And the Real Criminals Continue to Run Things

Look, if it was me who was thrown into a firefight in Haditha immediately following one of my buddies getting killed by an IED, I don't think I'd be doing anything but shooting to kill anyone and anything that didn't look like it was on my side. In the confusion and chaos of combat, I cannot imagine that careful discretion is even possible, no matter how much training you've had--and we know that the vast majority of our military personnel have not received any anti-insurgency training. A huge explosion, smoke, fire, blood, and people running toward you stimulate a response that I don't believe any of us could resist. You'd pull the trigger too.

Until the policymakers who put these young men into harm's way are held as equally accountable for plopping them into a civil war in which they cannot possibly tell friend from foe in a kill zone and in which the only logical response is personal survival, then there will be no justice for the innocents killed in the war. Yet this class of criminals are still lionized by the press and asked to concoct new lies about the war.

[Secretary of State Condoleezza] Rice was asked whether an additional $100 billion the Pentagon wants for the Iraq and Afghan wars might amount to throwing good money after bad in Iraq. President Bush and Congress have already provided more than $500 billion for the two conflicts and worldwide efforts against terrorism, including more than $350 billion for Iraq.

“I don’t think it’s a matter of money,” Rice said. “Along the way there have been plenty of markers that show that this is a country that is worth the investment, because once it emerges as a country that is a stabilizing factor you will have a very different kind of Middle East.”

And here are a few of those "markers" that demonstrate how stable Iraq is becoming. And then there are the other "markers," the Iraqis themselves, who seem to become stabilized by becoming dead.

So these poor damned marines are going to bear the burden for the true sins committed by the Chimpie criminal cabal--you know the names by heart by now--and when the marines are sent to Levenworth or Treasure Island to serve the terms of their scapegoated lives, Rice, Wolfowitz, Libby, et alia, will be writing memoirs about how they were poor, misunderstood, well-intentioned but misled public servants.

I certainly don't wish to deny them their memoirs, just so long as they're writing them from a jail cell in the Hague.

Now This Is a Xmas Present!

For a Cold War nut like me, the imminent declassification of government documents about our own version of the Stasi--J. Edgar Hoover's FBI--is going to be the best Christmas present ever!

At midnight on Dec. 31, hundreds of millions of pages of secret documents will be instantly declassified, including many FBI cold war files on investigations of people suspected of being Communist sympathizers. After years of extensions sought by federal agencies behaving like college students facing a term paper, the end of 2006 means the government’s first automatic declassification of records.

Not that everything will be made available, of course.

The F.B.I., by contrast, negotiated an exemption from the 1995 executive order and concluded last year that the 2003 executive order ended its special status. It has rushed to review material, seeking exemption for 50 million pages on intelligence, counterintelligence and terrorism, but leaving 270 million pages to be automatically declassified now.

Among those files, said David M. Hardy, the bureau declassification chief, are those on investigations of Americans with suspected ties to the Communist Party. Reviewers will keep working on the exempt material to see what can be released, but it is a slow process, Mr. Hardy said.

It's a pretty good start, considering that some NSA and CIA documents will also be released. There will be some big holes, no doubt, and I'll wager that most of them will have less to do with protecting actual techniques and technologies than preventing embarrassment of still living politicians and bureaucrats.

Dr. Kissinger--if you're reading this, you may want to get down to the Bush family ranch in Paraguay while you still can.

Forecast: More Horror

I've been pretty good about laying off Chimpie recently, but today's public appearance by the Incompetent-in-Chief had me boiling.

US President George W Bush has said the conflict in Iraq will require "difficult choices and additional sacrifices" in the coming year.

The "difficult choices" are kill or be killed and made by members of our armed forces alone, and the "additional sacrifices" will also be wholly borne by our military and their loved ones. Chimpie will neither make difficult choices--indeed, he has deferred those so that a few dozen more Americans can die first--nor will he suffer any sacrifices, nor will his family, friends, bootlicking followers, fellow incometents, criminals, enablers, and dupes.

