Headin’ to Helmand
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From President Obama’s lips to boots on the ground.
Word came Sunday night: Escalation — 35,000 more troops for the Afghan meat-grinder.
And the first batch, 9,000 Marines for Helmand province, will leave as soon as Obama opens his mouth Tuesday at West Point, an event creating a most-strange and ironic circumstance for a snow-job — He will try and somehow explain to US peoples why such a bloody, dumb-ass move makes sense.
(Illustration found here).
A poem from Jean Gerard, age 94: “Defragging Afghanistan”
Take Showkar Kariz for example.
It’s thirty miles northeast of Kandahar
as the crow flies over Mohammed Qasim’s head.
He’s the only remaining inhabitant now.
He looks up into a cloudless sky.“There’s no Al Quaeda here,” says he.
“I had just dug out a child when
the second strike flew over. That time
they got him!”
He squints in the sun,
rubs his eyes.
“These are war crimes,” he says.
Silence.
Then: “Guess who came by last week,
and for what? Americans,” he says.
He’s tired. His voice shakes. “They
buried a piece of the World Trade Center
here,” he says, “and took a piece
of our mosque back to New York.”
He points
to a small mound beside a ruined wall,
sifts a handful of dust through his fingers.
Bad moon rising, and so forth…
‘scrabbling for the smoking gun…’
Filed Under Scratching Sounds | Leave a Comment
Some serious shit: “Tony Blair and George Bush at Camp David in February 2001 where they discovered they both used Colgate toothpaste.”
And they loved war games, much to the peril of the planet.
These two terrifying clowns are together again — part-and-parcel of an UK inquiry into British shenanigans in the US-led nefarious run-up to the Iraq war.
Despite some nasty, back-stabbing testimony this week, news of the hearings have been downplayed in the US, if reported at all.
(Illustration found here).
On Thursday, the former British ambassador to Washington related how so intense the preparations for the invasion (in early 2002), the UN weapons inspectors couldn’t do the proper job and were forced to find evidence, any kind of evidence:
Sir Christopher Meyer said the “unforgiving nature” of the build-up after American forces had been told to prepare for war meant that “we found ourselves scrabbling for the smoking gun”.
He added: “It was another way of saying ‘it’s not that Saddam has to prove that he’s innocent, we’ve now bloody well got to try and prove he’s guilty.’
And we — the Americans, the British — have never really recovered from that because of course there was no smoking gun.”
…
Asked about Tony Blair’s meeting with Bush at Crawford, Texas, in April 2002, where, some observers believe, the decision to go to war was made, Meyer said: “To this day I’m not entirely clear what degree of convergence was signed in blood at the Texas range.”
…
On 9/11 Condoleezza Rice, then the US national security adviser, told Meyer she was in “no doubt: it was an al-Qaida operation.”
The following weekend Bush and his key advisers met at Camp David and contacts later told Meyer there had been a “big ding-dong” about Iraq and Saddam.
And Meyer expressed the idea Margaret Thatcher would have done a better job than Twisted-Tony Blair:
Sir Christopher said that he was “not making a party political point,” but Lady Thatcher had been much tougher on the “special relationship” with the Americans.
He expressed frustration over the failure of the allies to agree a diplomatic strategy to overthrow Saddam or to prepare properly for victory, which would have prevented the country’s descent into chaos.
“Quite often I think what would Margaret Thatcher have done,” Sir Christopher told the inquiry.
“I think she would have insisted on a clear, coherent political-diplomatic strategy. I think she would have demanded the greatest clarity about what the heck happened if, and when, we removed Saddam Hussein.”
And the ever-so-delightful Dick Cheney:
“I remember saying to London ‘This may be the most powerful Vice-President ever.’
I mean, his institutional opposite number was the Deputy Prime Minister,” said Sir Christopher. “This was an unbalanced relationship and probably didn’t reap the dividends that we might have expected.”
And on Wednesday, senior officials within UK’s Foreign Office told the inquiry Iraq’s WMD was known to be non-existent, even early on in pre-war planning:
The inquiry was told how officials within the Foreign Office had become convinced that the regime in Baghdad was developing chemical and biological weapons.
