You guys (ci, revel, wande) remind me of that Life of Brian bit involving the Sermon on the Mount.
Is there somewhere you have to be in the next half hour?
LOL
Actually, I was reading your link at work and decided to stop. (I am not allowed to sleep on the job.)
Well, then get somewhere you are allowed to sleep. If you've been married for a significant duration, that ought to provide a number of opportunities.
Blatham, I honestly didn't get it. I have admit that when I read this bit:
Quote:Practical experience, sitting at the right hand of a very powerful Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff [inaudible - noise] and watching probably one of the finest Presidents we've ever had, that's how I feel about George H. W. Bush, exercise one of the greatest adeptnesses at foreign policy I've ever seen.
I became confused on what this guy had to say that you would approve of knowing some of the things you had to say about Bush in the past here.
But I think the gist of it was that no matter how much a genius is, there has got to be transparency in government.
But I wondered how that tied in with the bit of about the treatment of detainees in the beginning and then him turning around and saying George Bush is the finest president we have ever had. (ugh)
All in all I just became muddled reading it and gave up and hoped you would explain.
well it was all perfectly clear to me
there is a decision making cabal around cheney and rumsfeld which actively harmful to american democracy
douglas j freith is a jerk.
revel wrote:Blatham, I honestly didn't get it. I have admit that when I read this bit:
Quote:Practical experience, sitting at the right hand of a very powerful Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff [inaudible - noise] and watching probably one of the finest Presidents we've ever had, that's how I feel about George H. W. Bush, exercise one of the greatest adeptnesses at foreign policy I've ever seen.
I became confused on what this guy had to say that you would approve of knowing some of the things you had to say about Bush in the past here.
But I think the gist of it was that no matter how much a genius is, there has got to be transparency in government.
But I wondered how that tied in with the bit of about the treatment of detainees in the beginning and then him turning around and saying George Bush is the finest president we have ever had. (ugh)
All in all I just became muddled reading it and gave up and hoped you would explain.
Guys
It's not an easy piece. Wilkerson is talking to a bunch of people who are familiar with his topic and his references (and who likely got a good heads up on the drift of this speech via an introduction).
But his overall subject is the modern concentration of power, and the consequent ability to exercise that power, by the executive body (down to a small few in the administration, a cabal, who may not be nearly competent enough to manage such power) with minimal balancing checks and with maximal secrecy.
Towards the end of this excerpt, he addresses the modern situation which Eisenhower warned of...the military industrial complex and its influence in this whole story.
I have read this through three times now and will read it a few more times before I'm done with it. Sometimes, that's just necessary.
yeah well read my summary blatham, its shorter and more to the point.
watching interviews of colin powell over the years this is my summation :
he has on occasion "mildly" criticized certain actions by the u.s. government. however, when being asked specifically if he disapproved of a certain action by the government, he essentially "clicked his heels, saluted" and would say that as a former soldier he would always approve of the president's actions.
i thought, after reading some books about him regarding the first iraqui war , that he was quite a respectable human being. i have been rather disappointed by him later since he seems to have some problems seeing the truth, but he has at least made it clear, that as a former soldier he must remain loyal "no matter what".
i still think that deep down he is an honest human being. it wouldn't surprise me if perhaps three to five years down the road, he might tell us what went on. hbg
Revealing truths 3 to 5 years down the line will have almost no impact since the current administration will be gone. People needs to know the truth today; not four years from now.
c.i : i'm sure you know : "there is truth and then there is the real truth" ... and it usually takes some time for the real truth to emerge.
how much time have you left (LOL) ? hbg
Thanks for the link, Blatham.
I'm still chuckling over this:
Quote:remind me of that Life of Brian bit involving the Sermon on the Mount.
It seems Bush has a direct line to god:
President George W Bush told Palestinian ministers that God had told him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq - and create a Palestinian State, a new BBC series reveals.
In Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs, a major three-part series on BBC TWO (at 9.00pm on Monday 10, Monday 17 and Monday 24 October), Abu Mazen, Palestinian Prime Minister, and Nabil Shaath, his Foreign Minister, describe their first meeting with President Bush in June 2003.
Nabil Shaath says: "President Bush said to all of us: 'I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, "George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan." And I did, and then God would tell me, "George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq
" And I did. And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, "Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East." And by God I'm gonna do it.'"
