I titled this screenshot "jeb wtf.png"

Putting this here because in November, 2016, we won't believe that a candidate for the Presidency actually said this and then thought it was a wise move to memorialize it the next day on social media.

One of the better reply Tweets notes that he's literally
standing on a pile of American corpses.

The other thing we won't believe Jeb Bush said was that he thought Margaret Thatcher should be on the American ten-dollar bill.

Forty-two years on

4 May 1970:

As they arrived at the top of the hill, twenty-eight of the more than seventy Guardsmen turned suddenly and fired their rifles and pistols. Many guardsmen fired into the air or the ground. However, a small portion fired directly into the crowd. Altogether between 61 and 67 shots were fired in a 13 second period. [ ... ] Four Kent State students died as a result of the firing by the Guard.

To understand who came looking for a riot, see who came dressed for a riot. When a protest situation gets out of control, you have to ask, every time, who did the escalating? Who brought in horses? Who is carrying pistols? Who is using billy clubs? Who is wearing military- and SWAT-style protective gear like helmets, body armor, body shields? Who arrived in a Blackwater armored vehicle? Who brought a panjandrum to a knife fight?

Honestly, I think the only reason we're not getting murders like this with Occupy events is that the actual National Guard is in Iraq and Afghanistan right now, instead of staying stateside to help evacuate cities during hurricanes and stuff.

Chickenhawk Romney wants the Iraq war to last forever

Mitt Romney, born in 1947 but who did not serve in Vietnam, doesn't want the Iraq war to end (MSNBC). How many of his 5 sons, born between 1971 and 1981, have served or are currently serving in the armed forces?

Survey says: zero. Remember? While other men of my generation served in Desert Shield and Desert Storm[1], Mitt Romney's sons were serving their country by serving their dad's political campaigns (CBS, 2007).

Shame on Romney. He couldn't care less how long we pour lives and treasure into Iraq because his horse in the race is interest in the private equity firms that own the brands that the Pentagon contracts with to operate the war. His bank account, not his family, is affected; and less war means less money to him. Unlike the 99%, to whom more war means more personal loss. You want war, you go risk your own sons. It's really pretty simple.

---

[1] Not to mention a high-school and college friend of mine who served in Desert Storm to pay for his university degree, spent the rest of the 1990s marrying and starting a family and serving his community as a police officer, and then got sent back to Iraq for the current war. One could say that he served twice so that one of Romney's sons wouldn't have to; but I wouldn't say that to the toddlers he left behind for his second tour in the desert.

Libya 2011 isn't Iraq 2003 -- how about Iraq 1990?

(BBC.)

Peter Bergen at CNN proclaims that U.S. participation in the U.N. no-fly-zone intervention in Libya is nothing at all like the American "operation" in Iraq in 2003. Instead, it's more like Iraq in 1990.

But what if it truly is more like Operation Desert Shield and the ensuing Gulf War? We'll stop just short of toppling Gaddafi and his government? Then we'll let him sit for another dozen years before we invade for real, with only grudging support from the U.N., secured through lies about weapons of mass destruction and nuclear capability? Resulting in tens of thousands of dead civilians and soldiers, as well as incalculable damage to world heritage sites?

President Obama remarked today that "we cannot stand idly by when a tyrant tells his people that there will be no mercy, and his forces step up their assaults on cities like Benghazi and Misurata, where innocent men and women face brutality and death at the hands of their own government." If that's truly the reason we've urged this action in the U.N. and are now participating, then why didn't we make such a move for Ivory Coast? Or Yemen? Or Bahrain?

Why does the government have money for this action, when it doesn't have the money to create jobs, repair highway infrastructure, expand benefits for hungry children, and fund public schools?

Will our children be fighting on the ground in Libya in 10 years? Will a veteran of the current intervention come back with some kind of PTSD and blow up a federal building?

