“The next six months in Iraq—which will determine the prospects for democracy-building there—are the most important six months in U.S. foreign policy in a long, long time.”
(New York Times, 11/30/03)
“What I absolutely don’t understand is just at the moment when we finally have a UN-approved Iraqi-caretaker government made up of—I know a lot of these guys—reasonably decent people and more than reasonably decent people, everyone wants to declare it’s over. I don’t get it. It might be over in a week, it might be over in a month, it might be over in six months, but what’s the rush? Can we let this play out, please?”
(NPR’s Fresh Air, 6/3/04)
“What we’re gonna find out, Bob, in the next six to nine months is whether we have liberated a country or uncorked a civil war.”
(CBS’s Face the Nation, 10/3/04)
“Improv time is over. This is crunch time. Iraq will be won or lost in the next few months. But it won’t be won with high rhetoric. It will be won on the ground in a war over the last mile.”
(New York Times, 11/28/04)
“I think we’re in the end game now…. I think we’re in a six-month window here where it’s going to become very clear and this is all going to pre-empt I think the next congressional election—that’s my own feeling— let alone the presidential one.”
(NBC’s Meet the Press, 9/25/05)
“Maybe the cynical Europeans were right. Maybe this neighborhood is just beyond transformation. That will become clear in the next few months as we see just what kind of minority the Sunnis in Iraq intend to be. If they come around, a decent outcome in Iraq is still possible, and we should stay to help build it. If they won’t, then we are wasting our time.”
(New York Times, 9/28/05)
“We’ve teed up this situation for Iraqis, and I think the next six months really are going to determine whether this country is going to collapse into three parts or more or whether it’s going to come together.”
(CBS’s Face the Nation, 12/18/05)
WASHINGTON - A Pentagon probe into the death of Iraqi civilians last November in the Iraqi city of Haditha will show that U.S. Marines “killed innocent civilians in cold blood,” a U.S. lawmaker said Wednesday.
From the beginning, Iraqis in the town of Haditha said U.S. Marines deliberately killed 15 unarmed Iraqi civilians, including seven women and three children.
One young Iraqi girl said the Marines killed six members of her family, including her parents. “The Americans came into the room where my father was praying,” she said, “and shot him.”
On Wednesday, Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said the accounts are true.
Military officials told NBC News that the Marine Corps’ own evidence appears to show Murtha is right.
A videotape taken by an Iraqi showed the aftermath of the alleged attack: a blood-smeared bedroom floor and bits of what appear to be human flesh and bullet holes on the walls.
The video, obtained by Time magazine, was broadcast a day after town residents told The Associated Press that American troops entered homes on Nov. 19 and shot dead 15 members of two families, including a 3-year-old girl, after a roadside bomb killed a U.S. Marine.
On Nov. 20, U.S. Marines spokesman Capt. Jeffrey Pool issued a statement saying that on the previous day a roadside bomb had killed 15 civilians and a Marine. In a later gunbattle, U.S. and Iraqi troops killed eight insurgents, he said.
U.S. military officials later confirmed that the version of events was wrong.
Murtha, a vocal opponent of the war in Iraq, said at a news conference Wednesday that sources within the military have told him that an internal investigation will show that “there was no firefight, there was no IED (improvised explosive device) that killed these innocent people. Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood.”
Ugly? That doesn’t even begin to cover it. Dick Cheney is ugly. The Pentagon is ugly. An Abrams tank is ugly. Executing helpless women and children while they’re huddled on the floor, praying to their God, is a war crime committed by terrorists. It’s Lidice and Rwanda and Srebrenica and, of course, My Lai. The men who committed this crime aren’t really human any more — they shed their humanity like a snake sheds its skin when they walked into those houses and started shooting. All that’s left of them is a dark pit at the center of their reptilian brain stems, a place that knows no pity or remorse or even self-awareness. They’re lost souls — lost to the world and to themselves.
And this is worth noting as well:
As for the excuse making, well, it’s just Abu Ghraib, not to mention My Lai, all over again. There’s something about war atrocities (ours as well as the other side’s) that brings out the absolute worst in the keyboard commandos. If they could only hear themselves, they might realize they sound just like a bunch of Serbian paramilitary groupies, arguing that their boys couldn’t have raped and murdered their way through Bosnia because Serbian fighters are men of honor, that everybody knows the foreign media made those stories up, and that the “Turks” just got what was coming to them — all at the same time.
