Posts from — August 2005

How do we know that Saddam didn’t have a nuclear weapons program? Well, he wasn’t on AQ Khan’s customer list.

So, the point behind the “National Missile Defense System” would be?

The Pentagon is complaining that Tri-Care is already eating up the military budget with its coverage for regular and retired members of the military.

[sarcasm] Yes, it is really inconsiderate of those people who get sent to die all over the world to expect health care for themselves and their families when the money is needed to cover the loss of taxes on the estates of multimillionaires. I mean what’s more important: the health of the families of people getting shot up in Iraq, or a new diamond collar for Paris Hilton’s dog?[/sarcasm]

Excuse me, but when some are asked to give up their lives, why shouldn’t others be asked to give up some money?

Well, the security people decided they would do something at Prince Charles’s Scottish retreat on the Balmoral Estate to stop this once and for all: they installed highly sensitive seismic detectors all over the place.

Great idea, except the highly ecologically sensitive Prince decided to use Indian runner ducks to control yard pests and keep the grass down.

When the ducks [Arabella, Antoine, Parsley, Sage, Rose, Mary and Thyme] go dashing about the yard they set off the alarm system.

[Edit: Runner ducks look like some one has stretched a regular duck or crossed a duck with a penguin.]

They are talking about putting their own tariffs on US goods coming into Canada. I’m hoping they don’t decide to take a 5-week vacation on lumber and oil shipments.

Okay, you have to understand, the Seminole tribe in Florida did not surrender to the white guys and have been selling swampland to white guys for a while. FSU didn’t get to use the name for free, although you’ll never find a copy of the agreement. All of the programs for Seminoles coming from FSU are because the University is really nice and filled with empathy for the tribe.

In Venezuela, however, Vice-President Jose Vicente Rangel said the U.S. response to Robertson would be a test of its anti-terrorist policy and that Venezuela was studying its legal options.

“It’s a huge hypocrisy to maintain this discourse against terrorism and at the same time, in the heart of that country, there are entirely terrorist statements like those,” Rangel said.

…

Rangel called Robertson “a man who seems to have quite a bit of influence in that country,” adding that the comments “reveal that religious fundamentalism is one of the great problems facing humanity in these times.”

As for the paranoia of Hugo Chavez, I guess most people don’t know who Otto Reich is, and his meetings with the Venezuelans who organized the coup against Chavez.

And the difference between Robertson and the Ayatollah Khomeini would be?

I went out and did a little research and have concluded that when the history of Iraqi Freedom is written this period will be identified as the beginning of the disaster that the war in Iraq has become.

In late March through early April in 2004 a series of events plunged the US into a quagmire.

Rumsfeld made the decision to replace major units, rather than individuals to accomplish troop rotations. This meant that most of the troops involved in these events were “green” from privates to flag officers. There were major losses among the new units because they lacked the equipment or experience to protect themselves.

This was the period when the death and mutilation of the four mercenaries occurred in Fallujah and the US said: ‘We will respond’ to contractor killings.

This is when Paul Bremer decided to go after Muqtada al-Sadr by having the Iraqi government issue an arrest warrant for him, by closing down his newspaper, and by having the Spanish pick up one of his deputies.

The April 7, 2004 post by Riverbend of Baghdad Burning gives you a feeling for what was going on in the city.

Things spun out of control as CNN reported on Tuesday, April 06, 2004: “…in Baghdad and at least four cities in the country’s south, U.S. and coalition troops battled supporters of Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr for a third day.”

No mention of April 2004 would be complete without the crowning event: Abu Ghraib reported by CBS and Seymour M. Hersh.

Quiddity at Uggabugga has a bar graph that shows that since this outbreak in 2004 our casualties have exceeded the first year. Notice that the worse casualties occur during April, the changeover month.

Casey Sheehan died because of Paul Bremer’s annoyance with Muqtada al-Sadr and Donald Rumsfeld’s rotation concept. Nothing has been accomplished in the effort to reconstruct Iraq since April 2004. The infrastructure of Iraq was in better shape on the day the fall of Saddam’s statue was stage-managed for a photo op [April, 9, 2003], than anytime since.

[Edited to clear up the path and provide a direct link to Larry Johnson.]

It’s a very large map, but the Kurds cover a large area.

Again and again I have wondered what is going on with government spending. Congress keeps authorizing money to buy body armor, to up-armor vehicles, to hire Border Patrol agents, to reconstruct Iraq, etc., but the money isn’t being spent. Where is it and what’s going on?

There are tens of billions of dollars unaccounted for in this administration. You have parts of the Homeland Security Department that have run out of money on paper, but no one is sure if they are out of money or have “lost” it in accounting errors.

The whole government needs a major audit by an outside group to find out what in hell is going on. A billion dollars in $100 bills weighs approximately 2040 pounds. It’s not something that just gets lost.

The father of Catblogging highlights a new “service” offered by ChoicePoint, the incompetents whose allowed criminals to loot their databases.

Hmmm…maybe we could charge under extortion laws, or the RICO law. I wonder what Eliot Spitzer thinks? I hope they offer the service to a New Yorker.

Science Fiction films would have never been the same without his work.

Mr. Murphy apparently thinks because he is in Iraq with Iraqi sources, listening to the gunfire and explosions, he gets to tell people about the reality without clearing it with Karen Hughes.

I just heard [4PM, CDT] that the Kurds and Shi’ia sent a constitution to the parliament, but the deadline has been extended by three days for more work because of Sunni objections.

The World Today on the BBC World Service has been reporting on it and posting things like Bangladesh bombs suspect arrested.

The interesting thing in the reporting is that the Bangladeshi government has been downplaying the problem of Muslim extremists in the country. This attitude has angered just about everyone following the controlled explosions.

The Islamic political parties are saying that the government can’t start attacking them having said there was no problem for years. The secular opposition party says that the government was too incompetent to deal with the problem so they ignored it.

It’s nice to know that we aren’t the country in the world with a government disconnected from reality.