel Steven Stover, denied any civilians were killed during Wednesday’s military operation in Obaidi.
“All extremists were positively identified as committing a violent act or posed a threat to commit a violent act before each engagement,” he told Reuters.
There have been conflicting accounts of Wednesday’s shootings in different parts of the Obaidi district. It lies close to Sadr City, the main stronghold of anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, where Iraqi troops backed by tanks have launched an operation to take control of the streets.
Police said the dead included an elderly man and three street cleaners, but also at least three Sadr militants.
Colleagues of Ouda, 32, who was buried in the holy city of Najaf on Thursday, said they had made pendants bearing his image to commemorate him.
“He was a close friend, we filmed a lot together. It’s a tragedy,” cameraman Ali Adnan said.
– Reuters, (5/22/08)
The Committee to Protect Journalists, based in New York, says Iraq is the most dangerous place on earth to work.
Since the 2003 US-led invasion, 130 journalists, both local and foreign, have been killed.
And this isn’t very-good US PR:
- GENEVA — The United States on Wednesday defended its detention of around 500 minors in Iraq, saying it had developed an “extensively robust” programme to meet the special needs of child combatants.
“The US does detain juveniles that are encountered on the battlefield,” said Sandra Hodgkinson, deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Defense.
“We go to great lengths when we do detain juveniles to recognise the special needs of the juvenile population and to provide them with a safe environment away from hostilities,” she told journalists.
The Pentagon confirmed last week a report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) that the US army is currently holding around 500 minors in detention in Iraq, as well as nearly a dozen juveniles in Afghanistan.
The ACLU has also said US forces had detained 800 minors in Iraq as recently as last September.
“The United States has not recognised these child detainees’ right to rehabilitation and reintegration, nor has the US recognised their juvenile status, in contravention of international juvenile justice standards,” the ACLU said.
…
Hodgkinson was speaking ahead of a review of the US implementation of its commitments under optional protocols to the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child. The review was to take place at UN offices in Geneva.
The United States has not ratified the main convention, the only state not to do so apart from Somalia.
– Agence France-Presse, (5/21/08)
AND THIS SUCKS!
- Vice President Dick Cheney told newly minted Coast Guard officers Wednesday that the war on terror would be won on their watch and dismissed fears that fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan would drag on indefinitely.
Cheney, sporting a 10-gallon hat, said the troop surge in Iraq “has succeeded brilliantly.”
“The war on terror is a lengthy enterprise, but it does not have to go on forever,” he told more than 200 graduating cadets during the 127th commencement at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy.
…
“The only way to lose this fight is to quit. That would be irresponsible,” Cheney said. “More than that, quitting would be an act of betrayal and dishonor. And it’s not going to happen on our watch.”
– Associated Press, rawstory.com/news/2008, (5/21/08)
Clusters of brain cells merge together and form an image.
The picture of a cowboy buffoon, looking like Lyndon Johnson with a skin disease
War is apparently the only real rush Dufus Dick gets out of his miserable, little life.
Despite never, ever serving in the military, despite not giving a shit about sending others off to die or get maimed, Dufus Dick must have his shit-slick fingers all over this horror:
- The United States on Wednesday opposed a worldwide ban on cluster bombs, calling instead for “technological fixes” that would make them safer.
State Department expert Stephen Mull told reporters the United States is “deeply concerned” about the danger of such munitions, but said a ban like one proposed at a major conference in Dublin would be impractical.
“We think that it will be impossible to ban cluster munitions as many in the Oslo process would like to do, because these are weapons that have a certain military utility,” Mull said.
“So rather than ban them, we think that a much more effective way to go about this is through technological fixes that will make sure that these weapons are no longer viable once the conflict is over,” Mull said.
He did not explain how such a technological solution might work.
…
Dropped from warplanes or fired from artillery guns, cluster bombs explode in mid-air, randomly scattering bomblets — ramping up the risk of civilians being killed or maimed by their indiscriminate, wide-area effect.
– AFP, (5/21/08)
Obvious in being absent from these weapons’ talks in Dublin, Ireland, this week are representatives from the US along with China, India, Israel, Pakistan and Russia.
One hundred other nations like France, Germany and Japan have been working since last year to develop some kind of agreement to halt the use of cluster bombs.
This character Mull from the above story is, of course, another one of those cluster heads from Decider George’s government.
The world cannot ban these type weapons because they “have a certain military utility,” Mull blubbered — One can actually hear Dufus Dick blubbering the word “utility” in everyday speech like it was a kitchen toaster instead of a terrible weapon of mass destruction for small spaces.
Also in the AFP story, Mull said the US does participate in the high-sounding-Orwellian-KGB-Peter Sellers-playing the president like Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons in Geneva.