When it received intelligence contradicting the claim in March 2003, this was discounted.
“There was contradictory intelligence, so I don’t think it invalidated the point about what weapons [Saddam] had,” Sir William (Ehrman, a senior official within the Foreign Office) said. “It was more about their use. Even if they were disassembled the [chemical or biological] agents still existed.”
It also emerged that a secret paper drawn up in the summer of 2002, which pointed to Iraq as a potential threat, was based almost entirely on uncorroborated and outdated assumptions.
Tim Dowse, the former head of counter-proliferation at the Foreign Office, said the document was based on information obtained before weapons inspectors were thrown out of the country in 1998.
“We had got ourselves in a particular mindset,” Mr Dowse said.
Nevertheless, there were repeated warnings to ministers about the reliability of the intelligence on Iraq.
In April 2000, intelligence was said to be “limited to chemical weapons.”
By May 2001, knowledge of major weapons programmes was described as “patchy;” by March 2002 it was “sporadic and patchy.”
Advisers admitted in August they knew “very little” about Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons, while intelligence information “remained limited” by September.
In June 2008, the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its report: “Before taking the country to war, this Administration owed it to the American people to give them a 100 percent accurate picture of the threat we faced. Unfortunately, our Committee has concluded that the Administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence,” (chairman of the Committee John D.) Rockefeller said. “In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.”
Meanwhile back at the UK hearings last week, Jeremy Greenstock, the Brit’s former ambassador to the UN, testified George Jr. was “hell bent on the use of force” in Iraq and was not going to be stymied:
As diplomats frantically attempted in early 2003 to agree upon a U.N. resolution approving a military offensive, Bush’s key aides grew impatient — criticizing the process as an unnecessary distraction, he said.
Grumbling from Washington “included noises about ‘this is a waste of time, what we need is regime change, why are we bothering with this, we must sweep this aside and do what’s going to have to be done anyway — and deal with this with the use of force,’” Greenstock testified before the inquiry into the Iraq war.
And on the Crawford, Texas, pow-wow between George Jr. and Twisted-Tony, there was this:
Greenstock said following the Crawford meeting, he realized Britain “was being drawn into quite a different discussion.”
But, like Meyer, he said the talks were secretive and the conversation between the two leaders was not disclosed to officials.
Read more on the inquiry here and here.
And read about what end the inquiry — according to the UK’s Independent, which will be nothing except some good headlines (in the UK, of course, not the US) and another whitewash.
A shame and disgrace that such public hearings won’t be held in the US as President Obama has made it fairly clear there won’t be any Iraq-war criminal investigations, despite all indications to the contrary.
From the Center for Public Integrity in January 2008:
President George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.
People should be scrabbling for a real-life legal gun.
Quick Punch
Filed Under Cloud gazing | Leave a Comment
(Illustration found here).
A new satellite-based study published Sunday in Nature Geoscience indicates the supposedly more-stable East Antarctic ice sheet has as been losing 57 billion tons of ice bulk a year since 2006.
From the BBC on the report:
“We felt surprised to see this change in East Antarctica,” study leader Jianli Chen from the Centre for Space Research at the University of Texas in Austin told BBC News.
The loss still looks small by contrast with West Antarctica, which is losing 132Gt (tons) per year, and with Greenland, where a recent analysis combining Grace data with other measurements indicated an annual figure of 273Gt.
(h/t Climate Progress).
Another brick in the wall of weird.
Also published Sunday in the Energy Bulletin:
The trouble with apocalypse is that most people have already seen it at the movie theater, watched it on television, read it in a book, or heard all about it from the pulpit.
So inundated with the language of crisis are we that we have become immune to it.
From the perspective of the historian our age has been chock full of “great transformations.”
And, it is, after all, the historian’s business to write about great change even if he or she has to invent some.
…
What apocalyptic narratives do is elevate the importance of the trajectory of every person’s life regardless of his or her station in society.
