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US – Iran locked into spiral conflict

Both the Bush administration and the Iranian clerical regime are reeling from historic low support figures from their constituent populations. United States politicians know that attacking Iran is a sure-fire political winner with the American public. Iran has become America’s all-purpose bogeyman. Foolish declarations, such as the State Department assertion that Iran is America’s “greatest security threat” are received uncritically by voters throughout the nation. Similarly in Iran, the United States can be freely demonized without serious question. The leaders of the Islamic republic regularly blame the United States for their own failings in managing economic development, border control and corruption.

It makes no sense for either nation, but a war between Iran and the US makes sense for both rulers of both countries as a way to shore up domestic support (caveat: the real rulers of Iran are the mullahs, not Ahmadinejad). And usually, when two power mad dictators want a fight, they get one. War? What’s it good for? The GOP’s domestic agenda and midterm elections, that’s who. Also, the mullahs, American and Iranian.

That Bush hears voices and has a messianic complex is just icing on the cake. Practical meets the wishful in one bow-wrapped Iranian nuking. In his warped menagerie of dusty cobweb-filled corners and coke-burnt passageways of a mind, that is.

This is madness. Sheer madness. And it’s probably going to happen anyway. What an interesting time in which to live.

Bush on keeping Rummy

Bush: I say I listen to all voices but mine’s the final decision and Don Rumsfeld is doing a fine job. He’s not only transforming the military, he’s fighting a war on terror – He’s helping us fight a war on terror. I have strong confidence in Don Rumsfeld. I hear the voices and I read the front page and I know the speculation but I’m the decider and I decide what is best and what’s best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the Secretary of defense.

These same voices are the one that tell him to wear a tutu, smear peanut butter all over his chest, and try to copulate with a Civil War era spitoon, but they are voices nonetheless. And they are speaking to him. Slowly. Using simple words.

Bush values loyalty above all things. Bubble boy can’t abide criticism and the entire Cheney administration is filled with yes persons and Cheney and Rummy. Cheney and Rummy aren’t yes men, but they’re sociopaths with the attendant self-preserving ability to shamelessly lie and fawn when needed. Well, it looks like Rummy’s rusty trombone job worked. Bush, you see, thinks that Cheney and Rummy are loyal… that is, when he’s not thinking about the pretty birds that go tweet.

war dissenters are the dupes and tools of Zarqawi and al Qaeda

There have always been people who have opposed wars…I think we just have to accept it, that people have a right to say what they want to say, and to have an acceptance of that and recognize that the terrorists, Zarqawi and bin Laden and Zawahiri, those people have media committees.

They are actively out there trying to manipulate the press in the United States. They are very good at it.

I would write more, but right now Zarqawi is making me pound my head into my desk for living in a country ruled by such morons.

Sy Hersh continues with his great reporting. US considers use of nuclear weapons against Iran

The administration of President George W. Bush is planning a massive bombing campaign against Iran, including use of bunker-buster nuclear bombs to destroy a key Iranian suspected nuclear weapons facility, The New Yorker magazine has reported in its April 17 issue.

The article by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said that Bush and others in the White House have come to view Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a potential Adolf Hitler.

This makes the bushevik propaganda’s, what, #4 neo Hitler? The fact of the matter is that we are run by a bloodthirsty chickenhawk junta, drunk on mad visions of glory.

If we use nuclear weapons in yet another illegal war of aggression, make no mistake about it – it will only be a matter of time before New York City becomes an ash-filled charnel house.

If it’s any consolation, Hersh also reports that many of the Joint Chiefs and the planning staff will resign if the Rumsfeld-Bush-Cheney band of megalomaniacal messianic fucktards goes forward with this plan.

You can’t handle the Joementum!

McEnroe: You probably know that I wrote in the Currant last Sunday that if I had to vote in the primary right now I would, with some sorrow vote for Ned Lamont simply because you have kind of drifted so far towards the Bush Administration whose policies I don’t approve of very much. Tell me why I’m wrong, tell me why I should vote for you.

Lieberman: Well I…I think that your statement just then was as ridiculous and unfair as your column was. I was really upset by it. I don’t get to hear you a lot because I’m in Washington but if you’re saying that on the air really I hope your listeners are taking it with a grain of salt.

First off let me go to something that really bothered me. You have this line saying that I’ve come to a point where I’m saying that those who do not parrot my support of the war are unpatriotic and then you take TOTALLY out of context something that I said in a speech that I gave last December when I came back from Iraq and I urge you to go back and look at that whole speech.

McEnroe: Okay, tell me why…

Lieberman: Let me just finish this!

There’s more. Lieberman’s cracking and Ned Lamont’s going to beat him in the primary. Good. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving prick. The audio, for now, can be found on the WTIC site.

FAIR recently did some yeoman work in collecting the quotes of the chickenhawk brigade and busheviks regarding the invasion of Iraq. You know, those cheeto-stained basement bloggers, pundits, and drunken catholigayhiv+ fucktards who classified everyone, such as yours truly, who opposed the war for any reason. They even went so far as to call anti-Iraq war opponents as traitors, a fifth column, cowards, appeasers, and idiots.

