Check, Please

President Barack Hussein Obama keeps another promise and ends the Iraq War for good. Yes, while it does feel a bit like Groundhog's Day (didn't we already announce we were pulling out...although still leaving 50,000 troops) it's still ending Dick Cheney, George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld's war, nine years later.

He's actually keeping George Bush's promise but, sure enough, no Republican can let on that he's once again proving to be our most able Commander-in-Chief since George H.W. Bush (regardless of what you think of some of the wars he chose to fight, like Panama). Come to think of it, Bush the Senior left Iraq as well.

I'm sure President McCain would still have us there. For the next nine years.

McNamara's Dead

Robert McNamara, he corporate leader who became architect of the failed U.S. war policy in Vietnam for Kennedy and Johnson from 1961-1968, is dead at 97 years old:

Half a million American soldiers went to war on his watch. More than 16,000 died; 42,000 more would fall in the seven years to come.

The war became his personal nightmare. Nothing he did, none of the tools at his command — the power of American weapons, the forces of technology and logic, or the strength of American soldiers — could stop the armies of North Vietnam and their South Vietnamese allies, the Vietcong. He concluded well before leaving the Pentagon that the war was futile, but he did not share that insight with the public until late in life.

In 1995, he took a stand against his own conduct of the war, confessing in a memoir that it was “wrong, terribly wrong.” In return, he faced a firestorm of scorn.

He lived long enough to get multiple helpings. Check out Errol Morris' masterpiece of McNamara intimate and unsettling non-confession, The Fog of War. A cautionary tale for the ages, but also what Derosaworld says about Robert Strange McNamara:

President John F. Kennedy was surrounded by some very strange men. Men who were the ‘best and brightest’, but who also had dark secrets and responsibilities beyond what previous generations of government leaders had experienced.

The atomic bomb ended World War Two, but it also ended a sense of terrain: mountains and seas, protecting people and countries from the total devastation of warfare.

Now, we were all potential victims of the bomb. We could blow up the entire planet in a day if we wanted to.

--

The best and the brightest. Robert McNamara looked the part. Young, nerdy, glasses, slicked back hair, the President of The Ford Motor Company. The New Frontier was here. Camelot was bivouacked in Washington, D.C.

A question for historians is why was McNamara selected to be the Secretary of Defense. Was it a Kennedy strategy to bring the various defense departments (air, sea, land) under White House managerial control? Was McNamara the loyal corporate man who would take orders from his Commander in Chief?

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The Johnson/McNamara era of the Vietnam War brings out the demons that brought America on the brink of insanity and Richard Nixon. The many locked doors in the White House became too scary for McNamara to open by 1968. He had to get out or was asked to leave. The nastiness was not over. Another Kennedy was going to be killed.

--

Robert McNamara was in the center of the American maelstrom from 1961 to 1968. Decisions made on his watch have led us to the place in history we stand now, on a precarious precipice. Robert McNamara was a watchman at the gate and he let too many bad things slip under our defenses…either by accident, mismanagement or on purpose.

To give the man credit for even having thought about this stuff after committing it and coming up with the prescription the Cheney Administration was too Nixon to follow:

R.S. McNamara's eleven life lessons

1. Empathize with your enemy
2. Rationality will not save us
3. There's something beyond one's self
4. Maximize efficiency
5. Proportionality should be a guideline in war
6. Get the data
7. Belief and seeing are often both wrong
8. Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning
9. In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil
10. Never say never
11. You can't change human nature

Guaranteed as much my parents generation hated McNamara when he was in office and the boys started coming home in boxes, I'll bet he comes out looking at least more reflective than this war criminal.

Years

Another blazing success of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rove Administration's War on Terra:

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — Rejecting a prosecution request for a severe sentence, a panel of military officers sentenced the convicted former driver for Osama bin Laden to five and a half years in prison on Thursday. The sentence means that the first detainee convicted after a war crimes trial here could complete his punishment by the end of this year.

The military judge, Capt. Keith J. Allred of the Navy, had already said that he planned to give the driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, credit for at least the 61 months he has been held since being charged, out of more than six years in all. That would bring Mr. Hamdan to the end of his criminal sentence in five months. After that his fate is unclear, because the Bush administration says that it can hold detainees here until the end of the war on terror.

Nice job, Republicans, of nailing Osama bin Laden's ex-chauffeur. I'm sure those five months will be worth all the money and brainpower spent on the conviction, although as long as Republican is President and can, like a king, keep him imprisoned indefinitely, at least more of the interrogation story won't come out.

