Tapes of Secret Military Investigation Into My Lai Massacre Found

Thanh Nien News: Fisherman To Tuu, 85, shows the names of victims from the My Lai Massacre listed on a grave stone next to his home in My Lai Village in Quang Ngai Province last week

Audiotapes of a secret 1970 Pentagon inquiry into the My Lai massacre were discovered in the National Archives by a British journalist, and broadcast for the first time on BBC Radio 4 last night. 403 witnesses were interviewed, and 400 hours of tapes were made. You can listen to a one-hour program including some of the footage at the first link below. It is chilling.

BBC: The Archive Hour (1 hr)
Broadcast on Radio 4 Sat 15 Mar - 20:00

1968: The My Lai Tapes. Robert Hodierne reveals the truth about the infamous My Lai massacre of 16 March 1968, based on the transcript of a Pentagon enquiry that was suppressed.

BBC: My Lai: Legacy of a massacre

Before [Lt. William Calley's] trial got under way, the United States army had, behind closed doors, completed an investigation of its own into the events at My Lai, and specifically into the possibility that those in authority had deliberately covered up a massacre.

Convened on 1 December 1969 in the basement of the Pentagon, The Department of the Army Review of the Preliminary Investigations into The My Lai Incident, known in abbreviated form as The Peers Inquiry, was chaired by Lt Gen William 'Ray' Peers.

In just 14 weeks, the Peers Inquiry conducted a comprehensive and wide-ranging investigation into the events of 16 March.

More than 400 witnesses were interviewed, and their testimony was tape-recorded.

When the inquiry concluded on 15 March 1970, those recordings were boxed-up, stored and forgotten.

In 1987, they were shipped to the US National Archives, as one small portion of a massive group of records of US Army activities in Vietnam.

There they remained hidden, never catalogued, never investigated, never uncovered - until last year.

[]

[O]n 15 March, on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the massacre, some of the most powerful testimony will be broadcast for the first time, on the Archive Hour on BBC Radio 4.

Some of the interviewees' statements reveal the mentality of the soldiers involved in the massacre.

"I would say that most people in our company didn't consider the Vietnamese human... A guy would just grab one of the girls there and in one or two incidents they shot the girls when they got done," said Dennis Bunning.

"That day it was just a massacre. Just plain right out, wiping out people," said Leonard Gonzales.

"Kill everything"

The wider, more awful truth that Gen Peers uncovered, was that this was an illegal operation, planned and co-ordinated at Task Force level by Lt Col Frank Barker.

It wiped out not one but three villages: My Lai, Binh Tay and My Khe.

And not one, but two companies were involved: Bravo and Charlie.

Both of these companies were given the same briefing by their respective commanding officers, permitting them "to kill everything and anything."

"It's not just the people of Task Force Barker that are on trial... It's the Army, it's you and it's me... and it includes our country and our people in the eyes of the world," said Gen Peers, during his investigation.

He concluded that 30 senior officers had been negligent in their duty.

Lt. Calley was the only military officer ever convicted in the My Lai massacre. Today he is retired and lives in Atlanta.

Independent (uk): Forty years on, survivors gather to remember My Lai

Thanh Nien Daily, Vietnam: Forty years on, scars of My Lai Massacre remain

Running Republican Chickenhawks

Excellent article in Salon about Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney and how they avoided service in Vietnam. Typical Republican chickenhawks, they talk big, but they and their children are never the ones to go fight their big, important wars.

salon.com: Rudy and Romney: Artful dodgers
When the most belligerent Republicans start to beat the war drums, it's important to look at what they're trying to hide.

As the great tabloid columnist Jimmy Breslin noted 20 years later, during the former prosecutor's first campaign for mayor: "Giuliani did not attend the war in Vietnam because federal Judge Lloyd MacMahon [sic] wrote a letter to the draft board in 1969 and got him out. Giuliani was a law clerk for MacMahon, who at the time was hearing Selective Service cases. MacMahon's letter to Giuliani's draft board stated that Giuliani was so necessary as a law clerk that he could not be allowed to get shot at in Vietnam."

[]

Like Giuliani and millions of other young American men at the time, Romney started out with student deferments. But he left Stanford after only two semesters in 1966 and would have become eligible for the draft -- except that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Michigan, his home state, provided him with a fresh deferment as a missionary. According to an excellent investigative series that appeared last month in the Boston Globe, that deferment, which described Romney as a "minister of religion or divinity student," protected him from the draft between July 1966 and February 1969, when he enrolled in Brigham Young University to complete his undergraduate degree. Mormons in each state could select a limited number of young men upon whom to confer missionary status during the Vietnam years, and Romney was fortunate enough to be chosen. (Coincidentally, or possibly not, Mitt's father, George W. Romney, was governor of Michigan at the time.)

No wonder they both supported Bush's pardon of Scooter Libby. They don't believe Republicans are subject to the same rules as the rest of us.

Are You Going to San Francisco?

Homeless people and panhandlers walk along Haight near Ashbury. A lot of ex-hippies are weary of the newcomers.
(Robert Durell / LAT)


It's not like it used to be. I lived in San Francisco briefly in 1980 and Haight Ashbury was a scary drug-infested place then, too.

LATimes: There's not a lot of love in the Haight
Gutter punks roam where, 40 years ago, flower children protested the war in Vietnam.

The song: San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)

As performed by Scott McKenzie and the Mamas and the Papas, 1967:

US Attorney Purge: Stealing Elections

Must-read article:

buzzflash.com: Greg Palast, Author of Armed Madhouse, on How Rove May Have Already Stolen the 2008 Election

BuzzFlash: You’re having incredible success with the new expanded paperback edition of Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans -- Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild. Of course, the electronic voting machines and how they function is a very significant issue, but your specialty has really been how the Bush/Rove GOP political machine keeps persons who are likely to vote Democratic or Independent from voting.

