Work remains even with BP leak plugged, oil fading.No. No, you guys. THE OIL IS NOT FADING. The oil is lurking. Down below because of the heavy use of poisonous dispersants. It is STILL THERE.
“I am not the same fucking person,” he tells me. “I am not the same person. I don’t know how to come home.”[snip]
To begin to understand where he’s coming from, Ware wants you to see a movie. He filmed it. It’s just after midnight during the second battle of Fallujah, November 2004. The marine unit he’s hooked up with has cornered six insurgents inside a house, and with no air support available, the only way to take them out is person-to-person. Staff Sergeant David Bellavia doesn’t like the sound of that — odds are one of his men, or he, will die in the pitch-black of an unfamiliar house — but he knows he can’t just let these guys go. So he asks for volunteers to go with him: Three men raise their hands, followed by Ware, who as a reporter (then for Time, now for CNN) is the only one without a gun or night goggles, and still can’t explain why he went along. He just couldn’t not.
Ware flips on his video camera and creeps into the house six feet behind Bellavia. His device is picking up nothing but darkness and the slow, creaking sound of footsteps. Then, light, blinding light. Bullets ping around the living room, and before he knows what’s going on, two bodies drop. Bellavia has knocked off the first of them. For the next hour — until all six insurgents are carried out dead from the house — Ware captures that same pattern of blackness and near silence (in the background you can hear the insurgents chanting, “Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar”) pierced by gunfire and screaming.
Ware believes he recorded the perfect war experience that night, a snapshot you can get only from terrifying proximity. He dreams of renting out a theater and subjecting an audience to it in full surround sound; that way people would know what it’s really like over there. “It’s my firm belief that we need to constantly jar the sensitivities of the people back home,” he says. “War is a jarring experience. Your kids are living it out, and you’ve inflicted it upon 20-odd million Iraqis. And when your brothers and sons and mates from the football team come home, and they ain’t quite the same, you have an obligation to sit for three and a half minutes and share something of what it’s like to be there.”
The Pentagon has posted to its website the roughly 8,000 pages and audio tapes it was forced to provide to the New York Times regarding its "military analyst" program. Anyone who reads through them, as I've now done, can only be left with one conclusion (other than being extremely impressed with David Barstow's work in putting together this story): if this wasn't an example of an illegal, systematic "domestic propaganda campaign" by the Pentagon, then nothing is.This should be exploding all over the front pages, but it's not. Glenn Greenwald continues:
Despite this, the truly extraordinary blackout by the major television and cable news networks -- which were complicit in this program -- continues. Howard Kurtz of CNN and The Washington Post previously called this blackout "pathetic", and yesterday, The Politico published a relatively impressive article further documenting the "deafening silence" from the networks at the center of this story. As the article noted:Now if this had been ... say ... Bill Clinton who had done this, they'd work in the death of Vince Foster, illicit sex, cigars, AND Monica Lewinsky into the relentless 24/7 news cycle. The frothing and blather would never cease.
While bloggers have kept the story simmering, Democratic congressional leaders also are speaking out, calling for investigations that could provoke the networks to finally cover the Times story — and, in effect, themselves.
Beyond the networks' keeping this scandal completely concealed from their viewers, The Politico story noted that only two network executives -- CNN's President Jim Walton and ABC's President David Westin (.pdf) -- even bothered to respond to the letters sent by Rep. Rosa DeLauro to all networks demanding answers with regard to their complicity in this program. When responding, the two executives -- exactly as Brian Williams was when he was finally forced by blog-inspired commenters to respond (on his blog, but not on NBC) -- were casually dismissive of the entire matter, insisting that they had done nothing wrong (other than CNN's acknowledgment that they failed to detect a conflict of interest with regard to a single military analyst they had used).
Glenn Greenwald points out that the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times both reported doubts about the Bush administration's linking bombs in Iraq to Iran. The New York Times regurgitates the White House talking points without question:Update: Tengrain at MockPaperScissors notices, too.But today, The New York Times does precisely the opposite -- it has published a lengthy, prominent front-page article by Michael Gordon that does nothing, literally, but mindlessly recite administration claims about Iran's weapons-supplying activities without the slightest questioning, investigation, or presentation of ample counter-evidence. The entire article is nothing more than one accusatory claim about Iran after the next, all emanating from the mouths of anonymous military and "intelligence officials" without the slightest verified evidence, and Gordon just mindlessly repeats what he has been told in one provocative paragraph after the next.
Start with the headline: Deadliest Bomb in Iraq is Made by Iran, U.S. Says. That is a proposition that is extremely inflammatory -- it suggests that Iranians bear responsibility for attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq, even though that is a claim for which almost no evidence has been presented and which is very much in dispute. Why should that be the basis for a prominent headline when Gordon's sole basis for it are the uncorroborated assertions of the Bush administration? The very first paragraph following that headline is the most inflammatory:
The most lethal weapon directed against American troops in Iraq is an explosive-packed cylinder that United States intelligence asserts is being supplied by Iran.
Is that extremely provocative claim even true? Gordon never says, and he does not really appear to care. He is in Pravda Spokesman mode throughout the entire article -- offering himself up as a megaphone for administration assertions without the slightest amount of scrutiny, investigation or opposing views.
While I don’t expect reporters to know it, but the whole world uses 81mm mortars, including the US and UK, and given that Iran and Iraq fought a decade long war, there is plenty of ordnance from both countries in both countries. If the US had guarded Saddam’s weapons storage areas we wouldn’t be dealing with this level of violence.
Iraqis don’t need help to create weapons. The army that Bremer dispersed had munitions people, explosive ordnance disposal people, engineers, artillery, tankers, etc. who all know how to make things, including tanks, go boom. After Gulf War I do they expect people to believe that the Iraqi army didn’t study how to disable Abrams tanks?
None of the people involved will identify themselves and take responsibility for what they are saying. The media isn’t allowed to photograph the “evidence” and submit it for review by experts. The briefing is in the controlled environment of the Green Zone. This is garbage.
