Sadly, No! makes fun of the warbots at the Corner and InstaStatist by highlighting their now-embarrassing excitement over the State Department’s 2003 report on terrorism that turned out to be a lie grossly wrong. Oops! Rahul Mahajan also has some apropriately withering comments:
I’m no expert on statistics, but it seems to me that comparing the number of incidents in an entire year with the number in part of a year is a pretty basic error.
Now, of course, there might be some of you out there who wish to defend the arithmetical ability of both State and Defense by pointing out that whenever they make “errors,” the errors always tend in the same direction, to make the administration look better. You might even produce arguments to show that the likelihood, if the errors were truly random, that all of them would pile up on one side, is negligible.
But if you make those arguments to Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Armitage be sure to speak very slowly and draw lots of pictures.
Fortunately for us, Col. Lounsbury was confined to his room with a case of food poisoning resulting in this review of the Pentagon-funded Al Hurra TV, the US Propaganda Channel in Arabic.
Giblets and Fafnir on why just because there exists a paper trail of memos justifying an action doesn’t mean it actually occured: (excerpt)
“Chris what you have there is a legal finding,” says Giblets.
“A consultation,” says me.
“Now all that means is that it was within Gibletsian law to sell your stuff and use it to buy a motorcycle,” says Giblets.
“But that doesn’t mean we actually sold your stuff and bought a motorcycle!” says me. “Least I don’t think we did.”
Chris gets all upset sayin “But there is a motorcycle!” which is really besides the point. I mean the memos just show that we talked about buyin a motorcycle, and the motorcycle shows that somebody bought a motorcycle but it doesn’t show who it was or how they did it or why. It is another mystery wrapped in a conundrum wrapped in a motorcycle.
Digby connects some dots and makes an interesting argument about the “flow of information” from the Abu Ghraib torture chambers to the White House. (excerpt)
Everyone’s been speculating that the reason General Fay has requested to be replaced by a higher ranking General is because of a need to interview General Sanchez and army protocol precludes him interviewing someone of a higher rank than he. I’m sure that’s at least partly true, although it is more likely that this shuffle is designed to kill more time before the election. But there is also the problem that Fay cannot complete his investigation without being able to talk to his equal in rank, Maj. General Barbara Fast, something which is also prohibited.
And, she may just be the key to the whole story.
Tom Ridge finally calls on the General to be an important part of the War Effort.
Raed Jarrar directed a country-wide survey of Iraq (link to Salam Pax’s description of the part of the survey he helped Raed with, along with numerous pictures)to determine civilian casualties after Mission Accomplished was declared in the now infamous Flight Suit Speech by Duhbya. He now has a website displaying his findings.
I would like to thank my great American friend, Michael Richardson, a writer and graphic designer from Northampton, MA, USA, for his huge effort, and for the time he spent designing the IRAQI CIVILIAN WAR CASUALTIES website. Michael emailed me some weeks ago offering to help me complete this small humanitarian job that started one year ago.
Thousands were killed and injured.
Each one of these thousands has a life, memories, hopes. Each one had his moments of sadness, moments of joy and moments of love.
In respect to their sacred memory, I would appreciate it if you could spend some minutes reading the database file when I publish them, read their names, and their personal details, and think about them as human beings, friends, and relatives — not mere figures and numbers.
For all of you who have linked to the lunaville Iraq Coalition Casualty Count site, they have moved. The new URL is http://icasualties.org/oif/ and they have added new information like casualty counts for contractors.
Tim Dunlop has an excellent post about the Bushie Republicans’ excuses for torture: (excerpt)
Excerpt: (click to enlarge pictures)
So let me make it easy for those who still wish to excuse what has happened. Here’s a list of things you can no longer say with any certainty about this issue and be considered credible:
- There was only a handful of people involved (a few bad apples etc.)
- It wasn’t systemic
- It only involved relatively junior officers
- As soon as they knew about them they acted immediately to stamp out the practices of abuse
- As soon as they knew about them they acted immediately to bring charges against those involved
- No-one died
- No-one was raped
- Only the guilty or terrorists were affected
- The investigation has been open to full scrutiny
- It wasn’t really torture
Repeat: none of this washes anymore, and you can read this report from Human Rights Watch (.pdf file) for a pretty comprehensive account of what we now know about the way the conditions for this abuse were put in place and encouraged, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, by the Bush administration, right down to—almost unbelievably—presenting legal argument that the president was not bound by US or international law and therefore able to authorise various techniques of abuse.
On the bright side, here’s something that, as far as we know, you can still say with relative certainty:
- It wasn’t as bad as Saddam
Maybe that makes you feel better, or is all you need to know. It seems to be more than enough for the likes of rightie-come-lately, Dennis Miller, who continues the rightwing tradition of making hilarious torture jokes:MILLER: I’m sorry, those pictures from the Abu Ghraib. At first, they, like infuriated me, I was sad. Then like, a couple days later, after they cut the guy’s [Nick Berg] head off, they didn’t seem like much. And now, I like to trade them with my friends.
And of course, he was taking his lead from Rush Limbaugh (same link as Miller):LIMBAUGH:“The media ought to start making some money off these pictures and videos, not just publishing them free. We need some prison torture, you know, bubble gum cards … you know, like I say, we got baseball cards and bubble gum.
Now let’s have terror cards — only let’s show our prison abuse photos instead of the terrorists and who they are and what they do.”
Which brings us back to moral relativism.
I added the pictures above to Tim’s post. These were released by the Washington Post yesterday and are archived here by AntiWar.com.