notes from The Neo-Con Front:

US 'victory' against cult leader was 'massacre'
By Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad
Published: 31 January 2007

"There are growing suspicions in Iraq that the official story of the battle outside Najaf between a messianic Iraqi cult and the Iraqi security forces supported by the US, in which 263 people were killed and 210 wounded, is a fabrication. The heavy casualties may be evidence of an unpremeditated massacre." more from the British news rag, The Independent

Let the fools keep talking:

notes from the Iranian Front

"You want me to give you my opinion? Honestly?" asked Hajj Hassan Sbeiti, a 44-year-old merchant, his face breaking into a wry smile. "If you say hello to me, you probably like me. If you say hello to me and ask what I need, you're a friend. If you say hello to me, ask what I need and put money in my hand, then you're going to be my brother." ...

..."It's very bleak and it's very dangerous," said Dakhil, the Saudi writer. "We have a sectarian civil war in Iraq now and this is drawing sectarian lines through the region. This is the most important, the most dangerous ramification of the American war in Iraq."
"With Iran Ascendant, U.S. Is Seen at Fault", By Anthony Shadid, Washington Post Foreign Service, Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Christian Cowboys at the Helm of this Ship of Fools: Burn Baby Burn

on Libby's memory and the neo-con worldview:
"He could remember not only all 79 ‘Star Trek’ episodes, as I could, but he knew all the titles, too,” Mr. Hindle said. “I think he always liked fantasy." From "As Trial Begins, Cheney’s Ex-Aide Is Still a Puzzle"
By SCOTT SHANE:

"Paradox seems to define I. Lewis Libby Jr., who remains a bit mysterious even to close colleagues. He is the White House policy enforcer who also wrote a literary novel; a buttoned-down Washington lawyer who likes knocking back tequila shots in cowboy bars and hurtling down mountains on skis and bikes; and a 56-year-old intellectual known to all by his childhood nickname, Scooter.

But now comes the most baffling paradox of all, as Mr. Libby, former chief of staff and alter ego to Vice President Dick Cheney, began his trial in federal court here on Tuesday on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. By all accounts a first-rate legal mind and a hypercautious aide whose discretion frustrated reporters, he is charged with repeatedly lying to a grand jury and to the F.B.I. about his leaks to the news media in the battle over Iraq war intelligence.

“I don’t often use the word ‘incomprehensible,’ but this is incomprehensible to me,” said Dennis Ross, the veteran Middle East troubleshooter who is now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “He’s a lawyer who’s as professional and competent as anyone I know. He’s a friend, and when he says he’s innocent, I believe him. I just can’t account for this case.”

Among Mr. Libby’s friends and former colleagues, the case brought by Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, is considered not only unjust, but also a terrible irony.

“He’s going to be the poster boy for the criminalization of politics, and he’s not even political,” said Mary Matalin, Mr. Cheney’s former political adviser.

Critics of the Bush administration say nothing was more political than the administration’s use of defective intelligence to take the country to war, in which Mr. Libby was deeply involved. At a time of deep public distress over events in Iraq, the trial will inevitably carry symbolic weight beyond the legal question of whether Mr. Libby lied.

He was “Cheney’s Cheney,” in Ms. Matalin’s words, “an absolutely salient translator” of the ideas of the man considered perhaps the most powerful vice president in history. Mr. Libby had a role in virtually every national security initiative of the administration’s first five years.

It was Mr. Libby who helped assemble a dossier on Saddam Hussein and unconventional weapons and ties to Al Qaeda for Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s speech to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, fighting to keep in the speech evidence that Mr. Powell found questionable. It was Mr. Libby, at Mr. Cheney’s direction, who repeatedly spoke to reporters to rebut Joseph C. Wilson IV after Mr. Wilson, a former ambassador, publicly accused the White House of distorting intelligence.

“Libby didn’t plan the war,” said John Prados, a historian of national security who wrote a book in 2004 on the flawed Iraq intelligence. “But he did enable the administration to set out on that course. He was the facilitator.”

Both fans and critics of Mr. Libby might be surprised by some anecdotes from Yale, where Mr. Libby graduated in 1972. Fellow students recall his helping silkscreen T-shirts proclaiming “solidarity” between Yalies and the Black Panthers and going with shoulder-length blond hair and in a leather jacket to help at an anti-Vietnam War demonstration.

