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Scotland Yard's investigation has centered on Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, two Russian ex-KGB officers who were present at the Millennium Hotel in central London when Litvinenko fell ill on Nov. 1 after contamination from a rare, radioactive substance.
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Reporting from inside the courtroom in the CIA leak-related trial of Scooter Libby this week revealed that former White House spokesman Ari Fleisher sought immunity from prosecution because he was worried he might have committed treason — and even fearred [sic] he was in jeopardy of receiving the death penalty: [my em]
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"I get the sense if there was a bull in the china shop, Cheney would blame the china."
Dick Durbin went to the floor of the Senate on Thursday night to denounce the vice president as “delusional.”
It was shocking, and Senator Durbin should be ashamed of himself.
Delusional is far too mild a word to describe Dick Cheney. Delusional doesn’t begin to capture the profound, transcendental one-flew-over daftness of the man.
Has anyone in the history of the United States ever been so singularly wrong and misguided about such phenomenally important events and continued to insist he’s right in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary?
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush's father accused the news media of "personal animosity" toward his son and said he found the criticism so unrelenting he sometimes talked back to his television set.
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"I won't get too personal here -- but this antipathy got worse after the 43rd president took office," the former president said. He was speaking at a reception for a journalism scholarship awarded in honor of the late Hugh Sidey, White House correspondent for Time magazine.
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BAGHDAD, Iraq -- In perhaps the boldest and most sophisticated attack in four years of warfare, gunmen speaking English, wearing U.S. military uniforms and carrying American weapons abducted four U.S. soldiers last week at the provincial headquarters in the Shiite holy city of Karbala and then shot them to death.
The U.S. military confirmed a report earlier Friday by The Associated Press that three of the soldiers were dead and one was mortally wounded with a gunshot to the head when they were found in a neighboring province, about 25 miles from the compound where they were captured. A fifth soldier was killed in the initial attack on the compound.
The new account contradicted a U.S. military statement on Jan. 20, the day of the raid on an Iraqi governor's office, that five soldiers were killed "repelling" the attack.
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The brazen assault, 50 miles south of Baghdad, was conducted by nine to 12 gunmen posing as an American security team, the military confirmed. The attackers traveled in black GMC Suburban vehicles -- the type used by U.S. government convoys -- had American weapons, wore new U.S. military combat fatigues, and spoke English, according to two senior U.S. military officials as well as Iraqi officials.
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... Things are much worse now, and bodies that breathe now and then are probably maxing their PT and rifle range scores via the Mark II pencil.
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Thirty generals agree, thirty senators agree, thirty Helens agree, and now thirty spies agree: the "surge" is the wrong way forward.
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AUSTIN, Texas - Liberal Texas columnist Molly Ivins has been hospitalized in her ongoing battle with breast cancer, her assistant said Friday.
Ivins may be able to go home Monday, Betsy Moon said.
"That's the day the doctors said," Moon said. "We're not sure what's going to happen, but she's very sick."
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N THE FICTIONAL world of the hit show "24," federal law enforcement agencies are pouring every last resource into the search for a nuclear terrorist in Los Angeles.
In the real world, federal agents apparently have so much free time that they can dress up in bulletproof vests and masks in order to raid clinics that serve patients battling cancer, AIDS and other diseases. That's what happened last week as Drug Enforcement Administration agents stormed 11 medical marijuana dispensaries throughout L.A. and West Hollywood. We can all rest easier knowing that lollipops, cookies, candies and candy bars laced with marijuana are in no danger of reaching seriously ill patients.
The West Hollywood City Council recently voted to control the number of medical marijuana dispensaries operating in the city. Last week, the Los Angeles Police Department submitted more than 40 recommendations for controlling dispensaries, seeking to ban them from being within 1,000 feet of schools and to require owners to remove all litter "visible to the public within 100 feet of the premises at least twice daily." The dispensaries also have practiced self-regulation. Yes, there have been poorly run dispensaries and others looking to circumvent the system - but the feds didn't focus on them.
