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Let us never forget the horrors inflicted upon our nation by President George W. Bush and the Other President Dick Cheney. This originally appeared in November 2007 at Daily Kos. Carnacki
At this point in the rule of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, I thought I had reached shock fatigue. We've seen illegal invasions, torture, unprecedented levels of corruption, a warrantless wiretapping on a nationwide scale, and an erosion of national credibility on everything from the environment to the rule of law.
Yet this morning I read a story that filled me anew with fresh outrage and I think exemplifies the horrors - the absolute horrors - of this administration and the political ideology behind them.
The article is in Vanity Fair's November edition, The People vs. the Profiteers. (If this was diaried earlier this month, my apologies. I did a search on several key words and did not see it. Vanity Fair is a very thick magazine and I read it from front to back so I usually read it spaced out over the entire month).
In it, the writer, David Rose, covers how an attorney, Alan Grayson, has led a campaign against government corruption. He's done so for 16 years. In the past the Department of Justice often allied with him to root out corrupt officials. But when it has come to the Iraq war, the DOJ has thrown up roadblock after roadblock.
In this administration corruption on a massive scale is a statistic. It's an example Rose uses from among the cases that is the outrage.
Consider the case of Grayson's client Bud Conyers, a big, bearded 43-year-old who lives with his ex-wife and her nine children, four of them his, in Enid, Oklahoma. Conyers worked in Iraq as a driver for Kellogg, Brown & Root. Spun off by Halliburton as an independent concern in April, KBR is the world's fifth-largest construction company. Before the war started, the Pentagon awarded it two huge contracts: one, now terminated, to restore the Iraqi oil industry, and another, still in effect, to provide a wide array of logistical-support services to the U.S. military.
In the midday heat of June 16, 2003, Conyers was summoned to fix a broken refrigerated truck-a "reefer," in contractor parlance-at Log Base Seitz, on the edge of Baghdad's airport. He and his colleagues had barely begun to inspect the sealed trailer when they found themselves reeling from a nauseating stench. The freezer was powered by the engine, and only after they got it running again, several hours later, did they dare open the doors.
The trailer, unit number R-89, had been lying idle for two weeks, Conyers says, in temperatures that daily reached 120 degrees. "Inside, there were 15 human bodies," he recalls. "A lot of liquid stuff had just seeped out. There were body parts on the floor: eyes, fingers. The goo started seeping toward us. Boom! We shut the doors again." The corpses were Iraqis, who had been placed in the truck by a U.S. Army mortuary unit that was operating in the area. That evening, Conyers's colleague Wallace R. Wynia filed an official report: "On account of the heat the bodies were decomposing rapidly.... The inside of the trailer was awful."
(As an aside, I have smelled the sickly scent stench of putrified corpses more times than I care to recall. It is one of the worst smells in existence. I cannot imagine what 15 trapped inside a metal trailer for two weeks in the desert heat would have been like.)
Under any consideration, the rule of civilian or military regulations or laws, religious taboos, and basic human decency, there are prohibitions against carrying food and water in the same containers that had been used to carry human corpses - yet alone putrid corpses.
But that is exactly what is being done in Iraq. To our soldiers. With our tax dollars.
But when Bud Conyers next caught sight of trailer R-89, about a month later, it was packed not with human casualties but with bags of ice-ice that was going into drinks served to American troops. He took photographs, showing the ice bags, the trailer number, and the wooden decking, which appeared to be stained red. Another former KBR employee, James Logsdon, who now works as a police officer near Enid, says he first saw R-89 about a week after Conyers's grisly discovery. "You could still see a little bit of matter from the bodies, stuff that looked kind of pearly, and blood from the stomachs. It hadn't even been hosed down. Afterwards, I saw that truck in the P.W.C.-the public warehouse center-several times. There's nothing there except food and ice. It was backed up to a dock, being loaded."
This is where a Republican ideology leads us. The for-profit contractor used a refrigerated tractor trailer permeated with human remains in the wood floor and on the floor itself to carry ice and probably food.
Profit over people - even when it comes to the troops they claim to support. They outsourced a basic government service of the feed and care of the troops for a for-profit enterprise which didn't care about their health or human decency.
