“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.”
– US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, June 5, 2008

Despite the obvious, none of George Jr.’s entourage has ever even been threatened with criminal prosecution.

(Illustration found here).

In a new view of the Iraqi horror is the word, “bugsplat:” One definition is a software for scanning your computer for registry errors; another is the lack of humanity in warfare.
The US military’s invasion was a nasty example of the latter.
In fact, ‘Bugsplat‘ was the name of a computer program in 2003 used to determine collateral damage inflicted by American bombs.
HaHaHaHa — bugsplat, anyone/anything squashed on the US windshield.

Robert Koehler took a look at this line of bullshit yesterday morning at the Baltimore Sun:

“But even when they’re not targeting civilians, which is probably most of the time, they end up killing massive numbers of civilians,” journalist Allan Nairn told Amy Goodman in a “Democracy Now!” interview last year.
“The Pentagon has a word for that, too,” he went on.
“They call it ‘bugsplat.’
In the opening days of the invasion of Iraq, they ran computer programs, and they called the program the Bugsplat program, estimating how many civilians they would kill with a given bombing raid.
On the opening day, the printouts presented to General Tommy Franks indicated that 22 of the projected bombing attacks on Iraq would produce what they defined as heavy bugsplat — that is, more than 30 civilian deaths per raid.
Franks said, ‘Go ahead. We’re doing all 22.’”
And this is the foundation of our national security.

Koehler concludes:

Project Bugsplat is the name of every war, at least from the planners’ point of view.
A winnable war is waged from above, invisibly, with godlike impunity.
Such wars, especially in today’s political order, cannot be effectively opposed with acts of equally brutal counterforce; they can only be prolonged.
“Bugsplat” is a term of ultimate disrespect and indifference, and it begins with a state of mind.
The global Occupy movement, with its humane and nonviolent core certainty, is tipping the balance. Finally it comes down to this: Occupy consciousness.

Without such, death comes by indifference.

This indifference can be applied to the US MSM — news organizations who have turned its eyes and ears away from exposing a rot now fully grown within the American soul.
Watch and listen here to the late Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter’s emotional outrage at the Iraqi war — he expresses horror at his own country (the UK) for being involved with such a crime.
And despite the US supposedly being gone, the blood still flows – from Bloomberg on a new report from London-based Iraq Body Count:

“The rate of Iraqi civilian deaths caused by U.S.-led coalition forces has declined steadily from 2009, while the rate caused by Iraqi state forces has increased,” the group said in an e-mailed news release.
Recent trends point to a “persistent low-level conflict in Iraq that will continue to kill civilians at a similar rate for years to come,” Iraq Body Count said.
“Time will tell whether the withdrawal of U.S. forces will have an effect on casualty levels,” the group said.

The US media, however, has been most quiet about any bad vibes coming off a war that tore apart the world’s thin fabric and left a country in a position beyond misery – a verbal snapshot of one Iraqi woman seems to sum it up: “Today is better than tomorrow.”

And tomorrow is the Iowa caucuses where the war party starts its machine rolling — horror of ugly horrors, though Newt Gingrich whined and took a bugsplat: “No, I feel ‘Romney-boated.”

The dogs of war fight amongst themselves — bug splatting everybody.

In reality, a picture is indeed worth a shitload of words.

One haunting face, that 4-year-old Iraqi kid — the above photo has been on Google Images for years, and has always caused me to hurt whenever I spotted it (used it a couple of times on blog posts to epitomize, or something like that, of a simple-impact of war-reality) and as a parent, always felt an intense, emotional near-freak-out in seeing a child’s innocence near-saturated by fear.
The little boy over her shoulder, held by the woman in black, appears still clueless.
She’s not.

The US is horribly shamed, only if by once having any shame.
America’s history ain’t pretty — from the get-go in using the term, “massacre,” in waging war against against the native population (near-genocide); slavery as a national economic institution; deliberately infecting sexually transmitted diseases, including syphilis and gonorrhea to some unfortunate citizens of Guatemala; and so forth…
And now one can add the current, though, long-time running, US near-destroying Iraq — though, in this particular case, the cost for everybody on the planet is near-about incomprehensible.
Since March 2003 and through December 2011, between 106,000 and nearly 114,000 Iraqi civilians have either directly/indirectly been killed (via Iraq Body Count), with some estimates much higher — in 2006, a survey was published online by British medical journal, The Lancet, which reported 655,000 Iraqis or more than 500 people a day (have been killed) since the U.S.-led invasion.
George Jr. dismissed the numbers: “I don’t consider it a credible report.”
Of course, a year later George Jr. would also deny the onset of the current financial chaos.

The number is Iraqi children killed, separate from the rest, is hard to pin down, there’s just no list somewhere — I tried Googling all kinds of ways, but no real substance, and a guess would be in the thousands or more.
Last July, UNICEF said in a report marking the “Day of the Iraqi Child,” 900 children were killed in violence between 2008 and 2010 and more than 3,200 wounded — children accounted for 8.1 percent of all casualties in attacks during that period.
Not much info, but no surprise — Tommy Franks blubbered at the outset, “We don’t do body counts,” and left it at that.

However, even before March 2003, Iraq children were dying in droves.
The sanctions imposed by the US-led UN in the early 1990s claimed half a million children under the age of 5 — in 1996, Lesley Stahl of CBS‘ 60 Minutes asked Madeleine Albright, then U.S. ambassador to the UN, about this:

“We have heard that a half million children have died,” Stahl said.
“I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And — and you know, is the price worth it?”
Albright replied, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.”

Such US compassion.

And of the children of US peoples?
In 2008, the median age of US serviceman/woman was 28, though, almost 50 percent was between 22 and 30 — reportedly, the last GI killed in Iraq was a 23-year-old North Carolina boy.
These guys paid the local price.