Instead, this raid hit one of the best-run dispensaries in West Hollywood - the Farmacy - where patients must present valid medical information verified by doctors; where purchases are limited to 1 ounce, even though the law allows patients to possess 8 ounces; where patients aren't allowed to medicate on the premises; and where anyone caught with forged documents is detained until police arrive and charged with a felony.
The Farmacy has been a leader in treatment and education. Caring for patients suffering from everything from cancer to glaucoma to multiple sclerosis, it teaches patients about the effects of different strains of indica and sativa marijuana and offers edibles and concentrated medicine in the form of oil to reduce the potential harm of smoking marijuana in plant form.
"The DEA is here to enforce federal drug laws," Special Agent Sarah Pullen declared, and, strictly speaking, she was right. In a 2001 case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the "medical necessity" of a patient could not be used as a defense against federal drug enforcement. (The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 classifies marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug with "no medical uses" - making it worse in the eyes of the feds than cocaine, methamphetamine and many other drugs.) In 2005, the court ruled that federal authorities could even stop a seriously ill patient from cultivating marijuana for her personal use.
In her dissent from that decision, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor declared that such "overreaching stifles an express choice by some states." Justice John Paul Stevens noted in his opinion for the court that Congress could revisit its outdated law to deal with the "strong arguments that marijuana does have valid therapeutic purposes."
Meanwhile, the DEA can still bully its way past California law while ignoring its own spectacular policy failures. The DEA has failed to significantly reduce marijuana consumption despite breathtaking increases in arrests and incarcerations. And its recent efforts aimed at keeping medicine from patients are shamefully transparent attempts to go after an easy target: Marijuana dispensaries operate openly, and cancer patients are limited in their ability to evade law enforcement.
The arcane classification of marijuana under the Controlled Substances Act persists despite the government's own actions and data to the contrary. In 1992, the Food and Drug Administration approved Marinol pills, which use the active ingredient in marijuana (THC) to treat nausea and vomiting. In 1999, the Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that "the evidence is relatively strong for the [marijuana] treatment of pain and, intriguing although less well established, for movement disorders."
So what can be done? Congress must reclassify marijuana in accord with the standards of science and medicine. The law simply needs to be fixed.
This reform is overdue. It should be an urgent priority for our new Congress to stop the Justice Department from arresting or harassing sick people in 11 states who have the legal right to use medical marijuana.
"I didn't get to go to Mass," recalled Donahue. "There were some other blood sacrifices being made to the ambitions of a hate-crazed power-maddened little man who wanted to take the place of God."
In an interview, Pelosi also said she was puzzled by what she considered the president's minimalist explanation for his confidence in the new surge of 21,500 U.S. troops that he has presented as the crux of a new "way forward" for U.S. forces in Iraq.
"He's tried this two times -- it's failed twice," the California Democrat said. "I asked him at the White House, 'Mr. President, why do you think this time it's going to work?' And he said, 'Because I told them it had to.' " (my em)
Question: What is the connection between a possible American attack on Iran and the perjury trial of I. Lewis Libby?
Answer: Vice President Dick Cheney.
Sober heads see an attack on Iran as both essentially baseless and an invitation to a widening war we are not prepared to fight, thanks to Iraq. Because of this, the idea that such an attack may be undertaken is not considered a pressing reality by many analysts. Ali Larijani, Iran's top national security official, shares this view. "The possibility of this is very weak, and it's more a matter of psychological warfare," said Larijani on Thursday. "The Islamic republic's armed forces are in a state of complete readiness and are monitoring everything in order to give a crushing response to even the smallest aggression or threat." Larijani concluded his remarks by stating, "I advise Mr. Bush and his advisors to be rational and think about their own nation's interest."
This would be sage advice if Mr. Bush were the one doing the thinking. These days, all the thinking and management is being done by Dick Cheney, and if this Libby trial comes to pose a danger to his standing, all the sober analysis by policy experts may turn to dust. Nothing is more dangerous, after all, than a cornered animal.
FORT STEWART, Ga. - The sergeant major calls the name, Staff Sgt. John L. Hartman Jr., as it's unveiled on a granite marker at the root of a new eastern redbud tree on Warriors Walk _ where hundreds of these living memorials have been planted to honor the wartime dead.