This gathering for just certain weapons is a gun-runner’s lovefest, Mulled continued, because the “principal producers and users of these munitions vote and participate and work together.”
War is such a sweet business — just ask Dufus Dick, smiling Dave Petraeus and of course, Decider George!
Apology ‘In the sense’
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Christians in the land of Islam.
Not only did the holier-than-thou armies of the West invade Iraq, but the religion’s hypocrisy was sucked along with it.
Trapped in an inferno, US GIs perform like the false, twisted logic that put them there.
- An American sniper has been sent home from Iraq for using a copy of the Koran for target practice at a shooting range near Baghdad, the US military says.
The Muslim holy book was found riddled with bullet holes last week by Iraqi police, who also discovered offensive graffiti inside its cover.
A US military spokesman said the soldier had been removed from his unit, sent home, and would be disciplined.
He was unnamed, but was reportedly a staff sergeant in a sniper section.
– news.bbc.co.uk, (5/18/08)
When is an apology not an apology?
- BAGHDAD – President Bush has apologized to Iraq’s prime minister for an American sniper’s shooting of a Quran, and the Iraqi government called on U.S. military commanders to educate their soldiers to respect local religious beliefs.
Bush’s spokeswoman said Tuesday that the president apologized during a video conference Monday with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who told the president that the shooting of Islam’s holy book had disappointed and angered both the Iraqi people and their leaders.
“He apologized for that in the sense that he said that we take it very seriously,” White House press secretary Dana Perino said. “We are concerned about the reaction. We wanted them to know that the president knew that this was wrong.”
…
On Tuesday, Khalaf al-Elyan, a senior Sunni Arab lawmaker, said the sniper must stand trial, preferably in Baghdad.
“It is a dangerous case. We had been silent and accepted the killing of our sons, the destruction of our homes and the theft of our money, but we do not accept insults to the holy Quran,” he said at a news conference.
…
Maj. Gen. Jeffery Hammond, the commander of U.S. forces in Baghdad, met with tribal leaders in Radwaniyah on Sunday to apologize while another American officer kissed a copy of the Quran before presenting it to the chiefs.
On Monday, the No. 2 U.S. commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, paid visits to al-Maliki as well as Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi and parliament speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, both of whom are Sunni Arabs.
– Qassim Abdul-Zahra, Associated Press Writer, (5/20/08)
Perino gives Decider George such great head.
She has turned into the extreme-best mouthpiece.
Even better than Mouthpiece-Through-The-Asshole Ari Fleischer!
The Iraqis are serious-as-shit about the incident, but the US president, under whose orders that staff sergeant sniper labored, is only sorry “…in the sense…” of how serious the affair could have become, and might still.
One of the worse things that could happen (out of a long, indexed list of worse things) is chaos comes like in Europe last year over that cartoon.
Or the Quran down the toilet routine at Gitmo.
Instead of an apology, a US general kissed Islam’s most holy book.
What pisses, however, as there will never be a Decider George apology to the US peoples:
- Here’s how the figures add up, just for Americans. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have thus far produced 300,000 psychological casualties, 320,000 brain injury casualties, plus 35,000 (probably understated) officially reported “normal” casualties. This adds up to 655,000 US casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, an average of just under 101,000 Americans killed or wounded every year since the wars began. If the idea of 101,000 casualties for every extra year in Iraq and Afghanistan gets out and infects the voting public, imagine the effect on the currently torpid national debate over leaving in five years versus fifteen years!
– Alexander Cockburn, CounterPunch Diary, counterpunch.org/Cockburn, (5/10-11/08)
Saying ‘I’m sorry’ and then doing something about the injustice, a normal procedure.
Instead, Decider George decides to give up golf.
Sad and Shameful
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Decider George shames all US peoples.
He couldn’t grasp his ass with both hands.
And his hypocrisy makes one suffer enough to shit a brick:
- SHARM EL SHEIK, Egypt — President Bush said Saturday that “it breaks my heart” that the Palestinian people have been unable to establish an independent homeland and he vowed anew to try to forge an Israeli-Palestinian agreement by year’s end.
Bush’s remarks from the sidelines of a regional conference here appeared aimed at Palestinians and other Arabs who consider the U.S. administration so staunch a supporter of Israel that it turns a blind eye to the human rights concerns of the Palestinians. Many also doubt Bush’s commitment to the tough negotiations ahead if he’s to succeed in helping to craft a deal in just seven months.
“It breaks my heart to see the vast potential of the Palestinian people, really, wasted,” Bush said, appearing alongside Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. “They’re good, smart, capable people that when given a chance will build a thriving homeland.” Bush said he is “absolutely committed” to achieving agreement.
“It would be an opportunity to end the suffering that takes place in the Palestinian territories,” Bush added.
