By Hume's Ghost
Let me start by saying that I do not begrudge those who are celebrating al-Zarqawi's death the right to take solace in it. They believe that his death signals a victory in Iraq and/or against terrorism and that this will help achieve peace in Iraq. That is an admirable thing to be happy about. I hope they are correct. But since a number of figures in the media have taken to using Zarqawi's death as the latest means of playing "gotcha" with their political opponents, I'd like to take a moment to explain why I do not celebrate al-Zarqawi's death.
First, as an example of the "gotcha" and celebrating that I'm talking about, consider this video, compliments of Michelle Malkin, who says that "it drives the Left mad." For the sake of argument we will assume here that "the Left" means anyone who does not share Mrs. Malkin's exuberance over the death of al-Zarqawi.
Al-Zarqawi's death does not drive me mad. Nor do the reports that this is good news in Iraq drive me mad. In fact, I hope that this is true and the chaos and misery in Iraq will lessen as a consequence. And neither does the video drive me mad. But it does unsettle me, yet this has nothing to do with my "poubt[ing]" for partisan reasons.
The following reasons are why the video unsettles me.
1) As a matter of principle, I do not believe the act of killing another human is in itself ever something to be celebrated; I do not celebrate death. If the death of al-Zarqawi means that there will be less death and horror in Iraq as a result, then that is what we are to celebrate. Al-Zarqawi's death is but a means to that end and it is important to draw the distinction between his death and the consequences of that death, otherwise we dehumanize ourselves, we become desensitized to the act of killing, which should always be a solemn affair. "Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster" and what not.
2) In the video you will notice that President Bush says that Al-Zarqawi has been brought to justice. He has not been brought to justice, he was killed. This may have been, and for all I know, most probably was the only way to stop the horrors being committed by al-Zarqawi, but killing him has nothing to do with justice. Bringing him to justice would have meant having him stand trial for his crimes against humanity, holding him accountable before a court of law. That is the concept of justice that the civilized world has adopted. The other is punitive and vengeful - the Biblical conception of justice - and we know that for much of time that the Biblical conception of justice dominated Western society, society was not just, but unjust.
3) I am weary of the claim that Zarqawi's death means that the killing and chaos in Iraq will subside as a consequence. While al-Zarqawi is responsible for some of the most heinous acts of barbarity in Iraq, it is estimated that his attacks only represent ten percent of the total number of attacks in the country, and that his importance to the insurgency has been exaggerated. [source]
So I do not feel that celebrating is in order so long as death and mayhem in Iraq persists. I believe it calls for cautious optimism, but that there is nothing to celebrate until peace has been brought to the region. And even then it will be a time for reflection upon the cost upon which that peace was bought. Which leads me to the next point.
4) There is a point raised in that video by Eric Alterman that goes unaddressed. Before the invasion of Iraq the United States had the opportunity to take out al-Zarqawi but chose not to because it was felt that eliminating him would undermine the case for invading Iraq. In essence, it was more important to be able to achieve a war with Iraq, as an adjunct of the "war on terror," than it was to stop al-Zarqawi.
With that in mind, I believe that consideration of the cost that the "victory" of al-Zarqawi's death was purchased is pertinent to whether or not this is something worth celebrating.
I consider the following the costs of achieving al-Zarqawi's death now, as opposed to before the invasion of Iraq:
- World opinion turned against the United States
- The legitimacy of the UN and international law was undermined by the invasion, making it more likely that other nations might also adopt the principle of unilateral preventative strikes.
- We have departed from fifty plus years of diplomacy where collective security was the emphasis. The go-it alone attitude we have adopted shifts the burden of global security onto ourselves, forcing us to devote more resources towards the military while diverting those resources away from other societal needs.
- As a concomitant of the above three points, the US has squandered the opportunity that the overwhealming support and sympathy the world offered the US in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks provided. The goodwill and sentiment could have been used to push for greater international efforts to secure lose nuclear materials ( such as Russia's) so that terrorists will not have easy access to the material in the first place.
- The invasion of an oil rich Middle Eastern country with troop commitments until at least 2009 reinforces Muslims worst fears about the US.
- Our military has been "stretched thin" by simultaneous deployments in Iraq and Afhganistan (also see here).
- The war in Iraq has cost over 200 billon dollars, and the final costs could end up at around a trillion dollars, at a time when we are projected for a ten year trillion dollar deficit.
- Global terrorist activity has increased since the invasion.
- The invasion turned Iraq into the "global center of suicide terrorism."
- The invasion generated terrorists.
- While our attention and resources have been diverted to Iraq, a nation that had no nuclear program, both North Korea and Iran have moved forward on their actual nuclear programs.
- The coast guard has gone underfunded, and our borders and ports remain unsecure.
- 2,708 soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq, and "at least 18,254 U.S. troops have been wounded in action." A conservative estimate of the number of Iraqi dead is a little over 38,000.
These are the reasons I do not celebrate al-Zarqawi's death. I am glad that he is gone, I hope that his death will signal a turning point in Iraq, and I hope that this will help bring an end to the insurgency. But I do not feel that celebrating is in order. And that is what unsettles me about the video and the game of "gotcha." It is glib, insulting, and petty over a matter that should not be partisan.
Well thought out. A viewpoint I can agree with wholeheartedly.
ReplyDeleteYou make a lot of valid points and express quite well the feeling I have had at the pit of my stomach each time I hear people celebrating Zarqawi's death- simply because it is a celebration of death.
ReplyDeleteYou seem to be hinting at an idea which I've had lately. Namely, that Bush intentionally manufactured this conflict in order that he could affirm his own identity as a "War President," as a "Commander in Chief," an identity which (he believes) gave him the power to control the affairs of Americans and subvert laws and democracy to push his own agenda.
Your suggestion that he didn't initially kill or capture Zarqawi before the Iraq war because this would discredit his push for war simply reaffirms this idea.
It's really troubling, because without a doubt, it seems to be that if he was truly concerned about terrorism and hitting it at its root level, and being able to claim for the US some moral authority over the brutal tactics of these terrorists, he would've taken Zarqawi a long time ago (not to mention upheld international law on torture, military excursions on foreign countries, etc.) After all, this is the one area in which his supporters claim he has some real strength: fighting terrorism. But it seems that he NEEDS terrorism.
Do you agree?
Ah yes, as the Israelis have now demonstrated for 39 years, killing the leaders of your enemies is an extremely effective way to disarm them, demoralize them, and drive them to the negotiation table for their abject surrender to be accepted.
ReplyDelete/snark
"In the video you will notice that President Bush says that Al-Zarqawi has been brought to justice. He has not been brought to justice, he was killed."
ReplyDeleteNote that this is part and parcel with gw's dictatorial power grab. "Justice" can't POSSIBLY have anything to do with the judiciary for gw - that's contra his unitary executive fanaticism.
Rather, "justice" can only mean to gw the only thing it can mean to the *executive* generally: killing. That's the power the executive has - and if the executive does it, it must be "justice".
well said. I wish we had trustworthy and honorable leaders and commentators.
ReplyDeleteAt least there are a few sane people left...
cdj,
ReplyDeleteGood point. If the courts try to promote "justice," that's just judicial activism.
"Do you agree?"
ReplyDeleteI try to speculate about the President's motivations as little as possible. I do not think he gives such matter the reflection necessary for him to have developed the overt plans suggested.
I largely agree with your post, but I have to cavil at this remark: "As a matter of principle, I do not believe the act of killing another human is in itself ever something to be celebrated; I do not celebrate death."
ReplyDeleteHaving seen some of the beheading videos, I can't pretend not to be happy that this vicious criminal is dead (and I feel this way without any strong belief that, in the long run, his death will do much good for the wretched people of Iraq). If I'm happy about his demise (and I am), I can't very well condemn anyone for celebrating his death.
To put the point more bluntly: it's not celebrating death itself to rejoice at some deaths. If the concept of desert means anything at all (a debatable point, I know), some deaths are richly deserved; and I think it's wrongheaded squeamishness rather than a sign of virtue to fret about them.
And to think that the US gave this thug a bigger playground to play in by invading Iraq... Anyone wonder what Bush and Zarqawi will talk about in Hell? No doubt, Z will thank W for the publicity, the bigger sandbox, and the chance to play big with al-Q.
ReplyDeleteWayne Madsen (waynemadsenreport.com) states that the identity was confirmed by his "tattoos," but Muslims do not tattoo themselves due to it being forbidden in the Quran. This may not be him after all, which implies another lie.
ReplyDeleteIt don't think it particularly behooves the left to point out that he could have been killed before, etc. My response is, well, good, a bad guy has been killed, but to what effect? I guess time will tell.
ReplyDeleteIt will be unfortunate if it turns out that his death gives us false reason to stay longer.
Progressives are called pacifists because they oppose THIS war. But any intelligent person who cares about other human beings does not go to war lightly, and certainly doesn't go to war under false pretenses.
ReplyDeleteLet's get this straight—these guys have no empathy for other human beings; it has been erased by their emotional attachment to killing. They care about the troops rhetorically, but were okay that they had insufficient body armor. They care about the flag, but not the Constitution or the actual ideals of our country.
Zarqawi was a terrible man; the world is better off without him. But the next time the warmongering right talks about how they are on the side of life, and progressives are on the side of death...well, it's time to play the video...
I tend to agree, but with a few added objections.
ReplyDeleteAccording to some of the reports, we had a well trained special service force in the area. Why didn't we use it to capture Zarqawi instead of dropping precision guided weapons? Seems to me that capturing him and his aides would have provided us with more serious intel than we will ever collect from the burnt pieces of flesh being now retrieved from the site. You would also think that our intel guys would find the entire computer systems that Z and his aides had in possession far more useful than scattered fragments.
Something doesn't quite add up. Which leads me to think that there were political factors involved, just as when Bush first rejected the idea of killing Zarqawi back in 2002 because Z's presence in Iraq made the case for invasion more favorable...
There is no justice in a war based on lies for the benefit of the military-industrial complex (of which the oil industry is a major component).
ReplyDeleteCelebrating one symbolic death enables the lie that that our "mission is accomplished."
The only "mission" that has been accomplished is the wholesale looting of the federal treasury to enrich a few, bancrupt the federal government, and force extreme fiscal measures for future generations.
Social Security, for example, is as good as gone - the wreck of the "great deciders" budgets will allow politicians on both sides to proclaim that we can no longer afford to take care of Americans.
Unreported: The Zarqawi Invitation
ReplyDeleteBy Greg Palast
They got him - the big, bad, beheading berserker in Iraq. But, something's gone unreported in all the glee over getting Zarqawi - who invited him into Iraq in the first place?
If you prefer your fairy tales unsoiled by facts, read no further. If you want the uncomfortable truth, begin with this: A phone call to Baghdad to Saddam's Palace on the night of April 21, 2003. It was Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on a secure line from Washington to General Jay Garner.
The General had arrives in Baghdad just hours before to take charge of the newly occupied nation. The message from Rumsfeld was not a heartwarming welcome. Rummy told Garner, Don't unpack, Jack - you're fired.
What had Garner done? The many-starred general had been sent by the President himself to take charge of a deeply dangerous mission. Iraq was tense but relatively peaceful. Garner's job was to keep the peace and bring democracy.
Unfortunately for the general, he took the President at his word. But the general was wrong. "Peace" and "Democracy" were the slogans.
