This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden

  • DoD blocks release of “torture” photos

    The Stars and Stripes and the Associated Press report that the Secretary of Defense has invoked new powers to keep photographs from the Abu Gahraib incident from the public;

    The Obama administration filed a brief with the Supreme Court late Friday saying that Gates has invoked new powers blocking the release of the photos.

    The American Civil Liberties Union had sued for the release of 21 color photographs showing prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq being abused by Americans. Federal courts had rejected the government’s arguments to block their release, so Congress gave Gates new powers to keep them private under a law signed by President Barack Obama last month.

    Gates’ order specifically cites the 21 pictures sought by the ACLU, plus 23 additional ones cited in a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. However, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the order covers all photographs from investigations related to the treatment of individuals captured or detained in military operations outside the United States between Sept. 11, 2001, and Jan. 22, 2009.

    Gates’ new powers were included in a budget bill for the Homeland Security Department.

    Of course, the ACLU is in a snit;

    Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU National Security Project, said the group will continue to fight for the release of the photographs, arguing that Gates’ order was overly broad.

    “We think the photos are an important part of the historical record. They are critical to the ongoing national conversation about accountability for torture,” Jaffer said. “It sets a bad precedent for the government to be suppressing information that relates to government misconduct.”

    Jameel Jaffer heads the ACLU’s Torture Report project which is currently digging through the Bush Administration’s public documents looking for someone to blame for heinous crimes of discomfort perpetrated against some Bronze Age subhumans. Among Jaffer’s staff is Matthew Alexander, the kinder, gentler interrogator – regular readers will learn all about the pseudonymous author of the book “How To Break A Terrorist” tomorrow morning in a TAH exclusive that was months in the writing.

  • AP: troop morale declines in Afghanistan

    Stars & Stripes runs an AP article on declining morale among troops in Afghanistan;

    Both surveys showed that soldiers on their third or fourth tours of duty had lower morale and more mental health problems than those with fewer deployments and an ever-increasing number of troops are having problems with their marriages.

    The new survey on Afghanistan found instances of depression, anxiety and other psychological problems are about the same as they were in 2007. But it also said there is a shortage of mental health workers to help soldiers who need it, partly because of the buildup Obama already started this year with the dispatch of more than 20,000 extra troops.

    Is it really surprising, if it’s true? The media reports only the bad aspects of the war while ignoring the gains, the President can’t bother himself to actually make a decision about how to end this conflict, Congress virtually ignores the troops while they focus on a domestic agenda and buying patronage.

    I remember jerk-assing around before Desert Storm while the politicians kicked us back and forth. COB6 and I were 15 km. inside of Iraq nine days before the ground war began when we got jerked out while the politicians gave each other reach-arounds. The Iraqis took advantage of the opportunity to fire a couple of Frog missiles at us while we were going back to Saudi Arabia – they didn’t hit any of us, but it certainly made us feel like we were retreating.

    That kind of horseshit plays with troops minds – they want to win, they don’t want be pawns in a tug-of-war of egos and agendas.

  • Kokesh to Sheehan; at least the neocons were honest

    I don’t know how they managed to squeeze their massive egos into the same recording booth, or even into the same bandwidth, but Cindy Sheehan interviewed Adam Kokesh this weekend on her show “Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox”. Kokesh admitted for Sheehan that he’s still a member of IVAW (even though he won’t admit it publicly anywhere else) and sounds a bit nostalgic for the Bush Administration;

    Well I’m a Constitutionalist. I’m a non-interventionalist. I’m still a proud member of Iraq Veterans Against the War and I support the mission of Iraq Veterans Against the War. I’m also a proud member of Veterans for Peace and I think that the mission of the organization Veterans for Peace is even more applicable now when we see the kind of hypocrisy of the Democrats. It’s almost worse than what we had when the neocons were in charge. The neocons were easy to hate, they were brazen and upfront about it and had this swaggering machismo whereas what we see under Obama now is this really disgusting deceitfulness that has some people with really intense mixed feelings.

    He sounds almost like the Republicans after the Soviet Union collapsed, doesn’t he?

    Nothing new, really about Kokesh’s disdain for Obama, though. I taped him calling on Obama to end the war at Code Pink’s “Shoe Bush” protest on the day before the Obama Inauguration, and then again he and I talked about the Obama policy before the March on the Pentagon last Spring. But he’s become a Paulian Republican espousing “nonintervention” (which is really isolationism) and some kind of anti-corporate capitalist agrarianism. In other words, he’s a populist with competing ideologies – he mouths the words that brings cheers but don’t stand up under intellectual scrutiny.

    I’m sure the company that rents out the Ron Paul blimp is calling him everyday.

  • Still waiting

    The Washington Post tells us this morning that the President will will make a “Decision soon on troops for Afghanistan“. In my considered opinion, nothing about this decision will be “soon”.

    “It’s a matter of making certain that when I send young men and women into war, and when I devote billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money, that it’s making us safer,” Obama said.

    The period for “making certain” has long passed. It’s now a period of making compromises and keeping voters from defecting. A matter of national security has become a matter of electioneering and instead of listening to the generals, Obama is listening to Code Pink and MoveOn. The advice from General McChrystal has taken a back seat to advice from David Axelrod.

    The Post is so embarrassed by Obama’s indecision, the article, entitled to address the Afghanistan issue, spends two pages discussing our foreign policy with Japan instead probably because there’s not much to discuss about Obama’s failure to display any measure of leadership on this issue.

    Yeah, he makes a big show out of meeting mourners at Arlington, speaking at Fort Hood, saluting fallen soldiers returning from the war, but in the leadership area and making actual decisions that don’t include iconic photos, he’s sorely lacking.

