Here’s a page-one story from today’s Washington Post with nasty details about an Iraqi general who apparently was wrapped inside a sleeping bag and beaten to death by US Army interrogators at Abu Ghraib: Documents tell of brutal improvisation by GIs.

This was in November, 2003, the time when new-and-improved interrogation techniques were being imported from Guantanamo so we could shut down the Iraqi insurgency once and for all.

Whew. I’m sure glad we had the balls to do what was needed back then. Otherwise, we might still be fighting the insurgency today.

Oh, wait.

P.S. Sorry for the long posting hiatus. I’m back now.

No time to obsess properly over this, so just a quick one to mention some noteworthy photography-themed links I’ve been staring at lately:

* I am very much in love with BAGnewsNotes.

* ymatt took one look at more bouncy balls and declared it an obvious piece of Photoshop fakery. At first I agreed. Then I looked closer, and decided no, it was real. ymatt seemed to agree, then did some more fiddling, and said no, he was leaning fake. I’m still leaning real. What do you think?

* You’ve seen me link before to daily dose of imagery. Recently, valued Lies.com contributor Sven sent me this link from photojunkie profiling the amateur photographer behind the site: Sam Javanrouh : Serving up your Daily Dose.

P.S. It’s Sven’s birthday today. Happy birthday, dude.

What did we do for fun before we had the Bulwer-Lytton contest? Fortunately, we don’t have to answer that: 2005 results.

As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual.

Minor point for those obsessing about Robert Novak’s outing of Valerie Wilson (née Plame): Why, in his initial column that outed her, did Novak use her maiden name? See discussion of the issue by Kevin Drum (Plame vs. Wilson) and Joshua Micah Marshall (There’s a rather…).

Once again quoting from Buckaroo Banzai (twice in one day), I’m glad someone on the Senate Intel Committee has the balls to face facts about Chairman Pat Roberts’ failure to live up to his promise to complete “Phase II” of the investigation. Specifically, those would be the balls possessed by the senior senator from California: Senator Feinstein urges progress in completion of investigation into pre-war intelligence.

I like this one. How’d they know I’m such a sucker for a meet-cute scene? I anticipate one of those somewhat painful moments when the cab driver, like Ghosts of Pasha and birthday “Ted” before him, finds out it was all a prank, but I think their heart is pretty much in the right place here. Anyway: Improv Everywhere mission: Romantic comedy cab.

A brief, but thoughtful, article on the use of juvenile chimpanzees in show business, from Gelf Magazine’s David Goldenberg: Meet Mikey, chimpanzee cover boy.

So, apparently Robert Novak, appearing with James Carville on a live CNN talking-heads show, decided to throw a mini-tantrum, calling some actually-pretty-mild-by-Carville-standards digs at Kathleen Harris “bullshit,” then storming out of the studio while the cameras rolled. The CNN moderator, Ed Henry, said at the end of the segment that he had been planning to ask Novak questions about the Plame outing, and had told Novak that before the program, so maybe that explains why Novak would act out in such a bizarre manner: it was an excuse to get out of the interview before he had to answer uncomfortable questions. It reminds me, in that sense, of Bill O’Reilly’s tantrum while being interviewed by Terry Gross.

Anyway, links:

* OneGoodMove has the priceless clip with Jon Stewart’s reaction: Novak flips out- Daily Show version.

* Crooks and Liars has more video, and a round-up of bloggy commentary: Novak freaks on the set!

* Particularly interesitng to me was the speculation at Joshua Micah Marshall’s TPM Cafe: Novak.

* From Fishbowl DC, on CNN’s putting Novak on hiatus post-outburst: ‘Time off’ for Novak after ‘bulllshit’.

Here are a number of items on the current state of the Iraq war that have caught my eye in the last few days:

• The final column from since-kidnapped-and-killed freelance journalist Steven Vincent: Switched off in Basra.
• Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London: Three ways to make us all safer.
• Tim Burke’s take from Easily Distracted: Time see what’s become of me.
• Spencer Ackerman in the New Republic: Self defeat.
• Medium Lobster of Fafblog! on the recent revelations about the sleeping-bag beatings of Abed Hamed Mowhoush: Claustrophobic techniques.

Just when you thought it was safe: Lies.com podcast 6.

I recorded this one in my car driving down for last Thursday’s Devo concert. No music or found audio; just me doing the stream-of-consciousness thing re:

• the use of “random” as a pejorative term
• the Bush administration’s visible elephant with the Plame outing
• a few anecdotes from my history as a geeky Devo fanboy
• skepticism and credulity re: bouncy balls and Art Lad
• working the graveyard shift
• offshore sailboat racing at odd hours

Enjoy!