"My preference," Garner told me in his understated manner, "was to put the Iraqis in charge as soon as we can and do it in some form of elections."
But elections were not in The Plan.
The Plan was a 101-page document to guide the long-term future of the land we'd just conquered. There was nothing in it about democracy or elections or safety. There was, rather, a detailed schedule for selling off "all [Iraq's] state assets" - and Iraq, that's just about everything - "especially," said The Plan, "the oil and supporting industries." Especially the oil.
There was more than oil to sell off. The Plan included the sale of Iraq's banks, and weirdly, changing it's copyright laws and other odd items that made the plan look less like a program for Iraq to get on its feet than a program for corporate looting of the nation's assets. (And indeed, we discovered at BBC, behind many of the odder elements - copyright and tax code changes - was the hand of lobbyist Jack Abramoff's associate Grover Norquist.)
But Garner didn't think much of The Plan, he told me when we met a year later in Washington. He had other things on his mind. "You prevent epidemics, you start the food distribution program to prevent famine."
Seizing title and ownership of Iraq's oil fields was not on Garner's must-do list. He let that be known to Washington. "I don't think [Iraqis] need to go by the U.S. plan, I think that what we need to do is set an Iraqi government that represents the freely elected will of the people." He added, "It's their country, their oil."
Apparently, the Secretary of Defense disagreed. So did lobbyist Norquist. And Garner incurred their fury by getting carried away with the "democracy" idea: he called for quick elections - within 90 days of the taking of Baghdad.
But Garner's 90-days-to-elections commitment ran straight into the oil sell-off program. Annex D of the plan indicated that would take at least 270 days - at least 9 months.
Worse, Garner was brokering a truce between Sunnis, Shias and Kurds. They were about to begin what Garner called a "Big Tent" meeting to hammer out the details and set the election date. He figured he had 90 days to get it done before the factions started slitting each other's throats.
But a quick election would mean the end of the state-asset sell-off plan: An Iraqi-controlled government would never go along with what would certainly amount to foreign corporations swallowing their entire economy. Especially the oil. Garner had spent years in Iraq, in charge of the Northern Kurdish zone and knew Iraqis well. He was certain that an asset-and-oil grab, "privatizations," would cause a sensitive population to take up the gun. "That's just one fight you don't want to take on right now."
But that's just the fight the neo-cons at Defense wanted. And in Rumsfeld's replacement for Garner, they had a man itching for the fight. Paul Bremer III had no experience on the ground in Iraq, but he had one unbeatable credential that Garner lacked: Bremer had served as Managing Director of Kissinger and Associates.
In April 2003, Bremer instituted democracy Bush style: he canceled elections and appointed the entire government himself. Two months later, Bremer ordered a halt to all municipal elections including the crucial vote to Shia seeking to select a mayor in the city of Najaf. The front-runner, moderate Shia Asad Sultan Abu Gilal warned, "If they don't give us freedom, what will we do? We have patience, but not for long." Local Shias formed the "Mahdi Army," and within a year, provoked by Bremer's shutting their paper, attacked and killed 21 U.S. soldiers.
The insurgency had begun. But Bremer's job was hardly over. There were Sunnis to go after. He issued "Order Number One: De-Ba'athification." In effect, this became "De-Sunni-fication."
Saddam's generals, mostly Sunnis, who had, we learned, secretly collaborated with the US invasion and now expected their reward found themselves hunted and arrested. Falah Aljibury, an Iraqi-born US resident who helped with the pre-invasion brokering, told me, "U.S. forces imprisoned all those we named as political leaders," who stopped Iraq's army from firing on U.S. troops.
Aljibury's main concern was that busting Iraqi collaborators and Ba'athist big shots was a gift "to the Wahabis," by which he meant the foreign insurgents, who now gained experienced military commanders, Sunnis, who now had no choice but to fight the US-installed regime or face arrest, ruin or death. They would soon link up with the Sunni-defending Wahabi, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was committed to destroying "Shia snakes."
And the oil fields? It was, Aljibury noted, when word got out about the plans to sell off the oil fields (thanks to loose lips of the US-appointed oil minister) that pipelines began to blow. Although he had been at the center of planning for invasion, Aljibury now saw the greed-crazed grab for the oil fields as the fuel for a civil war that would rip his country to pieces:
"Insurgents," he said, "and those who wanted to destabilize a new Iraq have used this as means of saying, 'Look, you're losing your country. You're losing your leadership. You're losing all of your resources to a bunch of wealthy people. A bunch of billionaires in the world want to take you over and make your life miserable.' And we saw an increase in the bombing of oil facilities, pipelines, of course, built on - built on the premise that privatization [of oil] is coming."
General Garner, watching the insurgency unfold from the occupation authority's provocations, told me, in his understated manner, "I'm a believer that you don't want to end the day with more enemies than you started with."
But you can't have a war president without a war. And you can't have a war without enemies. "Bring 'em on," our Commander-in-Chief said. And Zarqawi answered the call.
Iraqi Raises Questions on al-Zarqawi Death
The Associated Press
Baghdad - US officials have altered their account of the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, saying he was alive and partly conscious after bombs destroyed his hideout, and an Iraqi man raised fresh questions about the events surrounding the end of Iraq's most-wanted militant.
The man, who lived near the scene of the bombing, told AP Television News on Friday that he saw US soldiers beating an injured man resembling al-Zarqawi until blood flowed from the victim's nose...
If one considers that we went to Iraq becasue of a perceived threat to the US from WMD's
ReplyDeleteWhat, are you kidding me?
Sure wish folks would quite the endless speculation about the chimperor's motives - fact is, this psychobabble is just bullshit that does nothing to promote change.
ReplyDeleteIt also provides a distraction from what is really going on. THIS WAR BASED ON LIES HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE CHARACTER DEFECTS OF ANY INDIVIDUALZ!
The chimporer may proclaim to be the "decider" but he is just the man that stands in front of us while the neocons push their agenda on the world.
Talking about our opinions about whatever flaws exist in the personalities of bush will not change who is actually promoting idiots like him into symbolic positions to divert attention from those that really call the shots.
Please don't continue to protect the architects of this administration - the smirking chimp is merely a tool.
It will be unfortunate if it turns out that his death gives us false reason to stay longer.
ReplyDeleteI hope he’s wrong, but that’s exactly what Nir Rosen, who has done some excellent reporting from there thinks, he is most pessimistic.
No, it is not even a good omen, it is an ominous omen.
So time to dispel some myths. Zarqawi did not really belong to al Qaeda. He would have been more shocked than anybody when Colin Powel spoke before the United Nations in the propaganda build up to the war and mentioned Zarqawi publicly for the first time, accusing him of being the link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Zarqawi in fact did not get along with Bin Ladin when he met him years earlier…
Zarqawi only went down into Iraq proper when the Americans liberated it for him. He had nothing to do with al Qaeda until December 2004, when he renamed his organization Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, or Al Qaeda in Iraq as it has become known.
We in the media are often pilloried for only reporting "the bad news" in Iraq. But there is no good news. Its too dangerous to even tell you how bad things really are, but they are worse than what you see on the media, not better. The insurgency is passe, Iraq is about the civil war, chaos, anarchy, random and deliberate violence everywhere. And it is spreading throughout the region. Instead of stabilizing the Middle East, the US war in Iraq is tearing it apart, destabilizing it, reviving radical Islam and jihadism and giving a bad name to reform and democracy….
In short, Rosen says that Zarqwi’s death simply means that more will flock to Iraq to replace him and avenge his death. Is this what we want? Is that what our military wants? Is that what our troops want?
Sadly, and insanely, that’s exactly what our troll wants, “The strategy was to engage al Qaeda where they live and al Qaeda wanted the same thing. We obliged and are slaughtering them in Iraq.”
So, according to this sort of fascistic freeper thinking, the more recruits Zarqwi’s deaths brings to Iraq, the better. No wonder we’re building permanent bases and continuing to fund them – despite a unanimous public vote to stop this funding.
There’s good reason for pessimism.
In 2003 it was announced that Garner had been selected to lead the post-war reconstruction efforts in Iraq. He was regarded as a natural choice by the Bush administration given his earlier similar role in the north. Garner began reconstruction efforts in March 2003 with plans aiming for Iraqis to hold elections within 90 days and for the U.S. to quickly pull troops out of the cities to a desert base. He was replaced in his role by Paul Bremer, the Managing Director of Kissinger and Associates, on May 11th, 2003.
ReplyDeleteIt has been suggested that Garner was moved aside because he did not agree with Washington Neo-Conservatives about who should decide how to reconstruct Iraq. He wanted early elections - 90 days after the fall of Iraq, and the new government to decide how to run the country and what to do with their assets. The neo-conservative plan was to start the selling off of the countries assets including Iraq’s large oil assets and holding elections later. Garners responded to this by saying "I don't think [Iraqis] need to go by the U.S. plan, I think that what we need to do is set an Iraqi government that represents the freely elected will of the people. It's their country… their oil.” [1]
Anonymous said...
ReplyDeleteProgressives are called pacifists because they oppose THIS war.
No one confuses progressives with pacifists, except the neocons who conflate anyone opposed to permanent war on any false pretext all the time with pacifists. progressives and liberals have done more "liberating" and spread more democracy than any other political ideology on the planet. Ask the British Crown or the Confederate south. They are the true "bringers of it on". They just do it after the war has been declared on them on false pretenses, like with the Nazis and their fascist counterparts in Italy and Japan and their ideological heirs apparent, the American neocons.
Your tone of "cautious optimism" shows way too much deference to the wingnut propaganda fantasy.
ReplyDeleteI'll concede "agreeable astonishment" on that fine day killing Zarqawi appears to have had the remotest effect on the course of Iraq's civil war under permanent US occupation.
Now that it's Shiite death squad versus Sunni death squad, a real War on Terror would require taking out the Shia, the Sunnis, and bombing the US, starting with the White House. The idea of victory in the context of a war of competing death squads is psychotic and we need to stop helping the wingers pretend it is even intelligible, let alone applicable.
Not to put too fine a point on it, WE are the bad guys in this situation.
ReplyDeleteWE violated international law by invading a non-threatening sovereign nation.
WE initiated a war based on lies.
WE have held thousands of innocent Iraqis in notorious Abu Ghraib prison, (and elsewhere), where WE have abused them, (by means worse than we have seen, as the worst photographic and video evidence has been witheld from us).
WE have killed thousands of innocent Iraqis, both as "collateral damage" to our bombing sorties, and in firefights on the ground, and no doubt in Haditha-like massacres.
WE have destroyed Iraq's physical infrastructure, and have poisoned the environment with our use of depleted uranimum shells.
WE have robbed the country blind--(and as well as squandering the taxpayers' money, much of IT also stolen by corporate plunderers in Iraq such as Halliburton).
WE have violated the Nuremburg standard, and all those in our government involved in planning or prosecuting this war are war criminals, aided and abetted by the craven co-conspirators in Congress who voted to authorize use of force in Iraq.
"Justice" will be done when WE are repelled from the country by the Iraqis, a defeated imperialistic invading force.
"Justice" will be done when all those in our command structure responsible are tried, convicted, and sentenced to hard time in prison.