It came down to a shortage of refrigerated trucks. Rather than buy more, Kellough Brown and Root kept it running from corpse hauling to food hauling. Conyers was fired by KBR for not being a "team player."
How KBR treated Conyers would itself be an outrage but after hauling ice for human consumption with the remains of putrid corpses, anything KBR does under that pales in comparison. The entire story is well worth a read, including how the DOJ is using a provision of the whistle-blower law probably to keep incidents like this covered up rather than to investigate them as it should.
Grayson has hope that one day the deep-rooted profiteering and corruption of the Iraq war will come to light.
There are a few encouraging signs that a day of reckoning is drawing near. Committees in both the House and the Senate have held hearings on contracting in Iraq, and several plan to hold more. Patrick Leahy, the Democratic chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, has introduced a War Profiteering Prevention Act, which would make it much easier to investigate corrupt contractors and call them to account. And in August, the news that tens of thousands of weapons intended for Iraqi security forces had vanished or been stolen prompted the Pentagon to announce that its inspector general, Claude M. Kicklighter, would lead an 18-person team to investigate "contracting practices" in Iraq.
In the more distant future, a Democratic administration might open up the vaults and expose the American public to the scale of what has been looted. "What we have seen up to now is the worst of the worst in terms of a deliberate cover-up," Grayson says. But if and when it comes to an end, he thinks it's entirely possible that Congress will appoint a special prosecutor-one whose targets might one day reach "an extremely high level."
We can only hope. But I think the stench will linger forever.
She may be out of the military and out of prison, but West Virginia's Lynndie England gets to continue to serve as America's scapegoat:
More than two years since leaving her prison cell, the woman who became the grinning face of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal spends most of her days confined to the four walls of her home.
Former Army reservist Lynndie England hasn't landed a job in numerous tries: When one restaurant manager considered hiring her, other employees threatened to quit.
She doesn't like to travel: Strangers point and whisper, "That's her!"
In fact, she doesn't leave the house much at all, limiting her outings mostly to grocery runs.
"I don't have a social life," she says. " ... I sit at home all day."
Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice makes a point the AP doesn't have the balls to make:
We may never be allowed to call Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, William Kristol, or any of their prosperous fellows to account for their crimes during the ginning up and prosecution of our latest War Against the Iraqis. But, by the Christianists' God, we can at least ensure that the face of America's nightmare behavior there will be ostracized from Appalachia's fast-food emporiums and public housing
I missed this earlier this month in The New York Times when Stephen Colbert was on his USO tour for the troops:
Tom Foss is a comedian who has traveled to 18 countries to entertain the troops, including four tours of Iraq and three of Afghanistan.
As a comedian I use my freedom of speech to make a living, so it's an honor to entertain the troops. I get my biggest laugh when I tell them they make me feel like I am back at home in West Virginia. They have me staying in a trailer, I am working in a tent, its hot out and the Christmas lights are still up. Just like home!
I never go overseas with the idea that I am going to tell the troops what they are doing or what I would do if I were them. I try to bring them home for a couple of hours. I mostly tell Wal-Mart and Nascar jokes and let their minds get away from the stress of war. It's always hard to leave when the tours are over. But I still keep in touch with many of these great troops I've met on my tours. Entertaining them is the best thing that I can do with the skills I have.
Army Sgt. 1st Class Otie J. McVey, 53, of Oak Hill.
Evacuated from Iraq Sept. 23, 2004, for a non-combat related illness and died in Beaver, W.Va. Nov. 7, 2004.
BAGHDAD - Cheered wildly by U.S. troops, President Barack Obama flew unannounced into Iraq on Tuesday and promptly declared it was time for Iraqis to "take responsibility for their country" after America's commitment of six years and thousands of lives.
"You have given Iraq the opportunity to stand on its own as a democratic country," the president said as he made a brief inspection of a war he opposed as candidate and now vows to end as commander in chief. "That is an extraordinary achievement."
Sunday morning, a cold front has replaced the driving rain with chilly sun. What better time to enjoy a cup of your favorite morning beverage and dig into substantive topics.
These links caught my eye in the last 24 hours.
