With thanks (and sorrow) on Veterans Day
On this Veterans Day and every day, an humble thank you to all who have served. Get a history of Veterans Day here. Read more
Tony Blair, big-time neocon
The Christiane Amanpour interview with former British P.M. Tony Blair was revealing on many levels. First, Blair declared himself a “Democrat, rather than a Republican,” further cementing his Americanness, and further confounding those who can’t understand how a centrist, Clinton-friendly Labourite became so enamored of George W. Bush. What the interview mostly reveals, though, is just how thoroughly Blair drank the neoconservative Kool-Aid, on Iraq, and on what to do about Islamic fundamentalism worldwide, including the leadership in Iran. Read the transcript here, and here’s part one of the video version, in which Blair sounds for all the world like Douglas Feith or Paul Wolfowitz with the British accent. Watch:
Part two after the jump. Read more
Well said: rabid right’s demonization of the president is ‘sick and corrosive’
Following the president’s address on the end of combat operations in Iraq, NY Daily News writer Joshua Greenman serves one up for those who continue to demonize the president: Read more
Iraq by the numbers
Weary combat troops in Iraq.
The Toronto Star’s Mitch Potter may have said it best:
A war that may yet go down in history as America’s single greatest foreign policy blunder reached a milestone Tuesday night with five decisive words from President Barack Obama: “Operation Iraqi Freedom is over.”
And as I wrote in a previous post, the president was exceedingly gracious in his remarks about the end of a war he, and many Americans like myself, opposed from the outset (my first ever guest column for the Miami Herald was on that subject, back in April 2003.) Obama deserves credit for keeping his campaign promise to end the war in responsible fashion (though Iraq hasn’t exactly held up its end of the bargain by forming a stable government) and he was right to focus his speech Tuesday night on honoring the dead and wounded in the war, rather than on recriminations against the men who took us there. (The neocons tried in vain to recast George Bush as the Great Hero of the Tigris on Tuesday. Too bad only Fox News viewers will believe them.)
But there is more to the story. And it’s not good news. Read more
Is it over, over there? U.S. combat troops leave Iraq
MSNBC reporter Richard Engel went live from the scene as the last U.S. combat brigade packed up, and pulled out of Iraq. With Rachel Maddow in Baghdad and Keith Olbermann in the MSNBC studio. Watch the moment of truth:
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
The Washington Post on how combat troops view the end of the mission.
The New York Times on the civilian takeover.
I don’t know how you’re feeling about this, but all these years later, and more than 4,000 lives later, I still can’t help but wonder why on earth this country invaded Iraq — what we gained, and whether any of it was worth so many lives. It’s a question I’m assuming we’ll be asking ourselves for a lifetime. Iraq, and why the Bush administration was so determined to invade it, was the subject of the first column I ever wrote for the Miami Herald, back when I was working for the local NBC affiliate in Miami in 2003. I still don’t have an answer. Do you?
Obama: Iraq war coming to an end
It’s finally almost over. President Obama today told disabled veterans that the war in Iraq, launched by his predecessor for reasons no one still fully understands, is almost at an end. It’s an important campaign promise, and in many ways, a moral imperative, the president will soon fulfill.
The Wapo has the story. The president’s full remarks after the jump. Read more
Blair’s promise: U.K. would back U.S. in Saddam overthrow
Tony Blair reportedly promised to back George W. Bush if he decided to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein … and he apparently made that promise a year before the invasion, at a time when Bush was telling the U.S. media no such decision had been made … the Times of London reports on a series of secret notes that tell the sorry tale of how Great Britain followed Bush and Cheney off a cliff. Read more
The Wednesday funnies: The Cheney Bunch
**Bump** Dick Cheney’s newly public, chatty persona (and his daughter’s) just begs for a parody. Here it is:
The limits of Powell’s rethinking
Colin Powell is probably the most articulate current voice of the small, sane wing of the Republican Party. And he has successfully put distance between himself and the Bush administration in terms of the public’s esteem, even managing to maintain the respect of those of us who deeply disagreed with him on Iraq. But there are some things he just can’t seem to do. Involving himself in the question of torture for war is apparently one of them. From journalist Sam Husseini:
Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, recently wrote:
“What I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002 — well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion — its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa’ida.
But Powell isn’t ready to go there:
Sam Husseini: General, can you talk about the al-Libi case and the link between torture and the production of tortured evidence for war?
Colin Powell: I don’t have any details on the al-Libi case.
SH: Can you tell us when you learned that some of the evidence that you used in front of the UN was based on torture? When did you learn that?
CP: I don’t know that. I don’t know what information you’re referring to. So I can’t answer.
SH: Your chief of staff, Wilkerson, has written about this.
CP: So what? [inaudible]
SH: So you’d think you’d know about it.
CP: The information I presented to the UN was vetted by the CIA. Every word came from the CIA and they stood behind all that information. I don’t know that any of them believe that torture was involved. I don’t know that in fact. A lot of speculation, particularly by people who never attended any of these meetings, but I’m not aware of it.
Powell seems to be somehow at odds with himself over his involvement in the former administration’s policies: sorry he made the case for war at the U.N. without better facts, but somewhat defensive on the idea that he tried to make sure the facts were good before he made it. Perhaps the old soldier in him just can’t go where Wilkerson is able to. Maybe he really does believe that the Iraq war was the right thing to do. Or maybe he’s learning, along with the rest of us, the lengths his former colleague Dick Cheney and his band of neocons were willing to go to (including expending Powell’s reputation for their cause) in order to have their war. Either that, or he’s in deep denial.
Previous:
The CNN torture echo chamber
Has CNN adopted an editorial policy of ignoring altogether, the finding reported last week by McClatchy, that the serial torture of “high value detainees” Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and Abu Zubaydah was done not to prevent another terrorist attack, but rather to try and extract false confessions that would tie Saddam Hussain to 9/11?
John King this morning (Sunday) had on Diane Feinstein, Lindsey Graham and the treacherous Mr. Lieberman to discuss, among other things, the release of the torture memos. Lieberman and Graham were allowed, unimpeded by King, to repeat the meme that “enhanced interrogation techniques” (torture) was used, in Graham’s words, “not to commit a crime against individual people, but to save us all from another attack.”
At that point, King might have interjected that a senior U.S. inteligence official and a former Army psychiatrist have stated that the Bush administration’s desire to invade Iraq was central to the torture program (a desire that was shared by Mr. Lieberman for many years, by the way…) and asked his guests for comment.
He interjected no such thing. In fact, I don’t recall hearing the McClatchy story repeated on CNN in any daypart since the news broke last week. Has anyone else noticed what seems like an editorial decision to stick to the official (Bush-Cheney) narrative about torture being necessary to prevent another attack? Perhaps CNN simply doesn’t believe McClatchy’s sources, or maybe they don’t want to open up this line of inquiry against the prior administration for reasons unknown.
(Not that NBC has been exactly aggressive, other than Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow’s shows about making this point, either, but CNN seems to be particularly determined to hew to the Cheney line.)
Meanwhile, what will Howie Kurtz do…?
Cross-posted at TPM Cafe.
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