A Few Bad Men

I just had an email exchange with a friend of mine that I had to pass on to the dozens and dozens of ABP readers (tongue planted firmly in cheek).

He sent me an article about the “good American’s” that reported the abuses on the “few bad American’s” that screwed-up and abused “a few Iraqi’s”.

To my friend: I guess the investigation in Afghanistan and Gitmo are just a “few more” bad Americans?

This came from the top.

This was staged purposefully.

This is American intelligence gone amok and was approved from the top.

Okay?

But, you go ahead and read your conservative papers and not inform yourself on the "other" side of the news.

Jonathan Alter expresses concern over Bush Admin. SHUT UP ALTER!

Columnist Jonathan Alter is a moderate writer for Newsweek. He’s paid by Newsweek to report, and to opine.

Recently, Alter appeared on Al Franken’s radio show, carried by Air America.

Alter expressed dismay throughout the radio appearance at the American public’s view that the Bush administration are decent guys in a tough situation and some mistakes should be allowed.

At one point, Alter slammed the Bush White House stating, “the only way you can sort of start to let the public know is to say, no, they don’t know what they’re doing. They’re clowns”.

So, here’s the question from the ABP… who the hell is Jonathan Alter to express dismay at the American public’s view of the President, when he is the guy doing the writing?

Hey… ALTER… either write about it, or continue to bow down.

In either event, shut up until you back up your words.

Liberal Media and Abu Ghraib

If you listen closely, you can hear the faint beating of the drum.

It’s the drumbeat that we all heard in the 90’s and during the 2000 presidential campaign.

The “Elitist Media” beat is on its way back in the to the mainstream press conversation.

Yeah, we know the drum has never really stopped beating thanks to the usual suspects (Hannity, Rush, O’Reilly, etc.), but it’s coming on louder now that the Bush Administration is really starting to fall in its own manure.

You see, when The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh , a winner of four Polk awards and a Pulitzer Prize, investigates the Abu Ghraib prison scandal… well, it gives you pause (as a Republican).

When Hersh finds that the “roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation which had been focused on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq”, well, you know the drums are getting louder.

It’s the beat of verbal excuses… and, I’ve just heard it first hand:

“Must be a Liberal-Media thing.”

“…the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq.”

”This guy is really gunning after our President. A Liberal hack for the media, I say!”

Wait, this is the guy that wrote the first account of the My Lai massacre in South Vietnam. Which, as we all know, was discounted by the military until pictures of dead women and children were given to the public. Then the government acknowledged it happened.

The U.S. Army War College now uses Hersh’s reporting of My Lai to teach senior military officers about the preparation for war and the many issues that can go wrong. The My Lai massacre is now analyzed as one of the most brutal acts in modern American military history.

So…maybe he’s gone “elitist”. That’s it! He’s an elitist! I knew it! Only an ELITIST would write;

“In 2003, Rumsfeld’s apparent disregard for the requirements of the Geneva Conventions while carrying out the war on terror had led a group of senior military legal officers from the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps to pay two surprise visits within five months to Scott Horton, who was then chairman of the New York City Bar Association’s Committee on International Human Rights. “They wanted us to challenge the Bush Administration about its standards for detentions and interrogation,” Horton told me.”

Oh PLEASE. Can’t be true!

” The JAG officers were being cut out of the policy formulation process.” They told Horton that, with the war on terror, a fifty-year history of exemplary application of the Geneva Conventions had come to an end.”

No, no, no! Elitist, left-wing, liberal dribblings of a mad man!!!

“We’re giving the world a ready-made excuse to ignore the Geneva Conventions. Rumsfeld has lowered the bar.”, Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch”

Come on… it’s just a bunch of morons or “knuckleheads” that got out of control!

"The photos clearly demonstrate to me the level of prisoner abuse and mistreatment went far beyond what I expected, and certainly involved more than six or seven MPs," said GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, a former military prosecutor . He added: "It seems to have been planned."

Wait… he’s one of the Republican’s that went after and impeached Bill Clinton!

