Next Year, Pal -- Maybe

We are there at the invitation of the Iraqi government. This is a sovereign nation. Twelve million people went to the polls to approve a constitution. It's their government's choice. If they were to say leave, we would leave.
-George W. Bush, May 24, 2007

Yeah, it turns out that was a lie. Big shocker there, huh? Negotiations for a long term security deal between the US and Iraq broke down yesterday, with the Bush administration punting. There will be no security agreement, not this year, and Bush's responsibility for Iraq has been sloughed off on the next president.

Washington Post:

U.S. and Iraqi negotiators have abandoned efforts to conclude a comprehensive agreement governing the long-term status of U.S troops in Iraq before the end of the Bush presidency, according to senior U.S. officials, effectively leaving talks over an extended U.S. military presence there to the next administration.

In place of the formal status-of-forces agreement negotiators had hoped to complete by July 31, the two governments are now working on a "bridge" document, more limited in both time and scope, that would allow basic U.S. military operations to continue beyond the expiration of a U.N. mandate at the end of the year.

The failure of months of negotiations over the more detailed accord -- blamed on both the Iraqi refusal to accept U.S. terms and the complexity of the task -- deals a blow to the Bush administration's plans to leave in place a formal military architecture in Iraq that could last for years.

See that? It's all Iraq's fault. Never mind that the US terms were insane -- blanket legal immunity for US forces and contractors (including the almost universally despised Blackwater), unchecked access to anything within the borders of Iraq, the power to police and arrest -- independent of Iraqi law -- and an open-ended commitment (i.e., John McCain's "100 years").

For their part, Iraq didn't want any of this. Mostly because it was all insane -- it was the US governing Iraq while the Iraqi government pretended to. In fact, the Iraqi government wanted the Bush administration to commit to a timetable for withdrawal. Bush had thrown up so many firewalls against that idea at home that there was no way he could accept it from Iraqis without significant domestic political damage; not only for himself, but for the party that repeated his every word as if it were divinely inspired. By the lunatic reasoning the Republicans and neocons had constructed, the Iraqis were asking them to "cut and run."

-Continued after the jump-


Given the choice between keeping his word or accepting a timetable, Bush fled the table screaming. If anyone out there still needs proof that Bush's word isn't worth jack, there ya go. Iraq has asked us to leave and, rather than respect the wishes of this so-called "sovereign nation," Bush shut down negotiations and refuses to return to the table -- ever.

Of course, I called this last week, with a post I called "Not This Year, Buddy." Bush isn't going to leave Iraq. We could lose every man but one and Bush would insist he had to stay. "Losing" Iraq is what some other president will do. Bush hopes that the historical blame will fall on some other executive's shoulders, rather than where it belongs -- with the current executive. If the disaster of Iraq and our inevitable departure from that nation is seen as Bush's fault, the neocon ideology of gunboat diplomacy, global policing, and American supremacy (and I mean that in the same way that "white supremacy" is meant) is dead for good, having been proven wrong on pretty much every single point, dash, and ampersand. The reign of the neoconservatives will resemble that of the McCarthyites -- short, stupid, and thoroughly discredited.

So the negotiations have been put off until the next chump -- I mean, president -- takes office. If it's McCain, he'll be able to blame everything on what will most likely be an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress. If it's Obama, he'll be the president who "lost" Iraq. Either way, it's going to be the Democrats' fault.

A new problem for this strategy of blame-shifting is popping up -- the Pentagon will publish a report recommending a "16-month timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq." The withdrawal would leave a token force of 50,000, "with platoon-size U.S. detachments backing the Iraqis from small outposts, with air support." Forward operating bases would be mostly abandoned. The military is about to recommend "cutting and running."

Reality, it appears once again, has a liberal bias. Iraq wants us to leave Iraq, the American people want us to leave Iraq, and now even the military wants us to leave Iraq. The excuses for staying are becoming a pretty rare species. Luckily for Bush, he's closed that door on withdrawal, by putting off renewed negotiations until next year. If that means going back on his word, so what?

