Dylan Ratigan with the single most sane, coherent political diatribe about terrorism ever

Sure Dylan loses his mind every once in a while, but this is a series of brilliant observations about the nature of the war on terror and cognitive dissonance.

Mor lik dis plz.

Did U.S. troops in Iraq murder innocent civilians?

I've been sitting on this for a bit, because I needed to process it.

Dan Froomkin

Calling it a case of "collateral murder," the WikiLeaks Web site today released harrowing video of a U.S. Army Apache helicopter in Baghdad in 2007 repeatedly opening fire on a group of men that included a Reuters photographer and his driver -- and then on a van that stopped to rescue one of the wounded men.

None of the members of the group were taking hostile action, contrary to the Pentagon's initial cover story; they were milling about on a street corner. One man was evidently carrying a gun, though that was and is hardly an uncommon occurrence in Baghdad.

Reporters working for WikiLeaks determined that the driver of the van was a good Samaritan on his way to take his small children to a tutoring session. He was killed and his two children were badly injured.

In the video, which Reuters has been asking to see since 2007, crew members can be heard celebrating their kills.

"Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards," says one crewman after multiple rounds of 30mm cannon fire left nearly a dozen bodies littering the street.

A crewman begs for permission to open fire on the van and its occupants, even though it has done nothing but stop to help the wounded: "Come on, let us shoot!"

Two crewmen share a laugh when a Bradley fighting vehicle runs over one of the corpses.

And after soldiers on the ground find two small children shot and bleeding in the van, one crewman can be heard saying: "Well, it's their fault bringing their kids to a battle."

The helicopter crew, which was patrolling an area that had been the scene of fierce fighting that morning, said they spotted weapons on members of the first group -- although the video shows one gun, at most. The crew also mistook a telephoto lens for a rocket-propelled grenade.

What's worse, the cavalier video game-like attitude, the pleas to kill an unarmed rescue party, the collateral damage, the coverup, or the fact that we're in Iraq illegally?

I don't know.

Oliver Willis via Cesca
In the case of the Wikileaks video, Greenwald characterizes it as “the plainly unjustified killing of a group of unarmed men (with their children) carrying away an unarmed, seriously wounded man to safety”. Except in the mindset of the soldiers shown, this wasn’t just some guy, but part of a group of insurgents. While it’s very clear that the military coverup of the activities was wrong, and possibly a crime, it galls me that it becomes so simple for people “over here” to Monday morning quarterback the decisions soldiers make in the field when they feel their lives and the lives of others are on the line.

What continues to trouble me is the cavalier manner in which they approached what should be the most deadly serious part of their jobs.

This was Gears of War for them. It was treated as XBox when it was human lives they were ending. If they can be so cavalier and, at times, excited to kill, well that leads to not taking the appropriate care to make sure that they're in fact targeting terrorists and not murdering civilians.

The attitude displayed is what really upsets me. I would think that taking a human life would be a little more serious and a lot less fun and funny.

Over at Andrew Sullivan, a reader writes:

I was a member of a unit that killed one and wounded two Americans during Operation Desert Storm. Nothing has awakened the feelings I had that night in 1991 ever, until I watched that video of the Apache attack on the journalists. I had forgotten how sick one can feel at knowing you participated in the death of innocents, and I am deeply saddened today.

I have two things to say: First, and most importantly, is that none of us is qualified to judge what that helicopter crew did that day. I want to judge them. But I don’t know what happened an hour before that, or six hours before, or six days before or six months. We have no idea how close those men have come to dying in an ambush, or being unable to help someone who was. The context of that aircrew matters as much as anything that happened on the ground that day.

But second, and what leads me to want to judge that aircraft crew so unfavorably, is that the ground targets are clearly uninterested in the presence of the aircraft.

The real lasting legacy of this is that this is another loss of the moral high ground for the U.S.. it's another reason for them to hate us.

Apparently, gun possession should be punished by immediate execution

The Weekly Standard advocates the immediate killing of anyone caught in possession of a gun. Or maybe it only counts if you have brown skin and a name that doesn't sound like Steve. Why are the rules different in different parts of our empire?