Beyond the immoral, hard-to-grasp 4,484 US GIs killed, the more than 33,000 wounded, there’s the hardcase reality of a military that’s near busted — at least in its flesh and blood, the drones, of course, will continue to fly.
Due to Don Rumsfeld’s arrogant — “You go to war with the Army you have…,” and sorry about the inconvenience, war is war, “You can have all the armor in the world on a tank and it can (still) be blown up…” — bullshit, the US military got blind-sided/ass-wiped by Iraq.
And in turn, blind-sided/ass-wiped the planet.

Not everyone was blind — Iraq was topic “A” 10 days after the inauguration – eight months before Sept. 11 for George Jr., who although handled cabinet meetings “like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people,” near-immediately after the WTC attack wanted to bomb IRAQ.
From a CBS interview with Richard Clarke, former top White House anti-terrorism advisor and directly after 9/11:

“The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, ‘I want you to find whether Iraq did this.’
Now he never said, ‘Make it up.’
But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.
“I said, ‘Mr. President. We’ve done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind.
There’s no connection.’
“He came back at me and said, “Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there’s a connection.’
And in a very intimidating way.
I mean that we should come back with that answer.
We wrote a report.”

Rumsfeld appeared surrealistic during meetings, like a horror-outtake from Monty Python:

“Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq,” Clarke said to Stahl.
“And we all said … no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan.
We need to bomb Afghanistan.
And Rumsfeld said there aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq.
I said, ‘Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.
“Initially, I thought when he said, ‘There aren’t enough targets in– in Afghanistan,’ I thought he was joking.
“I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection, but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there saying we’ve looked at this issue for years.
For years we’ve looked and there’s just no connection.”

A little more than 18 months later, the US rolled into Iraq.

And out came a worn-down military machine with lots of burned-out cogs.
Due to the puzzlement of George Jr.’s crowd of incompetent people on what to do after the fall of Baghdad, the GI suffered, and suffered, dragging in the poor National Guard, 37,000 of which served in Iraq, where they were one-third more likely to be killed in combat than regular soldiers.
In Iraq, 140 Guardsmen were killed: A total of 94 Army National Guardsmen and no reservists were killed out of 58,209 U.S. deaths in Vietnam. (A reason the Guard was a ticket to safety in them days).

(Illustration found here).

And with current veterans — a reality figure of 800,000 — one in five — suffer from PTSD (although only 46 percent seek medical help), which might account for a higher-than norm suicide rate.

And the shit is so bad: “The four-legged, wet-nosed troops used to sniff out mines, track down enemy fighters and clear buildings are struggling with the mental strains of combat nearly as much as their human counterparts. By some estimates, more than 5 percent of the approximately 650 military dogs deployed by American combat forces are developing canine PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder].”
Dogs of an illegal and much-bungled war — a war which made the world a much-more dangerous place.

And Saturday morning, the last of US troops rumbled out of Iraq and into Kuwait in a 123-truck convey while a drone circled quietly overhead — the operative word, ‘quietly‘, no shock and awe here.
In its wake, a country shot to shit and back.
Iraq nowadays is a contradictory nightmare — despite economic growth at a China-like 9.6 per cent and about the same forecast for the next five years, Iraqi peoples get just 7.6 hours a day of electricity; only 30 per cent of homes are connected to sewerage; just 38 per cent of households rate availability of drinking water as “good” or “very good”; and one in eight Iraqis who dealt with a civil servant over the past year was obliged to pay a bribe; and this from Firas Naeem, a 37-year-old owner of a clothing store in central Baghdad’s busy Karrada Out shopping street: “…but anyone who is honest has to admit that life for ordinary people is still harder now than it was before (the invasion in) 2003.”
Another man-made horror.

Chris Floyd, who can be passionate, got so in a post on Friday concerning the Iraqi catastrophe:

This is the reality of what actually happened in Iraq: aggression, slaughter, atrocity, ruin.
It is the only reality; there is no other.
And it was done deliberately, knowingly, willingly.
Indeed, the bipartisan American power structure spent more than $1 trillion to make it happen.
It is a record of unspeakable savagery, an abomination, an outpouring of the most profound and filthy moral evil.
Line up the bodies of the children, the thousands of children — the infants, the toddlers, the schoolkids — whose bodies were torn to pieces, burned alive or riddled with bullets during the American invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Line them up in the desert sand, walk past them, mile after mile, all those twisted corpses, those scraps of torn flesh and seeping viscera, those blank faces, those staring eyes fixed forever on nothingness.
This is the reality of what happened in Iraq; there is no other reality.
These children — these thousands of children — are dead, and will always be dead, as a direct result of the unprovoked act of military aggression launched and sustained by the American power structure.
Killing these children, creating and maintaining the conditions that led to the slaughter of these children, was precisely what the armed forces of the United States were doing in Iraq.
Without the invasion, without the occupation, without the 1.5 million members of the American volunteer army who surrendered their moral agency to “just follow orders” and carry out their leaders’ agenda of aggression, those children would not have died — would not have been torn, eviscerated, shot, burned and destroyed.
This is the reality of what happened in Iraq; you cannot make it otherwise.
It has already happened; it always will have happened.
You cannot undo it.

One would also like to bring George Jr. and all his lackeys to justice — it’s obvious to anyone with walking around sense they’re war criminals.
No way, however.
Instead of the real culprits, President Obama is going balls-to-the-wall after Julian Assange via a sad US serviceman, Bradley Manning, whose first court appearance was on Friday.
Read about Manning’s inhumane trip here, and the secrecy bullshit here.
In reality, all to make an example: Other young soldiers thinking of telling the truth about America’s wars must by now have surely gotten the message: if you see something, don’t say something. Meanwhile, Manning couldn’t be faulted for wondering why he did not just take a cue from his commander-in-chief and kill some innocent foreigners like a good American boy. Instead of facing a lifetime in prison, he might have been up for a medal.

Reality ain’t fragile.

The US ended its military misadventure on Iraq yesterday awash in bullshit.
Leon Panetta has got to be one of the most disingenuous and hypocritical assholes this side of Newt Gingrich, claiming the Iraqi debacle was worth the price in blood and money because it set Iraq on a path to democracy.