It's much more important that someone else take the blame for the debacle in Iraq. If a whole bunch of people have to die in order to keep this thing rolling for a few months more, so what? There's a lunatic ideology to defend, a vision of an American world in a New American Century. We won the cold war, we get the world -- that's the way the reasoning works.

Nothing is more important than that vision -- not Bush's word, not Iraqi sovereignty, not the lives of Iraqis and their occupiers, not even the opinion of the military. The only thing that's important is that the neocons are proven right. If that turns out to be impossible to do, then they must not be proven wrong.

So, when Iraq asked him to leave, he didn't. Bush turned his back on everything he'd previously said about Iraqi sovereignty. He walked away from the negotiating table and unilaterally decided the war would go on as scheduled -- until he's safely out of office.

-Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; war; Military; Pentagon; neocon; propaganda; peace; Barack Obama; John McCain; Bush lied to Iraq

Baghdad, Tourist Destination?

Have you ever heard of the "friday dump?" That's the practice of putting out embarrassing press releases on friday, guaranteeing that the story is underreported. The friday news broadcasts have the lowest viewership and saturday newspapers have the lowest readership. If you want to bury a press release or an announcement, you do it on friday.

But sometimes, the news you want to bury is so stupid and crazy that not even friday is safe enough. What you need for these sorts of stories is some sort of prescheduled news event that will suck up every square inch of oxygen in every newsroom in the nation. Something really big, like -- say -- the Superbowl or Christmas or primaries in two states that have been pushed as "do or die" for the Democratic candidates for weeks on end.

So it is with plans for Baghdad's "Green Zone" -- the heavily fortified area that's the target of rocket and mortar attacks.

The Guardian:

Picture, if you will, a tree-lined plaza in Baghdad's International Village, flanked by fashion boutiques, swanky cafes, and shiny glass office towers. Nearby a golf course nestles agreeably, where a chip over the water to the final green is but a prelude to cocktails in the club house and a soothing massage in a luxury hotel, which would not look out of place in Sydney harbour. Then, as twilight falls, a pre-prandial stroll, perhaps, amid the cool of the Tigris Riverfront Park, where the peace is broken only by the soulful cries of egrets fishing.

Improbable though it all may seem, this is how some imaginative types in the US military are envisaging the future of Baghdad's Green Zone, the much-pummelled redoubt of the Iraqi capital where a bunker shot has until now had very different connotations.

How much coverage do you think that's going to get today?

The idea is to create a "zone of influence" around the $700 million US Embassy. An Embassy the size of Vatican City. When you dump that kind of money into a compound, you want to make sure it's in a nice neighborhood.

And it's not. The Associated Press lists the dominant features in the zone as "rocket attacks, concrete blast walls and no sewer system." Amazingly, Marriott International Inc. is said to have agreed to a deal to build a hotel. I can't imagine that they'll be breaking ground anytime soon.

USA Today:

Raed Falah Hasan has lost count of how many times rockets or mortar shells aimed at the nearby international Green Zone have fallen short and landed in his high-rise apartment complex.

Three neighbors have been killed and eight injured by the missiles. One rocket severed his building's gas line. His daughter Suror, 4, has been sick with fear.

Hasan's biggest worry is his wife, Nahla, who works in the Green Zone as a security screener for a U.S. contractor. Whenever a rocket or mortar round explodes there -- sometimes five or six times a day -- she calls home to say she is all right.

No word on whether this is anywhere near the planned golf course.

This is the admission of a long term presence -- Baghdad John McCain's one hundred years in Iraq. You have to wonder about the investors; are they completely insane? An L.A.-based holding company for equity firms, C3, has confirmed it's starting "a $500 million project to build an amusement park on the outskirts of the Green Zone in an area encompassing the Baghdad Zoo. The first phase, a skateboard park, is scheduled to open this summer."

A skateboard park? Here's an interesting question, in all the coverage of Iraq you've seen over the years, have you ever seen even one kid on a skateboard? I guess it doesn't really matter, since it'll last a week before a rocket lands in the middle of it.