(Ain't it funny, by the way, how Li'l Butch loves to assert, over and over, that HE is the "Commander in Chief," yet when asked about drawing down, or increasing, troop strength on the ground, or any other such acts as the Commander in Chief might conceivably be considered to have thoughts about, he has NO answers but, "When the generals in the field tell me blah blah blah, we'll do it." Well, wouldn't the Commander in Chief be presumed to have his OWN thoughts on strategy and tactics, not always dependent on what his generals in the field might suggest? After all, by definition, isn't that what a Commander in Chief IS? And those generals in the field who suggest needs contrary to what Li'l Butch and Big DICK prefer are quickly cashiered. So, Li'l Butch's comments must be seen as pure horseshit, as has been every other aspect of his term in office, including the idea he was legitimately elected in either race.)
zack (responding to another post): It will be unfortunate if it turns out that his death gives us false reason to stay longer.
ReplyDeleteI hope he’s wrong, but that’s exactly what Nir Rosen, who has done some excellent reporting from there thinks, he is most pessimistic.
Is there anyone who really believes that the US will leave Iraq soon at all? Jimmy Carter said the US will be there for 50 years. Gary Hart reiterated this estimate the other day. There is no intention to leave Iraq--by either Reps or Dems (except Murtha and Feingold). I am sorry to rain on anyone's parade, but the US is in this for a long haul.
C.L.,
ReplyDeleteThe LA Times reports that
Congressional Republicans killed a provision in an Iraq war funding bill that would have put the United States on record against the permanent basing of U.S. military facilities in that country, a lawmaker and congressional aides said Friday.
$21 Bilion Missing - Who's
ReplyDeleteFollowing The Iraq Money?
By Dave Lindorff
During the days of the Nixon Watergate scandal investigation, reporter Bob Woodword was famously advised by his mysterious source, Deep Throat, to "follow the money" as a way of cracking the story.
Well, there is a lot of money to follow in the current scandal that can be best described as the Bush/Cheney administration, and so far, nobody's doing it.
My bet for the place that needs the most following is the more than $9 billion that has gone missing without a trace in Iraq--as well as $12 billion in cash that the Pentagon flew into Iraq straight from Federal Reserve vaults via military transports, and for which there has been little or no accounting.
When word of the missing money first surfaced in 2004, Congress passed legislation creating an office of Special Inspector General, assuming that this new agency would root out the problem and figure why all that taxpayer money had disappeared, and why only minimal reconstruction was going on in destroyed Iraq, instead of a massive rebuilding program as intended.
The new inspector general, an affable attorney named Stuart Bowen, went to work and came up with a report in early 2006 that sounded scathing enough. Bowen found cases of double billing by contractors, of payments for work that was never done, and other scandals. But he never came up with more than $1 billion or so worth of problems.
Now we know why.
It turns out that Bowen was never really looking very hard.
When the Boston Globe, this past April, broke the story that President Bush has been quietly setting aside over 750 acts passed by Congress, claiming he has the authority as "unitary executive" and as commander in chief to ignore such laws, it turned out that one of the laws the president chose to ignore was the one establishing the special inspector general post for Iraq. What the president did was write a so-called "signing statement" on the side (unpublicized of course), saying that the new inspector general would have no authority to investigate any contracts or corruption issues involving the Pentagon.
Well, since most of the missing money has been going to the military in Iraq, that pretty much meant nothing of consequence would be discovered by the inspector general.
You might think that the inspector general himself would have complained about such a restriction on his authority to do the job that Congress had intended, but Bush took care of that. In his role as Chief Executive, he appointed Bowen to the post, a man who has a long history of working as a loyal manservant to the president. Bowen was a deputy general counsel for Governor Bush (meaning he was an assistant to the ever solicitous solicitor Alberto Gonzales). He did yeoman service to Bush as a member of the term that handled the famous vote count atrocity in Florida in the November 2000 election, and then worked under Gonzales again in the White House during Bush's first term, before returning briefly to private practice.
Bowen simply never mentioned to anyone that, courtesy of a secretive and unconstitutional order from the president, he was not doing the job that Congress had intended.
The deception was far-reaching. When Thomas Gimble, the acting inspector general of the Pentagon, was asked in 2005 during a congressional hearing by Christopher Shays (R-CT), chair of the House government reform subcommittee, why the Pentagon had no audit team in Iraq to look for fraud, Gimble facilely replied that such a team was "not needed" because Congress had set up the special inspector general unit to do that. He didn't mention that the president had barred the special inspector general from investigating Pentagon scandals.
This would all be pretty funny except for two things.
First of all, Americans and Iraqis are dying in droves because of the chaos that the U.S. invasion and occupation have created in Iraq-a problem that that $9 billion in missing Congressionally-allocated funds, and the bales of US dollars, were supposed to have solved.
Second, and I admit this is pretty speculative on my part, money being like water, it tends to flow to the lowest level, which, from a moral and ethical standpoint, would be the Bush/Cheney administration and the Republican Party machine that put them, and the do-nothing Congress that covers up for them, into office.
My guess is that a fair piece of those many billions of dollars is sloshing around back in the U.S. paying for things like Republican Party electoral dirty tricks, vote theft, bribing of Democratic members of Congress, and god knows what else.
If this seems far-fetched to anyone, remember that this administration has included a number of people who were linked to the Reagan-era Iran-Contra scandal, when the creative-and criminal-idea was conceived of secretly selling Pentagon stocks of shoulder-fired Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to Iran, and using the proceeds to secretly fund the U.S.-trained and organized Contra fighters who were fighting to topple the Sandinista government in Nicaragua (Congress had inconveniently banned any U.S. aid to the Contras).
It seems to me inconceivable that this corrupt and obsessively power-mad administration would have passed up an opportunity to get its hands on some of the easy money flowing into Iraq over the course of the last three years.
Given all this, it seems almost unfathomable that Democratic Party leaders would be insisting, as have Rep. Nancy Pelosi (R-CA) and Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), Democratic leaders of the House and Senate, that there would be no impeachment hearings in Congress if Democrats were to succeed in winning back Congress this November.
What better way to follow that money than an impeachment hearing into why the president unconstitutionally subverted the intent of Congress in establishing an office of special inspector general for corruption in Iraq?
Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of CounterPunch columns titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press. Lindorff's new book is "The Case for Impeachment", co-authored by Barbara Olshansky.
http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff06072006.html
"Sorry Ghost, but I'm not buying the 'resistance is futile' attitude"
ReplyDeleteNeither am I. My attitude is that the way the administration has confronted terrorism is disastrous, incompetent, and counter productive.
What you present here is the false dichotomy options that defenders of the administration always presetn - either support teh President, regardless of how ineffective he might be, or do nothing.
Sour grapes indeed!
ReplyDeleteHere's another video for you.
Democraps will get obliterated in November.
Shooter 242 said, "Like WW2 the President decided that entering the war was prudent, even though we had not been attacked ourselves."
ReplyDeleteExcept...we HAD been attacked, by Japan, and days later, on Dec. 11, 1941, GERMANY declared war against America.
It's not as if we had any choice in the matter at that point.
You're correct, killing Al-Zarqawi earlier would likely have had little overall mitigating effect on the violence and chaos which was unleashed by our criminal invasion of Iraq and our accompanying destruction of their physical and civic infrastructure. The point is, Al-Zarqawi was always a minor player, but he was used by Li'L Butch and Big DICK as a rhetorical device to amplify fears of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Had they killed or captured Al-Zarqawi earlier, they would have erased one of their claims to an Iraqi "connection" to 9/11 (via its agents). They decided against acting against Al-Zarqawi earlier precisely to preserve one of their several bogus claims to a necessity to attack Iraq.
Now, if we HAD believed Al Zarqawi to have been truly a serious threat to us, a major player against us, and if we had successfully acted against him then, and we consequently could not adequately arouse support for our illegal invasion (an unlikely consequence, I believe), and therefore had never destroyed Iraq, in THAT instance his earlier death WOULD have reduced significantly the deaths, maimings, chaos and destruction in Iraq which has flowed from our crimes.
The most disturbing thing about the death of Zarqawi is the matted and framed snuff photograph that was displayed all over the media. Matted! and Framed! Think about what that says about us and how we "celebrate."
ReplyDeleteHere is an excellent article at Consortium News which discusses Al Zarqawi and the overselling of the terrorist threat by Li'l Butch and Big DICK:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/060806.html
Zarqawi: A Bogeyman Made by the US
ReplyDeleteby Brendan O'Neill
So Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the man, is dead. Maybe now we can finally kill off the myth too. The myth is that Zarqawi, a Jordanian jihadist who had moved his operations to Iraq in recent years, was one of the greatest threats to Western civilization, who had single-handedly been hampering progress in Iraq and spreading terror around the globe. In fact, Zarqawi was an isolated and fairly insignificant insurgent – or at least he had been, until American and British officials decided to transform him into an all-purpose bogeyman and brand him the most evil man in the world. In the process, they handed him fame and notoriety on a platter, and turned this nobody into a headline-grabbing terrorist. Make no mistake: Zarqawi was a creation of Western propagandists.
Zarqawi came a long way over the past three years. Until January 2003 he was a mysterious figure, described by the CIA as a "lone wolf." He was known as an Islamic fundamentalist from Jordan who had travelled to Afghanistan to fight against the Soviet-backed regime at the tail-end of the Eighties. During the Nineties he was apparently fixated on toppling the "infidel" Jordanian monarchy, and was imprisoned in Jordan for seven years. He was reportedly injured in America’s war in Afghanistan in 2002, and later fled to northern Iraq to seek shelter with the radical Islamist outfit Ansar al-Islam. He is believed to have moved down to Iraq proper some time after the Coalition’s major combat operations came to an end – in mid-2003 perhaps – with an eye for taking on Coalition forces and stirring up some trouble. In short, he wasn’t that different from many other jihadists who travel around looking for opportunities to fight the infidels.
Yet now, a mere three years after moving into Coalition-occupied Iraq, Zarqawi has become the most infamous insurgent of all, with his death hailed as a great victory not only for Iraqis but for the entire world. Washington had described him as "the most wanted man in Iraq" and there was a $25 million bounty on his head – the same as that offered for info that leads to the capture of Osama bin Laden. Indeed, Zarqawi seemed to elbow bin Laden aside in recent years, to become, in the words of Newsweek in 2004, "the world’s most dangerous terrorist." Many governments around the world were "scared to death of him," reported Newsweek. He was even accused of wanting to "foment civil war in Iraq," as if one man could push an entire nation into sectarian strife and bloodshed. The photos of his corpse are beamed around the world, to prove that this great evil has finally been vanquished and that we can all sleep peacefully in our beds once again.
How do we explain Zarqawi’s meteoric rise between 2003 and 2006? How did he go from being a "lone wolf" hitching a ride from one war-torn hotspot to another to become an international household name? It was not any strength of numbers or vision on Zarqawi’s part that elevated him to this position – yes, he had proved himself willing to organize gruesome beheadings and bloody car bombings, but he remained a fairly minor figure in the Iraqi insurgency and he had little support on the ground. Rather, it was American and British officials who transformed him into evil incarnate, because they desperately needed a bogeyman to rail against as their venture in Iraq started to go horribly wrong. In short, Zarqawi played a role written for him by Western propagandists.
