Can Someone Explain Why Sally Quinn Still Has a Job?

I mean, really. She's touted as a contributor to the "On Faith" segment of the WashingtonPost.com website. She took communion at the funeral of Tim Russert and she's not a Catholic. (If you've been to Sunday School, you know of what I speak when it comes to sorting out that issue.) Here she tries to legitimize a discussion of Astrology, faith, and the Presidency.

Note: I was going to embed the video, but it kind of whiffed on me. Check it out if you dare.

Yes--a discussion about astrology and the Presidency. I know, I know. My brain hurts after that, too.

Is Sally Quinn the village idiot of Washington DC? Sure looks like it. She's a "Washington Post Reporter" who actually claims to be a "Washington DC Insider" in her biographical sketch. Isn't there something about that one might want to downplay?

No Sunday school necessary:

I took Holy Communion at Tim Russert’s funeral mass. I am not a Catholic. I wrote about it for “On Faith”. I wrote about how I had interviewed Tim and asked him about Communion and transubstantiation and what it meant to him. He knew I had not always been a believer and he would tease me about bringing me over to the other side. Before I started the website he had always called me “Miss Sal”. Afterwards he called me “Sister Sal.”

He was a dear friend and I was devastated by his loss. Cardinal McCarrick conducted the funeral mass. Communion was offered. I took it. All I could think about was Tim smiling down at me and saying, “We’re winning you over after all, aren’t we Sister Sal?” It made me feel uplifted, close to Tim and it assuaged my grief.

I guess that settles it. Hey, to each their own. But PZ Myers wants that cracker...

--WS

Have I Got a Solution For You, General

When problems arise, I'd like to think I can do my part to solve them. Instead of bitchy snark or righteous indignation, I'm giving out answers and advice with this one:

The Air Force's top leadership sought for three years to spend counterterrorism funds on "comfort capsules" to be installed on military planes that ferry senior officers and civilian leaders around the world, with at least four top generals involved in design details such as the color of the capsules' carpet and leather chairs, according to internal e-mails and budget documents.

Production of the first capsule -- consisting of two sealed rooms that can fit into the fuselage of a large military aircraft -- has already begun.



Air Force officials say the government needs the new capsules to ensure that leaders can talk, work and rest comfortably in the air. But the top brass's preoccupation with creating new luxury in wartime has alienated lower-ranking Air Force officers familiar with the effort, as well as congressional staff members and a nonprofit group that calls the program a waste of money.

Air Force documents spell out how each of the capsules is to be "aesthetically pleasing and furnished to reflect the rank of the senior leaders using the capsule," with beds, a couch, a table, a 37-inch flat-screen monitor with stereo speakers, and a full-length mirror.

Sounds reasonable, if you're a megalomanical, self-important and self-centered asshole.

But enough of my opinionating, preachifying, ponderous pontificationating and all that. I'm going to solve the problem right now. And I'm going to save the government a ton of money while stimulating the economy AND protecting the environment. There's a loaf of bread in it for you, if you're so inclined.

I even have a catchy title. I call it the Six Gallon Bucket of Freedom.



This particular bucket comes full of wheat, general. Bake yourself some bread with it and you'll have plenty to eat when you're riding around on the government's dime. Empty it out and there's plenty of uses for it. Fill it with golf balls! Take a crap in it if you need to--remove the golf balls first. You can sit on it, you can carry it, and if you need to, you can even drop it out of the plane and hit a terrorist on the head with it. Thirty bucks, general! That's a savings we can all appreciate.

Debunking Some Serious Concern Trolling

UPDATED, 8:52AM, to correct some errors:

With thanks to commenter GHFarber, let me correct some aspects of this post and make it a little clearer.

I am criticizing the tone and the subject of a "forum" post by William Arkin, who, according to some research I did this morning, has actually done some good work that I agree with. I just take exception to what I feel is concern trolling or giving stupid advice to Barack Obama with the way he kicked off this forum. His work on this forum likely is not under the control of any editor at the Washington Post but is likely managed by an online editor at the washingtonpost.com.

My original statement: The unhinged and misinformed crowd at the Washington Post finally gets a new editor soon--hopefully one that actually understands the world. I've had enough of the Len Downie era. I've had more than my fair share of Fred Hiatt. And in checking their ridiculous "forums" section, I find this:

...was wrong--Downie was, and Hiatt is currently, part of a chain that answers to management, but they are likely considered co-equals or near co-equals because the Washington Post keeps OpEd separate from News. I have high hopes that the tenor and tone of the content at the Washington Post will improve, but my high hopes, like this post, are probably going to crash by noon today.

The intended goal of the Washington Post company is to more closely meld their online edition with the print edition and trim costs; that's why they are cutting staff, getting rid of Downie, and trying to update their business model. Their coverage during the primary and over the last few months has been dismal in my estimation and has always been rather awful when it comes to the war in Iraq or issues like the outing of CIA employee Valerie Plame. I was making a clumsy effort to criticize that history when I should have been more specific. I apologize for the generalities when specifics would have been better.

---back to original post:
Arkin starts the discussion with:

Is Barack Obama already shooting himself in the foot as commander-in-chief?…

That's how moderator William Arkin proposes to kick off a discussion about Obama's sit-down interview with the Military Times group of newspapers. By engaging in some serious wankery and concern trolling.

Let's go point by ridiculous point:

In a long interview by the Military Times newspapers, the candidate shows a deference to the uniformed military, a humility that he associates with his lack of service in uniform but one that could also backfire as Clintonian weakness – Bill Clinton that is.

Blatant wankery, that statement. Get this--Barack Obama is being criticized for showing "deference" to the uniformed military. Can you imagine a similar criticism of President Bush? Of President Reagan? Of the first President Bush? Men who deferred to their military advisors on a daily basis. Can you imagine a first President Bush calling out Colin Powell and saying "he's wrong, and I'm not deferring to him--we're going to do this MY way." Can you imagine Ronald Reagan standing up in the Rose Garden and saying "the Joint Chiefs are idiots--I say, we bomb the Soviets tomorrow!" I can't imagine President Bush the younger saying anything at all--I've blocked out the nightmare of the syntax. You get the drift.

And how did Clinton's record turn out? How many fucking quagmires did he lead us into?

“I have always said that as commander in chief, I would seek the advice and counsel of our generals,” Obama said in the interview. “Great. The inmates will be running the asylum,” an insider tells me.

How denigrating. Someone, anonymously, says that the senior leadership of the US military are "inmates" running an "asylum." If that's the case, why isn't anyone doing anything about it? Why is there not panic? Could it be that those "inmates" rightly rebelled against Don Rumsfeld--a man not known for showing deference or humility to people who demonstrated they knew better--got in line behind Bob Gates and stopped a foolish war with Iran? Could it be that the "inmates" saved America without anyone realizing it? Tune in 25 years from now to find out.

Talk about concern trolling--asking Obama to not be deferential to the uniformed military is asinine. Well, if he isn't deferential, then the next thing you'll say is that he's a loose cannon who is ignoring the experts and conducting unilateral military operations without benefit of their wise counsel. Which is it then? Defer or seek counsel? How about--shut the fuck up?

Withdrawal from Iraq, his own surge in Afghanistan, dealing with the Bush legacy on Iran and Pakistan, missile defenses in Europe, increasing the size of the Army and Marine Corps despite his Iraq withdrawal pledge, a bloated and voracious defense budget, the outsourcing of defense, the intelligence mess, China and Russia:

Funny--where's the criticism of THIS administration? Where's the criticism of John McCain and his inability to tell the players apart from one another? Where's the criticism of his "tell people to knock this shit off" clown-cowboy approach to problem solving? Where's the realization that these weren't issues in 2000. You know. When Clinton was President? I mean, if Clinton was such a bad Commander in Chief, how the fuck did he have none of those issues on his plate, peace in the Balkans, a framework for dealing with North Korea, Saddam contained, Iran as a non-issue, Israel and the Palestinians talking, China talking to Taiwan, Russia in a coffin militarily and impotent, Europe ready to meet its NATO obligations, and Osama Bin Laden running like crazy from Sudan to Afghanistan, trying to evade capture? Today, we have Russia and China surging, no diplomacy in the Middle East, Bush's campaign promise in 2000 to get us out of the Balkans unfulfilled, North Korea contained solely because of Christopher Hill's efforts to undo the damage of the Bush Administration, Pakistan providing safe haven for Bin Laden and the Taliban, and 140,000 US troops trapped in Iraq while Afghanistan spins out of control?

