Despite All The BushshitBullshit, Women in Iraq Still Suffer

Ashley Wright details some of the terrible stuff happening in Iraq that particularly target women. Mind you, before our invasion in March 2003, Iraq was perhaps the most "progressive" of the Islamic cultures toward women. But we put a stop to that! Just like Bush claimed we attacked Afghanistan to "help the women and let girls go to school" while women are at more risk there than ever before, and many (most?) girls have again disappeared from schools under threat of death.

How the bloody hell did we make Iraq even worse than it was under a brutal dictator like Saddam Hussein? Sadly, the answer falls under the category of our own brutal dictators, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Military Suicides Soar While Bushies & Pentagon Look The Other Way

In case you haven't heard, Bush's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have brought active-duty military GI and veteran suicides to some of the highest - if not THE highest, since the Bush Administration and the Pentagon have steadfastly ignored the issue altogether - levels on record. Here:

The parents of an Iraq war veteran who committed suicide and members of Congress on Wednesday questioned why there's not a comprehensive tracking system of suicide among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.

Mike Bowman, of Forreston, Ill., said his son, Spc. Timothy Bowman, 23, is a member of the "unknown fallen" not counted in statistics. His son, a member of the Illinois National Guard, took his own life in 2005 eight months after returning from war. Bowman said he considers his son a "KBA" — killed because of action.

"If the veteran suicide rate is not classified as an epidemic that needs immediate and drastic attention, then the American fighting soldier needs someone in Washington who thinks it is," Bowman said.

Think About Next Thanksgiving

When we approach Thanksgiving 2008, we _should_ already know who won the 2008 presidential race (but it's hard to exclude the possibility the Bushies will pull either a 2000 vote cheat/a 2001 "Rudy tells NY he must stay mayor after 9-11"/a Musharraf end-run around democratic vote this last month).

I suspect certain things will be true by then and while I'll tender some here, please keep in mind that what I predict does NOT mean what I necessarily want to have happen AND that I'd like to see what your predictions are for this time next year.

Mine:

* I don't think it's a given that the Democratic candidate WILL win the 2008 presidential race as much as some would like to believe it is; in fact, because we've allowed "fair election" policies to languish rather than get enacted, we've made it more likely there will be incredible shenanigans pulled in 2008

* IF a Dem wins, it will be Hillary - a choice that many Dems and Republicans will not embrace; if it's Hillary, we have ourselves to blame

* If a GOPeeuponus wins, it will be Rudy Giuliani, and that will be a disaster for the world as well as just us

* Before the 2008 race, we will be in a fight with Iran - whether it's full blown war which I expect it to be or not, it's still wrong

* A fight with Iran will make the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq seem like child's play; it will further bankrupt us financially and militarily and will ensure that those who want to hurt us have more free rein to do so because our resources will be committed in Iran

* Iran's Ahmadinejad was RIGHT about one thing this week: the American dollar is worth almost nothing; the longer the current GOP policies prevail, the worse our dollar will get and more and more and more Americans will suffer

* ALL of the bad inherent here CAN be changed if WE get involved and give as much passion and energy to changing events as we do to carping about what is wrong; NOTE this: it's critical - we can affect a change but only if we DO something more than complain and blog and slog

What say you?

This Veterans Day

I think it's important to consider that IF Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney truly respected our American service men and women, many of them now vets, than they would NOT be talking about another bloody, useless, war without end with Iran - worse than our endless wars with Iraq and Afghanistan rolled together.

Instead, it's telling just to remember how hard Bush fought to keep from fighting in Vietnam while Dick Cheney, speaking of this time and his many evasions of the draft: "I had other priorities."

Not Just Iraq: U.S. Also Marks Deadliest Year In Afghanistan

Not only does the Bush-led campaign in Iraq result in more U.S. and coalition deaths than ever in 2007 despite all the happy horseshit about the "grand success" of the "surge" to kill the insurgency; no, Bush has something else to boast about (and he's enough of an ass to do so, too): this is our deadliest year for American troops in Afghanistan (remember them?) since we invaded in early October 2001.