And this shining new example of capitalism and freedom -- assuming there's any hope in hell of it ever actually happening -- will just underscore how bad life is in Iraq. Most Iraqis aren't allowed in the Green Zone. Either you work there or you don't go. This new Embassy district will be a segregationist haven.

Even Navy Capt. Thomas Karnowski, who led the team that developed the plan, admits they're building from scratch. "There is no sewer system, no working power system. Everything here is done on generators. No road system repair work. There are no city services other than the minimal amount we provide to get by," Karnowski says.

Sounds lovely.

What bothers me most about this is that it's so clearly empire. In his 2000 campaign against Al Gore, George W. Bush ran against the idea of empire or, as it was put then, "nation building."

...I'm worried about overcommitting our military around the world. I want to be judicious in its use. You mentioned Haiti. I wouldn't have sent troops to Haiti. I didn't think it was a mission worthwhile. It was a nation building mission, and it was not very successful. It cost us billions, a couple billions of dollars, and I'm not so sure democracy is any better off in Haiti than it was before.

Of course, no one ever accused Bush of not being a big fat hypocrite. "Nation building" was bad when Clinton did it, over-extending the military was terrible when Clinton supposedly did it (he didn't), but building a damned city in the Iraqi desert with golf courses, hotels, and coffee shops is just a great idea.

Meanwhile, we can't even rebuild the parts of Iraq we blew up. Bloomberg News reports, "Iraq's Nassriya Water Treatment Plant, the country's largest reconstruction project, is a failure so far because it isn't delivering sufficient water to enough people, a new audit says." That represents $277 million for nothing. It's not the only one -- Agence France-Presse tells us, "Hundreds of contracts to rebuild Iraq have been abandoned short of completion for reasons that range from poor performance to the killing of the contractor, a US audit said Monday."

"Most of the contracts on record -- 743 -- were terminated by the government because it was no longer considered to be in the US interest to continue," AFP says. In one case, the construction of a police station was abandoned because "the building was blown up prior to completion."

We can't build police stations, schools, and water treatment plants, we can't deliver electricity or sewer service, we can't keep militants from shelling the Green Zone, but we can build a freakin' amusement park? Pardon me if I'm a bit skeptical. I don't think anyone's going to be playing a par three in Baghdad anytime soon.

As I said, all of this will be out of reach for ordinary Iraqis. Worse, the whole idea's a big, shining middle finger to them. "That sort of indifference to the suffering of Iraq is provocative," writes Spencer Ackerman. "If I was Moqtada Sadr, I would use it as a rallying cry."

No doubt someone will. If this actually happens, there's no way that Iraqis could see it as anything other than a slap in the face -- a foreign power invades, takes over your country, screws everything up so badly that you don't even have sewers, and builds a big segregated country club in the middle of the capital. How would you feel? Once again, I find myself feeling the need to remind everyone that people actually live in Iraq. Sometimes, it seems like people forget that.

No wonder they put this out yesterday -- there's no way they want anyone talking about it today. There's just no part of this that's anything close to a good idea. One more disaster, one more huge waste of money and time and lives. One more plan that's so bad that the Pentagon and the administration doesn't even want you to know about it.

If you ever needed proof that war backers don't live in the real world, there you go.

-Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; war; military; Green Zone; reconstruction; Bush; Pentagon; White House; And you thought the plan to invade Iraq was stupid and unrealistic...

John McCain's Hundred Year Jobs Program

As the wars slog on and on and on, the consequences at home grow. The war in Iraq is now expected to cost Americans $3 trillion dollars, once all the borrowing and spending has finally been accounted for. That figure, by the way, represents cockeyed optimism -- the debts continue to rise.

Coalition losses total 4052 military deaths. Of course, that's today. Accurate casualty figures have a very short shelf life and the number only increases. On the Iraqi side, as many as 90,778 have died.

Those costs are permanent, the money wasted will never be regained and the fallen will never rise again. Other costs are likewise permanent, but go unmeasured or when they are documented, go largely ignored by a media fascinated by a presidential campaign at home and war fatigue among the public.