When Clinton left office, we still had a military. When Bush leaves office, we won't have but a hollow shell of what once was, with hundreds of thousands of men and women needing medical and mental care that no one bothered to provide for. Which was the Commander in Chief and which was the idiot savant, minus the savant part?

What does the candidate tell us that is his new innovation? He says he wants to allow gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military. Yeah, let’s spend the first year of a new administration fighting about this again

It's about time--hey, the military needs all the men and women it can get. Obama has a plan to increase the number of men and women who can serve their country. McCain has a plan to put them in Iraq for a hundred fucking years. Who's more qualified to be Commander in Chief? Especially since fat, pink, young Republican males simply haven't stepped up and asked to join the military.

Concern trolling and wankery. Hopefully, the Washington Post can eliminate some of that, and soon.

The Future of the Intelligence Community

We have focused, in recent weeks, on several intelligence issues. The US intelligence community uses contractors in record numbers and may be forced to make drastic cuts soon. The community has many challenges, such as Iran and China, but no comprehensive assessment has been done as to why the community has failed with regards to 9/11 and Iraq, other than the 9/11 Commission and, to a much lesser extent, the Iraq Study Group.

Given the track record, should the intelligence community be shrunk down in size and eliminated from policy discussions? Some believe that, no matter how big the intelligence community is, it won't prevent another 9/11 attack.

Mark Lowenthal wrote last weekend that the intelligence community needs to get out of the policy game altogether and stop issuing National Intelligence Estimates:

The pressure to avoid another 9/11 or Iraq is so intense that the intelligence community is expending great effort to little gain. The state of the NIEs is a perfect example. The collectors of intelligence now have to swear by their sources, all of which will be thoroughly scrubbed. The push for consensus among the intelligence community's often squabbling agencies will end. But none of this will assure that the reliability of the estimates themselves will increase. More important, none of this will increase the likelihood that policymakers, in the executive branch or Congress, will read these often ponderous, densely written tomes.

The blunt truth? The intelligence community would be far better off scrapping NIEs altogether and going to a streamlined, better written product similar to the sharper assessments produced in Britain and Australia. And if we are going to be serious about improving intelligence analysis, we have to stop publishing the end products -- even in redacted forms that can show up in the pages of this newspaper. More than anything else, this certainty that internal assessments will wind up on public display stifles the vibrant, edgy, out-of-the-box analysis that everyone says they want -- until it disagrees with their political point of view, of course.

Those "sharper" assessments written in Britain and Australia didn't serve those countries any better when it came to warning them of attacks in London and Bali. We can learn a lot from our allies about intelligence gathering, but the fact remains that their governments are structured differently. We are supposed to have oversight and compliance as our operating principle, and if we get back to that, we'll see marked improvement in the way the government functions. We've had over 7 years of virtually no oversight and compliance, and look where the signing statements and the bald-faced lying to Congress has gotten us.

The appropriate reaction to Lowenthal's ideas comes in the form of Eric Rosenbach's editorial in rebuttal, which was published today in the Washington Post:

A better way to separate intelligence from politics would be to rebuild trust with Congress. Senators who learn about controversial intelligence programs from the front page of The Washington Post, as in the case of CIA interrogations and secret prisons, won't be willing to defend the intelligence community and may very likely lambast it. Key intelligence leaders should make more frequent trips to the Hill to keep the oversight committees "fully informed," per the requirements of the National Security Act of 1947. And if there's a time for the intelligence community to stand up, it's when the White House asks that Congress be kept in the dark. To their credit, both CIA Director Hayden and DNI McConnell have opened up on several key issues over the past two years and as a result, the Senate Intelligence Committee has provided them increased support. Unfortunately, the CIA is now allowing the White House to withhold access to intelligence about the Israeli bombing of an alleged Syrian nuclear facility. Don't be surprised if this leads to another round of intelligence bashing on Capitol Hill.

Lowenthal's assertion that intelligence hasn't improved in recent years largely because there wasn't much room to improve -- is also puzzling. The intelligence community today is arguably more proactive and capable than at any time since the Cold War. The newest generation of spies no longer waits for defectors to walk into their arms. They actively pursue new sources of information on hard targets, like Iran and al Qaeda. The most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, for example, impressively contained information from almost 1,500 sources. Our intelligence operators now also eliminate top terrorist leaders on a regular basis. This powerful and effective capability stands in stark contrast to the days when Richard Clarke, then-White House counterterrorism czar, begged in vain for the CIA to do anything that would take terrorists off the streets.

Lowenthal's conclusion, that reports like the National Intelligence Estimates have little policy impact and therefore should be scrapped, underestimates the influential role such assessments play in debates on the Hill. He's wrong to say that the "slam dunk" NIE warning that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction didn't influence Congress in the run-up to war. Even senators who didn't read the entire document knew and considered its bottom line. And look at the latest NIE on the Iranian nuclear program. Nearly all foreign policy analysts believe that it dramatically lowered the probability of U.S. military action. The intelligence assessment process places the intelligence community in the middle of heated policy debates, which is exactly where the nation needs an objective and credible voice.

Given that the Democrats are likely to hold on to the Senate this fall, that means less of the administration-enabling shenanigans of Pat Roberts and hopefully a lot less of the telecom immunity-wishywashyedness of Jay Rockefeller. The Senate needs new leadership and new committee chairmen, badly. There is no reason for the Senate to go into another session of Congress with Rockefeller and Lieberman where they are.

Lowenthal does attempt to get one thing right, but he misses one crucial point:

Indeed, the notorious October 2002 NIE warning that Iraq possessed WMD had virtually no effect on anyone's decision about whether to go to war. It probably did not influence President Bush or other senior policymakers, who had pretty much made up their minds to invade Iraq months earlier. It had no effect on the Senate: As The Washington Post reported in 2004, no more than six senators read beyond the five-page executive summary of the NIE, although 77 senators voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq. Nor did the NIE have much effect on the United Nations: The Security Council declined to support the hawkish U.S. and British position despite the NIE's alarming (and alarmist) assessment of Iraq's arsenal.

Senator Bob Graham provided that missing link for us way back in 2005:

For his part, President Bush claims that Democrats examined the evidence before the war. "They looked at the same intelligence I did, and they voted -- many of them voted -- to support the decision I made," said the president.

That is a claim made by many administration officials in the past two weeks -- that everyone saw the same intelligence. But former Sen. Bob Graham, who is also a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence committee, disagrees. Graham notes that members of Congress do not have access to the President's Daily Brief, a highly classified document containing specific and contextual intelligence. And he says he was stunned to find that in the run-up to the war, the president did not order a National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq, despite the fact that the Senate Intelligence Committee demanded that one be drawn up.

When the document was finally prepared, "what we got was a document that was slanted towards 'yes, there were weapons of mass destruction at 550 sites in Iraq,'" says Graham, who claims that Congress did not have access to anywhere near the amount of raw data that the president did. The quality of that intelligence is now a major part of the fight between the White House and Democrats on the Hill. The administration clearly perceives this fight as a threat to its credibility, a threat that it must answer in no uncertain terms.

This is clearly a case of selective memory and wishful thinking. As in, people have not been given a comprehensive accounting for why we were lied into war, and wishing it would all just go away isn't in the best interests of our country.

Rosenbach writes:

Here's some advice for the next Director of National Intelligence: Don't whine to policymakers about the difficulty of your job. Don't make excuses for your failures. And definitely don't claim that the intelligence community can't do any better.