Finally! A trial for a Gitmo detainee: the Canadian child

Yay! The Obama administration is finally taking a Gitmo detainee to trial! Oh, wait, it's the brainwashed child soldier (and Canadian citizen) Omar Khadr. You remember him. When he was a young child, his father took him to Afghanistan, where he brainwashed him into fighting for al-Qaeda. After a firefight in eastern Afghanistan in 2002, when he was 15, Khadr was found huddled in a bunker out of which someone tossed a grenade at some American soldiers. One of the soldiers was killed. The others identified Khadr as the grenade-thrower. So Khadr was shipped off to Gitmo, where he's remained the facility's youngest prisoner.

After seven-odd years of sitting in a cage, and about 18 months after his trial was supposed to start, he's going before a judge, "probably . . .  the first full military commission trial under President Obama" (Washington Post).

Army sergeant home from Iraq service accused of waterboarding 4-year-old daughter

It was only a matter of time before something like this happened:

An Army sergeant who served in Iraq for 15 months has been restricted to his Washington military base after being accused of waterboarding his 4-year-old daughter because she refused to recite her ABCs.

Police responded to a report that the soldier had been storming up and down the street threatening neighbors. When they got to his house, they found the girl cowering in a bathroom.

[Yelm, Wash., police chief Todd] Stancil said that when the cops coaxed the little girl out of the bathroom they saw that she was covered in "multiple bruises pretty much all over her body."

"She was very open with us," Stancil said of the young girl, whose name is not being released because she is a minor. "She basically came right out and said, 'Daddy does this to me. He uses his hands.'"

Is David Sirota freaking kidding me?

David Sirota asks a series of less-than-thoughtful "simple" questions about President Obama's plan for dealing with Afghanistan. I don't agree with Sirota's characterization of Obama's plan as a "massive escalation," so I have a few questions for Sirota myself.

One, the President has set an 18-month deadline for re-evaluating what's going on, though granted it's not a timeline for complete withdrawal. How is this a "massive escalation"?

Two, what would Sirota have the administration do? Withdraw our forces completely right away without doing something to stabilize the land mass between Iran and Pakistan? Why does Sirota like acid thrown in schoolgirls' faces so much?

And three, regarding his "Where's the antiwar movement" complaint, there was a protest at Philadelphia City Hall yesterday afternoon, which some friends of mine attended. Sirota lives in Denver, I think, so of course he wouldn't have known about it. But there are protests planned for Denver and Colorado Springs. They're small, to be sure, but it's pretty lame of Sirota to try to make his point by denying their existence -- he'd get better mileage out of the situation by decrying how few people are protesting despite the toll of the Afghanistan war on the soldiers at Fort Carson. Or if he's genuinely disappointed at the lack of a sizeable antiwar protest, then why isn't he organizing and attending one?

I don't envy the President's position. I don't know what I'd do if Afghanistan were thrown in my lap, but I don't think Sirota's questions are particularly thoughtful. I think it's staggeringly naïve to imply that it's in our nation's best interests to quit Afghanistan and leave the country in the hands of militants, terrorists, grifters, grafters, and acid-throwing, eschatological Dark Ages religionists -- with a nuclearizing state to the west and a fully nuclear state to the east. Is Sirota freaking kidding me?

And I'm a pacifist! It's all nice and liberal and sweet to complain about how we can't bring peace to Afghanistan, but that's begging the question that bringing peace to Afghanistan is President Obama's goal. At this point, he should probably settle for helping establish a stable government that, if it does get its hands on nuclear weapons, won't use them to blow away the infidels across the way in Europe, invade Pakistan on the one side, go after Iran's oil fields on the other (does Iran need to be given a legitimate reason to expand its nuclear capabilities?), and exact some long-festering revenge on the ex-Soviets to boot. In the face of these real geopolitical questions, Sirota's "simple" questions are just that: simple and naïve.

"New Yorkers are generally unafraid of putting swarthy-looking terrorists on trial in their courts"

BooMan takes on "conservative cowards" and explains why why KSM and the other Gitmo detainees should be tried in S.D.N.Y.:

[Conservatives] want to fight the terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them here. Why be afraid to fight terrorists wherever they might arise? After putting New Yorkers at increased risk of retribution by attacking and occupying a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, the conservatives feign concern for the safety of New Yorkers when they try to put the real culprits on trial. It is beyond insulting.

