Author: Tex MacRae

This recent email exchange between Knight Ridder military affairs reporter Joe Galloway and Rumsfeld’s spokeshack is not to be missed.

Pat Lang has it in .pdf and .doc form here, but Larry Johnson has put it online in an easy to read format here.

An excerpt:

i can wish that your boss had surrounded himself with close advisers who had, once at least, held a dying boy in their arms and watched the life run out of his eyes while they lied to him and told him, over and over, “You are going to be all right. Hang on! Help is coming. Don’t quit now…” Such men in place of those who had never known service or combat or the true cost of war, and who pays that price, and had never sent their children off to do that hard and unending duty. i could wish for so much. i could wish that in january of this year i had not stood in a garbage-strewn pit, in deep mud, and watched soldiers tear apart the wreckage of a kiowa warrior shot down just minutes before and tenderly remove the barely alive body of WO Kyle Jackson and the lifeless body of his fellow pilot. they died flying overhead cover for a little three-vehicle Stryker patrol with which i was riding at the time. i could wish that Jackson’s widow Betsy had not found, among the possessions of her late husband, a copy of my book, carefully earmarked at a chapter titled Brave Aviators, which Kyle was reading at the time of his death. That she had not enclosed a photo of her husband, herself and a 3 year old baby girl. those things i received in the mail yesterday and they brought back the tears that i wept standing there in that pit, feeling the same shards in my heart that i felt the first time i looked into the face of a fallen american soldier 41 years ago on a barren hill in Quang Ngai Province in another time, another war. someone once asked me if i had learned anything from going to war so many times. my reply: yes, i learned how to cry. Jg

Saddam’s Mercedes

Federal agents seized a Mercedes-Benz from an Army reservist who said the armor-plated, bulletproof luxury car probably belonged to Saddam Hussein. First Sgt. William von Zehle said he bought the car while serving in Iraq. U.S. Immigration and Customs enforcement agents said the car, which was also equipped with loudspeakers and hidden microphones, was being treated as a “possible war trophy.”
“It belonged to the former Iraqi regime,” ICE spokesman Dean Boyd said. He said investigators were unsure whether the former Iraqi dictator actually owned it.
[…]
Federal agents are holding the car while investigating possible violations of federal smuggling laws and an executive order barring the importation of property from the former Iraqi regime.

Saddam’s Pistol

US President George Bush has been given a pistol Saddam Hussein had with him when he was captured and now proudly shows it to selected guests, Time magazine has reported.

The gun was taken from Saddam by US special forces when they caught him in a spider hole near his home town, Tikrit, last December, the report said.

The military had the pistol mounted, and it was presented to Mr Bush privately by some of the troops who ferreted out Saddam, Time said, citing unnamed sources.

Mr Bush now takes select visitors to see the pistol in a small study next to the Oval Office, the magazine said.

“He really liked showing it off,” the report quotes an unnamed recent visitor to the White House as saying. “He was really proud of it.”

The Mercedes story made me think of the embarrassing, childish, elitist and, as it turns out, illegal Saddam Pistol episode from back in the days before the phrase “Mission Accomplished” caused Bushies to wince in pain. As Bush explained to reporters in his characteristically rambling and grammatically-challenged way, “What she’s referring to is a — members of a Delta team came to see me in the Oval Office and brought with me — these were the people that found Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq, hiding in a hole. And, by the way, let me remind everybody about Saddam Hussein, just in case we all forget. {Blah, blah …mass graves…blah, blah…torture chambers…blah, blah…hands cut off}
So this is the person. So needless to say, our people were thrilled to have captured him. And in his lap was several weapons. One of them was a pistol. And they brought it to me. It’s now the property of the U.S. government.”

I guess if First Sgt. von Zehle had presented the car to Bush it would have been all okay.

Neil Young is streaming his new album, “Living with War”, in it’s entirety, for free.

Listen here.

Via Anthony Gregory and Daniel McAdams on the LewRockwell.com Blog.