News & Observer (N. Carolina), "Combat vets face hurdles as students":

Spc. Natasha McKinnon survived losing part of her left leg to an improvised bomb in Iraq. Now that she's back, she's trying to find her balance in college life. Sometimes she can't recall a professor's name. She loses track of test dates. Occasionally, she forgets she has pulled off her prosthetic leg to rest her stump during a long lecture, only to tilt off balance when she tries to stand.

As tens of thousands of veterans of the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq try to collect on their promised college benefits, McKinnon and others are finding that their combat experience complicates the transition from soldier to student.

Some have trouble collecting the government money that is supposed to pay for college, or they discover that the benefits aren't nearly enough to cover tuition and other bills. While their classmates complain about homework and hangovers, many vets struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder, the effects of traumatic brain injury, lost limbs and a range of chronic medical problems.

"Not only am I a full-time student," McKinnon told the paper, "I'm a full-time patient. It takes a toll, mentally and physically. Sometimes I'm there in class, but only in body. Not in mind."

There are moves out there to make the lives of student vets like McKinnon's a little easier. Enter the Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act of 2007. This has widely been reported as an "expansion" of the WWII-era Montgomery G.I. Bill, but it's really just an update. According to the Inside Higher Ed, "The bill would enable eligible veterans to receive payments covering tuition -- up to the cost of in-state tuition at the most expensive public college in a veteran’s home state -- room and board, fees, educational costs and a $1,000 monthly stipend." We aren't talking about sending vets to Harvard or Yale here; this would allow them to enroll in state universities.

Of course, the Pentagon and John McCain oppose the bill -- which otherwise has bipartisan support. "Officials in charge of Pentagon personnel worry that a more generous and expansive GI Bill would create an incentive for troops to get out of the military and go to college," ABC News reported. Do they really need an incentive? You'd think a pointless and needless war would be incentive enough.

For his part, McCain has offered an alternative bill. Not surprisingly, it's a freakin' joke. "The McCain-sponsored bill aims to increase the $1,100 per month active-duty service members now get for educational expenses to $1,500." reports The Hill. "The sum would increase to $2,000 per month for a member who served on active duty 12 years or more."

Let me repeat that -- under McCain's bill, you'd have to serve for twelve years in order to qualify for just $2,000 a month. And, for people enlisting today, that's not $2,000 today dollars, that's $2,000 2020 dollars. Figure in projected inflation and that's $1,516.51. You know what? You might as well take that $1,500 and get out as soon as possible, while you're actually college-aged. There's your "incentive for troops to get out of the military and go to college." McCain apparently shares Bush's math skills, which have us shoveling $3 trillion down a rat hole while cutting taxes for the wealthy.

Of course, that's not the only program Baghdad John has in mind for military personnel. A new Democratic National Committee ad reminds us of McCain's jobs program:



On the plus side, McCain's "hundred years in Iraq" means jobs for life -- if you can call that a plus. It also means shoveling trillions more down that aforementioned rat hole.

John McCain has been running as America's leading veteran. But veterans would be right to ask him, "What have you done for me lately?" Under President McCain, they'd get endless war, joke benefits, and -- assuming they ever get out -- they'll come home to a ruined economy.

If that's leadership, John McCain can keep it.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; war; Iraq; Afghanistan; Republican; elections; 2008; G.I. Bill; Jim Webb; The bad news is John McCain's education benefits for veterans, the worse news is his century-long jobs program

A War of Words

About a year ago, a study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that, despite having 24/7 news and the internet, Americans weren't any more knowledgeable about current events than they were twenty years ago. This study was generally seen as an indictment of cable news networks like CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News. After all, people who can get the news anytime they want should be more informed -- it's supposed to be up-to-the-minute and "breaking now" news, right?

There was one demographic who stood out in the study. "...the survey respondents who seemed to know the most about what’s going on -- who were able to identify major public figures, for example -- were likely to be viewers of fake news programs like Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show and The Colbert Report," The New York Times reported, "Those who knew the least watched network morning news programs, Fox News or local television news."

