The National Security Archive has just released a Load of Files Electronic Briefing Book No. 253 Posted - August 20, 2008 under the title: 1998 Missile Strikes on Bin Laden May Have Backfired with a subtitle: Extensive 1999 Report on Al-Qaeda Threat Released by U.S. Dept of Energy, Taliban Told U.S. They Wanted to Bomb Washington

With backlinks to the PDF's and more links in the sidebar on the left.

On Friday August 15 the Bush administration sent Condoleezza Rice to meet with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili as a "show of U.S. support." Yikes. They sent Condi? Talk about giving somebody the goodbye look. If this were a Marty Scorsese movie, Saakashvili would have been sleeping with the fishes come Saturday morning. You'd think Keystone Kondi would have lent sufficient slapstick to the Georgian situation, but no. Adding to the antics, John McCain announced on Friday August 15 that he would send along as his personal representatives Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, the Bea Arthur and Betty White of neoconservatism. Then, to cap things off, McCain himself dropped the atomic punchline: "In the twenty-first century, nations don't invade other nations."

You could hear irony clawing at its coffin lid.

The bananastans are going bananas, Iran's down the can, al Qaeda is a more dangerous enemy than ever and our "victory" in Iraq has gone off in our faces like a joke shop cigar. Less than a decade into the New American Century, young Mr. Bush and the neoconservatives who promised us an empire have squandered everything our forefathers achieved in the America's first two and a quarter centuries as a nation. Yet, incredibly, bewilderingly, stupefyingly, a septuagenarian Senator who steals Christian prisoner stories from Alexander Solzhenitsyn and promises to protract the Bush foreign policy fumble-rama is a viable contender for the presidency of the United States.

We live in hysteric times.

promoted - cho

War correspondents have been all the rage in America for generations. News organizations love war coverage, even if what’s reported isn’t actually entirely true. “You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war," William Randolph Hearst, publisher of the New York Journal, telegraphed one of his soon-to-be famous correspondents in Cuba in 1898. We are again in a gilded age for war reports, with Russia invading the republic of Georgia—or was it Georgia attacked first?—just as the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were going stale as old news.

Susie Dow reviews The Curse of the Al Dulaimi Hotel: and other half-truths from Baghdad by Colin Freeman, now the Chief Foreign Correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph. Landing in Baghdad on May 1, 2003 as an independent journalist, Freeman's new book reveals the story behind getting the story including the hilarious antics of his charmingly insane personal assistant, Mohammed Kadom.

The law firm involved is very small and has never filed a class action suit before. The focus of the suit is very narrow according to the attorney, "Our claims are specifically for Americans put into situations where they were put at risk by lack of training, and the failure of their supervisors to handle that issue." Their client alleges KBR failed to provide adequate training. He lost the use of his hand when his co-worker mis-operated the wreckers machinery, crushing his hand in the mechanism.

The suit lists KBR and 9 subsidiaries it uses to pay contractors.

This lawsuit is worth keeping an eye on.

Ilona Meagher has just posted on her blog site, PTSD Combat: Winning the War Within, an outstanding collection of links and a few video's on what the subject title describes "Art For, By And About Veterans Begins Sunday" and the link just above will take you to it.

She starts it out with this:

Bumped. Originally posted 2008-08-16 07:32:49 -0500

We have two theaters of occupations of others in destroyed countries, destroyed by us, one in continuing destruction from others before to us now and our broken promises of helping to rebuild as that theater grows more dangerous, the other totally destroyed on the trumped up lies of a twisted ideology of a few, tens of thousands dead and maimed, millions living as refugee's, billions of dollars wasted, stolen, lost in the machine of war profitteering, soldiers serving mutiple tours in both, families of same scraficing as a nation that is not moves along, most not caring what is happening In Their Names.

We call this "The War On Terror" and in the seven years these conflict theaters have been raging all we've created are the hatreds that will feed the ranks of the criminal terrorists leading to damaged National Securities around the globe and more theaters of death, destruction and occupations.

The sub title of this 'War On Terrorism' has been sold to all as a clash of twisted religious ideologies, a 'Religious War', on all sides. Those war hawks supporting and pushing these ideologies, few of them fighting, define everything about these clashes with political and religious labels, those opposed are left to define in same manner.

The official hidden history of our disastrous war in Vietnam was leaked to the news media in a purloined document called the Pentagon Papers. The damning truth about America’s disastrous war on terrorism was quietly made public in a press release.

“There is no battlefield solution to terrorism," The RAND Corporation, a top Pentagon contractor on national defense research, concluded in a comprehensive study of military campaigns against insurgency groups around the world. Specifically, US military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan are not working, the study concluded.

promoted by roxy. Original posting info: 2008-08-11 08:16:18 -1000

Bush, Manson, and the Media Blackout

An Interview with Vincent Bugliosi - Part 2

"More dead since the war was declared won. A war based on lies and deceit." Image cc

Michael Collins
Washington, DC
(Also See Part 1

If a man carefully plans and executes the killing of another, we call him a murderer, arrest and try him, then send him off to the nearest death chamber. In many states, individuals convicted of three felonies are subject to an automatic life sentence under a program quaintly referred to as the "three strikes and you're out law." Justice for ordinary citizens in the United States may not be swift but when executed, it is final and unforgiving.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates wants to spend $20 billion to double the size of Afghanistan's army as part of a program designed to bring the country that was once the "crown jewel" of our woebegone war on terror under control. We might be better served by simply bribing the Taliban and al Qaeda elements in Afghanistan to take a little breather. That's how General David Petraeus got the Sunni militias in Iraq to play ball with him, and that only cost us about $216 million. As peace making measures go, it's cheaper to buy guerillas than it is to make soldiers, so why not take the path of least resistance?

Of course, the cost of victory through bribery in the bananastans could get twice as expensive now that "top Bush administration officials" are looking to step up ground force forays into Pakistan. I guess the top officials finally realized that bombing Pakistani weddings with nuclear submarines isn't getting the job done.

Not to worry, though. General David Petraeus, young Mr. Bush's "main man," is about to take charge of the bananastans, and if he can't win there, nobody can.