Egypt is one of Bush’s most reliable Arab allies, yet even here state-backed media mocked Bush’s peace efforts, especially after his cozy visit to Israel on Thursday to celebrate the Jewish state’s 60th anniversary – a date the Palestinians call the “day of catastrophe.”
In his speech Thursday to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, Bush mentioned only vaguely “the hard choices necessary” for Israelis to do their part for peace, but offered no concrete steps. In those remarks, Bush lavished praise on Israel and reiterated its right to defend itself. He did not visit Palestinian territories, and the only time he mentioned them was to say that Israel at 120 years old – in 2068 – would border an independent Palestinian state.
– Hannah Allam, mcclatchydc.com/world/story, (5/17/08)
The president of the US peoples has now gone off his rocker.
Eerily, and however, Decider George’s trip to the Middle East also conjures up rather repugnantly Dick Nixon’s visit to the region just weeks before he was overly-unceremoniously run out of town (via helicopter) in the summer of 1974.
The last graph from yesterday’s McClathy news story above:
- Bush’s agenda for the conference is grueling, with one-on-one time built in for several of his most crucial Middle Eastern allies. On Saturday, Bush met with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Karzai and Abbas. On Sunday, he’s expected to sit down with leaders of Pakistan, Jordan and Iraq before giving a speech to the general conference audience.
Nixon’s ’74 trip was also a gut cruncher and kind of grueling. He had been suffering from phlebitis, blood problems in his extrementies, even once being hospitalized – his physicians really didn’t want the president traveling, there was a chance of blood clots — but because of the heat off “Watergate,” Dick needed to take a hike out of town. His hectic 10-day schedule included visits not only to Israel, but to Saudi Arabia, Syria and Egypt.
The scandal-pot, however, was way-more-than-boiling over back in DC.
Wikipedia explains late spring, early summer 1974:
- The House Judiciary Committee controlled by Democrats opened formal and public impeachment hearings against Nixon on May 9, 1974. Despite his efforts, one of the secret recordings, known as the “smoking gun” tape, was released on August 5, 1974, and revealed that Nixon authorized hush money to Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt, and also revealed that Nixon ordered the CIA to tell the FBI to stop investigating certain topics because of “the Bay of Pigs thing.” In light of his loss of political support and the near certainty of both his impeachment by the House of Representatives and his probable conviction by the Senate, he resigned on August 9, 1974, after addressing the nation on television the previous evening. He never admitted to criminal wrongdoing, although he later conceded errors of judgment.
During Nixon’s visit to Eygpt in June 1974, he and President Anwar El Sadat once travelled by train from Cario to Alexandria.
In a scene not unlike Lawrence of Arabia, huge crowds lined the train track, waving and screaming. Unlike our current leader, Nixon was well-liked in the Middle East (in fact, he was more popular abroad than at home).
He and Sadat at one point even stood on at open platform between railroad cars waving to the waving throngs as the train slowly swept pass, through towns and villages, churning through the Egyptian countryside.
According to The Final Days, written by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (which told of Nixon’s last months in office), this particular trip was harrowing for medical people, the Secret Service, and probably Nixon’s whole staff.
Blood clots be damned! Assassination come forth!
Woodward and Bernstein cite sources traveling with Nixon which implied that maybe, just maybe, Dick wanted to be plucked from the crowd, wanted to be gunned down, maybe wanted somebody to shoot him: A tactical death wish, Nixon political right up to the razor wire.
The all-consuming meltdown caused by a simple burglary had caused ‘Tricky Dick’ to maybe go beyond more than just tricky.
A better way out: Get blown away in a far land and go down as a hero instead of having to return home and get your ass shamefully kicked.
Nixon is relative, however. Compared to Decider George, he was damn-near not bad.
‘Support the troops!’
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Is Decider George’s government heartless and cruel at every level?
Apparently, the whole shebang is not worth a shit:
- WASHINGTON (AP) — An internal e-mail message written by a Veteran’s Affairs Department employee suggested that the agency avoid giving a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder for veterans and instead consider a diagnosis that might result in a lower disability payment.
The message, dated March 20 and titled “Suggestion,” said: “Given that we are having more and more compensation seeking veterans, I’d like to suggest that we refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out. Consider a diagnosis of Adjustment Disorder, R/O PTSD.” R/O stands for “rule out.”
“Additionally,” it said, “we really don’t or have time to do the extensive testing that should be done to determine PTSD.”
…
In a statement, Dr.James B. Peake, the secretary of veterans affairs, called the suggestions “inappropriate.” The employee’s name was not released.
– Associated Press, (5/16/08)
Despite all the evidence, despite all the bullshit about supporting the troops, Bootjack John McCain keeping US GIs in Iraq a 100 years (now it’s just until 2013, according to a fairy-tale speech he gave yesterday), despite all the lofty tones for US fighting men and women:
- An estimated 300,000 veterans among the nearly 1.7 million who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan are battling depression or post-traumatic stress disorder. More than half of these people, according to the study conducted by the Rand Corp., are slipping through the cracks in the bureaucratic system, going without necessary treatment.
