Worth a thousand words

Fastest probe in the west

Army Probes Porno for Corpse Photos:
The Army is investigating complaints that soldiers posted photographs of Iraqi corpses on an Internet site in exchange for access to pornographic images on the site.
Associated Press 7:35 PM 27 September 2005

U.S. Army ends probe on porn site photos of Iraq corpses:
The U.S. Army after a brief inquiry has failed to determine whether U.S. soldiers provided grisly photos of people killed in the Iraq war to a porn Web site in exchange for free access to it, officials said on Wednesday.
Reuters 28 Sep 2005 19:59:07 GMT

The gory details.

YEEEE-HAAAAAAAAAAA!

WASHINGTON -- A Texas grand jury on Wednesday charged Rep. Tom DeLay and two political associates with conspiracy in a campaign finance scheme, forcing the House majority leader to temporarily relinquish his post. DeLay attorney Steve Brittain said DeLay was accused of a criminal conspiracy along with two associates, John Colyandro, former executive director of a Texas political action committee formed by DeLay, and Jim Ellis, who heads DeLay's national political committee. "I have notified the speaker that I will temporarily step aside from my position as majority leader pursuant to rules of the House Republican Conference and the actions of the Travis County district attorney today," DeLay said.

The pornography of war

"US soldiers trade grisly photos of dead and mutilated Iraqis for access to amateur porn. The press is strangely silent.

"If you want to see the true face of war, go to the amateur porn Web site NowThatsFuckedUp.com. For almost a year, American soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan have been taking photographs of dead bodies, many of them horribly mutilated or blown to pieces, and sending them to Web site administrator Chris Wilson. In return for permission to post these images, Wilson gives the soldiers free access to his site. American soldiers have been using the pictures of disfigured Iraqi corpses as currency to buy pornography.

"At Wilson's Web site, you can see an Arab man's face sliced off and placed in a bowl filled with blood. Another man's head, his face crusted with dried blood and powder burns, lies on a bed of gravel. A man in a leather coat who apparently tried to run a military checkpoint lies slumped in the driver's seat of a car, his head obliterated by gunfire, the flaps of skin from his neck blooming open like rose petals. Six men in beige fatigues, identified as US Marines, laugh and smile for the camera while pointing at a burned, charcoal-black corpse lying at their feet.

"The captions that accompany these images, which were apparently written by soldiers who posted them, laugh and gloat over the bodies. The person who posted a picture of a corpse lying in a pool of his own brains and entrails wrote, 'What every Iraqi should look like.' The photograph of a corpse whose jaw has apparently rotted away, leaving a gaping set of upper teeth, bears the caption 'bad day for this dude.' One person posted three photographs of corpses lying in the street and titled his collection 'DIE HAJI DIE.' "
-- Chris Thompson, East Bay Express. Full article here.

Now, I don't believe that this sort of behavior represents the majority gestalt of our military. But it certainly represents the same coinage of the culture that allowed Abu Ghraib and other such atrocities to flourish.

An open letter to Families United for the Troops and other supporters of the Iraq war

On Saturday September 24, 2005, I and perhaps 199,999 or more other people passed by a small coterie of supporters of George W. Bush and the war in Iraq as we peacefully demonstrated in the streets of our nation’s capital. The hostility that you feel for us was palpable. You called us “traitors, cowards, communists, smelly hippies,” among other epithets. I looked around and saw among my fellow marchers people from the American mainstream, war veterans from several conflicts (some on crutches), retired senior citizens, mothers and fathers with children. I did not see hate. Only when I turned my eyes back to the sidelines, did I feel the emanations of that most blinding of emotions.

First, let me say that to any of you who have lost loved ones in the battlefield of Iraq, I share your loss. Though I may not be able to feel the depth of sorrow that only you can harbor, our common humanity grieves for the end of youth in its blossoming, as well as for the loss of men and women in their prime who likely never thought that their service in the National Guard Reserve would bring them to the killing fields of the Middle East. However, I also grieve for the lost lives of thousands of Iraqi innocents whose deaths go untabulated in the newspapers of America’s heartland, but whose loved ones mourn them as deeply as you do yours. But unlike you, I see a greater tragedy in both their loss and yours: the tragedy of ignoble cause, misguided objectives, and the unseemliness of lies. I see the usurpation of the ideals that you believe empower this conflict. I see the machinations of power, power corrupted by a grave ideology that bears little fealty to the teachings of Christ while painting itself in the colors of faith, power fueled by greed and delusion.

