Changing Places

Rumsfeld Says He Underestimated Level of Violence in Iraq (washingtonpost.com)

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld acknowledged yesterday that he had not expected the level of violence confronting U.S. forces in Iraq, but he stood by his decision to send fewer troops than some Army officials and lawmakers have argued were necessary to stabilize the country.

So, he was wrong, but it was still a good decision? Huh?

“If you had said to me a year ago, ‘Describe the situation you’ll be in today one year later,’ I don’t know many people who would have described it — I would not have — described it the way it happens to be today,” he said.

OK, so he didn’t bother to read the seventeen volumes that would have told him exactly this situation would occur. Think he could have asked for a summary? Or listened to the people who had read it?

“Everyone is, at this point, realizing that when everybody said this will be a period during which we will be tested a lot, this is what it meant,” said a senior Rumsfeld aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be more candid. “How it would unfold, I don’t think anyone knew.”

This is like the standard Bush admin excuse, well, no one knew. Hell, people knew, people told you, and you ignored them. Don’t say you didn’t know, just admit you didn’t really care.

The Agonist: Baghdad Warning

Baghdad Warning
The following letter was distributed on the streets of Baghdad today:

To our families in Baghdad:

Do not leave your homes and do not go to school, universities, offices. Do not walk around in the markets and to all supermarket owners and commercial markets: close your shops from April 15 2004 to April 23 2004, since your brothers the Mujahadieen in Ramadi, Khaldiya, and Fallujah will transfer the resistance fire to Baghdad, the capital, to help out Mujahideen brothers from the Al-Mahdi Army to free you from the darkness of the occupier, and so you have been warned.

Your Brothers the Mujahideen companies

>From God victory and success

(Name of source withheld)

___

Damn. It’s gonna get worse….

Press Conference of President Bush

What else — part of the question — oh, oil revenues. Well, the oil revenues are — they’re bigger than we thought they would be at this point in time. I mean, one year after the liberation of Iraq, the revenues of the oil stream is pretty darn significant. One of the things I was concerned about prior to going into Iraq was that the oil fields would be destroyed. But they weren’t, they’re now up and running. And that money is — it will benefit the Iraqi people. It’s their oil, and they’ll use it to reconstruct the country.

Yup, just like our taxes, and Bush’s friends will reap the benefit of “their oil” just like they reap the benefit of “our money”….

Bush’s Plea of Ignorance

In his January 2003 State of the Union address, Bush said: “Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have the terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike?”

President Bush said the Aug. 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Brief did not have “actionable” detail about impending Al Qaeda attacks. “There was not a time and place of an attack,” Bush told reporters Sunday.

Bush: I’ve Made No Mistakes Since 9/11

WASHINGTON – American President George Bush grimaced, sighed, rambled and chuckled under his breath on Tuesday, before saying he could not think of a single mistake he had made since the September 11 attacks.

“I wish you’d have given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it.” President George W. Bush during a nationally televised news conference at the White House April 13, 2004. Before the glare of live television cameras at his first prime time news conference in more than a year, Bush responded to many of the questions from reporters by repeating fairly stock phrases about freedom in Iraq and the history-changing impact of the Sept. 11 attacks. (Larry Downing/Reuters)

Before the glare of live television cameras at his first prime time news conference in more than a year, the Republican president responded to many of the questions from reporters by repeating fairly stock phrases about freedom in Iraq and the historical impact of the September 11 attacks.

But one question for which Bush was evidently not prepared invited him to name his biggest mistake since 9/11.

“I wish you’d have given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it,” Bush joked before taking a long pause.

“I’m sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with answer, but it hadn’t yet.”

Then came a meandering soliloquy that wandered from an affirmation of his decisions to invade Afghanistan and Iraq to his firm belief that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and the discovery of mustard gas on a turkey farm in Libya.

Yahoo! News – 83 U.S. Troops Killed in Iraq in April

83 U.S. Troops Killed in Iraq in April
For American forces in Iraq (news – web sites), these are the deadliest days of the war. At least 83 U.S. troops have been killed in action so far this month, with the most recent death announced on Tuesday. Also this month, more than 560 have been wounded and two soldiers were declared missing. At least four American civilians were killed, one contractor was captured by gunmen and six others were missing and feared abducted.

Iraqis also are dying � in their case, by the hundreds, particularly in Fallujah. About 880 Iraqis have been killed since April 5, according to an AP count based on statements by Iraqi hospital officials, the U.S. military and Iraqi police.
As of Tuesday afternoon, the Pentagon said 678 U.S. troops had died since the war began. That does not include two Department of the Army civilians who were killed last month.