Here's to former Senator Bob Graham being the NEXT Director of National Intelligence.

Ruth Marcus Hearts Her Some John Yoo

Really, did they ever date? Were they an item? I'm trying to go through the gossip blogs and find out.

Should this man be teaching constitutional law at one of the nation's top law schools? If he were being hired on the basis of that memo, certainly not. But he is already teaching at Berkeley's Boalt Hall, and he has tenure, which makes the matter far more complicated and argues, in the end, for keeping Yoo on the faculty.

Yoo's memo for the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel has long been repudiated by the administration for which he worked, which gives some hint of how extreme it is.

Now, the declassification of the document has ignited a new round of demands for his dismissal, with online petitions deluging the e-mail inbox of Boalt Hall dean Christopher Edley. Yoo "twisted the law in order to sanction what is highly likely to be considered a war crime," lectured a group called the American Freedom Campaign.

Edley, a veteran of the Clinton and Carter White Houses, responded last week with a memo of his own, concluding that Yoo "offered bad ideas and even worse advice during his government service." Still, he found, this failing does not "warrant dismissal or even a potentially chilling inquiry."

Absent "very substantial evidence" of "clear professional misconduct" or criminal violations, Edley said, "no university worthy of distinction should even contemplate dismissing a faculty member."

Disputes over academic freedom tend by their very nature to involve unpleasant choices. No one wants a comparative literature professor who marches with Nazis on the faculty, but pushing her out for that reason invites McCarthyite purges.

The scientist who argues that blacks are genetically inferior to whites (William Shockley), or the "ethnic studies" professor who describes those killed in the World Trade Center as "little Eichmanns" (Ward Churchill) may be even more repugnant because their offensive statements are intertwined with their academic work.

Really? John Yoo is not as bad as Ward Churchill?

Should John Yoo even be allowed to practice law in this country? That's a question above my pay grade. But for a whole lot of people who are at that pay grade, the ball is now rolling to get Yoo fired from his job and to have his ability to practice law in this country taken away. Either they will or they won't--but if they do, who can argue that having John Yoo find another line of work would be a bad thing? I hear the military is looking for a few good men. Perhaps Yoo could pour his ass into some BDUs and go over to Iraq and check out how things are going now that our enemies know we torture people.

I never understood the furor over Churchill. He was typical of a lot of professors I saw at the school that I went to--a wannabe, a poseur and a borderline phony. Well, in Churchill's case, the borderline part is pretty much confirmed--he was a fraud and a phony. But he had tenure, he had a chairmanship, and he was published. And widely read, if you believe the hype. Professors at that level are always striving, but get caught up in the fact that they really aren't that smart, can't think for themselves, and they make the fatal mistake of believing their own bullshit.

When Yoo started believing his own bullshit, the legal justification for torturing people became the policy of the United States of America. When Churchill started believing his bullshit, he got to see his reputation trashed by a bunch of wingnuts. He got fired. Yoo got hired. And that's more than Alberto Gonzales can say, right?

That whole thing about not wanting to be like Joe McCarthy? Yeah, you might want to read the Constitution first. Try to tape it back up first, because after being eviscerated with a razorblade, there isn't a whole lot left of it that makes any sense anymore--again, thanks to the likes of Yoo.

But let's be clear--Ruth Marcus thinks that an ethnic studies professor who got fired from the University of Colorado at Boulder because he said something that pissed off Fox News is worse than a man who actually committed a war crime by providing the legal basis for torture.

How fucking insane is that?

Your tax dollars abused

"Too many government employees have viewed purchase cards as their personal line of credit.
It's time to cut up their cards and start over." Sen. Norm Coleman, R-MN

Ya know, it sets my teeth on edge to have to agree with Norm Coleman first thing in the morning. It really, truly does. But that is exactly where I find myself today, reading the GAO report and corresponding Washington Post article on the abuse and misuse of purchase cards by government employees.

About a decade ago, it was decided that department managers, shift supervisors and certain other personnel working in the various and sundry federal departments should have a little latitude. Cards were issues for routine and ordinary purchases. The old procurement process was a bureaucratic nightmare. The old process is where those "speed of government" jokes came from. Let me illustrate by example. In 1988, if a monitor crapped out, an entire workstation would be down for weeks while a new monitor was requisitioned and ordered from a specific supplier who had the contract to supply all of the monitors to a specific government entity. This was stupid, and it was infuriating.

Fast forward one decade...purchase cards were issued to certain federal employees that situations like I just described might be eliminated. People like me had the option of performing the troubleshooting checklist and then going to Office Max or Best Buy or Comp USA and buying a new monitor and getting the workstation back up after lunch instead of having it sit idle for weeks, perhaps months.

Makes sense, right? You trust me with submitting all these man hours to payroll, you can trust me to buy office supplies. Right?

Me personally? Sure. Every penny accounted for properly. Justified, verified and immediate supervisor informed. All "i's" dotted and "t's" crossed. Hand delivered to the appropriate administrator and a receipt requested. Copies made and filed in my file cabinet in my office. No screwing around, since at the end of the journey, I always figured I was ultimately spending my own money, since as a taxpayer I am the origin of the governments funding source.

I'm such a chump!

The GAO found that nearly half the "purchase card" transactions it examined were improper, some because they weren't authorized correctly and others because they did not meet requirements for the cards' use. The audit determined that the overall rate of problems "is unacceptably high."

Nearly $2 million was spent on items such as laptops and digital cameras and can not be accounted for. The Department of the Army charged more than a dozen computer servers worth a hundred grand apiece to the cards, and now can't account for them.

The audit is the culmination of a series of GAO reports over the past decade that have uncovered improper use of government-issued purchase cards at agencies, including the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security. Government employees spent nearly $20 billion last year using "SmartPay" cards and related convenience checks, for items ranging from pencils to computers to utility trucks.

Purchase cards, used by about 300,000 government employees in 2007, are essentially the federal government's equivalent of corporate credit cards. Issued by five major banks, they are primarily for transactions under $2,500 but can be used for larger contract payments. All transactions are supposed to comport with federal purchasing guidelines, including proper authorization and documentation.

The latest study used scientific sampling to gauge problems with the cards across numerous federal agencies from July 2005 to September 2006. The report singles out incidents for special criticism as "abusive," "improper" or "fraudulent."

In the fraudulent category, a longtime employee of the U.S. Forest Service in Oregon, Debra K. Durfey, wrote convenience checks worth more than $640,000 from 2000 to 2006 to a live-in boyfriend, who used the money for gambling, car expenses and mortgage payments, according to the GAO and the Justice Department.

The fraud went undetected until a whistle-blower forwarded a tip to the Agriculture Department's inspector general. Durfey, who headed her unit's purchasing office, pleaded guilty last year and was sentenced to 21 months in prison and restitution.

Another fraud case involved the U.S. Postal Service, where an unidentified postmaster used his card to charge $1,100 over a 15-month period for "various online dating services" while he was under investigation for viewing pornography on a government computer. The employee worked out an agreement to remain on sick leave until he retired in 2007 and paid back the money spent on the dating services, according to the GAO report and a Postal Service spokesman.

In a case the GAO deemed "abusive," the Postal Service spent $13,500 in 2006 on a dinner at a Ruth's Chris Steak House in Orlando, including "over 200 appetizers and over $3,000 of alcohol, including more than 40 bottles of wine costing more than $50 each and brand-name liquor such as Courvoisier, Belvedere and Johnny Walker Gold." The tab came to more than $160 a head for the 81 guests, the report said.

A spokesman for the Postal Service, Gerry McKiernan, seemed almost indignant that the expense for the dinner would even raise an eyebrow and he would have to answer questions about it by unctuous guttersnipes from the GAO. "When you're having dinner with customers, it's normal to have a drink," McKiernan asserted.

In another glaring example of perfidy, a State Department cardholder spent $360 at a lingerie boutique in Ecuador. Ostensibly, the expense was for "women's underwear/lingerie for use during jungle training by trainees of a drug enforcement program." No further details of the purchase were revealed, but a State Department official "agreed that the charge was questionable." (Ya think???)