    Just A Grunt sends us these two media links from an interview with a soldier injured at the Fort Hood shootings who discusses the comparison of the visits of former-President Bush and current-President Obama.

    (The links are about a third of the way down this page under the picture of the Fort Hood sign)

    ADDED: Oh, great, WaPo changed the title of their article.

  • The “trickle” is on!

    According to the Washington Times, President Obama has decided to listen to his general and start his own “surge” in Afghanistan. But it’s less like a surge and more like a trickle;

    Military officials said Obama will have choices that include a phased addition of up to 40,000 forces over some six months or more next year, based on security conditions and the decisions of NATO allies.

    Several officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the decision has not been made also said Obama’s announcement will be much broader than the mathematics of troop numbers, which have dominated the U.S. debate.

    Officials said a substantial increase in troops is all but inevitable, but the precise number is less important than the message that an expansion and refocus of U.S. commitment in Afghanistan would send.

    Boy, that ought to scare the be-jeebus out of those militants – knowing that the math isn’t as important as the message. The message ought to be worth a few hundred extra al Qaeda lives. The message I see is that the administration is acting real reticent about committing a sufficient number of forces to win the war in Afghanistan. It looks to me as if he’s found a way to vote present on being decisive.

    A decisive commander would have all of his troops on the ground as soon as the mountain snows recede (since he couldn’t summon the fortitude to decide during this year’s fighting season), but this guy won’t even have all of his forces on the ground in the Spring. And they’ll be trickling in during a six month period. Yeah, my confidence level is high.

  • Hey! Why is my pantleg wet?

    Oh, Obama says it’s raining;

    President Barack Obama said new figures released Friday showing national unemployment has hit the double-digit mark are a sobering reminder of the challenges still facing the U.S. economy.

    Standing in the White House Rose Garden a few hours after the government reported that the jobless rate hit 10.2 percent last month, Obama said his administration is working hard to restore the struggling economy.

    It’s a good thing Joe Biden is watching that stimulus distribution, or we’d be in deep kim che about now.

  • Veterans lobbying Congress today

    While the dithererer-in-chief contemplates his inaction, veterans groups are stalking Congress in their offices this morning. Vets for Freedom are meeting as I type this to plan out their day in the halls of Congress in conjunction with Michelle Bachman’s troops.

    Meanwhile, VoteVets’ Executive Director focuses on the really important issues, according to Politico;

    In 2007, Veterans for Freedom supported the surge of U.S. forces in Iraq, and VoteVets.org opposed it, advocating a drawdown from Iraq instead. But for now, the organization is still debating its position on the war in Afghanistan, said VoteVets Chairman Jon Soltz, and it is concentrating its efforts on climate change.

    Don’t forget Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. While Obama fiddles over the war in Afghanistan, Jon Soltz prefers to focus his energies on social issues because whenever he shoots his big mouth off over actual military and veterans’ issues, somehow he always turns out to be wrong. It’s hard to believe that someone who has over three months experience in a combat motor pool could be wrong about military issues, but apparently it happens.

    How many things can you find wrong in this paragraph;

    The [VFF]’s founder, David Bellavia, who in 2008 ran unsuccessfully for Congress in New York, attacked Kerry and the late Sen. Ted Kennedy in 2005 for supporting statements that Iraqis wanted the United States to leave their country, claiming in an article on FrontPageMag.com that the comments were “a political attack on the troops, an attack that is aiding our enemy.” The publication is run by Holocaust denier David Horowitz.

    Bellavia was ONE of the founders of VFF, he didn’t unsuccessfully run for Congress (the party machine asked his to withdraw in favor of a candidate who could fund his own campaign) and I have no idea where the article’s author, Jen deMascio, got the idea that David Horowitz is a Holocaust denier – but I’ve got an email into her to get her source on that specious charge.

    Of course, deMascio, has found a group she likes out of the three she discusses – the new one that I introduced to you the other day “Veterans for Rethinking Afghanistan” and our new friend Jake Giliberto, who just happened to email me after the last piece I did on his. But DeMascio writes;

    “Listen, you’ve got to stop falling in love with the military solution; it’s not feasible,” said Jake Diliberto, one of the group’s founders. “This is a war of poverty and cultural misunderstanding, and it’s an Afghan problem that we don’t have the means or the wisdom to figure out.”

    So what’s Jake’s solution? Just let Afghanistan go back to being a stone age shit hole like we did in 1988. That worked out well for us the first time, didn’t it? Well, the “Rethinking Afghanistan” was started by a filmmaker and we know how much more intelligent filmmakers think they are than the rest of us – so let’s ask Hollywood to formulate our foreign and defense policy instead of generals.

    I like Jake, he’s real friendly and fairly bright, but he’s being used by the peace movement, just like all of those IVAW clowns. The peace movement doesn’t care about them or their opinions beyond the fact that they can wear T-shirts proclaiming the proper message.

  • A world of change in 287 days

    Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson took time away from playing with his Barack and Michelle action figures to pen the most ridiculous column ever to grace the pages of the Post entitled “A world of change in 287 days“.

    You’re going to have to click over and read Robinson’s fantasies of grandeur…I just can’t bring myself to copy and paste excerpts here, except the last line. Robinson goes through each nonaccomplishment of the current administration and after admitting that each hasn’t happened yet, he exclaims that all of these things that haven’t happened, haven’t happened faster than we could ever hope.

    Quite a record for 287 days: All that, and a Nobel Peace Prize, too.

    Yes, that’s the kind of cutting-edge, outside-the-box, pushing the envelope journalism that won Robinson the Pulitzer last year. I hope he showers before he goes home at night – I’m sure his wife doesn’t appreciate combing all of that dickcheese out of his mustache.