But then, if they could hear themselves, if they understood what role they are playing in the degradation of a nation and its armed forces, they probably wouldn’t be doing it. Or at least, I prefer to think so. Better to believe we’re living in the same country with a movement of fools, rather than out-and-out fascists.
Bush dispatches the National Guard to defend the border with Reality
May 16, 2007
In a move White House staffers describe as an attempt to shore up his far-right base, President Bush last night announced his intention to send National Guard troops to defend his administration’s increasingly fragile border with Reality.
In a prime time speech broadcast live only by Fox News Channel and the Outdoor Life Network, Bush attempted to raise his sagging poll numbers back into double digits by employing the words “initiative,” “comprehensive,” and “solution,” spoken as if they were somehow related to the rest of the speech.
In last night’s address, the president took his case to the American people that Reality is “out of control,” and as a result he is dispatching “five schmillion” National Guard troops to patrol its borders.
“We are a nation of laws,” Bush declared, although it was unclear if he understood the words. “Reality is always welcome within our borders, when it is willing to cooperate with our laws and obey our commands. But Reality cannot enter this great nation in an uncontrollable tide. Therefore, tonight, I am announcing a comprehensive solution initiative.”
However, Bush displeased many of his remaining supporters by suggesting that limited “guest visits” from Reality might be part of the solution. “We all know what happens when you let just one stray fact in,” said one poster to the National Review Online. “Then comes another, and another, and they start reproducing, and pretty soon we’ll be completely overrun.”
The speech was interrupted before it began when an NBC producer accidentally allowed the public to view President Bush for thirteen seconds of unscripted Reality. Everyone that producer has ever met will now have their phone calls placed into a database as potential Reality sympathizers. The producer himself is said to be resting comfortably on a waterboard.
The president’s plan, available in detail online if you close your eyes and think of your happiest place, includes requirements that Reality learn to speak English, “meaningful penalties” for Reality if it refuses to comply, and provisions to hold employers who allow Reality in their workplaces accountable.
However, if the schmillions of National Guard troops are unable to control Reality, the president asserted the right to use other options, including a series of air strikes, possibly including nuclear weapons. “Reality cannot be allowed to flout the international community. This is why we cannot wait for the United Nations to act,” Bush said.
“The use of the military, however, does not mean that this is militarization,” the president added, pretending to drink from an invisible teacup.
The president’s speech concluded with an attempt to appear reasonable and decent, primarily by using those specific words in a reassuring tone. “We must remember that much of Reality is reasonable and decent, and willing to do things that the rest of us aren’t willing to, or can’t even understand how,” the president said. “America itself was founded on a limited amount of Reality. Initiative. Comprehensive. Solution.”
Asked for comment, Karl Rove, currently under house arrest while awaiting sentencing for perjury and obstruction of justice, replied, “I am not under house arrest. I am winning the war in Iraq. Care for some tea?”
If you haven’t signed up for Michael Moore’s newsletter, now’s the time — for the next two weeks, Michael and his web team will be giving away one signed copy of my new book each day to new people on the list.
Today’s the official pub date for Glenn Greenwald’s book, How Would a Patriot Act. Glenn was kind enough to share an advance copy of the manuscript with me, but I didn’t get a chance to read it closely until last week. Very short review: this is an important book which lays out the Administration’s crimes against the Constitution with methodical precision. Well worth reading, which should come as no surprise to anyone who reads Glenn’s blog.
My friend Eddie was passing through and invited my wife and me to come hear his band. And I’ll tell you, the boys know how to put on a rock and roll show. I think they’ve got a real future in the music business.
More seriously: what a great time. Pearl Jam is an awesome band to see live, particularly when you’re watching from the edge of the stage with a bottle of wine you’ve been given by your insanely generous and solicitious host. There are definitely worse ways to spend a Saturday night.
Dean Baker is an economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. People who closely followed Bush’s attempts to dismantle Social Security last year know Baker may have done more than any one person to stop it.
For decades the media (and conservatives) have pushed a particular framing of political views on the economy: conservatives favor free market policies, while progressives want the government to intervene in the market. In fact, The Conservative Nanny State explains, this is completely untrue: conservatives are strongly anti-free market. They depend on the government to make the wealthiest people in America even more stupendously rich.
As Baker shows, this is the case essentially across the board. Conservatives push trade, monetary, tax and intellectual property policies that get the government deeply involved in the economy. The only difference between them and progressives is that conservatives want the government to help Paris Hilton, while progressives want the government to help regular people.