Hartman volunteered for a third tour inIraq last year so an Army buddy could stay home with his newborn son. He was killed Nov. 30 when a bomb blast tore into his Humvee.
Last week, Hartman became the 318th soldier memorialized at Warriors Walk, a grove of eastern redbuds started with 34 trees in April 2003.
Read the full story here.
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Jack Welch is the guy who was CEO of General Electric from 1981 to 2001. He acquired NBC for GE in 1985 as part of the RCA deal, and in 1993 had hired former Republican National Committee chair Roger Ailes to rework NBC's news division, particularly its CNBC channel, to be more to the GOP's liking. (Ailes was then hired in 1996 by another right-wing media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, to create and run FOX News. Funny how that works.) Welch took great pride in corrupting former liberals like Chris Matthews and Tim Russert, seducing them with cold hard cash and then boasting about it:
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"My husband, Khalil, was killed during the US invasion in 2003 when he drove through a closed road and soldiers shot him dead.
"I live in Haifa Street, one of the most dangerous places to live in Baghdad today. The area is infamous for its huge number of insurgents. This is why Iraqi and US soldiers have increased their activity in the area, constantly raiding homes and arresting men for interrogation.
"Last month, they arrested my 23-year-old brother Fae'ek, who lives with me. He is a pharmacy student but nonetheless they took him and kept him in prison for more than a week - even after knowing he was innocent. He returned with signs of torture on his body and was crying like a baby because of the pain.
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... Bottom line is that we've had enormous successes, and we will continue to have enormous successes.
Sign up! Sign up! Be part of the surge. Pres. Bush needs young Republicans to volunteer for service in Iraq. He especially needs the sons and daughters of members of his administration, his appointees and of Republican members of Congress to help him fight "the enemy" in Iraq.
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For the president's critics, the State of the Union was a boring disappointment, filled with half-truths and missed opportunities. He defended an indefensible policy in Iraq; he made ridiculous budget claims, he ignored Katrina reconstruction, and he unveiled awful (and largely rehashed) health care and energy policies. There wasn't much to like.
But as it turns out, Bush's allies were even less impressed. Here's an item that was sent to Focus on the Family's membership yesterday afternoon.
Kristi Hamrick, a spokeswoman for American Values, said the president aimed at the wrong target.
"Frankly, his speech was really a reaction to his critics and to the Democratic House and Senate leadership," she said. "They are the ones who want to talk about global warming. They are the ones who want to say that Iraq is in a shambles. He lost a golden opportunity to set the stage - to describe the issues that were most important to the American people."
Hamrick said Bush, who has two years left in the White House, was trying to be pragmatic but shouldn't have leaned so far toward the liberals.
Yes, the GOP base thought the State of the Union was geared towards the left.
The conservative crack-up continues.
Bush seems to believe in a democracy as long as the people and their representatives bend to his will. In this guest essay, political analyst Brent Budowsky observes the tragedy of an American President who no longer is hailed as the "leader of the free world":Had George Walker Bush begun his State of the Union speech with the words, "Ladies and Gentleman, I am taking my leave and retiring from the Presidency," there would have been tidal waves of standing ovations from the Congress across the United States to the far corners of the free world.
Instead, after a modest courtly bow to the first woman Speaker and the party that triumphed in the last election, the President continued his contempt for what Jefferson called the decent opinion of mankind.
Still, nothing has changed; it is business as usual for obsessive escalation of war.
Sadly, tragically, outrageously, the President of the United States is no longer the leader of the free world.
This is why there will be celebrations and rejoicing from lovers of freedom and democracy everywhere, when this President finally takes his leave from office, and his successor begins the hard work of undoing the damage he has done to our country and our world.
This was a tiny, tepid performance by a tiny man who is shrinking, even now, before our very eyes. Let all the gods that are or ever were be thanked that he only has one more speech to go before history swallows him, before this nation and the world is faced with the grueling challenge of cleaning up all the bloody messes he has made.