According to a report in the Washington Post on 3 October 2004, Zarqawi was "barely known outside Jordan until a year and a half ago" – or, to be more precise, until February 2003. It was then US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations on 5 February 2003, six weeks before the start of the Iraq war, which first brought Zarqawi to the world’s attention. In a speech which, as we now know, contained a lot of see-through nonsense about Iraq’s WMD, Powell cited Zarqawi’s presence in northern Iraq, where he was said to be training and advising Ansar al-Islam, and his alleged trip to Baghdad in May 2002 for medical treatment on his injured leg, as evidence of "a sinister nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaeda network." This followed a televised address by President Bush four months earlier, on 7 October 2002, in which Bush referred to a "very senior al-Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year."
Powell’s speech catapulted Zarqawi, that mysterious lone wolf, on to the international stage. He was indeed "barely known" before it. He rarely, if ever, featured in news reports in late 2001 or in 2002, a time when al-Qaeda was being written about on a daily basis. Take the Guardian newspaper: he was not mentioned in the Guardian at all in 2001 and only twice in 2002 – both times after Bush’s 7 October address. There is no mention of Zarqawi in the online archives of BBC News for 2001 or 2002. Yet after Powell’s speech Zarqawi started to become a talking point. He was mentioned in 23 articles in the Guardian in 2003, and in 50 articles published by BBC News in 2003. The turning point from being a "barely known" to becoming a notorious figure came courtesy of Bush and Powell.
From the very outset, Zarqawi’s power and influence were exaggerated by US officials. You would think, listening to Bush and Powell’s statements in 2002 and 2003, that Zarqawi was influential inside both al-Qaeda and Saddam’s Iraq, so much so that he personified the "sinister nexus" between them. We now know that was nonsense. There was no nexus, sinister or otherwise, between al-Qaeda and the Ba’athists. At that time, Zarqawi’s links with al-Qaeda were tenuous at best, and there is no evidence that he had any links whatsoever with Saddam’s regime. According to Jason Burke, author of the 2003 book Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror, Zarqawi may have had "some contact with bin Laden but [he] never took the bayat [oath of allegiance] and never made any formal alliance with the Saudi or his close associates. He was just one of thousands of activists committed to jihad living and working in Afghanistan in the 1990s." Burke says Zarqawi had "no real relationship with al-Qaeda."
Powell’s evidence that Zarqawi was associated with the Ba’athists was based on the fact that he had been present in northern Iraq since 2002 and had popped down to Baghdad for some kind of medical treatment. Yet northern Iraq is territory that had been wrested from Saddam’s control by the United Nations following the first Gulf War in 1991 and turned into a "safe haven" for Iraqi Kurds. And Ansar al-Islam, the group that Zarqawi joined, was vehemently opposed to Ba’athist socialism. If anything, Zarqawi, like bin Laden, would have been decidedly anti-Saddam rather than being in any way associated with him.
Western officials also claimed that Zarqawi was developing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Powell said in February 2003 that "one of the specialities of [Zarqawi’s camp in northern Iraq] is poisons…. He is teaching operatives how to produce ricin and other poisons." When Coalition forces destroyed the Ansar al-Islam camps in northern Iraq on 30 March 2003, the front page of the British tabloid newspaper The Sun said "PROOF: an Iraqi terror camp making ricin poison has been smashed by a huge Allied blitz." Again the claims were unfounded. Reporters visiting the camps in the days after the attacks said there was "no evidence of chemical weapons having been used or stored here." One US official later admitted that he was "unaware that any WMD have been found."
What we can see is that Coalition officials desperate to find some justification for their war constantly turned to Zarqawi. First, they labelled him "the link" between al-Qaeda and Saddam, in a bid to depict their war in Iraq as some kind of payback for the events of 9/11. In fact, Zarqawi had nothing to do with Saddam and was only vaguely linked to al-Qaeda at that time. Second, they spread rumors that Zarqawi was making chemical weapons in northern Iraq in an attempt to justify their decision to invade on the basis of the threat posed by WMD. In truth, there is no evidence that Zarqawi was developing chemicals or any other substances of mass destruction during his time in northern Iraq. By constantly talking up the role of Zarqawi, US officials elevated this loner hiding out in northern Iraq into something he wasn’t: an international player, a terrorist with unprecedented reach, the embodiment of evil. It is perhaps not surprising that Zarqawi decided to venture into central Iraq in 2003 to exercise these new powers granted to him by the Coalition.
Even when Zarqawi did start fighting in Iraq from 2003 onwards, during which time he did some very grisly things indeed, the Coalition exaggerated his role. Where US and UK officials described him as the main "barrier to peace" in Iraq, one study by Sami Ramadani, a refugee from Saddam’s Iraq and a senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University, found that out of thousands of attacks launched by Iraqi insurgents only a small minority were carried out in the name of Zarqawi. Ramadani also found that "the vast majority of Iraqis reject Zarqawi and his ilk."
Now both Bush and Blair make grand statements to the world’s press about finally ridding the world of the wicked Zarqawi, yet a year and a half ago, at the end of 2004, US agents in Iraq admitted that they may have helped to promote Zarqawi by blowing his campaign out of proportion and falsely claiming that he was the top dog of the insurgency. One told the Australian newspaper The Age: "We were basically paying up to $10,000 a time to opportunists, criminals and chances who passed off fiction and supposition about Zarqawi as cast-iron fact, making him out as the linchpin of just about every attack in Iraq." The agent went on to say: "We have to conclude that Zarqawi is more myth than man."
It was the Coalition that created this myth. In talking up Zarqawi’s threat they not only distorted the facts but also inflamed and encouraged his violent campaign. They created a role for Zarqawi as Evil Terrorist Mastermind and he was more than happy to play along. As Loretta Napoleoni, author of Insurgent Iraq: al-Zarqawi and the New Generation, has argued, Zarqawi turned America’s myth into a reality: "From a small-town bully, to a small-fry jihadist, to the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, he fully exploited the legend woven around his person. While back in February 2003 he was an insignificant jihadist, [by 2005 he had become] the undisputed most-wanted terror leader."
Zarqawi’s terror campaign was a self-fulfilling prophecy. In 2003, US politicians handpicked this insignificant jihadist and labelled him a terror leader – and sure enough, he later became a terror leader. Also in 2003 they said he was a leading figure in al-Qaeda – no he wasn’t, though he later became one when bin Laden appointed him leader of "Al-Qaeda in Iraq" in 2004. Throughout 2004 and 2005, Western officials and journalists exaggerated his role in the Iraqi insurgency and hinted that he was behind every attack – that no doubt flattered Zarqawi’s sense of power and encouraged him to continue his campaign. Coalition leaders described Zarqawi as evil – and he played up to that by releasing videos of himself beheading American hostage Nick Berg. At every stage, Zarqawi was acting out the perverse propaganda fantasies of the Coalition itself. As Napoleoni put it: "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi fulfilled the prophecy expressed years earlier by the Jordanian authorities, the Kurdish secret service, and the US government: he turned the myth into a chilling reality."
The final stage in the Zarqawi drama is his death. It has been hailed by Coalition officials as a great day for democracy and a great step forward for Iraq. Not many people will shed a tear for the bloody murderer Zarqawi – but just as we should put his jihadist antics while he was alive in to perspective, so we should view his death in perspective too. He was not the cause of instability and anti-democracy in Iraq, and his death will not make a great deal of difference. Zarqawi was a bogeyman of the Coalition’s making. Now that he’s gone, can we please have a proper debate about the impact of the war and occupation on Iraqi society?
"I'm all ears"
ReplyDeleteCould have fooled me. Since I suggested several things we could have done differently.
1. Don't invade countries that have nothing to do with al Qaeda or nuclear weapons, creating the terrorist capitol of the world in the process.
2. Fund coast guard, spend resources on port and border security.
3. Use international diplomacy to secure lose nuclear materials so that nuclear material does not fall into hands of a terrorist.
4. This is the part where I really have a hard time believing your all ears, Iran and North Korea. I listed those specifically as two things that should have been greater priorities than Iraq.
Those are just starters. See Graham Allison's Nuclear Terrorism for more ideas of what should have been done after 9/11 in regards to proliferation.
And you said the UN wanted Saddam to remain in power in the first Gulf War. The US decided to leave him in power.
"A new regime [in Iraq] would have become the United States' responsibility. Conceivably, this would have led the United States into a more or less permanent occupation of a country that could not govern itself, but where the rule of a foreign occupier would be increasingly resented" - Paul Wolfowitz (1997), on why the US did not remove Saddam during the Gulf War
shooter242, bart and davidbyron recycle the same god damn arguments in the comments section of every single new post.
ReplyDeleteBut since a number of figures in the media have taken to using Zarqawi's death as the latest means of playing "gotcha" with their political opponents, I'd like to take a moment to explain why I do not celebrate al-Zarqawi's death.
ReplyDeleteThe gotchya concerns the comments of too many on the left arguing that the death of Zarqawi is somehow a bad thing, that the killing was a Bush conspiracy to make himself look good or the nonsense argued by some here that Bush had Zarqawi located and targeted for bombing before the liberation of Iraq.
These comments were unsolicited and very revealing of the thinking of the commentators.
1) As a matter of principle, I do not believe the act of killing another human is in itself ever something to be celebrated; I do not celebrate death.
Fair enough, I can respect that. You are the first one of Mr. Bush's opponents that I have read to make this humanist argument.
2) In the video you will notice that President Bush says that Al-Zarqawi has been brought to justice. He has not been brought to justice, he was killed.
Here we differ.
A jury trial is a means of determining whether the facts prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime was committed. The justice is delivered through the sentence.
There is no doubt that Zarqawi is guilty of mass murder. He bragged about his killings and even starred in a video tape sawing off the head of Nick Berg while he was screaming. His termination with extreme prejudice was far more justice than Zarqawi deserved. His true justice will be delivered when he meets Allah.
3) I am weary of the claim that Zarqawi's death means that the killing and chaos in Iraq will subside as a consequence. While al-Zarqawi is responsible for some of the most heinous acts of barbarity in Iraq, it is estimated that his attacks only represent ten percent of the total number of attacks in the country, and that his importance to the insurgency has been exaggerated. [source]
The majority of the murders of Iraqi civilian non-combatants over the past couple years are from suicide bombings. The perps are foreign Arab sunni jihadis recruited by al Qaeda. The Iraqis have always strenuously denied engaging in suicide bombings and there is no evidence they did so.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5257052
There are two possible results we need to look for.
First, whether al Qaeda is able to replace Zarqawi and maintain its past tempo of operations.
Next, whether the Iraqi sunni who were intimidated by Zarqawi's assassination campaign against Suni who joined the government will continue the migration to the government.
4) There is a point raised in that video by Eric Alterman that goes unaddressed. Before the invasion of Iraq the United States had the opportunity to take out al-Zarqawi but chose not to because it was felt that eliminating him would undermine the case for invading Iraq.
This is a filthy lie.
The CIA source for this story only states that we knew that Zarqawi had set up an al Insar / al Qaeda camp in Iraq and that we declined to bomb it because we were negotiating with France to get them on board the liberation.
Unlike all the times we identified the location of bin Laden in Afghanistan and the declined to send in bombers standing by, there is absolutely no evidence that we ever located Zarqawi before the war with the kind of specificity that would allow us to have kill him. We bombed the al Qaeda camp just after the war started and then a number of safe houses and missed him for over two years before we finally cornered him.
Just lobbing some cruise missiles at an al Qaeda camp in Iraq was no more likely to kill Zarqawi than lobbing cruise missiles at the al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan took out any of the al Qeada leaders then.
