Author: Tex MacRae

Newsweek, in an article highlighting the animosity of many NY Times staffers to Stenographer to Power Judith Miller, ends the short piece with this intriguing little insight into Miller’s reaction to her pariah status:

But Miller is, for now at least, standing firm. Late last week she told NEWSWEEK she had every intention of returning to work. She also did some digging of her own. “Are you hearing anything about Fitzgerald?” she asked, before quickly hanging up.

What an amusing spectacle. Judy – cornered, discredited, and widely detested even by her ostensible colleagues – has delusions of dishing dirt on Fitzgerald, despite the fact that she will almost certainly be a guest, once again, in his courtroom? The Bushista talking-point phrase “divorced from reality” springs to mind.

I wonder if Judy has considered that this first impulse of smearing adversaries, so typical of her and the Bush Administration crowd she hangs with, is what got them into this mess to begin with. Some people never learn.

This poll result:

Forty-five percent of Iraqis believe attacks on U.S. and British troops are justified, according to a secret poll said to have been commissioned by British defense leaders and cited by The Sunday Telegraph.

Less than 1 percent of those polled believed that the forces were responsible for any improvement in security, according to poll figures.

Eighty-two percent of those polled said they were “strongly opposed” to the presence of the troops.

Might explain why scenes like this still occur in Iraq:

Four U.S. contractors for the U.S. military were killed in Iraq last month, the military said on Saturday, confirming an attack that a British newspaper said saw two of the men murdered in front of a jeering crowd.
[…]
The Telegraph, quoting a U.S. officer in the area who had spoken to soldiers involved, said the victims were American employees of Halliburton unit Kellog, Brown & Root, the biggest U.S. military contractor in Iraq.

At least two of the men were dragged alive from their vehicle, which had been badly shot up, and forced to kneel in the road before being killed, it said.

“Killing one of the men with a rifle round fired into the back of his head, they doused the other with petrol and set him alight,” the newspaper report said.

“Barefoot children, yelping in delight, piled straw on to the screaming man’s body to stoke the flames.”

The Telegraph said U.S. soldiers escorting the convoy were unable to respond quickly because the hatches on their Humvees were closed.

The hatches on their Humvees were closed? That’s an odd thing to say, isn’t it? Were the soldiers locked in or what?

As if on cue, the New York Times has posted another story featuring death by fire:

The Bradley fighting vehicles moved slowly down this city’s main boulevard. Suddenly, a homemade bomb exploded, punching into one vehicle. Then another explosion hit, briefly lifting a second vehicle up onto its side before it dropped back down again.

Two American soldiers climbed out of a hatch, the first with his pant leg on fire, and the other completely in flames. The first rolled over to help the other man, but when they touched, the first man also burst into flames. Insurgent gunfire began to pop.

Several blocks away, Lance Cpl. Jeffrey Rosener, 20, from Minneapolis, watched the two men die from a lookout post at a Marine encampment. His heart reached out to them, but he could not. In Ramadi, Iraq’s most violent city, two blocks may as well be 10 miles.

“I couldn’t do anything,” he said of the incident, which he saw on Oct. 10. He spoke quietly, sitting in the post and looking straight ahead. “It’s bad down there. You hear all the rumors. We didn’t know it was going to be like this.”

Here in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province, Sunni Arab insurgents are waging their fiercest war against American troops, attacking with relative impunity just blocks from Marine-controlled territory. Every day, the Americans fight to hold their turf in a war against an enemy who seems to be everywhere but is not often seen.

The cost has been high: in the last six weeks, 21 Americans have been killed here, far more than in any other city in Iraq and double the number of deaths in Baghdad, a city with a population 15 times as large.

Does this sound as if Iraq is getting any better? Even before these stories were reported, Larry Johnson made the following astute observation:

The delusional happiness reflected in Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s remarks this week to Congress about the so-called progress in Iraq ignores hard facts that point to a debacle. The international media appears to be finally catching on that the Washington spin about the purple thumb as a sign of democratic progress is pure nonsense. It is true that more people in Iraq voted in this election than last January. What Rice and other folks out of touch with reality ignore is that the increased number of Sunnis who voted came out to defeat the constitution. Unfortunately, the fix was in. Vote fraud was rampant. U.S. TV crews caught one Shia on tape casting seven yes votes. That’s sort of an old style American politics a la Chicago’s Daley machine–you know, vote early, vote often. And, results are now, once again, being withheld to “investigate” the irregularities.

