I’m going to be offering something different this Christmas for the TMW fan in your life: my friends at Great Lakes Science and Novelty will be producing a set of Sparky and Blinky Christmas tree ornaments. I just got some early production samples this morning and I have to say, they look really cool. We’re still tweaking the designs slightly, but I’ll be posting photos in a week or two.
Hearts and minds
Seymour Hersh, transcribed by Jonathan Schwarz:
I got a call last week from a soldier — it’s different now, a lot of communication, 800 numbers. He’s an American officer and he was in a unit halfway between Baghdad and the Syrian border. It’s a place where we claim we’ve done great work at cleaning out the insurgency. He was a platoon commander. First lieutenant, ROTC guy.
It was a call about this. He had been bivouacing outside of town with his platoon. It was near, it was an agricultural area, and there was a granary around. And the guys that owned the granary, the Iraqis that owned the granary… It was an area that the insurgency had some control, but it was very quiet, it was not Fallujah. It was a town that was off the mainstream. Not much violence there. And his guys, the guys that owned the granary, had hired, my guess is from his language, I wasn’t explicit — we’re talking not more than three dozen, thirty or so guards. Any kind of work people were dying to do. So Iraqis were guarding the granary. His troops were bivouaced, they were stationed there, they got to know everybody…
They were a couple weeks together, they knew each other. So orders came down from the generals in Baghdad, we want to clear the village, like in Samarra. And as he told the story, another platoon from his company came and executed all the guards, as his people were screaming, stop. And he said they just shot them one by one. He went nuts, and his soldiers went nuts. And he’s hysterical. He’s totally hysterical. And he went to the captain. He was a lieutenant, he went to the company captain. And the company captain said, “No, you don’t understand. That’s a kill. We got thirty-six insurgents.”
You read those stories where the Americans, we take a city, we had a combat, a hundred and fifteen insurgents are killed. You read those stories. It’s shades of Vietnam again, folks, body counts…
You know what I told him? I said, fella, I said: you’ve complained to the captain. He knows you think they committed murder. Your troops know their fellow soldiers committed murder. Shut up. Just shut up. Get through your tour and just shut up. You’re going to get a bullet in the back. You don’t need that. And that’s where we are with this war.
Boycotting Sinclair
Outrageous
The conservative-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group, whose television outlets reach nearly a quarter of the nation’s homes with TV, is ordering its stations to preempt regular programming just days before the Nov. 2 election to air a film that attacks Sen. John F. Kerry’s activism against the Vietnam War, network and station executives familiar with the plan said Friday.
Sinclair’s programming plan, communicated to executives in recent days and coming in the thick of a close and intense presidential race, is highly unusual even in a political season that has been marked by media controversies.
Sinclair has told its stations — many of them in political swing states such as Ohio and Florida — to air “Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal,” sources said. The film, funded by Pennsylvania veterans and produced by a veteran and former Washington Times reporter, features former POWs accusing Kerry — a decorated Navy veteran turned war protester — of worsening their ordeal by prolonging the war. Sinclair will preempt regular prime-time programming from the networks to show the film, which may be classified as news programming, according to TV executives familiar with the plan.
(Story.)
So they’re basically ordering their stations to run a 90 minute Swift Boat ad. Those of you who have Sinclair Broadcasting Group stations in your area might want to start calling their advertisers and letting them know what you think.
…if anybody knows where to find a list of such advertisers, please let me know.
“I own a timber company?”
Yes, Mr. President, it appears you do:
Bush got a laugh when he scoffed at Kerry’s contention that he had received $84 from “a timber company.” Said Bush, “I own a timber company? That’s news to me.”
In fact, according to his 2003 financial disclosure form, Bush does own part interest in “LSTF, LLC”, a limited-liability company organized “for the purpose of the production of trees for commercial sales.”
So Bush was wrong to suggest that he doesn’t have ownership of a timber company. And Kerry was correct in saying that Bush’s definition of “small business” is so broad that Bush himself would have qualified as a “small business” in 2001 by virtue of the $84 in business income.
From the site Dick Cheney tried to refer viewers to a few days ago: factcheck.org.