US military deaths in Iraq fell in July, with 54 deaths (compared to the 78 deaths in June).

Again, I’m getting these figures from the advanced search tool at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund site, and from Lunaville’s page on Iraq coalition casualties. The figures are for the number of US dead per month, without regard to whether the deaths were combat-related.

The first graph shows the first 29 months of each war. (Click on any image for a larger version.)

Next, the same chart, with the Vietnam numbers extended out to cover the first four years of the war:

Finally, the chart that gives the US death toll for the entire Vietnam war:

Disclaimer: I’m aware that we have more troops in-theater in Iraq than we had during the corresponding parts of the Vietnam War graph. Vietnam didn’t get numbers of US troops comparable to the number currently in Iraq until shortly after Johnson won the 1964 election, some three-and-a-half years after the starting point of the Vietnam graphs above.

These graphs are not intended to show the relative lethality of the two conflicts on a per-soldier basis. I was just curious how the “death profile” of the two wars compared, and these graphs let me see that. You are free to draw your own conclusions.

If you listened to the latest podcast, you know I’ve been obsessing about the credibility of online images lately. Here are a few examples of why, from Worth1000.com:

• Match point
• Old Paris
• Best in show

The last one actually took me a few minutes.

I was in Top Dog the other day, waiting for my dog and purusing the social comentary on the walls (looking for something I hadn’t seen before) when a leaflet I had seen before (but never read) caught my eye: “A Primer For Prospective Jurors“. My recently recieved jury duty summons is probably what motivated me to read it while I ate — and I found it fairly interesting…

Once on a jury, must I use the law as given by the judge, even if I think it’s a bad law, or wrongly applied?
No. You are free to vote on the verdict according to your conscience. You may not increase the charges, but you may choose to vote to acquit, even when the evidence proves that the defendant “did it”, if your conscience so dictates. And if you think the charges are too high, you can ask the judge to tell you about any reduced charges of which you might, in good conscience, be willing to find the defendant guilty. The same options apply if you learn that the evidence, though true, was gathered in a way that violated the rights of the accused, or if you believe that the government is just trying to flex its muscle by making an example out of the defendant or feel that you were not allowed access to some of the facts of the case, or that victimless crimes should not be punished-or for any other reason you believe that justice will not be served by finding the defendant guilty or liable as charged. You have the power to render a conscientious verdict.
…
This power to “do the right thing” and bring in a conscientious verdict, even when the defendant is — by the letter of the law — guilty or liable, is the very backbone of our jury system.

It lead me to the “The American Jury Institute and Fully Informed Jury Association” website(s), which then lead me to another interesting read: Jurors’ Handbook: A Citizens Guide to Jury Duty.

All of which makes me a little sad that I allready check the “I am exempt because my obligation was satisified in the last 12 months” box on my summons.

Anyone who’s read Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 will remember Milo Minderbinder, the entrepreneurial genius who found, in the chaos and the massive scale of war, the perfect opportunity to become very, very rich. With all that money flying around, and no one really in charge of keeping track of it, making large amounts of it flow in a particular direction turns out to be not so hard (at least for someone like Minderbinder).

It sounds like a lot of the same thing was going on in Iraq in the early days of the US occupation. This article is fairly old, but I found it interesting: From The Guardian: So, Mr Bremer, where did all the money go?

Per Jonathon Schwarz of A Tiny Revolution: George Bush makes it clear.

Our mission is clear in Iraq. Should we have to go in, our mission is very clear: disarmament…. it’s very clear what we intend to do. And our mission won’t change. Our mission is precisely what I just stated. — George W. Bush, March 6, 2003

Our mission in Iraq is clear. We’re hunting down the terrorists. We’re helping Iraqis build a free nation that is an ally in the war on terror. We’re advancing freedom in the broader Middle East. We are removing a source of violence and instability, and laying the foundation of peace for our children and our grandchildren. — George W. Bush, June 28, 2005

If there’s one thing Bush knows, it’s clarity.

From Arianna Huffington: At Rummy’s bizarro Pentagon, torture is rewarded while sex is a firing offense.

There really is a hideous perversion of the normal order of how a government (or any organization) should be run in the Bush administration, and Huffington gets to the heart of it.

Not that I had any interest at all in seeing the movie, but the following Roger Ebert review is not to be missed: Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo.

I haven’t mentioned the Cindy Sheehan protest going on outside the Bush ranch; haven’t really had time to pay much attention, and I don’t watch much TV, where it seems to have been happening in a big way. But in coming across these collected news photos from cryptome.org, I got an idea of what a big deal this is turning into: Eyeballing the Bush ranch protest. And see this video of Cindy Sheehan talking (virtually) to Bush, if you’ve managed to miss it so far, for the full effect: QuickTime video.