Calley's apology: 41 years late

After years of radio silence on his war crime, Lieutenant William Calley has apologized for the My Lai massacre, where he ordered and participated in the mass rape, torture, and murder of some 450 Vietnamese non-combatants, including infants and children:

There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened.

I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry.

My first thought is "McNamara Syndrome" -- I wonder if he's just had a cancer diagnosis. My second thought is that he's not apologizing for the acquittal of the other participants, nor for the military's cover-up of the event. (The initial report, reducing the massacre to the sad result of the combat unit's psychological breakdown, disclosed only about 120 dead and appeared to excuse the action with a claim that the soldiers had found a few American weapons in enemy hands.) My third thought is to follow some bouncing links and dig up some testimony:

[Infantryman] Paul D. Meadlo, his [landmined] right foot and self-respect gone, came to the motel determined to relieve his conscience and describe the horrors of My Lai. He stated that Calley had left him and a few others with the responsibility of guarding a group of about eighty people who had been taken from their homes and herded together. He repeated Calley’s instructions. “You know what I want to do with them,” Calley said, and walked off. Ten minutes later he returned and asked, “Haven’t you got rid of them yet? I want them dead. Waste them!” After telling about this, Meadlo raised his eyes to the ceiling of the motel room and began to cry. His compassion for the victims had taken control of him months before, and his body shook with sobs as he continued. “We stood about ten to fifteen feet away from them and then he started shooting. Then he told me to start shooting them. I used more than a whole clip -- used four or five clips.”

Calley ended up serving 3 years house arrest. He was the only person who served any time at all, or was even convicted, for My Lai and a few related massacres.

Pete Seeger comments in 1971 (0:27 to 2:40):

Do I see Lieutenant Calley?
Do I see Captain Medina?
Do I see Gen'ral Koster and all his crew?
Do I see President Nixon?
Do I see both houses of Congress?
Do I see the voters, me and you?

Who held the rifle? Who gave the orders?
Who planned the campaign to lay waste the land?
Who manufactured the bullet? Who paid the taxes?
Tell me, is that blood upon my hands?

At the meeting this week where Calley apologized for the massacre,

[h]e did not deny what had happened that day, but did repeatedly make the point -- which he has made before -- that he was following orders. Calley explained he had been ordered to take out My Lai, adding that he had intelligence that the village was fortified and would be "hot" when he went in.

In other words, "I was just following orders and acting on faulty intelligence."

The village was populated with babies, non-combatant women, and old people (very large PDF includes photos), and Calley was observed personally killing dozens of them. He's been called a scapegoat and fall guy. Poor Lieutenant Calley and his lame, qualified apology.

Why the French wouldn't help "thwart Gog and Magog"

President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.

[ . . .]

Now out of office, Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their “common faith” (Christianity) and told him: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East. . . . The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled. . . . This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”

Then-President Chirac declined to assist the U.S. in invading Iraq, leading to the sudden proliferation of "freedom fries" being sold across the U.S.

So while the right-wing pundits and chickenhawk war-mongers were calling the French "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" for not helping the U.S. invade Iraq, the real reason was that President Bush had called President Chirac in a religious frenzy, trying to convince the leader of one of the most secular states in the world that the biblical end days were upon us, and we needed Mirage jets and sacrificial French bodies to fend off monsters from the Book of Revelation.