And this distinction was earned BEFORE Pakistan fell apart to prop up Musharraf's ego; with the chaos there now, one must assume that Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, and friends have more room to manuever than ever. And each day, the Bushies push harder and harder for war with Iran, a country where we can't even begin to claim it will be a "cakewalk" to wage war.

The Bush Administration: fucking the world over since January 2001.

Cheney Impeachment Resolution And War With Iran

I also posted this at All Things Democrat but...

From Ramsey Clark, an appeal to action in advance of plans against war with Iran and acknowledging that Rep. - and Democratic presidential candidate - Dennis Kucinich’s priority resolution to be presented on the floor tomorrow (Tuesday, November 5th) calling for the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney. Read the rest of this letter from Clark here.

President George Bush plans to attack Iran. From coast to coast, the people of this country are demanding impeachment, which may be the only way to stop him. We are acting now because a failure to impeach Bush with Vice President Cheney and other civil officers for crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity may condemn the world to war without end. Has he not made it clear that he intends to attack Iran?

Again and again he has threatened Iran with attack if it does not abandon its nuclear program and act to please him. The threat, like the use of force against a nation, is a violation of Article 2.4 of the Charter of the United Nations just as the threat of assault, like assault itself, is a crime in all legal systems. President Bush has unilaterally imposed the most comprehensive economic sanctions within his power against Iran, excepting of course the purchase of Iranian oil. Sanctions are crueler than the colonial whipping post because they harm infants, children, the elderly and the infirm.

When President Bush decides to launch missiles at Iran, he will proclaim the ecessity for his action to prevent nuclear terrorism, and save freedom and democracy. “This government does not torture people,” President Bush assures us despite Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, rendition, the staunch defense of torture by his legal advisers throughout his Presidency and what We the People know, as he knows we know. We are being told that truth is what the Decider says it is. As with Iraq before, he now says Iran is a nuclear threat to the U.S. and brooks no dispute of his decision.

Failure to act will place the United States and much of the rest of the world in great danger of spreading war and violence resulting from a direct attack ordered by President Bush against Iran, retaliation by Iran and the fueling of existing tensions and conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other countries in the region.

A Little Late Halloweening

.... more earthly matters kept me busy on Halloween itself but let me offer this from the page of a local - and phenomenal musician who happens to be a descendant of the Countess Bathory herself that suggests that a woman, at least as much as the Romanian prince Vlad the Impaler, was the basis for Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Note, however, that the 600+ dead from the Countess pales mightily compared to Bush's Iraq and Afghanistan adventure. ::choke::

Paul Krugman: "All The President's Enablers"

Like Krugman, I couldn't care less if Bush is "certain" and "confident" we'll defeat Iraqi insurgents and al Qaeda because Bush was just as confident about the ease of the Iraq war, how fast he would find Osama bin Laden, and how the world would love our War on Terror, areas in which he failed light years beyond miserably. Read the rest here:

In a coordinated public relations offensive, the White House is using reliably friendly pundits — amazingly, they still exist — to put out the word that President Bush is as upbeat and confident as ever. It might even be true.

What I don’t understand is why we’re supposed to consider Mr. Bush’s continuing confidence a good thing.

Remember, Mr. Bush was confident six years ago when he promised to bring in Osama, dead or alive. He was confident four years ago, when he told the insurgents to bring it on. He was confident two years ago, when he told Brownie that he was doing a heckuva job.

Now Iraq is a bloody quagmire, Afghanistan is deteriorating and the Bush administration’s own National Intelligence Estimate admits, in effect, that thanks to Mr. Bush’s poor leadership America is losing the struggle with Al Qaeda. Yet Mr. Bush remains confident.

Sorry, but that’s not reassuring; it’s terrifying. It doesn’t demonstrate Mr. Bush’s strength of character; it shows that he has lost touch with reality.