Here is a bold prediction: The Constitution will pass and Shia politicians will have a lock on the new Government of Iraq. Consequently, the civil war currently underway will escalate. As the Iraqi Army grows, comprised mostly of Shia and Kurds, attacks against Sunnis will also increase. And that will put the United States in an impossible situation. If we allow the Shia Army and militias to attack Sunni targets we will continue to be the target of Sunni insurgents. If we intervene to try to aid the Sunnis, the Shia’s will turn on us. If you doubt that I would ask you to recall what happened in the Shia enclave, Sadr City, in April of 2004. That battle killed Casey Sheehan and left my cousin’s son with a shattered leg.

End it. Now. Bring them home.

Dear US State Department,

Here’s a suggestion for shutting Karen Hughes up:

Please bring her back to the US before she says any more offensive and stupid things.

U.S. envoy Karen Hughes on Friday defended Washington’s decision to go to war against Iraq in front of a skeptical audience, saying Saddam Hussein had gassed to death “hundreds of thousands” of his own people. A State Department official later said she misspoke about the number.

Hughes, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, made the comment before a group of Indonesian students who repeatedly attacked her about Washington’s original rationale for the war, Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. No such arms were ever discovered.

“The consensus of the world intelligence community was that Saddam was a very dangerous threat,” Hughes said days after the ousted dictator went on trial in Baghdad on charges of murder and torture in a 1982 massacre of 148 Shiites in the town of Dujail.

“After all, he had used weapons of mass destruction against his own people,” she told a small auditorium with around 100 students. “He had murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people using poison gas.”

Although at least 300,000 Iraqis are said to have been killed during Saddam’s decades-long rule — only about 5,000 are believed to have been gassed to death in a 1988 attack in the Kurdish north.

Hughes twice repeated the statement after being challenged by journalists. Gordon Johndroe, a State Department official traveling with Hughes, later called The Associated Press to say she misspoke.

The title of this post has been blatantly ripped off from Princess Sparkle Pony. 

Holy cow, who’s leaking to the Daily News today? Here’s another shocker they just broke:

It was called the White House Iraq Group and its job was to make the case that Saddam Hussein had nuclear and biochemical weapons.

So determined was the ring of top officials to win its argument that it morphed into a virtual hit squad that took aim at critics who questioned its claims, sources told the Daily News.

One of those critics was ex-Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who debunked a key claim in a speech by President Bush that Iraq sought nuclear materials in Africa. His punishment was the media outing of his wife, CIA spy Valerie Plame, an affair that became a “side show” for the White House Iraq Group, the sources said.

The Plame leak is now the subject of a criminal probe that has seen presidential political guru Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, hauled before a grand jury.

Both men were members of the group, also known as WHIG. From late 2002 through mid 2003, it was locked in a feud with officials inside the CIA and State Department over claims Saddam tried to buy “yellow cake” uranium in Niger to build nukes, a former Bush administration and intelligence sources told The News.

“There were a number of occasions when White House officials or Vice President [Cheney’s] staffers, or others, wanted to push the envelope on things,” an ex-intelligence official said. “The agency would say, ‘We just don’t have the intelligence to substantiate that.'” When Wilson was sent by his wife to Africa to research the claims, he showed the documents claiming Saddam tried to buy the uranium were forgeries.

“People in the Iraq group then got very frustrated. It was a side show,” said a source familiar with WHIG.

Besides Rove and Libby, the group included senior White House aides Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, James Wilkinson, Nicholas Calio, Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley. WHIG also was doing more than just public relations, said a second former intel officer.

“They were funneling information to [New York Times reporter] Judy Miller. Judy was a charter member,” the source said.

The wheels are coming off the Bush war bus.

What if they have a trial and no witnesses come?

THE chief judge trying Saddam Hussein and seven others on charges of crimes against humanity said today the main reason why the trial has been adjourned was because many witnesses were too afraid to turn up.

Judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin said about 30 or 40 witnesses had not come to Baghdad for the trial, which took place in a heavily defended building inside Baghdad’s fortress-like Green Zone compound.

“The main reason is the witnesses did not show up,” Judge Amin said. “They were too scared to be public witnesses. We’re going to work on this issue for the next sessions.”

The trial has been adjourned until November 28.

It’s kind of takes the show out of your show trial when you hold it in the middle of a war zone occupied by foreign troops. And Saddam studied up his dialogue and everything!

Condoleeza Rice is telling Congress today that the Bush strategy for Iraq is the “successful” one they used in Afghanistan.

Here’s Condi:

“Our strategy is to clear, hold, and build,” she said. “The enemy’s strategy is to infect, terrorize, and pull down.”

I couldn’t find a mention anywhere that indicated what the end to this was supposed to be. However, shooting for the Afghanistan benchmark is probably a good idea, as the two countries have some clear similarities already.