I also liked this thoughtful item from Jeanne of Body and Soul: Claudette Colvin, Cindy Sheehan, and us.

Some items from the last few days, on how bad things are going in Iraq:

From the NY Times: A nation in blood and ink.

Baghdad seems a city transported from the Middle Ages: a scattering of high-walled fortresses, each protected by a group of armed men. The area between the forts is a lawless no man’s land, menaced by bandits and brigands. With the daytime temperatures here hovering at around 115 degrees, the electricity in much of the city flows for only about four hours a day.

Things are going really, really badly. Not just in the ways they’ve been going badly; they’re going badly in new and different ways. And the Bush team’s faith-based cheerleading for our inevitable victory is gradually, grudgingly, giving way to more-realistic assessments.

From the Washington Post, a couple of days ago: No clear finish line in Iraq.

Administration officials have all but given up any hope of militarily defeating the insurgents with U.S. forces, instead aiming only to train and equip enough Iraqi security forces to take over the fight themselves. At the same time, they believe that the mission depends on building a new political infrastructure, a project facing its most decisive test in the next three days as deeply divided Iraqis struggle to draft a constitution by a Monday deadline.

In the face of all that, Bush is trying to buy time. After meeting with his national security team at his ranch near Crawford, Tex., yesterday, Bush again beseeched the public to stick with his strategy despite continuing mayhem on the ground, exemplified most recently by the deaths of 16 Marines from the same Ohio-based unit in the past two weeks. Overall, more than 1,800 U.S. troops have died.

[snip]

At his meeting with his war cabinet yesterday, Bush reviewed the latest developments but reported no new direction. The administration has set up seven interagency groups focused on its main priorities in Iraq. These are providing security and training Iraqi forces, building national political institutions, restoring energy and other services, tackling economic problems, establishing rule of law, enlisting international help, and improving strategic communications.

Setting up committees like this might have helped three years ago, when the invasion was in the planning stages. They’re not likely to do much good now. And there are growing signs that this reality isn’t lost on the Bush team. An article from today’s Washington Post has some really choice quotes from anonymous source to that effect: US lowers sights on what can be achieved in Iraq.

“What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground,” said a senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion. “We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we’re in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning.”

[snip]

U.S. officials say no turning point forced a reassessment. “It happened rather gradually,” said the senior official, triggered by everything from the insurgency to shifting budgets to U.S. personnel changes in Baghdad.

The ferocious debate over a new constitution has particularly driven home the gap between the original U.S. goals and the realities after almost 28 months. The U.S. decision to invade Iraq was justified in part by the goal of establishing a secular and modern Iraq that honors human rights and unites disparate ethnic and religious communities.

But whatever the outcome on specific disputes, the document on which Iraq’s future is to be built will require laws to be compliant with Islam. Kurds and Shiites are expecting de facto long-term political privileges. And women’s rights will not be as firmly entrenched as Washington has tried to insist, U.S. officials and Iraq analysts say.

“We set out to establish a democracy, but we’re slowly realizing we will have some form of Islamic republic,” said another U.S. official familiar with policymaking from the beginning, who like some others interviewed would speak candidly only on the condition of anonymity. “That process is being repeated all over.”

[snip]

Washington now does not expect to fully defeat the insurgency before departing, but instead to diminish it, officials and analysts said. There is also growing talk of turning over security responsibilities to the Iraqi forces even if they are not fully up to original U.S. expectations, in part because they have local legitimacy that U.S. troops often do not.

“We’ve said we won’t leave a day before it’s necessary. But necessary is the key word — necessary for them or for us? When we finally depart, it will probably be for us,” a U.S. official said.

The realization continues to spread: Bush’s war of choice in Iraq was a huge mistake, with costs that we’ll be paying for many years to come.

Here are some more-than-usually fascinating comments (usual caveat applies) by BAGNewsNotes on some recent images of John Roberts, Cindy Sheehan, and George Bush: Finding the love in Crawford.

Frank Rich’s op-ed piece in the New York Times does a compelling job of tying together the various themes floating around these days: Someone tell the president the war is over. His conclusion:

WHAT lies ahead now in Iraq instead is not victory, which Mr. Bush has never clearly defined anyway, but an exit (or triage) strategy that may echo Johnson’s March 1968 plan for retreat from Vietnam: some kind of negotiations (in this case, with Sunni elements of the insurgency), followed by more inflated claims about the readiness of the local troops-in-training, whom we’ll then throw to the wolves. Such an outcome may lead to even greater disaster, but this administration long ago squandered the credibility needed to make the difficult case that more human and financial resources might prevent Iraq from continuing its descent into civil war and its devolution into jihad central.