“You will leave with great pride – lasting pride,” Mr Panetta told the troops.
“Secure in knowing that your sacrifice has helped the Iraqi people to begin a new chapter in history.”

No wonder the US is disliked by so much of the planet.

(Illustration found here).

Worth it, Leon?

The UK’s The Guardian has a good overview this morning of the ‘worth’ in the Iraqi horror story:

• The US has lost 4,484 military personnel since 2003 in Iraq – the vast majority of the 4,802 coalition casualties. This year has seen casualties too – 54 people have been killed, although that is much lower than the 2007 peak of 904. (Reportedly, my state, California, seemed to carry a big burden — 388 of the state’s people were killed).
  Thousands more have been wounded in Iraq – 32,200 at last count, 22,490 of them in the Army, followed by 8,622 US Marines.

• The war in Iraq has cost the US $823.2bn since 2003 – and in 2011 cost $49.3bn, only $4bn less than 2003 when the invasion happened.

• Civilians have suffered enormously in Iraq — the data above comes from Iraq Body Count, which monitors reported deaths and reckons up to 113,728 Iraqis have died.
  Recently, IBC reported that at least 1,003 suicide bombings caused civilian casualties in Iraq from 2003 to 2010.
  The Wikileaks data showed how many died, particularly in the violent sectarian aftermath of the war, with murders as the main cause.
  That database recorded 109,032 deaths , 66,081 of them civilians, 23,984 insurgents and 15,196 Iraqi security forces.
  The worst place for deaths was Baghdad, with 45,497.

And that’s just a quick look — a closer view makes for a grim read.

One of those is a small slice of the horror — the 2005 massacre by Marines of Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha in Anbar Province.
From TruthOut:

“I mean, whether it’s a result of our action or other action, you know, discovering 20 bodies, throats slit, 20 bodies, you know, beheaded, 20 bodies here, 20 bodies there,” Col. Thomas Cariker, a commander in Anbar Province at the time, told investigators as he described the chaos of Iraq.
At times, he said, deaths were caused by “grenade attacks on a checkpoint and, you know, collateral with civilians.”
The 400 pages of interrogations, once closely guarded as secrets of war, were supposed to have been destroyed as the last American troops prepare to leave Iraq.
Instead, they were discovered along with reams of other classified documents, including military maps showing helicopter routes and radar capabilities, by a reporter for The New York Times at a junkyard outside Baghdad.
An attendant was burning them as fuel to cook a dinner of smoked carp.

The documents — many marked secret — form part of the military’s internal investigation, and confirm much of what happened at Haditha, a Euphrates River town where Marines killed 24 Iraqis, including a 76-year-old man in a wheelchair, women and children, some just toddlers.
Haditha became a defining moment of the war, helping cement an enduring Iraqi distrust of the United States and a resentment that not one Marine has been convicted.
But the accounts are just as striking for what they reveal about the extraordinary strains on the soldiers who were assigned here, their frustrations and their frequently painful encounters with a population they did not understand.
In their own words, the report documents the dehumanizing nature of this war, where Marines came to view 20 dead civilians as not “remarkable,” but as routine.

And from the testimony of Major Gen Steve Johnson, then-commander of US forces in Anbar Province:

“There were other — this was November — so we had been at it since March.
And examples of many civilians being killed at a given time were precedent for that.
It happened all the time, not necessarily in the west all the time, but throughout the whole country.
…
But at that point in time, I felt that that was — had been, for whatever reason, part of that engagement and felt that it was just a cost of doing business on that particular engagement.”

Killing a guy in a wheelchair, and babies?
Cost of doing business…

Announce that whatever new approach the U.S. decides on, the U.S. is doing so on a trial basis.
This will give us the ability to readjust and move to another course, if necessary, and therefore not “lose.”
– Donald H. Rumsfeld memorandum, Nov. 6, 2006

(Illustration found here).

In the annuals of world history there’s near-about no match for the horror of the US invasion of Iraq and all its far-flung ugly consequences.
Despite any rational reasoning beyond greed, George Jr.’s little party tipped the world into the hellish crevasse it now finds itself and murdered thousands of Iraqi innocents in the process — and despite the guffaws, a tribunal in Malaysia right-recently found George Jr. and his suck-buddy, Tony Blair, guilty of war crimes for their instigation of the slaughter: The Malaysian tribunal judges ruled that the decision to wage war against Iraq by the two former heads of government was a flagrant abuse of law and an act of aggression that led to large-scale massacres of the Iraqi people.
Why hasn’t the rest of the world jumped?

Nobel Peace Prize nominee, political scientist Michael Haas on  just the noncompliance of rational, humane justice:

First, however, it is useful to recall that when the Afghan War began, General Tommy Franks ordered compliance with the Geneva Conventions on October 17, 2001.
On November 13 he was countermanded by an executive order in the form of a military order from President George W. Bush regarding prisoners who were then being collected, though no specific mention was made of the Geneva Conventions.
When the first prisoners arrived at the Naval Base on January 11, 2002, the commanding general, Brigadier General Rick Baccus, ordered compliance with the Geneva Conventions.
His order was then rescinded on February 7 by another executive order signed by George W. Bush making specific reference to the inapplicability of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 but not the 1929 Geneva Convention.

On Guantanamo alone George Jr. and ‘The Dick‘ Cheney should be jailed with the keys thrown into the muddy Potomac River.

And so today, in fanfare and a shitload of lying bullshit, the US ended its “official” military presence in Iraq with a so-called flag-casing ceremony in Baghdad — US defence honcho Leon Panetta added his body weight in bullshit, too.
From Aljazeera English:

Nearly nine years after the start of the controversial invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein and sparked years of violence, Panetta told Iraqis “Your children will have a better future”, and said the US and Iraq would have “a new relationship rooted in mutual interest and mutual respect”.
“We are not about turn our backs on all that has been sacrificed and accomplished in Iraq,” Panetta said.
“Iraq will be tested in the days ahead by terrorism, by those who would seek to divide, by economic and social issues … by the demands of democracy itself,” he said, while adding that the US would be a “committed friend and … partner” to the country.
General Lloyd Austin, the commander of US forces in Iraq, said that the country would be “a source of stability and inspiration in the region”.