Hey, it's not even Friday yet and there's another GOP politician in a disgraceful sexual scandal:

JEFFERSON CITY -- Missouri state Rep. Scott Muschany, R-Frontenac, was indicted today in connection with a reported sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl on May 17, the day after this year’s Legislative session ended.

The alleged victim is the daughter of a state employee. The girl’s mother and Muschany -– who is married and has two children -- were romantically involved, the woman said.

A Cole County grand jury returned an indictment today charging Muschany with the Class C felony of "deviate sexual assault." The indictment identifies the victim only by initials. It says that on May 17, Muschany "had deviate sexual intercourse" with the girl, "knowing that he did so without" her consent.

Muschany, 42, was booked into the Cole County Jail today at 2:50 and he was released after posting a $5,000 bond. If convicted, Muschany faces a fine of up to $5,000 and a prison term of up to 7 years.

Only seven? Maybe he can take some of Hamdan's six.

What are the Republicans doing right, besides giving Paris Hilton some awesome new material?

They're doing what Obama said:

BAGHDAD (AP) - Iraq and the U.S. are near an agreement on all American combat troops leaving Iraq by October 2010, with the last soldiers out three years after that, two Iraqi officials told The Associated Press on Thursday. U.S. officials, however, insisted no dates had been agreed.

Hey, it's fun to mock, but there's a point to it. While grandpa McCain is putting a softer face on the deadly GOP brand, let's not forget that the same Karl Rove driving his vile and lying character smears of Obama has been driving U.S. policy for almost a decade. Let's not forget that the GOP financial and ideological party apparatus, taken over by Tom Delay, Jack Abramoff, Grover Norquist, Dick Cheney et al is essentially corrupt, a criminal enterprise that will take more than this election to wash through the system, if ever. It's the party of blatant hypocrisy, dividing voters with anti-gay rights laws while assaulting young boys or seeking illicit sex in airport bathrooms.

This election is about much, much more than Barack Obama. He's a vessel, sure, he brings youth and intelligence, strategy and tenacity to the Party and hopefully the Republic, and he's the right man at the right time. But this is just as much about clearing the palate, flushing the toilet, lighting sage and Native chants.

They'll try to smear Obama, to bring them down to their level. But that's just not the guy he is.

Just remember who these smearmongers are, Rove to McCain, and how much they've just gone and ruined these last eight years.

Yes, Torture

Men of amelioration of torture like Rudy Giuliani would like to blur the discussion of how the Cheney/Bush Administration has lowered our country into international barbarism by instituting, for the first time in U.S. history, the notorious practices of the Spanish Inquisition.

Waterboarding. Is that like snowboarding?

Or waterskiing?

It turns out, it isn't. In fact, it's proper name is either "Controlled Drowning" or, most accurately, "Induced Drowning."

If you don't think the embrace or even consideration of Induced Drowning as an interrogative technique isn't grounds for Presidential candidate disqualification, then read this thorough description of the vile practice by Hunter at DailyKos.

WARNING: This post sickened me. It delineates something that happens to an accidentally drowning human only once but, in the hands of torture operatives like ours, can be prolonged in such a way that it happens to the torture subject, the (yes) victim, over and over and over again for hours:

Compare this with the crude techniques of torturers: cutting off a thumb or finger is repeatable, at most, ten times. Drowning can be repeated indefinitely, or at least until the information is obtained, the interrogator deems the sessions worthless, or the prisoner accidentally dies.

I read it like watching a blood-freezing, clinical description of a butchering car accident, mainly to know exactly what it is that I thought I was against.

Now I'm sure.

And remember, these techniques were originally used to bring about false confessions, because they were the confessions the brutal ruling powers needed. Hence the whole section on how torture subjects give false information, and the need for additional violent punishment (not specified) due to that common result.

Hell, I'd lie to stop the assault. Wouldn't you?

After reading the post it became clear to me that there was only one fair answer to the likes of Giuliani, "Double Guantanamo" Romney, Richard Bruce Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush and all those who would seek to enlist the darkest and most sadistic among us to perform this perverse and godless act.

They must voluntarily submit to 24 hours of Induced Drowning interrogation themselves.

C'mon, Blackwater.

Hijacked

Just a quick note from New York City where I'm spending most of the week. It's easy to lose sight of what happened on 9/11/2001 from sunny Southern California when so much of the actual comprehension of the attack has been obfuscated by the Cheney/Bush Administration's perversion of that event for naked partisan gain.