A couple of years after graduation, a classmate, Donald Hindle, met Mr. Libby, then a student at the Columbia Law School, and noted a decidedly nonpolitical talent.

"He could remember not only all 79 ‘Star Trek’ episodes, as I could, but he knew all the titles, too,” Mr. Hindle said. “I think he always liked fantasy."... more from the NY Times article

Jon S. body slams Cheney

Good Christians Bearing Witness?

Truth and Context: Thank You Mr. Olbermann!

"In Isaiah Berlin's typology of leaders, Bush isn't merely a hedgehog who knows one thing rather than many things. He's a delusional hedgehog who knows one thing that isn't so."Our Delusional Hedgehog
By Harold Meyerson, The Washington Post



"Right-wing Slime Machine"


"Submission" by Theo van Gogh and Ayaan Hirsi Ali


Theo Van Gogh was murdered by Mohammed Boyeri for directing this work. See "Murder in Amsterdam: the Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tollerance".

More intellectual and moral integrity from Fox and their ship of fools

CNN debunks false report about Obama:

JAKARTA, Indonesia (CNN) -- Allegations that Sen. Barack Obama was educated in a radical Muslim school known as a "madrassa" are not accurate, according to CNN reporting.

Insight Magazine, which is owned by the same company as The Washington Times, reported on its Web site last week that associates of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-New York, had unearthed information the Illinois Democrat and likely presidential candidate attended a Muslim religious school known for teaching the most fundamentalist form of Islam.

Obama lived in Indonesia as a child, from 1967 to 1971, with his mother and stepfather and has acknowledged attending a Muslim school, but an aide said it was not a madrassa.

Insight attributed the information in its article to an unnamed source, who said it was discovered by "researchers connected to Senator Clinton." A spokesman for Clinton, who is also weighing a White House bid, denied that the campaign was the source of the Obama claim.

He called the story "an obvious right-wing hit job."

Insight stood by its story in a response posted on its Web site Monday afternoon.

The Insight article was cited several times Friday on Fox News and was also referenced by the New York Post, The Glenn Beck program on CNN Headline News and a number of political blogs. (Watch how the Obama "gossip" spread )

School not a madrassa

But reporting by CNN in Jakarta, Indonesia and Washington, D.C., shows the allegations that Obama attended a madrassa to be false. CNN dispatched Senior International Correspondent John Vause to Jakarta to investigate.

He visited the Basuki school, which Obama attended from 1969 to 1971.

"This is a public school. We don't focus on religion," Hardi Priyono, deputy headmaster of the Basuki school, told Vause. "In our daily lives, we try to respect religion, but we don't give preferential treatment."

Vause reported he saw boys and girls dressed in neat school uniforms playing outside the school, while teachers were dressed in Western-style clothes.

"I came here to Barack Obama's elementary school in Jakarta looking for what some are calling an Islamic madrassa ... like the ones that teach hate and violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan," Vause said on the "Situation Room" Monday. "I've been to those madrassas in Pakistan ... this school is nothing like that."

Vause also interviewed one of Obama's Basuki classmates, Bandug Winadijanto, who claims that not a lot has changed at the school since the two men were pupils. Insight reported that Obama's political opponents believed the school promoted Wahhabism, a fundamentalist form of Islam, "and are seeking to prove it."

"It's not (an) Islamic school. It's general," Winadijanto said. "There is a lot of Christians, Buddhists, also Confucian. ... So that's a mixed school."

The Obama aide described Fox News' broadcasting of the Insight story "appallingly irresponsible."

Fox News executive Bill Shine told CNN "Reliable Sources" anchor Howard Kurtz that some of the network's hosts were simply expressing their opinions and repeatedly cited Insight as the source of the allegations.