If we’re all in this together, then we can share in a great destiny no matter who we are.
But destiny sounds like fate.
What can one do if one is headed toward a great apocalypse? Pray, perhaps. Repent, maybe.
But responding to such a gargantuan event calls more for attaining the right relationship with one’s god than engaging in constructive social and political action.
Punch line: Don’t mothball the tuxedo!
Lyin’ through his ass
Filed Under War & Politics | Leave a Comment
The Iraqi saga is a horror-eyed bristle of lies.
In the run-up to the invasion, all kinds of fear-mongering lies created a sense of urgency, which quickly evaporated when those woeful tales of woe were shot-to-bits by reality.
We’re familiar with George Jr. and Dick Cheney’s intentional falsehoods — “deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate” — but what about others involved in the criminal and immoral enterprise.
Today in the UK’s Sunday Telegraph:
Tony Blair, the former prime minister, misled MPs and the public throughout 2002 when he claimed that Britain’s objective was “disarmament, not regime change” and that there had been no planning for military action.
In fact, British military planning for a full invasion and regime change began in February 2002.
The need to conceal this from Parliament and all but “very small numbers” of officials “constrained” the planning process.
The result was a “rushed”operation “lacking in coherence and resources” which caused “significant risk” to troops and “critical failure” in the post-war period.
Operations were so under-resourced that some troops went into action with only five bullets each.
Others had to deploy to war on civilian airlines, taking their equipment as hand luggage.
Some troops had weapons confiscated by airport security.
Commanders reported that the Army’s main radio system “tended to drop out at around noon each day because of the heat.”
One described the supply chain as “absolutely appalling,” saying: “I know for a fact that there was one container full of skis in the desert.”
…
The leaked documents bring into question statements that Mr Blair made to Parliament in the build up to the invasion.
On July 16 2002, amid growing media speculation about Britain’s future role in Iraq, Mr Blair was asked: “Are we then preparing for possible military action in Iraq?”
He replied: “No.”
Twisted-Tony Blair just lied through his ass.
In the pile of leaked documents to the Telegraph — classified verbatim transcripts, reports and papers — was the actual situation of the British forces: The analysis of the war phase describes it as a “significant military success” but one achieved against a “third-rate army.” It identifies a long list of “significant” weaknesses and notes: “A more capable enemy would probably have punished these shortcomings severely.”
Reminds one of Donald Rumfeld’s reply to all those young US boots-on-the-ground who were getting killed or blown apart by inadequate military equipment: “As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”
He added: “If you think about it, you can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can be blown up.”
Pity the heartless lie.
And one does wonder if any of these lying bastards on both sides of the pond will ever pay the piper for creating a horror story for the ages.
Slow-Melt Irony
Filed Under Environment, Finance, Madness | Leave a Comment
One of the great turds of the US political system, Sen. James Inhofe, yes, that silly-assed Republican from Oklahoma, displayed a most-marvelous bit of horror-irony this week as he tweaked the future and all those to come after us.
Inhofe is a major big-mouth-crybaby global-warming denier — appears a fairly ignorant man.
And with the Copenhagen climate talks coming up in a couple of weeks, the pecker-head, dim-witted Inhofe claims the world is safe as nothing good comes out of Denmark.
Via HuffPost:
And Inhofe had a message specifically for Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) — “We won, you lost, get a life.”
Something terrifyingly-paradoxical there.
(Illustration found here).
Whether one wants to hear it or not, or even, whether you believe/know it or not, the near-future of the planet is way-grounded in the word, change.
There’s so much afoot nowadays aimed at a really-clouded and anxious tomorrow — weather, energy, food (all the basics) — that despite all of stinky-Jim Inhofe’s blubberings will affect/effect everyone in such a profound way it’s unfathomable here writing this morning.
Read the basics on weather/climate here.
And on energy here; the basic problem on food here.
Inhofe’s mouth-off last week was in response to news the full Senate won’t get around to a climate bill until this coming spring, months after the Denmark meeting.