Thus the president’s claim on Thursday that “no decision has been made yet” about withdrawing troops from Iraq can be taken exactly as seriously as the vice president’s preceding fantasy that the insurgency is in its “last throes.” The country has already made the decision for Mr. Bush. We’re outta there. Now comes the hard task of identifying the leaders who can pick up the pieces of the fiasco that has made us more vulnerable, not less, to the terrorists who struck us four years ago next month.

The Carpetbagger does a good job of tying together several recent items (by Murray Waas, in the Villlage Voice and on his ‘whatever already!’ weblog, and by Richard B. Schmitt in the LA Times) that speculate on what’s happening behind the scenes in the Plame-outing investigation. I’d intended to link to all of them, but now I can just link to the Carpetbagger: Rove and Ashcroft and Fitzgerald… oh my.

One thing he didn’t quote from Waas’ Village Voice piece is this part, near the end, which discusses the current status of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general who has been in charge of Fitzgerald since John Ashcroft recused himself:

Comey, then only recently named deputy attorney general, called a press conference and dramatically announced: “Effective today, the attorney general has recused himself . . . from further involvement in these matters.”

He also said he was naming Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who also serves as U.S. attorney in Chicago, as special prosecutor to take over the case. To further assure his independence, Comey also announced that he personally would serve as “acting Attorney General for purposes of this matter.”

Last week, however, Comey announced he was leaving the Justice Department to become the general counsel of the defense contractor Lockheed Martin. In his absence, Associate Attorney General Robert McCallum is the most likely choice to be named as the acting deputy attorney general, and thus the man overseeing Fitzgerald’s work. But McCallum has been a close personal friend of President Bush. Justice Department officials are once more grappling as to how to best assure independence for investigators. And Democrats on Capitol Hill are unlikely not to question any role in the leak probe by McCallum.

This sends a bit of a chill down my spine. It would be just like the Bush/Rove political juggernaut — or at least just like my paranoid nightmares of their Machiavellian omnipotence — for them to have manipulated things behind the scenes to put their own man in charge of the investigation just as Fitzgerald is nearing the point of announcing indictments, and to have the whole thing then just go poof! and disappear.

I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.

From Faiz at Think Progress, here’s another fun example of what a difference a few years make, at least when it comes to the public positions taken by our current Flip-Flopper in Chief: In 1999, Bush demanded a timetable.

Bush on Kosovo (you know, that place where the US waded into a civil war and worked with allies to craft a peaceful resolution, without it turning into a bloody quagmire), as quoted in the Houston Chronicle on April 9, 1999:

“Victory means exit strategy, and it’s important for the president to explain to us what the exit strategy is.”

And here’s Bush quoted in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on June 5, 1999:

“I think it’s also important for the president to lay out a timetable as to how long they will be involved and when they will be withdrawn.”

Fast forward to June 24, 2005, as Bush answers reporters’ questions at a White House ceremony with Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari:

“It doesn’t make any sense to have a timetable. You know, if you give a timetable, you’re — you’re conceding too much to the enemy.”

As someone who’s made much of the Bush administration’s lies (and yeah, that’s what they were) about Iraqi WMD in the run-up to the invasion, I would be remiss if I didn’t link to this story in the Washington Post from last week: Iraqi chemical stash uncovered.

BAGHDAD, Aug. 13 — U.S. troops raiding a warehouse in the northern city of Mosul uncovered a suspected chemical weapons factory containing 1,500 gallons of chemicals believed destined for attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces and civilians, military officials said Saturday.

Oh my gosh. But don’t you see? This proves Bush was telling the truth all along! Saddam was stockpiling dangerous weapons of mass murder. Okay, maybe not nukes, but still.

Except for one small detail:

[Military spokesman Lt. Col. Steven A.] Boylan said the suspected lab was new, dating from some time after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Oops.

You know, we still have Saddam on ice. We could put him back in charge and have the old Iraq back again, the Iraq that was only a make-believe threat to our security, rather than a real one.

Maciej Ceglowski of Idle Words lays bare the sad truth at the heart of the space shuttle program: A rocket to nowhere.

I enjoyed this article in the LA Times the other day, and feel like I’d be remiss if I didn’t link to it from Lies.com, the weblog-of-record for shameless deception: Fred’s storied career (login required, cypherpunk98/cypherpunk works).

Brito, 49, has spent his adult life using aliases and phony credentials to pull off one elaborate deception after another. He has lied his way into jobs as a Catholic priest, a youth counselor for a foster care agency and executive director of the National Kidney Foundation of Southern California, among many others. He once convinced a judge he was a psychiatrist in order to testify in a friend’s criminal trial.

With the Times’ web-hostile archive policy, the story won’t be there for long, but it’s available for now.