Actually, it’s not clear that he ever was in touch with reality. I wrote about the Bush administration’s “infallibility complex,” its inability to admit mistakes or face up to real problems it didn’t want to deal with, in June 2002. Around the same time Ron Suskind, the investigative journalist, had a conversation with a senior Bush adviser who mocked the “reality-based community,” asserting that “when we act, we create our own reality.”

People who worried that the administration was living in a fantasy world used to be dismissed as victims of “Bush derangement syndrome,” liberals driven mad by Mr. Bush’s success. Now, however, it’s a syndrome that has spread even to former loyal Bushies.

Yet while Mr. Bush no longer has many true believers, he still has plenty of enablers — people who understand the folly of his actions, but refuse to do anything to stop him.

Pottersville delivers the rest (say "hi" to JurassicPork for me).

Nicholas D. Kristof: "Cheney's Long-Lost Twin"

That there can be even one Cheney has cost many meals and countless times worshipping the porcelain goddess" after reading about the Bushies' latest atrocities; the idea, as Kristoff proposes in this Times OpEd column, he may have a twin is beyond frightening (read it all here):

Could Dick Cheney and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad be twins separated at birth?

The U.S. vice president and Iranian president, each the No. 2 in his country, certainly seem to be working together to create conflict between the two nations. Theirs may be the oddest and perhaps most dangerous partnership in the world today.

Both men are hawks who defy the international community, scorn the U.N. and are unpopular at home because of incompetence and recklessness — and each finds justification in the extremism of the other.

“Iranians refer to their new political radicals as ‘neoconservatives,’ with multiple layers of deliberate irony,” notes Gary Sick, an Iran specialist at Columbia University, adding: “The hotheads around President Ahmadinejad’s office and the U.S. foreign policy radicals who cluster around Vice President Cheney’s office, listen to each other, cite each others’ statements and goad each other to new excesses on either side.”

So one of the perils in the final 18 months of the Bush administration is that Mr. Cheney and Mr. Ahmadinejad will escalate provocations, ending up with airstrikes by the U.S. against Iranian nuclear sites.

Already we’re seeing a series of leaks about Iran that echo leaks in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. The reports say that Iran is turning a blind eye to Al Qaeda, is using Hezbollah to wage a proxy war against U.S. forces in Iraq, is transferring bomb-making skills to Iraq insurgents and is handing out armor-piercing bullets to fighters in Iran and Afghanistan so as to kill more Americans.

Yet the jingoists aren’t all in our government: These leaks may well all be accurate, for Mr. Ahmadinejad is a perfect match for Mr. Cheney in his hawkishness and contempt for the international community.

It’s worrying that Iran has just recalled its most able diplomat — Javad Zarif, ambassador to the U.N. — and sent him out to pasture as an academic. Hard-liners always hated Mr. Zarif; goons from a mysterious Iranian security agency detained me on my last trip to Tehran and accused me of being a C.I.A. or Mossad spy, apparently because they were trying to get dirt to use against Mr. Zarif (who had given me my visa).

[...]A recent opinion poll in Iran found that 70 percent of Iranians want to normalize relations with the U.S., and 61 percent oppose the current Iranian system of government. Any visitor to Iran knows that it is — at a people-to-people level — the most pro-American Muslim country in the region, and the regime is as out of touch and moribund as the shah’s was in the late 1970s.

The ayatollahs’ only hope is that we will rescue them with a military strike, which would cement them in place for many years to come. But look out, because that’s what may happen if bilateral relations are driven by those jingoistic twins, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Ahmadinejad.

JP at Pottersville offers more.

Maureen Dowd: "Hey, W! Bin Laden (Still) Determined To Strike In U.S."

Maureen lays it on the line, most ably (find the rest here at Pottersville):

Oh, as it turns out, they’re not on the run.

And, oh yeah, they can fight us here even if we fight them there.

And oh, one more thing, after spending hundreds of billions and losing all those lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’re more vulnerable to terrorists than ever.