Greg Palast: Yes. People ask me: Are they going to steal the 2008 election? No, they’ve already stolen the 2008 election. We still have a chance of swiping it back, but the reason I’ve expanded and put out the new edition of Armed Madhouse is to tell you how they will steal in 2008, and what to do about it. That’s one of the main new things. Plus a special chapter on New Orleans and my bust down there.

Of course, I was very flattered that the first review of the new edition of Armed Madhouse was written by Karl Rove and the Rove-bots -- it was subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee -- I can’t make this up. On February 7th, the Rove team, which had been writing several e-mails screaming about Armed Madhouse and "that British reporter," Greg Palast, were gloating that no U.S. media had picked up my stories. And they had a .pdf file attached. Of course, the reason my book was subpoenaed is that it has to do with the US prosecutor firings. The prosecutor firings were 100% about influencing elections -- not about loyalty to Bush, which is what The New York Times wrote. The administration team couldn’t tolerate appointees who wouldn’t go along with crime. In the book I present the evidence that Karl Rove directed a guy named Tim Griffin to target suppressing the votes of African American students, homeless men, and soldiers. Nice guy. They actually challenged the votes and successfully removed tens of thousands of legal voters from the voter rolls, same as they did in 2000. But instead of calling them felons, they said that they had suspect addresses.

BuzzFlash: In which election cycle?

Greg Palast: 2004. And in 2006 and 2004, they challenged tens of thousands of black soldiers. They stopped their votes from being counted when they were mailed in from Baghdad. Go to Baghdad and lose your vote -- mission accomplished.

BuzzFlash: How did they do that?

Greg Palast: By sending letters to the homes of soldiers, marked "do not forward." When they came back undelivered, they said: Aha! Illegal voter registered from a false address. And when their ballot came in from Fallujah, it was challenged. The soldier didn’t know it. Their vote was lost. Over half a million votes were challenged and lost by the Republicans -- absentee ballots. Three million voters who went to the polls found themselves challenged by the Republicans. This was not a small operation. It was a multi-million dollar, wholesale theft operation.

They’re right that I’m a British reporter, because I put this story on British TV, not on American TV, which won’t touch it. [BuzzFlash note: Palast writes for British papers and reports on the BBC, but he is a product of the San Fernando Valley and the University of Chicago, 100% American.] But our election was a complete, total fraud. This is grand theft -- no question. It’s not a dirty trick; it’s a felony crime.

I’m working with Bobby Kennedy, who is a voting rights attorney. He said, “This is not just an icky, horrible thing that people do wearing white sheets. This is a felony crime.” [paraphrase] And the guy they put in charge of this criminal ring to knock out voters is a guy named Tim Griffin. Today, Tim Griffin is -- badda-bing -- U.S. Attorney for Arkansas. When they fired the honest guys, they put in the Rove-bots to fix the 2008 election. That’s what I’m saying -- it’s already being stolen, as we speak. Tim Griffin is the perpetrator who’s become the prosecutor, and that’s what’s going down right now.

BuzzFlash: You have been questioned about prosecutor-gate and about the theft of the election of 2008. But these replacement prosecutors are still in place, not to mention the ones who have cooperated with Bush. Gonzales has basically told the House Judiciary Committee, make my day. I’m staying on. It’s over with. You asked me questions. I didn’t give you answers, but you don’t have the courage to impeach me, so I’m staying.

Greg Palast: That’s the game, too. Congress is shooting at the glove puppet. I shoot at the puppeteers. It’s not Gonzales. He’s meaningless. He’s a nothing. He should go because he allowed it to happen, and that’s a crime. When I was a racketeering investigator, we used to call it “willful failure to know.” He can’t just say to his staff, I know what Rove is doing, but don’t tell me about it. He would still be liable for criminal conspiracy of obstruction of justice. That’s why Monica Goodling took the Fifth. Not knowing doesn’t mean you’re not guilty, especially when you went out of your way not to know.

Gonzales should be read his rights and carted away. But it’s the puppeteers behind him -- Rove and Harriet Miers -- who were deeply involved in the prosecutor hits. No one’s talking about her. This is the woman who went from head of the Texas State Lottery to nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court by George Bush, and no one asked how that happened. They said: Harriet who? But they didn’t ask how that happened. They said, oh, she’s loyal to Bush. She’s the one who did the payoffs to cover up the fact that George Senior got George Junior out of the war in Vietnam. Do you think that that was done just by daddy making a call? Money had to be paid -- lots and lots of money to keep people quiet -- $23 million. That is something I reported on BBC Television and in the Guardian newspaper. We’ve given them plenty of time to challenge that story about the payoffs. We’ve never gotten a peep from these guys. And unlike CBS, the BBC has not withdrawn the story that the fix was put in to get Chicken George out of Vietnam. No one has challenged our story, nor have we withdrawn a comment on our story that the payoffs were made to keep it quiet.

BuzzFlash: Let’s focus for the moment on voter suppression, and we'll return later to other elements of the voter manipulation story.

Greg Palast: I have it all in Armed Madhouse, including in the three new chapters. First and foremost, is that it’s not one thing. It ain’t just electronic voting, guys. You go, oh, we have paper ballots, we’re saved, we’re saved. Bulls***! Wake up! Hello! Let’s remember that in Florida and Ohio, they didn’t have computer voting. So all the stuff about Diebold -- Ohio was not stolen by computers, because they didn’t have computers there. In fact, they were thrilled when people complained about computers because they could keep the junky punch cards in. That doesn’t mean that computers are safe. As I point out in the new chapter, the Republicans held on to Katherine Harris’ seat -- and we don’t want to think too carefully about that image -- they held onto Katherine Harris’ seat with 300 votes, while 18,000 votes disappeared in the computers. So they do use computers. That was a pure, straight-up, shoplift of the Congressional seat.

BuzzFlash: A House committee just voted not to pursue an investigation of that election, despite the disappearance of 18,000 votes.

Greg Palast: That’s sick -- deeply, deviously sick. First of all, in New York and other states, when votes are in question, they simply redo them. People talk about recount -- forget it. Redo the vote. When the machines collapse, then there’s no question that there was monkey business.

