On Friday, September 29, it's mourning in America

The following is from an editorial from Buzzflash:

Just as it is hard to fully comprehend the grief of a beloved friend or relative killed needlessly in an accident, it is excruciatingly painful to try to come to terms with the pernicious betrayal of our Constitution and liberty that occurred in the Senate on Thursday, September 28.

In the past week alone, we have seen factual evidence that belies the need for the power play/pre-election attack on our Constitution. In fact, these developments indicate that giving Bush even more unprecedented power is not only unconscionable; it puts the national security of the United States of America in peril:

Bush’s newly "revamped" top 16 intelligence agencies reached the conclusion that the Iraq War had become a primary cause in the growth of terrorists and the increased threat of terrorism to the United States. Bush called the report of his own top intelligent agencies "naïve." Meanwhile, a second U.N. report came to the same conclusion as the American spy agencies. The U.N. also reported that more Iraqis may now be being tortured under U.S. occupation than were tortured under Saddam Hussein.

And there is a second National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) report just on Iraq that the Bush Administration will not release until after the election. So it clearly must be even more harsh in its assessment of the Iraq War than the White House "selective conclusions" Executive Summary of the first NIE, which was revealed by the New York Times.

On September 25, retired American generals provided testimony that Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush Administration threatened to fire any member of the Pentagon brass that provided a plan for keeping the peace in Iraq after the invasion. They testified that Rumsfeld, who has no combat experience, has made peremptory, uninformed and arrogant decisions that have resulted in the needless deaths of American Gis and Iraqis.

Bob Woodward, for many years the loyal Royal Court reporter of the Bush Administration, now has been stricken with a case of reality. In his latest book, he apparently reports, according to "60 Minutes," "that the Bush administration has not told the truth regarding the level of violence, especially against U.S. troops, in Iraq. He also reveals key intelligence that predicts the insurgency will grow worse next year."

According to Woodward, insurgent attacks against coalition troops occur, on average, every 15 minutes, a shocking fact the administration has kept secret. "It’s getting to the point now where there are eight-, nine-hundred attacks a week. That's more than 100 a day. That is four an hour attacking our forces," says Woodward.

The situation is getting much worse, says Woodward, despite what the White House and the Pentagon are saying in public. "The truth is that the assessment by intelligence experts is that next year, 2007, is going to get worse and, in public, you have the president and you have the Pentagon [saying], 'Oh, no, things are going to get better,'" he tells Wallace. "Now there’s public, and then there’s private. But what did they do with the private? They stamp it secret. No one is supposed to know," says Woodward.

"The insurgents know what they are doing. They know the level of violence and how effective they are. Who doesn't know? The American public," Woodward tells Wallace.

Woodward’s view is confirmed by the National Intelligence Estimate and a report that this summer set a record for Iraqi civilian deaths in recent years.

What’s more, a poll in Iraq reported in the Washington Post indicates 60% of Iraqis support attacks on American GIs. We repeat, while Bush is saying we are fighting the terrorists in Iraq, the overwhelming majority of Iraqis believe killing American soldiers is justifiable! The population we are supposedly liberating and bestowing democracy on in Iraq supports the deadly assaults on our military.

For 59% of Americans, Iraq is already in a civil war. And the "confidence in Iraq policies" dropped to 20% in the U.S.
And, according to the Washington Post, "A strong majority of Iraqis want U.S.-led military forces to immediately withdraw from the country, saying their swift departure would make Iraq more secure and decrease sectarian violence, according to new polls by the State Department and independent researchers."

In addition, "Almost four in five Iraqis say the U.S. military force in Iraq provokes more violence than it prevents."

Meanwhile, the Bush vaunted efforts to train the Iraqi police and army are being proven a sham. An Iraqi police academy that was built as a war profiteering gift to some American firm is a total failure, symbolic of the Bush Administration’s fiasco in Iraq:
"A $75 million project to build the largest police academy in Iraq has been so grossly mismanaged that the campus now poses health risks to recruits and might need to be partially demolished, U.S. investigators have found. The Baghdad Police College, hailed as crucial to U.S. efforts to prepare Iraqis to take control of the country's security, was so poorly constructed that feces and urine rained from the ceilings in student barracks. Floors heaved inches off the ground and cracked apart. Water dripped so profusely in one room that it was dubbed ‘the rain forest.’"

We are losing the war in Afghanistan to a resurgent Taliban, who is being given safe harbor by our "major ally," Pakistan. And the leaders of Afghanistan and Pakistan aren’t even cooperating with each other.

We could go on and on. This is just the tip of the iceberg – all from just the last week ...
Buzzflash

Tagged: bush, iraq, disinfo, disinformation, war, peace, war+on+terror, cia