Look, about France. Nearly 28% of the French are complètement athées, as some friends described themselves when I spent a few undergraduate months near Rouen. The citoyens consider that the separation of church and state is second only to universal suffrage in importance to the fundamentals of their republic (PDF). More from the 2008 survey:

• 87% of respondents "mostly agree" that "religions can create tensions at the heart of society"
  
• 60% of respondents "mostly agree" that "believing in god is a help and a support in everyday life"
  
• 56% of respondents think that President Sarkozy is wrong to emphasize, in his speeches, "the civilizing role of religion"

Anyone with a lick of sense would have tried to secure military contributions from France by going some other route. Instead, we had a dry-drunk eschatological Methodist politician trying to convince a French politician, probably an atheist and almost certainly deeply averse to mixing religion and government, that he should help bring along the Rapture. And in any event, the French are Catholics, culturally even if not practicing, not evangelical Protestants. And Catholics don't really "do" Revelation.

I'm not a French constitutional scholar, but here are a few lines from the constitution that appear to need little judicial interpretation:

La France est une République indivisible, laïque, démocratique et sociale. (France is an indivisible, secular, democratic, and social Republic.) This is from Article 1, which is almost the very beginning of the document, so it's probably important.

La République française, fidèle à ses traditions, se conforme aux règles du droit public international. Elle n’entreprendra aucune guerre dans des vues de conquête et n’emploiera jamais ses forces contre la liberté d’aucun peuple. (The French Republic, faithful to its traditions, conforms itself to the rules of international public rights. It will undertake no war of conquest and will never use its forces against the liberty of any people.) This is from the Preamble to the 1946 constitution, which governed the Fourth Republic, 1946-1958. The Fifth Republic replaced this constitution, but the 1946 document's preamble is considered included in the current constitution.

In short, you don't ask a French politician for help in a war for oil, and you definitely don't ground your appeal for such a war on religion, and especially not on John's end-times hallucinations. A diplomat or historian with the slightest knowledge of French political history could have told President Bush that.

Robert McNamara, 1916-2009

Good riddance to war-mongering, conscience-comes-late rubbish.

17-year-old girl flogged for adultery in Pakistan; court hearing ordered

Direct from Afghanistan, some adherents of the religion of peace were cell-phone recorded flogging a reportedly 17-year-old girl for adultery. The incident occurred some 6 weeks ago, even before sharia law was officially permitted through recent negotiations with militants in the Swat region. I lost count at 15 blows (if you've ever been flogged with an actual, for-real flogger, you may find the video hard to watch; the blows only look sort of light):



From the Timesonline article:

[S]some residents of Matta have accused the commander of ordering the beating to get revenge after the girl refused to accept his proposal of marriage, the reporters told The Times.

“Please! Enough! Enough!” the girl is heard crying in Pashtu[. . . .] At another point, she cries: “I am repenting, my father is repenting what I have done, my grandmother is repenting what I have done...”

The man flogging her is also heard abusing his colleague as he struggles to hold her down and stop her covering her backside with her hands.

“You should hold her tightly so she doesn’t move,” he is heard saying.

It's reported that the man holding the girl down is her brother.

This is what happens when you return the Taliban to legitimacy, folks. The chief justice of Pakistan's supreme court has ordered a hearing -- that is, he's ordered the girl to come in and explain what happened. As the BBC further reports:

After the incident, the Taleban forced the couple to marry and instructed the man not to divorce his wife. His relatives say he has been left mentally scarred.

How terrible for him. But hey, could be worse. Before they were allowed to have sharia courts, the Taliban "[p]reviously . . . had beheaded dissidents and killed women accused of un-Islamic behaviour." I guess the girl is just lucky she wasn't stoned.

Ari Fleischer continues the lie that Saddam had anything to do with 9/11

WTF?! "[A]fter September 11th, having been hit once, how can we take a chance that Saddam might not strike again? That's the threat that has been removed . . ." Ari Fleischer, White House press secretary from 2001 to 2003, on Hardball:



Republicans lie. Every last one of them, all the time.

War resister Lillian Willoughby, 93

Lillian Willoughby passed away on the 15th. I didn't know about it until I saw the notice in the Inky today.

She was a member of the group I was in when I got arrested protesting the Iraq war in 2003. I paid my fine -- but she refused to, so she spent a week in jail the next year.

This is a loss for Philadelphia.