RIP David Halberstam

Horst Faas/Associated Press

His reporting for The New York Times from Vietnam left little doubt that a corrupt South Vietnamese government supported by the United States was no match for Communist guerrillas and their North Vietnamese allies. For that work, Mr. Halberstam shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1964.

David Halberstam wrote three of my favorite books: The Best and the Brightest, The Breaks of the Game, and The Teammates, about my favorite topies: politics and sports. He died yesterday in a car accident in California, on his way to interview Y.A. Tittle, the former quarterback of the New York Giants. I would have liked to read that book. When I was a kid I had the famous picture of Y.A. Tittle's last game, bloodied and bowed, on the door of my closet:


David Halberstam books are books I passed around, or bought to give as gifts. In my mind, reading The Breaks of the Game is inextricably tied with the 1980s Larry Bird Celtics. All my Celtics fan friends read the book, and we marveled at the writing and at the insider's view. I listened to The Teammates a few years ago as a book-on-tape and was brought to tears several times (always dangerous while driving!) as he described the life-long devoted friendship between Ted Williams, Johnny Pesky, Bobby Doerr, and Dom DiMaggio. I will miss his writing. Here's a piece he wrote for the Boston Globe about Red Sox Nation (hat tip, A Red Sox Fan in Pinstripe Territory):

David Halberstam, Boston Globe, 8/29/03: Facing the Nation
Up-close look at the Red Sox fan base finds it is as passionate as ever

For a Citizen of the Nation, beating the Mariners or A's is merely winning a baseball game, while beating the Yankees is the very essence of life itself....

[]

It's a condition, being a Red Sox fan, not a cult, nor a religious affiliation, although there are on occasion certain religious experiences. (Think Yaz in '67, and Fisk in the World Series in '75.) Most Americans are relatively indifferent to the past, believing that America is so powerful that history does not matter, that our nation is so strong and energetic, that we can mold the present to our needs, despite the burdens of the past. Not Red Sox fans: They know the past matters, and they know as well that you are, more than you realize, a prisoner of it. In a country where there has been an amazing run of material affluence for almost 60 years with the expectation built into the larger culture that things are supposed to get better every year, citizens of RSN know better. They know that things do not always get better. They know that the guys in the white hats do not always win in the last five minutes of the movie. They know the guys in the black hats have plenty of last-minute tricks, and that they can pick up just the right player off the waiver list in the waning days of a season (think Johnny Mize, 1949).

The Red Sox fan knows that the fates can be cruel. Never mind the Babe. Just think a mere 31 years ago -- why it was like yesterday: Sparky Lyle for Danny Cater. A 27-year-old lefthanded reliever, who had pitched in 184 games in the previous three years, and had saved 16 that year (and would save a league-leading 35 the next year) for a 32-year-old first baseman with up to then 52 career home runs. Oh dear.

David Halberstam, ESPN Page 2: One Splendid day [with Ted Williams]

David Halberstam, ESPN Page 2: Sports can distract, but they don't heal

David Halberstam, ESPN Page 2: Thanks, soccer, see you in four years

salon.com: David Halberstam, 1934-2007
In a host of Salon interviews, the great journalist talks about the depths of his work and passions, from Vietnam to Michael Jordan.

WaPo: David Halberstam, 1934-2007
Author Uncloaked Vietnam Blunders

NYTimes: David Halberstam, 73, Reporter and Author, Dies

San Francisco Chronicle: DAVID HALBERSTAM: 1934-2007
Author was on his way to an interview
He was to meet with Y.A. Tittle to talk about football

San Francisco Chronicle: DAVID HALBERSTAM: 1934-2007
Car crash ends award-winning writer's life

SFGate.com: Friends and former colleagues remember David Halberstam

Academy of Achievement: The David Halberstam Interview

wikipedia: David Halberstam

Deja Vu All Over Again: 1967, Vietnam, Presidential Speech, 2007, Iraq, Presidential Speech, Lather, Rinse, Repeat

Attytood: "E-Day": It was 40 years ago today

This comes with a huge hat tip to a good Friend of Attytood who was born 40 years ago on this date -- Happy Birthday, dude! -- and as a result is more up to speed on what happened on January 10, 1967, than the rest of us.

The big news story that night? President Lyndon B. Johnson's State of the Union address.

The topic that dominated all others: Vietnam.

I'm going to guide you to some excerpts of that address -- exactly 40 years ago tonight. See how it compares to some of the excerpts from President Bush's speech that were just released minutes ago:

LBJ, Jan. 10, 1967: We have chosen to fight a limited war in Vietnam in an attempt to prevent a larger war--a war almost certain to follow, I believe, if the Communists succeed in overrunning and taking over South Vietnam by aggression and by force. I believe, and I am supported by some authority, that if they are not checked now the world can expect to pay a greater price to check them later.

GWB, Jan. 10, 2007: Tonight in Iraq, the Armed Forces of the United States are engaged in a struggle that will determine the direction of the global war on terror – and our safety here at home. The new strategy I outline tonight will change America's course in Iraq, and help us succeed in the fight against terror.

LBJ, Jan. 10, 1967: I wish I could report to you that the conflict is almost over. This I cannot do. We face more cost, more loss, and more agony. For the end is not yet. I cannot promise you that it will come this year--or come next year. Our adversary still believes, I think, tonight, that he can go on fighting longer than we can, and longer than we and our allies will be prepared to stand up and resist.

GWB, Jan. 10, 2007: Our past efforts to secure Baghdad failed for two principal reasons: There were not enough Iraqi and American troops to secure neighborhoods that had been cleared of terrorists and insurgents. And there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have.

Go read the whole post -- it's eerie.