That’s right, and he was an Air Force judge, prosecutor and defense lawyer for 20 years! He’s an Air Force Reserve colonel! He’s the only senator in a National Guard or Reserve unit!

Well, he’s gone soft then, right?

”No one else …has his knowledge of military law”, Sen. John McCain.

Shit.

Hey, let’s stay focused. Still, it’s the kids, those dumb reservists that did this.

Newsweek, May 24:
Indeed, the single most iconic image to come out of the abuse scandal—that of a hooded man standing naked on a box, arms outspread, with wires dangling from his fingers, toes and penis—may do a lot to undercut the administration's case that this was the work of a few criminal MPs. That's because the practice shown in that photo is an arcane torture method known only to veterans of the interrogation trade. "Was that something that [an MP] dreamed up by herself? Think again," says Darius Rejali, an expert on the use of torture by democracies. "That's a standard torture. It's called 'the Vietnam.' But it's not common knowledge. Ordinary American soldiers did this, but someone taught them."

Okay, look, you might have something.

RUMSFELD did it! He might have stepped over the line! And, President Bush, out of deep loyalty, has kept him around. But, hey, the President didn’t know of all of this. That’s why Rumsfeld got a reaming from the President last week!

Right?

“But a NEWSWEEK investigation shows that, as a means of pre-empting a repeat of 9/11, Bush, along with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, signed off on a secret system of detention and interrogation that opened the door to such methods. It was an approach that they adopted to sidestep the historical safeguards of the Geneva Conventions, which protect the rights of detainees and prisoners of war. In doing so, they overrode the objections of Secretary of State Colin Powell and America's top military lawyers—and they left underlings to sweat the details of what actually happened to prisoners in these lawless places. While no one deliberately authorized outright torture, these techniques entailed a systematic softening up of prisoners through isolation, privations, insults, threats and humiliation—methods that the Red Cross concluded were "tantamount to torture."

But, what about the “American Hero’s”. Like those that are reporting the abuses. See? The war has created hero’s!

Wooo hooo! A platform!

Pathetic.

The drumbeats continue…

Meet the Press (or, not)

Could anything be more stupid then the politics of TV production?

Emily Watson, Press Aide to Colin Powell had an agreement for 10 minutes with Meet The Press. Naturally, as all TV productions do, they went long, ignored their agreements, and kept the Secretary of State longer for questioning.

Meet the Press producers are leaning towards blaming Watson for going long because Powell was 45 minutes late for the taping.
Watson, stupidly, got… shall we say… pissed-off that they were running long with the interview (and presumably about the questioning) and had the camera focus on palm trees behind Powell (who was in Jordan) to end the interview.

Then Powell got pissed. Russert got pissed.

Everybody was pissed.

Drudge has the breakdown here (it’s fun reading).

MLB - Red Sox and Yankee's have no shame.

Since the ABP also covers “pop culture” we just wanted to say that Major League Baseball is despicable. It’s bad enough the walls of the ball field are now covered with advertisements. But, to put a Spider-Man 2 ad on the bases is just turning a game in to a constant ad. The ads give each ball club $100,000.

Rumor has it that uniforms are next (a la NASCAR).

Imagine the amount of erectile dysfunction ads on the uniforms… and the PLACEMENT for that matter.

President Bush has done a FABULOUS job of pacifying Iraqi's!

As you can see, this picture was taken shortly after the interview with President Bush with an arab television network, and shows how pleased the Iraqi public is with the American "apology" (was there one?).

The photo is from AlJazeera.net, and is taken outside of Abu Ghuraib prison.

Say what now?

"I'm here to fertilize the grass roots today"
President Bush to his supporters yesterday on his bus tour through Michigan and Ohio.

Required Reading

Complete text of Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba is linked below.

FYI - this is some brutal reading.

Colin Powell Wants Out

That's what the article in GQ says!

Taliban Kill Fourteen

The Taliban (remember them?) has killed 9 soldiers and 5 policemen. All the members were Afghani's.

The Taliban has succesfully over-run government buildings on numerous occassions. Since August of last year the Taliban have killed over 700 people.

Glad to see the "evil Taliban government" has "been overthrown".

Whatever.