** What exactly caused our latest economic meltdown? Kevin Drum weights the evidence... the housing bust or ... ?
Good article on the persistence of cliches and stereotypes in movies about West Virginia from Tony Rutherford, entertainment editor of the Huntington News. We see that the stereotyping not only in films but also from many political pundits and bloggers.
Speaking on behalf of Gov. Manchin, press secretary Matt Turner stated the governor believes that often " the writers and producers responsible for the portrayal not only are not familiar with the state, [but] in many cases they have never been here. It's easy to pass judgment on a place or people you don't know and to base that on an existing stereotype."
For those of you in the Shepherdstown area, please attend:
"Shared Prosperity" Town Hall Meeting
West Virginians United for Social & Economic Justice, a coalition of progressive state organizations, is holding the next in its series of community town hall meetings at the Robert C Byrd Center for Legislative Studies on Sept. 22nd from 7-9 PM.
Speakers will outline the group's basic agenda with brief comments and then open the discussion up to community members. These policy topics are: Health Care for America Now - making health care affordable and assessable to all West Virginians; Cost of War - connecting the extreme costs of the conflict in Iraq to the cuts in spending for education, housing, social services and other domestic spending right here in West Virginia; Justice in the Workplace - how workplace issues affect quality of life; Civil Justice - protecting citizen access to our courts; and Economic Fairness - how public policy can level the playing field and work toward a shared prosperity by Investing in America's Future!
Contact Gary Zuckett 304-346-5891 for more information.
"The greatest judge will be history. Mistakes have been made."
History has already judged, Ms. Capito. Seven years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11th, the mastermind Osama bin Laden remains free. He remains free because George W. Bush - with your endorsement and support - diverted troops and resources from the hunt for bin Laden to attack Iraq, a country we knew had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks.
Today of all days, Ms. Capito, you should bow your head in shame and pray for the forgiveness of the dead from Sept. 11th for the justice delayed that is owed them.
No wonder Bush Republican Rep. Shelley Moore "Country Club" Capito's Pennsylvania campaign manager wouldn't let Capito speak about the Iraq war. Interviewed by the Charleston Gazette, the woman showed she's unrepetenant. More than 4,000 dead soldiers, hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqs, the U.S. reputation in tatters, our military at the breaking point, a "surge" being called successful despite reaching not a single defined goal set by the administration and Capito says this:
"I have regrets," Capito said. "It may end up to have been a mistake. But I can't make that judgment now."
It may end up being a mistake? Bush's own intelligence reports have shown the Iraq war not only is creating more enemies for us there, it also diverted the military from the hunt for Osama bin Ladin and allowed the Sept. 11 mastermind to remain alive and free.
Another major obstacle has been the war in Iraq.
Officials with the CIA and the U.S. military said they began shifting resources out of Afghanistan in early 2002 and still haven't recovered from that mistake.
"Iraq was a fundamental wrong turn. That was the most strategically negative action that was taken," said John O. Brennan, a former deputy executive director of the CIA and a former chief of the National Counterterrorism Center. "The collective effort in the government required to go after an individual like bin Laden -- the Iraq campaign consumed that."
The Bush administration tried to reinvigorate the flagging hunt for bin Laden early last year by redeploying Predator drones, intelligence officers and Special Forces units to Pakistan and Afghanistan. But by then, U.S. counterterrorism officials said, the war in Iraq had already given bin Laden and his core command precious time to regroup and solidify their new base of operations in northwestern Pakistan.
To Capito that's not a mistake. Just as Bush has been a boon to help bin Laden recruit new people, Capito and the Republicans have used him as a campaign tool, turning the united desire of America for justice into partisan politics.
Capito refuses to acknowledge that her support of the Iraq war was a mistake. It certainly was. She claims to have "regrets." Her regret is we see the blood on her hands. Some day she's going to have to acknowledge it is there and come clean with how deeply she has failed the American people and West Virginians.
Capito refuses to acknowledge her mistake. We have the opportunity in November to correct ours in electing Capito in the first place and send Anne Barth to Washington to represent us.
"We spend $12 billion a month on the war. Iraq is getting new roads, new bridges and new schools. Their government has a surplus."