Am I angry? Oh… a tad.

Well, bitches, you reap what you sow. I was right, for all the right reasons, and everything I predicted has come to pass. Quagmire, civil war, making us weaker, making us a pariah nation, strengthening the terrorists, and making us more vulnerable. It’s actually been worse than I predicted, since I never countenanced that we would have a government that actively supports torture and the destruction of the Constitution. My bad.

The blood of thousands upon thousands of people is at least partially on the hand of people like the entire Faux “news” staff, Andrew Sullivan, the knuckledraggers at the Corner, the NYT, the Washington Post, and the rest of the high-income punditocracy.

Here are a few choice quotes:

“The war was the hard part. The hard part was putting together a coalition, getting 300,000 troops over there and all their equipment and winning. And it gets easier. I mean, setting up a democracy is hard, but it is not as hard as winning a war.”
(Fox News Channel’s Fred Barnes, 4/10/03)

“Oh, it was breathtaking. I mean I was almost starting to think that we had become inured to everything that we’d seen of this war over the past three weeks; all this sort of saturation. And finally, when we saw that it was such a just true, genuine expression. It was reminiscent, I think, of the fall of the Berlin Wall. And just sort of that pure emotional expression, not choreographed, not stage-managed, the way so many things these days seem to be. Really breathtaking.”
(Washington Post reporter Ceci Connolly, appearing on Fox News Channel on 4/9/03, discussing the pulling down of a Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad, an event later revealed to have been a U.S. military PSYOPS operation–Los Angeles Times, 7/3/04)

“The war winds down, politics heats up…. Picture perfect. Part Spider-Man, part Tom Cruise, part Ronald Reagan. The president seizes the moment on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific.”
(PBS’s Gwen Ifill, 5/2/03, on George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech)

“Now that the war in Iraq is all but over, should the people in Hollywood who opposed the president admit they were wrong?”
(Fox News Channel’s Alan Colmes, 4/25/03)

“I doubt that the journalists at the New York Times and NPR or at ABC or at CNN are going to ever admit just how wrong their negative pronouncements were over the past four weeks.”
(MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, 4/9/03)

“This will be no war — there will be a fairly brief and ruthless military intervention…. The president will give an order. [The attack] will be rapid, accurate and dazzling…. It will be greeted by the majority of the Iraqi people as an emancipation. And I say, bring it on.”
(Christopher Hitchens, in a 1/28/03 debate– cited in the Observer, 3/30/03)

“Speaking to the U.N. Security Council last week, Secretary of State Colin Powell made so strong a case that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is in material breach of U.N. resolutions that only the duped, the dumb and the desperate could ignore it.”
(Cal Thomas, syndicated column, 2/12/03)

Mmmm… I love the smell of crow in the morning.

According to an article published in the New York Times , Saddam Hussein took steps to avoid war with the United States, including divesting himself of WMDs and scrubbing the country clean of all evidence of past production so that it would not be found and thought to be current.

The article says that Iraq’s senior military leaders told their U.S. captors that they were stunned when Saddam called them together 3 months before the war and told them not to base their military planning on the use of any unconventional weapons, such as nuclear, biological or chemical weapons because Iraq did not possess them. The overall strategy was to convince the United Nations that they had complied but to leave some doubt so that neighbors such as Iran would still be detered by the possibility that Iraq had nonconvential weapons to use in case of an invasion.

It appears that in the final analysis that the very steps the Iraqi government took to comply with Bush’s demands were ironically the things that the Bush administration used to jusify the war. Hussein’s efforts to sanitize his old weapon production sites were presented as evidence that he was attempting to hide the evidence. As it turns out, it was the Bush administration’s need to rush into hostilities, that caused mistakes to made. Had he listened to the team of inspectors and allowed them to do their job to determine if an invasion was actually necessary, we wouldn’t be bogged down in Iraq now.

Word has it that Libby is saying that Cheney ‘authorized’ him to leak classified intelligence during the run-up to the preemptive war. Now, absent an executive order declassifying material – read: explicit Bush authorization, in writing, with records of this decision – Cheney is committing treason.

Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, testified to a federal grand jury that he had been “authorized” by Cheney and other White House “superiors” in the summer of 2003 to disclose classified information to journalists to defend the Bush administration’s use of prewar intelligence in making the case to go to war with Iraq, according to attorneys familiar with the matter, and to court records.

If there’s some exception in the US Code that allows for this declassification at the whim of a zombie the Vice President or an unelected troll named Rove can someone please explain to me how Cheney is not in jail at this moment? Because the Vice President under Article II of the Constitution… is not the President. You’ll have to excuse the tautology here.

I suppose it’s probable that Cheney is on the list of people with Original Classification Authority, but if so, there has to be a written record of this declassification. Why would loyal lapdog Libby try to use this as a defense tactic if it weren’t true? He’s implicating his boss here, when all he has to do is stonewall until Bush gives him a pardon in 2 years.

How, exactly, were the GOP able to message themselves as the party concerned about national security again?

You don’t say?