Reading reports like this just disgusts me to my very core. I am easily infuriated by people who just don't know how to act. People who, apparently, have never managed to grow up. Narcissistic brats who think the world owes them something instead of realizing humbly that it's the other way around.

The War In Afghanistan Enters an Escalation Phase

Today, we're going to take a look at what's going on in Afghanistan.

Capt. Chris Hammonds expected it. In a mud-brick command center, the 32-year-old Army Ranger pivoted between a radio and a map, tracking reports of approaching Taliban. Several explosions soon ripped through the night as U.S. forces hit the suspected Taliban positions, including a cross-border guided-munitions strike on a compound about a mile inside Pakistan where senior associates of Siraj Haqqani -- considered one of the most dangerous Taliban commanders -- were thought to be meeting.

The U.S. military usually strikes across the border only when taking accurate fire from Pakistan, and standard practice calls for informing the Pakistani military about threats from its side. But Hammonds argued that the Pakistani military checkpoint was "under siege" from the Taliban and that Pakistani officers -- fearful of retaliation -- could tip off the insurgents.

First of all, I'm not going to criticize Captain Hammonds in any way, shape or form. He is on the ground and he is carrying out his orders and he is protecting the lives of his men. Second of all, I am going to criticize the tactics. Third, I'm going to explain why criticizing the tactics DOES NOT mean that I'm finding fault with Captain Hammonds.

The end result of carrying the fight across an International border:

The rare strike averted an imminent Taliban attack, Hammonds said, but across the border a starkly different account emerged. "Two women and two children got killed, so whatever was assessed was not correct," said Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, a spokesman for the Pakistani army. No Taliban were meeting in the family compound, he said. The Pakistani government issued a protest, and demonstrations erupted. "We were never informed about the strike," Abbas said. "This has serious implications for operations."

The March 12 incident highlights how, more than six years into the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, efforts to stabilize the country increasingly focus on the rugged frontier area straddling the border with Pakistan. Over the past 18 months, Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters have exploited peace deals by Pakistan's government to create an unprecedented haven in the region, U.S. officials said. From there, insurgents have escalated attacks in Pakistan and in eastern Afghanistan, leading the United States last year to double its troop presence along more than 600 miles of frontier.

The short answer--we're escalating the war into Pakistan. Do we need to? If that's where the enemy is, yes. But there's a right way and a wrong way, and the wrong way is to get lazy and rely on airstrikes or long range artillery. This just creates insurgents. I'm sorry, but send the F-16s home and replace them with helicopters that can ferry in supplies and extra troops when there's trouble.

What do leading proponents of effective Counterinsurgency or "COIN" tactics say about these types of incidents?

Indiscriminate attacks against non-combatants and human-rights abuses aid and abet the enemy’s cause. In our globalized world, abuses such as prisoner maltreatment in Abu Ghraib are quickly broadcast around the globe. Our enemies use these accounts and images as part of their propaganda campaign to discredit host-nation governments and distort popular perceptions of our intentions. Such propaganda mobilizes those who were previously friendly or at least neutral to our efforts to bring stability and security.

Now, this was a fairly discriminate attack. This was not a case where there wasn't a good reason to make a move against the Taliban. The motive was clear but the end result was a propaganda victory for the enemy.

Instead of Captain Hammonds and his men being in a position they are forced to defend, why not take Captain Hammonds OUT of his position and put him in a position to succeed. That is, allow him to close with his real enemy and kill that enemy, irregardless of the International boundary? Here's why I think this is a better approach:

Toward that end, the Army should consider abolishing branch distinctions among field-grade officers for most within the operational career field. Under the current model, an officer remains in his basic branch until he retires or is promoted to the rank of general officer. This lifelong branch affiliation narrows an officer’s perspective and limits his familiarity with capabilities outside his branch. The new model for career advancement should terminate branch affiliation for most officers in the operational career field at the rank of captain. A captain who commands with distinction within his basic branch should have the opportunity to command again in another branch. Officers who command successfully in two organizations from two different branches — maneuver and logistics, fires and intelligence, etc. — are those most suited to command battalions and brigades. The pathway to high command should be reserved for officers who demonstrate a facility with a variety of tools, both lethal and nonlethal. While there would still be a significant need for specialized officers, the surest pathway to high command ought to lie open to the adaptive generalist over the narrow specialist.

To win the Long War, the Army must embrace the combined-arms battalion (CAB) as the basic building block for tactical operations and develop a flatter organizational structure. The development of modular brigade combat teams is a step in the right direction but does not go far enough. The current organization is too hierarchical and too specialized to operate most effectively in the Long War.

During the Plains Indian Wars, many of the tribes opposing America’s westward expansion adopted decentralized hit-and-run tactics to terrorize settlers. In response to these threats, the U.S. Cavalry abandoned the large-scale tactics of the Civil War in favor of small-unit operations. Cavalry troops and squadrons conducted area security operations to protect settlers dispersed over wide areas of the frontier. Cavalry squadrons were combined-arms formations that contained intelligence collectors and cultural advisers (then called scouts) as well as maneuver forces and an organic indirect fires capability. This decentralized approach was necessary to ensure that these organizations possessed the tools they needed to bring security to the frontier.

Again, I don't fault Captain Hammonds. I fault a system that puts him in a place at night that is vulnerable. He and his unit should be integrated with an Afghan Army unit that can cross the border with the cooperation of the Pakistani forces and attack and surround any Taliban unit it finds. Whatever cultural differences exist, it's in the best interests of the Afghans and the Pakistanis to set aside their differences and work together. If it starts with a dozen of each at a time, fair enough. But we should be constructing small, rapid movement units that take parts of each entity and fuses them into something that we haven't seen yet. This force should be capable of fighting and sustaining itself for short periods of time and it should be able to break contact and move where it needs to move. It should feature a creative implementation of fast movement and ambush tactics. It should be a force large enough to be effective but small enough to emplace itself anywhere it wants and catch any insurgent Taliban movements off guard.

Instead of reliable Afghan and Pakistani counterparts, Captain Hammonds deals with a shortage of US troops, an Afghan Army mutiny, and Pakistani corruption:

In the latest operation, in the Kowchun Valley just north of Paktika, Hammonds's company staked out a position above a narrow streambed that snakes through a gorge into North Waziristan, the scene of dozens of firefights between U.S. troops and the Taliban. From his base, Hammonds can see for miles into Pakistan. Haqqani "is extremely upset and can't get anything through," said Fenzel, citing U.S. intelligence.

But because of a shortage of U.S. troops, Hammonds's company can stay in the area only for several weeks. He doubts that Afghan and Pakistani soldiers will be able to control the route once he leaves.

"You're in the middle of an ANA mutiny," Hammonds said one afternoon, referring to the Afghan National Army, as Afghan soldiers from the 203rd Battalion piled into pickup trucks and quit the camp. The Afghans left after learning that the operation, originally to last nine days, would continue for weeks. The exodus underscored Hammonds's belief that Afghan army units cannot guard the border because they rotate every three to six months and they lack enough local knowledge. "The key to securing the border is to remove the ANA completely," he said.

Instead, Hammonds favors the Afghan border police, but eastern Paktika now has only 66 percent of its 857 authorized border police officers and, until December, they were led by a corrupt commander who colluded with the Taliban.

A greater frustration, he and other U.S. troops said, is that they cannot trust their Pakistani counterparts. "The Pakistan military is corrupt and lets people come through," Hammonds said. Pakistani forces reportedly told insurgents the location of his observation post, and when U.S. troops in a firefight call the Pakistani military for help, he said, "they never answer the phone."

Criticizing the situation that this officer is put into means I'm criticizing the strategic lack of vision and not what this officer goes through on the ground. These men are tired, cold, hungry for good food and doing work that most Americans--myself included--couldn't do and wouldn't do for all of the money in the world. These are far better people than we realize and deserve way more than we're capable of giving them. They don't want yellow ribbon magnets, lapel pin wearing loudmouths, or platitudes. Shut the fuck up and appreciate what they do.