Forensic specialists to examine al-Zarqawi
ReplyDeleteBy PATRICK QUINN, Associated Press Writer Sat Jun 10, 7:34 PM ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq - The U.S. military flew in two forensic specialists Saturday to examine the remains of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi "to see how he actually died" and to reconstruct the last minutes of his life, a spokesman said.
The examination comes after U.S. authorities altered their initial account of the al-Qaida leader's death, first saying he died outright in a U.S. airstrike, then saying he survived but died soon after.
Also, an Iraqi man raised fresh questions, telling Associated Press Television News that he saw U.S. soldiers beating an injured man resembling al-Zarqawi until blood flowed from his nose....
The Iraqi, identified only as Mohammed, said he lives near the house where al-Zarqawi was killed. He said residents put a bearded man in an ambulance before U.S. forces arrived.
"When the Americans arrived they took him out of the ambulance, they beat him on his stomach and wrapped his head with his dishdasha, then they stomped on his stomach and his chest until he died and blood came out of his nose," Mohammed said, without saying how he knew the man was dead.
A dishdasha is a traditional Arab robe.
A similar account in The Washington Post identified the man as Ahmed Mohammed.
Disseminating this kind of enemy propaganda is why the military loathes the press and why jumping to conclusions about Haditha based on similar reports is incredibly irresponsible at the least.
i think the point we should all be taking from this is it really is as bad as we are hearing it is over there. After all of the turned corners, and all of the purple fingers, and all the democracy, it is still a war zone.
ReplyDeleteHad we been able to catch him and try him in court, we could have shown it was an improving situation. Instead, if you contrast this with Saddam's capture, it shows that the country has gotten worse over there. No longer can you send a group to catch him, you have to drop 1,000 pounds of explosives on him. Instead of capturing that scum bag, we blew up the house he was in, and anyone else that happened to be there or walking by. We started the war dropping bombs on a suspected safehouse for saddam, then captured him alive, now we're back to dropping bombs instead of catching him. So much for "westernizing" and "democratizing."
C. Shyler wrote:
ReplyDelete"Having seen some of the beheading videos, I can't pretend not to be happy that this vicious criminal is dead (and I feel this way without any strong belief that, in the long run, his death will do much good for the wretched people of Iraq). If I'm happy about his demise (and I am), I can't very well condemn anyone for celebrating his death."
I agree with Hume's Ghost - there is no celebration in another's death.
This distinction deserves to be addressed: there may be celebration in what that death means.
It just came to my attention that "the airstrike also killed his spiritual adviser, two men, two women and a girl estimated between the ages of 5 and 7"
ReplyDeleteIf for nothing else, that little girl's death would give me pause before I would do any celebrating.
Gee, ghost, if you won't celebrate, what should we do with your piece of cake and the funny party hat and noisemaker?
ReplyDeleteYou know, if we decided that instead of bombing him, we should capture him and bring him before a court of law, it's not like there's any shortage of evidence. Moreover, if we did that, we wouldn't have provided much of the extremist world with another "martyr". Nor would Fidel Castro be able to come out and rightly decry the "atrocity" of bombing someone and declaring it to be "justice".
ReplyDeleteBut Bush, and many Americans, seem to believe that because we are on the "good" side, we have a right to use the most violent means at our disposal even if there are other means which comply with our system of law and standards of humanity. But no. The point I'm making is that this type of "war on terror" seems to have at its goal not the antithesis of terror, namely peace, but rather the spreading of American terror to stop Muslim Jihadi terror.
This incident and the glee it has incited in many cuts to the heart of the deep flaws that will prevent our War on Terror from ever achieving any vestige of peace.
1. Our leaders help create these monsters.
ReplyDelete2. Our soldiers are sent to break them.
3. Oorah!
4. Rinse and Repeat.
You know, if we decided that instead of bombing him, we should capture him and bring him before a court of law, it's not like there's any shortage of evidence.
ReplyDeleteYou must be refering to the overwhelming evidence that must exist about the war criminals that started this crime against the civilized world in the first place.
No wonder they had to kill him - heaven forbid any truth or "evidence" gets out. Our great decider would be prosecuted for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Of course, he would still get away with stealing 2 US Presidential elections.
You must be refering to the overwhelming evidence that must exist about the war criminals that started this crime against the civilized world in the first place.
ReplyDeleteObviously it's true that Bush's war is illegal and there is strong evidence that he and his administration have broken innumerable laws regarding wiretapping, torture, etc. And obviously I'm not surprised that we simply took the bombing approach, considering that the administration has nothing but contempt for the rule of law.
As for your point though, I don't think it would undermine Bush's credibility if he actually put a known terrorist who comes out and declares as much on video on trial for his crimes. I'm just talking about what we always have a moral responsibility to do, and how America can (though it doesn't) assume moral authority over terrorists: bring them to trial. Not just moral leverage but positive practical consequences can come from this, as I mentioned: less martyrs and more international respect.
Not that I actually expect the US to change course and act in its own interests in an intelligent way any time soon.
glue m: You know, if we decided that instead of bombing him, we should capture him and bring him before a court of law, it's not like there's any shortage of evidence....
ReplyDeleteI just finished watching a show on the Nazi guerillas, the Wehrwuflen, during which the trials of Nazi generals and staff were described. If America could afford to put these men on trial, why not Zqrqawi? Wouldn't that serve a purpose--eg, the strength of the US system of justice?
So many points so little time.
ReplyDeleteAZ personally sawed peoples heads where they screamed for minutes as the blade sliced back and forth. He purposely tried to kill as many Iraqi women and children as possible for propoganda purposes. I notice none of the body counts on this blog count the deaths caused by AZ.And you are sad because he didn't go to trial??? You don't think justice was served to him by catching a 500 lb. bomb in the face?
Then you go through a litany of bogus lies. The war was not illegal, we had tons of UN resolutions, congress gave it's blessing.
Do you think $200 billion is worth it to establish democracy in the middle east?
Having civilians die is the worst part of war yet the death rate is lower than when Saddam was killing them off.
Admit, what you are afraid of is that Bush was right.
Going to war in Iraq removed Saddam, took the battle to radical Islam to a country in its belly of the beast and has inflicted massive damage to al-quaeda. Libya turned over its nukes. Sucess in Iraq will topple Iran and its fundamentalism.
The fact that you took the time and effort to write why you won't celebrate the death of AZ puts you square in the Pete Stark/Kucinich camp.
You simply don't want to celebrate the death of an enemy of an America you now hate. You hate Bush so bad you that can't even bring yourself to acknowledge that AZ's death should be celebrated.
And yet you wonder why this is partisan??? Look in the mirror.
Once again the "major" says, "I eat glue paste and I love the taste!"
ReplyDeleteHint, people don't lie when they disagree with you. They lie when the y deliberately skew the truth for personal gain.
People rarely rebel because of charistmatic leaders. The rebel because of living conditions.
If you are placed in the situation that the US has placed the majority of Iraqis, you too mr "major" would be an insurgent.
"Anonymous said...
ReplyDeleteSo many points so little time."
So many invalid points in such a short post.
Starting with UN resolutions - those were UN resolutions contemplating actions by the UN. They were not UN Reward posters offering a prize to the first country to take over Iraq. Read the resolutions on Iraq, look at the wording. After all the edits they go through, the wording is obviously important, so pay attention to the words they use, not the ones you think back your case. (you're also doing a good job illustrating recent criticism from the UN about US right wingers bashing the UN, then using the UN)
Secondly, "Libya turned over its nukes." Nukes, as in nuclear weapons? Nope, wrong, big wrong, not what they turned over. And as a follow up, Libya is not a democratic country. It is one lead by a dictator. I thought we were changing things, not dealing with all them "bad guys," bring freedom? Normalizing relations with Libya was a big slap in the face to the victims of Pan Am 93 and to our troops who's lives are on the line bringing democracy to Iraq.
bart said...
ReplyDeleteThe gotchya concerns the comments of too many on the left arguing that the death of Zarqawi is somehow a bad thing, that the killing was a Bush conspiracy to make himself look good or the nonsense argued by some here that Bush had Zarqawi located and targeted for bombing before the liberation of Iraq.
There has been nothing good to come from of the Bush presidency. The best thing to come from this entire clusterfuck shall be the end of conservatism and the GOP for many decades, when scumbags like you die out.
Anonymous said...
ReplyDeleteSo many points so little time.
AZ personally sawed peoples heads where they screamed for minutes as the blade sliced back and forth. He purposely tried to kill as many Iraqi women and children as possible for propoganda purposes...
All that and worse was done against the civillian population by a U.S. Army Platoon from the 101st Airborne's 1st battalion/327th Infantry Regiment designated as Tiger Force in Vietnam, but an actual war hero, John Kerry, was excoriated and insulted for mentioning it. Imagine that.
You neglected to mention the hundreds (possibly thousands) of lives that were ended as a direct or indirect result of Zarqawi not having been taken out before the invasion. In that sense, the blood of all those who could have been spared forever stains Bush's hands.
ReplyDeleteRNC Chairman Ken Mehlman, whose committee has seen a 10 percent fundraising drop, compared with 2004, said Internet fundraising has allowed Democrats to reach a new group of liberal donors and narrow the GOP's edge with individuals. But he said his party still holds a solid financial lead because of money raised by state parties.
ReplyDeleteStill, the trends at the national level are diminishing what in past years has been a powerful GOP asset: the ability to overpower opponents with expensive television advertising and voter-mobilization campaigns in House and Senate races.
Good-bye and good riddance.
anonymous:
ReplyDeleteRNC Chairman Ken Mehlman, whose committee has seen a 10 percent fundraising drop, compared with 2004, said Internet fundraising has allowed Democrats to reach a new group of liberal donors and narrow the GOP's edge with individuals. But he said his party still holds a solid financial lead because of money raised by state parties.
You mean like the corporate money that DeLay was laundering through the party?
Cheers,
I always wondered what happened to the guy who made David Hasselhoff's "Hooked On a Feeling" video.
ReplyDeleteBart said:
ReplyDelete"4) There is a point raised in that video by Eric Alterman that goes unaddressed. Before the invasion of Iraq the United States had the opportunity to take out al-Zarqawi but chose not to because it was felt that eliminating him would undermine the case for invading Iraq.
This is a filthy lie.
The CIA source for this story only states that we knew that Zarqawi had set up an al Insar / al Qaeda camp in Iraq and that we declined to bomb it because we were negotiating with France to get them on board the liberation.
Unlike all the times we identified the location of bin Laden in Afghanistan and the declined to send in bombers standing by, there is absolutely no evidence that we ever located Zarqawi before the war with the kind of specificity that would allow us to have kill him."
Dissembling again Bart. Here is the report:
ZARQAWI STORY CONFIRMED....Two years ago, Jim Miklaszewski of NBC News reported that a few months after 9/11 the Pentagon drafted multiple plans to hit the camp of Abu Musab Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda terrorist who had taken up residence in Iraq's northern no-fly zone, outside Saddam Hussein's control. George Bush, however, refused to authorize a military strike.
