General: July 2005 Archives

Too many of Iraq’s new police officers are barely literate, some have shown up for training with criminal records, and the extent of insurgent infiltration in their ranks is largely unknown, according to a new U.S. government report issued Monday.

Inspectors from the State Department and Pentagon, who spent five weeks in Iraq this spring evaluating police training, also found that most of the training had been designed and carried out with too little input from Iraqi leaders.

The inspectors agreed with recommendations from Iraq’s Interior Ministry and international trainers that Iraqis would be better able to screen police recruits than foreign soldiers would. They further suggested that the program should be focused on training police already in the ranks, rather than simply adding more.

The U.S.-led coalition plans to train 135,000 new Iraqi police by the end of 2006. Turning more of the country over to Iraq’s nascent security forces is a cornerstone of the U.S. strategy for an eventual drawdown of American soldiers.

But “this emphasis on numbers overshadows the attention that should be given to the qualitative performance of those trained,” the inspectors found. [...]

“We are preparing them for failure,” the report quoted one unidentified officer as saying. Another said that it is “widely perceived that the police are under-trained and underpaid.” (source)

And yet, today I read that General George Casey stated that the US may be able to “make fairly substantial reductions” in personnel in Iraq in the next year.

What are these people smoking? I suppose that statement is coming just in time to gear up for the next presidential race. It’s more difficult to keep political footing for the Republicans when our sons and daughters are coming home in flag-draped coffins. I suppose they feel that they have to throw a bone to the people.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The United States hopes to sharply reduce its forces in Iraq within the next year, its top commander on the ground said on Wednesday.

“I do believe that if the political process continues to go positively, if the developments with the (Iraqi) security forces continue to go as it is going, I do believe we will still be able to make fairly substantial reductions after these elections -- in the spring and summer of next year,” General George Casey said at a briefing with visiting Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. (source)

ALBANY -- Republican George Pataki, who brought down Democratic icon Mario Cuomo to become governor of New York and is now weighing a possible 2008 bid for the White House, said Wednesday he would not seek a fourth term next year.

“It’s the rig ht thing to do,” Pataki told The Associated Press during an interview in his state Capitol office.

Pataki said when it comes to a possible presidential run, “That’s for down the road. I’m not ruling anything in or out, but my goal is to be the best governor I can be for the next year and a half.” “I don’t want people thinking that I’m focused on being something other than being the best governor I can be for the next year and a half,” he said. (source)

Governor Pataki is right, not running again for Governor is the right thing to do. Especially after giving his nod of approval to George W. Bush for taking us into the war in Iraq. His exact words were, “With supreme guts and righteousness, President Bush went into Iraq.”

Pataki then turned around to offer his support to get his son a three-year law school deferment from the Marines so his son wouldn’t have to die in the war he just supported. It really is true that politicians wage wars that are fought by the children of others. In most cases, these kids come from poor families.

As far as running for President in 2008, Pataki should fit right in. Lies and deception seem to be enough these days to get anyone elected to be President of the United States.

This is a tough entry to make, but I feel I have to do it so that the deaths of these two gay teenagers are not forgotten.

It astonishes me the savagery in our world today. These two teenagers were caught having sex, an act punishable by death in Iran. Death can be carried out one of four ways; being hanged, stoned, halved by a sword, or dropped from the highest perch. The accused can make the choice.

According to Article 152, if two men not related by blood are discovered naked under one cover without good reason, both will be punished at a judge‘s discretion. Gay teens (Article 144) are also punished at a judge‘s discretion. Rubbing one‘s penis between the thighs without penetration (tafheed) shall be punished by 100 lashes for each offender. This act, known to the English-speaking world as ‘frottage,’ is punishable by death if the ‘offender’ is a non-Muslim. If frottage is thrice repeated and penalty-lashes have failed to stop such repetitions, upon the fourth ‘offense‘ both men will be put to death. According to Article 156, a person who repents and confesses his gay behavior prior to his identification by four witnesses, may be pardoned. (source)

Further discussion is given here.

I have reluctantly posted the photos of this act. The executions took place on July 19.

And this is a country that we want better relations with. What does that say of us? These people are barbarians.

Protecting The King. In the case of Washington, D. C., that’s how things work - protect The President, at all costs. AT ALL COSTS! Nothing is more inportant than that, America, not even the lives of your children who lost their lives in Iraq. You had better wake up to the fact that they did not lose their lives to “protect freedom”, or “restore democracy” (which was not there to restore in the first place), or “fight terrorism”. This war was about personal political interests and financial gain. There is a military term for what they call people who die in such a war, as your sons and daughters did. It’s called “collateral damage”.

History repeats itself. Now is the time for the administration to enter the cover it’s ass stage, just as the Nixon Administration did in the Watergate scandel.

Nixon Administration - 1972
“I am saying that if anyone was involved in that type of activity which I referred to, they would not be working here.” - Ron Ziegler, press secretary to Richard Nixon, defending the presidential aide Dwight Chapin on Oct. 18, 1972. Chapin was convicted in April 1974 of perjury in connection with his relationship to the political saboteur Donald Segretti.

Bush Administration - 2005
“Any individual who works here at the White House has the confidence of the president. They wouldn’t be working here at the White House if they didn’t have the president’s confidence.” - Scott McClellan, press secretary to George W. Bush, defending Karl Rove on Tuesday.

Kent forwarded me this op-ed article on the controversy surrounding Karl Rove. It’s well thought out and I think right on target. (highlighting my own)

Even so, we shouldn’t get hung up on him [Mr. Rove] - or on most of the other supposed leading figures in this scandal thus far. Not Matt Cooper or Judy Miller or the Wilsons or the bad guy everyone loves to hate, the former CNN star Robert Novak. This scandal is not about them in the end, any more than Watergate was about Dwight Chapin and Donald Segretti or Woodward and Bernstein. It is about the president of the United States. It is about a plot that was hatched at the top of the administration and in which everyone else, Mr. Rove included, are at most secondary players. [...]

This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit - the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes - is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That’s why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair. [...]

Once we were locked into the war, and no W.M.D.’s could be found, [...] The administration began its dog-ate-my-homework cover-up, asserting that the various warning signs about the uranium claims were lost “in the bowels” of the bureaucracy or that it was all the C.I.A.’s fault or that it didn’t matter anyway, because there were new, retroactive rationales to justify the war. But the administration knows how guilty it is. That’s why it has so quickly trashed any insider who contradicts its story line about how we got to Iraq, starting with the former Treasury secretary Paul O’Neill and the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke.

Next to White House courtiers of their rank, Mr. Wilson is at most a Rosencrantz or Guildenstern. The brief against the administration’s drumbeat for war would be just as damning if he’d never gone to Africa. But by overreacting in panic to his single Op-Ed piece of two years ago, the White House has opened a Pandora’s box it can’t slam shut. Seasoned audiences of presidential scandal know that there’s only one certainty ahead: the timing of a Karl Rove resignation. As always in this genre, the knight takes the fall at exactly that moment when it’s essential to protect the king. (source)