Captain Hammonds should be paired up with an Afghan Army officer and loyal troops who can fight, a Pakistani Army officer and troops that can also fight, and they should combine their efforts to effectively identify, track, chase and kill any Taliban that enter their area of control. If it takes US money to get quality troops, pay it. If it takes concessions, make them. Out of the chaos, use whatever means necessary to solve the fucking problems instead of tolerating indifference, corruption and neglect.

Instead of Captain Hammonds sitting in a bunker waiting for an attack, Captain Hammonds should be waiting in ambush for the Taliban, for as long as necessary, safe in the knowledge that a quick-reaction force can come in with enough firepower to help them out. That doesn't mean parking B-52s overhead. It means his unit is rotating in and out with other units that know what he's going through. When the Taliban cannot move in that area for fear of being ambushed by a combined American/Afghan/Pakistani force that cannot be located or tracked, only then will you take the initiative away from the enemy.

And when they're not doing that, Captain Hammonds should sleep at night in peace and security, in an area protected from Taliban attack. And how do they do that? By making sure the population around them are giving them good intel and alerting them if they see Taliban elements appear in the vicinity.

That's how you make the long war a shorter war.

The one where we crow a little bit because we beat the Washington Post to this by almost three months

Remember all those heady promises of increased airline security so something like the attacks of September 11 could never happen again?

Technology was going to save us! Technology would provide sniffer machines that would detect explosives and biometric data collection systems would be a able to detect a terrorist by his shifty eyes.

Well...Been to the airport lately? Going on seven years after September 11 and what changes have been made? Lets see - I have to take off my shoes. My shampoo, conditioner and toothpaste are treated as weapons-grade materials, and my three year old granddaughter is likely on a terrorist watch list now because of the fit she threw when they took her sippy cup.

Yet GAO investigators had no problem getting real bomb making components past various incarnations of Roscoe P. Coltrain and his deputy Enos.

(Yes, we were three months ahead of the Washington Post - they are reporting today on the findings of a GAO report we read in November.)

The sluggish pace of technological innovation and deployment has left holes in checkpoint security that could easily be exploited by terrorists, according to government officials and outside experts. Congressional investigators reported last year that they were able to smuggle bomb components through checkpoints despite new security measures. Other investigative reports questioned the government's efforts to get emerging technology into the field.

"The snail's pace of deploying new technology is unacceptable," said Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. "We remain vulnerable because we have not kept up with technological innovation."

The TSA in coming months is expected to begin the government's first substantial investment in new checkpoint security technology since the 1970s, according to officials at the TSA, which plans to spend about $250 million on new devices, up from about $89 million last fiscal year. The machines include upgraded X-ray equipment that will provide multiple views of bags and hand-held scanners that can detect liquid explosives in bottles after they are identified by screeners.

The machines my luggage passed through was the same vintage 70's equipment that was screening luggage on September 10, 2001.

So what happened? Why haven't these wonderful technological advances materialized? Well, the government says that private investment has been anemic and the private sector says the government hasn't done it's part to foster investment.

I get frustrated with such maddening petulance. Sometimes you just suck it up and do what's right - or that's how it's supposed to be. But in America 2.0, Beta it doesn't work that way. Nowadays, the mantra is "Fuck you if I can't make a buck!"

Is anyone else just worn out with this shit? I sure as hell am. I'm so god-damned sick of fucked-up priorities and wrong-headed, selfish behavior that it's all I can do to keep from banging my head on the desk out of the sheer frustration of it all.

Can we have the grown ups back in charge please? I don't like this "Lord of the Flies" reality these juvenile nitwits have created.

"Probably" His Final State of the Union Address???

Scroll Down So You Can Read About The Fundraiser (SDSYCRATF)

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What the..?

For years, President Bush and his advisers expressed frustration that the White House received little credit for the nation's strong economic performance because of public discontent about the Iraq war. Today, the president is getting little credit for improved security in Iraq, as the public increasingly focuses on a struggling U.S. economy.

That is the problem Bush faces as he prepares to deliver his seventh and probably final State of the Union address tonight. For the first time in four years, he will come before Congress able to report some progress in tamping down violence in Iraq. Yet the public appears to have moved on from the war -- and possibly from Bush himself.

What do you mean "probably" his final SOTU address?

Does the Washington Post know something we don't? Or are they in need of an editor who is worth a damn and actually reads the swill they are printing these days? Will the election be suspended so that we can have another four more years of Bush-Cheney?

Waterboarding Did NOT Save Anyone's Life

The only way to approach this is to expose the lie they're using to hide the fact that all of them are complicit in something that should drive them out of public life forever. When you had the chance to speak up, you didn't do it. When you had the chance to step up, you hid in the shadows. There's only one piece of advice I can give you--GET OUT OF THE WAY of people who CAN lead. Russ Feingold and James Webb can do the job better than you can. And Speaker of the House Waxman and Majority Leader Conyers has a nice ring to it.

Juan Cole told us all about this in September. He spelled it out for us. But the trail goes back all the way to 2002 and has some interesting twists and turns. Bear with me, and if you click the links, I'm sure you'll find some good stuff.

To expose the lie, look at this headline on MSNBC.COM:

Waterboarding ‘probably saved lives’
Ex-CIA officer says technique worked, but he now considers it torture

BULLSHIT.

When you see bullshit, call it what it is and never back down. Waterboarding did NOT save the life of one single, solitary person. Bad main stream media, bad! You're no better than a puppy that piddles everywhere and won't learn to actually do your business outside where it is socially acceptable. With patience, we will teach you.

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The article continues:

A former CIA officer who participated in the capture and questioning of the first al-Qaeda terrorist suspect to be waterboarded said yesterday that the harsh technique provided an intelligence breakthrough that "probably saved lives," but that he now regards the tactic as torture.

Zayn Abidin Muhammed Hussein abu Zubaida, the first high-ranking al-Qaeda member captured after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, broke in less than a minute after he was subjected to the technique and began providing interrogators with information that led to the disruption of several planned attacks, said John Kiriakou, who served as a CIA interrogator in Pakistan.

Abu Zubaida was one of two detainees whose interrogation was captured in video recordings that the CIA later destroyed. The recent disclosure of the tapes' destruction ignited a recent furor on Capitol Hill and allegations that the agency tried to hide evidence of illegal torture.

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First of all, John Kiriakou is a liar. Plain and simple. When there is "closed circuit" video system in place, it generally means someone has also installed a goddamned recording device. Pretty much anyone who walks upright and can chew gum knows that. What a ridiculous, bald-faced lie:

Kiriakou said he did not know that the interrogations were videotaped, although there often were closed-circuit video systems in the rooms where questioning took place. He said he also had no knowledge of the decision to destroy videotapes of the interrogations. Officials said there are hundreds of hours of recordings, but most are of Abu Zubaida alone in his cell recovering from his injuries.

Yes, after he'd been shot, we denied him treatment and we denied him painkillers. We're just batting a thousand when it comes to decency and compassion, aren't we? Of course, to prove we're tough, we have to remember that this guy was a "terrorist."

This controversy over who was told what is ridiculous. You can go to the archives of the Washington Post and see that this was all well-known and spelled out in great detail. As far back as 2002, the foundation of a policy of torturing detainees was laid by men who have never worn the uniform, never stood a watch and never been held accountable for anything in their lives. And we will be paying the price for that for a generation or more.

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An August 2002 memo by the Justice Department that concluded interrogators could use extreme techniques on detainees in the war on terror helped provide an after-the-fact legal basis for harsh procedures used by the C.I.A. on high-level leaders of Al Qaeda, according to current and former government officials.

The legal memo was prepared after an internal debate within the government about the methods used to extract information from Abu Zubaydah, one of Osama bin Laden's top aides, after his capture in April 2002, the officials said. The memo provided a legal foundation for coercive techniques used later against other high-ranking detainees, like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, believed to be the chief architect of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, who was captured in early 2003.