TIme To End The War For Oil

Here's why Chimpy McFlightsuit is proposing escalation: It's all about the oil, the riches, the spoils of war. The sons and daughters of the poor will die so the uber-rich can get richer. The Independent (uk) reports that the Iraq parliament is planning to introduce a law that will allow foreigners (giant international oil firms, that is) to take Iraq's oil, for profit. Not only were the WMD not there, they were a complete smokescreen for the real purpose of the war: to make money for Bush and his cronies. Hundreds of thousands of dead, for money. The moneychangers are in the temple. Sickening.


Independent (uk): Future of Iraq: The spoils of war
How the West will make a killing on Iraqi oil riches

Iraq's massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.

The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.

Independent (uk): Blood and oil: How the West will profit from Iraq's most precious commodity

Independent (uk): Iraq poised to end drought for thirsting oil giants
After 35 years, the third-largest reserves in the world are to be opened to American and British companies

Independent (uk): (Commentary) Leading article: The oil rush

Gerald Ford's only achievement in office, according to Frank Rich in today's NYTimes, was getting the U.S. out of Vietnam . Bush isn't getting out of Iraq. His entire plan is staying until he leaves, then dumping the fetid mess in the lap of the next president. That's the plan. Don't let anybody tell you different.

Blogtopia* Roundup, Tuesday December 19th, 2006

We all need to know the difference between Shi'a and Sunni now. TRex at firedoglake gives the history of the two sects.

Many voices weighing in on the insanity of Bush's latest 'surge' proposal: ThinkProgress says he's trying to copy the 'success' of Vietnam; Digby digs up some of those 'we let the military make the decisions, not the politicians' lies from Commander Codpiece; Steve Gilliard sez, for the Joint Chiefs this is the Clark Clifford moment: will they go along with this catastrophic idea, or will they say no?

Confined Space on today in Workplace Safety History.

And a horrible story from the Sunday Times (uk) about the rise of militant Islam in Banda Aceh and other tsunami-ravaged parts of Indonesia: Tsunami survivors given the lash: Banda Aceh disaster donations help Islamic vigilante force impose punishments on women


*YSCTP!

Image from bush-whacking.com

Pop Quiz

Who wrote, of Vietnam:

“It was a shameful thing to ask men to suffer and die, to persevere through god-awful afflictions and heartache, to endure the dehumanizing experiences that are unavoidable in combat, for a cause that the country wouldn’t support over time and that our leaders so wrongly believed could be achieved at a smaller cost than our enemy was prepared to make us pay.

“No other national endeavor requires as much unshakable resolve as war. If the nation and the government lack that resolve, it is criminal to expect men in the field to carry it alone.”


Answer in comments.

Saturday November 18th Blogtopia* Roundup

I want that drink. I need that drink? How long 'til this dumb dinner is over?

Actual caption: President Bush attends a dinner hosted by Vietnam's President Nguyen Minh Triet in Hanoi, November 17, 2006. (Reinhard Krause/Reuters)
New drinking game: Drink every time the media refers to Nancy Pelosi as 'Nancy'!

James Wolcott reports rumors that Bush is indeed drinking again.

Maru the Crankpot (WTF IS IT NOW?) links to this and many other funny posts (scroll up to see the post).

Glenn Greenwald: Cheney Administration is pathological, laughing as they shred the Constitution.

Soon to be former Congressman John Sweeney (R-Wife Beating and Drinking) in trouble again, this time for doctoring police records. Bye bye!

Professor Juan Cole at Informed Comment:

Bush went to Vietnam and boasted about how we would have won if we had not quit. This was, he said, the lesson for Iraq of the Vietnam War. He managed to be wrong about two wars at once and to anger both his hosts (how churlish!) and the Iraqi public. The American Right never admitted that they lost in Vietnam, thus the Rambo movies and, Melani McCallister argues, the US admiration for Entebbe. Iraq was their chance, they thought, to get it right. Bush had also said insulting things to the Philiippines about how wonderful it was that we had colonized them (and killed 400,000).

Colonialism is over with. When will they get that through their heads?

And actually we can't win in Iraq by just staying. Just like when you are sinking in quicksand, staying put is not a virtue.

Reminds me of the old joke about Bush. What's the difference between Iraq and Vietnam? Bush had a plan to get out of Vietnam. Who knew the plan was not to go until 2006 and to have Air Force One at the ready?


*yes! skippy coined that phrase!

'Innocents Slaughtered'

Incompetent fools, sending soldiers to kill and die
Our in bed media has never reported the truth of the atrocities against Iraqi civilians until now, when the war is going badly and the casualties have piled up and up and up. War is hideous. Our military leaders with their scrambled egg chests full of medals and ribbons are incompetent, like everyone else appointed or promoted by the Bush Administration. The soldiers are under attack by an enemy they cannot see, whose language they do not understand, a classic guerrilla war. Trained to kill, they strike back indiscriminately. Robert Fisk's editorial from the Independent (reprinted in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer) is chilling but I suspect accurate.

Robert Fisk: The way Americans like their war

Could Haditha be just the tip of the mass grave?

The corpses we have glimpsed, the grainy footage of the cadavers and the dead children; could these be just a few of many? Does the handiwork of the United States' army of the slums go further?

I remember clearly the first suspicions I had that murder most foul might be taking place in our name in Iraq. I was in the Baghdad mortuary, counting corpses, when one of the city's senior medical officials, an old friend, told me of his fears. "Everyone brings bodies here," he said. "But when the Americans bring bodies in, we are instructed that under no circumstances are we ever to do post-mortems. We were given to understand that this had already been done. Sometimes we'd get a piece of paper like this one with a body." And here the man handed me a U.S. military document showing with the hand-drawn outline of a man's body and the words "trauma wounds."

[]

We have all heard of Bloody Sunday. The Israelis sat and watched while their proxy Lebanese militia butchered and eviscerated its way through 1,700 Palestinians. And of course the words My Lai are now uttered again. Yes, the Nazis were much worse. And the Japanese. And the Croatian Ustashi. But this is us. This is our army. These young soldiers are our representatives in Iraq. And they have innocent blood on their hands.

