The Cost of Afghanistan and Iraq

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---> Go here.

Watch the numbers roll by.

Enter your state.

Watch the numbers roll by.

We have to stop this insanity.

This country is deeply in debt (Thank you, George Bush 43 & Company), our infrastructure is crumbling around us. Unemployment is high with extremely high numbers in some areas. We alone among the industrialized nations can not find a way to pay for what should morally be a human right for our citizens--health care.

Over 5000 of our troops have given their lives for vengeance because of 2976 victims killed on 11 September 2001. We are upside down in this escapade. We need to to get out.

In addition, our surviving soldiers are deeply hurt by this engagement: too many stop-loss notifications, too many PTSD cases, too many traumatic brain injuries, other injuries/conditions that have not even been identified yet, suicides, family violence & murder, loss--so much loss. We need to get out.

30,000 additional troops to hunt down 100 al-Qaeda members? I don't know where the General that thought up this exercise studied, but apparently there was not even a short course in common sense. (Remember, McChrystal is the same general who tried to cover up the friendly fire death of Pat Tillman. How can McChrystal be trusted?) We need to get out.

"And it's - ONE! TWO! THREE!
What are we fighting for?
Don't ask me..."
(Country Joe and the Fish, I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag, 1967)

It's deja vu all over again!

And it is not worth it this time either.

Oh, My God!

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This re-enforces what we all knew from the beginning--even in the face of vast and numerous denials.

Eager to Tap Iraq's Vast Oil Reserves, Industry Execs Suggested Invasion

• Two years before the invasion of Iraq, oil executives and foreign policy advisers told the Bush administration that the United States would remain "a prisoner of its energy dilemma" as long as Saddam Hussein was in power.
• That April 2001 report, "Strategic Policy Challenges for the 21st Century," was prepared by the James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy and the US Council on Foreign Relations at the request of then-Vice President Dick Cheney.

• The advisory committee that helped prepare the report included Luis Giusti, a Shell Corp. non-executive director; John Manzoni, regional president of British Petroleum; and David O'Reilly, chief executive of ChevronTexaco.

• James Baker, the namesake for the public policy institute, was a prominent oil industry lawyer who also served as secretary of state under President George H.W. Bush, and was counsel to the Bush/Cheney campaign during the Florida recount in 2000.
• Ken Lay, then-chairman of the energy trading Enron Corp., also made recommendations that were included in the Baker report.

• The New Yorker's Jane Mayer later made another discovery: a secret NSC document dated February 3, 2001 - only two weeks after Bush took office - instructing NSC officials to cooperate with Cheney's task force, which was "melding" two previously unrelated areas of policy: "the review of operational policies towards rogue states" and "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields."

• Ray Rodon, a former executive at Halliburton, the oil-service giant that Cheney once headed, said he was dispatched to Iraq in October 2002 to assess the country's oil infrastructure and map out plans for operating Iraq's oil industry.

What a terrible price this country has paid--soldiers lives and bodies and minds--for "the power and the glory" of BushCo! Sad, sad.

Will it never end?
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Will It Never Cease?

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This from McClatchy:

• The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.
• A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.
• [In late 2002 and] into 2003 (Emphasis mine; this is very important.), Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."
• "There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he continued.
• "Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies."
• Senior administration officials, however, "blew that off and kept insisting that we'd overlooked something, that the interrogators weren't pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information," he said.
• A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under "pressure" to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.
• In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.
  

Why are those dates in bold important?

If torture was to "keep us safe" (although team-Bush had already let us be attacked on 9/11 despite very specific security memos warning just such an attack was going to take place), then why were the extreme measures not used immediately following the attack 11 September 2001?

Now we know.

The torture was not to keep us safe.

The torture was to give team-Bush an excuse to attack Iraq. When no link between al Qaida and Saddam Hussein was found, and when the yellow cake uranium/aluminum tube fiasco was exposed, team-Bush turned to torture. They did this in a desperate attempt to give themselves cover for their invasion of Iraq.

There seems to be no depth to which they would not sink to give themselves cover for that which they went into office desiring to do.

I am beginning to feel as though I awoke into a country where the Monty Python crew is running our internal security forces--the CIA, the FBI, etc.
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The Worst Thing in the World

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I have been working for a long time now on just how to register my agony from what the Bush administration did to this country when they sanctioned torture. My every attempt to date has been less than satisfactory to me.

Jeff Fecke at Alas, a blog has succeeded where I have failed.

