Return to Iraq–What Could Go Wrong?

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/06/13/the-seven-people-who-need-to-stfu-about-iraq-right-now/#.U5tf1StV6rM.twitter

“Hush you guys. The guy who thought Sarah Palin would make a good vice-president is explaining to us what we should do in Iraq.”

And do you remember which genius said this, about how long success in Iraq would take: “It could last, you know, six days, six weeks. I doubt six months“?

Giving me an excuse to post this excerpt, which I love:

But imagine if “Donald Rumsfeld” was a wholly imaginary character and that the events recounted in his memoir were audacious fiction, a wicked satire describing an implausible campaign of deceit that ultimately ensnared even the deceivers themselves, leading to a catastrophically lethal blunder in which trillions were squandered and hundreds of thousands slain. Yet despite that all-too-predictable outcome, this fictional narrator with the oddly Dickensian name is unrepentant, effusively praising himself as a hero and a champion of virtue. If it were fiction — the product of conscious artifice rather than of unconscious artifice – Known and Unknown would be on the syllabus of English literature classes everywhere.

Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2013/08/09/nra-what-would-rayford-do-do-the-opposite/#ixzz34ca4cB00

Mister Peabody Visits the Middle East in 1953

And gives Sherman a little lesson in what the CIA has been up to since then in the region. I love it!

I never realized how talky Mister Peabody and Sherman cartoons were until now. Makes it easy to replace the original dialogue with dialogue of your own, if you’re a talented voice artist. I must have learned a lot of history from these cartoons.

Found at Just Another Blog From LA.

btw, there is some foul language, so don’t traumatize the little kiddies.

Aw, Man

Somehow it’s worse when what you dread turns out to be true.

The Bush administration tortured prisoners so they’d cough up the Saddam-9/11 connection Bush and cronies wanted so desperately (which never existed).

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would’ve provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush’s main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and Saddam’s regime.

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

“There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used,” the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity.

“The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.”

“Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies.”

Senior administration officials, however, “blew that off and kept insisting that we’d overlooked something, that the interrogators weren’t pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information,” he said.

Levin recalled Cheney’s assertions that a senior Iraqi intelligence officer had met Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, in the Czech Republic capital of Prague just months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The FBI and CIA found that no such meeting occurred.

At least it makes sense. Since torture doesn’t elicit real information, but what the interrogators want to hear, naturally the Bush administration tortured these guys so that they’d say that Saddam was behing the 9/11 attacks. It’s good that we have the real rationale, rather than any “ticking time bomb” scenario dreamed up by an aficionado of 24.