More details are emerging about the Brazilian man gunned down by authorities on a London Underground train. From The Guardian: New claims emerge over Menezes death.

Basically, the guy we were told a) emerged from an apartment that was under surveilllance because it contained dangerous Muslim radicals, b) wore a heavy winter coat with wires dangling from it, c) refused orders to stop, d) was not recorded on closed-circuit TV due to mechanical problems, e) vaulted the turnstile, and f) ran to the train with officers in hot pursuit, actually didn’t do any of those things.

Instead, he a) was not seen emerging from the suspect apartment (because the officer in question was taking a leak around the corner), b) wore a light denim coat with no wires, c) was never contacted by officers on his way to the train, d) was recorded on closed-circuit TV, e) did not vault the turnstile, but paid with his pass, and f) entered the train and took his seat (though he apparently did run at the end, presumably to catch the train), before plainclothes cops burst onto the train and shot him.

This is preliminary, being based on leaked documents from the official investigation. But it’s interesting how thoroughly the official version of events told by authorities in the immediate aftermath of the shooting is being contradicted.

Here’s some interesting controversy surrounding Mr. Public-Meltdown-in-Progress, Christopher Hitchens. First, his rant about Cindy Sheehan in Slate: Cindy Sheehan’s Sinister Piffle - What’s wrong with her Crawford protest. Then, a nice, snarky debunking from Dennis Perrin in his Red State Son weblog: Even lower.

Of particular interest to me is the part where Hitchens says he is quoting from a statement that “comes from Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed in Iraq last year. It was sent to the editors of ABC’s Nightline on March 15.” Hitchens quotes Sheehan as follows:

Am I emotional? Yes, my first born was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the army to protect America, not Israel. Am I stupid? No, I know full well that my son, my family, this nation and this world were betrayed by George Bush who was influenced by the neo-con PNAC agendas after 9/11. We were told that we were attacked on 9/11 because the terrorists hate our freedoms and democracy… not for the real reason, because the Arab Muslims who attacked us hate our middle-eastern foreign policy.

Now, I don’t find that statement, in and of itself, all that ridiculous, and one could have a spirited discussion about the extent to which US support for Israel helpd to bring about the 9/11 attacks, or was a motivating factor in Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. But according to Perrin’s debunking:

Sheehan apparently told CNN that she never wrote those words about Israel, and I’ve been informed that the entire quote is a fake, intended to smear Sheehan, for rather obvious reasons (the evidence of this, I’m told, will soon appear, and I will link to it when it does).

As of now I don’t have any other evidence that this alleged Nightline letter is a fake, but I’d be interested in learning more about it. Anyone know about this?

Update: Well, of course someone knows about it. The answer (as it frequently is), is “look it up on Wikipedia.” So: Cindy Sheehan (Wikipedia), which discusses the issue, including linking to the following three items: ABC confirms: Sheehan wrote the letter (nationalreviewonline.com), Cindy Sheehan’s diary (dailykos.com), and A copy of the (alleged) original email (Google groups).

Hard to tell, at this point. Either Cindy wrote the email as quoted, and she’s willing to lie a little bit about it (or at least buy more or less sincerely into her own flawed, emotionally tinged recollection of it over the evidence of others), or a somewhat-unlikely, but not-impossible scenario has taken place, in which an email she sent (and which she apparently doesn’t have an original copy of) was doctored by her enemies after it left her hands in order to make it just a little more damning. Though in the latter case, the doctors were impressively subtle, making such a small change.

On balance, I think Cindy is just misremembering what she wrote, either intentionally (as part of her makeover into media-savvy activist), or unintentionally (as part of just doing her best to deal with the tornado of bullshit she’s currently at the center of). And again, I don’t think the statement as given is especially damning, anyway. Though certainly, if it’s accurate, and she’s now making a point of lying about it, that would tend to undercut her moral authority some in my eyes.

It’s an interesting paradox: I agree with her views, for the most part. And I applaud the political damage she’s inflicting on Bush. Given those facts, which would I prefer: That a media-savvy Sheehan lies in order to increase her effectiveness? Or that she undercuts that effectiveness by clinging to a scrupulous, and politically naive, honesty?

Good question.

Sometimes I link to things that you wouldn’t think I would, and sometimes I don’t link to things that seem like they’re right up my alley. I don’t know why that is. It’s a complex equation.

For example, I saw everyone linking to that walken2008.com site a week or two ago, and I took a look at it, but said, meh, not interested. It’s not that I necessarily believed it to be a hoax, but there really just didn’t seem to be any there there. I guess I figured if it was real, there’d be time to talk about it later, and if it wasn’t, I didn’t want to waste my time.

Anyway, a few days go by, and the word is out: Walken presidency site a hoax (Zap2it.com). See also News.com’s Mike Yamamoto: Christopher Walken for president!