The Rand study underscores one of the lessons of modern counterinsurgency conflicts: Such wars may kill fewer troops than traditional fighting but can leave deeper psychological scars.
– Julian E. Barnes, latimes.com/news/science, (4/18/08)
And on the other side of the fence, which is actually the same side:
- A poorly run Pentagon program for providing civilian employees in Iraq and Afghanistan with workman’s compensation has allowed defense contractors and insurance companies to gouge American taxpayers, a House oversight committee said Thursday.
Insurance companies alone have pocketed $600 million in excessive profits over the past five years, says a staff report from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, but the Defense Department refuses to adjust its approach for managing the program.
According to the committee, the Pentagon allows its contractors to negotiate their own insurance contracts. By contrast, the State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development and the Army Corps of Engineers have all selected a single insurance carrier to provide the insurance at fixed rates.
“What makes the situation even worse is the people this program is supposed to benefit — the injured employees working for contractors — have to fight the insurance companies to get their benefits,” committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said at a hearing Thursday. “Delays and denials in paying claims are the rule.”
KBR Inc., one of the largest defense contractors in Iraq, paid the insurance giant AIG $284 million for medical and disability coverage under the Defense Base Act, a reference to the federal law mandating the insurance. Due to the way KBR’s contract is structured, this premium, along with an $8 million markup for KBR, gets billed to the taxpayer.
“Out of this amount, just $73 million actually goes to injured contractors, and AIG and KBR pocket over $100 million as profit,” Waxman said.
– Richard Lardner, AP, (5/15/08)
Decider George has got to be the most openly deceitful leader in the whole, wide world.
‘Support the troops’ my ass!
Maybe along with uncle Karl Rove, the US Congress should have Decider George arrested and ass-stomped into the basement.
And the public:
In the nothingness on the public airwaves about the Pentagon propaganda machine — no not that one — but where all these half-looped retired military officers lied about Decider George’s foreign policy on every news network in the US, comes another nail in the coffin of truth.
Joe Galloway, a long-time war correspondent and author of the book, We Were Soldiers Once…And Young, was cited this week as one of the critics “reached out” for by big Don Rumsfeld during the operation lie-to-the-Americans exercise performed by those lying, greedy retired military assholes on TV.
Galloway also says Rumsfeld is a liar.
In a story posted on Thursday at editorandpublisher.com, Galloway writes
- This is why alarm bells should be ringing all over Washington about The New York Times’ disclosure that then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld encouraged a secret Pentagon program to care for and spoon-feed more than 50 retired senior military officers whom the administration deemed reliable friends who could be counted on “to carry our water” on the television and cable networks.
Feeding the military analysts “key and valuable information” in secret briefings by Pentagon and White House officials, the idea went, would make them the go-to guys for the networks and encourage the networks to “weed out the less reliably friendly analysts . . . .”
…
Let the record show that Rumsfelds’ folks reached out to me on these few occasions:
–In early summer of 2003, half a dozen of us were invited to an off-the-record lunch with Rumsfeld in the Pentagon. The defense secretary seemed to have a poor grasp of the reality on the ground in Iraq and was still declaring that we’d do no nation-building there. He saw no insurgency, only a handful of “dead-enders”.
– In November 2005, DiRita invited me to a “one-on-one” lunch with Rumsfeld at the Pentagon. This one I accepted. I arrived to find across the table Rumsfeld, the then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Peter Pace; Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Dick Cody; Joint Staff Director Lt. Gen. Walter Sharp and (then Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Larry) DiRita.
We went at it hammer and tongs for an hour and a half over their conduct of the war and the errors that were costing the lives of American soldiers. As I left, I told Rumsfeld that I’d continue to point out those mistakes every week in my column.
–In April 2006, DiRita sent me an e-mail telling me that my most recent column was “silly”. That column had discussed an expensive war game the Pentagon conducted about a U.S. attack on a thinly disguised country that obviously was Iran. His complaint sparked an escalating e-mail war that most reckon DiRita lost .
So much for the Rumsfeld/DiRita outreach to their critics. They were much too busy hand-feeding horse manure to their TV generals, who in turn were feeding the same product to the American public by the cubic yard.
There’s little doubt that this program violated the laws against covert propaganda operations mounted against the American public by their own government. But in this administration, there’s no one left to enforce that law or any of the other laws the Bush operatives have been busy violating.
The real crime is that the scheme worked. The television network bosses swallowed the bait, the hook, the line and the sinker, and they have yet to answer for it.
So far no one in Decider George’s government has answered for any thing.
Common folk answer.