Colin Powell's endorsement is worthless

Colin Powell has endorsed Senator Obama for President. Well, whoop-de-do.

Powell spoke to the U.N. Security Council in 2003 and told them that Iraq was producing weapons of mass destruction. We know now -- hell, we knew then -- that Powell was not giving the Security Council the truth.

There are two possibilities here. One, Powell was knowingly lying to the U.N. This conduct makes him a despicable warmonger who is largely responsible for the tens of thousands of civilian and military deaths in Iraq since 2003.

The other is that Powell actually believed he was telling the truth to the Security Council and made his speech in good faith. If that's the case, then he is an idiot who was stupid enough to be fooled by President Bush and who didn't bother checking with the CIA to verify what he was saying in his speech.

My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. I will cite some examples, and these are from human sources.

Over 4000 Americans dead and over 30,000 wounded in Iraq because of Powell's lies to the U.N. Whether liar or idiot, either way Powell is our generation's McNamara: Iraq's purported WMDs are our generation's Gulf of Tonkin Incident. Powell's endorsement is worthless, and neither candidate should be happy to get it.

CNN calls Virginia for Senator Obama

Depending on which poll you look at today, it's 49% Senator Obama to 45% Senator McCain, or 53% Obama to 44% McCain in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Mithras, who has a job, as opposed to me, who will be leaving law school to face the worst American economy in the history of the universe, was wondering which swing state he should go to, if McCain abandons his campaign in Pennsylvania. Looks as though the list of those states may be a little shorter than he thought it was. "Virginia Republicans," writes CNN, "have not won a statewide race since Democrat Mark Warner won the governorship in 2001."

Speaking of which, since when did we start calling swing states "battleground" states? There's a navel-gazing academic essay in there somewhere about the militarization of language in a militaristic, sovereign-country-invading society.

And speaking of Virginia, Brendan has pointed out that Ralph Stanley of Dickenson County has endorsed Obama in a radio ad that warms the cockles of my Piedmont heart.

White House jaw-droppingly denies that Osama Bin Laden masterminded 9/11

Incredible. The White House is trying to cover its ass for its 7-year failure to find the person who made 9/11 happen by baldly asserting that Osama Bin Laden wasn't the person who made 9/11 happen.

From the horse's assmouth on 10 September 2008:

I will remind you that the top deputies have had a very tough time of it. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, is in jail today, and he is awaiting trial. That is something we should all be thankful for, not only just for the fact that he is no longer out, able to plot and plan, but we should be very thankful for the work that our intelligence community has done to bring some of these people to justice.

When a reporter called out the Dana Perino on this outrageous statement, she stood by it (video).

I see two possibilities here. Either the White House is a 9/11-truther organization that denies the findings of the 9/11 Commission, which clearly explain that "[t]he 9/11 attack was driven by Usama Bin Ladin" (Executive Summary, page 3). Now that would be ridiculous. Or it's an attempt -- and the phrase cynical attempt doesn't begin to approach the level of despicableness I intend to convey -- an attempt to make it OK to the American people that the Republican administration has wasted thousands of lives, trillions of dollars, and almost 10 years in Iraq and Afghanistan failing to capture Osama Bin Laden.

Who, and let's be completely clear about this, was the mastermind of 9/11.

To the Republicans, 9/11 is nothing but fodder -- background material, theatrical props -- for their PR machine of propaganda and lies. At the convention, they'd have used footage of the U.S.S. Arizona at Pearl Harbor, only it's not in color. And not as many Americans were killed.

I didn't lose anyone on 9/11; I've never lived in New York; and as far as I can tell I have no personal interest in anything or anyone surrounding the events of 9/11. But 9/11 is a big reason why I moved back to the East Coast in 2002, and I'm not the only American who had no involvement in 9/11 but still felt it deeply. The attackers couldn't have chosen any target that was more of a fundamental symbol of the U.S. and all it stands for. Other people have written more eloquently than I possibly could about all that stuff, so I'll wrap up with my final point:

You don't use dead Americans to try to get yourself elected, and you don't lie about who was responsible for killing those Americans in order to cover your ass for 7 years of one hell of a fucked-up administration.