Last summer, the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill (the American Clean Energy and Security Act), which called for cutting US greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, 83 percent by 2050.
The Senate’s slightly more ambitious bill calls for a 20-percent cut by 2020.
And from the clown who blubbered years ago climate change was “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” Inhofe continues to bluster hysterical about the hysteria behind global warming alarmism:
I also said in Milan that the science is not settled.
That was an unpopular view back then.
But today, since Al Gore’s science fiction movie, more and more scientists, reporters, and politicians are questioning global warming alarmism.
I proudly declare 2009 as the “Year of the Skeptic” — the year in which scientists who question the so-called global warming consensus are being heard.
…
Of course, from the most memorable tidbit from my two-hour global warming speech in July of 2003 were my comments about the science behind global warming.
Now, six years later, and as I head to the next UN global warming conference, I am pleased by the vast and growing number of scientists, politicians, and reporters all over the world who are publicly rejecting climate alarmism.
When I made those comments on the Senate Floor, few people were there to stand with me.
Today, I have been vindicated and I am proud to share the stage with all those who now dare question Al Gore, Hollywood elites, and the United Nations.
Inhofe feels “vindicated” from what?
Barbara Boxer is head of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee — the EPW passed global warming legislation a couple of weeks ago by bypassing bowl-obstructed GOP members, thus eliminating their participation — the guys were being asshole-jerks, they’d boycotted the bill by stubbornly seeking more EPA analysis at an estimated (and additional) $140,000 cost.
Inhofe whined about it anyway: “In the history of this, we’ve not been able to find a time when a bill has been marked up without minority participation…”
However, he does seem to get the ever-changing last laugh –spine-lacking Harry Reid’s assertion of no Senate debate on climate-warming until the snow melts.
Read a view of the Senate version of the climate bill at Climate Progress.
And adding fuel to the skeptic/denier crowd were e-mails hacked this week from the UK’s Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and posted online — actually a bit to do about nothing, unless you’re scamming.
From Wired:
Global warming skeptics are seizing on portions of the messages as evidence that scientists are colluding and warping data to fit the theory of global warming, but researchers say the e-mails are being taken out of context and just show scientists engaged in frank discussion.
And one such e-mail from Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado:
But Trenberth, who acknowledged the e-mail is genuine, says bloggers are missing the point he’s making in the e-mail by not reading the article cited in it.
That article – An Imperative for Climate Change Planning (pdf) — actually says that global warming is continuing, despite random temperature variations that would seem to suggest otherwise.
“It says we don’t have an observing system adequate to track it, but there are all other kinds of signs aside from global mean temperatures — including melting of Arctic sea ice and rising sea levels and a lot of other indicators — that global warming is continuing,” he says.
…
“If you read all of these e-mails, you will be surprised at the integrity of these scientists,” he (Trenberth) says. “The unfortunate thing about this is that people can cherry pick and take things out of context.”
A good semi-insider response can be found at RealClimate.
Global warming and all its outlying complications are all too real — even a total mainstream source like National Geographic has a good interactive site on climate change — and Time magazine posed on Friday the consequences of a lame or near-non-existent agreement coming out of Copenhagen:
But there’s no getting around the fact that as the science of climate change grows more dire, the global political system seems increasingly unable to deal with that reality.
“We don’t want a global suicide pact,” said Mohamed Nasheed, the president of the Maldives, a low-lying Indian Ocean nation that could be swamped by global warming-caused flooding. “We want a global survival pact.”
But the world’s most influential leaders still aren’t ready for that.
Ready for what? An event way down the road, a maybe-problem for some future generation?
Not so fast…
From the executive summary of a new study (pdf) commissioned by the World Wildlife Fund International (h/t Climate Progress):
This report models the ability of low-carbon industries to grow and transform within a market economy.
It finds that runaway climate change is almost inevitable without specific action to implement low-carbon re-industrialisation over the next five years.
The point of no return is estimated to be 2014.
Re-invent modern industry in five years?
You gotta be shittin’ me!
Just follow Jumping-Jim Inhofe’s advice: ‘Get a life.’