And, um, you know that Dead-or-Alive stuff? We may be the ones who end up dead.

Squirming White House officials had to confront the fact yesterday that everything President Bush has been spouting the last six years about Al Qaeda being on the run, disrupted and weakened was just guff.

Last year, W. called his “personal friend” Gen. Pervez Musharraf “a strong defender of freedom.” Unfortunately, it turned out to be Al Qaeda’s freedom. The White House is pinning the blame on Pervez.

While the administration lavishes billions on Pakistan, including $750 million in a risible attempt to win “hearts and minds” in tribal areas where Al Qaeda leaders are hiding and training, President Musharraf has helped create a quiet mountain retreat, a veritable terrorism spa, for Osama and Ayman al-Zawahiri to refresh themselves and get back in shape.

The administration’s most thorough intelligence assessment since 9/11 is stark and dark. Two pages add up to one message: The Bushies blew it. Al Qaeda has exploded into a worldwide state of mind. Because of what’s going on with Iraq and Iran, Hezbollah may now “be more likely to consider” attacking us. Al Qaeda will try to “put operatives here” — (some news reports say a cell from Pakistan already is en route or has arrived) — and “acquire and employ chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear material in attacks.”

(Democrats on cots are ineffectual, but Al Qaeda in caves gets the job done?)

After 9/11, W. stopped mentioning Osama’s name, calling him “just a person who’s now been marginalized,” and adding “I just don’t spend that much time on him.”

This week, as counterterrorism officials gathered at the White House to frantically brainstorm on covert and overt plans to capture Osama, the president may have regretted his perverse attempt to demote America’s most determined enemy.

W. began to mention Osama and Al Qaeda more recently, but only to assert: “The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq were the ones who attacked us in America on September the 11th.” His conflation is contradicted by the fact that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, as the Sunni terrorist group in Iraq is known, did not exist before 9/11.

Fran Townsend, the president’s homeland security adviser, did her best to put a gloss on the dross but failed. She had to admit that the hands-off approach used by Mr. Musharraf with the tribal leaders in North Waziristan, which always looked like a nutty way to give Al Qaeda room to regroup, was a nutty way to give Al Qaeda room to regroup.

[...]W. swaggers about with his cowboy boots and gunslinger stance. But when talking about Waziristan last February, he explained that it was hard to round up the Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders there because: “This is wild country; this is wilder than the Wild West.”

Yes, they shoot with real bullets up there, and they fly into buildings with real planes.

If W. were a real cowboy, instead of somebody who just plays one on TV, he would have cleaned up Dodge by now.

The rest is here.

Dead Kids? No Problem in Bush's War of Error on Terror

Gee, is this what President Bush meant by "No Child Left Behind"?

Reported on MSNBC by Keith Olbermann: The Bush Administration - supported by a rabid right who will cry long and hard about the "right to life" of barely multi-cell organisms - and the Pentagon now admit that they knew children were in the Afghanistan compound they bombed over the weekend, and decided to bomb anyway, killing at least 7-8 little kids.

While the children died, it seems that our bombs did NOT take out the so-called "high profile" Al Qaeda target they were aiming for. So I guess killing a bunch of toddlers is a "great" moment in the War on Terror.

In The "How Kind Of Bush To Pay $200 In Restitution For Killing My Son But I Would Rather Have My Child Back" Department

Here's another example of why Greg Mitchell is a good as well as an important read in these disastrous, far from rapturish Bush years:

Until recently, the press has rarely covered the U.S. military program that occasionally offers “condolence” payments to Iraqis and Afghans whose loved ones have been killed or injured by our troops. But a number of high-profile incidents involving the killing of noncombatants has drawn some long-overdue, if fleeting, attention to the subject.

On Tuesday, in the latest example, the U.S. military apologized for a not-accidental atrocity near Jalalabad back in March and agreed to make the usual maximum payment -- don’t laugh -- of about $2000 to survivors for each of the 19 Afghan lives lost.