I suspect part of the problem is that we never really cared about Iraqis, which is why we refused to count their dead. Once the Iraqis turned upon the army of occupation with their roadside bombs and suicide cars, they became Arab "gooks," the evil sub-humans whom the Americans once identified in Vietnam. Get a president to tell us that we are fighting evil and one day we will wake to find that a child has horns, a baby has cloven feet.

Remind yourself these people are Muslims and they can all become little Mohamed Attas. Killing a roomful of civilians is only a step further from all those promiscuous air strikes that we are told kill 'terrorists" but which all too often turn out to be a wedding party or -- as in Afghanistan -- a mixture of "terrorists" and children or, as we are soon to hear, no doubt, "terrorist children."

[]

For who can be held to account when we regard ourselves as the brightest, the most honorable of creatures, doing endless battle with the killers of Sept. 11 or July 7 because we love our country and our people -- but not other people -- so much. And so we dress ourselves up as Galahads, yes as Crusaders, and we tell those whose countries we invade that we are going to bring them democracy. I can't help wondering today how many of the innocents slaughtered in Haditha took the opportunity to vote in the Iraqi elections -- before their "liberators" murdered them.

Raw Story has photos of the civilians murdered at Ishaqi. Not for the squeamish; so many are children.

The military has already investigated the slaughter at Ishaqi, and pronounced it good:

U.S. commanders used appropriate force in taking down a safe house in Iraq during a March 15 military raid that led to the deaths of as many as a dozen civilians, according to the results of an investigation announced in Baghdad yesterday.

Memorial Day

It's a beautiful day today. In my memories of childhood Memorial Days were always like this, sunny and blue, although Coach Mom tells me that there were a few Memorial Day celebrations held in school due to rain. I grew up in a small town in the Catskills, and Memorial Day was definitely a town event, as opposed to a family day.

We kids woke up with excitement for the parade, which usually started at 11:00 a.m. The churches and civic groups made floats, and we'd run all over the neighborhood through wet dewy grass checking on the progress of tying crepe paper flowers on chicken wire sculptures, or what was being done to decorate the wagon the Boy Scouts or FFA were going to ride in.

The parade lined up at school, went from Maple Avenue, to Lindsley, to Union, then on to Main Street, past the traffic light at the corner (biggest crowds there), past the fire house, and eventually to the cemetery.

Very little, we marched with our classes, holding a bunch of fragrant purple and white lilacs from the bush that grew next to the house. In 3rd or 4th grade we started riding our bikes, bringing up the rear of the parade, red, white and blue crepe paper carefully pulled in circles through our bike spokes, playing cards affixed with clothespins to give a satisfying whap, whap, whap as we pedaled.

From 7th grade on, I was in the marching band. Some well-meaning band leader back in the 50s had purchased an expensive set of uniforms for the school band. They were heavy boiled wool, jacket and long pants, with a semi-Prussian hat with a jaunty white feathery plume, which strapped onto your head. We only wore the damn uniforms on Memorial Day, and occasionally 4th of July when it was hot. Therefore wearing them was misery. My high school band teacher marched alongside us with a spray bottle filled with water. When we stopped periodically to play, he'd spray us in the face, concentrating on the kids with the heaviest instruments. One year a girl in my class fainted dead away.

The veterans marched, or walked, or limped; from the really elderly men from WWI, to the scraggly Vietnam vets. Most of the Vietnam vets didn't participate. The rest of the parade consisted of the Ladies Auxiliary, the firemen, their Ladies Auxiliary, the town's oldest and newest fire truck, the police car, the Firemen's queen on the back of a convertible, with her court, and floats by the churches, the Women's Club, the Lions Club, the FFA, the FHA (Future Farmers of America, and Future Homemakers of America), the Grange, Gold Star mothers, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and various others. Despite all these participants, being such a small town, the parade was short, and never took more than 15 minutes to watch, although if you marched it was longer.

At the end of the parade, there was a short ceremony in the cemetery. Veterans were remembered, and a lone trumpeter hidden up on the mountain played "Taps". For me, the most powerful part was always the recitation of this poem:

IN FLANDERS FIELDS the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

In Flanders Fields
By: Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
Canadian Army

RIP Jane Jacobs, Urban Planning Activist

Jane Jacobs was a person who lived in New York City and found it good. She believed cities were for people, not cars. She was brave and tenacious and therefore considered a giant pain in the ass by the powerful and mighty. She was arrested in urban renewal protests, and moved to Toronto in 1969 because of her opposition to the Vietnam War. Farewell to a giant thinker of our age.

Her book "The Life and Death of Great American Cities" (1961) attacked the 'urban renewal' concept that was obliterating neighborhoods in cities across America to build high-rise buildings and expressways. (Boston, for example, completely bulldozed its West End neighborhood to build ugly towers for rich people to live in. The neighborhood isn't really a functioning neighborhood any more.) From the NYTimes obituary:

"Death and Life" made four recommendations for creating municipal diversity: 1. A street or district must serve several primary functions. 2. Blocks must be short. 3. Buildings must vary in age, condition, use and rentals. 4. Population must be dense.

These seemingly simple notions represented a major rethinking of modern planning. They were coupled with fierce condemnations of the writings of the planners Sir Patrick Geddes and Ebenezer Howard, as well as those of the architect Le Corbusier and Lewis Mumford, who championed their ideal of graceful towers rising over exquisite open spaces.

NYTimes: Jane Jacobs, Urban Activist, Is Dead at 89

Village Voice: Jane Jacobs, in Her Own Words
For the urban thinker, now dead at 89, the fight was not abstract

Preserving the Village
Reason, Emotion, Pressure: There is No Other Recipe
By Jane Jacobs

May 22, 1957

The best you can say for redevelopment is that, in certain cases, it is the lesser evil. As practiced in New York, it is very painful. It causes catastrophic dislocation and hardship to tens of thousands of citizens. There is growing evidence that it shoots up juvenile-delinquency figures and spreads or intensifies slums in the areas taking the dislocation impact. It destroys, more surely than floods or tornados, immense numbers of small businesses. It is expensive to the taxpayers, federal and local. It is not fulfilling the hope that it would boost the city's tax returns. Quite the contrary.