Barth believes that money would be better spent at home. "We need to invest in our infrastructure....
"The Bush administration had grossly mismanaged our economy. They destroyed a $5.6 trillion surplus. We have $10 trillion in national debt."
Barth remembers talking with worried parents who called Byrd's office. "We sent troops to Iraq without body armor. We sent them in and did not provide that for them. I would have voted against it [the Iraq invasion]."
Like Senator Robert C. Byrd, Barth understands West Virginians and will work for us and not continue the failed policies of George W. Bush.
Over and over again we've seen a pattern from Republican Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (R-Big Oil). When Democrats in Congress tried to take steps to do what the American people want and bring the troops home from Iraq, Capito called it "playing politics." But when George W. Bush and his administration plays politics with the lives of troops, we hear only silence from her. So much for her "independence." The only conclusion that can be reached: Capito likes it when Bush plays politics with the lives of soldiers.
Capito on March 23, 2007 regarding a Congressional bill in support of timelines:
"By giving our enemy a date-certain timeline for withdrawal, we are simply asking them to duck into the shadows and wait for us to leave. Such timelines hog-tie the hands of our commanders in the field and essentially hand our enemy a roadmap to victory.
Yet the Bush administration reached a timeline agreement with the Iraqi government as reported on Aug. 22, 2008 that sets specific dates.
A deal between American and Iraqi officials was given fresh impetus by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's surprise visit to Baghdad on Thursday. Ms. Rice met with Mr. Maliki and other Iraqi leaders and confirmed that both sides saw the value in "aspirational timetables" to govern the continuing role, mission and size of American forces in Iraq.
She declined to discuss the timing, saying that to go into details of the talks "would be inappropriate at this time." Instead, she reiterated the consistent American position that decisions must be based on events, not timetables.
...
Iraqi officials were more forthcoming with their interpretation of the draft agreement. In an interview by telephone in Baghdad, Mohammad Hamoud, the chief Iraqi negotiator, said that the draft contained two dates: June 30, 2009, for the withdrawal of American forces from "cities and villages" and Dec. 31, 2011, for combat troops to leave the country altogether.
But we heard nothing from Capito after Bush and the Iraqis agreed, in Capito's own words, to giving the enemy "a roadmap to victory."
Capito also on March 23, 2007 expressed her "belief" that decisions should be left to the commanders on the ground:
"Congress has the power of the purse, but it should not micromanage this war or any war by making decisions best left for those on the battlefield. I want our troops to come home, but I want that decision to be made by our commanders who are basing their decisions on the conditions on the ground and in what is best for the security of our nation."
Yet we find out today from Bob Woodward's interviews with Bush and those very same commanders on the ground and in the Pentagon that Bush made decisions for political reasons. He took the decisions out of the hands of the commanders and made the country less safe.
At the Joint Chiefs of Staff in late November 2006, Gen. Peter Pace was facing every chairman's nightmare: a potential revolt of the other chiefs. Two months earlier, the JCS had convened a special team of colonels to recommend options for reversing the deteriorating situation in Iraq. Now, it appeared that the chiefs' and colonels' advice was being marginalized, if not ignored, by the White House.
During a JCS meeting with the colonels Nov. 20, Chairman Pace dropped a bomb: The White House was considering a "surge" of additional troops to quell the violence in Iraq. "Would it be a good idea?" Pace asked the group. "If so, what would you do with five more brigades?" That amounted to 20,000 to 30,000 more troops, depending on the number of support personnel.
Pace's question caught the chiefs and colonels off guard. The JCS hadn't recommended a surge, and Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the Iraq commander, was opposed to one of that magnitude. Where had this come from? Was it a serious option? Was it already a done deal?
Pace said he had another White House meeting in two days. "I want to be able to give the president a recommendation on what's doable," he said.
A rift had been growing between the country's military and civilian leadership, and in several JCS meetings that November, the chiefs' frustrations burst into the open. They had all but dismissed the surge option, worried that the armed forces were already stretched to the breaking point.
Where is Capito's criticism that she made before of politicians making decisions instead of the "commanders on the ground"?
