Well said, sir.

Printed on the flag held in distress position:

There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.

And they are coming home to a neighborhood near you

US soldiers 'killed Afghan civilians for sport and collected fingers as trophies'

The Pictures of War You Aren’t Supposed to See

Chris Hedges:

Look beyond the nationalist cant used to justify war. Look beyond the seduction of the weapons and the pornography of violence. Look beyond Barack Obama’s ridiculous rhetoric about finishing the job or fighting terror. Focus on the evil of war. War begins by calling for the annihilation of the others but ends ultimately in self-annihilation. It corrupts souls and mutilates bodies. It destroys homes and villages and murders children on their way to school. It grinds into the dirt all that is tender and beautiful and sacred. It empowers human deformities—warlords, Shiite death squads, Sunni insurgents, the Taliban, al-Qaida and our own killers—who can speak only in the despicable language of force. War is a scourge. It is a plague. It is industrial murder. And before you support war, especially the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, look into the hollow eyes of the men, women and children who know it.

The picture they used for this article is just heartbreaking.

Mother sees how her son died in Iraq on video

And writes:

"I am the mother of the driver of the Bradley you see upside down and burning," she wrote. "He was 19 years old and could see the futility of Iraq invasion and occupation."

Watch the video in the right hand column for blunt and honest comments by soldiers to an embedded reporter about the surge, the war, and what it is doing to them. It is heart breaking and infuriating.

What noble cause, Bush? Want to try and explain it now?

You know that Iraqi bank heist of millions of dollars?

Apparently it was faked:

....three security guards were reported to have made off with $282 million in a spectacular bank robbery last week.

Baghdad was obsessed with the enormous figure for about a day. But before long an Iraqi-American Web site declared that the bank robbers' spoils were not in fact all that impressive -- especially when compared with the cost of the US military operation in Iraq, which costs US taxpayers $375 million a day, or more than $11 billion a month and around $135 billion a year.

In truth, the bank robbers made off with only $388,000, which is certainly a handsome sum, but a drop in the ocean compared to the numbers both Iraqi and American officials are currently tossing around. The game they are playing is meant to divert the public's attention from the dead, the mutilated soldiers, the war widows and the pressing questions of whether the American nightmare on the Tigris makes any sense at all and when it will finally come to an end.

If we had taken the Iraqi population pre-2003 invasion: 24,001,816 (estimation given here.)

And taken the amount of money we've spent on the war as of today: 443,940,000,000 (Those numbers don't hold still, do they?)

And then offered each and every single Iraqi 18,000$, adults and children alike, do you think they would have risen up and overthrown Saddam by themselves?

No shock and awe, no bombings, no war. Everybody would have been happy.

Except Cheney and the oil robber barons.

Stats on Iraq

By the numbers.