If you've watched TDS and TCR, this might not seem all that likely to you. Both shows are only one hour, four nights a week. They tend to focus on the big story of the day, but that day is usually yesterday, since the shows aren't broadcast live. "Informative" isn't a word you'd use to describe them.

Except on one issue; media criticism. Both are brilliant and biting in their criticism of the news industry -- and TV news in particular. People who watch these shows would have finely honed BS filters. It's not that these shows inform viewers better than the actual news media, it's that these shows teach viewers to be better news consumers. It's unlikely that a Jon Stewart fan could watch FOX News for more than fifteen minutes without laughing out loud at how wrong it all was.

That's never been as important as it is now. I used to wonder what it would be like to live in a propaganda-shaped world, where you pick up Pravda, read a story, and try to determine whether it's true or not.

I don't wonder that any more. The New York Times broke a story in their sunday edition about the Bush administration, military analysts, and news networks.

... To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

In response to this story, middle east expert Juan Cole echoes a post I wrote friday. "It is these secret networks of corrupt agents of influence that have Orwellized our society in recent years," he writes. "And it will go on unless the public wakes up and demands a change. If you see a network or cable news segment with only Establishment commentators (i.e. two retired generals, or one and someone from the American Enterprise Institute), then get up an email campaign to complain to the anchor. Threaten an advertiser boycott. Our country is in danger from this stuff..."

Get mad as hell. Don't take this anymore.

Unfortunately, our country has been in danger from this stuff for a long time. "[I]t is difficult to take the article's underlying points seriously as though they are some kind of new revelation," writes Salon's Glenn Greenwald. "And ultimately, to the extent there are new revelations here, they are a far greater indictment of our leading news organizations than the government officials on whom it focuses."

The media is supposed to be our BS filter. We shouldn't need to be experts at weeding out the propaganda from our daily news. That's what these guys are for. We shouldn't be getting raw data from a TV news show, we should be getting the filtered and refined product. As it is now, the idea of "objectivity" (which is a modern development, it's not written anywhere in some dusty tome of journalistic ethics) forces the media to tell "both sides of the story" -- even when one side is complete crap. Worse, they present you with information that's half truth and half lie, and never bother to tell you which is which. Accuracy is, apparently, bias.

Adding to this problem is that many in the media are for sale. I remind you of right wing talk radio hack Armstrong Williams, who was paid nearly a quarter of a million dollars by the Bush administration to promote "No Child Left Behind" in 2004.

And the Bush administration doesn't see the media as an essential part of a functioning democracy. In a 2005 article (The Propaganda President), Slate editor at large Jack Shafer wrote, "Every administration has warred with reporters, but Bush's is the first to challenge the very legitimacy of the press... Bush regards the press as a filter -- an unnecessary one. 'I'm mindful of the filter through which some news travels, and somehow you just got to go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people,' he said in October 2003 during a media push in which he gave interviews to five regional broadcasters about his Iraq policy because he disliked the national news coverage."

Even the news that "military analysts" are propaganda pushers isn't news. In 2000, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting warned that "several officers from the US Army's 4th Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) Group at Ft. Bragg worked in the news division at CNN's Atlanta headquarters last year, starting in the final days of the Kosovo War." I guess the bright side is that CNN's propaganda dealing is bipartisan, depending on who's in the White House at the time.

Here's a crazy idea. Why don't we agree that the bedrock of journalistic ethics be reporting truth? It's a sad commentary on the media as it stands that this would mark a revolutionary shift in focus. How about we care less about what the government believes we should think and more on giving us the truth it takes to make up our own minds?

What I despise about propaganda is that it's as reality-altering as any drug, as untrue but convincing as a hallucination. Without any real information or truth, this democracy thing can't work. You might as well drop a hit of acid before you go to the polls, then vote based on what the giant blue toad tells you. If we live in a world that isn't actually real, in which nothing is true or untrue, we're voting for the most comforting lie.

When shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report represent sobriety in a propaganda-drunk world, something's got to change or something's going to give.