So we've now established that anyone with a brain knew that Zubaida and Khalid Shiekh Mohammed were tortured in 2002. The government told everyone what they were doing and dared people to challenge them. This was all spelled out again and again in 2004 when the CIA had to put their efforts on hold and wait for legal justification to be dishonestly concocted by the White House and the Justice Department. What people did not know is that it was videotaped. And, as Abu Ghraib shows, it's one thing to talk about naked monkeypiles of people. It's a whole other thing to show people what it looks like.

You can go into those same archives and see things from 2002 like this little chestnut:

While the U.S. government publicly denounces the use of torture, each of the current national security officials interviewed for this article defended the use of violence against captives as just and necessary. They expressed confidence that the American public would back their view. The CIA, which has primary responsibility for interrogations, declined to comment.

"If you don't violate someone's human rights some of the time, you probably aren't doing your job," said one official who has supervised the capture and transfer of accused terrorists. "I don't think we want to be promoting a view of zero tolerance on this. That was the whole problem for a long time with the CIA."

Sorry, chumley. We don't back your view. And respecting human rights means we have a thing called moral authority. And that moral authority is now long gone. Long gone.

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We also know that, in 2004, it was reported that:

The interrogation methods were approved by Justice Department and National Security Council lawyers in 2002, briefed to key congressional leaders and required the authorization of CIA Director George J. Tenet for use, according to intelligence officials and other government officials with knowledge of the secret decision-making process.

When the CIA and the military "started capturing al Qaeda in Afghanistan, they had no interrogators, no special rules and no place to put them," said a senior Marine officer involved in detainee procedures. The FBI, which had the only full cadre of professional interrogators from its work with criminal networks in the United States, took the lead in questioning detainees.

So where's the story in all of this? The story that they're trying to concoct is that there was a need to torture Zabaida and that the Congress was briefed. That gives them their plausible deniability. Because we're long past "discussing" whether people should go to jail. We need to discuss things like "hard time" and "Leavenworth" and "shower privileges."

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And what they certainly don't want anyone to know is that Abu Zabaida is delusional and insane, and had no useful information. It was known at the time that he was not to be trusted. But they tortured him anyway. This is where the lies get really interesting, and go virtually unchallenged. The first thing people should know is that we tortured a crazy person and he gave up nothing useful. Seems like that's the part we should "focus" on as we figure out how we pissed away our soul for 35 seconds of torture. You know, our "soul?" The thing that used to make us proud? America's soul is now an Amsterdam hooker with one leg, standing in front of a dirty window with a thousand yard stare. It's not easy to get your soul back when you've given it away:

He described Abu Zubaida as ideologically zealous, defiant and uncooperative — until the day in mid-summer when his captors strapped him to a board, wrapped his nose and mouth in cellophane and forced water into his throat in a technique that simulates drowning.

The waterboarding lasted about 35 seconds before Abu Zubaida broke down, according to Kiriakou, who said he was given a detailed description of the incident by fellow team members. The next day, Abu Zubaida told his captors he would tell them whatever they wanted, Kiriakou said.

"He said that Allah had come to him in his cell and told him to cooperate, because it would make things easier for his brothers," Kiriakou said.

Kiriakou's remarks came a day before top CIA officials are to appear before a closed congressional hearing to account for the decision to destroy recordings of the interrogations of Abu Zubaida and another senior captive, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Last Thursday, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden announced that the recordings were destroyed in 2005 to protect the identities of CIA employees who appear on them.

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What did Zubaida give them?

Nothing. He was nuts.

"The interrogations of Abu Zubaida drove me nuts at times," Downing said. "He and some of the others are very clever guys. At times I felt we were in a classic counter-interrogation class: They were telling us what they think we already knew. Then, what they thought we wanted to know. As they did that, they fabricated and weaved in threads that went nowhere. But, even with these ploys, we still get valuable information and they are off the street, unable to plot and coordinate future attacks."

Really? Here's Juan Cole, writing about what is in Ron Suskind's book The One Percent Solution:

Ron Suskind's One Percent Solution discusses Abu Zubayda. His sources in the intelligence community revealed to him that Abu Zubayda turned out not to have been a high level planner, as Rumsfeld had announced. He was more like a low level travel agent for the families of al-Qaeda operatives.

And he could barely pull off that basic job, since he seems to suffer from multiple personality syndrome. The CIA captured his diary. The entries were by his three distinct personae, Hani-1, Hani-2 and Hani-3 (a boy, a young man, and a middle-aged man).

The entries contained exhaustive detail about making travel arrangements for his clients. It was useless, junk detail, compulsive in nature and completely unhelpful. It went on forever. Dan Coleman, then the FBI's lead man in fighting al-Qaeda said the diary was about "what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said. . . This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality."

So where's the discussion about how fucking nuts this guy was? Buried deep in the articles being used to give the administration cover? Forgotten?

How about putting it in the goddamned FRONT of the story, where it fucking belongs?!? I think I'm gonna blow a gasket, and it's only Tuesday.

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And, no. Bill Clinton did NOT do it, too:

According to present and former officials with firsthand knowledge, the CIA's authoritative Directorate of Operations instructions, drafted in cooperation with the general counsel, tells case officers in the field that they may not engage in, provide advice about or encourage the use of torture by cooperating intelligence services from other countries.

"Based largely on the Central American human rights experience," said Fred Hitz, former CIA inspector general, "we don't do torture, and we can't countenance torture in terms of we can't know of it." But if a country offers information gleaned from interrogations, "we can use the fruits of it."

Bush administration officials said the CIA, in practice, is using a narrow definition of what counts as "knowing" that a suspect has been tortured. "If we're not there in the room, who is to say?" said one official conversant with recent reports of renditions.

The Clinton administration pioneered the use of extraordinary rendition after the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. But it also pressed allied intelligence services to respect lawful boundaries in interrogations.

After years of fruitless talks in Egypt, President Bill Clinton cut off funding and cooperation with the directorate of Egypt's general intelligence service, whose torture of suspects has been a perennial theme in State Department human rights reports.

"You can be sure," one Bush administration official said, "that we are not spending a lot of time on that now."

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That's right. We were warned. Nothing to see here, folks. Continue to not pay attention to what your government is doing in your name. Move along.

The soul of this country is under siege. The soul of this country and what it stands for is being stripped away from us. Don't let the bastards do it.

Saturday Night Recap

There were three significant stories that I fully intended to blog about today, but I never got much blogging done Saturday...and here it is Sunday morning, and the Sunday editions are out, so lets consider this a mini-roundup of stuff that shouldn't get past your attention

*****

The New York Times reported that that Iraqi government, dominated as it is by al-Maliki and the Shiites factions, are balking at the American reliance on arming and fortifying Sunni tribesmen as security forces.

Who would have thought that the Iraqis would be sketchy about that plan? It isn't like Saddam Hussein, the brutal thug that oppressed the Shiites for two decades and change was a Sunni tribesman, or anything like that...

Oh...Wait...

*****

From McClatchy we learned that the State Department is (finally!) taking a closer look at First Kuwaiti and their future at the lucrative embassy-construction trough is in doubt. I am glad to see the State Department at least pretending to take this issue as seriously as I have been for ages. (See here, here, here, & here).

*****

The Washington Post ran a gut-check feature that should make even the most cold-blooded war supporter at least feel a moments hesitation about continuing this clusterfuck.

"When we first got here, all the shops were open. There were women and children walking out on the street," Alarcon said this week. "The women were in Western clothing. It was our favorite street to go down because of all the hot chicks."

That was 14 long months ago, when the soldiers from the 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, arrived in southwestern Baghdad. It was before their partners in the Iraqi National Police became their enemies and before Shiite militiamen, aligned with the police, attempted to exterminate a neighborhood of middle-class Sunni families.