Right-wing blogger: 11 dead American soldiers = continued success

Dan Cirucci headlines a blog post as "Iraq: Continued Success."

The first phrase of the post: "Eleven US soldiers were killed in Iraq in July[.]"

It takes a sick mind to think that 11 American deaths are indicative of success. General David Petraeus, quoted further on in the article, characterizes the death toll as merely "a level of normal or latent violence" showing "a degree of durability." That is, the rate of soldiers' deaths may be down to 11 per month, but it's likely to stay there.

This is how a conservative defines success?



What about Afghanistan, Dan? Do you call 20 American servicemembers killed before the end of July success, too?

CBS covers up McCain gaffe, replaces it with anti-Obama comment

Katie Couric was interviewing John McCain about Iraq. As you've probably heard all over the place, he got confused after one particular question and said that the troop surge was directly responsible for the Anbar Awakening (in real life, the Awakening happened a good three months before the surge). Then, a few questions later, McCain tried to salvage the interview by criticizing something about Barack Obama.

CBS altered the interview in the editing room and, on Tuesday night, broadcast the Barack criticism as if it were the answer to the other question. Keith Olbermann shows both tapes via jedreport.com:



The Crooks and Liars blog points out that this kind of behavior would violate CBS's standards and practice rules, and suggests that you contact the network's ombudsman. They also note that CBS had a choice here. The network could choose, as it did, to edit out McCain's confusion. Or it could have had a huge scoop, choosing to be the first news outlet to show its viewers that McCain, who says he "know[s] how to win wars," isn't clear on the immediate past history of one that we're fighting right now, and resorts to ad hominem attacks on his opponent when he can't answer a question plainly.

Anyone care to speculate why CBS would broadcast such misleading edits?

My country tortures children

This kid is 16 years old:



Omar Khadr has been at Gitmo since he was 15. About a year after he was captured in Afghanistan, he spoke to Canadian officials. Someone sneaked a camera into an air duct and videoed ten minutes of the conversation, in which he begs the officials to help him. He shows them injuries. He pulls his hair and rocks back and forth. He's crying hard. He says, bizarrely, that he's "lost" his eyes and feet.

He's not a child any more. He's 21 now, and not to talk down to my readers by pointing out the obvious, but he's spent the last of his childhood in a maximum-security prison -- no, a supermax prison -- no, alone in a cage on an island, going blind in his injured eye, with almost no human contact. He would try to talk to the guards (born in Toronto, he's a native speaker of English), but they would not respond to him, except when they were randomly dragging him from his cage to interrogate him.

This kind of treatment resulted in hundreds of incidents of self-harm and hunger strikes between 2002 and 2006, and led three adult Gitmo prisoners to suicide. But the official in the video accuses Khadr of putting on a show, squeezing out crocodile tears so that the Canadian embassy will swoop in and save him.

Not that the Canadian embassy would, even if their intelligence service wanted to. Ottawa is deferring to the U.S. military and won't intervene.

Watch that video again. (I can't.) Imagine it's your own child. If you don't have kids or can't imagine being a parent to a 16-year-old, put yourself back into your high school shoes. This exercise works especially well if you were brainwashed by your religious extremist dad and then recruited into some military organization in your early teens, like JROTC. But in any event, you're 16. You are 16. Whether you spent your pre-Gitmo time thinking about the junior prom or thinking about joining al-Qaeda, you are 16. You've been recovering from serious, life-threatening injuries alone, in a cage, on an island. The guards, who not police but are marines who routinely thrash the prisoners for no reason, have been depriving you of sleep for weeks on end (and not just when you can't sleep for the sounds of other prisoners screaming from their own beatings). Then, after a year of this treatment, you finally talk to someone you think can help, and he says, "You want to go back to Canada? Well, there's not anything I can do about that."

His "Guantanamo military commission" -- it's like a trial, only not -- will be held in October.