That’s an improvement in some ways. Last month I titled a column on this subject, "Sorry We Shot Your Kid, Here’s $500," referring to a documented case in Iraq.

In Bush's Constant Warmongering, We Do Unto Others As We Most Fear They Could Do Unto Us

So we can dish it out, but we can't accept that it be served to us? Isn't "Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto Us" part of the Bible? Donald Rumsfeld, then Secretary of Defense and the crazed leader of the Pentagon/Defense Department, only thought he walked on water.

From TPM Muckraker:

Many of the controversial interrogation tactics used against “war on terror” detainees in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan are similar to strategies the United States feared its worst enemies would use against captured soldiers during the Cold War.

Time magazine catches this connection in a recently declassified report, "Review of DoD-Directed Investigations of Detainee Abuse,” that has received little media coverage.

The same potential enemy tactics the U.S. military trained forces to face during the Cold War became interrogation strategies used on enemy combatants.

You know how badly this will work; we've already seen it with the grisly and gruesome deaths (by torture, by decapitation/beheading) of some soldiers and aid workers.

Bear in mind that, while U.S. Attorney Greed4all er.. Alberto Gonzales called the Geneva Conventions "quaint", these rules about combat and treatment of the enemy was developed in large part to keep American soldiers safe. But we can't demand better treatment for our men and women GIs than we afford others.

And Still The Bushies Do Nothing But Lie, Inflame, and Corrupt All They Touch!

So Emperor Bush continues to behave, while things worsen by the hour, like he's the only one smart enough to know what's going on and he's sure he owes the American people NO explanation, let alone apology. When great skepticism was tendered about Bush's "Iraq Surge", and a way to burn through a trillion more dollars and lives of soldiers and Iraqi citizens, the Bush crew either ignored the skeptics outright, tried to discredit them, or flat out lied. With it, they've concocted huge webs of lies and spin so convoluted and labyrinthian they are sure the "dumb" voting public will nap through it.

If you've been paying attention to any of the Bush Administration's latest ever-expanding lists of the reasons King George demands we "give war a (thousand more) chance(s))", you're welcome to share my bottle of Bush-strength Excedrin. While you swallow (and the longer Bush and Cheney stay in office, the harder it becomes each day to try to force down your palate their strange and twisted recipes), let me note some of the White House's wildly changing rational, talking points, and unofficially official statements: which include:

• why we haven't caught Osama bin ForgottenLaden whom Bush told us "can run, but can't hide!" - For a megalomaniac who smirks thinking how smart he is (anyone who disagrees with him is garbage), the president SURE is wrong a lot, a WHOLE lot
• it was necessary to LIE throughout the build-up to war
• why we waged war when we KNEW there was no reason to do so
• we keep forgetting that Afghanistan, since our invasion on October 8, 2001, has turned from a bottom-of-the-bottom third world country into a full fifth world humanitarian meltdown producing a truly STUNNING amount of drugs and people with no great love for Bush, the United States, or the Bush Far Right's war on Muslims/oil producing countries
• With it clear to almost every American now (and obvious to those outside the U.S. far sooner) that the War on Terror was to finally satisfy those rich dinosaur fatcats (in deep grief since the Cold War "ended") and their war-making hardware, how can anyone treat the War on Terror seriously when the Bushies and Neocons try to act like something out of a very dim-witted Marvel comic book?

I don't know about you but I don't need superheroes. Especially pretend, fucked-up, corrupting superheroes like The Burning Bush, "Duck, It's Dick!" Cheney, Why-ever-would-you-conclude-I'm-a-woman-of-color? Captain Condi (Rice), Revoltin' Smotin' (John) Bolton, Karl "Blow Out The Pilot Lights On That Democrat's Gas Stove" Rove, and a cast of tens of thousands more representing "connected", crooked, confabulating, incompetent, factless fuckers of all time.

