Iraq Egress

Am I the only one who thinks that the corporate media coverage of certain US forces leaving Iraq under cover of darkness long since passed the point at which the gag reflex was triggered?

In reviewing my least favorite parts of it, the worst has to be this exchange on the NBC Nightly News on Wednesday [18 Aug] evening:

(anchor) Brian Williams: Richard, I understand your reporting of this, at this hour tonight, constitutes the official Pentagon announcement.

(reporter riding in the back of army truck) Richard Engel: Yes, it is....

[emphasis mine]

This clip from last night's Colbert Report is worth watching.

Given the gleeful cooperation of the MainStream Media with the process of lying the US into this war, I suppose it is only fitting that they would be holding hands with the military during the presentation to the sheep of the meme that the war is now over.

I suppose we should admire the restraint the MSM displayed in not setting a team of CGI wizards to the task of depicting those soldiers riding into Kuwait from Iraq astride unicorns.

An indicator of the worthlessness of The News On TV That We Are Supposed To Believe™ is that the most honest reporting on this comes from The Onion.

Addressing troops at Andrews Air Force Base Tuesday, President Barack Obama claimed victory in Iraq, saying that formal combat operations in the region would end Aug. 31, and that the United States had emerged from the seven-year war triumphant, kind of.

"For nearly a decade, our mission in Iraq has been to root out those who would choose violence over peace, to create a stable Iraqi government, and to transfer power to an incorruptible civilian police force," Obama said. "And, in a manner of speaking, we sort of did some of that, right? More or less?"

"Granted, this is not the definitive, World War II–like victory most of us expected," Obama continued. "But there's a military triumph in there somewhere, I swear. You just have to look at it from the right angles."

[. . . .]

"By the end of this month, victory, to a certain extent, will be ours, and we can finally welcome our troops back home," Obama concluded. "That is unless they are one of the 50,000 U.S. soldiers who will have to stay in the region for the foreseeable future."

Following the president's address, a car bomb ripped through an outdoor market in Baghdad killing eight Iraqis and wounding 32.

Pentagon officials also declared the mission, in a sense, kind of sort of accomplished Tuesday, citing the handful of Iraqi hearts and minds that may have been won over by the U.S. occupancy, and the fact that Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki had not yet been assassinated.

"In cases where we were unable to rebuild infrastructure or quell violent civil unrest, it wasn't for lack of trying," Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, said during last Sunday's taping of ABC's This Week. "And trying your best, one could argue, is technically a triumph in and of itself."

[. . . .]

Pentagon and White House sources said the American people should expect more wince-inducing victory-if-you-can-call-it-that celebrations 10 or 15 years from now when we kind of, but not really, win in Afghanistan.

Confessions Obtained by Threatening a Teenager with Rape are OK

Let me clarify. This is at Gitmo, not down at your local county lock-up... not yet, anyway.

And to be specific, the threat wasn't just that the 15 year old boy would be raped. No, the boy's interrogator, U.S. Army Sergeant Joshua Claus has testified that the threat was that he would be "gang-raped to death" if he did not cooperate.

As reported by The Raw Story:

In one of the first military commissions held under the Obama administration, a US military judge has ruled that confessions obtained by threatening the subject with rape are admissible in court.

The case involves Omar Ahmed Khadr, a citizen of Canada who was apprehended in Afghanistan when he was 15 years old and has remained in Guantanamo Bay for the last seven years awaiting trial for terrorism and war crimes.

Read the whole sad, sickening thing at Raw Story.

I have to find some way to get that damned Lee Greenwood song out of my head.

[all emphasis mine]

Google: Technology Good, Anonymity Bad!

Anyone who has been paying attention at all lately knows that Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt is no friend of privacy in general and net anonymity is particular. Still, it is good to be reminded.

Schmidt addressed the start of the Techonomy Conference yesterday in Lake Tahoe, and CNET reported this.

For those concerned with privacy, Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave them a few more things to start worrying about.

At a conference here Wednesday, Schmidt noted that using artificial intelligence, computers can take 14 pictures of anyone on the Internet and stand a good chance of identifying that person. Similarly, the data collected by location-based services can be used not only to show where someone is at, but to also predict with a lot of accuracy where they might be headed next.