In the wake of 9/11, the United States was the recipient of an outpouring of empathy unparalleled in our recent history. Nations across the globe decried this base and barbaric act of murder. A candlelit vigil of support was held in Iran, of all places, one of the triumverate of George W. Bush's "axis of evil." We had the world community behind us as our forces toppled the Talaban and sought Osama bin Laden in Afganistan. For the first time in his short political career, the prodigal son of the Bush dynasty evinced a degree of leadership. Little did we know, this was a mere distraction. A myth began to be spun, even as our search for bin-Laden unravelled, a myth about "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, a myth, despite the revelation of its falseness, to which so many of you of still cling, even in the face of its repudiation by its fork-tongued architects. You will never hear your favorite spin jockeys on right wing radio and Fox News tell you the truth: Saddam Hussein was supported militarily by the US and Germany and the UK (among others) up until 1988. Donald Rumsfeld even met Saddam giving him US intelligence to help fight and kill Iranians (see photo on left).

The President of the United States and the Neoconservative ideologues that surround him knew the truth. But they also knew that so many of you could be duped. Duped by the naive belief that our country's government is not capable of ignominy, or that anything that our country does can be excused purely because it is our country, that somehow, in some mysterious way, we are on always on a path of righteousness and can never stray.

"After 218 inspections of 141 sites over three months by the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei charged that the U.S. had used faked and erroneous evidence to support the claims that Iraq was importing enriched uranium and other material for the manufacture of nuclear weapons. So why, considering all this good news, is the White House afraid to allow the inspections to continue? Is Bush worried that the weapons may not exist and that his real goal, stated blatantly in his last press conference, of taking over Iraq might be undermined? How else to explain the president's indifference to the fact that the evidence of weapons locations supplied by his own intelligence agencies has not checked out on the ground?

"To distract us from this essential truth, the president has shamefully frightened the American people, first with his baseless attempt to link Saddam Hussein to 9/11 and then with unproven claims that Iraq's government and weapons pose an immediate danger to Americans. The real story is that U.N. inspectors are reporting substantial progress in terms of Iraqi cooperation and the destruction of weapons in Iraq."
-- Robert Scheer, Los Angeles Times, 11 March 2003

And by reciting the mantra of "9/11", with all the attendent outrage and fear that those numbers inspire, these architects of deception succeeded.

Until now. Revulsion for the policies of this administration brought over 100,000 souls to the nations capital last weekend, while your coterie of true believers could only marshall a few hundred. It is apparent to me why so many of you loathe Cindy Sheehan with such vitriole, why she is such a target for your attacks. She represents your worst fears, the nagging voice in the corner of your mind that whispers that you have spurned the truth in exchange for the empty assurances of a false dream unending, that asks you why, among all the sons and daughters of America who pay the price of war in Fallujah, Basra and Baghdad, none are the children of this administration and its allies in Congress?

George W. Bush and his Neoconservative administration continue to tell us that we are pursuing a "noble cause" to export American democracy and respect for human rights to Iraq. I would like to challenge you to reconcile this belief, which I assume that you share, with these facts:

• There is the right to be free from arbitrary arrest and from being exiled, but since the Patriot Act, a person can be arbitrary held without charges.
• The U.S. has failed miserably to ratify United Nations Declarations to guarantee human rights in more than half the cases.
• It took 21 years to even ratify the Genocide Convention (the Soviets ratified the Convention in 1954) and then the U.S. did it with so many attachments to the original convention so as to make it worthless. We can accuse other of Genocide but can never be judged ourselves.
• The United States and Somalia are the ONLY countries in the world that has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).
• The United States is the only industrialized nation that has REFUSED to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW.
• The United States has NOT ratified the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR).
• AND for those declarations the United States does ratify, it attaches conditions which undermine their effectiveness.
• The U.S. has REFUSED to ratify the International Criminal Court.
• George W. Bush withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
• The U.S. walked out of the World Conference Against Racism.
• And the United States, by order of its commander-in-chief George W. Bush launched a virtually unilateral attack on Iraq for which it DID NOT HAVE APPROVAL OF THE UNITED NATIONS SECURITY COUNCIL.

The UN and everyone else on this planet are afraid of the power of the world's only real super-power. Only Germany, France, and Russia made any real noise of objection and were punished by being denied lucrative contracts (read "booty") in occupied Iraq.

Would those of you who still parlay the terms "noble cause" to this conflict still stand as strong if they were substituted with the words "oil and money?"

"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
--Hermann Goering, at the Nuremberg trials

I am indebted to Hank Roth's web page Right Wing Ideologues for some of my information.

The invisible tsunami

More video links of the human tide in DC on 9/24 from Truthout.org:

A Massive Convergence For Peace in the Nation's Capitol
A Film by Chris Hume
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Anti-War March in Washington, DC
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Foggy Bottom II

More photos of true patriots in DC on Saturday. You know, the ones that want their country back.

What the media says didn't happen

Courtesy of the Brad Blog, the voice of democracy is heard in DC. Watch the video that you won't "see at 11."

And photos of DC and other "non-events" around the world.

But I am sure glad we got hours and hours of Anderson Cooper in his waders on CNN.