Remember. This is still the Bush Administration, where we consider Charles Darwin a greater threat than Osama Bin (over)Laden-with-business-contacts-with-Bush-Family bank accounts, where free speech should only be allowed to praise this president and to demand more war, and where the 25-year-old-and-never-held-a-job Bush Twins have spent more in one single night of partying (with some of the same drugs that would send you to prison) than almost all U.S. soldiers in Iraq each earn in a single year.

On This Memorial Day Weekend...

Let us appreciate America's 25 million living veterans (one in every dozen citizens), demand we stop unnecessary aggression against other countries, and begin to worry about our own massive problems. At the same time, think about all the many wars this Republican chickenhawk vice president (Dick Cheney) and chickenshit commander in chief, Mr. Bush, have started since they used corrupt court processes to take the White House in December 2000:

Besides those declared wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the proxy war Israel waged for Bush to break the spine of Lebanon in proxy:

• War on the military and our veterans (asking so much while cutting services to them every damned day)
• War on basic human rights
• War on individual privacy
• War not on poverty but against the poor
• War on families (you have to be the "right" kind of family not to feel "intruded" upon
• War on science
• War on reason
• War on truth and accountability as well as the whistleblowers who try to make the Bushies honest
• War on public education and against the best conditions for our kids
• War on young minds, trying to lure them away from high school or college with lies
• War on drugs (which got rolled into the War on Terror which, as they say, is a bumper sticker motto but hardly a game plan) which includes the ability for Americans to afford them, to get them for their most urgent needs (ex: contraception, pain relief, and yes, even decongestants in cold formulas), and to make decisions about their own bodies
• War on anyone who isn't of the Fascist Fundamentalist Christian "faith" (Muslims, especially)
• War on America's honor, its reputation, its compassion
• War on the sick (remember Terri Schiavo, kept alive when there was little brain left in her while the Bushies had no trouble discontinuing treatment to the ultra poor minority babies)
• War on journalism
• War on the United Nations, NATO, and other worldly agencies

Care to name some other wars?

"The Price Of Citizenship"

While military industrial complex businesses like Halliburton have set up a mail drop only in the Cayman Islands JUST to avoid taxes payment of appropriate taxes to the American/federal government/IRS, Prospect offers a recommendation that the ultra-rich (and the mega corps they own) lose U.S. citizenship :

"When the super-rich use offshore tax havens to avoid paying what they owe in taxes, the consequence ought to be the loss of their U.S. citizenship."

Let me propose an amendment: defense contractors who are American in nature CANNOT bid for contracts UNLESS they not only pay their share of the taxes we mere mortals already do; they also must be up-to-date with their tax payments.

A couple of years ago, there was quite a story about how many "favored" Bush no-bid defense contractors were in default for both very large sums of money due to the feds and sometimes for years at a time. Yet they were being pretty promptly handed checks for their invoices, as if the feds "overlooked" their whopping defaults to the taxmen.

Bush's Wars: Strangely, They Can Only One In Three Direction: Worse, Worser (eh?), And Worst

While Afghanistan's Taliban (the same people Bush and Cheney claim to have annihilated six years ago) adopts President Bush's rule to only allow journalists and the rest of what calls itself media to report lies, the violence in Afghanistan and its neighbor, Iraq, only continues to defy all laws of basic statistics by worsening each and every day (even a lame coin toss should give you the occasional "win" but Bush makes us lose each and every damned time).

Here's what I noted at All Things Democrat:

April was the nation’s bloodiest overall month (we set terrible new records there all the time) since we arrived and May is off to a tragically busy start; many U.S. soldiers along with more than 100 Iraqi civilians were killed in operations just this past weekend.

It’s not a case that this escalating violence is completely about Bush’s so-called surge or escalation of military actions in Iraq. First, we already sent many of the “surge” troops in already and second, many forces are already working on new “surge” orders on the ground. So it’s a fabrication to claim that the heightened violence is only because “insurgents are scared and doing what they can now because they know that Bush means business THIS time.”