• Once, we prided ourselves on being better than our enemies. It was not just idle boasting; the fact that America did not have the gulag system, did not disappear political enemies, did not torture its citizens or its enemies — these were not just signs that we were good people, but they were part of our national belief in our inherent moral superiority. Americans didn’t torture, we said, because we didn’t need to torture.
• We didn’t condone torture. It wasn’t just wrong; it was un-American.
• But in the past eight years, we now know, America abandoned that once-cherished belief. We stopped being a nation that would never stoop to torture, and started looking for ways to rationalize torture so that we could call it something else.
• And today [16 April 2009] we found out that we used psychological forms of torment.
• But while these memos don’t tell us anything new — well, not exactly — they do remind us of just what the previous administration thought of our national soul.
• There are worse things that can happen to a nation than being attacked. The destruction that occurred on September 11, 2001 was awful, but it was transient; it was an awful moment in time, but it was just a moment in time. But in our reaction to it, our thoughtless invasion of Iraq, our shredding of civil liberties, and our embrace of torture methods perfected by our erstwhile enemies in the U.S.S.R. — by these actions, we lost a bit of what it was to be America. We lost a bit of our soul.
• I will always despise George W. Bush and his cronies for that; they stained the very soul of this nation. May God have mercy on our souls for not stopping them, and may we find the strength to do what must be done to prevent this from happening again — and if that means prosecuting the bastards, that’s what we have to do.

We should have been forewarned. But most of us did not look, did not listen. George Bush always liked torture.

• In 1967, a Yale Daily News article exposed hazing traditions that make the stories of contemporary initiation rites seem like a mere weeklong frat party. "Pledge week at DKE this fall began with a food fight," the article stated, "and ended with a hot branding iron applied to the small of each pledge's back." The article, stating that beatings and hot coat hangers bent in a "D" shape were routine parts of DKE initiation, led to a story in The New York Times a week later, in which President George W. Bush '68, a former DKE president, defended his fraternity's practices.

I read 1984 in my early teen years in the late 1950's. I KNEW that America did not do this. I breathed a sigh of relief upon finishing my trip to Oceana. I was safe. This would never be my country. I was wrong.

And so it seems that no matter whether we just go on or whether we set in motion some sort of justice for those at the top who instituted the torture, we lose. Prosecuting Bush, Cheney, Rice, Gonzales, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Jay Bybee, et al, may make us feel better, but it will never erase the terrible, terrible stain, the very stench of what they did to and in the name of this country.

Don't get me wrong. I yearn for GW to stand before the bar. I crave seeing Cheney, Gonzales, Rich, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Jay Bybee, et al, join him there. I want it to be clear that in this country, truly, no matter how high you sit, you must not injure this country. And they did. I want that made perfectly clear. I want it to never happen again.

However, at the very least, if we are NOT going to prosecute Bush administration members, we SHOULD pardon those soldiers who have already been convicted of actually carrying out the orders from higher ups. Trust me those soldiers never packed for Iraq by putting dog collars and leases into their bags: some one furnished those items and instructed the soldiers in how to use them to humiliate and intimidate the Iraqis.

What a continued, ongoing mess. Sad, sad.
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All of the Above

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Over at Slate, Doonesbury is running a straw poll on President's biggest fiasco. Here are the choices:

THE IRAQ WAR. The lead on his obit. Conceived in obsession, sold with lies, executed with stunning incompetence, our unprovoked dismantling of a nation, killing tens of thousands, driving millions from their homes, torturing suspects, squandering global goodwill, handing Al Qaeda a new front, is a widening stain on American honor, one that will take generations to remove. KATRINA. Why clueless cronies in critical positions are a bad idea. Hard to pick a favorite moment of callousness. Barbara Bush telling the Superdome inhabitants how good they had it was breath-taking, but the iconic shot of Bush touring the drowning city at 30,000 feet said it best. Heckuva job, Junior. THE ECONOMY. Endless tax cuts for the rich, skyrocketing deficits, a weakening dollar, unconscionable lack of regulation. Unfortunately, you go into a depression with the economy you have, not the one you wish you still had. By the way, the entire world blames us for the mess. No pass for Clinton, but this was on your watch. Pretty well sums it up. Short, pithy, to the point. Not a word wasted. Too bad I can only vote for one. Whatever happened to "All of the above" as a choice? 20 January 2009 can not come soon enough. I so want Bush 43 out of our collective faces. Too bad he's going to Dallas (complete with gates across the street, paid for by you and me) and not the wilds of Crawford where there is less visibility. Take one more whack at the ugly little troll: Go vote.