I hope they find Lipscomb and I hope he can turn his life around because of this. This is what most folks are like down deep, if they just give themselves a chance.After about 10 minutes, Slaughter, 53, who is a crewman on a yacht that cruises the Potomac River, started to lose muscle control in the frigid water, he said. Just then, he could not believe his eyes: Three men were ambling along the street by the Washington Marina, separated from him by a seven-foot-high iron fence.
He yelped for them, and one, aided by the others, climbed over the fence and ran over to Slaughter, who was struggling to keep his head above water.
Floyd Lipscomb, who police said is homeless, tried to pull Slaughter out of the channel. But he did not have the strength to pull Slaughter and his heavy wool coat out of the water, Slaughter said last night from his room at George Washington University Hospital.
... I learned that if I really wanted to, I could conquer my fear, and do what I needed to do ...
Five Blackwater employees died when the helicopters they were riding in were shot down, apparently by machine gun fire. The bodies were later recovered, some with bullet wounds to the head, which suggests execution. Little else is known at this moment.
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Hundreds of thousands of Americans will march to their capital city Washington DC on Saturday 27 January. It could be the rebirth of the US peace movement. People round the world - let’s join the march with our own global internet protest! Last week, our ad told decision-makers in Congress how strong world opposition is to Bush’s escalation in Iraq.R.
This Saturday, Avaaz supporters at the US march will carry banners and country placards announcing how many of us from each nation are joining the marching. Every signature will be counted on the banners! Let’s raise a global voice for a real plan to end this war. Let’s make those numbers big. Time is short. Join the global peace march and tell your friends today!
WASHINGTON --Senator John F. Kerry announced today that he will not run in the 2008 presidential race, and will instead remain in Congress and seek reelection to his Senate seat next year.I can't say that I'm disappointed.
There was little for current and aspiring middle-class Americans in tonight's State of the Union Address.
President Bush: We must make Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid fiscally sound.* "With enough good sense and good will, you and I can fix Medicare and Medicaid - and save Social Security."
DMI SAYS: "Unfortunately, when President Bush proposes fixing something, it usually means weakening it."
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In short, the middle class of this country, our historic backbone and our best hope for a strong society in the future, is losing its place at the table. Our workers know this, through painful experience. Our white-collar professionals are beginning to understand it, as their jobs start disappearing also. And they expect, rightly, that in this age of globalization, their government has a duty to insist that their concerns be dealt with fairly in the international marketplace.
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With respect to foreign policy, this country has patiently endured a mismanaged war for nearly four years. Many, including myself, warned even before the war began that it was unnecessary, that it would take our energy and attention away from the larger war against terrorism, and that invading and occupying Iraq would leave us strategically vulnerable in the most violent and turbulent corner of the world.
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Like so many other Americans, today and throughout our history, we serve and have served, not for political reasons, but because we love our country. On the political issues - those matters of war and peace, and in some cases of life and death - we trusted the judgment of our national leaders. We hoped that they would be right, that they would measure with accuracy the value of our lives against the enormity of the national interest that might call upon us to go into harm's way.
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The majority of the nation no longer supports the way this war is being fought; nor does the majority of our military. We need a new direction. Not one step back from the war against international terrorism. Not a precipitous withdrawal that ignores the possibility of further chaos. But an immediate shift toward strong regionally-based diplomacy, a policy that takes our soldiers off the streets of Iraq's cities, and a formula that will in short order allow our combat forces to leave Iraq.
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As his poll numbers continue to tank like so many lonely ejaculates from the pasty, shivelled weener of Rush Limpbaugh, Jebus McRetard hopes to "rally" the country over his misguided "plan" of suppl[y]ing more cannon fodder to try to save his so-called legacy.
Defense Department officials have laid off most of their case workers who help severely injured service members, sources said.
The case workers for the Military Severely Injured Center serve as advocates for wounded service members who have questions or issues related to benefits, financial resources and their successful return to duty or reintegration into civilian life - all forms of support other than medical care.
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Shorter Version so far: Libby says the White House set him up to take the fall for Karl Rove.
Attorney Theodore Wells, in the opening statements of I. Lewis Libby's perjury trial, said Libby went to Vice President Dick Cheney in 2003 and complained that the White House was subtly blaming him for leaking Valerie Plame's identity to columnist Robert Novak.