To you more-credulous types, see? That’s what you get for jumping into something before it has received the Lies.com imprimatur of authenticity.

Cindy Sheehan offered some additional detail about the alleged email to Nightline in her DailyKos diary entry today: Vigils.

Another thing is that the Israel thing has not died. I did not say that my son died for Israel. I have never said it, I don?t think it, I don?t believe it. It is just another lie, smear tactic from the right. It needs to die right now. It?s not the truth. I stand by everything that I have said. But I will not stand by things that I haven?t said. I am not anti-Semitic. I am just anti-killing. George Bush is responsible for killing so many people, but nobody scrutinizes anything he says, especially leading up to the war. Since there is nothing to smear me about with the truth, they have to tell lies. A former friend who is anti-Israel and wants to use the spotlight on me to push his anti-Semitism is telling everyone who is listening that I believe that Casey died for Israel and has gone so far as to apparently doctor an email from me. People have to know that he doesn?t speak for me. ABC Nightline can?t confirm his email is real and therefore any reporting on it is irresponsible. That is not my issue. That is not my message and anyone who knows me knows it doesn?t sound like me.

I’m focused on my mission in Crawford: to meet with the President and demand answers. That?s it. I have spent enough time on that. Enough is enough.

Later in the same entry she includes a letter allegedly from Rabbi Arthur Waskow, vouching for her and bolstering her version of events.

As I was saying to Janus/Onan in Ishar earlier today, I feel like I’m perfectly poised between skepticism and credulity on this one. Both explanations (that she’s telling the truth, and the person who forwarded her email to Nightline doctored it to inject an anti-Israel screed; or that she’s spinning about a statement she actually made, but now realizes could undercut her efectiveness) seem pretty much equally plausible to me.

Which means, of course, that both the pro- and anti-Cindy people will be confident that the facts support their position, with at least one of those groups being wrong.

I’m really curious which one it is.

Update: Stephen Spruiell on National Review Online (which it must be said is only a step or two above places like FreeRepublic.com in my personal trustworthiness scale) says he has some information that would tend to undercut Cindy’s “my ex-friend doctored it” explanation: Sheehan herself sent “Israel” letter to friend.

Of course, this is the beauty of the right-wing echo chamber: Even if Cindy’s version of events is perfectly true, this kind of stuff will predictably succeed in changing the subject and distracting people from her actual message. Whereas if she is trying to spin away earlier statements she actually made, they just get to push it that much harder.

It’s the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth all over again.

Later update: MSNBC: Antiwar mom leaving camp to aid ailing mother. Cindy’s mother is in the emergency room in Los Angeles after a stroke, apparently, and she’s left the camp to be with her. Ymatt’s instantaneous comment:

Yserbius . o O ( rove killed mrs. sheehan! )

Let the conspiracy theorists commence theorizing!

Paul Krugman talks about the 2000 and 2004 elections, and about what might happen in 2008: What they did last fall.

In his recent book “Steal This Vote” - a very judicious work, despite its title - Andrew Gumbel, a U.S. correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent, provides the best overview I’ve seen of the 2000 Florida vote. And he documents the simple truth: “Al Gore won the 2000 presidential election.”

Two different news media consortiums reviewed Florida’s ballots; both found that a full manual recount would have given the election to Mr. Gore. This was true despite a host of efforts by state and local officials to suppress likely Gore votes, most notably Ms. Harris’s “felon purge,” which disenfranchised large numbers of valid voters.

No real time for a proper obsession, being busy with various things, but here is a quick roundup of items on Iraq that I’ve been accumulating for the last week or so, and meant to pass your way:

• Bradley Graham has an interesting article in the Washington Post: Prewar memo warned of gaps in Iraq plans. Those darned State Department eggheads. Luxuriating in the freedom to think and question and gather actual evidence independent of the White House political operation (damn you, Colin Powelll, and good riddance), State Department analysts were warning (with remarkable prescience) exactly what was going to go wrong in Iraq — a month before the invasion.
• Even good, solid, echo-chamber conservatives with funny credentials like Andy McCarthy of NRO are having second thoughts about spending all this blood and treasure just to establish an Islamic republic that will be a defacto client state of Iran: Losing the war on terror: The voice of despair echoes again. (Further commentary on McCarthy’s commentary from Digby at Getting off the bus.)
• More on where Bush is headed in Iraq from this Reuters piece: U.S. conceding to Iraqi Islamists, negotiators say, with commentary by Billmon: Slouching towards the Islamic republic.
• Continuing with the reality-based community, some discussion of what possible exit options remain, from Kevin Drum (Can we win in Iraq? and The best hope for Iraq) and Juan Cole (Ten things Congress should demand from Bush on Iraq).
• Susan Nossel of Democracy Arsenal has a Top 10 list: Consequences of Iraq becoming a failed state.