Furthermore, the results of all this expense and travail look dull and are dull. The great virtue of the city, the thing that helps make up for all its disadvantages, is that it is interesting. It isn't easy to make a chunk of New York boring, but redevelopment does it.

On the other hand here is the Village—an area of the city with the power to attract and hold a real cross-section of the population, including a lot of middle-income families. An area with demonstrated potential for extending and upgrading its fringes. An area that pays more in taxes than it gets back in services. An area that grows theaters all by itself . . .

Wouldn't you think the city fathers would want to understand what makes our area successful and learn from it? Or failing such creative curiosity that they would at least cherish it?

WaPo: Jane Jacobs, 89; Writer, Activist Spoke Out Against Urban Renewal

The urban-renewal movement of the mid-20th century spent hundreds of millions of dollars clearing communities that were deemed slums, building low-income housing projects and creating parks and highways. Anyone criticizing the model, with its political backing, was not looked on kindly.

In this atmosphere came Mrs. Jacobs, a middle-aged, self-taught architectural and urban-planning specialist with Architectural Forum magazine. She was an incautious woman, at times disheveled in appearance, who tended to anger very powerful people. Several times, she courted arrest to speak out against plans by Robert Moses, a New York City commissioner whose portfolio included oversight of the city's parks and roads.

In her name-making book, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" (1961), she recorded what she considered the human toll of urban renewal.

She spoke of the displacement of thousands of residents and the destruction of small, if untidy, communities whose diversity she said was crucial to a city's allure. She maintained that urban renewal worsened the problems it was intended to solve: high crime, architectural conformity and a general dullness infecting daily life.

She attacked the arrogance of city planners for making decisions without consulting those affected.

"The planner's greatest shortcoming, I think, is lack of intellectual curiosity about how cities work," she told the New York Times in 1969. "They are taught to see the intricacy of cities as mere disorder. Since most of them believe what they have been taught, they do not inquire about the processes that lie behind the intricacy. I doubt that knowledgeable city planning will come out of the present profession. It is more likely to arise as an offshoot of economics."

Wikipedia: Jane Jacobs

Liars

DEADLY FIBERS: This shirt was worn by Yeheda Kaploun at Ground Zero on Sept. 11 and 12, 2001.A toxic examination by RJ Lee Group foud the collar contained 93 million chrysotile asbestos structured per square centimeter - 93,000 times higher than the normal 500-1,000 structures per square centimeter, which is the average amount of asbestos found in American cities.
Photo: Liz Sullivan

Remember the EPA lying about air quality in Lower Manhattan after 9/11?

This shirt puts the lie to that:

NY Post: ASBESTOS SHIRT IS A TOXIC NEW WRINKLE IN WTC WOE

April 9, 2006 -- Sky-high toxic levels of potentially deadly asbestos still cling to the fibers of this ordinary white dress shirt - worn by a 9/11 volunteer for two days at Ground Zero, a shocking analysis sought by The Post reveals.

Community liaison Yehuda Kaploun volunteered at Ground Zero for 48 hours immediately after the attack, wearing the shirt as he watched good friend and beloved Fire Department chaplain Mychal Judge die in a building collapse.

The volunteer kept his contaminated shirt packed in a sealed plastic bag until last week, when The Post sent the garment to RJ Lee Group laboratories for testing.

Analyzed portions of his shirt collar reveal a chilling concentration of chrysotile asbestos - 93,000 times higher than the average typically found in the environment in U.S. cities. That appears to be even higher than what the EPA said was found in the most contaminated, blown-out building after 9/11.

While there appear to be no specific regulations for asbestos levels on clothing, one lawyer for relief workers called the sickly shirt's amount "astronomically toxic."

It's the "high end of surface concentrations that you would find anywhere," added Chuck Kraisinger, a senior scientist for RJ Lee.

Testing also revealed the shirt was contaminated with zinc, mercury, antimony, barium, chromium, cobalt, copper, lead and molybdenum. Tons of the heavy metals were pulverized and burned in the debris in fires that raged for four months.

The test results are especially frightening in light of last week's report by the Centers for Disease Control that 62 percent of those caught in the massive dust cloud suffered respiratory problems. Also, 46 percent of civilians living or working in the immediate area but not caught in the cloud still experienced respiratory problems - and 57 percent reported new and worsening respiratory symptoms.

Making matters worse, Dr. Mark Rosen, chief of the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Beth Israel Hospital, said that because it can take decades for asbestos cancers to develop, "We just won't know the effect [of Ground Zero exposure] for years."

About 400,000 tons of asbestos were released in the World Trade Center collapse. David Worby, a lawyer for 7,300 rescue and recovery workers who inhaled the smoke and dust at Ground Zero for months, called the area "the worst toxic site ever.

"It's mind-boggling the poisons they made these people work through," Worby said. "The amount of dioxins there make Vietnam look like a kindergarten."

"It is an urgent situation. If the government does not act . . . in terms of setting up [widespread] medical testing . . . more people over the next few years will die of toxic diseases than died on 9/11."

Have a nice day, Christy Todd Whitman.

Presstitute of the Day: Howie Kurtz

For relentlessly flogging the Republican effort to Swiftboat Jack Murtha. His Media Notes Online article is front paged on the WaPo website today, giving life to a story that a real journalist would have ignored and let die its own pathetic death. But Howie is a presstitute through and through.

A Swift-Moving Story

Howie whines in response to Murray Waas's criticism of his original article:

I would welcome a deeper examination, as I had three hours to write the story on deadline. But I provided the needed context about Cybercast -- which was formerly called Conservative News Service -- and I'd note that the military, after all, decides when to hand out the medals.

Howie: If you didn't have time to research the story adequately, you shouldn't have submitted it for publication. Why were you in such a rush, anyway? Was Mrs. Kurtz, Sheri Annis, Republican operative, on your case? Maybe I should buy your cell phone records to find out.