Democracy cannot work this way.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: The Daily Show; The Colbert Report; politics; media; cable news; Bush; Bill Clinton; White House; Pentagon; PSYOPS; military analysts; Armstrong Williams; CNN + MSNBC + FOX News = propaganda

Criminal, Unaccountable, and Tax Financed

It may be stating the obvious, since war encompasses everything that is the worst in humanity, but war brings out the worst in people. It's hard to imagine a more stressful situation than being a professional target or obstacle to people with guns and bombs. Nothing makes any damned sense -- at least, not in any way we've been brought up to believe. Killing is desirable and non-aggression is cowardice. Destruction is celebrated, not the human impulse to build. Anger and hatred propel you forward, where empathy, morality, and love for humanity can only hold you back.

When you drop someone in the middle of this society in reverse and they lose it, it shouldn't surprise anyone. We pretend to be shocked, but we know the history of war. It's never been any other way. When you 'let slip the dogs of war,' crime -- beyond the crime of war itself -- is unleashed as well. It can't be any other way and it's unrealistic to imagine any other outcome.

The military has some controls in this system of legalized crime. There are still lines that can't be crossed and crossing those lines turns on the justice machine -- in theory, anyway. It doesn't always work that way, but that's the way it's supposed to work. There are checks on the soldier's behavior, even if they're terribly inconsistent.

But in this war, in our time, there are more than soldiers on the ground in Iraq. Private contractors, who aren't governed by the Uniform Code of Military Justice and who, according to the Associated Press, "are exempt from prosecution by Iraqis for crimes committed there," also exist there. The only real check on these people are the fact that they can be fired. Technically, they're supposed to provide security, but they act as far more than rent-a-cops. They are a collection of private armies.

Writes Deborah Hastings for AP:

There are now nearly as many private contractors in Iraq as there are U.S. soldiers - and a large percentage of them are private security guards equipped with automatic weapons, body armor, helicopters and bullet-proof trucks.

They operate with little or no supervision, accountable only to the firms employing them. And as the country has plummeted toward anarchy and civil war, this private army has been accused of indiscriminately firing at American and Iraqi troops, and of shooting to death an unknown number of Iraqi citizens who got too close to their heavily armed convoys.

Not one has faced charges or prosecution.

You don't get these guys for free, this is your tax dollars at work. Hastings tells us, "Security firms earn more than $4 billion in government contracts" -- even though we have no idea how many 'security officers' are on the ground or even where many of them are. "I understand this is war," says Rep. Jan Schakowsky, "But that's absolutely no excuse for letting this very large force of armed private employees, dare I say mercenaries, run around without any accountability to anyone."

These security officers suck rocks at supplying security. On Christmas Eve, 2006, for example, a drunken Blackwater USA employee shot and killed a guard for the iraqi Vice President. The employee made his way to the US embassy, where he was flown out of the country. Eight months after this murder, he hasn't been charged with any crime.

Back to the AP story, another example involves an "incident in which a supervisor for a Virginia-based security company [Triple Canopy] said he was 'going to kill somebody today' and then shot at Iraqi civilians for amusement, possibly killing one, according to two employees" -- it was the witnesses who were fired for reporting the crime, not the shooter for committing it.

Other crimes came to light when "employees of London-based Aegis Defence Services, holder of one of the biggest U.S. security contracts in Iraq - valued at more than $430 million - posted videos on the Internet in 2005 showing company guards firing automatic weapons at civilians from the back of a moving security vehicle."

Here's an interesting and obvious question -- if armed thugs were doing this sort of thing on your street, what would you do? The answer probably depends on your age.

It may seem anti-intuitive, but kids join gangs to protect them from crime. At least, in the US. In Iraq there are other organizations they can turn to. "I returned to the bureau in tears after hearing one story after the others of brutal killings at the hands of the Mahdi Army," wrote Laila Fadel of McClatchy Newspapers in June, "It was Lord of the Flies, young boys ruling and killing in a Baghdad neighborhood." It begs the question, how much do these hired seciurity officers contribute to insecurity?