"They're trying to set me up. They want me to be the sacrificial lamb," Wells said, recalling the conversation between Libby and Cheney. "I will not be sacrificed so Karl Rove can be protected."
In November 2004, the American military took siege of the ancient city of Falluja, Iraq, a city comparable to the size of Cincinnati, Ohio with a population of at least 250,000. The city of Falluja has now been declared "pacified" and the battle of Falluja has been declared a victory by the American administration. With interviews with the filmmakers, Caught in the Crossfire is an eyewitness account from the only independent journalists to live with the people of Falluja, exposing the devastating humanitarian disaster that is the result of American foreign policy in Iraq.
Dear Friend,Please join me in protesting the Iraq War through the Virtual March on Washington:
http://democrats.com/outofiraqIt only takes 1 minute - just email your Representatives in Congress:
http://www.democrats.com/peoplesemailnetwork/90You will be joining hundreds of thousands of patriotic Americans who are marching against the Iraq War in Washington DC and in cities and towns across America.
What you Need to Play:
# Four taxpayers: One rich white guy wearing a Suit. Cuff links are nice. Two people wearing jeans, one in a blue work shirt, the other in a white shirt. One person wearing clothes rejected by the Salvation Army. (Belt and shoelaces removed.)
# One shot glass per person. Everybody brings their own from home and places it on table. Suit gets first pick for use during game. White shirt picks next, then Blue shirt. Suit takes last shot glass as well, and Rags has to beg a glass from other players when necessary, or drink out of own cupped hands.
# Twenty buck ante for everybody, except Suit who tosses in a quarter.
10. If George W smirks during a standing ovation, take turns throwing chips of chili and guacamole at TV. First person to hit Bush's head exempt from drinking three shots of beer.
11. If George W tells a folksy Texas tale with a deeper meaning about not leaving before the job is done, Suit has to drink out of beer-filled hands of Rags, who gets to dry his hands on Suit's jacket.
EXTRAS:
# Anybody who can identify the person giving the Democratic Response doesn't have to watch it.
# If George W uses a heartfelt story about one of our brave troops, White gets to kick everybody once. Twice if the brave troop is a woman. Rags gets to kick Suit if Bush reveals the subject of the anecdote is in the audience. Twice if the brave troop is sitting next to an astronaut.
# Suit takes home the $60.25. (Ain't that the Repug way? - G.)
# Leftover beer, chili and guacamole go home with Rags, after he/she is finished washing the dishes.
New way forward-way forward-
or any variation on the theme - 3 points
Al Qaeda - 2 points
Fight them there rather than here-or variations on that theme - 2 points
Nuclear in same sentence as Iran - 5 points
Provacative language as relates to Iran - 10 points
Terrorists when referring to insurgents - 2 points
War on terror when referring to Civil War - 3 points
Islamic Fascists-or variations on the theme - 4 points
Afghanistan in the same sentence as victory - 10 points
Afghanistan in the same sentence as "thriving heroin industry" - oh fuck it, what are the odds?
Axis of Evil (if he's dumb enough to go there again) - 100 points
Madame Speaker - Priceless
"Media reform is the most important issue confronting our democratic republic and the people of our country," Representative Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) said at the Free Press National Media Reform Conference held in Memphis, Tennessee last weekend. "This is a critical moment in history that may determine the future of our country...maybe forever."
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Hinchey faults the mainstream media for failing to tell Americans the truth about "an administration in Washington that has falsified information to people about weapons of mass destruction in order to justify an illegal and unjustified attack perpetrated on Iraq. How was it that Congress voted to give the President that authority? And how was it that so many people just bought into it when Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks on the World Trade Center and whatever weapons they had were given to them by the Reagan administration?"
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Hinchey believes the takeover of the U.S. media has been carefully calculated by the "political right wing," starting with the abolition in 1987 of the Fairness Doctrine, which was originally adopted in 1949 in reaction to the rise of global fascism prior to World War II.