Next month, the U.S. soldiers will complete their tour in Iraq. Their experience in Sadiyah has left many of them deeply discouraged, by both the unabated hatred between rival sectarian fighters and the questionable will of the Iraqi government to work toward peaceful solutions.

Asked if the American endeavor here was worth their sacrifice -- 20 soldiers from the battalion have been killed in Baghdad -- Alarcon said no: "I don't think this place is worth another soldier's life."

Read the whole thing. Just be warned, it's tough reading and may take you a while to get through. I have to wonder tho - will Rush Limbaugh weigh in and condemn them as "phony soldiers" because they see the futility of this fiasco?

Washington Post: "Al-Qaeda in Iraq Reported Crippled"

Well, the frothing fuckwits will have a field day with that WaPo headline. I can hear the chest thumping and chickenhawk bravado from here. They are already lighting bonfires around which to dance naked while chanting “Boo-Ya, Bitches! We Win! U!S!A! U!S!A!”

They are so predictable.

They will read the first sentence:

The U.S. military believes it has dealt devastating and perhaps irreversible blows to al-Qaeda in Iraq in recent months, leading some generals to advocate a declaration of victory over the group, which the Bush administration has long described as the most lethal U.S. adversary in Iraq.

Then conveniently overlook the inconvenient parts…

But as the White House and its military commanders plan the next phase of the war, other officials have cautioned against taking what they see as a premature step that could create strategic and political difficulties for the United States. Such a declaration could fuel criticism that the Iraq conflict has become a civil war in which U.S. combat forces should not be involved. At the same time, the intelligence community, and some in the military itself, worry about underestimating an enemy that has shown great resilience in the past.

"I think it would be premature at this point," a senior intelligence official said of a victory declaration over AQI, as the group is known. Despite recent U.S. gains, he said, AQI retains "the ability for surprise and for catastrophic attacks." Earlier periods of optimism, such as immediately following the June 2006 death of AQI founder Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in a U.S. air raid, not only proved unfounded but were followed by expanded operations by the militant organization.

I hate that these jokers make me a conspiracy theorist, but what the hell? I’m just a crackpot blogger anyway, so here goes…is the WaPo article just a piece of a larger PR campaign?

Let’s take stock…last spring more astute observers started noticing that suddenly every single thing that happened in Iraq was the work of al Qaeda in Iraq. If a swarthy man sneezed, it was the work of al Qaeda. By last summer, virtually every report out of Iraq was citing violence by “al Qaeda” – but in reality, al Qaeda in Iraq has never really been more than a bogey-man, even the most generous assessments put their numbers at 10% of the insurgency, and likely only about 4%. (It has been long acknowledged that Shi’ite militias have represented a far greater threat than Sunni insurgents and jihadist fighters professing membership in AQI.)

Then the references slowed down.

And now, the WaPo prints a specious headline (Fred Hiatt is a perennial contender for the Wurlitzer Prize) and yellow feathers fill the air as the self-congratulating cowards and chickenhawks bust out the beer-bongs, launch at one another in belly-bumps and exchange high-fives and Hulk poses. “We’re kickin’ ass!!!”

Of a piece? That’s possible I suppose.

It’s always good news when groups attacking Americans are on the wane. But only if there is some “there” there, and this cast of characters has a lousy track record where honesty is concerned - having lied to get us into the war in the first damned place - so you'll just have to pardon me if I don't come running when the little boy cries "wolf!"

Washington Post Baghdad Bureau Reporter Murdered While Covering a Story

Salih Saif Aldin was a veteran Washington Post reporter, working out of the Baghdad bureau.

Sunday afternoon, he was taking photographs and documenting the violence that has plagued Baghdad's Sadiyah neighborhood when he was shot in the forehead at close range and killed. He had left the bureau offices by taxi to conduct interviews in the neighborhood, where militia fighters and insurgents have clashed. About 4:00 p.m. local time, a Post colleague answered the phone at the bureau office; the call came from Saif Aldin's cell phone. The caller identified himself as an Iraqi police officer, and said he was standing over the reporters body.

His death brings to at least 118 the number of journalists who have perished covering the war in Iraq. Nearly 100 of them were Iraqi nationals.

"Courageous beyond imagination, Salih was determined to unveil the truth," said Sudarsan Raghavan, The Post's Baghdad bureau chief. "He was instrumental to The Post's coverage of Iraq. He will be sorely missed by his friends and colleagues."

Occupation going badly? All you need is better advertising!

Image is everything

They have decided that what the military really needs in Iraq is…a new branding effort! To that end, they are looking into ways to repackage a hostile occupation to make it palatable and desirable for the occupied population. A veritable “must have” if you will.

“Well, why not?” They must be thinking. “The American sheeple sure bought the “greeted with flowers and candy as liberators” hokum.

Since the whole “show of force” thing has proven to be wildly unpopular with the targeted consumers – the citizens of Iraq – maybe repackaging the occupation will improve the market share. Even though every focus group conducted shows that the Iraqis simply want us to leave.

The key to boosting the image and effectiveness of U.S. military operations around the world involves "shaping" both the product and the marketplace, and then establishing a brand identity that places what you are selling in a positive light, said clinical psychologist Todd C. Helmus, the author of "Enlisting Madison Avenue: The Marketing Approach to Earning Popular Support in Theaters of Operation." The 211-page study, for which the U.S. Joint Forces Command paid the Rand Corp. $400,000, was released this week.

Helmus and his co-authors concluded that the "force" brand, which the United States peddled for the first few years of the occupation, was doomed from the start and lost ground to enemies' competing brands. While not abandoning the more aggressive elements of warfare, the report suggested, a more attractive brand for the Iraqi people might have been "We will help you." That is what President Bush's new Iraq strategy is striving for as it focuses on establishing a protective U.S. troop presence in Baghdad neighborhoods, training Iraq's security forces, and encouraging the central and local governments to take the lead in making things better.

Many of the study's conclusions may seem as obvious as they are hard to implement amid combat operations and terrorist attacks, and Helmus acknowledged that it could be too late for extensive rebranding of the U.S. effort in Iraq. But Duane Schattle, whose urban operations office at the Joint Forces Command ordered the study, said that "cities are the battlegrounds of the future" and what has happened in Baghdad provides lessons for the future. "This isn't just about going in and blowing things up," Schattle said. "This is about working in a very complex environment."

Can you even stand it? They went rushing into a country, destabilized the entire region, gave the Iranians a long-awaited victory in their war with Iraq, and fomented a civil war…now they are convinced that all they really need is to rebrand the whole thing. That’ll be just the ticket...That is what the Joint Forces Command paid the Rand Corporation $400,000 dollars to conclude.

"Certain things do not translate well," the study warned. "Danger lies behind assumptions of similarity." A gesture Bush made during his 2005 inaugural parade -- the University of Texas "hook 'em horns" salute with raised index and pinkie fingers -- stands for the "sign of the devil" in some cultures and an indication of marital infidelity in others. A leaflet dropped to intimidate Iraqi insurgents, the study noted, "also reached noncombatants" and "gave everyone who picked it up the 'evil eye.' "

I bang my head on my desk in frustration. It’s a bit late for that, don’t you think?

The arrogant bastards who ignored reality in favor of the alternate one they created think they can salvage this whole fiasco with a new image?

There is only one explanation…They must think Iraqis are as gullible and stupid as most Americans.

At least they are consistent about getting it wrong

While the resident grows ever more shrill, while Hadley makes the rounds to all the bobble-head Sunday morning venues; while the administration beats the drum, the hangers-on and true believers chant over and over again “al Qaeda, al Qaeda, al Qaeda”

If we cut our losses in Iraq, it will be a victory for al Qaeda. If we don’t fight them there, al Qaeda will follow us home and attack a shopping mall near you. The only possible thing we can do is keep feeding ~30 American kids a week in the meatgrinder sacrificing them to appease the cruel al Qaeda, who will apparently salt our fields, poison our wells, wither our crops and cause our cows to go dry and our chickens to molt. Oh - they will behead us all and make the survivors wear burkas, too. At least that's how it will be if we don't keep up with our sacrificin' until January 2009. (After all, only a Defeat-o-crat would even think such a cowardly cut-and-run thing. Right?)