You might remember the fate of four Blackwater employees lynched in Iraq. On March 31, 2004, they were burned, beaten, decapitated, and their bodies hung from a bridge over the Euphrates in Fallujah. It was a horrific crime. But there was no explanation as to why those employees were in Fallujah -- there was no legitimante reason for it and, at the time, the city could only be considered 'enemy territory.'

That's when things got really weird:

Alternet:

...Following these gruesome deaths which were broadcast on worldwide television, the surviving family members looked to Blackwater for answers as to how and why their loved ones died. Blackwater not only refused to give the grieving families any information, but also callously stated that they would need to sue Blackwater to get it. Left with no alternative, in January 2005, the families filed suit against Blackwater, which is owned by the wealthy and politically-connected Erik Prince.

Blackwater quickly adapted its battlefield tactics to the courtroom. It initially hired Fred F. Fielding, who is currently counsel to the President of the United States. It then hired Joseph E. Schmitz as its in-house counsel, who was formerly the Inspector General at the Pentagon. More recently, Blackwater employed Kenneth Starr, famed prosecutor in the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal, to oppose the families. To add additional muscle, Blackwater hired Cofer Black, who was the Director of the CIA Counter- Terrorist Center.

Blackwater sued the families for $10 million to get them to shut the hell up. These people, who are thugs on the streets of Iraq, are thugs all the way up to the executive level. And likely criminal -- you don't go to such lengths to cover up something where there's no wrongdoing. Those contractors were in Fallujah and the most likely reason was that they were sent there.

We can also see that these security contractors are very well connected -- and, in the case of Blackwater, to one party exclusively. With connections like these, how likely do you think it is that anyone in the Justice Dept. or the Pentagon is going to investigate them? These people are a street gang and the only difference between them and the punk on the street are expensive suits, glass executive towers, and well-connected buddies. They shoot at iraqis and americans with impunity, they're unaccountable for their crimes, they're given absolute free reign in Iraq, and they're doing it all on the public dime.

Back in March, I wrote about a single death in Iraq, quoting Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher, "Col. Ted Westhusing, a West Point scholar, put a bullet in his head in Iraq after reporting widespread corruption. His suicide note -- complaining about human rights abuses and other crimes -- was addressed to his two commanders, including Gen. David Petraeus, now leader of the U.S. 'surge' effort in Iraq. It urged them to 'Reevaluate yourselves....You are not what you think you are and I know it.'"

Col. Westhusing chose death before dishonor. Those who defend hired thugs like Blackwater USA, Triple Canopy, or Aegis Defence Services embrace dishonor.

And they do so on your dime and in your name.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; Iraq; Blackwater; Triple Canopy; Aegis Defence Services; Pentagon; law; scandal; crime; We're outsourcing war to republican street thugs

Onward, (Crazy-Assed Right Wing) Christian Soldiers...

It's a little disturbing to look at Christian Embassy's homepage. A group dedicated to spreading the word of God throughout government, CE obviously believes in a top-down approach to evangelism -- get the boss and the staff will follow. It's an abusive approach, using the power of the employer over the employee, sure. But this is all about Jesus and, when the stakes are that high, nothing is out of bounds. Besides, government is temporary -- Heaven is eternal. God's laws take precedence over those of nations.

That's why we see links on that page titled, I Work on Capitol Hill, I am a Member of the Diplomatic Community, I am a Presidential Appointee, and I Work at the Pentagon. Christian Embassy clearly has no time for peons.

So it's no surprise that military officers have been abusing their position to convert the heathens below them.

Washington Post:

The Defense Department's inspector general has found that four generals and three other military officers improperly participated in a fundraising video for an evangelical Christian group, inappropriately offering support for the religious organization while appearing to operate within the scope of their official government duties, according to a 47-page investigative report.

Investigators concluded that the officers should not have participated in the filming in 2005 of a 10-minute video for Christian Embassy, a nonprofit religious group, which ultimately used the video as a fundraising tool. While Christian Embassy has hosted prayer meetings at the Pentagon for years, the inspector general concluded that the officers' endorsement of its activities -- while in uniform, showing their rank and in the halls of the Pentagon -- violated ethical rules.