It was so important to her that Capito made that point the basis of another statement on Nov. 14, 2007:
"This is yet another politically motivated resolution by the Majority that would undercut the decision-making power of commanders on the ground in Iraq," said Capito.
And yet that is what top Pentagon officials told Bob Woodward Bush did. Bush was motivated by politics at home to take away their decision to withdraw troops in order to have his escalation, his "surge" that they thought stretched the military to the breaking point and left the country with out a strategic reserve in the event of another crisis elsewhere:
The president was not listening to Casey's boss, Gen. John P. Abizaid at Central Command, anymore, either.
"Yeah, I know," the president said to Abizaid at a National Security Council session in December, "you're going to tell me you're against the surge."
Yes, Abizaid replied, and then presented his argument that U.S. forces needed to get out of Iraq in order to win.
"The U.S. presence helps to keep a lid on," Bush responded. There were other benefits. A surge would "also help here at home, since for many the measure of success is reduction in violence," Bush said. "And it'll help [Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-] Maliki to get control of the situation. A heavier presence will buy time for his government."
The rest of Iraq wasn't as tenuous as Baghdad, Abizaid said. "But it's the capital city that looks chaotic," Bush said. "And when your capital city looks chaotic, it's hard to sustain your position, whether at home or abroad."
Clearly Bush was motivated by political reasons. Think that's just my interpretation:
Pace, Schoomaker and Casey found themselves badly out of sync with the White House in the fall of 2006, finally losing control of the war strategy altogether after the midterm elections. Schoomaker was outraged when he saw news coverage that retired Gen. Jack Keane, the former Army vice chief of staff, had briefed the president Dec. 11 about a new Iraq strategy being proposed by the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank.
"When does AEI start trumping the Joint Chiefs of Staff on this stuff?" Schoomaker asked at the next chiefs' meeting.
Yet where is Capito's criticism of Bush making "politically motivated" decisions that tied the hands of the commanders on the ground?
She made that criticism to justify her roadblocking of legislation to do EXACTLY what the generals were wanting to do - to pull the troops out to let the Iraqis take over. Yet we hear only silence from her now.
She's not independent. She's a coward who only does what Bush and the Republican leaders tell her to do. Capito knew the surge would not work. She said as much:
However, I have grave concerns regarding the call for increased American troop numbers in Iraq and am skeptical of this new plan's success. I believe the escalating sectarian violence in Iraq requires a political solution, not a military solution rooted in increased numbers of American troops.
Never forget this. Despite expressing those "concerns," Capito backed it anyway. She made the politically motivated decision to back Bush's politically motivated surge and then she accused Democrats and Republicans who opposed the surge and sought to bring the troops home of tying the hands of the commanders in the field, when that is exactly what she supported George W. Bush in doing.
How many died since she made the decision to back the president playing politics with the lives of soldiers instead of standing up and representing the American people?
Capito shouldn't be running for reelection. She should be hanging her head in shame.
We have a chance to elect a Congressional representative who wants to end the war in Iraq quickly and responsibly.
Here's Anne Barth's position:
We must focus on training the Iraqis to take responsibility for their own security soon, set benchmarks for the Iraqi military, and give more emphasis to diplomatic strategies.
The war in Iraq has had a serious impact on our military, and our brave men and women are stretched thin by extended deployments. In Congress, I will work to strengthen America's national security and refocus on the terrorist threats around the globe that are currently ignored.
Look how closely it mirrors the exact view held by the commanders on the ground - the same ones whose views Capito said were so important and for years she ignored as Bush played politics and others paid the ultimate price.
We're coming up on 10 months - Sept. 14, 2007 - since Bush Republican Rep. Shelley Moore Country Club Capito issued a statement about the Iraq war. Since that time we've had the Iraqi government and the Bush administration endorse timelines, a move Capito called in the past as "aiding the enemy."
God bless her, who can remember the last time she mentioned Afghanistan? Like their collosal failure in Iraq, she and other Republicans would like you to forget about what is going on there.
While she has nothing to say on her rubberstamp support for an endless occupation in Iraq, I bet you if someone asked her about her golf game she'd talk endlessly about that. She's got her priorities. They're just not the same as the people in the district or for America.
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