You see, if you aren’t pissing-down-your-leg terrified of al Qaeda, you are obviously tetched.

Well, fine. Color me tetched.

I have been telling anyone who would listen to just calm down a bit, al Qaeda is not nearly the threat that too many people have been deluded into thinking it is.

There was no al Qaeda in Iraq before this cocked-up invasion was launched. I have also been trying to get people to remember that Iraq is a Shia majority country and al and the boys are fundamentalist Sunnis. Just like there was no al Qaeda in Iraq before the U.S. invaded, there will be no al Qaeda in Iraq after the US forces leave.

They are simply not the threat this resident makes them out to be.

Instead, the gravest threat many American G.I.’s face comes from Jaish al-Mahdi (the Mahdi Army)

In the 10-square-mile district of West Rashid, the Mahdi Army also controls the housing market, the gas stations and the loyalty of many of the residents, according to the soldiers from the 1st Infantry Division's 1st Battalion, 28th Infantry Regiment. The militia has a structure familiar to U.S. soldiers: brigade and battalion commanders leading legions of foot soldiers. Its fighters are willing and able to attack Americans with armor-piercing bombs, mortars, machine guns and grenades. Meanwhile, the political wing of Sadr's movement plays an outsize role in the national government.

West Rashid confounds the prevailing narrative from top U.S. military officials that the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq is the city's most formidable and disruptive force. While there are signs that the group has been active in the area, over the past several months, the Mahdi Army has transformed the composition of the district's neighborhoods by ruthlessly killing and driving out Sunnis and denying basic services to residents who remain. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, described the area as "one of the three or four most challenging areas in all of Baghdad."

Dominance by Shiite militias is typically associated with places in eastern Baghdad, such as Sadr City, while areas west of the Tigris River and south of the Baghdad airport road are home to large Sunni enclaves. Not long ago the western neighborhoods conformed clearly with this perception. U.S. soldiers estimate that a year ago, Sunnis made up about 80 percent of the population there and Shiites 20 percent. But those numbers have now reversed, after a concerted effort to cleanse Sunnis from the area, according to U.S. military officials. Graffiti marking the walls in these neighborhoods herald the new order: "Every land is Karbala, and every day is Ashura," read one slogan, extolling the Shiite holy city in southern Iraq and a major Shiite religious holiday.

The brazen attacks on U.S. soldiers also appear to challenge the idea that the Mahdi Army has been lying low to avoid confrontations with Americans. Street fighting between the Mahdi Army and U.S. forces has also broken out in other parts of the capital recently, including clashes in the al-Amin neighborhood Thursday in which Apache attack helicopters were called in to quell the gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades targeting U.S. troops. The next day, U.S. soldiers killed six Iraqi policemen during a raid in which they captured a police lieutenant believed to be working with Iranian-backed Shiite militias.

American soldiers who oversee West Rashid -- a district of about 700,000 people that includes the al-Amil, Bayaa and al-Jihad neighborhoods -- described an organized, well-financed Shiite enemy that rules ruthlessly and distributes the spoils of war to the area's impoverished residents.

In recent months, U.S. commanders have contended that the Mahdi Army, also known by its Arabic initials JAM, has splintered into a loosely connected militia in which its leader, Sadr, exerts a tenuous grip over disparate factions.

American commanders attribute much of the current violence to what they are now calling "special groups" or "secret cells" of Iranian-backed militiamen who may be acting independently of, or against, Sadr and his followers. But taken together, they say, militiamen acting as criminal power-brokers seeking profit and the perhaps more moderate Sadr loyalists constitute a formidable challenge for the soldiers who arrived in the capital in March as part of President Bush's troop buildup.

"We have a different fight than the rest of Baghdad," said Capt. Jay Wink, the battalion's intelligence officer. "It's all JAM, really. In one way, shape or form, everybody who lives there is associated with it."

Reading the piece in the Washington Post today, I was immediately drawn back to one of the tenets set forth in the white paper Rethinking Counterinsurgency by Dr. Steven Metz.

In cases where a serious insurgency cannot be managed, the state and its supporters might consider an approach designed to deliberately encourage the insurgency to mutate into something less dangerous such as an organized criminal organization. This is never desirable, but there may be rare instances where organized crime is less of a threat than sustained insurgency. Call this strategic methadone. [p.52]

Even before I got to this part:

"The Mahdi Army kind of shorts them out of power," said Capt. Charles Turner, who oversees reconstruction projects for the battalion. "You drive down the roads, you look over here, it's light. And you look over there, it's dark. From what I've seen, it's kind of a Tony Soprano thing: 'I outnumber you, so I'm going to do what I want.' "

Along certain militia-controlled blocks, "the curbs are painted, the streets are cleaner, they have beautification projects," Turner said. "It would be cool if it was a positive thing, but it's not."

Well, positive thing or not, it represents the current reality. And since that reality was addressed in Dr. Metz’ paper, maybe it is time the Pentagon took their fingers out of their ears, stopped saying "La La La La La! I can't hear you!!!" and stopped trying their level best to ignore it until it goes away.

Checks & Balances are not just “Academic”

And they aren't "quaint" either. They are integral to what makes us, well, America. I am sick of my birthright being sacrificed on the altar of the "Global War on Terror™." You should be to, if your citizenship is American. And if you aren't smart enough to get properly pissed off about this, stay the hell out of my way. If you aren't in, at least don't be a hindrance to those of us who want liberty restored.

When John Conyers ordered the GAO report on signing statements, I got tingly. I’m weird that way, but you already knew that. Well, it is out. I have not had a chance to read the actual report yet (I will be doing that and following up soon) but I have read the Washington Post article about it.

For example, Congress directed U.S. Customs and Border Protection to relocate its checkpoints around Tucson every seven days to improve efforts to combat illegal immigration. But the agency took the law as an "advisory provision" that was "not always consistent with CBP's mission requirements." Instead, the agency periodically shut down its checkpoints for short periods of time, believing that would comply with congressional demands.

Frustrated by the Pentagon's broad budget submissions for the "global war on terrorism," Congress demanded in its 2006 military spending law that the Defense Department break down its 2007 budget request to show the detailed costs of global military operations, such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The department ignored the order. While the Pentagon did break out the costs of operations in the Balkans and at Guantanamo Bay, it did not detail expenditures in other operations.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency also ignored Congress's demand that it submit an expenditure plan for housing assistance and alternatives to the approaches that failed after Hurricane Katrina. FEMA told the GAO that it does not normally produce such plans.

In all those instances, presidential signing statements had asserted that congressional demands were encroaching on Bush's prerogatives to control executive branch employees as he sees fit and to receive effective services from his employees. White House spokesman Tony Fratto said Congress should not be surprised that the administration carried out the recommendations of the signing statements, although he cautioned that he could not know whether the agencies took action because of the statements.

Okay - I am not even going to address the absurdity of closing a checkpoint to increase the effectiveness of the strategy. Or that the Pentagon uses a bookkeeping system so effed up as to be unauditable. And if I go down the Katrina path one more time, I'm liable to set my locks alight. I'll just stick to the article, which you have to read to the end to get the point.

The findings are significant because they confirm that the Bush administration has sought to marginalize the peoples representatives. This means that they sought to marginalize you – when they embarked down that path – in the naked power grab that has amounted to an imperial presidency.

Bruce Fein, a conservative Constitutional lawyer who served on an American Bar Association panel that excoriated the use of signing statements in a report last year said that the report could be used as a basis for legal action against the Bush administration. "At least it makes clear the signing statements aren't solely for staking out a legal position, with the president just saying, 'I don't have to do these things, but I will,' " Fein said. "In fact they are not doing some of these things. You can't just vaporize it as an academic question."

Legal action against BushCrimCo? I’m game.

Diane Silver has more, Here and Here.