I've written about this multiple times (I used to jokingly call it my "monthly Zarqawi post"), but Miklaszewski's story always had a big problem: it was based on anonymous sources, which made it easy for the White House to ignore. Today, however, the Australian show Four Corners has gotten confirmation of the story from Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit:
HE TOLD FOUR CORNERS THAT DURING 2002, THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION RECEIVED DETAILED INTELLIGENCE ABOUT ZARQAWI'S TRAINING CAMP IN IRAQI KURDISTAN
...."Almost every day we sent a package to the White House that had OVERHEAD IMAGRY OF THE HOUSE HE WAS STAYING IN. It was a terrorist training camp...experimenting with ricin and anthrax...any collateral damage there would have been terrorists."
This is a filthy lie….
ReplyDeletethere is absolutely no evidence that we ever located Zarqawi before the war with the kind of specificity that would allow us to have kill him.
I see our troll is calling the Pentagon and our military officials filthy liars again. If he doesn’t like the facts, he calls them a “lie” – but he doesn’t provide any evidence to back that up.
In effect, he’s claiming that the Pentagon was repeatedly drawing up plans to bomb locations without any evidence – can he prove they had “no evidence” ? No, he can’t.
Does he provide such evidence? No, he doesn’t.
According to NBC:
“Military officials insist their case for attacking Zarqawi’s operation was airtight, but the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.”
Where is our troll’s evidence that these military officials are lying? Can he back up his claims that what they said is a “filthy lie”?
And just how does some angry little freeper have better intelligence on this matter than the Pentagon and our military officials?
Shooter242 said...
ReplyDelete"* This would be the Murtha "stretched thin" line. The war was won in short order, this about nation building. PS. the Army has met it's recruiting goals for a year at least."
If it weren't for you and Bart we wouldn't have any comic relief at all on this Blog.
The regular Army signed up 5,806 new recruits last month, compared with its target of 5,400, and the Army National Guard and Army Reserve also exceeded their May goals, according to statistics released by the Pentagon.
Nonetheless, eight months into its budget year, the active Army is barely beyond the halfway mark of recruiting its goal of 80,000 new soldiers. Through May it had signed up 42,859, meaning that in the final four months of the period it will have to enlist an average of nearly 9,300 per month to reach the 80,000 target.
Last year, the only month the active Army came close to signing up 9,300 in a single month was August, when it got 9,452.
If you shove half your recruiting goal for the year into the last four months, lowering them for the previous eight, then I guess you could claim that you have met your goals.
The US intelligence apparatus has created it own terrorist organizations. And at the same time, it creates its own terrorist warnings concerning the terrorist organizations which it has itself created. In turn, it has developed a cohesive multibillion dollar counterterrorism program "to go after" these terrorist organizations.
ReplyDeleteCounterterrorism and war propaganda are intertwined. The propaganda apparatus feeds disinformation into the news chain. The terror warnings must appear to be "genuine". The objective is to present the terror groups as "enemies of America."
The underlying objective is to galvanize public opinion in support of America's war agenda.
The "war on terrorism" requires a humanitarian mandate. The war on terrorism is presented as a "Just War", which is to be fought on moral grounds "to redress a wrong suffered."
The Just War theory defines "good" and "evil." It concretely portrays and personifies the terrorist leaders as "evil individuals".
Several prominent American intellectuals and antiwar activists, who stand firmly opposed to the Bush administration, are nonetheless supporters of the Just War theory: "We are against war in all its forms but we support the campaign against international terrorism."
To reach its foreign policy objectives, the images of terrorism must remain vivid in the minds of the citizens, who are constantly reminded of the terrorist threat.
The propaganda campaign presents the portraits of the leaders behind the terror network. In other words, at the level of what constitutes an "advertising" campaign, "it gives a face to terror." The "war on terrorism" rests on the creation of one or more evil bogeymen, the terror leaders, Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, et al, whose names and photos are presented ad nauseam in daily news reports.
Thought I had heard it all till I read the following this morning concerning the detainees at Gitmo and why they can't challenge the charges against them:
ReplyDelete"Gen. John Craddock, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, said in the conference call that the three had left suicide notes, but refused to disclose the contents.
One of the detainees was a mid- or high-level al-Qaida operative, Harris said, while another had been captured in Afghanistan and participated in a riot at a prison there. The third belonged to a splinter group.
SOME OF THE EVIDENCE AGAINST DETAINEES IS CLASSIFIED, SO THEY ARE NOT PERMITTED TO KNOW OF IT, AND ARE THUS UNABLE TO CHALLENGE IT."
Great post, Ghost. I am not saying I am in line with it, but I always like seeing your thoughts. Despite the conspiracy-laden, "Bush lied", "war-was-illegal" comments section that you have going on.
ReplyDeletenuf said asked about the bounty. The Zarqawi aide who gave us the info to find him is in custody himself, and will not be getting the bounty. Sorry.
There will be more deaths. There will be more innocent deaths. But the killing of Zarqawi is great news - better than a capture and trial.
Wulf said...
ReplyDelete"Great post, Ghost. I am not saying I am in line with it, but I always like seeing your thoughts. Despite the conspiracy-laden, "Bush lied", "war-was-illegal" comments section that you have going on."
"During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003," read the Times, "Bush made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr. Blair's top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by the New York Times."
"The memo indicates the two leaders envisioned a quick victory and a transition to a new Iraqi government that would be complicated, but manageable," continued the Times report. "Mr. Bush predicted that it was 'unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups.' Mr. Blair agreed with that assessment. The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein."
Quite a nifty trick for an Average Joe, yes? This was from the same regular fella who ever-so-earnestly told journalist Helen Thomas last week that he didn't want war, because no president wants war. Here we have merely another lie, an accent in a symphony of lies. If Bush did not want war, why decide upon an attack despite the absence of the public motivator for attack, the weapons of mass destruction? Why try to goad Hussein into a fight?
From shooter242 at 7:16PM:
ReplyDelete"This argument goes nowhere but to gratuitous griping."
Agreed, but please confine your own comments to addressing the original post, *not* your own comment.
From shooter242 at 8:28PM:
ReplyDelete"This is just absurd." Followed by the usual laundry list of nonsense typed up by spider monkeys and dictated by a bed-wetter.
"The reality of current life is that we live in a time when one person with a WMD can cripple a country, and the world's largest religion has plenty of people that are willing to do it. No matter what we do to appease them."
I hate to break it to you, but that's been the 'reality' for the last 30-plus years since the development of Alpha Units ('suitcase nukes'). The fact no-one has previously been insane enough to try to use them, or simply successful in acquiring or employing them, doesn't change the fact this has been a genuine if remote scenario long before 9/11 (which I remind you was accomplished with purely conventional weaponry).
"Therein lies the problem, we would have to throw Israel overboard and become Muslims ourselves, just to begin. But even that wouldn't guarantee anything as witnessed by sectarian killings."
Or we could actually behave as a civilized nation might and actually try convincing the rest of the world we don't seek planetary hegemony through military conquest. But that would involve considerably more thought and ability than your comment and the current Administration has demonstrated to date.
"Sorry Ghost, but I'm not buying the "resistance is futile" attitude."
You really need to learn how to read, old chap. No-one's quoting the Borg here, merely presenting a more grounded and realistic attitude than yourself.
From davidbyron at 8:29PM:
ReplyDelete"What happened to the so-called "reality based" community? There's just no attempt whatsoever to stick to the truth."
You're already in said community; sorry if the scenery isn't to your liking. You can always go off and create your own.
As to 'the truth', I'd love to hear what you object to in this post.
steve pointed out at 11:12PM:
ReplyDelete"shooter242, bart and davidbyron recycle the same god damn arguments in the comments section of every single new post."
True, but its also so darned fun to call them on it and keep demolishing their 'arguments'. Cathardic even. Better than a five-minute hate.
"Does the US government ever lie? Not in Hume's Ghost's world."
ReplyDeleteMy god, you're a twit.
Dave Neiwert wrote a post yesterday about an article Craig Unger has written for Vanity Fair which makes the case that the Niger documents were part of a psy-ops war targeted at the American public, where Mr. Neiwert concludes that it's up to the blogosphere to discuss this because the mainstream media seems incapable of deviating from the idea that the Bush administration was anything but the victims of good intentions and bad intelligence.
At this point, the evidence that U.S. citizens were victims of a massive campaign of deception to sell a war with Iraq is incontrovertible ( for those who are dubious of this claim, I plan on making this case in a post at some point this week.) Neiwert makes a key point about the threat that the infiltration of fake news represents to democracy.
Hey, who wrote that?
You know, there's something admirable, even *heroic* about the fact shooter242, Bart, and the rest persist in holding and advocating positions that have proven either discredited or argued against.
ReplyDeleteBut then there was plenty of heroism shown by the Bolsheviks when they invaded Poland in 1919, and look how *that* turned out.
That said, shooter242's reponse to Hume's Ghost above shows the sort of absolutist thinking that has prompted the Iraqi expedition three years ago. One wonders if he doesn't have a simple "positive/negagtive" switch in his brain. The rest of us recognize the world is a bit more complex.
I'll let HG speak for himself.
Perhaps you've forgotten that this is exactly what we thought Iraq was about? We didn't invade Guatemala. Do I need to list all the Dem quotes about WMD's and terrorism from 1998 issued to support their bombing?
ReplyDeleteThe evidence for wmd's was bad. It was always bad. Thousands and thousands of people had to die because of the faulty case presented for invading and a servile media not putting forth the effort to point out the case for invasion was made out of swiss cheese.
Guatemala? Are you sure you want to use that as an example?
Do you think we spent 14 months at the UN trying to convince them to join the effort because it was a sham?
Yes, actually. The leaked Downing memos indicate that. Peter Singer had already argued persuasively that going to the UN was a sham, independent of any leaked revelations.
I'm also in favor of rounding up loose nukes.
Look into the Allison book.
Excuse me? They had already been taken care of. At least according to liberal prescription.
Nice. Kind of a heads I win, tails you lose argument, you've got there. Whatever the "liberal presecription" was, my contention that they were priorties that needed addressing is unaffected by that. Neither is the contention that our involvement in Iraq puts us at a disadvantage at dealing with both N. Korea and IRan.
The US bent to the UN request
See Rise of the Vulcans by James Mann and look at the section on the Gulf War. That will answer your questions and explain Wolfowitz.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteGris Lobo
ReplyDeleteBart said:
"4) There is a point raised in that video by Eric Alterman that goes unaddressed. Before the invasion of Iraq the United States had the opportunity to take out al-Zarqawi but chose not to because it was felt that eliminating him would undermine the case for invading Iraq.
This is a filthy lie.
The CIA source for this story only states that we knew that Zarqawi had set up an al Insar / al Qaeda camp in Iraq and that we declined to bomb it because we were negotiating with France to get them on board the liberation.
Unlike all the times we identified the location of bin Laden in Afghanistan and the declined to send in bombers standing by, there is absolutely no evidence that we ever located Zarqawi before the war with the kind of specificity that would allow us to have kill him."
Gris: HE TOLD FOUR CORNERS THAT DURING 2002, THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION RECEIVED DETAILED INTELLIGENCE ABOUT ZARQAWI'S TRAINING CAMP IN IRAQI KURDISTAN
Which part of we located the camp but not the person of Zarqawi did you not understand?
Hume's Ghost said...
ReplyDeleteIt just came to my attention that "the airstrike also killed his spiritual adviser, two men, two women and a girl estimated between the ages of 5 and 7"
If for nothing else, that little girl's death would give me pause before I would do any celebrating.
