McCain Had His Own "Mission Accomplished" Moment

McCain Had His Own "Mission Accomplished" Moment

Five years ago today, George W. Bush got all gussied up and landed a jet on an aircraft carrier floating off the Southern California coast, where he declared "mission accomplished" in Iraq. Roughly 97 percent of American military deaths in Iraq have come after that moment.

Less well known is the fact that John McCain also prematurely declared a win in Iraq. In the congressional record on May 22, 2003, he declared "massive victory":

"We won a massive victory in a few weeks, and we did so with very limited loss of American and allied lives. We were able to end aggression with minimum overall loss of life, and we were even able to greatly reduce the civilian casualties of Afghani and Iraqi citizens."

Calling evil by it's name

we all know evil triumphs when good people do nothing.

clipped from www.opednews.com By saying “evil” over and over, Bush dehumanizes inhabitants of target lands. By emphasizing the goodness of the USA and our moral obligation to spread democracy, to bring freedom at gunpoint as our God-given right, Bush has convinced a large portion of our population that killing thousands of Iraqi civilians in the name of battling evil and spreading democracy is an acceptable fact of war. Bush invaded Iraq, based on fabricated evidence evil residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Ultraconservative administration and a complicit Congress are an axis of evil, thrusting their ultimatums with oppressively brutal footprints on countries to be conquered while telling us that foreign terrorists wish to kill us because they, the terrorists, are jealous of our freedom. what is being done in our names—cataclysmic destruction, torture, and death. Let’s call evil by its name—American imperialism. And leadership that profits from the anguish of others.

Naeim Giladi, another disillusioned critical Jew like Finkelstein

clipped from en.wikipedia.org Naeim Giladi was born in Iraq in 1929 to an Iraqi Jewish family and later lived in Israel and the United States. He is an Anti-Zionist, and author his originally self-published book Ben Gurion's Scandals: How the Haganah and the Mossad Eliminated Jews. He says he was assigned the task of procuring the signatures of the Palestinian inhabitants of al-Mejdil on a set of government forms that stated that they were willingly giving up their lands to go to Gaza, at the time under Egyptian occupation. He writes that he, "was disillusioned personally, disillusioned at the institutionalized racism, disillusioned at what I was beginning to learn about Zionism's cruelties. The principal interest Israel had in Jews from Islamic countries was as a supply of cheap labor, especially for the farm work that was beneath the urbanized Eastern European Jews. Ben Gurion needed the "Oriental" Jews to farm the thousands of acres of land left by Palestinians who were driven out by Israeli forces in 1948"

US Torture Interrogator Blames Himself For Downfall In Iraq

Former US Army Interrogator Speaks Out.

clipped from www.telegraph.co.uk A former American army torturer has laid bare the traumatic effects of American interrogation techniques in Iraq - on their victims and on the perpetrators themselves. Tony Lagouranis conducted mock executions, forced men and boys into agonising stress positions, kept suspects awake for weeks on end, used dogs to terrify detainees and subjected others to hypothermia. But he confesses that he was deeply scarred by the realisation that what he did has contributed to the downfall of American forces in Iraq. He says that he realised he had entered a moral dungeon when he found himself reading a Holocaust memoir, hoping to pick up torture tips from the Nazis. Mr Lagouranis, who held the rank of specialist, equivalent to a lance corporal, says he never beat a prisoner. But he said: "These coercive techniques - isolation, dogs, sleep deprivation, stress positions, hypothermia - crossed a legal line because they violated the Geneva Convention.

Iraq's mercenaries - with a licence to kill

clipped from comment.independent.co.uk 'These private contractors can get away with murder... They aren't subject to any laws at all' Iraq is rapidly vanishing into the mists of uncollectable, unknowable news, with information travelling only as far as an Iraqi scream can be heard. But sometimes, if you peer closely, you can glimpse reality. Last week, Shia militiamen seized four "security contractors" working for the Canadian company Gardaworld. Buried in the story of this small horror is the bigger tale of a vast shift in how Western wars will be fought in the 21st century if the American right has its way - and one of the great lost scandals of this war. As he scurried out the door in 2004, Paul Bremer - the first US viceroy to Iraq - issued Order 17, which exempted all mercenaries operating in the country from having to obey the law. He in effect gave these men a licence to kill - and they are using it, every day.