But when on the streets of Manhattan, looking to orient myself, I glance over where the World Trade Center used to be, the southern tip of the island, and when I see only empty sky, it all comes rushing back and I utter under my breath, "You bastards."

We shouldn't forget that we were attacked, nor the need to take measures to prevent a future attack. We did strike back, definitively and with both bi-partisan and worldwide support, when we went into Afghanistan.

How tragic that we failed to finish the job -- Bin Laden escaped under George Bush's direction, any permanent fix abated due to the Cheney/Bush/Rumsfeld/Neoconservative misdirection into Iraq, their complete undermining of favorable world opinion and U.S. "soft power" by their war atrocities and illegal renditions.

There is no way to overstate how much this villainous Administration has abused the memory and emotion engendered by the attacks.

That alone is worthy of a treason trial, if not ruling.

Cribnotes

Happy Monday, and to start off the week, here's a memory jogger for all those reasons you want our current Executive Federal leadership impeached.

Amazing how far back some of this footage goes. Hard to believe most of these criminals are still in office.

Tell your Senator and Representative what you'd like them to do about it.

Failed State

Heckuva job, tragic Bushie:

Iraq has emerged as the world's second most unstable country, behind Sudan, more than four years after President George W. Bush ordered the U.S. invasion to topple Saddam Hussein, according to a survey released on Monday.

The 2007 Failed States Index, produced by Foreign Policy magazine and the Fund for Peace, said Iraq suffered a third straight year of deterioration in 2006 with diminished results across a range of social, economic, political and military indicators. Iraq ranked fourth last year.

The one thing he, Cheney, Rove and Rumsfeld know how to do: break things. A country. A Constitution.

And yes, by the way, they are indeed criminals.

Festival of Lies

Is it wrong to think of our government as a cheap sham?

Ask the brave Americans who testified today in Congress.

Try Private Jessica Lynch, who got railroaded into fake marine hero-dom, in order to bolster support for the liars' war. She's so shockingly eloquent. The wounded soldier girl next door, patriot, truth-teller. Which these days feels like a rebel.

They staged everything, exploiting her pain and dignity.

Then check out Pat Tillman's family. They destroyed his uniform, for God's sake, to cover up the friendly fire tragedy with a b.s. story, straight to his family's face.

Brother Kevin: “Fraud–deliberate and calculated lies.” Calls out for Congress to investigate. Wildly compelling, justice.

And his poor mother. Institutionally lied to about her very own son for White House political advantage, and then told she isn't Christian enough to do so. Told her son is "worm dirt".

Smells like treason.

Eye into the army: Specialist Bryan O'Neal, U.S. Army. Another brave guy who will have a clear conscience tonight. Didn't make the changes in his reports, must have been done higher up. His climactic description of Pat's killing...this is what really happened, from the guy who could have been hit in Pat's place.

As one regular reader wrote to me this evening, incensed to obscenity over what this says about the officers in our military bureaucracy:

What the officer class acceded to w/ Tillman & Lynch is f*cking disgraceful. Besides the obvious examples, here are 3 more:

1) they delayed a rescue attempt on Lynch for over a day because they didn't have the right equipment to videotape it; they knew that their "rescue"would be a success since they knew she was being treated in an unguarded Iraqi hospital, not shackled and tortured in some fortified structure

2) they ordered Tillman's closest army pals to LIE to his brother -- ANOTHER US ARMY RANGER -- about the circumstances of his death

3) Everyone understands now that all of the docs regarding Tillman's death were fabricated, yet none of these "men of honor" will stand up and say "I did it," or "I ordered it."

Fuck them.

So how high up does this go? From The NY Times:

Democratic members of the committee devoted much time to an urgent memorandum sent by a top special operations commander, Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, to other high-ranking commanders a week after Corporal Tillman’s death. General McChrystal is now a lieutenant general.

The memorandum said a preliminary investigation was likely to find that American fire caused the death. The message urged them to pass on the information to President Bush, the secretary of the army and others.

The Tillmans said they believed that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld must have known the truth early, a contention that Army investigators said they had failed to establish. “It’s a bit disingenuous to think that the administration did not know about what was going on, something so politically sensitive,” Kevin Tillman said. “So that’s, kind of, what we were hoping you guys could get involved with and take a look.”

Bush knew.

Which means he had to have approved of it.

Isn't that the story here?