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March, 2007 |
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March 26, 2007 - Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad sent a parting message to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. He told the Iraqi that the American people were losing patience with the war. But then al-Maliki already knew that. If he has half the knowledge of the world that any head of state has to have he got that message from the fall election campaign in the United States. He got that message when the American people gave the opposition party control of the US Congress. At the latest he got that message when the House of Representative voted to have American troops out of Iraq by September 2008. You can be sure that Nouri al-Maliki and his Shiite patrons already had that message. The one who hasn’t got the message is George W. Bush.
Our President keeps insisting that the troops will stay in Iraq “until the job is done.” Every one of the objectives we allegedly went to war to achieve in Iraq has been accomplished. Iraq is free of any trace of weapons of mass destruction. The Ba’athist regime has been toppled. Saddam Hussein has been tried and executed along with his closest aides. The Iraqi people have adopted an interim constitution. They have held elections pursuant to that constitution, brandishing their ink-stained fingers for the world to see. They have installed their own sovereign, democratically selected government. What else remains to be done before the job that we set out to do is done? .....click here for entire article March 24, 2007 - It seems like it was just yesterday when Tony Snow was defending the Presidents offer to have his aides go up and be interviewed by a few members of the Congress and the Senate; but not under oath, behind closed doors, and without a transcript being made. He told the Press Corps that it did not make any difference that the White House staff would not be under oath. “It is”, he repeatedly said, “illegal to lie to Congress. If they lie they go to jail. It is as simple as that.”
It seems like it was just last week when Attorney General Albert Gonzales was telling the Press Corps and the Congress that he was not involved in the decision to fire 8 US Attorneys whose investigations of public corruption had come too close for comfort. It turns out not to have been quite true. Justice Department e-mails and memos released within the last 24 hours show that not only was the Attorney General quite involved in the process of firing the prosecutors; he had a two hour meeting with his staff on November 27, 2006 in which the process of firing them and then making new appointments was the subject matter. Like I said it was just yesterday when Tony Snow was saying, “If they lie they go to jail. It is as simple as that.” .....click here for entire article March 22, 2007 - Garrett Anderson is 30 years old. He lives in Champaign, Illinois. He is 30 years old, married with one child. He was a member of the Recon platoon of the 2nd Battalion of the 130th Infantry Illinois National Guard. He was sent to Iraq. On October 15, 2005 he was on patrol when an improvised explosive device destroyed his right arm, peppered him with shrapnel and injured his face. From the time of the explosion Garrett’s memory is clouded. He was treated in a field hospital in Iraq, shipped to Germany, and then transferred to Walter Reed in Washington. He simply doesn’t know when or where his right forearm was amputated. He received his hook at Walter Reed. March 21, 2007 - America went to war against Iraq based upon false premises. There was no fearsome Iraqi arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. There was no Iraqi program to develop nuclear weapons, clandestine or otherwise. There was no significant connection between Ba?athist Iraq and Al Qaeda. Whether the Bush administration?s pre-invasion claims resulted from a calculated program of intentional misstatement or from a negligent reliance on inadequate or massaged intelligence those provocative administration claims were false, even the President of the United States has publicly acknowledged that the facts did not support his administration?s partisan rhetoric in the run up to the invasion of Iraq. March 13, 2007 - We have counted the dead coming home in ones and tens. Three thousand one hundred and ninety three have died so far. That is how we have counted the human cost of war. But that is not the whole sum of the price American soldiers have paid to purchase chaos in Iraq. Nearly 24,000 Americans have been wounded in this war. We don’t talk about them. It is the dead to whom we look to symbolize this war. We don’t count hospital beds in the same way that we count coffins. Coffins are buried in the ground; out of sight – out of mind. Occupants of hospital beads must be dealt with. Missing limbs must be replaced by prosthetics. Shattered brains must be retrained to manage shattered bodies. Shattered lives must be rebuilt day by day; month by month; year by year.
Pat Robertson is a man quite fond of sharing his private conversations with us – especially those that he has with God or President Bush. He tells us of a conversation that he had with the President before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. It was in Nashville the Christian broadcaster said. “And I warned him about this war. I had deep misgivings about this war, deep misgivings. And I was trying to say, ‘Mr. President, you had better prepare the American people for casualties.’ ” According to Robertson the President responded, “Oh, no, we’re not going to have any casualties.”....click here for entire article March 08, 2007 - Rewind to March 16, 2003. Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on Meet The Press and said, "I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators. . . . I think it will go relatively quickly . . . (in) weeks rather than months." March 7, 2007 - It's too early to judge the success of this operation ... But even at this early hour there are some encouraging signs. Iraq's government has kept its pledge to deploy three additional Iraqi army brigades to Baghdad and has lifted restrictions that prevented coalition and Iraqi forces from going into certain areas. We can expect al-Qaida and other extremists to try to derail this strategy by launching spectacular attacks,'' the President told an American Legion convention today. It was as if he was preparing them for the news that nine more US service personnel were killed in combat and more than 100 Iraqi Shia pilgrims had died in suicide bomb blasts in the continuing Iraqi sectarian civil war...click here for entire article March 2, 2007 - One thing that you cannot accuse the Bush administration of is uncertainty. Remember that day that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld squarely faced the camera and told us all in no uncertain terms that he knew where Saddam’s fearful arsenal of unconventional weapons was located. When he said it the UN Inspectors had not been able to find any such weapons and we wondered just why the Secretary did not just call Hans Blix and tell him where they were. The Secretary’s expression of certainty was not the first such declaration to issue from the Bush administration. The G.W. Bush Presidency was barely 30 days old when the United States broke off talks with North Korea and suspended energy and food aid to Pyongyang. The Bush Administration justified its action by claiming that North Korea had broken its agreement to suspend its nuclear weapons program by secretly working on an enriched uranium program...click here for entire article |
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