UPDATE BELOW

Clear and chilly again this early Thursday on California’s north coast, the near-full moon hanging brightly out west over the Pacific Ocean.
All seems serene.

Appearances can be deceiving — in DC, the shit-for-brains bunch accomplished nothing more than raising the level of being “scoffed” and rebuked.
Although our government is open again, we’ll see the same shit in a few weeks — crazy will still be crazy.

(Illustration: One panel, Francisco Goya’s “The Disasters of War” collection, found here).

And war crimes are still war crimes, and should be called out as such, even if Americans are the perps — swept under the rug this week, buried underneath the screaming-melee fiddle-fuck in DC, was the report the Iraq horror-venture is/was way-worse then even seen and believed at the time.
There has to be a jail cell — or even a hangman’s noose — for the shit-list assholes who lied and badgered the US into the Iraqi war. Arrogant incompetents all: George Jr., The Dick, Paul ‘Wolfman’ Wolfowitz, Condi Rice, Don Rmsfeld, etc., the short/long list here.
All bona-fide war criminals — only if they were from a different country other than this one, the good, old, exceptional US of A.
Here, though, they write books, get on TV news shows, even poke fun at having actually authorized torture.
Verbal accessory before the fact, Joe Lieberman: ““said something to the effect that it’s nice that we’re all here at the Plaza instead of in cages after some war crimes trial.”
Hilarious, Joe, now just look at the nightmare-horror you assholes created.
Just yesterday in Iraq, only 14 people were killed — i.e., “only.”

Via a new survey/report from PLOS Medicine on the number of Iraqis killed due to the above listed assholes:

From March 1, 2003, to June 30, 2011, the crude death rate in Iraq was 4.55 per 1,000 person-years (95 percent uncertainty interval 3.74–5.27), more than 0.5 times higher than the death rate during the 26-mo period preceding the war, resulting in approximately 405,000 (95 percent uncertainty interval 48,000–751,000) excess deaths attributable to the conflict.
Among adults, the risk of death rose 0.7 times higher for women and 2.9 times higher for men between the pre-war period (January 1, 2001, to February 28, 2003) and the peak of the war (2005–2006).
We estimate that more than 60 percent of excess deaths were directly attributable to violence, with the rest associated with the collapse of infrastructure and other indirect, but war-related, causes.

Half-a-fucking-million!

The Washington Post examined the report via graphs and it ain’t pretty — title of the piece: “This chart shows that the Iraq war was worse than we think.”
And that’s bad — money quote:

Two trends should jump out at you right away: The war got a lot less dangerous for Iraqi men, but it stayed about consistently dangerous for women.
There seem to be two most-likely explanations for that.
First, a lot of men who might have fought were killed in the war’s first five years, so by 2008 there were fewer of them around to fight and die.
Second and perhaps more plausible is that the nature of the war changed.
For the first several years, violent deaths tended to come from combat, which disproportionately kills men.
But over time, more of it came from bombings and other acts of terrorism, which target civilians and thus have a high probability of killing women.
This sort of violence has been getting much worse since 2011.

And al Qaeda in Iraq, which wouldn’t be if it weren’t for George Jr. and his crowd, has come back full-strength and is killing a shitload of people: “Nobody is able to control this situation,” said Ali, who watches over a Sunni graveyard that sprang up next to the hallowed Abu Hanifa mosque in 2006, when sectarian fighting threated to engulf Iraq in all-out civil war. “We are not safe in the coffee shops or mosques, not even in soccer fields,” he continued, rattling off some of the targets hit repeatedly in recent months.

Shame.

PM UPDATE — Add on

I was going to include this in the original post this morning. A little hectic getting to work, and although I’d thought about it, this escaped my brain — the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and from its final report in June 2008 on the bullshit prior to the invasion of Iraq:

“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.

And with President Obama not looking back, those guys literally got away with near-premeditated murder.