Abu Mazen was at the same meeting and recounts how President Bush told him: "I have a moral and religious obligation. So I will get you a Palestinian state."
The series charts the attempts to bring peace to the Middle East, from President Bill Clinton's peace talks in 1999/2000 to Israel's withdrawal from Gaza last August.
Norma Percy, series producer of The 50 Years War (1998) returns, with producers Mark Anderson and Dan Edge, to tell the inside story of another seven years of crisis.
Presidents and Prime Ministers, their generals and ministers tell what happened behind closed doors as peace talks failed and the intifada exploded.
Israel and the Arabs: Elusive Peace - Mondays 10, 17 and 24 October, from 9.00 to 10.00pm on BBC TWO.
English-Irish journalist captured in Baghdad, released 36 hours later
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1597450,00.html
Great news.
Yikes...Kofi Annan's son is a fat white oilman from texas.
Quote:Oilman Indicted Over Kickbacks to Saddam Hussein's Regime
By JULIA PRESTON and SIMON ROMERO
Published: October 22, 2005
Oscar S. Wyatt Jr., the flamboyant Texas oil trader who flaunted his close ties to the regime of Saddam Hussein, was indicted yesterday in federal court in New York on charges that he paid millions of dollars in kickbacks to the regime to sell Iraqi oil under a United Nations program.
The indictment says that Mr. Wyatt was informed by Iraqi officials sometime in the fall of 2000 that he and other traders would have to begin paying secret surcharges to continue to be granted the right to sell Iraqi oil under the United Nations oil- for-food program.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/22/business/22food.html?hp&ex=1130040000&en=eb7b239a5b2322b3&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Clearly, this indictment demonstrates once and for all that Texans involved in the oil business are irredeemably corrupt. Hell, you could take the famous Oil Producers and Distributors Building in Houston and remove the top ten stories and it would make NO DIFFERENCE AT ALL!
I read an interesting article today about Karen Hughes in her tour of Muslim countries. To say that she is not well received is an understatement. She does not help her cause by making inaccurate statements. I honestly don't know why the WH thought she would welcomed in Arab/Muslim countries. I can't understand their strategy there. I mean she sets my teeth on edge, I can't imagine how she comes across to Muslims/Arabs. The only people who like her are ones that don't need any convincing of WH in the first place. So it sort of defeats the purpose it seems to me.
(couldn't find the Karen Hughes thread, since the article stems around Iraq I thought it would ok.)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/21/AR2005102101870.html
Hughes Misreports Iraqi History
Envoy Vastly Overstates Fact in Justifying War to Indonesian Students
By Alan Sipress
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, October 22, 2005; A15
Quote:JAKARTA, Indonesia, Oct. 21 -- Bush administration envoy Karen Hughes visited Indonesia on Friday as part of her campaign to repair U.S. standing with the world's Muslims and defended the invasion of Iraq by telling skeptical students that deposed president Saddam Hussein had gassed hundreds of thousands of his own people.
Her remark was an impassioned answer to familiar criticisms of U.S. policy raised by her audience at one of Indonesia's leading Islamic universities. But it was also wrong.
State Department officials later acknowledged that Hughes, tapped by President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to set the record straight on U.S. policies in the Muslim world, had misreported history.
revel, Our local newspaper has an article on Karen Hughes with a different twist. She was telling the Indonesians about Saddam's gassing of his own people saying it numbered some 300,000, but some media people questioned her on those 'facts.' The estimate given by the experts on this subject say that the number is closer to 5,000.
she just made everybody angry about the message she's sharing with the Indonesians and the world by not telling the truth and twisting of facts.
Another incompetent Bushco worker making things worse.
Any company need an incompetent PR person on their staff? There's one looking for a job.
From the NYT:
For Americans, Fight Is Fiercest in a Sunni City
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
RAMADI, Iraq, Oct. 22 - The Bradley fighting vehicles moved slowly down this city's main boulevard. Suddenly, a homemade bomb exploded, punching into one vehicle. Then another explosion hit, briefly lifting a second vehicle up onto its side before it dropped back down again.
Two American soldiers climbed out of a hatch, the first with his pant leg on fire, and the other completely in flames. The first rolled over to help the other man, but when they touched, the first man also burst into flames. Insurgent gunfire began to pop.