"The overall circumstances of the interviews emphasized the speakers' military status and affiliation and implied they were acting within the scope of their official positions as DoD spokespersons," the report concluded.

In other words, the video made it look like the Pentagon and the Defense Dept. endorse CE. The report is here [PDF].

This is more than just some club that's been misrepresented by military generals. This is those in power using the power of government in non-governmental ways. It's a violation of the Constitution and, to be a generous as I possibly can, a complete misunderstanding of what it really means to be an american.

Wall of Separation:

Perhaps the most disturbing feature of the report is the justification employed by some of the officers: They argued that Christian Embassy had become so fully ingrained in the Pentagon that they regarded it as a "quasi-federal entity."

In fact, Christian Embassy is a wholly private group. It was founded 30 years ago by the late Bill Bright, who also founded Campus Crusade for Christ. Bright, a Religious Right activist, believed that fundamentalists of his stripe must exercise influence and control over all areas of life, including government agencies.

The report shows us that military involvement in CE is hurting our legitimacy abroad. Wall of Separation tells us, "During the investigation, Major Gen. Sutton admitted that while he was stationed in Turkey, his Turkish driver presented him with a copy of a newspaper called Sabah that called Sutton a member of a radical fundamentalist Christian sect. The online version of the paper included clips from the Christian Embassy video."

And Sabah's absolutely correct. Christian Embassy is a radical fundamentalist Christian sect. In 2003, founder Bill Bright signed the 'Land Letter' -- a letter to President Bush telling him that invading Iraq would be justified under the theory of a 'just war.' Other signatories were Nixon figure Charles Colson, Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, and D. James Kennedy of 'Sweet Jesus do I ever hate gays' fame. Like the signatories to the PNAC letter to Bill Clinton, the signatories to the Land Letter are a fine collection of right wing nuts.

The letter cites President Bush himself almost exclusively as a source -- which you'd think would be a little weird in a letter to President Bush. Wouldn't he already know all of this?

Of course, not a single reason why invading Iraq would be a good idea holds up now (all you bloggers and forum warriors out there heed this example -- single sourcing will bite you in the ass down the road). Then again, when almost everything you believe is summed up in the Bible, I suppose single sourcing becomes second nature.

How right wing and dangerous are these guys? In writing about the Christian Embassy's and other right wing evangelical groups' influence in the military, Chris Hedges, former New York Times Mideast Bureau Chief and author of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America, writes:

If the United States falls into a period of instability caused by another catastrophic terrorist attack, an economic meltdown or a series of environmental disasters, these paramilitary forces, protected and assisted by fellow ideologues in the police and military, could swiftly abolish what is left of our eroding democracy. War, with the huge profits it hands to businesses and right-wing interests that often help bankroll the Christian right, could become a permanent condition. And the thugs with automatic weapons, black uniforms and wraparound sunglasses who appeared on street corners in Baghdad and New Orleans could appear on streets across the U.S. Such a presence could paralyze us with fear, leaving us unable to question or protest the closed system and secrecy of an emergent totalitarian state and unable to voice dissent.

Alarmist? Maybe. But when you've got a bunch of nuts who think that God's law takes precedence over US law trying to take over government, who's law do you think they want to enforce? If a godly, christian government is what they think the Bible requires -- and they do, hello death penalty for gluttony -- do you think they give a damn about the Constitution or your right to religious freedom?

As I said, the best thing you could say about these people is that they have a profound misunderstanding of what it means to be american. At worst -- which seems to be the case -- they don't give a good goddam. They love the America they envision in their christian fantasies -- no gays, no muslims, no jews, no atheists, no agnostics, no pagans, no buddhists, no hindus, no adultery, no pornography, no abortion, no divorce, no staying home from church on sunday, no religious freedom or freedom of speech whatsoever.

Think Iran, only with everyone talking about Jesus instead of Allah. Their America is pretty much the same place.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; Pentagon; military; religious right; Bush; Constitution; Christian Embassy isn't a big fan of religious freedom