Of the total, 540 have died since May 1, when President Bush (news – web sites) declared that major combat was over. And 220 have died since Saddam Hussein (news – web sites) was captured on Dec. 13, an event that many in the U.S. government had hoped would mark the beginning of the end of the anti-occupation insurgency.

Press Conference of President Bush
Q Mr. President –

THE PRESIDENT: Hold on for a minute. Oh, Jim.

Q Thank you, Mr. President.

THE PRESIDENT: I’ve got some “must calls,” I’m sorry.

and of course, don’t ever admit you could have possibly made a mistake!

Q Thank you, Mr. President. In the last campaign, you were asked a question about the biggest mistake you’d made in your life, and you used to like to joke that it was trading Sammy Sosa. You’ve looked back before 9/11 for what mistakes might have been made. After 9/11, what would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons have you learned from it?

THE PRESIDENT: I wish you would have given me this written question ahead of time, so I could plan for it. (Laughter.) John, I’m sure historians will look back and say, gosh, he could have done it better this way, or that way. You know, I just — I’m sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn’t yet.
hope I — I don’t want to sound like I’ve made no mistakes. I’m confident I have. I just haven’t — you just put me under the spot here, and maybe I’m not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one.

Press Conference of President Bush

“And of course, that concerns me. All those reports concern me. As a matter of fact, I was dealing with terrorism a lot as the President when George Tenet came in to brief me. I mean, that’s where I got my information. I changed the way that — the relationship between the President and the CIA Director. And I wanted Tenet in the Oval Office all the time. And we had briefings about terrorist threats. This was a summary.”

C.I.A. Chief Defends Agency but Allows `We Made Mistakes’
Mr. Tenet also conceded in an answer to a panel member, Timothy J. Roemer, a Democrat, that while other C.I.A. personnel had briefed President Bush during the summer of 2001, he himself did not talk to the president during August 2001. That was the same month that Mr. Bush received a controversial briefing prepared by the C.I.A. on domestic threats posed by Al Qaeda to the United States.

GeorgeWBush.com :: The Official Re-election Site for President George W. Bush

waffles waffles waffles waffles waffles…

Yahoo! News – Kerry Says U.S. Must ‘De-Americanize’ Iraq Policy

Democratic challenger John Kerry (news – web sites) said on Monday Washington needed to “de-Americanize” the transformation of Iraq (news – web sites) by replacing U.S. administrator Paul Bremer with someone like top U.N. aide Lakhdar Brahimi.

In some of his most detailed remarks on Iraq, Kerry told students at the University of New Hampshire he would be prepared to turn over authority for the political transformation of Iraq, and its reconstruction, to the United Nations.

But he said he would “hold on to the military security component under our command.”

“The absolute prerequisite which many of us have said many times, is getting more people involved, more people sharing the burden, more people sharing the risk, more people sharing the on-the-ground responsibility,” he said. “So my step is to work to internationalize it.”

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Defiant US says Falluja dead were rebels
But when asked about the victims numbers, US marine Lieutenant Colonel Brennan Byrne said: “What I think you will find is 95% of those were military age males that were killed in the fighting. The marines are trained to be precise in their firepower … The fact that there are 600 goes back to the fact that the marines are very good at what they do,” he said.

Pictures of the “rebels” here (very graphic).

>From the Guardian:

“In al-Thawra hospital, I met Raad Daier, a 36-year-old ambulance driver with a bullet in his lower abdomen, one of 12 shots fired at his ambulance from a US Humvee. According to hospital officials, at the time of the attack, he was carrying six people injured by US forces, including a pregnant woman who had been shot in the stomach and lost her child. ”

“I saw charred cars that dozens of eye-witnesses said had been hit by US missiles, and local hospitals confirmed that their drivers had been burned alive. I also visited Block 37 of Sadr City’s Chuadir district, a row of houses where every door was riddled with holes. Residents said US tanks rolled down their street firing into their homes. Five people were killed, including Murtada Muhammad, aged four. ”

Just rebels…

Memo Not Specific Enough, Bush Says (washingtonpost.com)

Yes, it’s true. Bush can’t read.

President Bush said yesterday that a memo he received a month before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks did not contain enough specific threat information to prevent the hijackings and “said nothing about an attack on America.”

In his most extensive public remarks about a briefing he received Aug. 6, 2001, titled “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US,” Bush also said that he “was satisfied that some of the matters were being looked into” by the FBI and the CIA that summer and that they would have reported any “actionable intelligence” to him.

“I am satisfied that I never saw any intelligence that indicated there was going to be an attack on America — at a time and a place, an attack,” Bush told reporters after Easter services in Fort Hood, Tex. “Of course we knew that America was hated by Osama bin Laden. That was obvious. The question was, who was going to attack us, when and where and with what?”

Washington. New York. Airplanes. Explosives. Hell, can’t the idiot read?!

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