Obama has noted in his two books, "Dreams From My Father" and "The Audacity of Hope," that he spent two years in a Muslim school and another two years in a Catholic school while living in Indonesia from age 6 to 10.CNN

Precious

"My daddy was a wildlife warrior and I'm going to continue his work."
— BINDI IRWIN
the eight-year-old daughter of the late Steve Irwin, in a joint press conference with her mother, Terri, at the National Press Club on Friday.

on Libbey..."Cheney's Cheney":

“He could remember not only all 79 ‘Star Trek’ episodes, as I could, but he knew all the titles, too,” Mr. Hindle said. “I think he always liked fantasy.”NY Times article

Reality check for the ship of fools: Maliko to Congress-woman Clinton: "Senator Evan Bayh, an Indiana Democrat who traveled with Mrs. Clinton, said that in a meeting with Mr. Maliki, the prime minister seemingly "paid lip-service to some of the president’s proposals." But Senator Bayh said that when Mr. Maliki was pressed to be candid, he said something like, 'I’d frankly prefer that you give us the arms and get out of the way.'"NY Times

Jon Stewart Does Condi

Looks like Condi is Next on the Hit List

Hubris: Iraq and Vietnam: Why Bush's Escalation won't work

"...The Vietnamese communists had key advantages that the U.S. side couldn't match: a better army, more determined and more competent leaders, and a political legitimacy that they had earned by expelling the French colonizers. And they were fighting for a unified Vietnam.

Iraq is different. The "enemy" there is not a single group of Iraqis, but nearly all Iraqis, because Iraqis do not share a common definition of their state or a common agenda for its future. This disarray has been compounded by the presence of Islamic fanatics from countries that have seized the opportunity to go to Iraq to try to kill Americans. Polls and reporting by Post correspondents suggest that, overwhelmingly, Iraqis of all factions want U.S. forces to leave.

In the face of chaos, the United States has no reliable ally -- no legitimate political authority that crosses sectarian lines and attracts the loyalty of large numbers of Iraqis. Which Iraqis will risk their lives to promote Washington's idea of Iraq? The army and police defend sectarian, not national, interests, even when they are fighting the same people U.S. troops are fighting.

The Iraqis who would presumably have been most supportive of a modernizing and democratic Iraq -- the secular intelligentsia that thrived in Iraq until the Persian Gulf War -- is now dramatically depleted. Hundreds of thousands of these Iraqis have already fled to other countries, including many doctors, lawyers, academics and other trained professionals. The war has created a vacuum in the upper reaches of Iraqi society.

What's the lesson to be learned? Modesty. Before initiating a war of choice -- and Vietnam and Iraq both qualify -- define the goal with honesty and precision, then analyze what means will be needed to achieve it. Be certain you really understand the society you propose to transform. And never gamble that the political solution to such an adventure will somehow materialize after the military operation has begun. Without a plausible political plan and strong local support at the outset, military operations alone are unlikely to produce success.

Bush's latest initiatives -- like all his earlier ones -- will not produce the desired political result, because Americans cannot accomplish political objectives in Iraq. Americans are outsiders, occupiers, foreigners in every sense of the word. Only Iraqis have a chance of finding a political resolution for their divisions. So now we await the fate of this latest gamble like a high roller in Las Vegas watching a roulette ball in a spinning wheel. We have about as much control over the situation as the gambler has of that ball. The outcome is out of our hands, and it would be foolish to bet that we will like the way the conflict ends..."(read hear at the Washinton Post)

the burden of his-story

the Daily Show reveals more Republican stupidity

more fun with the ship of fools gang

Limbaugh on Pelosi: "Why, she can multitask. She can breastfeed, she can clip her toenails, she can direct the House"

Maliki and Friends have got to be laughing at Bush and his ship of American Fools

Think about this. Maliki and his Shite militias, including their Iranian facilitators, have us right where they want us. After the Saddam hanging, it became clear to me that the Shiite leadership is simply using this ship of fools, and those American's who support this war, to do their bidding. Maliki and Al-Sadr want us there to give their government legitimacy and to kill Sunni's--"the Terrorists". If we leave, Al- Sadr simply goes in and kills thousands, and, get this, the world blames America. If we stay, we keep killing their enemies for them, sacrificing more Americans, and bleeding the economy, and millions go into Shiite and Islamic revolutionary coffers. What's the solution? There is only one, stupid! End the folly of Bush and Cheney's divinely inspired nightmares, and Get Out.

COST OF THE WAR: HOW ABOUT A WAR TAX FOR EVERY AMERICAN WHO VOTED FOR THIS ADMINISTRATION?