And the locals?

“If the Americans have achieved anything, they have achieved it to their own benefit in the first place.
They are the ones who get benefits from this issue.
As for Iraqis, maybe they have the change they have been waiting for, but they paid high price for it as you can see the killings, devastation and sectarian violence.
And up to now the situation is still unstable,” said Qassim Abdullah, an Iraqi citizen.

What benefits?

The Iraqi people see the benefit — a yearly celebration of the US departure.
Via Pakistan’s Daily Times:

Shouting slogans in support of the “resistance,” the demonstrators held up banners and placards inscribed with phrases like, “Now we are free” and “Fallujah is the flame of the resistance.”
In the centre of the city surrounded by the Iraqi army, demonstrators carried posters bearing photos of apparent insurgents, faces covered and carrying weapons.
They also held up pictures of US soldiers killed and military vehicles destroyed in the two major offensives against the city in 2004.
The demonstration was dubbed the first annual “festival to celebrate the role of the resistance.”

In the place of flowers.

President Obama traveled yesterday to Fort Bragg, N.C., to add his two-cents worth to the madness, claiming the Iraqi adventure “an extraordinary achievement,” and let it go at that.

And, of course, the US will continue to have a presence in country: The embassy compound is by far the largest the world has ever seen, at one and a half square miles, big enough for 94 football fields. It cost three quarters of a billion dollars to build (coming in about $150 million over budget). Inside its high walls, guard towers and machine-gun emplacements lie not just the embassy itself, but more than 20 other buildings, including residential quarters, a gym and swimming pool, commercial facilities, a power station and a water-treatment plant.
Along with all this shit, a staff of 16,000.

Iraqi Parliament Speaker Osama Al Nujaifi has called that high number of personnel “illogical.”

Not by warped, horrifying US logic, however.
Again, one wonders, why the jails aren’t full of George Jr.’s lackeys.

“The issue is not whether the Iraqi people will greet U.S. soldiers as their liberators, but what will they do six months after that.
I find it naive and disingenuous to claim that you can create democracy in Iraq any time soon.
The administration has already assured us that the U.S. will not stay there for very long, and, if that is the case, then the goal of establishing a constitutional system in Iraq is a joke.”
– Gen. William Odom, February 2003

The late Gen. Odom was my most-favorite commentator on the whole messed-up adventure in Iraq — he pulled no punches and was a welcome sight on PBS.
Of course, the network and cable news outlets wouldn’t touch him with a 10-foot pole — they had the Pentagon’s generals to provide biased-color commentary on the Iraqi business.
Odom called the real deal: “The invasion of Iraq I believe will turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history.”
An ugly joke with one long, asshole-of-a-punchline.

(Illustration found here).

The latest bit of shit to come out of Iraq — beyond President Obama’s phoney-baloney announcement that ‘all’ US troops will be out of that destroyed country by this year’s end — is a report from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) on another disaster within the greater disaster.
The lede graph in the CNN story tells the tale:

As the U.S. military heads towards the exits in Iraq, a new report released Sunday on a major reconstruction project there reads like a critique of the war in general — poorly planned, unexpectedly costly, years behind schedule and with an uncertain future.

The project in question is the Fallujah Waste Water System, an operation that should have raised alarms at its very conception, but back in those days, no one with any sense at all was in charge.
Another example of wasted lives and treasure — the system was supposed to handle 100,000 Iraqi homes, but up to last month, only 6,000 have been connected, and the project was suppose to cost $35 million, but now its cost is $100 million with no end in sight.
In fact:

“In the end, it would be dubious to conclude that this project helped stabilize the city, enhanced the local citizenry’s faith in government, built local service capacity, won hearts or minds, or stimulated the economy.”
“Coupled with the fact that the outcome achieved was a wastewater treatment system operating at levels far below what was anticipated, it is difficult to conclude that the project was worth the $100 million investment and the many lives lost.”

Gen. Odom would turn over in his grave with shame.

As the so-called last of US troops get ready to depart, they will leave in their wake a country that’s not only dangerous, but completely screwed.
Also included in that SIGIR report was comments from Lt. Gen. Babakir Zebari, Iraq’s defense chief, who says that the Iraqi military won’t be able to operate on its own until sometime between 2020 and 2024.
WTF!
Until then what happens?

Gen. Odom underestimated the horror — beyond the US tragedy (4,481 GIs killed, more than 32,000 wounded, and more than 30 percent of all US armed forces have some form of PTSD) the death and destruction to the Iraqi nation is near impossible to grasp.
From The Nation last week:

The Brookings Institute estimates that 115,250 Iraqi civilians were killed during the war.
Iraq Body Count puts the figure at between 103,158 and 112,724 people.
Other estimates of excess deaths from the war, such as the Lancet survey and the Opinion Research Business survey, are substantially higher, but it is enough here to grapple with the most conservative estimates.
…
But that comparison understates how devastating the war has been to Iraq, because it ignores Iraqi combatants who’ve been killed, and neither does it address displaced persons.
By a conservative estimate, 3,700,000 Iraqis have been displaced from their homes by the war.
By way of comparison, a year after Hurricane Katrina, the population of a devastated New Orleans had shrunk by 378,000 people.
Or put another way, if you cleared every last person out of Los Angeles, you could fill the city back up to its current population with displaced Iraqis.

And further to inflame an out-of-control fire, 40 percent of Iraqi professionals have left the country since 2003, and Iraq had 34,000 physicians before the invasion, now have about 12,000.
A shitty life there, and it’s George Jr.’s fault — why isn’t he in jail?

The financial cost of the Iraqi war keeps piling up — for a never-ending dial, see Cost of War — the amount this morning is $801,234,070…and climbing by the second.
The Christian Science Monitor remembers this: When President George W. Bush launched the war, charging incorrectly that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the Pentagon estimated its cost at $50 billion to $60 billion. Economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey got in hot water at the White House when he guessed in public the war could cost as much as $200 billion.
Ha!