I feel sorry for the girl who was brought into this by Zarqawi or his subordinates.
As for the rest of the al Qaeda, the more the merrier. Based on materials captured at this house, we rolled up another 26 al Qaeda and their bomb factories within hours.
Anonymous said...
ReplyDeleteThis is a filthy lie….
there is absolutely no evidence that we ever located Zarqawi before the war with the kind of specificity that would allow us to have kill him.
I see our troll is calling the Pentagon and our military officials filthy liars again. If he doesn’t like the facts, he calls them a “lie” – but he doesn’t provide any evidence to back that up.
I never said that at all. Let's take a look at what you have...
According to NBC:
“Military officials insist their case for attacking Zarqawi’s operation was airtight, but the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.”
Can he back up his claims that what they said is a “filthy lie”?
In posted that we had identified the camp. I also posted that we had held off attacking that camp.
The filthy lie is that we had identified the person of Zarqawi and did not kill him in a bombing strike when we could have ala Clinton's refusal to kill bin Laden in Afghanistan.
There is no evidence whatsoever the Zarqawi was ever personally located and then we called off a bombing strike.
That is a filthy lie and an intentional misrepresentation of the NBC sources.
Shooter- While Bush has been president North Korea has made 5 or 6 nuclear bombs while we continue to refuse direct negotiations with their government. Please tell me how this means that things are going well for us. The Bush administration's diplomats negotiated away any leverage with India's continuing development program for more nuclear bombs by giving them a free pass on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Please tell me how this means that things are going well for us. We continue to ignore the fact that Pakistan and Israel both have ongoing nuclear bomb programs. Please tell me how this means that things are going well for us. The Qaddhafi dictatorship in Libya (remember when he was the new Hitler?) turned over some rusty outdated nuclear machinery for lots of economic aid and diplomatic recognition for one of the few countries in the world that has actually been convicted of international terrorism so the Bush administration could have a talking point. Please tell me how this means that things are going well for us. The guys running this adventure are corporate shills who have gamed the system so much here in the USA, i.e. Enron, Halliburton et al, that they think of themselves as brilliant negotiators. They can't negotiate worth crap. We are in deep doodoo as witnessed by our 'successes' in Iraq that you so proudly regurgitate. You, bart and all the war loving apologists... what a pathetic bunch of losers you all are. The bully boys' best friends.
ReplyDeleteShooter 242 said, "The truth of the matter is that everybody including Joe Wilson expected to find WMD's."
ReplyDeleteThis is false.
I, for one, didn't think we would find WMD there, and not because I'm unusually brilliant or had any inside dope...I merely listened to and read commentary by the many persons who DID present substantive arguments against the likelihood of Saddam having WMD. Such commentary was drowned out by the barrage of administration lies and propaganda, which was merely repeated without question by the mainstream media, but it was out there for those interested enough to pay attention.
Michael Berg, son killed in Iraq. Running for Congress on the Green Party ticket:
ReplyDeleteFriday, June 9th, 2006
Zarqawi's Death "Another Step in the Endless Cycle of Violence" - Father of Beheaded Iraq Hostage
AMY GOODMAN: We welcome you to Democracy Now!, Michael Berg.
MICHAEL BERG: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you first share your reaction to the reported death of Zarqawi?
MICHAEL BERG: Well, I was not relieved, not comforted by his death. In fact, I was saddened by his death, as I am about any human's death. Zarqawi is not the only one that died if 1,000 pounds of bombs were exploded there. Aside from being a human being and having people that love him that will suffer the same pain that my family and I have suffered, Zarqawi is a political figure. He and George Bush have been playing a volleyball game of revenge for too long now, and this is just another spike in that volleyball game, and it will bring about only more death, more sadness, and it will perpetuate this endless cycle of revenge.
AMY GOODMAN: Michael Berg, do you believe that Zarqawi beheaded your son personally?
MICHAEL BERG: I don't know, and I say that because I have been lied to so many times by the F.B.I., the State Department, and by George Bush -- we've all been lied to by George Bush -- that I neither believe nor disbelieve anything that I hear they said or that I hear them say. So I really can't -- I really don't know. I don't even know if Zarqawi was alive at that time or whether he's been dead for a long time, whether he ever existed.
AMY GOODMAN: Why are you -- why do you have these questions?
MICHAEL BERG: Again, because I've been lied to so many times. I don't believe anything the American government says. I don't believe anything the F.B.I. says. I don't believe anything the State Department says because I have been lied to by them. The F.B.I. came to my house on March 31 and said, “We have your son.” On May the 11th, they denied they have my son. The State Department sent me an email. I still have the original email saying, “your son is being held in a military prison in Iraq.” A couple days later, they said -- a couple of weeks later they said that that was wrong, that he wasn't held in a military prison. George Bush lied to us about weapons of mass destruction. He lied to us about the Al Qaeda presence in Iraq before he destabilized the country, and he lied to us about Iraqi involvement in 9/11. How can I believe anything that any of these people say? The whole thing can be orchestrated. Maybe many people are Zarqawi, maybe not. I don't believe, nor do I disbelieve.
AMY GOODMAN: Michael Berg, if you could go back to that time, because I think for a lot of people, this is perhaps new information. Explain why Nicholas went to Iraq, and then the course of what happened in those months in March and April of exactly what you understood.
MICHAEL BERG: Ok. My son, Nick, went to Iraq. He actually went twice. During his second trip -- and he went there because he believed in the policies of George Bush and because he wanted to help rebuilding the infrastructure of Iraq. He worked on communications towers. He went there legally with all the permits that are required to have -- visas, passports, everything that he was required to have.
He left on his second trip on March 14. On March 24, he was arrested by the Iraqi police, just because he was suspicious. He was suspicious because he was an American that was traveling alone, not with a Halliburton or Bechtel convoy, not with the American military, and he was immediately turned over to the American military police in Mosul. These police, namely Lieutenant Colonel William Kern, decided all on his own that, yes, Nick was suspicious, and he would be held for F.B.I. questioning. The F.B.I. questioned him for 13 days. They deprived him of his right to due process. They wouldn't let him call home and tell his parents, “I'm okay; I'm not dead.” They wouldn't let him have a lawyer. They put him in with Iraqi insurgents who wanted to kill him.
Finally, I filed a writ of habeas corpus on April 5, and he was released the next day, but in the meantime, the events that took place in the Abu Ghraib prison had been revealed and had so inflamed the resistance in Iraq, events happening in Fallujah particularly -- and he was in Fallujah when he was abducted later on -- that Nick could never get home again.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Michael Berg, father of Nicholas Berg, who was captured and beheaded in Iraq in May of 2004. Now, Michael Berg, you are running for Congress on the Green Party ticket from Delaware. Why?
MICHAEL BERG: That's right. Well, when Nick died, I mean, I have been a war resister since 1965, but when Nick died, I took responsibility for the war. That is, I dedicated every moment of my life to doing whatever I can do to ending the war, and the opportunity to run on the Green Party ticket, the Green Party that is the only party that says, "Bring the troops home now, today" as part of its platform. That opportunity seemed to me to be an extension of my ability to speak out against the war, so that's why I did it.
AMY GOODMAN: Why didn't you choose to run within the Democratic Party in Delaware?
MICHAEL BERG: Because I am not in favor of continuing the war for six months or for unlimited time until certain conditions are met. Every twelve minutes, someone dies. Any plan to end the war in more than twelve minutes from right now is irresponsible and immoral, and I don't think that any of our politicians, Joe Biden here in Delaware, or Murtha, or any of them, have the right to say, 'Well, we can stay in the war this much longer.' No, we can't.
AMY GOODMAN: And how do you respond to those who will say that Iraq will descend into a civil war if U.S. soldiers pull out immediately?
MICHAEL BERG: I would ask them to open their eyes and to look at the civil war and the chaos that's going on now. Look at the massacres of people every day that are going on now. How many people died when those bombs fell that got Zarqawi? How many people have died since Zarqawi was killed? Just in retaliation for his death. We're losing ground in Iraq every day. Baghdad is totally out of our control, except for the Green Zone, and it's going to be far worse if we wait another six months, if we wait another year, if we wait another eight years. You know, eight years at the present rate would be 400,000 deaths, 400,000 more deaths. That would be over half a million all together. Is that what we want? Like we did in Vietnam?
If I had had my head sawed off by some superfreak, I would be rather disappointed if my father "forgave" him and bemoaned his death.
ReplyDeleteMichael Berg is a disgrace.
Q: [Do you understand] that the death of innocent civilians is a bad thing for the United States and our current mission there?
ReplyDeleteshooter242 said:
I think you mean the execution of innocent civilians as retribution. Yes, that would be a very bad thing.
I can't speak for the original questioner, but all of a sudden I'm very curious about shooter242's distinction between "the death of innocent civilians" and "the execution of innocent civilians as retribution". Shooter242, do you understand that it means you think that there are certain situations where the death of innocent civilians is NOT a bad thing?
Wow.
shooter242 said:
The fact remains that without invasion we wouldn't know [if Iraq had WMDs].
Without granting your premise, doesn't your statement underline the importance of being right when it comes time to go to war? War is such a costly and ultimately wasteful way to change the state of the world, and yet you shrug off the fact that two of the primary reasons we went to war didn't exist! Why aren't you disturbed and angered by the fact that we went to war on false premises?
Here we have shooter242, unconcerned with certain kinds of civilian death, and unconcerned with being wrong about war. How horrifying that there are Americans like shooter that are so callous about human life and so insecure about their own beliefs that they are willing to defend almost anything in order to avoid admitting to being wrong and consequently changing their beliefs.
"Collateral damage" isn't just a silly euphemism for shooter, it's a way of life.
Eric in Ottawa,
ReplyDelete"Using the sort of argument that we can just kill someone that we know is guilty, because we KNOW they're guilty is undermining the very system of justice that our society is based upon"
When you say "our society", are you talking about Canada, or what?
Anyway, you might be right. The Pentagon sure missed a public relations bonanza when instead of a summons to appear in court, they sent an F-16 to drop a couple of 500-pound satellite guided bombs on this guy.
The initial "evidence" and "witnesses" trumpeted by the press as proving a Marine "massacre" of civilians at Haditha is falling apart under Internet scrutiny...
ReplyDelete> http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=5566
> http://www.sweetness-light.com/archive/time-corrects-its-mistakes-about-haditha
> http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/6/3/111600.shtml?s=ic
> http://michellemalkin.com/archives/005321.htm
The WP deserves kudos for giving front page treatment to the emerging defense against these charges - the Marines were under fire from these houses and cleared them one by one. Our local papers running this WP story off the wire buried it.
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/10/AR2006061001129.html
It will be interesting to see what actual evidence exists when the DoD report comes out.
From Bart at 9:15PM:
ReplyDelete"The initial "evidence" and "witnesses" trumpeted by the press as proving a Marine "massacre" of civilians at Haditha is falling apart under Internet scrutiny..."
Those are your sources? Newsmax? Michelle Malkin?
The Sweetness & Light blog, which equates criticism of Coulter's latest screed with Nazism?
The American Thinker blog, which can't seem to muster a coherent argument on any of its purported 'positions'?
You're not impressing anyone Bart.
You couldn't have said it better. There was no justice in killing al-Zarqawi. Justice means holding a trial to determine innocence or guilt. But bush's idea of "justice" is to assassinate or execute "suspects" without trial.