"Pretty interesting," Schmidt said. "Good idea, Bad idea?...The technology of course is neutral but society is not fundamentally ready."

[. . . .]

Schmidt said that society really isn't prepared for all of the changes being thrust upon it. "I think it's time for people to get ready for it."

Schmidt said these records are a challenge for everyone....

On balance, Schmidt said that technology is good, but he said that the only way to manage the challenges is "much greater transparency and no anonymity."

Schmidt said that in an era of asymmetric threats, "true anonymity is too dangerous."

[emphasis mine]

What Obamacare Looks Like

What Obamacare looks like... as things stand now, before they get worse.

[The graphic above is linked to a .pdf file with a full-size image.
You will want to view it at 200% minimum.]

Update ::

An anonymous commenter posted August 10th that the link wasn't working. It works for me, so perhaps one has to be signed in on a Google ID to access Google Docs even when they are flagged "public." Whatever that case, the .pdf file is now available at http://drop.io/sebaygo1docs1. That link should be good for the next year.

Funnies - 2010 July 30

US War Crimes: Fallujah Worse than Hiroshima

I have wanted to blog this story for a few days, but very shortly after I found it on Global Research.ca the site was down for a couple of days. I won't reproduce the whole article here, but the whole article definitely deserves to be read. With the site back up, I was able to copy the article and create a .pdf file which I have uploaded as a mirror to a location where it will be available until at lease one year from today. All boldface is my emphasis.

The Iraqi city of Fallujah continues to suffer the ghastly consequences of a US military onslaught in late 2004.

According to the authors of a new study, “Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005–2009,” the people of Fallujah are experiencing higher rates of cancer, leukemia, infant mortality, and sexual mutations than those recorded among survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the years after those Japanese cities were incinerated by US atomic bomb strikes in 1945.

The epidemiological study, published in the International Journal of Environmental Studies and Public Health (IJERPH), also finds the prevalence of these conditions in Fallujah to be many times greater than in nearby nations.

The assault on Fallujah, a city located 43 miles west of Baghdad, was one of the most horrific war crimes of our time. After the population resisted the US-led occupation of Iraq . . . Washington determined to make an example of the largely Sunni city. This is called “exemplary” or “collective” punishment and is, according to the laws of war, illegal.

The new public health study of the city now all but proves what has long been suspected: that a high proportion of the weaponry used in the assault contained depleted uranium, a radioactive substance used in shells to increase their effectiveness.

In a study of 711 houses and 4,843 individuals carried out in January and February 2010, authors Chris Busby, Malak Hamdan, Entesar Ariabi and a team of researchers found that the cancer rate had increased fourfold since before the US attack five years ago, and that the forms of cancer in Fallujah are similar to those found among the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb survivors, who were exposed to intense fallout radiation.

In Fallujah the rate of leukemia is 38 times higher, the childhood cancer rate is 12 times higher, and breast cancer is 10 times more common than in populations in Egypt, Jordan, and Kuwait. Heightened levels of adult lymphoma and brain tumors were also reported. At 80 deaths out of every 1,000 births, the infant mortality rate in Fallujah is more than five times higher than in Egypt and Jordan, and eight times higher than in Kuwait.

[. . . .]

The US military uses depleted uranium, also known as spent nuclear fuel, in armor-piercing shells and bullets because it is twice as dense as lead. Once these shells hit their target, however, as much as 40 percent of the uranium is released in the form of tiny particles in the area of the explosion. It can remain there for years, easily entering the human bloodstream, where it lodges itself in lymph glands and attacks the DNA produced in the sperm and eggs of affected adults, causing, in turn, serious birth defects in the next generation.

The research is the first systematic scientific substantiation of a body of evidence showing a sharp increase in infant mortality, birth defects, and cancer in Fallujah.