"Fascist government dominated discussions in Europe. They could now broadcast all over and control all information going out. That's how they took over governments in Spain and Italy," Hinchey recalled. "The U.S. said the airways should be owned by everyone."
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Like the Big Push of the Somme, the Big Push in Iraq is a reapplication of tactics that have already proven a calamitous failure. As the outspoken retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General William Odom, former director of the National Security Agency, puts it, it's like finding yourself in a hole and then digging deeper.
There are huge differences, of course, between the First World War and the current fighting in Iraq. But, even beyond the optimistic talk of the Big Push, there is another eerie resemblance between the two conflicts. In both cases, a great power was itching to launch an invasion, and seized on a handy excuse to do so. For the Bush administration, of course, the excuse was September 11th. From a long string of insider revelations, we know that its top officials were hungry to invade Iraq, looked eagerly for the most far-fetched connections between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, and - even then not finding them - invaded anyway, while continuing to vaguely imply the connections were there.
Something remarkably similar happened in 1914. Austria-Hungary was a shaky empire of restless ethnic minorities ruled by a German-speaking elite in Vienna. Nearly half the population was Slavic, including many Serbs. As a result, the imperial rulers in Vienna felt threatened by the very existence on their border of the independent nation of Serbia, small though it was. They were determined to invade it, possibly partition it, and so stamp out pan-Slavic and Serb nationalism once and for all.
Part of that remaking, ironically, was the post-war cobbling together of three provinces of the defeated Ottoman Empire into what was first a British protectorate and then, after 1932, independent Iraq.
There is a final resemblance between the present bloodshed there and the First World War. Both conflicts were fought for a curiously shifting set of noble-sounding goals. With Iraq, the Bush administration has tried on for size finding weapons of mass destruction, liberating the Iraqis, combating Islamist terrorism, and installing democracy in the Arab world. In the First World War, the Allies initially talked of coming to the defense of innocent, invaded little Belgium, then of defeating German militarism and defending the British and French way of life. Once Woodrow Wilson brought the United States into the conflict, he spoke of "the war to end all wars."
It didn't. The humiliation of the losers and the catastrophic loss of life on both sides did nothing to end all wars and much to light the fuses of later ones - especially the Russian Civil War and the Second World War. The longer the war in Iraq goes on, and the more American troops are planted by Big Pushes in a highly combustible part of the world, the more we will continue to stoke a widespread humiliation and anger whose consequences are already guaranteed to haunt us for decades to come.
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"Hack's" [the late Col. David Hackworth] pessimistic assessment was influenced by his own experiences fighting North Vietnamese guerillas but this "soldier's soldier" was also debriefing his beloved Iraq War "grunts." For the past couple of years, I've interviewed scores of American soldiers, asking them about their experiences in Iraq. I too heard accounts from these GIs that indicated that early on, the hearts and minds campaign to win over the Iraqi people was pretty much lost and with it, the war.
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Personally, I think the time for winning the hearts and minds has long passed, the opportunity squandered.
Qantas bans passenger over anti-Bush t-shirt
"January 22, 2007: Qantas turns away passenger over terror T-shirt - Qantas is refusing to let an Australian man board a plane from Melbourne to the United Kingdom because he insists on wearing a T-shirt depicting US President George Bush as a terrorist. Alan Jasson said he was defending freedom of speech through his insistence on wearing the T-shirt. Qantas says the t-shirt was offensive to other passengers, but Mr Jasson has told the ABC he's considering court action..."
... This committee expected to be briefed on the long-awaited NIE [National Intelligence Estimate] by an official from the National Intelligence Council (NIC), which coordinates NIEs by gathering input from all of the nation's various intelligence agencies. But the NIC official turned up empty-handed and told the committee that the intelligence community hadn't been able to complete the NIE because of the many demands placed upon it by the Bush Administration to help prepare the new military strategy on Iraq...
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Four U.S. soldiers and a Marine were killed during combat in Anbar province, the Sunni insurgent stronghold west of Baghdad, the military reported Sunday. The five newly reported deaths on Saturday raised that day's toll among American forces to at least 24, the third deadliest single day for U.S. troops since the war began in March 2003.