Several blocks away, Lance Cpl. Jeffrey Rosener, 20, from Minneapolis, watched the two men die from a lookout post at a Marine encampment. His heart reached out to them, but he could not. In Ramadi, Iraq's most violent city, two blocks may as well be 10 miles.
"I couldn't do anything," he said of the incident, which he saw on Oct. 10. He spoke quietly, sitting in the post and looking straight ahead. "It's bad down there. You hear all the rumors. We didn't know it was going to be like this."
Here in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province, Sunni Arab insurgents are waging their fiercest war against American troops, attacking with relative impunity just blocks from Marine-controlled territory. Every day, the Americans fight to hold their turf in a war against an enemy who seems to be everywhere but is not often seen.
The cost has been high: in the last six weeks, 21 Americans have been killed here, far more than in any other city in Iraq and double the number of deaths in Baghdad, a city with a population 15 times as large.
"We fight it one day at a time," said Capt. Phillip Ash, who commands Company K in the Third Battalion, Seventh Marines, which patrols central Ramadi.
"Some days you're the windshield," he said, "some days you're the bug."
Ramadi is an important indicator of just how long it may be before an American withdrawal.
The city has long been a haven for insurgents, but it has never fallen fully into enemy hands, as Falluja did last fall, when marines could not even patrol before an invasion in November. Senior commanders here will not rule out a full invasion, but for now, the checkpoints and street patrols continue.
Because troop levels have stayed steady here, Ramadi also differs from Tal Afar, a rebel stronghold near the Syrian border, where Americans laid siege only to have to return later because they were unable to leave enough troops to secure it.
Still, more than two years after the American invasion, this city of 400,000 people is just barely within American control. The deputy governor of Anbar was shot to death on Tuesday; the day before, the governor's car was fired on. There is no police force. A Baghdad cellphone company has refused to put up towers here. American bases are regularly pelted with rockets and mortar shells, and when troops here get out of their vehicles to patrol, they are almost always running.
"You can't just walk down the street for a period of time and not expect to get shot at," said Maj. Bradford W. Tippett, the operations officer for the Third Battalion.
Capt. Rory Quinn, a Bronx native who majored in international relations at Boston University, used a mixed analogy: "It's kind of like playing basketball: short sprints. Everything we do here is a minefield."
Commanders remain hopeful that Iraqi soldiers will soon be able to take full responsibility for the city. The number of Iraqi Army soldiers here has doubled in recent months. A city council has begun to work, and a local police force is being trained. But the relentlessness of the insurgent violence here ties the American units to the streets, forcing them to focus on the fight.
"We've never given them the chance to breathe, but it continues to be one of the most violent places," said Lt. Col. Roger B. Turner, commanding officer of the Marine battalion, which is attached to the Army's Second Brigade Combat Team.
The vast majority of Americans killed here since September have been victims of homemade bombs, what the military calls improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.'s. Sgt. William Callahan, a member of the bomb disposal team stationed with the Third Battalion, estimated that troops hit four such bombs a day in Ramadi. Most do not result in death or serious injury. Almost all are remotely detonated, which means someone is hiding in wait for coming vehicles.
Besides the two soldiers who died near Corporal Rosener's post, seven soldiers, including two Iraqis, in a Bradley were victims of homemade bombs in eastern Ramadi a week ago. Bombs killed one marine in a Humvee on Oct. 4, and five soldiers were killed in a Bradley on Sept. 28.
Gunnery Sgt. Jose C. Soto, the bomb squad's leader, said insurgents in Ramadi were highly trained, making bombs by linking several large artillery rounds together. They use fuel enhancements, like gasoline mixed with sugar, to cling to a victim's body and make a bigger fire, said First Lt. Bradley R. Watson, 27, of the battalion's Company L.
The Oct. 4 attack is an example. The area was rarely traveled by troops and was laced with explosives. Sergeant Callahan said 10 I.E.D.'s went off in the area that day. At 7:18 a.m., insurgents set off three explosives from holes in the road under a convoy, flipping a Humvee onto its back. Fuel gushed, making a pool on the ground, and a marine trapped under the vehicle was barely able to keep his mouth above the rising fluid. A Navy medic riding in the Humvee lost his leg but still gave first aid. The driver was killed instantly.