Iraqi and American officials say they are seeing a troubling pattern of government corruption enabling the flow of oil money and other funds to the insurgency and threatening to undermine Iraq’s struggling economy.

You know who’s in charge of the Iraqi oil ministry, right? Ahmed fuckin Chalabi, that’s who.

Heckuva a job you’re doing there, Bushie.

In this case, a Tom Toles cartoon

Tom Toles editorial cartoon published in The Washington Post on Monday and on its Web site has drawn a very rare and very strong protest letter to the editors from all six members of The Joint Chiefs of Staff, E&P has learned.

The letter, not yet published by the Post, charges that the six military leaders “believe you and Mr. Toles have done a disservice to your readers and your paper’s reputation by using such a callous depiction of those who have volunteered to defend this nation, and as a result, have suffered traumatic and life-altering wounds. … As the Joint Chiefs, it is rare that we all put our hand to one letter, but we cannot let this reprehensible cartoon go unanswered.”

Right, why should we be worried about a military promoting “freedom” abroad while attempting to stifle free speech at home? An institution that funds and organizes fake pro-war marches, plans to wage war on the information sharing system it created, and illegally spies on war protestors, peace activists, and vegans in the United States? I don’t see the danger in this at all.

Here’s the cartoon they don’t want you to see:

Jill Carroll, in case you haven’t been following the story, was a reporter in Iraq. She was kidnapped not long ago (and her interpreter was killed), with the kidnappers demanding that the US release Iraqi women in exchange for Ms. Carroll. This seemed bizarre on its face, but, hey, who knows what lurks in the mind of these kidnappers, huh?

Well, it turns out, that there is more to the story. You see, the reason why Ms. Carroll was kidnapped and why they asked for the release of women in US custody is because we have been kidnapping suspected guerilla leaders’ wives when we cannot get to the man.

U.S. forces in Iraq, in two instances described in military documents, took custody of the wives of men believed to be insurgents in an apparent attempt to pressure the suspects into giving themselves up.

Both incidents occurred in 2004. In one, members of a shadowy military task force seized a mother who had three young children, still nursing the youngest, “in order to leverage” her husband’s surrender, according to an account by a civilian Defense Intelligence Agency intelligence officer.

In the other, an e-mail exchange includes a U.S. military officer asking “have you tacked a note on the door and challenged him to come get his wife?”

The documents were among thousands obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union from the government under court order through the Freedom of Information Act.
…
t described the actions of Task Force 6-26, which has been mentioned in other documents in connection with allegations of detainee abuse, and stated that on May 9, 2004, task force personnel detained the wife of “a suspected terrorist” in Tarmiya, Iraq.

“The 28-year-old woman had three young children at the house, one being as young as six months and still nursing. Her husband was the primary target of the raid, with other suspect personnel subject to detainment as well,” the memo stated.

“During the pre-operational brief, it was recommended by TF (task force) personnel that if the wife were present, she be detained and held in order to leverage the primary target’s surrender,” the memo stated. Its author said that “I objected to the detainment of the young mother to the raid team leader” and “I believed it was a dead issue.”

This is abominable on many levels. This also happens to be a violation of the Geneva conventions, Article 34.

Art. 34. The taking of hostages is prohibited.

I am really tired of living in a country run by an administration that does not respect the rule of law or anything other than their own twisted, narcissistic fantasies. That we are violating the Geneva conventions (again), is the direct result of an illegal, illegitimate, preemptive war and for which the miserable failure bears full responsibility.

Impeach George Bush. Impeach him now.

Update: on the day that scAlito’s nomination was just sent to the floor, I thouhgt I’d give a taste of the kind of discourse we are going to have when the American Taliban takes over.

Why should she be upset — She’s among friends…

I have NO sympathy for her — sorry
3 posted on 01/30/2006 6:08:01 PM PST by conservativehusker (GO BIG RED!!!!)

…

I’m sorry, but for some reason I’m not convinced she’s not faking it.

I’ve seen both videos. In the first, I did not see any fear in her eyes.

In the second, she seemed to me to be acting.

I base all this in the context of having watched other hostage videos and saw plenty of fear in the eyes of the captives.
10 posted on 01/30/2006 6:21:38 PM PST by FReepaholic (Proud participant in FR mass hysteria since 1998)

…

The radical Ialamic mouthpiece, Aljazera, did not air the audio from this tape or from her previous tape. I have a strong feeling that her tears were not for herself. She just does not seem like the type of person who would have this type of fear for herself. I think she is crying in empathy from a different sort of threat.

I would love to see a lip reader’s transcript of her tapes.
14 posted on 01/30/2006 6:23:17 PM PST by Jeff Gordon (Is tractus pro pensio.)

…

Regardless of her political inclinations, were the Islamofascists to execute her, it would confirm the need to invade their countries and kill their leaders – lets not make the same mistake we made in the 20’s and 30’s.

22 posted on 01/30/2006 7:11:14 PM PST by spanalot

If I hear anyone in my presence say one more time how it is the left bringing incivility to our culture, I’m going to kick them in their nether regions.