See lenin at the Tomb on the British Foreign Office’s Cheney-esque  tactics in the attempted silencing of  former  UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray.  Particularly revolting are the Yoo-like legal contortions of one Michael Wood as he justifies the use of "intelligence" obtained via Karimov’s torture chambers. 

And lest any Americans feel smug about a torture scandal of which they aren’t the central stars, the Brits receive the Uzbeki torture product through the CIA, who, as we all know, deal in only the highest quality intelligence.

See the documents stashed for safekeeping here. Download and distribute them freely.

Remember the mystery surrounding the crash of the British RAF Hercules on Purple Finger Day in Iraq? It was widely reported as a shootdown, but of course, we’ve had to wait for the “facts” to be determined by the state. Here, nearly a year later, is the official pronouncement:

The RAF Hercules plane which crashed in Iraq killing 10 British servicemen in January had come under “hostile fire”, Defence Secretary John Reid has said.

Mr Reid said the investigation board had concluded “the aircraft crashed because it became uncontrollable after hostile ground to air fire.”

Other British reports give more details, though they are apparently not going to be confirmed by the official report.

IRAQI rebels used a heavy machinegun to down a British C-130 transport, killing all 10 servicemen on board, a newspaper reported today, quoting the results of a 10-month probe.
[…]
A ministry of defence spokesman said he could not confirm the accuracy of the report in The Sun, but added there would be a briefing tomorrow on the findings of the investigation into the January 30 crash near Baghdad.

At least one round, probably from a Soviet-made Dshke heavy calibre machine-gun, penetrated the fuel tank in the plane’s right wing during the incident, according to investigators quoted by the newspaper.

The “very lucky shot” caused a massive explosion that sent the four-engined Hercules plummeting to the ground in a fireball, it said.

The plane was “hedge-hopping” – flying fast and low in a combat zone, usually a highly effective means of avoiding enemy ground fire, the newspaper said.

The downed aircraft was on a 70km flight north from Baghdad to the major coalition special forces base at Balad. The Sun said it belonged to the RAF’s elite 47 squadron, who move elite forces soldiers covertly all over the world.

The defence ministry has declined to comment on reports that members of Britain’s elite Special Air Service were aboard the flight.

It seems I was right when I thought that the story put out by the military to account for the death of ten Marines and the wounding of eleven more was fishy. Still, the new account doesn’t seem all that forthcoming, either. CNN reports:

An insurgent homemade bomb that killed 10 Marines and wounded 11 others last week in Iraq was triggered as troops were leaving a promotion ceremony, Marine Corps officials said Tuesday.

Military officials originally said the Marines died December 1 while on foot patrol near the restive city of Falluja in western Iraq.

Misreporting up the chain of command led to the incorrect reporting of the location to the media, Marine officials said

Officials determined the blast went off at an abandoned flour factory used by the Marines as an outpost. It’s believed one of the Marines stepped on a pressure plate, setting off the explosion, officials said. (Marines identified)

Two of the Marines killed — from the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, I Marine Expeditionary Force — had been promoted at the ceremony. The area around the abandoned factory had been swept for explosives before the company commander’s arrival.

The bomb was believed to have been made up of at least four artillery shells.

I still don’t understand why a promotion ceremony was held in an abandoned flour factory, even if it was used as an “outpost”, whatever that means. Maybe eventually the whole story will come out, Tillman-style.

You’ve got to wonder how insurgents got into the flour factory and booby trapped it with four wired together artillery shells while it was in service as an outpost. An inside job?

UPDATE: OK, people are emailing links to this video and asking things like:

But if this new story is true, then why did the insurgents quickly release a video showing themselves detonating a roadside bomb?

Who is telling the truth? Why tape a different event and release it? They seem to like to tape their exploits, so why not tape the factory and release that?

All I can see in that video are 8 soldiers (Marines if this is the video of the 10 killed.) Assuming there are 2 in the humvee, that could account for 10 casualties. But, there were supposed to be 21! Where are the other eleven?