The real story on Murtha is on the op-ed pages of the New York Times today, by "James Webb, a secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration, [] a Marine platoon and company commander in Vietnam."


Purple Heartbreakers

The accusations against Mr. Murtha were very old news, principally coming from defeated political rivals. Aligned against their charges are an official letter from Marine Corps Headquarters written nearly 40 years ago affirming Mr. Murtha's eligibility for his Purple Hearts - "you are entitled to the Purple Heart and a Gold Star in lieu of a second Purple Heart for wounds received in action" - and the strict tradition of the Marine Corps regarding awards. While in other services lower-level commanders have frequently had authority to issue prestigious awards, in the Marines Mr. Murtha's Vietnam Bronze Star would have required the approval of four different awards boards.

Notorious House of Presstitution

This week's Notorious House of Presstitution Award goes to ..... drum roll, please ..... The Washington Post!

The Post triumphs over the rest of the fawning corporate media by having two blatant falsehoods trumpeted in its pages.

Article No. 1: On Saturday, Republican House Organ Howie Kurtz and Shailagh Murray published this little gem:

Web Site Attacks Critic of War
Opponents Question Murtha's Medals

Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), the former Marine who is an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq, has become the latest Democrat to have his Vietnam War decorations questioned.

In a tactic reminiscent of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth assault on Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) during the 2004 presidential campaign, a conservative Web site yesterday quoted Murtha opponents as questioning the circumstances surrounding the awarding of his two Purple Hearts.

David Thibault, editor in chief of the Cybercast News Service, said the issue of Murtha's medals from 1967 is relevant now "because the congressman has really put himself in the forefront of the antiwar movement." Thibault said: "He has been placed by the Democratic Party and antiwar activists as a spokesman against the war above reproach."

Here, Republican operative Sheri Annis' husband "reports" the hysterical allegations of a right-wing propaganda machine whose most prominent client is GOPUSA, the group that owned Talon News and pimped Jeff Gannon/Jimmy Guckert into a coveted seat in the White House pressroom.

Yes, Virginia, in this article the Washington Post cites Cybercast News Service (CNS). A Republican website that works for GOPUSA.

And then the Post runs a quote from Harry Fox from 1996.

The article included a 1996 quote from Harry Fox, who worked for former representative John Saylor (R-Pa.), telling a local newspaper that Murtha was "pretending to be a big war hero." Fox, who lost a 1974 election to Murtha, said the 38-year Marine veteran had asked Saylor for assistance in obtaining the Purple Hearts but was turned down because the office believed he lacked adequate evidence of his wounds.

However, the Post leaves out the very salient fact (which was in the original CNS article) that Mr. Fox is now 81 years old and because of health reasons can no longer communicate whether or not this quote is accurate.

The Post article also leaves out the extremely salient fact that Saylor, who the now incommunicative Fox is trying to quote, has been DEAD since 1973.

Murray Waas deconstructs this steaming pile of horsepucky.

And that's not all, folks, because on Sunday the Washington Post's ombudsperson, Deborah Howell, continued the Post's Republican talking points journey.

Getting the Story on Jack Abramoff

Several stories, including one on June 3 by Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, a Post business reporter, have mentioned that a number of Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) and Sen. Byron Dorgan (N.D.), have gotten Abramoff campaign money.

This is a stupid and demonstrably false statement by Howell. No Democrat received money from Jack Abramoff. They did receive money from Abramoff's clients: The Indian tribes who were ripped off by Abramoff. There is no evidence that the tribes were attempting to bribe the Democrats. There is ample evidence that Abramoff was stealing from the Indians to bribe the Republican officials to funnel the money back into the coffers of Republican-owned businesses by passing legislation to do just so. That's why Abramoff just took a plea, you idiot.

Firedoglake did the best send-up of Howell: The Naked Lies of Deborah Howell

So, for these two shining examples of naked presstitution, we give the Washington Post the coveted Notorious House of Presstitution award. For this week, at least.

Blog Round-Up January 10, 2006

Roger Ailes (the good one) says that Jack's friends don't know Jack anymore: Toward Amnesia

Steve Gilliard at the News Blog compares today's Army lowering its standards for recruiting to McNamara's "Project 100,000" for Vietnam (which I had never heard of): Time travel back to 1970

Digby says Alito is a Freeper (and an asshole, or is that redundant?): Freeping The Court

By contrast, I just had a chance to see Alito's opening statement and I have to say that I think he came off as an asshole:

And after I graduated from high school, I went a full 12 miles down the road, but really to a different world when I entered Princeton University. A generation earlier, I think that somebody from my background probably would not have felt fully comfortable at a college like Princeton. But, by the time I graduated from high school, things had changed.

And this was a time of great intellectual excitement for me. Both college and law school opened up new worlds of ideas. But this was back in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

It was a time of turmoil at colleges and universities. And I saw some very smart people and very privileged people behaving irresponsibly. And I couldn't help making a contrast between some of the worst of what I saw on the campus and the good sense and the decency of the people back in my own community.

This is the same guy who wanted to keep women out of Princeton. Presumably, they wouldn't have "felt comfortable" there. But that's not what made that statement so revealing. It's this notion of smart and privileged people "behaving irresponsibly."

I think it's fairly certain that he's not talking about branding frat boys' asses or getting drunk and stealing Christmas Trees. He's talking about anti-war protestors, feminists etc. And like so many campus conservatives of that era, he sounds like he's still carrying around a boatload of resentment toward them.

John Yoo, Bush's facilitator of illegal spying, answers questions on Edicts of Nancy: Ask John Yoo!

Presstitute of the Day: Jim VandeHei Buys Operation Photo Op, Oval Office edition, 1.0, Hook, Line and Sinker

Is Jim VandeHei the worst political journalist currently plying his trade? He's gotta make the top five, for gems like this:

New York Times on Operation Photo Op, Oval Office edition: Visited by a Host of Administrations Past, Bush Hears Some Chastening Words

Jim VandeHei's take on the very same meeting, for the Washington Post: Voices From History Echo Anew
Former Cabinet Officers Offer Advice on Iraq to Commander in Chief

Journalism is all about the basics, right? Who, what, when, where, why.