Finally, let’s end with a few visual notes. First, from Salon, a collection of disturbing images of the sort that, for whatever reason, seldom make it into the mainstream media in the US: Iraq: The unseen war (one-day pass required).

And from the latest issue of The Onion, this informative infographic:

Whew. Lies.com: Linking to relevant content in big, soggy bunches since 1996!

Birds are so cool.

First, a quick update on the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, the long-believed-extinct Liberace of the bird world recently rediscovered (or so we hope) in Arkansas. Tom Nelson has his doubts: my thoughts: Was “Elvis” just a partially leucistic Pileated Woodpecker? But meanwhile, the NYT has an article about how some early skeptics are coming around to the “yup, probably an Ivory-Billed” position based on some interesting sound recordings: Sound files ease doubts on elusive woodpecker.

Meanwhile, if you want a well-written and entertaining insight into what it means to be a birder, check out this piece from Jonathan Franzen in The New Yorker: My bird problem: Love, grief, and a change in the weather.

So, a French sports magazine is saying that Lance Armstrong’s old (circa 1999) urine, which originally tested clean, now fails a more-sensitive, modern test for EPO, a banned substance.

From VeloNews:

• L’Equipe alleges Armstrong samples show EPO use in 99 Tour
• Reactions often cautious to L’Equipe story
• Litke: Suspicion remains Lance’s opponent
• Leblanc: Armstrong owes fans an explanation

Update: Here’s the transcript of Armstrong’s appearance on Larry King where he responded to the allegations.

I know it’s an issue that some of those around here like to comment about, so here you go: another opportunity to comment on Paul Krugman’s assertions about what happened in Florida in the 2000 presidential election: Don’t prettify our history.

I really liked this op-ed piece from Bernd Heinrich, in which he praises the documentary March of the Penguins, while addressing the broader issue of what it means to anthropomorphize animals in movies, and where one might usefully draw the line between things like Bambi and things like Winged Migration: Talk to the animals.

Paradoxically, the cartoonish anthropomorphism of “Bambi,” although it entertained the youngsters, blocked rather than promoted an understanding of animals. In “Bambi” we do not see other creatures. Instead, we are presented humans with antlers, and with our thought and speech. This is what the traditional idea of anthropomorphizing is - expecting animals to feel and behave like humans, which they never will. One look at that penguin with the egg on its toes shows the inadequacy, the outright folly, of wishing they “were more like us.”

Nature is the greatest show on earth, and reverence for life requires acknowledging the differences between ourselves and the animals as well as seeing our relatedness.

Some fishermen in the Mekong Delta pulled something really big out of their nets back in May: Truly, it was a whopper, but are there bigger fish? The view of the researcher quoted in the story is that no, as of now, he doesn’t have evidence of any bigger (freshwater) fish.

The monster fish was one of just three giant catfish caught in Thailand this year.

Before he headed out on May 1, one of the men who caught it, Thirayuth Panthayom, 29, made sure luck would be on his side. He said he prayed at the shrine of the God of Catfish and begged his boat to help him, “Please, Miss Boat, let me catch something today and I’ll sacrifice a chicken for you.”

He said he had only been out for 15 minutes when he saw the fish smack the water four times with its tail - “Pung! Pung! Pung! Pung!” It took his crew an hour to pull it in.

His father, as owner of the boat, earned nearly $2,000 for the fish from the village fishing association, a fortune in rural Thailand. Mr. Thirayuth, like the other four members of the crew, got $175 of this, which he said he gave right back to his father.

As required by its permit to fish for these endangered catfish, the village association then sold it to the Department of Fisheries, which harvests their eggs and sperm as part of a captive breeding program.

After that, the fish are to be returned to the river, but few have survived the harvesting process, in which hormone injections are administered and the belly is vigorously massaged and manipulated.

The monster fish was returned dead to the fishermen, who cut it into giant steaks and sold it.

When he tried a bit, Mr. Thirayuth said, it tasted soft and sweet and mild.

“It’s hard to describe,” he said. “You have to try it yourself.”

Unforutnately, I seem unlikely to get the chance. Even more unfortunately, the rest of the world’s fish-eaters seem unlikely to have the chance for much longer.

I really like McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. There’s often an oddly engaging quirkiness to the items that really sucks me in.

Anyway, here’s a good example: Klingon fairy tales.

I hadn’t read Michael Yon before, but this item is pretty amazing: Gates of fire.

There’s a total Starship Troopers feel to it (the movie, I mean, not the book, though I guess the particular sensibility I’m talking about is common to both).