Hugely nasty attacks occurred yesterday (Sunday) in Iraq, with bodies found all over Baghdad, including those of at least eight American GIs. [Afghanistan worses every day as well.] At the same time, a major general, in a piece in the Boston Globe, says Iraq will get FAR deadlier still (quite the effortless slam dunk promised):

BAGHDAD — A US Army general yesterday forecast a rise in deaths among American forces in the coming months, a prediction underscored by the announcement that a roadside bomb had killed six US soldiers and a foreign journalist north of Baghdad. Five other American troops died elsewhere over the weekend.

Major General Rick Lynch, commander of the Third Infantry Division, said casualties will climb as American troops dig into enemy territory as part of a stepped-up military operation ordered by President Bush in January. Lynch, who oversees a swath of territory to the south and east of Baghdad, gave his bleak prediction on the heels of the deadliest month this year for American forces in Iraq.

In April, 104 troops were killed, the fourth time since the beginning of 2005 that US deaths exceeded 100 in a single month. At least 25 troops have been killed in May, a grim start to a month in which Democrats are expected to keep up pressure on the White House to plan a withdrawal from Iraq.

So April's Become The Deadliest Month For U.S. Troops (Not to Mention Iraqi Civilians) This Year?

Glad to see that Bush surge is working!

And Bush never loses a chance to tell us of his "hard work", this from a man who averages being "on vacation" two of every five business weekdays of his nearly six-and-a-half-years in office.

Funny, troops in Iraq and Afghanistan often have to work multiple weeks without a day off, and standardly work no less than 12 hour days. But Bush is the one "workin' hard"... yup.

Rollingstone Magazine: Seymour Hersh on Possible "Secret Plan" to Bomb Iran

The next best thing to reading one of Sy Hersh's excellent exposes in New Yorker Magazine (perhaps), is to read Matt Taibbi's feature on Hersh and the Dick Cheney/White House's "big secret" to bomb the hell out of Iran. (After all, with Iraq and Afghanistan going soooo well, why not tackle Iran next?)

Remember that several sources have indicated that we can/will be seeing a U.S. strike on Iran before the end of April (this April). And the days of April are getting might few now.

What You Don't Know Of Degree of Deception in Sports Hero Pat Tillman's Death By Friendly Fire

[Ed. note: I also posted this at All Things Democrat, but I believe this needs to be seen by as many eyes as possible.]

If you think you already know all the horrible truth about the level of corruption and lies in the coverup of the death of former sports star Pat Tillman - who chose to serve in Afghanistan because he did not, says his mother, believe that the war in Iraq was just - you don't. Not by a long shot.

Read this Associated Press probe piece at Editor & Publisher.

Within hours of Pat Tillman's death, the Army went into information-lockdown mode, cutting off phone and Internet connections at a base in Afghanistan, posting guards on a wounded platoon mate, and ordering a sergeant to burn Tillman's uniform.

New investigative documents reviewed by The Associated Press describe how the military sealed off information about Tillman's death from all but a small ring of soldiers. Officers quietly passed their suspicion of friendly fire up the chain to the highest ranks of the military, but the truth did not reach Tillman's family for five weeks. The clampdown, and the misinformation issued by the military, lie at the heart of a burgeoning congressional investigation.

"We want to find out how this happened," said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House oversight committee, which has scheduled a hearing for Tuesday. "Was it the result of incompetence, miscommunication or a deliberate strategy?"

It is also a central issue as the Army weighs punishments against nine officers, including four generals, faulted in the latest Pentagon report on the case of the NFL star-turned-soldier. Military offocials said those recommendations could come in the next several weeks.

It is well known by now that the circumstances of Tillman's April 22, 2004, death were kept from his family and the American public; the Army maintained he was cut down by enemy bullets in an ambush, even though many soldiers knew he was mistakenly killed by his own comrades. The nearly 1,100 pages of documents released last month at the conclusion of the Army Criminal Investigation Command's probe reveal the mechanics of how the Army contained the information.

Read the rest here.