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MoDo suggests a few more books that the Crawford Clown needs to read.
George Bush may have lost his swagger, but Harry Flashman hasn't.
Maybe the president presiding over a quicksand empire got a vicarious thrill out of the fictional Victorian brigadier general who roamed from Chillianwalla to Isandlwana to Abyssinia at the height of the British Empire, always making conquests in love andwar despite his cowardly, caddish behavior.
In our continuing odyssey of discovery through the president's reading list, we learned that he perused two of George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman books, "Flashman at the Charge" and 'Flash for Freedom."
"Flashman" is based on a devastating British defeat during one of their wars in Afghanistan. After invading Kabul in 1839 and setting up an unpopular puppet shah, the British trekked through the snowy mountains to Jalalabad. Of more than 16,000 troops and camp followers, only one doctor survived; the rest were picked off in ambushes by Afghan warriors.
The lesson is that Afghanistan is a no man's land that can't be tamed by gringos. The British Empire, on which the sun never set, never succeeded in occupying Afghanistan even as it engaged in the Great Game with the Russians for influence there. It was terra incognita and terra fuggedaboutit.
"Eventually, I suppose, we'll get out of Iraq and pretend it's been a success when it's just a mess. ... "Afghanistan is slightly different. You cannot ever win. When you consider the Russians put in more than 100,000 troops and couldn't do it. There's only one way to deal with the Afghans, and that's to buy them."
Mr. Fraser recites the end of Kiplings "The Ballad of the King's Mercy":
Abdhur Rahman, the Durani Chief, of him is the story told,
He has opened his mouth to the North and the South,
They have stuffed his mouth with gold...
and sweet his favours are...
from Balkh to Kandahar.
"It wouldn't do Bush any harm to read Kipling," he concluded before signing off.
They shall not return to us, the resolute, the young,
The eager and whole-hearted whom we gave:
But the men who left them thriftily to die in their own dung,
Shall they come with years and honour to the grave?
They shall not return to us; the strong men coldly slain
In sight of help denied from day to day:
But the men who edged their agonies and chid them in their pain,
Are they too strong and wise to put away?
Our dead shall not return to us while Day and Night divide--
Never while the bars of sunset hold.
But the idle-minded overlings who quibbled while they died,
Shall they thrust for high employments as of old?
You don't want decisions being made based upon politics, or focus groups, or political polls.
Unbeknownst to me, certain people in the White House were thinking 'We had to federalize Louisiana because she's a white, female Democratic governor and we have a chance to rub her nose in it.
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But the Fairness Doctrine isn't going to kill Rush or Hannity. With tens of millions of listeners and a dozen years head start, are they really in jeopardy? This is about something much bigger. The Fairness Doctrine would bring new competition to the radio airwaves at all levels all across this country. It wouldn't keep a show on that wasn't any good either. But even wingnuts like Rush and Sean would actually have to offer facts amidst their snide, condescending decent into propaganda, while having guests on to offer the opposite side. That's just too much work, especially for Rush, who hasn't broken a sweat, except when he was in trouble for allegedly doctor shopping pills, or when he got caught with somebody else's penis pills after his single man's holiday to an underage capital of the world. [my ems]
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Democrats do not call for an end to the war because they're certain Republicans will try to blame them for the debacle and they're certain the "journalism" corps will happily go along. The mighty Wurlitzer of right-wing radio, conservative press and filthy television will breathlessly enable Republicans and endlessly repeat the Democrats stabbed our troops and the country in the back, losing us the war.
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They're simply being rational political actors, to call for end to the war could very well mean the end to their careers. CBS, ABC, CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, thanks so much. This insane war continues this very day because our "journalism" enables Bush and Republicans to get away with it.
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This is al-Zawraa TV, a 24-hour satellite station that lionises Iraq's insurgency to the drumbeat of Saddam-era martial music. It is a crude and dizzying mix of images and videos harvested from jihadi websites - and a cult hit. There are grainy loops of car bombs and mortar attacks interspersed with images of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and bloodied children. "Mujahideen" are seen training. Clips of Michael Moore's film, Fahrenheit 9/11 are thrown in for good measure.
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