Retro Truth in Comics

By Creature



If it's Sunday, it's Truth in Comics.

87,215

By Creature

That's the number of Iraqis that have been "killed in violence since 2005." This figure comes to us from a "previously undisclosed" Iraqi government count. To that number we can add a conservative 20,000 more to reach the total number of Iraqis killed since George Bush and Dick Cheney invaded on a wing, prayer, and a lie. Throw in the displaced, the detained, the tortured, the widows, and the orphans and then you get the full picture of the mess we have made. Republicans may think we, as a country, have nothing to be sorry for, but I am sorry and I am embarrassed.

Middle East in recent weeks -

By Carol Gee

The Middle East is one of the subjects I regularly visit. Today the focus is on torture, the economic side of national security, help for Pakistan and Iraq, DoD contractors, and it ends with some assorted items about detainees.

Red Cross report -- "The CIA interrogation program was 'inhuman';" a headline made the headlines recently. The Red Cross reported on active participation of medical officers, who in some cases, participated in torture. The author wondered whether the release of the report (against the wishes of the Red Cross) will add to the pressure to investigate further. From TPMMuckraker I quote,

The journalist Mark Danner has obtained the entire report on torture by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which he published excerpts from last month. The report has been posted on the website of the New York Review of Books. Danner's new writeup of it is here.

Global Financial Crisis -- The "Pentagon prepares for economic warfare," an article by Eamon Javers in Thursday's Politico.com, discussed a two-day war game last month that looked at how hostile countries might try to cripple the U.S. economy. What could China do to harm us economically, for example? And how we should think about integrating any economic conflict with "kinetic" conflict. To quote further:

. . . instead of military brass plotting America’s defense, it was hedge-fund managers, professors and executives from at least one investment bank, UBS – all invited by the Pentagon to play out global scenarios that could shift the balance of power between the world’s leading economies.

. . . In the end, there was sobering news for the United States – the savviest economic warrior proved to be China, a growing economic power that strengthened its position the most over the course of the war-game.

Pakistan is problematic -- President Obama ruled out U.S. troop raids into Pakistan at the end of last month, according to Yahoo! News, saying that "he will consult with Pakistan's leaders before pursuing terrorist hideouts in that country." On CBS the President emphasized that Pakistan is a sovereign government. CQ Politics predicts "trouble ahead for the Pakistan aid Obama wants," if Oklahoma's Senator Tom Coburn renews his objections to the Kerry-Lugar bill that will be the vehicle for the increased aid appropriation. The WaPo reported recently that "Congress Moves to Set Terms for Pakistan Aid." Terms include benchmarks.

Iraq Refugees -- The Iraq Refugee problem persists, according to an April 1 article in ProPublica. "Only a fraction of Itaq refugees have begun returning home," the story says. To quote:

The number of Iraqis living outside of their homes remains in dispute; the U.N. places the figure at 4.7 million. How quickly they return is viewed by many as a bellwether of Iraqi stability, with implications for regional security and U.S. military efforts.

. . . Last month, the Obama administration announced additional funds to support displaced and conflict-affected Iraqis in Iraq, Jordan and Syria in the current budget year, bringing the U.S. commitment so far this year to roughly $150 million; in 2008 the U.S. contributed $400 million. Al-Tikriti said the U.S. has been criticized for failing to invest more robustly. "Much of the international community feels that this is primarily a U.S. crisis and the U.S. should be primarily responsible for dealing with it."

DOD Contractors -- As we know, spending for contract work surged markedly during the Bush administration. However we learned through ProPublica that, to quote:

Pentagon inspectors sent 76 percent fewer contracting fraud and corruption cases to prosecutors than those under President Clinton did, reports the Center for Public Integrity. A Pentagon spokesman blamed the drop partly on laws passed in the 1990s that require contractors to disclose less information, and IG reports have cited staffing shortages.

ProPublica's Alexandra Andrews also revealed this little blurb,

In 2005, four Blackwater guards in Iraq fired more than 70 shots at a car without justification, according to State Department investigators, and left the driver in unknown condition, reports USA Today. But in what the paper calls "another example of lax State Department oversight," documents show that the top security official at the U.S. Embassy in Iraq refused to punish them because he didn't want morale among contractors to suffer.

About Detainees --

• A National Geographic television documentary, "Explorer: Inside Guantanamo," premiered April 5. CQ-Politics'Jeff Stein reported on "the full treatment of the issues" by the documentary.