In October of 2009, several Iraqi and British doctors wrote a letter to the United Nations demanding an inquiry into the proliferation of radiation-related sickness in the city:

“Young women in Fallujah in Iraq are terrified of having children because of the increasing number of babies born grotesquely deformed, with no heads, two heads, a single eye in their foreheads, scaly bodies or missing limbs. In addition, young children in Fallujah are now experiencing hideous cancers and leukemias.…

“In September 2009, Fallujah General Hospital had 170 newborn babies, 24 percent of whom were dead within the first seven days, a staggering 75 percent of the dead babies were classified as deformed.…

[. . . .]

The history of the atrocity committed by American imperialism against the people of Fallujah began on April 28, 2003, when US Army soldiers fired indiscriminately into a crowd of about 200 residents protesting the conversion of a local school into a US military base. Seventeen were killed in the unprovoked attack, and two days later American soldiers fired on a protest against the murders, killing two more.

This intensified popular anger, and Fallujah became a center of the Sunni resistance against the occupation—and US reprisals. On March 31, 2004, an angry crowd stopped a convoy of the private security firm Blackwater USA, responsible for its own share of war crimes. Four Blackwater mercenaries were dragged from their vehicles, beaten, burned, and hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River.

The US military then promised it would pacify the city, with one unnamed officer saying it would be turned into “a killing field,” but Operation Vigilant Resolve, involving thousands of Marines, ended in the abandonment of the siege by the US military in May, 2004. The victory of Fallujah’s residents against overwhelming military superiority was celebrated throughout Iraq and watched all over the world.

The Pentagon delivered its response in November 2004. The city was surrounded, and all those left inside were declared to be enemy combatants and fair game for the most heavily equipped killing machine in world history. The Associated Press reported that men attempting to flee the city with their families were turned back into the slaughterhouse.

In the attack, the US made heavy use of the chemical agent white phosphorus. Ostensibly used only for illuminating battlefields, white phosphorus causes terrible and often fatal wounds, burning its way through building material and clothing before eating away skin and then bone. The chemical was also used to suck the oxygen out of buildings where civilians were hiding.

Washington’s desire for revenge against the population is indicated by the fact that the US military reported about the same number of “gunmen” killed (1,400) as those taken alive as prisoners (1,300-1,500). In one instance, NBC News captured video footage of a US soldier executing a wounded and helpless Iraqi man. A Navy investigation later found the Marine had been acting in self-defense.

Fifty-one US soldiers died in 10 days of combat. The true number of city residents who were killed is not known. The city’s population before the attack was estimated to be between 425,000 and 600,000. The current population is believed to be between 250,000 and 300,000.

[. . . .]

But unlike those other massacres, the crime against Fallujah did not end when the bullets were no longer fired or the bombs stopped falling.

The US military’s decision to heavily deploy depleted uranium . . . was a wanton act of brutality, poisoning an entire generation of children not yet born in 2004.

The Fallujah study is timely, with the US now preparing a major escalation of the violence in Afghanistan. [. . . .]

McChrystal was replaced by General David Petraeus, formerly head of the US Central Command. Petraeus has outlined new rules of engagement designed to allow for the use of disproportionate force against suspected militants.

Petraeus, in turn, was replaced at Central Command by General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, who played a key planning role in the US assault on Fallujah in 2004. Mattis revels in killing, telling a public gathering in 2005 “it’s fun to shoot some people.... You know, it’s a hell of a hoot.”

I guess I need someone to play that Lee Greenwood song, because I don't feel awfully proud right now.

Oh, They DO Intend to Steal from You

Hat tip to a fairly pissed-off Karl Denninger at MarketTicker.

And what's better, now the lapdogs of Wall Street are immune from FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests!

The law, signed last week by President Obama, exempts the SEC from disclosing records or information derived from "surveillance, risk assessments, or other regulatory and oversight activities." Given that the SEC is a regulatory body, the provision covers almost every action by the agency, lawyers say. Congress and federal agencies can request information, but the public cannot.

That argument comes despite the President saying that one of the cornerstones of the sweeping new legislation was more transparent financial markets. Indeed, in touting the new law, Obama specifically said it would “increase transparency in financial dealings."

Mr. President, you're a lying sack of crap. [MY emphasis] 

Nor is this theoretical either. Fox News has already had an FOIA denied:

The SEC cited the new law Tuesday in a FOIA action brought by FOX Business Network.

Nice.

Read the whole thing here.