ReplyDeleteIt demonstrates how low this country has gone. We no longer support the Geneva Conventions, we assassinate people without trial or jury, suspended habeas corpus, kidnap "suspects" and take them to countries that sanction torture. We no longer have a free-press -- they are stenographers for the WH. Meanwhile bush's belief in pre-emptive attacks against nations we do not like fabricates reasons for doing so. How can one be proud of that ?? These are not American values.
Three times bush could have caught al-Zarqawi, but chose not to -- he was merely a thug that rose to prominence beginning with Powell's speech at the UN. After which he became the bogey man. And at every chance Zarqawi was elevated to be more than he was.. Most Iraqis say they do not know him ... never even saw him... and believe he is a myth.
Since his death reporters use the words "terrorist" and al-Qaeda over and over again in referring to the bombings in Iraq. They repeated that there is no new al-Qaeda leader, yet... but the WH could easily exploit that as well. The media is using al-Zarqawi's death to re-write history.
There are no al-Qaeda members (or very few) in Iraq. There is however, a civil war taking place exacerbated by the US occupation. Iraqis are not cheering in the streets; they are more concerned with lack of: security, water, food, money to buy food, safety, so on and so forth.
No there is no joy in the death of someone, not even al--Zarqawi's. If Bush wanted to bring him to justice he should have captured him. That would have been the correct action to take.
BTW: did anyone check to see if al-Zarqawi was wearing a prothesis?
And moreover according to an MSNBC article Zarqawi died in 2004 when militants in Iraq claimed he had been dead for some time: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4446084/
yankeependragon said...
ReplyDeleteFrom Bart at 9:15PM: "The initial "evidence" and "witnesses" trumpeted by the press as proving a Marine "massacre" of civilians at Haditha is falling apart under Internet scrutiny..."
Those are your sources? Newsmax? Michelle Malkin?
The Sweetness & Light blog, which equates criticism of Coulter's latest screed with Nazism?
The American Thinker blog, which can't seem to muster a coherent argument on any of its purported 'positions'?
You're not impressing anyone Bart.
Ah, the usual ad hominem attacks in place of an actual argument.
You didn't even read any of the actual argument, did you?
You didn't follow the links to the variety of retractions by Time magazine and their admission that they were relying upon double hearsay with no corroborating, did you?
You didn't read the Newsmax quotations from a CNN interview with an alleged Iraqi witness where she admitted that she knew the IED was set to explode, did you?
You didn't read how Malkin outed the UK Times for lying that a photo of executed Iraqis was evidence in the Haditha case and how the embarrassed writer apologized for his lying editors, did you?
You didn't read the history of each of the identified Iraqi witnesses misrepresented by the press along with corroborating links, interviews and photographs of the witnesses, did you?
You also probably didn't read the defense presented by the Marines involved, did you?
However, you were more than willing to take the word of that treasonous scumbag Murtha that our Marines had committed a massacre without seeing a single scrap of evidence beyond the BS which Time and the Times are now backing away from.
Tell me what it is about you that allows you to assume automatically that our Marines are guilty of heinous crimes without proof but reject evidence that this charge is enemy propaganda without even reading it?
If the Marines cannot come up with evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that these Marines committed cold blooded murder, will you even feel the least bit guilty for jumping to conclusions?
serena1313 said...
ReplyDeleteYou couldn't have said it better. There was no justice in killing al-Zarqawi. Justice means holding a trial to determine innocence or guilt. But bush's idea of "justice" is to assassinate or execute "suspects" without trial.
It demonstrates how low this country has gone. We no longer support the Geneva Conventions, we assassinate people without trial or jury, suspended habeas corpus, kidnap "suspects" and take them to countries that sanction torture. We no longer have a free-press -- they are stenographers for the WH. Meanwhile bush's belief in pre-emptive attacks against nations we do not like fabricates reasons for doing so. How can one be proud of that ?? These are not American values.
:::shakes head in utter amazement and disbelief:::
Zarqawi is not a criminal defendant, he is an enemy combatant in a war.
This is not an episode of Law and Order. THIS IS A WAR. In a war, you kill the enemy mercilessly until the surrender or there are no more enemy.
There are no al-Qaeda members (or very few) in Iraq. There is however, a civil war taking place exacerbated by the US occupation. Iraqis are not cheering in the streets; they are more concerned with lack of: security, water, food, money to buy food, safety, so on and so forth.
What a load of utter crap.
The vast majority of the murders of innocent Iraqi civilians are the result of suicide bombings of markets, restaurants, mosques and even funerals of those murdered by prior suicide bombings.
al Qaeda brags openly of its suicide bombing mass murder campaign and issues videos and communiques to al Jezeera documenting their heinous war crimes.
The Iraqi Baathists have always denied ever taking part in suicide bombings of Iraqi civilians and there is no proof they did.
The "civil war" which you leftwingnuts wrap yourself around never existed outside of the mind of Zarqawi, who told anyone who would listen that he was murdering Shia to initiate a civil war between the Shia and Sunni. It never happened.
And moreover according to an MSNBC article Zarqawi died in 2004 when militants in Iraq claimed he had been dead for some time: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4446084/
Yup, the US killed Zarqawi in 2004 and kept him in a freezer for two years just so they could fake an attack two years later because..., um just because.
Of course, you would be calling a liar the other enemy source who claimed that the US soldiers kicked Zarqawi to death after the bombing.
Are you truly this deluded?
Hume:
ReplyDeleteConservatives do not have to play "gotchya" in order to generate the kind of moonbat lunacy gracing the thread concerning Zarqawi.
Posters like serena shovel this stuff by the truckload all over the leftist blogosphere.
David,
ReplyDeleteWhat in the world are you talking about? I listed the lower estimate from Iraq Body Count, the "conservative estimate" because its just that. A conservative estimate. I personally believe that number is significantly higher, but that is debateable, so I went went with a nubmer that could not be disputed because a debate over the number of dead Iraqis isn't relevant to the point I was making. I'm sorry I'm not operating from the same absolute certainty over the number of dead that you are. And you've got to be the only person in the world that thinks the people at IBC are racist, possibly conservative, liars.
You're saying things that do not make any sense. For example, I say that I don't think we should celebrate until peace has been achieved. You, operating off your false assumption of blind patriotism for everyone but yourself, interpret that to mean I believe the UN started the war or that I'm in favor of the US occupation, which you believe is buttressed by my statement that the US's unilateral preventative invasion of Iraq undermined the legitimacy of the UN, which you somehow interpret to mean that I'm suggesting the UN sanctioned the invasion, when I'm saying the exact opposite.
Well, people. It's absolutely conclusive.
ReplyDeleteMohammed said he saw something.
NONONONO it's not like his name was "Smith" or "Brown".
The media cleared that up by saying his name was "Ahmed".
Who could see blood coming from his nose while covered up.
Yep, makes sense to me, my fellow libs.
It's certainly a sad statement when you see people so desperately clinging to the original "Mi Lai" style Haditha stories.
ReplyDeleteThe Marines were defending themselves by responding to small arms fire within a small radius surrounding the original IED attack.
Let's see if any of you can tell us where the enemy small arms fire was coming from, if not from one or more of the buildings near the road?
serena1313,
ReplyDelete"There are no al-Qaeda members (or very few) in Iraq. There is however, a civil war taking place exacerbated by the US occupation"
Welcome to the Gump family reunion everybody!
DavidByron said...
ReplyDeleteMakes you wonder why anyone bothers to listen to those idiots who thought there'd be WMDs doesn't it?
The final straw for me was the news that they'd had Saddam's nephew the ex-head of Iraq's WMDs program as a defector for years and trusted his testimony -- but had ommited to mention that testimnoy included the fact that the programs were all closed down shortly after the end of the first war -- just as agreed to in the ceasefire terms.
Based entirely on the unsubstantiated allegations of Hussein Kamal after he allegedly defected to Lebanon, Duelfer too concluded that Saddam destroyed his WMD in 1991 and 1992.
However, Duelfer never found any documents, physical evidence or witnesses to an actual destruction, which would have taken hundreds of personnel and large incinerators.
However, the Kamal account basically fell apart when we captured and translated the audio tape to one of Saddam's staff meetings, where Kamal was heard telling Saddam:
"We did not reveal all that we have," Kamel says in the meeting. "Not the type of weapons, not the volume of the materials we imported, not the volume of the production we told them about, not the volume of use. None of this was correct."
> http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/Investigation/story?id=1616996
From Bart at 10:45PM:
ReplyDelete"Ah, the usual ad hominem attacks in place of an actual argument."
There's no argument to be had here, Bart. You and I simply aren't reading from the same page or from the same material.
The Washington Post article, the *only* source you cite I would put any credence to (NewsMax is too busy spinning conspiracy theories or regurgitating talking points, Malkin is long discredited both factually and ethically, and both S&L and American Thinker are too far to the lunatic fringe to waste breath on), simply quotes the claims of one of the defendants, none of which casts this mess in any better light btw.
I would also point out that I have not "assumed automatically that our Marines are guilty of heinous crimes without proof", nor have I "rejected evidence that this charge is enemy propaganda without even reading it". I have consistently pointed out that evidence that has come to light to date doesn't absolve the Marines involved nor minimize the impact here; your willingness, almost desperation, to push the latter meme that you're willing to quote what amounts to fact-lite rantings
and take them as gospel is more worrisome. I also would be hesitant to take Sgt. Wuterich's statements as solid testimony either, particularly when the full story hasn't been prevented yet.
Perhaps we should agree to a moratorium on this topic until the full probe is finished. Not that I expect that will be the final word nor answer all questions on the matter.
bart said:
ReplyDeleteThis is not an episode of Law and Order. THIS IS A WAR. In a war, you kill the enemy mercilessly until the surrender or there are no more enemy.
But only if you have to, bart, only if you have to. I'll grant that there was probably zero chance of capturing Zarqawi, but I'm uncomfortable with your assumption that there is NO place for justice and restraint in war.
In general, our primary objective should be to capture, charge, convict, and imprison terrorists, so that:
-the world knows that we are more civilized than the terrorists.
-the world knows that we can achieve victory with one hand tied behind our back.
-because of the first two, much of the 2nd and 3rd world nations will realize that secular democracy is the more successful form of governance.
-because of the previous, the 2nd and 3rd world nations will realize it is better to ally with the US than against us.
I don't think we should automatically use unrestrained warfare to stop terrorism, mainly because I think that will ultimately fail. But I guess it comes down to what the victory conditions for the war on terror are.
For me, the above mentioned will suffice for now. How about you, bart- what do you consider to be the victory conditions necessary to end the War on Terror?
From Bart at 10:59PM:
ReplyDelete"This is not an episode of Law and Order. THIS IS A WAR. In a war, you kill the enemy mercilessly until the surrender or there are no more enemy."
So you're now advocating genocide of all people of Middle Eastern complexion? Or have you found some way of magically identifying just Al Qaeda sleepers and paramilitary fighters amongst the native population?
We've gone over this time and again, Bart, and you've yet to clarify exactly who we are 'at war' with or what the metrics are for measuring 'victory' versus 'defeat'.
But then, I never expect the impossible.
10 trillion dollar deficit or debt?
ReplyDeletePlease correct.
Ten year projected trillion dollar Deficit.
ReplyDelete