Michael Yon appears to be something of a darling of the Fighting Keyboardists of the right-wing blogger brigade. As near as I can tell, he’s not actually a journalist, but is instead an ex-Green Beret who self-published an autobiographical account of his acquittal on murder charges after he killed someone in a bar fight in 1983.

Anyway, he sounds like a serious adrenaline junkie who identifies more or less completely with the soldiers he’s embedded with, and provides what is probably the closest thing we’re going to get to a first-person account of what it is like to be a US soldier fighting in Iraq these days.

It comes off as about as one-sided as it’s possible for an account to be (notice, for example, how the Lieutenent’s “sixth sense” for bad guys is infallible, and leads to “random Iraqi standing on the street” instantly transforming into “terrorist”, without even the possibility of doubt), but again, I think that’s actually a feature, not a bug. This is how soldiers in a war-zone think, and operate; this is what distinguishes military operations from police work.

I don’t believe that the laws of the universe so faithfully assign moral virtue and heroism and noble sacrifice solely to one side of a conflict, but I recognize that those engaged in killing people (for either side) have a powerful need to believe that it does, and that it is their own side that possesses that virtue.

Anyway, if you bear that in mind, it’s interesting stuff.

From an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, Wesley Clark has a plan: Before it’s too late in Iraq.

The growing chorus of voices demanding a pullout should seriously alarm the Bush administration, because President Bush and his team are repeating the failure of Vietnam: failing to craft a realistic and effective policy and instead simply demanding that the American people show resolve. Resolve isn’t enough to mend a flawed approach — or to save the lives of our troops. If the administration won’t adopt a winning strategy, then the American people will be justified in demanding that it bring our troops home.

Percentage point by percentage point, more and more of the country is reaching the conclusion that Bush made a mistake by invading Iraq. By repeating the same tired phrases this past week to hand-picked crowds of supporters he hasn’t bolstered his case; he’s weakened it, by reminding people that he’s pathologically incapable of admitting error, and so will never be able to get us out of this.

There was an interesting post the other day by Cenk Uygur comparing Bush’s latest approval numbers (36%) with those posted by Bill Clinton on the day of his impeachment (72%): Big Media lie: People like George Bush.

You know me; I can’t resist a picture. So here you go, from Professor Pollkatz. First, Bush’s approval numbers to-date:

Next, Bill Clinton’s approval numbers (second term only):

(Note the y-axis scales, by the way. Bush’s goes from 20% to 100%, with gridlines every 20%. Clinton’s goes from 20% to 80%, with gridlines every 10%. Someone’s sure to accuse me of making an apples-to-oranges visual comparison here, but that’s the way Pollkatz made the graphs, and I don’t want to spend the time to make them conform more closely to each other.)

Individually, people can be pretty stupid. Collectively, they can be pretty smart. And in those numbers you see a collective judgement of Bush and of Clinton.

Competence matters. Character (as revealed by a willingness to get blow jobs from interns and lie about it under oath) matters, too, but on balance, much of the country basically approved of the job Clinton did. Meanwhile, Bush’s numbers sink lower and lower, as people realize that even if he seems like a nice guy to have a beer or ride a bike with, he’s got a real knack for making bonehead decisions.

Christopher Hitchens was on the Daily Show last week, and the interview included one of those great moments when Jon Stewart gets serious about what he’s looking for, and failing to find, in the public debate on the Iraq war. (Video available from One Good Move.)

One downside to having Hitchens interviewed by someone as rational as Stewart is that he (Hitchens) is prevented from really spinning out into the convoluted combination of misplaced self-loathing and desperate blather that has become his stock in trade lately. But when he’s talking to himself (in effect) when writing an essay for the Weekly Standard, he’s free to indulge: A war to be proud of.

Basically, as near as I can tell, Hitchens really, really hates the positions he used to espouse, and is on a one-man jihad to expose everyone stupid and evil enough to hold such positions in the post-9/11 world. Which, when you get right down to it, is a jihad against his own former self, and which, as such jihads tend to do, has become pretty nasty.

From Lies.com Ivory-billed Woodpecker Bureau Chief Ethan P comes this latest New York Times update on the big question at the AOU meeting held last week in my neck of the woods: Ivory Bill or not? The proof flits tantalizingly out of sight.

Check out Norm of Onegoodmove’s account and re-hosted video of a hilarious turn of events at the “Cindy Doesn’t Support Us Rally” in Crawford: We don’t do irony.

It seems the good subversives of Protest Warrior, who like to stage counter-demonstrations with signs bearing clever (well, at least they think so) slogans like, “WAR HAS NEVER SOLVED ANYTHING (except for ending slavery, fascism, naziism and communism)”, carried said signs into