7 years, thousands dead Americans, hundreds of thousands total dead, tens of thousands wounded, hundreds of billions spent, no safer.... all for a lie

Brave New Foundation

U.K. envoy: U.S. was 'hell bent' on Iraq war

(AP)

The United States was "hell bent" on a 2003 military invasion of Iraq and actively undermined efforts by Britain to win international authorization for the war, a former British diplomat told an inquiry Friday.

Jeremy Greenstock, British ambassador to the United Nations from 1998 to 2003, said that President George W. Bush had no real interest in attempts to agree on a U.N. resolution to provide explicit backing for the conflict.

The ex-diplomat, who served as Britain's envoy in Iraq after the invasion, said serious preparations for the war had begun in early 2002 and took on an unstoppable momentum.

As diplomats frantically attempted in early 2003 to agree upon a U.N. resolution approving a military offensive, Bush's key aides grew impatient — criticizing the process as an unnecessary distraction, he said.

Grumbling from Washington "included noises about 'this is a waste of time, what we need is regime change, why are we bothering with this, we must sweep this aside and do what's going to have to be done anyway — and deal with this with the use of force,'" Greenstock testified before the inquiry into the Iraq war.

Several nations had hoped to stall the invasion of Iraq to allow U.N. weapons inspectors more time to search for evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction — the key justification for the war. No such weapons were ever found.

Yet Bush's inner circle cared little about what international allies thought and refused to halt plans to invade in March 2003, Greenstock said. He said even Blair was unable to persuade Bush, winning only a brief hiatus of two weeks.

"The momentum for earlier action in the United States was much too strong for us to counter," Greenstock said in a written statement to the inquiry, provided alongside his live testimony.

In the Loop indeed:


But it's not funny. George W. Bush and his advisors are responsible for deaths numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Try to justify that to your God.

Obama at Arlington

The President marked Veteran's Day with a speech at Arlington, laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and then a surprise stop. In what Arlington confirms was the first ever for a president on Veteran's Day, the President and the First Lady got out of the armored limo and strolled through Section 60 - the final resting place for many veteran's of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.





New York Daily News journalist James Gordon Meek was there, visiting the graves of friends, when the President walked up to him. The entire story is worth reading, but following is an excerpt:

He didn't introduce himself. He didn't have to.

President Obama simply stuck out his hand and asked for my name as he stepped toward me amid a bone-chilling drizzle in the Gardens of Stone.

This was Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery. I wasn't there as a reporter, but to visit some friends and family buried there when Obama made an unscheduled stop - a rare presidential walk among what Lincoln called America's "honored dead" - after laying a Veterans Day wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns.

What I got was an unexpected look into the eyes of a man who intertwined his roles as commander in chief and consoler in chief on a solemn day filled with remembrance and respect for sacrifices made - and sacrifices yet to be made.

I'm sure the cynics will assume this wasjust anotherObama photoop.

If they'd been standing in my boots looking him in the eye, they would have surely choked on their bile.

His presence in Section 60 convinced me that he now carries the heavy burden of command.

The unseen cost

The human capital involved in war is often forgotten. This video is a compilation of reunions between soldier-parents and their children. I hope this is on the President's mind as he makes his decision on the way forward, and out of, our wars.

Questions I have, part 1: when is a trillion not a trillion?

When Bush signed his $1.3 trillion tax cut in June of 2001, a cut that largely benefited the super-wealthy, who screamed and complained?

When Bush took us to war with an unknown price tag, who wondered 'how will we pay for it'?

So now, why does the right wing get so breathless about a health care plan that provides what should be a basic human right, and according to the CBO, will generate a surplus?

Why are wars and handouts to the rich preferable to basic health care for all?

** benefits of the Bush tax cuts here (Center for American Progress) and here (Citizens for Tax Justice)

Operation Iraqi Stephen: Going Commando

It's “Operation Iraqi Stephen: Going Commando”. Colbert is in Iraq, filming a week's worth of shows from one of Saddam's former palaces. Leaked pictures show Colbert in a business suit made of Army camouflage and getting a haircut from General Ray Odierno.





(NY Times - registration required)

Cheney used torture used to build a phony case for Iraq war

It's beginning to appear that torture was not only used under the guise of "keeping the country safe" after 9/11, but also to build a case for war with Iraq, especially as evidence piled up that Iraq did not have WMD's.