The Conservative Nanny State is short and easy to read, and requires no special background in economics. It’s also available for free as an e-book at its website, or for $6.91 as a paperback. (For Baker’s ideas on how copyright law can be overhauled to benefit writers, musicians, artists and everyone else in the internet age, see Chapter 4.)
What’s really amazing is that conservatives have gotten away with yelling about “free markets” for so long. Of course, they’re the same people who spent years screaming about Iraq’s terrifying WMD, and look how well that’s turned out.
Heh. The President is going to give a major primetime address on Monday to try to convince the public that, four and a half years after 9/11, he finally cares about illegal immigration. It’s sorta quaint how the White House still thinks the public likes Bush enough to sit through one of his speeches and respects him enough to believe what he’s saying. It’s been a long, long time since he was a speech away from reversing his political fortunes. Too little, too late, Junior.
The big idea that’s apparently important enough to interrupt 24 to tell us about is a plan to deploy whatever National Guard troops the President can scrape together to help secure the border. This might be a good idea if illegal immigration was a sudden crisis, but the immigration “problem” has been brewing for more than thirty years. It’s not like the President can just pretend this snuck up on him. Besides, we already have an agency that patrols the border….they’re the border patrol. If you’re responding to a semi-permanent security situation on the border, you should devote more resources to that agency, not misuse the National Guard again.
Regardless of the merits of the Presidents proposals or their popularity with the public, as someone who’s firmly opposed to this latest bit of pandering, I see very little to worry about. After all, if we learned anything during Hurricane Katrina, it’s that the President’s promises to deploy National Guardsmen are worthless. Just like his pre-hurricane assurances to Louisiana state and local officials, George Bush just wants to give everyone the impression that he’s on top of things, but he doesn’t want to bother with paying attention to a crisis or taking any responsibility whatsoever. The only “crisis” the President is concerned about is the likelihood of Republicans losing the House. So on Monday night, he might give a cute little speech, but we all know it’s not going to mean a damn thing.
Was out of town overnight. Got home around noon, and immediately cranked out a new cartoon about the latest NSA revelations, which I just finished a few minutes ago. The cartoon that got bumped was about Porter Goss and the hookergate stuff. Now I see that Dusty Foggo’s home has been raided by the FBI. (Atrios will have the links, I’m too beat right now). It’s always a balancing act, trying to look ahead and guess what’s going to be in the news and on people’s minds, when the next cartoon sees print. We’ll see if I guessed right or not on this one.
Anyway, a reader sent these images in, noting that they were suddenly timely again, and I wanted to post them before I closed up shop for the day. These are a couple of posters I designed in the early nineties, for a software company that somehow was involved in these issues — I don’t remember the details. They’ve apparently become quite the collector’s items — I get email pretty regularly from people wanting to know if they’re available anywhere. Unfortunately, I don’t even have copies of the full size posters myself. If anybody does have them, I wouldn’t mind getting a high quality scan from you.
If you always assume that the administration is lying and that things are much worse than you’re being told, you will rarely be proven wrong:
The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.
The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.
“It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world,” said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA’s activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency’s goal is “to create a database of every call ever made” within the nation’s borders, this person added.
For the customers of these companies, it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made — across town or across the country — to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.
The three telecommunications companies are working under contract with the NSA, which launched the program in 2001 shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the sources said. The program is aimed at identifying and tracking suspected terrorists, they said.
The sources would talk only under a guarantee of anonymity because the NSA program is secret.
Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, nominated Monday by President Bush to become the director of the CIA, headed the NSA from March 1999 to April 2005. In that post, Hayden would have overseen the agency’s domestic call-tracking program. Hayden declined to comment about the program.
The NSA’s domestic program, as described by sources, is far more expansive than what the White House has acknowledged. Last year, Bush said he had authorized the NSA to eavesdrop — without warrants — on international calls and international e-mails of people suspected of having links to terrorists when one party to the communication is in the USA. Warrants have also not been used in the NSA’s efforts to create a national call database.
In defending the previously disclosed program, Bush insisted that the NSA was focused exclusively on international calls. “In other words,” Bush explained, “one end of the communication must be outside the United States.”
As a result, domestic call records — those of calls that originate and terminate within U.S. borders — were believed to be private.
Sources, however, say that is not the case. With access to records of billions of domestic calls, the NSA has gained a secret window into the communications habits of millions of Americans. Customers’ names, street addresses and other personal information are not being handed over as part of NSA’s domestic program, the sources said. But the phone numbers the NSA collects can easily be cross-checked with other databases to obtain that information.