• Given the release of Legal Counsel memos by the DOJ, the ACLU called a couple of weeks ago for the administration to "release photos of other Abu Ghraibs." The ACLU points out that there are still-secret and mostly unknown pictures of U.S. personnel abusing detainees at overseas black sites other than Abu Ghraib. A FOIA lawsuit by ACLU is making its way through the courts.


• The legacy of Abu Ghraib remains. On March 10 a suicide blast killed at least 32 people at the Abu Ghraib marketplace in western Baghdad.


• Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) is detaining the nomination of Christopher Hill to be the next ambassador to Iraq. The question will come up again following the spring recess of Congress.


• And finally, undersecretary of defense policy during the Bush administration, Douglas Feith told the New York Times that he is "shocked, simply shocked by possible torture charges" brought against him in Spain, according to TPMMuckraker (3/31/09).

The Middle East is a subject of fascination for me at this blog. Unfortunately I did not find much good news in recent days as I surveyed the blogosphere. National security will take a tremendous amount of our time and treasure as the Obama administration continues to face most everything head on. It will not be easy.

Reference: "You Can't Put Out Fire With Flames," by guest poster Amjad Atallah, is an important analysis of President Obama's major speech in Turkey when he was recently abroad. It comes from the April 6 Washington Note.

(Cross-posted at South by Southwest.)

What to say when the words won't come?

By Carol Gee

In the United States today is Memorial Day, 2008, and our military, whose dead we honor today, are still in harm's way in Iraq. I have opposed the invasion of Iraq since before it happened, and and yet I have unqualified feelings of respect for those who fight the war in good faith, despite the bad faith of their leaders. It is because of this ambivalence that I have very few words every year on Memorial Day. Today is no exception. In place of what I cannot say, I borrow from others, who also have had trouble with words this weekend.

I begin with this photo that whispered something about the war to me the moment I saw it. My hat is tipped to my blog friend, Margaret, who comes from Lebanon, Glued Blue Glass, aka Margaret's Wanderings, who posted "Exhaustion" with a number of wonderful photographs that she recently took of the flood waters in her area. I have included one of them to illustrate this post. I regret to say it is without her permission ahead of time, because she does not have an e-mail address through which I can ask. I do not think she will mind, however, because of this quote at the top of her blog under, "Words I Live By." I quote :

Those of us who grow in war are like clay pots fired in an oven that is over hot. Confusingly shaped like the rest of humanity, we nevertheless contain fatal cracks that we spend the rest of our lives itching to fill.
-Alexandra Fuller

"BlogIraq Murdered in Baghdad" is the cryptic headline of Saturday's post from my blog friend Fayrouz in Dallas. Her few words say it all about the war in Iraq:

Sometimes, Iraqi bloggers stop writing because the situation in Iraq is futile.

This time it's different; BlogIraq was murdered while investigating corruption in Iraq. It's a sad reminder that the situation in Iraq is far from being stable.

Echoes of the Vietman war are background behind a discussion thread at Forum Lucidity in recent days. PseudoCyAnts poignantly posted the video and lyrics to "Warhead"- Otep. The last verse speaks it for me:

The elephants march to war
Concede
Conform
Concede
Conform
Deny the big lie
My tribe
Join me
An alliance of defiance, in the warhead
An alliance of defiance
All are welcome here
Give me your tired, give me your sick, give me your indulgence and decadence
He lied, they died, keep the peasants terrified
This is a catastrophe
You must lead if they get me
On my command
Break free

Just a little bit says a lot -- "La Popessa" at Make it Stop! Make it Stop! had to break her post up into smaller parts on successive days, each containing the minimum word requirement: Heading Towards Memorial Day - Part 1 on female veterans difficulties; Heading Towards Memorial Day - Part 2 on the military casualty figures; and Heading Towards Memorial Day - Part 3 on the associated other casualties of the wars.

To conclude -- This newly bookmarked website, Alternate Brain, has a great Memorial Day post that talks about the war. It begins with this:

Memorial Day is a time to reflect on the people who sacrificed their lives so you can live the life you do in this country.

And The Sirens Chronicles' Memorial Day, looks at what it is about and what it's not about, in a couple of good posts.

(Cross-posted at South by Southwest.)