Like, how long did this "meeting" take?

VandeHei:

Bush spent an hour with [] prominent foreign policy voices

Not really, according to David Sanger of the New York Times:

an exceedingly upbeat 40-minute briefing to 13 former secretaries of state and defense about how well things are going in Iraq,

followed by

But if it was a bipartisan consultation, as advertised by the White House, it was a brief one. Mr. Bush allowed 5 to 10 minutes for interchange with the group - which included three veterans of the Vietnam era: Robert S. McNamara, Melvin R. Laird and James R. Schlesinger - before herding the whole group into the Oval Office for what he called a "family picture."

And who did the assembled really get to meet with? Not exactly the principals:

Those who wanted to impart more wisdom to the current occupants of the White House were sent back across the hall to meet again with Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, and Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But as several of the participants noted, by that time Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had gone on to other meetings.

All of the detail provided by Sanger, omitted by VandeHei, as to the details of the meeting tell us the truth. It was a photo op, using the former officials for that nice Oval Office photo at the top of each article. Bush didn't even meet with them for more than 5 or 10 minutes, if he listened at all. (Listening not exactly his forte, you know?)

VandeHei's concludes his paean of praise to Bush for the photo op with this obsequious paragraph:

Still, it was a sense of the span of history in the room -- as much as the future of Iraq -- that left a lasting impression for many in attendance. "It was a sense that when we walked into the room and you see the personalities as far back as McNamara . . . that it was a good feeling among people who have shouldered considerable responsibility in the past and understand what this administration now confronts," Cohen said.

Presstitute.

Operation Photo Op, Oval Office Edition, 1.0

Bush and Former Cabinet Members Discuss Topic No. 1: Iraq

WASHINGTON, Jan. 5 - Colin Powell said nothing - a silence that spoke volumes to many in the White House today.

His predecessor, Madeleine Albright, was a bit riled after hearing an exceedingly upbeat 40-minute briefing to 13 living former secretaries of state and defense about how well things are going in Iraq. Saying the war in Iraq was "taking up all the energy" of President Bush's foreign policy team, she asked Mr. Bush whether he had let nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea spin out of control, and Latin America and China policy suffer by benign neglect.

"I can't let this comment stand," Mr. Bush shot back, telling Ms. Albright and the rare assembly of her colleagues, who reached back to the Kennedy White House, that his administration "can do more than one thing at a time."

The Bush administration, the president insisted, had "the best relations of any country with Japan, China and Korea," and active programs to win alliances around the world.

That was, according to some of the participants, one of the few moments of heat during an unusual White House effort to bring some of its critics into the fold and give a patina of bipartisan common ground to the strategy that Mr. Bush has laid out in recent weeks for Iraq.

But if it was a bipartisan consultation, as advertised by the White House, it was a brief one. Mr. Bush allowed 5 to 10 minutes this morning for interchange with the group - which included three veterans of another difficult war, the one in Vietnam: Robert S. McNamara, Melvin R. Laird and James R. Schlesinger. Then the entire group was herded the Oval Office for what he called a "family picture."

I'm not sure you really need to read the article. Anyone who is really paying attention to this White House knows that George W. Bush doesn't listen to anyone but his inner circle. This meeting was all about the photograph at the top of the article. Operation photo op, Oval Office edition, 1.0. People will hear, or see, that this bipartisan group of former officials gathered. They won't hear or see the substance. Rove's theory -- and it's been working to date -- is that a good picture triumphs the facts or the truth.

As media have proliferated, people just don't read any more. They don't even have the attention span to watch the entire evening news program. People hear a fragment, they read a headline, they glance at a picture on the front page or as they flick through the channels looking for something interesting. My parents watched the evening news religiously, and discussed it. Today, they'd be reading their email, answering their cell phones, driving their kids to extracurricular activities (in my day we took the bus for such things), flicking through their 57 or 300 or 1000 television channels, surfing the web, or working late to keep their jobs and their health insurance.

And even if people were paying close attention, there is always the Mighty Wurlitzer, Faux News and talk radio and MSNBCNNCNBCABCD, all saying "On the one hand, on the other hand...", all issues have two sides and both are equally valid.

And thus the New York Times headline: "Bush and Former Cabinet Members Discuss..." Discuss, my Irish ass. There was no discussion. There was a short, faux meeting and a very real photo op. No substance. They may have been talking, but Lalala I Can' Hear You George Bush isn't listening.

1000 Days of War in Iraq

From the Independent (UK):

The war in numbers: From WMD to the victims

$204.4billion The cost to the US of the war so far. The UK's bill up until March 2005 was £3.1 billion

2,339 Allied troops killed

98 UK troops killed

30,000 Estimated Iraqi civilian deaths

0 Number of WMDs found

8 per cent of Iraqi children suffering acute malnutrition

$35,819m World Bank estimated cost of reconstruction

53,470 Iraqi insurgents killed

67 per cent Iraqis who feel less secure because of occupation

$343 Average monthly salary for an Iraqi soldier. Average monthly salary for an American soldier in Iraq: $4,160.75

66 journalists killed in Iraq. Journalists killed during Vietnam war: 63

5 foreign civilians kidnapped per month

47 per cent Iraqis who never have enough electricity

20 casualties per month from unexploded mines

20 per cent Inflation rate 2005

25-40 per cent Estimated unemployment rate, Nov 2005

251 Foreigners kidnapped

70 per cent of Iraqi's whose sewage system rarely works

183,000 British and American troops are still in action in Iraq. There are 162,000 US troops and 8,000 British with 13,000 from other nations

90 Daily attacks by insurgents in Nov '05. In Jun '03: 8

82 per centIraqis who are "strongly opposed" to presence of coalition troops

15,955 US troops wounded in action