"It's like being caught in the undertow of a wave," said Lieutenant Watson, who was slightly hurt in the attack - the third time he has been wounded in Iraq. "Everything flips around. Everybody is shouting."
Snipers are a constant plague. In one area of the city, snipers have hit four Americans since late August, and soldiers were obliged to set up blast walls for security for a polling center there last week in the dark. A law school in eastern Ramadi had to be shut down because sniper attacks were coming from it at night.
"It's like everyone in this town is a sniper," said Muhammad Ali Jasim, an Iraqi soldier who has been stationed here since May. "You can't stand in one place for long."
"You get a workout," Corporal Rosener said. "It's all running. Running from building to building."
But closeness to the insurgents - a popular sniping position is in the hotel across the street from the marine camp in the governor's office - has given the Americans a better look at their enemy. The marines of Company K have seen arms pulling dead or wounded insurgents away from the hotel's windows.
Insurgent groups appear to be numerous and fractious. Religious and militant graffiti are scrawled on walls. Colonel Turner said he saw a man on Thursday giving out leaflets exhorting citizens to ignore any mujahedeen literature that did not bear the symbol of the Islamic Army militant group - two crossed swords draped with a black flag.
Ansar al-Sunna, another militant group, claimed to have killed four Iraqi contractors here on Friday.
Many of their techniques directly involve Ramadi residents. One is to use telephones to track American raids: Captain Quinn said he had heard the phone ring in houses along a block they were searching, and when the owner of the house they were standing in did not pick up, the calls stopped - the insurgents had found them.
The line between civilians and insurgents is blurry in Ramadi. In a twist that sets it apart from other violent cities, insurgents usually do not attack civilians in large groups. There have been no suicide bombings in recent memory, and I.E.D.'s are rarely placed close to houses. Insurgents have left alone American projects that deliver services that locals want, like the installation of 18 transformers last month for more power. And when the streets empty out, the Americans know an attack is imminent.
"The population clearly gets the word - there's a network out there," Colonel Turner said at the Third Battalion's camp, in an old palace on the Euphrates. "The average population has to go against them" or the fighting will continue, he said, referring to the insurgents.
Maj. Daniel Wagner, a civil affairs officer with the battalion, spends his days trying to draw in locals. But progress in Ramadi is measured in inches. Much of his time is spent patching and paving roads to prevent bombings, and planning demolitions to take away sniper nests - work he has sardonically referred to as urban renewal. Two parks are planned, as is a new police station. But the violence is a major hindrance.
"I should be able to just drive over," he said. "You need a four-vehicle convoy, you're out of breath, you're sweating, you sit down and say, 'Do you feel safe here? O.K., I've got to get out of here now.' "
The task is more difficult in that Anbar is one of Iraq's three poorest provinces, according to a survey conducted by the United Nations in 2004. Impoverished locals are easily recruited by insurgents. Captain Quinn said bomb makers usually carried $500 in their pockets - half the fee, he estimated, for the job, the rest being paid after detonation.
So far, reaching out to locals and persuading them to shut out insurgents seems a distant goal. Among the obstacles is the very armor that the troops so badly need for protection: on Ramadi's streets, marines in Humvees might as well be astronauts in orbit.
On one patrol last week, a marine from Florida smiled through several inches of bulletproof glass at a tiny boy in blue pants and a dinosaur shirt. The boy solemnly stood beside the Humvee, motioning with his arms - perhaps asking for a treat. The marine shook his head and shrugged, unable to understand.
The most immediate way forward, military commanders here agree, is training and deploying more Iraqi soldiers. Of the seven battalions in Ramadi, three are in eastern Ramadi with their own territory to patrol, said Maj. William R. Fall, the Iraqi Security Force coordinator. Still, only about a company and a half is based inside the central and western parts of the city.
Officers said Iraqi soldiers had vastly improved over the past year. The day of the referendum here was violent, with mortar and rocket-propelled grenade attacks raining down on many of the stations. But Iraqi soldiers stayed at their positions and returned fire when under attack, marines near the sites reported.
"I see incremental progress every single day," Captain Quinn said. "It's working, but it's not a three-month affair."
Qais Mizher contributed reporting for this article.
