Support our troops?

I'm not certain this is a message I still want to convey. We chant, "Support our troops! Bring them home! Stop the war! Now!" during our weekly peace march here in SB, but I'm having new thoughts about its nature, its message. Kinda like this blogger's sentiments. Some of our soldiers are blackening American traditions and images abroad, and I wonder whether the chants fortifies this, somewhat.

A new form of guided missle

I have a good friend who's an animal activist, a dog-lover in particular. He's not gonna like this story. The lesson: War makes us monsters, all of us.

A professor's outlook for Iraq

Read it and weep.

And now as if Baghdad residents hadn't suffered enough,

cholera.

Finally...

According to Gallup, one half of Americans disapprove of Bush's handling of his presidency. First time he's hit that mark, ever...

Why do they hate us?

No mystery there: I hate us.

Meanwhile, in our other war

May has been a violent month in Afghanistan, with shootings, kidnapings,bombings. And this is the war we "won"!

Infuriating

A headline in the NYT today blares, "Eight Soldiers Killed in Two Days," and is echoed in headlines on my AOL portal and in dailies throughout the US. Like suddenly the war in Iraq is on again. What bullshit. Check out the deaths, by daily tally, during the month of May here. There have been many days when the two-day total exceeds eight, including one in which eight were killed in a single day.
So...the awareness of our public is dependent on a the caprice of the layout person at the NYT? Or the headline writer? Wouldn't you think that the papers, and the TV could at least support the troops enough to keep their deaths on the front page, maybe a little boxed article or something? No--instead of "support our troops" the MSM's motto is, "Forget our Troops."

What can we do

to stop killings like this?

"Proud to be an American?"

This lengthy NYT article about US military prisoner abuse in Afghanistan leaves no doubt: Our military is no different from other nations'. It is a cruel tool of a war-mongering empire that is due to fail as have all others before it because of the inherently bestial nature of war. We were taught, as citizens of previous empires were taught, that we have a special place in history, that we are a benign force. Wrong. We're not only not special, we're more dangerous than any previous force because of our global dominance.

I pray for all of us--for America, sure; but more urgently for the rest of the world.

Baghdad seething

Riverbend's latest post, describing Condi Rice as The Vampire and relating the horror of car bombs in Baghdad, concludes with this compelling observation:

Detainees coming back after weeks or months in prison talk of being forced to eat pork, not being allowed to pray, being exposed to dogs, having Islam insulted and generally being treated like animals trapped in a small cage. At the end of the day, it's not about words or holy books or pork or dogs or any of that. It's about what these things symbolize on a personal level. It is infuriating to see objects that we hold sacred degraded and debased by foreigners who felt the need to travel thousands of kilometers to do this. That's not to say that all troops disrespect Islam- some of them seem to genuinely want to understand our beliefs. It does seem like the people in charge have decided to make degradation and humiliation a policy.

By doing such things, this war is taken to another level- it is no longer a war against terror or terrorists- it is, quite simply, a war against Islam and even secular Muslims are being forced to take sides.

We have guided missles, why can't they?

It's a bit chilling, but it seems the insurgency in Iraq has found a way to make sure their car bombs get to the target. Duct tape.

"The officer said that in two of the recent Baghdad bombings, investigators
had found indications that the men driving the cars had been bound with duct
tape before the attacks. He said the foot of one of the attackers, in a
marketplace bombing last week that killed 22 people in south Baghdad, had been
found taped to his vehicle's accelerator. In another case, the officer said, the
attacker's hands were taped to the vehicle's
wheel.
"The implication was that those planning the
attacks wanted to be sure that the vehicles would continue to their targets even
if the drivers were killed by American or Iraqi gunfire as they
approached."

Modern medicine, modern war

There have been various reports of this before, but here's a chilling one: The prevalence of brain trauma among US soldiers who're wounded in Iraq. Our modern medicine saves their lives, keeping them from being counted as war dead, but at what cost?

What does it take

for the "smoking gun" story to get legs. For weeks (two-plus, now) bloggers have been beating the drum about the "fix the facts" memo that surfaced in Britain and so far, besides some random mentions, nothing, nada, nichts, in any MSM publication, including cable TV. Maybe the publication of the entire memo in the NYT Review of Books will change that, but I wouldn't hold my breath, especially in light of Newsweek's recent cave-in on the Koran-flushing story.

If Nixon had managed equally to cow the press, he'd have served out his term and been hailed as a much-maligned leader of the free world.

My hope: The Bushies weather all of these early storms, only to have all the revelations pile up at the end of his term so that he leaves in disgrace and his Republican successor loses to anybody in a landslide.

Surprise, surprise

Rummie, and now Condie, have made surprise visits to Iraq of late. Here's another example of how the media is cowed by the administration's verbiage. These visits aren't surprises to anyone but the media and the Iraqi insurgents. Obviously both our military and the administration knows of the visits in advance. The only people who're surprised are the media and the Iraqis, who, if they were told, would make the visits impossible due to the overwhelmingly negative response, and possible danger, the visits would engender.

Now isn't that special...

Iraq, according to the International Drug Control Board, has now become a key artery for smuggling drugs that are grown in Afghanistan. The route through porous borders and a fractured security system takes heroin, speed and marijuana, from their source to the Mediterranean and then into the European marketplace.

So--with all the money and lives we've expended, we've managed to turn Iraq from a harsh dictatorship into a violent hotbed of terrorism and a major drug-trafficking center. I suppose if we drop some more cash and bodies into the fray, we can add civil war to the list.

Update about the AWOL MSM story

It's been a couple of days now, and still no MSM story about the British memo about how the Bushies predetermined the attack on Iraq and "fixed the facts" to justify it, all as reported in my previous post, "I'm soliciting suggestions." Several bloggers have commented on the MSM silence, and 88 Congresspersons have jointly authored a letter to the President to inquire about the story (while noting the MSM silence on the subject), but still so far nothing from NYT or WaPo or any of the TV channels, not even cable, so far as I can see.

I just don't get it

With CEOs' salaries skyrocketing (even after all the scandals involving over-compensated corporate managers), it turns out that the workers' pensions will fall to the axe because of United Airlines' bankruptcy reorganization. Result: its defined-benefit plan will pay $800 per month as a pension to an employee who'd been promised $1700.

Isn't it time Americans woke up to what's afoot in America? Apparently not, so long as the same companies that are sucking up our money own the media that doesn't report it.

I'm not making this up

Halliburton's KBR unit, the one that's been all over the news in the last two years for overcharges and missing documents in its Iraq rip-off, was just awarded bonuses of millions of dollars by the Defense Department for its "very good" work.

This essay from a Louisville, Kentucky, paper, says it all

Louisville, Kentucky? How can a city in a red state have such a blue paper? No, not blue. True blue.