I’m not joking — If I was joking, it’d go something like this: Horse walks into a bar, bartender asks, “Why the long face?”

“How can we let this happen? How is that acceptable in the United States of America? The answer is, it’s not. It’s an outrage. And it’s a betrayal — a betrayal — of the ideals that we ask our troops to risk their lives for.”
– Presidential candidate, Barack Obama, April 2008, reacting to the suicide of an 89-year-old WWII veteran

War is nowhere fun.
In this so-called modern age, however, war is everywhere — more of a world at war then even the two named world wars, and US GIs are getting the shit end of the stick.

And from noted war correspondent Richard Engel on NPR last month: “And I’ve seen battles like this on little outposts in other parts of Afghanistan and when you add them up, [you ask] ‘Why? What are these amounting to?’”
Yes, the $1.2 trillion question.

Right now, there’s about 40,000 troops still in Iraq and more than 90,000 in Afghanistan, and although the US is supposed to be out of Iraq by this December, it’s still up in the air about how many will remain, while apparently we’ll be involved in the Afghan horror for years to come.

(Illustration found here).

Not only are these war zones horrible, these GIs are bring the horror home with them.
Although 96 percent of soldiers are proud of their service, the trauma will remain with them seemingly forever.
In a study by Veterans for Common Sense, nearly 20 percent of the more than 2 million troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from mental health conditions, and the situation won’t get better for a long while.
From McClatchy Newspapers:

“A large number of people serving overseas have mental health impacts, and more and more are coming home,” said Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. “I am deeply concerned that we are not ready.”
The Department of Veterans Affairs, which is trying to grapple with the wave of new and damaged veterans, has been under considerable stress.
In a related development this week, an internal VA survey requested by Murray’s committee found that its staff doesn’t think it has the resources to handle the growing demand from new veterans for mental health services.
Paul Sullivan, the executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, said that in 2003, the government expected that the VA would see about 50,000 new patients from both wars.
With nearly three-quarters of a million Iraq and Afghanistan veterans already in the VA system, he said, the long-term estimate was “ominous.”
“More than 1 million total patients from the wars by the end of 2013,” Sullivan predicted.

And some terrible stats:

Of the 109,000 casualties since combat in Iraq and Afghanistan began, 6,200 troops have been killed.
Among those were 298 war-zone suicides, according to the study.
Overall, it reported 2,300 active-duty suicides since 2001.
Suicides have been a persistent problem, underscoring the stress that 10 years of war have placed on the troops as a result of multiple deployments.
In 2009, suicides exceeded deaths in combat.
The study said that nearly 1 million troops — 42 percent of all service members sent to the combat zones — have been deployed at least twice.

And these wars appear nowhere at an end.

A new Pew Research poll reports a third of US military think all this war mongering is not worth it and we should get our ass out of foreign shit and focus more on shit at home.
From the UK’s The Guardian:

One in three US veterans of the post-9/11 military believes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not worth fighting, and a majority think that, after 10 years of combat, America should be focusing less on foreign affairs and more on domestic problems, according to an opinion poll.
…
The Pew survey found that veterans were ambivalent about the net value of the wars, although they were generally positive about Afghanistan, which has been a more protracted but less deadly conflict for US forces.
One in three veterans said neither war was worth the sacrifice; a view shared by 45 percent of the public polled.
Some 50 percent of veterans said the campaign in Afghanistan had been worthwhile; 41 percent of civilians agreed.
Among veterans, 44 percent said the war in Iraq was necessary; 36 percent of civilians shared that view.
Of the former service members who were seriously wounded or knew someone who was killed or seriously wounded, 48 percent said the war in Iraq was worth fighting, compared with 36 percent of those with no personal exposure to casualties.
Exposure to casualties had an even larger impact on attitudes toward the war in Afghanistan.
Some 55 percent of those exposed to casualties said the military campaign in Afghanistan had been worth the cost to the US, whereas 40 percent of those who were not exposed to casualties held that view.

And the survey also touched upon US civilian outlooks on the military:

Pew said its survey results found “isolationist inclinations” among the war veterans.
About six in 10 said the US should pay less attention to problems overseas and instead concentrate on issues at home.
In a survey it conducted earlier this year, a similar share of the public agreed.
The results also reflected what many view as a troublesome cultural gap between the military and the public.
Although numerous polls have shown that Americans hold troops in high regard, the respondents in the Pew research admitted to a lack of understanding of what military life entails.
Only 27 percent of adult civilians said the public understood the problems facing those in uniform, while the proportion of veterans who said so was even lower at 21 percent.

The toll of war on the homeland for generations to come.
And somebody should ask Obama about the political reality of his use of the word, betrayal.

Two such unrelated examples occurred this past weekend, one involved GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry and the other concerned the former US vice president, The Dick.

(Illustration found here).

Due to a tilted MSM, this gall bullshit is allowed to be played out on the media wires without so much as a ‘Hey, wait a minute,” and certainly no saying ‘that’s a lie.’
A public lambasted by continuous crap comes to believe the crap is real — this caused by some like the Tea Party nit-twits who just don’t give a shit.

In the Perry case, the story is race.
Born and raised in the US Deep South (don’t hold that against me), I understand the culture of racism as a normal byproduct of ordinary life — I got outta there as soon as I could.
And with my own children’s upbringing (a single parent, I raised five kids near-about alone), there were two words that were never heard or spoken in my household on threat of great bodily harm — one was the combination of god and damn together, and the other, the “n” word for African-Americans.
The kids would sometimes blurt out the first one in anger (much to my consternation, and to their credit, they’d apologize, or at least look sheepish), but never, ever used the second.
Of course, all other words were fair game — we could make the late George Carlin blush.