Accountability by the numbers -- 2

By Carol Gee

Four soldiers died in Iraq and it marks another milestone in the seemingly interminable war in the Middle East. It was a war of aggression that should never have been undertaken. The threat level of terrorism from Iraq did not rise until after we invaded. OCP (our current president) is directly accountable for it. Today's post is the second in a series on accountability by the numbers. I do not know whether there is a connection between the war in Iraq and our current economic situation. But it feels like there is, somehow. We begin with this disheartening news.

4,000 and counting -- Monday's New York Times reports that the AP announced that the U.S. military death toll in Iraq has now reached 4,000. To quote:

BAGHDAD (AP) -- The overall U.S. death toll in Iraq rose to 4,000 after four soldiers were killed in a roadside bombing in Baghdad, a grim milestone that is likely to fuel calls for the withdrawal of American forces as the war enters its sixth year. The American deaths occurred Sunday, the same day rockets and mortars pounded the U.S.-protected Green Zone in Baghdad and a wave of attacks left at least 61 Iraqis dead nationwide.

. . . One widely respected tally by Iraq Body Count, which collects figures based mostly on media reports, estimates that 82,349 to 89,867 Iraqi civilians have lost their lives in the conflict.

. . . Iraq's National Security Adviser Mouwaffak al-Rubaie said he sympathized with the American losses but warned against pulling out U.S. troops before Iraqi forces are ready to take over their own security and the situation is sufficiently stable.
''Honestly, this war is well worth fighting. This war, we are talking about war against global terror,'' he said Sunday in an interview with CNN.

Southwest news by the numbers connected to the job situation caught my eye this morning. One way the war is connected to the unemployment rate is that people sometimes go into the military in order to make a living. Experts say that one of the key indicators of an economic downturn's level of seriousness is connected to the unemployment rate. According to a recent editorial in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, whether or not we are in a recession is all relative. To quote:

Yes, the stock market took a dive last Friday when the Labor Department announced that the economy had lost 63,000 jobs in February. But the unemployment rate was still just 4.8 percent, which is pretty good. (The rate's most recent high was more than 6 percent in 2003.)

Texas is still adding jobs -- 28,000 of them in January and 277,200 in the previous 12 months, according to the latest figures available from the Texas Workforce Commission. The statewide seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was 4.3 percent in January.

The Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington area added 35,616 jobs from January 2007 to January 2008 and has an unemployment rate of 4.6 percent.

The bigger picture looks very different -- The war and the economy are inextricably intertwined. As the war has dragged on OCP has been distracted from anything much more than reacting to the most headline-grabbing business events. Assistance for higher education has suffered cuts in competition with a bloated defense budget. With the financial drain of the war, effective help for the unemployed has also been limited. A McClatchy article, "Less-educated workers particularly at risk," included an astonishing figure about job losses since the current administration took office:

WASHINGTON -- The steady loss of "good jobs" for less-educated workers has left them more vulnerable to recession than at any time in nearly 30 years, and signs are mounting that a recession is either already here or coming soon.

. . . The Center for Economic and Policy Research defines a "good job" as one with health insurance, a pension plan and earnings of at least $17 per hour. That works out to about $34,000 a year, the inflation-adjusted median income for men in 1979, when U.S. manufacturing jobs numbered 19.6 million, an all-time high.

Since then, the economy has lost nearly 6 million manufacturing jobs -- 52,000 in February alone. Among them were many of the 3.5 million "good jobs" lost from 2000 to 2006, according to CEPR economist John Schmitt.

Our next president will certainly be challenged after taking office. We are currently in a very big mess by the numbers. It might be a good idea to think about Senator McCain's thin economic portfolio before casting a vote in that direction. It could be throwing good money after bad, for any of you Clinton fans who might be considering a protest vote for McCain.

(Cross-posted at South by Southwest.)

No need for further explanation

By Carl

Iraq war numbers abound: five years; 4,000 American military deaths; 28,500 more (or fewer) troops; $5,000 per second; and X number of Iraqi military and civilian casualties -- where the X is unknown, at least here at home.

The numbers can't actually tell us what we should do, and they are all inhumanely impersonal. Despite whatever "success" has come from the surge, public support remains low. Five years seems so long, and 4,000 seems a number so extreme to the cause, and a war costing $5,000 per second seems so obscene, and gas is more than $3 a gallon, and our economy is now reeling. There are 224 days until Tuesday, Nov. 4.

Yesterday, four U.S. soldiers were killed when their vehicle in south Baghdad was hit by an IED, bringing the U.S. military death toll in Iraq to 4,000.

(crossposted to Simply Left Behind)