Are you mad yet? Olbermann is!

...seeing divine justice, through the glass darkly

What it might mean...an interesting view.

A Scaffold's Dark Portrait of Iraq
By Eugene Robinson
Tuesday, January 2, 2007; Page A17

"Since history is written by those who rule, the annals of the U.S.-supported Iraqi government record that the deposed dictator Saddam Hussein was given a fair trial, sentenced to death for the mass murder of innocent Shiite civilians and duly executed by hanging on Dec. 30, 2006, in accordance with Iraqi law. A tragic era was brought to an end, according to the official history, opening the way for a brighter tomorrow.

But the dark, remorseless, unflinching cellphone video of the execution that quickly surfaced on the Internet tells an alternate history, one that is neither tidy nor hopeful -- and that demonstrates, not just by its content but by its very existence, that forces other than the current beleaguered government intend to be the final authors of Iraqi history. That's because they intend to be the ones in charge.

The grainy footage was apparently captured surreptitiously by someone whose vantage point was near the foot of the gallows. Anyone thinking of watching it should be warned that the camera does not shirk from the inevitable "money shot" -- the grotesque moment when the trap door opens and Saddam Hussein's life is terminated. It's history as snuff film.

The most revelatory moment comes when the condemned tyrant -- unhooded, unbowed, still acting as if he expects the deference owed to a legitimate head of state, especially one who rules by terror -- gives a religious exhortation. A voice responds by speaking a name that is also a taunt: "Moqtada, Moqtada, Moqtada."

The reference is to the Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who leads what is generally described as the biggest, best-equipped and most powerful of Iraq's many sectarian militias -- and whose father, a widely revered cleric, was ordered killed by Hussein. The message is clear: Hear this, Sunni dog. Iraq is a Shiite country now, and payback is sweet.

Hussein can't believe the impertinence. "Moqtada?" he asks, as if he's trying to catch the thread of a narrative that no longer makes sense.

In the dictator's curses against "the Americans" and "the Persians," it is impossible not to hear echoes of the time when Hussein was the one who wrote Iraq's history. For years, the Reagan administration gave him military and intelligence support to keep the hated Persians from defeating his outnumbered forces in the Iran-Iraq war. In 1983, Donald Rumsfeld was dispatched to visit Baghdad as a special envoy; he smiled broadly as he shook the tyrant's hand.

Naturally, that's not an episode from Iraq's recent history that the current government will care to highlight. Nor is this Iraqi regime's official history of the tyrant's execution likely to dwell on the fact that it was the Americans who captured him in the first place. And since the government doesn't like to acknowledge how little of the country it controls and how utterly unreliable its security forces are, not much emphasis will be given to how the Americans had to hold the tyrant in custody all this time to guarantee against lynching or escape, finally handing him over just hours before he was to be legally killed.

I wonder about the man who called out "Moqtada, Moqtada, Moqtada," though. I wonder if future historians of the Shiite ascendancy will so easily forget the U.S. "tilt" toward Hussein during the war, or America's nonchalant acceptance of the way Hussein's Sunni regime oppressed, persecuted and massacred majority Shiites all those years, or the way America encouraged Shiites to rise up against Hussein after the Persian Gulf War and then backed off and watched as he sent helicopter gunships to slaughter them.

And I wonder about the man -- I assume it was a man -- who filmed Hussein's execution with his cellphone and showed it to the world. I wonder how he got past what had to be super-tight security, and I wonder what his motivation was.

Is it possible he was working for the government, which wanted to send a message of solidarity to Moqtada al-Sadr, who needs to be kept inside the tent if the government is to survive? Was this jittery, spooky, haunting video a promise to militant Shiites that they will remain large and in charge? Or is that too wheels-within-wheels even for the nest of vipers that is today's Iraq?

One alternative is that the anonymous videographer wanted to show Sunni insurgents -- and the rest of the Muslim world, in which Sunnis far outnumber Shiites -- just how much is at stake in the civil war, and why Sunnis view the insurgency as a matter of survival. His message might have been this: If they can hang the fearsome Saddam Hussein like a dog, they can do the same to any of us." (Washington Post)

MORE AMERICAN/REPUBLICAN/FUNDAMENTALIST IDIOCY...