As more information leaks out, it appears that the Bush Administration was torturing detainees in order to build, then buttress, it's case that Saddam Hussein was an iminent danger to the U.S.

(CNN)
Finding a "smoking gun" linking Iraq and al Qaeda became the main purpose of the abusive interrogation program the Bush administration authorized in 2002, a former State Department official told CNN on Thursday.

The allegation was included in an online broadside aimed at former Vice President Dick Cheney by Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff for then-Secretary of State Colin Powell. In it, Wilkerson wrote that the interrogation program began in April and May of 2002, and then-Vice President Cheney's office kept close tabs on the questioning.

"Its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at preempting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al Qaeda," Wilkerson wrote in The Washington Note, an online political journal.

Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, said his accusation is based on information from current and former officials. He said he has been "relentlessly digging" since 2004, when Powell asked him to look into the scandal surrounding the treatment of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

The argument that Iraq could have provided weapons of mass destruction to terrorists such as al Qaeda was a key element of the Bush administration's case for the March 2003 invasion. But after the invasion, Iraq was found to have dismantled its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs, and the independent commission that investigated the 2001 attacks found no evidence of a collaborative relationship between the two entities.

Wilkerson wrote that in one case, the CIA told Cheney's office that a prisoner under its interrogation program was now "compliant," meaning agents recommended the use of "alternative" techniques should stop.

At that point, "The VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods," Wilkerson wrote.

"The detainee had not revealed any al Qaeda-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, 'revealed' such contacts."

Al-Libi's claim that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's government had trained al Qaeda operatives in producing chemical and biological weapons appeared in the October 2002 speech then-President Bush gave when pushing Congress to authorize military action against Iraq. It also was part of Powell's February 2003 presentation to the United Nations on the case for war, a speech Powell has called a "blot" on his record.

Al-Libi later recanted the claim, saying it was made under torture by Egyptian intelligence agents, a claim Egypt denies. He died last week in a Libyan prison, reportedly a suicide, Human Rights Watch reported.

Stacy Sullivan, a counterterrorism adviser for the U.S.-based group, called al-Libi's allegation "pivotal" to the Bush administration's case for war, as it connected Baghdad to the terrorist organization behind the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.

This is becoming a web of lies almost too big to fathom. We have the Vice-President of the United States authorizing torture in a bid to create a case for war because he knows that conventional means won't work.

(Josh Marshall via Sullivan)
More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.

He orders the torture ostensibly to protect American lives, and now demonizes the Obama Administration for not continuing the "advanced interrogations. Cheney accuses Obama of endangering American lives, leaving out a major part it: his own administration did not use advanced interrogation in it's second term. As Colin Powell's top aide says:

"What I am saying is that no torture or harsh interrogation techniques were employed by any U.S. interrogator for the entire second term of Cheney-Bush, 2005-2009. So, if we are to believe the protestations of Dick Cheney, that Obama's having shut down the "Cheney interrogation methods" will endanger the nation, what are we to say to Dick Cheney for having endangered the nation for the last four years of his vice presidency?" — Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former
chief of staff of Colin Powell's Department of State

Plus, in a bid to demonize the Speaker of the House, the GOP are creating distractions about what she knew and when she knew it. Never mind that she was in the minority party that was being steamrolled, and painted as unpatriotic for opposing the buildup to war.

I've opposed the cries of "war crimes". Until now. I think we're approaching that arena.

Rush lies: Dems wanted us to lose Iraq

Dave Neiwert of Crooks and Liars is challenging a Limbaugh meme from his beer hall speech at CPAC.  Limbaugh, trying to pull the "you did it first" line of reasoning 4th graders use, said"

Limbaugh: Did the Democrats want the war in Iraq to fail?

[Crowd shouts:] Yeah!

Limbaugh: Well, they certainly did. We were in the process of winning the war and the last thing they wanted was to win. They hoped George Bush failed.

That's a bald-faced lie.  And Neiwert is demanding proof:

I'd like to challenge Hannity, or Steele, or Limbaugh, to search the public record to find any leading Democrat -- congressman, senator, talking head, or otherwise -- who ever said: "I hope George Bush fails in Iraq."

Where is it? We're waiting.

Waiting....

Waiting....