- According to US News & World Report, the CIA has sent out warnings to "agency veterans" including No Quarter's Larry Johnson that "any writings--even blogs--must first get agency approval." "Exempted from the review list: radio and TV appearances--unless written notes are used."
- The Army Times reports: The U.S. military'’s goal is to have Iraqi security forces in control of 75 percent of the country'’s territory by this summer, the second-ranking U.S. commander in Baghdad said Friday." How is that even remotely possible when, at this time, there isn't even one Iraqi battalion that can stand on its own after three years?
- Fed up with Bush? Don't Impeach; Impale
- One Iraqi hospital pharmacist's perspective on the health care system in Iraq.
I remember one day in the hospital we started talking about the Americans and asking if they had brought us anything good. No, we said, with all their wealth and knowledge, they haven't shared their great technology, they haven't given us new equipment, they haven't even given us basic medicines. "Yes, they have given us something," said one doctor. "They brought us cold storage for the corpses."
- Bush: slowly killing the Republicans power - one candidate at a time.
Democratic pollster Geoffrey Garin said that even some once-powerful weapons in the Republican political arsenal have less appeal today than in the past. "Whether it's taxes or moral conservatism or national security, there's nothing the Republicans have said or done in their experimenting with message that outweighs this overwhelming sense Americans have that President Bush has misled the country onto a negative path," he said.
- The Guardian examines what happened to the reconstruction money in Iraq.
"Iraq was awash in cash - in dollar bills. Piles and piles of money," says Frank Willis, a former senior official with the governing Coalition Provisional Authority. "We played football with some of the bricks of $100 bills before delivery. It was a wild-west crazy atmosphere, the likes of which none of us had ever experienced."
The environment created by the coalition positively encouraged corruption. "American law was suspended, Iraqi law was suspended, and Iraq basically became a free fraud zone," says Alan Grayson, a Florida-based attorney who represents whistleblowers now trying to expose the corruption. "In a free fire zone you can shoot at anybody you want. In a free fraud zone you can steal anything you like. And that was what they did."
- Katherine Harris is just as deluded as Bush. Headline: "Harris tells Christian group she believes God wants her in public service".
- An Afghan man faces the death penalty for converting to Christianity. From the White House: sounds of crickets chirping.
- A Pakistani newspaper reports that Pakistani and Saudi Arabian engineers helped the Taliban destroy the Giant Buddhas in Afghanistan.
- US troops are accused of executing 11 people - "including a 75-year-old woman and a 6-month-old infant". The Washington Post also reports:
A top police official, as well as a resident who claimed he saw the fighting, said U.S. troops also shot and killed a family of three during house-to-house searches after the firefight.
"I saw corpses on the ground that I believe were of armed men who had clashed with the American forces" and with the Iraqi army, said Ahmad Hashem, the resident. "Then the American soldiers appeared and started searching homes. They raided a house which was close to my home and killed a man named Ahmad Khalaf Hussein, his wife and his 10-year-old son."
- William Rivers Pitt: Bush is Deranged, Disconnected, and Dangerous, but he sure loves his rug.
- Editorial writers on Iraq: The Silence of the Sheep
- Andrew Sullivan suddenly supports Feingold's censure resolution? "My paper led Sunday morning with an impeachment story by Sarah Baxter. Maybe the meme has legs; and I should reconsider, as my reader has, the wisdom of Feingold's move."
- Starving the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
- Republican Senator Chuck Hagel: Iraq is having a "low grade civil war". The reason the Bush administration will not admit there's a civil war going on is because they had promised to stay out of such an internal conflict and with zero Iraqi battalions set to go, they are in no position to let the Iraqis fight their own battles.
- How Pakistan Bought Its Way Out of the 9/11 Report:
Pakistan gave tens of thousands of dollars through its lobbyists in the United States to members of the 9/11 inquiry commission to convince’ them to drop some anti-Pakistan findings in the report. This was disclosed by Foreign Office officials to the Public Accounts Committee at a secret meeting held last Tuesday. Even more interesting was the revelation that Pakistan embassy officials in Washington did indeed manage to convince the commission to drop the information.
No comments:
Post a Comment