Anyway, the thing on Perry arrived Sunday via a story in the Washington Post:

In the early years of his political career, Rick Perry began hosting fellow lawmakers, friends and supporters at his family’s secluded West Texas hunting camp, a place known by the name painted in block letters across a large, flat rock standing upright at its gated entrance.
“Niggerhead,” it read.
Ranchers who once grazed cattle on the 1,070-acre parcel on the Clear Fork of the Brazos River called it by that name well before Perry and his father, Ray, began hunting there in the early 1980s.
There is no definitive account of when the rock first appeared on the property.
In an earlier time, the name on the rock was often given to mountains and creeks and rock outcroppings across the country.
Over the years, civil rights groups and government agencies have had some success changing those and other racially offensive names that dotted the nation’s maps.
But the name of this particular parcel did not change for years after it became associated with Rick Perry, first as a private citizen, then as a state official and finally as Texas governor.
Some locals still call it that. As recently as this summer, the slablike rock — lying flat, the name still faintly visible beneath a coat of white paint — remained by the gated entrance to the camp.
When asked last week, Perry said the word on the rock is an “offensive name that has no place in the modern world.”

Perry claims the rock was painted over near immediately.
Others differ:

“I remember the first time I went through that pasture and saw that,” said Ronnie Brooks, a retired game warden who began working in the region in 1981 and who said he guided three or four turkey shoots for Rick Perry when Perry was a state legislator between 1985 and 1990. “. . . It kind of offended me, truthfully.”
…
Another local who visited the property with Perry and the legislators in those years recalled seeing the rock with the name clearly visible.
“I thought, ‘This is going to embarrass Rick some day,’ ” said this person, who did not want to be named, fearing negative consequences from speaking on the subject.

The Perry camp pushed back: “A number of claims made in the story are incorrect, inconsistent, and anonymous, including the implication that Rick Perry brought groups to the lease when the word on the rock was still visible. The one consistent fact in the story is that the word on a rock was painted over and obscured many years ago.”

Right, and a minor example of gall as explained by this from the Post story:

Mae Lou Yeldell, who is black and has lived in Haskell County for 70 years, recalled a gas station refusing to sell her father fuel when he drove the family through Throckmorton in the 1950s. She said it was not uncommon in the 1950s and ’60s for whites to greet blacks with, “Morning, nigger!”
“I heard that so much it’s like a broken record,” said Yeldell, who had never heard of the hunting spot by the river.

Even in my red-neck of the Alabama woods I never heard such ugly racial shit as the above.
Hence use of simple gall in repudiating the whole thing.

However, unmitigated gall was displayed this weekend by The Dick.
On CNN yesterday (via Raw Story), The Dick offered praise for President Obama in the war on terror, but then demanded an apology from Obama not using the old bullshit phrase, “war on terror” and the old boy is still stung by Obama’s 2009 Cario speech.

“It matters a lot,” Cheney said. “In terms of the signals that are sent by the commander-in-chief with respect to the kind of efforts that are going to be used, what we expect our people to be doing.
He needs to be clear with what he’s doing, and he clearly is fighting a war.
I agree with the attacks.
But don’t get wrapped up in your underwear then trying to go back and validate the foolish things said in their campaign.”
…
“They need to call it what it is,” he said.
“When he goes to Cairo and in-effect says we walked away from ideals, we forgot our core principles and values on our (the Bush Administration’s) watch, that’s a big mistake.”
When (CNN moderator Candy) Crowley asked if he wanted an apology from Obama, Cheney said, “I would. Not for me, but I think for the Bush Administration and that he misspoke when he gave that speech two years ago.”
Cheney’s aughter Liz added: “I think he (Obama) did tremendous damage. I think he slandered the nation and I think he owes an apology to the American people.”

One almost has to do a double-take on that huge pile of bullshit.

The Dick and George Jr. are war criminals, no doubt and no amount of unmitigated gall will change that cold-hard fact.

“If this works out, we’ll have the ability to track people persistently across wide areas,” says Tim Faltemier, the lead biometrics researcher at Progeny Systems Corporation, which recently won one of the Army contracts.
“A guy can go under a bridge or inside a house. But when he comes out, we’ll know it was the same guy that went in.”
– Description of innovative drone technology, from Wired

(Illustration found here).

Even as the situation on the ground in Afghanistan is becoming worse — an uptick of nearly 40 percent more violence this year than in 2010 — the sky-ways above the war-spattered country has become alive with the whine of unmanned drones.
The conflict there, however, is getting bad, real bad: Three NATO soldiers were killed Wednesday in eastern Afghanistan, while nearly at the same time, eight Afghan policemen died in an ambush in the south, and all this horror in the wake of the US embassy attack in Kabul earlier this month, followed by the assassination of a former Afghan president who was trying to work with the Taliban on a peace plan.
No country for young or old men.

Emboldened by the successful slaughter in Afghanistan, the US reportedly are building new drone bases in Ethiopia and in the Seychelles, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean — all in secret, of course — to enable better attacks on insurgents in Somalia and Yemen.
Use of drones surged 134 percent in 2010 over the previous year, and President Obama has apparently made these machines the focal point for modern war — only five drone attacks in Pakistan during 2007, 36 in 2008 (most of those in the last half of that year) and in Obama’s first year in office, the tempo of such attacks in Pakistan increased 47 percent.

Despite all evidence to the total contrary, last summer, Obama’s chief counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan, blubbered “there hasn’t been a single collateral [civilian] death” in Pakistan and since drones are perfect, “exceptionally surgical and precise” and “do not put… innocent men, women and children in danger.”
Such bullshit — there’s been 236 attacks under Obama, one every four days.

And with drones, it’s quiet, easy killing with machines themselves making life-and-death decisions.
War has gone beyond human control:

And the machines being used to do the killing are also being enhanced, moving the United States one step closer to an apparent goal of constant low-intensity warfare capability worldwide.
The United States government is reportedly working to develop pilotless military drones that are fully automatic, identifying and destroying human targets on the ground without any intervention from an operator or pilot back in Nevada, and this is generating virtually no public outrage.
The drones would reportedly seek their targets based on facial-recognition software or other biometrics. The Defense Department planners have dubbed the technological leap “lethal autonomy,” meaning that the life-or-death decision can be made instantaneously and independently by the machine without any slowing down of the process due to a human being having to make a decision whether to fire or not.