Foggy Bottom

Don't believe the media spin about "around 100,000", there were 300,000 peaceful protestors marching through downtown DC yesterday in one of the most inspirational events of which I have ever proudly been a part. Over a quarter of a million strong, we marched demanding an end to the lies and crimes of the Bush administration. Young and old, black, white, brown, yellow and red, we overwhelmed even the most optimistic estimates of United for Peace and Justice. High points: the Lakota nation giving Cindy Sheehan a star quilt to honor her heroism, hearing Joan Baez and Steve Earle serenade us, and the greatest moment of all: turning around at one point on 15th Street and seeing a sea of bodies in the street that seemed to go on forever.

It's somewhere between one and a trillion (we think)

"The Pentagon has no accurate knowledge of the cost of military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan or the fight against terrorism, limiting Congress's ability to oversee spending, the Government Accountability Office concluded in a report released yesterday."

-- Ann Scott Tyson,Washington Post Full article

GAO report here.

The eloquence of experience

Video of antiwar statements from U.S. soldiers who have served in the Iraq.

If you can still support this war after viewing these, then you have surrendered completely to the state of delusion that the Bush administration inhabits 24/7.

Who's been blind?

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a potential presidential candidate in 2008, sold all his stock in his family's hospital corporation about two weeks before it issued a disappointing earnings report and the price fell nearly 15 percent.

Full story here.

Might we conclude, then, that the definition of a blind trust has to do with the public's belief in the integrity of Republican billionaire senators? Don't hold your breath waiting for an independent counsel on this one.

Conservative blog taxonomy

When I stumble onto some of these right wing blogs, and I feel the temperature rising, I just head over here to put it all in perspective. Thanks, Mithras.

They knew

In exclusive stunning admissions to The BRAD BLOG some 11 months after the 2004 Presidential Election, a "Diebold Insider" is now finally speaking out for the first time about the alarming security flaws within Diebold, Inc's electronic voting systems, software and machinery. The source is acknowledging that the company's "upper management" -- as well as "top government officials" -- were keenly aware of the "undocumented backdoor" in Diebold's main "GEM Central Tabulator" software well prior to the 2004 election. A branch of the Federal Government even posted a security warning on the Internet.

Yes, yes, yes. Just more moonbat paranoia, right?

More walking the talk

Truthout.org's Chris Hume at the DOD sponsored 9/11 Freedom Walk. To me, the most chillling thing was watching people state with ironclad conviction that Iraq was directly linked to 9/11. And the most inspirational? One brave, dissenting mother of a Marine.

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Rats on the sinking ship?

"You run down the list of things we thought we could accomplish and you have to wonder what we thought we were thinking," says a Bush Administration member who joined on in 2001. "You get the impression that we're more than listless. We're sunk."

There's more at the door (from the American Spectator, well-known rightie rag).

The shadow knows...

Karl Rove, President Bush's top political advisor and deputy White House chief of staff, spoke at businessman Teddy Forstmann's annual off the record gathering in Aspen, Colorado this weekend. Here is what Rove had to say that the press wasn't allowed to report on.

On Katrina: "The only mistake we made with Katrina was not overriding the local government..."

On The Anti-War Movement: "Cindy Sheehan is a clown. There is no real anti-war movement. No serious politician, with anything to do with anything, would show his face at an anti-war rally..."

On Bush's Low Poll Numbers: "We have not been good at explaining the success in Iraq. Polls go up and down and don't mean anything..."

On Iraq: "There has been a big difference in the region. Iraq will transform the Middle East..."

-- from the Huffington Post

There's a story about this detestable, porcine, doughboy that illuminates the machinations of his febrile mind. Supposedly, when he was a little boy he was beaten up by a little girl who happened to be a Democrat. True? False? Apochryphal or not, it fits.

Evangelical Christian blues

According to evangelical Christian author Ronald J. Sider's book The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience:

• Conservative Protestants are more likely to divorce than the national average.
• Conservative Christian men are as likely as non-Christians to view pornography.
• Evangelical teens are "only a little less" sexually promiscuous than non-evangelicals.
• Those who make abstinence pledges are, on average, as likely as non-pledgers to contract sexually transmitted diseases.
• Wives in traditional marriages "where the husband was dominant" are three times more likely to be beaten than wives in egalitarian marriages.

This of course dovetails with the parcel of delusions we Americans maintain about ourselves and the status of our nation as "number one" in myriad ways, but especially those right wing rallying points about moral values.

Recovery, Texas style

Teach your children well

WANTED

For Substance Abuse and Antisocial Behavior

Noelle Bush (left), John Ellis Bush (right)

I don't mean to be (too) churlish, but maybe Florida Gov. Jeb Bush needs to attend to things closer to the hearth before he starts vociferously defending the rights of those certifiably braindead and living in a persistently vegetative state.

And I'm not talking about his big brother.