Here's what the Decider revealed in todays conference, according to the BBC:

He gave no clues as to what he had been told by his military advisers, nor as to what a new strategy might look like.

The president seems to be all but ignoring last week's report from the Iraq Study Group.

A source close to the administration says Mr Bush was angered by what he saw as the report's negative and harshly critical tone. The report, said the source, "will not provide the architecture" for a new Iraq strategy.

Isn't that heartwarming? The Decider isn't deciding, but he is exhibiting the wonderful consistency of becoming petulant whenever anyone--including his father's handpicked interventionists--point out that he has not only erred, but created utter catastrophe on a scale unimaginable in 2001, and I'm referring to the Saturday Night Live skit at that time in which a map showed the Great Lakes on fire and Will Farrell's Bush admitted, "Even I know that's bad!"

Who the fuck cares if Bush is angry at the ISG's negative and harshly critical tone? Is he so insane that he expected a pat on the back and hearty "Hail fellow, well done, Sir!" for his performance? We are currently witness to Republicans on prime time television calling Bush delusional, and yet he is still accorded the courtesy of a platform upon which to exhibit his madness. How many more die because he doesn't like to be criticized? How much longer is he going to hold his breath and make no decision because Jim Baker and friends were mean to him? When is someone going to step up and move to remove this dangerous maniac from his position of power? Can the Congress not find the will to publicly exclaim that what has been happening in this country far exceeds lying about a blowjob from an intern, and therefore deserves, no, demands and requires impeachment and removal from office?

Bush is dangerous and delusional. Why is he still allowed to command the nation? Even now that the Chimperor has been shown indisputably not only to have no clothes, but no sense, no desire to make good on his mistakes, and no condition that does not reflect a definition of sociopathy, he is still given deference by members of the press, the legislature, and the pundits in a giant Kabuki theatre that ignores that every day death and dismemberment is visited upon people whose only crime is to live in the wrong place at the wrong time or volunteer to serve an office that has somehow been commandeered by an incompetent, incurious, incapable, and incurable idiot.

Merry fucking Xmas.

Back from Winslow to Welcome ex-CIA Dude as SecDef

La Posada was a fine place to stay and the dinners in the Turquoise Room were transcendental. Thank heavens I'm not so rich as to eat like that all the time, because I'd be suffering gout and have to purchase an entire new, larger-sized, wardrobe. Winslow itself has a few hopeful businesspeople with some very nice establishments along the main drag, but the town is frankly desolate and rather depressing. It's too bad, really, because walking around it's possible to imagine it as a vibrant, high desert escape for Phoenicians and as an interesting historical destination for people headed cross-country. Sadly, an atmosphere of loss and desperation hangs over it.

My money's still on Berlin.

Meanwhile, Bob Gates has become the new Secretary of Defense, echoing Russia's penchant for shifting former KGB officers into policy positions in the executive branch. In strategic and operational terms, I have to applaud this move for two reasons. One, the obvious one, is that it finally jettisons the dessicated carcass of Donald Rumsfeld along with his atrophied brain which managed to direct US Special Forces to thwart not Al Qaeda operations but rather those of our very own CIA. I would assume that Mr. Gates will be able to straighten out or fire the remaining incompetents at the Defense Department responsible for such idiocies. If nothing else, he will be able to establish contacts within the CIA so they can be warned in advance of potential Rumsfeld-legacy disasters-in-waiting.

The big question, of course, is if Gates is the real hitman for the Baker Commission, aka Iraq Study Group, since he was a member and is now in a position close enough to Chimpie to put the knife in, figuratively speaking. Is the plan to have him spike Chimpie's bedtime hot chocolate with something that will unhinge him even further so we will all witness the on-air meltdown that will trigger a popularly supported coup against Chimpie and Cheney?

Farfetched? Perhaps. But with Bush's continuing refusal to even give lip service to his father's handpicked intervention squad, I imagine that they are to the point of reaching for some kind of final option, and a CIA man at DoD is positioned perfectly to supervise the takedown.

If I'm right, you all owe me beers--Pilsner Urquells, please.