The key words ‘generating virtually no public outrage‘ is where the US war effort is moving in an attempt to keep the Long War going even longer — out of sight, out of range.

And it’s topical — this week, the FBI arrested a 26-year-old US citizen on charges of “plotting an attack on the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol with a remote-controlled model aircraft” and although authorities claim there was no real danger, the ability of this guy armed with a physics degree to plan something like this might become common place in the near future.

So these unmanned drone future is kind of scary, even for US peoples.
From the Wire link above:

The Pentagon isn’t content to simply watch the enemies it knows it has, however.
The Army also wants to identify potentially hostile behavior and intent, in order to uncover clandestine foes.
Charles River Analytics is using its Army cash to build a so-called “Adversary Behavior Acquisition, Collection, Understanding, and Summarization (ABACUS)” tool.
The system would integrate data from informants’ tips, drone footage, and captured phone calls.
Then it would apply “a human behavior modeling and simulation engine” that would spit out “intent-based threat assessments of individuals and groups.”
In other words: This software could potentially find out which people are most likely to harbor ill will toward the U.S. military or its objectives.
Feeling nervous yet?
“The enemy goes to great lengths to hide his activities,” explains Modus Operandi, Inc., which won an Army contract to assemble “probabilistic algorithms th[at] determine the likelihood of adversarial intent.”
The company calls its system “Clear Heart.”
As in, the contents of your heart are now open for the Pentagon to see.
It may be the most unnerving detail in this whole unnerving story.

Not only watch your back, but watch your emotions.

Seemingly, the further away from the invasion of Iraq and closer to the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, we all get, the repulsive ugly of George Jr.’s term as a war president becomes even more apparent — the real question is why are these people not in jail.
In the newest wrinkle, an October 2002 letter from Tony Blair’s office reveals he and George Jr. were going into Iraq come hell or high water: A letter from Blair’s private secretary reveals that “we and the US would take action” without a new resolution by the UN security council if UN weapons inspectors showed Saddam had clearly breached an earlier resolution. In that case, he “would not have a second chance.”

(Illustration of Pablo Picasso’s ‘Head of a woman‘ found here).

On the letter from the UK’s The Guardian (the link above):

In a devastating passage, Rycroft (Blair’s secretary) added: “In other words, if for some reason [such as a French or Russian veto] there were no second resolution agreed … we and the US would take action.”
The Downing Street letter is particularly significant considering the government’s repeated emphasis in public at the time on the need for UN approval before any invasion of Iraq.

Another of that public to private bullshit.

Also from the UK yesterday, Baroness Manningham-Buller, former director general of the domestic security service, who retired in 2007, said Blair and his lackeys had been warned prior to any war action an Iraqi invasion was a major f*ck up.
Via The Telegraph:

In an interview with the Radio Times, Lady Manningham-Buller suggested that she argued at the time that the Government should focus on defeating al Qaida and winning the war in Afghanistan instead of attacking Saddam Hussein.
“Iraq did not present a threat to the UK,” she said.
“The service advised that it was likely to increase the domestic threat and that it was a distraction from the pursuit of al Qaida.
I understood the need to focus on Afghanistan.
Iraq was a distraction.”
She said it was “for others to decide” whether the Iraq war had a mistake but added: “Intelligence isn’t complete without the full picture and the full picture is all about doubt.
Otherwise, you go the way of George Bush.”

And The Dick.

In a realistic look at The Dick’s most-wonderful new book, ‘In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir,’ a column at antiwar.com by political activist, Medea Benjamin (Susan Benjamin), co-founder of Code Pink, explains the tome actually needs to be in a bookstore’s fiction section.
She lists 10 reasons why — most touching war crimes, torture and genocidal actions, but the #3 reason is financial:

War profiteering.
U.S. taxpayers shelled out about $3 trillion for the Bush-Cheney wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — a major factor in our nation’s present economic meltdown.
But Cheney and his cronies at Halliburton made out like bandits, getting billions in contracts for everything from feeding troops in Iraq to constructing the U.S. embassy in Afghanistan to building the infamous Guantanamo prison.
Cheney was CEO of Halliburton from 1995-2000, leaving for the VP position with a $20 million retirement package, plus millions in stock options and deferred salary.
Before the Iraq War began, Halliburton was 19th on the U.S. Army’s list of top contractors; with Cheney’s help, by 2003 it was number one — increasing the value of Cheney’s stocks by over 3,000 percent.

Big bucks for The Dick.

And in that vein, a couple of members of the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan penned an op/ed in Sunday’s Washington Post, claiming billions and billions of US bucks have been flushed down  The Dick’s toilet of war.
A few enlightening snips:

At least one in every six dollars of U.S. spending for contracts and grants in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade, or more than $30 billion, has been wasted.
And at least that much could again turn into waste if the host governments are unable or unwilling to sustain U.S.-funded projects after our involvement ends.
…
Tens of billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted through poor planning, vague and shifting requirements, inadequate competition, substandard contract management and oversight, lax accountability, weak interagency coordination, and subpar performance or outright misconduct by some contractors and federal employees.
Both government and contractors need to do better.
…
The contractor workforce in Iraq and Afghanistan has at times exceeded 260,000 people and has sometimes outnumbered U.S. military forces in theater.
The roughly 1-to-1 ratio sustained over the years reflects a basic operating truth that Defense Department officials expressed in testimony to the commission: The United States cannot conduct large or prolonged military operations without contractor support.
…
Projects that are or may be unsustainable are a serious problem.
For instance, U.S. taxpayers spent $40 million on a prison that Iraq did not want and that was never finished.
U.S. taxpayers poured $300 million into a Kabul power plant that requires funding and technical expertise beyond the Afghan government’s capabilities.
Meanwhile, a federal official testified to the commission that an $11.4 billion program of facilities for the Afghan National Security Forces is “at risk” of unsustainability.

And that’s no fiction — after awhile that mounts up to some real money.

George Jr. knows it too.
Last February, the little shit abruptly cancelled a Geneva, Switzerland, speaking engagement after reports of the possible filing of an official criminal complaint against him about torture of U.S.-held detainees.

(Illustration found here).

Katherine Gallagher, an attorney with the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights: “Whatever Bush or his hosts say, we have no doubt he cancelled his trip to avoid our case,” said Gallagher. “The message from civil society is clear — if you’re a torturer, be careful in your travel plans.”

Except within the safe confines of the US of A.
And this in spite of war-crime-related charges being there, in plain sight, and even from within the US government.
In June 2008, the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its report on intelligence slapped together for Iraq, a country which seemingly required invasion.
From the committee’s press release and chairman of the group, Jay Rockefeller:

“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,” 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.”
“It is my belief that the Bush Administration was fixated on Iraq, and used the 9/11 attacks by al Qa’ida as justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein.
To accomplish this, top Administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and al Qa’ida as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11.
Sadly, the Bush Administration led the nation into war under false pretenses.
“There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence.
But, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate.”

Based on that shit alone, some kind of legal action should have been taken by now, or at the bare-ass minimum, at the least some low-level public inquiry on the validity of the committee’s press release.
Enter Mr. Barack Obama.

If one has been paying even somewhat close to attention to detail, the release in mid-July by the group, Human Rights Watch, of its 107-page report,, “Getting Away with Torture: The Bush Administration and Mistreatment of Detainees,” wasn’t a bell-sounding news event in terms of actual life.
Pretty much the same story over the past couple of years, maybe longer — double-standards and violations of actual international accords and treaties signed by the US, and yes, even public statements by some of these assholes to the effect of, ‘Yeah, I tortured, so fuck off!‘
In this particular case, I believe to shame, that nothing will ever be done.
Although HRW’s report of “overwhelming evidence” and presentations of “substantial information warranting criminal investigations,” looks and sounds good, the real-time reality of any of those clowns ever ending up anywhere-near a jail cell is so way-down-the-road it’s never going to happen.
And the reason?

Nat Hentoff explains in a piece at  The Star Democrat on the HRW report that it’s a vital requirement for future generations of US peoples that the current US peoples hold account those who ordered torture, and get rid of the nefarious US double-standard, a tool for al-Qaeda recruitment.
The last couple of lines of Hentoff’s story, though, cops the deal: Not one of the aspiring Republican candidates for the presidency next year has said a word about this. And Obama cherishes their silence.

On a lot of stuff, especially with foreign policy, Obama’s been a frickin’ turncoat.

Although in those most-wonderous (and more dreamy than then realized) just after Obama’s election — November 2008 — there were news stories on reported rumors that then-president George Jr. might issue a blanket pardon for everybody involved, including his-own-self, but the guy shouldn’t have worried.
From the UK’s The Independent in April 2009:

Only last weekend Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, was re-iterating what his boss was saying even before he was inaugurated.
A new administration meant a new beginning.
It was time to “move on” and, Mr Emanuel indicated, the former White House and Justice Department officials who formulated the policy, as well as the CIA operatives who had carried them out, should not be prosecuted.

And in spite of an occasional legal side-glance/lip service at the issue, Obama has stood by “move on” and its implication that all those war criminals should not be prosecuted.

In being such a set of unique war criminals, George Jr.’s little group is also responsible — beyond torture — for mass death and great, horrible suffering.
Iraq greatly suffered/and is still suffering from the dubious US invasion — according to Iraq Body Count through July 24, 2011, an estimated more than 102,000 to near 112,000 Iraq civilians have been killed (other estimates are much higher — the Lancet study claimed the deaths caused by the U.S. invasion of Iraq rivaled the death toll of the 1994 Rwandan genocide).
And Iraq, along with Afghanistan, are now just one long fire fight — yesterday in Iraq, a day of what’s considered “very light violence,” five Iraqis died, including this incident: In Hadid, a sticky bomb placed on an education department employee’s car exploded and killed three family members.
An so it goes…

Meanwhile, back at the ranch.
George Jr.’s escapades have cost a generation of young people most dearly.
Not only have 4,474 US GIs have died, along with more than 32,172 wounded, more than 300,000 troops suffer from all kinds of PTSDs (18 to 20 percent of the whole force) and more are killing themselves — 32 US Army soldiers committed suicide last month (a record) and even veterans in college now have a much higher risk of suicide than a regular, non-veteran student.
What a horrible mess.

And back to that Senate Select Committee and a most-poignant story in yesterday’s Stars and Stripes on the death of a US GI in August 2003, just just four days after his 20th birthday.
Some snips:

Army Spc. Justin W. Hebert’s story is sad and sadly unremarkable, a tragedy bound up in the tale of a grinding war that took young lives with grievous regularity.
Nearly one-third of U.S. troops killed in Iraq were age 18 to 21.
Well over half were in the lowest enlisted ranks.
For Hebert, the Army was an adventure. But it didn’t last long.
…
It was Aug. 1, 2003.
The war, according to the Pentagon’s plan, was supposed to be over.
Baghdad had fallen swiftly.
But a new, more menacing phase of conflict was just beginning.
An insurgency was in the making, and in its formative months it perplexed U.S. commanders and cost Hebert his life.
In the years since, the U.S. effort in Iraq has veered from the brink of calamity to the threshold of surprising success.
With the remaining U.S. troops now packing to leave, possibly for good, casualties and costs will be tallied one last time.
…
The sacrifice of so many lives like Hebert’s helped turn U.S. public opinion firmly against the war by the time Barack Obama was campaigning for president in 2008.
Three years later, young Americans still die in Iraq even though the war is widely seen as over.
It is also widely seen as a mistake, and by some as a waste.

And a crime that cries for justice.
Torture is a side-issue when it comes to real-shit horror on a mass scale and those who perpetrated it should be held accountable — Sadly, the Bush Administration led the nation into war under false pretenses.

Prosecute the lie, but, alas Obama’s not so much for change, but for ‘move on.’
To the utter shame of all Us peoples.