Eric's Story

Eric is a special guy. He really truly made a huge impression on me.

He seemed both naively innocent and bold and brave.

I'm worried about what is in store for him and of course all the others who just like him agree to fight this war.

They truly have no idea of the battles ahead or the physical and mental scarring.

Let's keep this thread's discussion about helping those who have enlisted and helping our veterans out there.

What bills have passed that have harmed them or helped them?

How can we do better right here and right now?

Thanks,

Suz

War...the reality. Heartbreaking story on D.U.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x5407456

Good story!
I'm still in San Diego - my convention gave me a free margarita, fajitas & blue so I was so happy I hired myself a cute Russian rickshaw driver!!
& after my classes today I took the trolley by myself to Tijuana & got alot of great photos (I hope - can't tell til see them on computer).

Now I've hired myself some internet time & am trying to find out what that crazy government of ours has been up to. I couldn't avoid a newspaper headline (uncritical) about Bush attending an Evangelical service in China. I will say that with everyone I've met, somehow politics has come up in the discussion. I have managed to get in some little slams & I have found that others are in universal agreement.

I can travel down the west coast and cannot find a Bush supporter for the life of me - not the pilots, not the flight attendants, not the ticket takers, not the merchants, not anyone anywhere.

Today I ran into the former President of my professional association and I'm talking nationally. He said that he was proud of us, when he heard that I had protested Bush & his social security plan with Bert in Minneapolis, who is also one of his former students.

Now off to read more of this blog & the news.
xoD

PS I met two black speech pathologists - one from Michigan had met with some architects etc about how to rebuild New Orleans - they hoped to use what had happened (Katrina) as an opportunity to build things New Orleans hasn't had in the past. The other one was from New Orleans.

When I was in Mexico, I was moved to tears by some of the beauty amid the sadness & poverty. There is always a point where I don't want to go back to US from Mexico. There is something alive and vibrant and human in Mexico & I don't find it amongst the Marriots, Hyatts & Embarcadero yachts of San Diego.

Interesting human story Suz. Honesty I pity your new found friend, Eric. He has been conned by the corportists like Dick Cheney, who believe that America's youth are worth sacrificing for corporate profit. You describe him as a young man. I suppose he is. Yet, I think he has a childlike understanding of America's role in the world. Of course all should be done to support veterans. There is no argument here. Yet, I have not heard any politician in my area make the case for supporting the veterans. Beyond that, we can do more for them by insisting that we bring the troops home now. I admit that may not be how most feel, but when I follow this situation to its logical conclusion. There is nothing to be gained by having young men like Eric sacrifice themselves for an illusion created by corporate monsters.

Oncall, have missed you.

You speak with conviction. Immediately, or systematically, our troops must be brought home.
And by systematically, I don't mean a long drawn out process that takes a few years. Six months sounds optimum, as Murtha suggested.

Otherwise we run the risk of politicians manipulating the pullout for political advantage, on both sides of the aisle.

I am very leery of a politician wanting to not give a concrete plan of withdrawal.

Hi DiAnne,

Sounds like you are having a great time!

Interesting that no one supports Bush along the entire coast.

Myself, I could use a long weekend in Puerto Villarta.

I'm sorry that I'm late to post about this, but I just wanted to bring up some more info about the congressional candidate Fe spoke with in San Francisco last week. His name is Charlie Brown (yep) and he's running against one of the most notorious Repubs in Congress: John T. Doolittle. You might recall Doolittle as the guy who practically ran away from Michael Moore in F 9/11. More recently, he had tiny golden hammer lapel pins made to distribute to those inside the beltway who ardently support Tom DeLay. Yeah, we're talking capital "D" doofus. Doolittle is the ultimate chickenhawk. Charlie on the other hand, served in Vietnam and his son is about to report for his third rotation in Irag. Charlie has been against the war in Iraq from day one.

Anyway, here's the link to his website if you'd like to learn more:

http://brown4congress.org/

Nov 19, 2005



Rise of the 'patriotic journalist'
By Robert Parry

Editor's note
September 11, 2001 and subsequent events threw into sharp focus the shortcomings of the media in the United States. In fact, contrary to popular belief, the media had been been in a steep decline for decades prior to the terrorist attacks, as veteran US journalist Robert Parry documents in the article below.

The apex for the "skeptical journalists" came in the mid-1970s when the press followed up exposure of Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal and disclosure of the Vietnam War's Pentagon Papers with revelations of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) abuses, such as illegal spying on Americans and helping Chile's army oust an elected government.

There were reasons for this new press aggressiveness. After some 57,000 US soldiers had died in Vietnam during a long war

fought for murky reasons, many reporters no longer gave the government the benefit of the doubt.

The press corps' new rallying cry was the public's right to know, even when the wrongdoing occurred in the secretive world of national security.

But this journalistic skepticism represented an affront to government officials who had long enjoyed a relatively free hand in the conduct of foreign policy. The Wise Men and the Old Boys - the stewards of the post-World War II era - now faced a harder time lining up public consensus behind any action.

This national security elite, including then-CIA director George H W Bush, viewed the post-Vietnam journalism as a threat to America's ability to strike at its perceived enemies around the world.

Yet, it was from these ruins of distrust - the rubble of suspicion left behind by Watergate and Vietnam - that the conservative-leaning national security elite began its climb back, eventually coming full circle, gaining effective control of what a more "patriotic" press would tell the people, before stumbling into another disastrous war in Iraq.

Pike report
One early turning point in the switch from "skeptical" journalism to "patriotic" journalism occurred in 1976 with the blocking of Otis Pike's congressional report on CIA misdeeds. CIA director Bush had lobbied behind the scenes to convince Congress that suppressing the report was important for national security.

But CBS news correspondent Daniel Schorr got hold of the full document and decided that he couldn't join in keeping the facts from the public. He leaked the report to the Village Voice – and was fired by CBS amid charges of reckless journalism.

"The media's shift in attention from the report's charges to their premature disclosure was skillfully encouraged by the executive branch," wrote Kathryn Olmstead in her book on the media battles of the 1970s, Challenging the Secret Government.

"[Mitchell] Rogovin, the CIA's counsel, later admitted that the executive branch's 'concern' over the report's damage to national security was less than genuine," Olmstead wrote. But the Schorr case had laid down an important marker.

The counterattack against the "skeptical journalists" had begun.

In the late 1970s, conservative leaders began a concerted drive to finance a media infrastructure of their own along with attack groups that would target mainstream reporters who were viewed as too liberal or insufficiently patriotic.

Nixon's former treasury secretary, Bill Simon, took the lead. Simon, who headed the conservative Olin Foundation, rallied like-minded foundations - associated with Lynde and Harry Bradley, Smith Richardson, the Scaife family and the Coors family - to invest their resources in advancing the conservative cause.

Money went to fund conservative magazines taking the fight to the liberals and to finance attack groups, like Accuracy in Media, that hammered away at the supposed "liberal bias" of the national news media.

Reagan-Bush years
This strategy gained momentum in the early 1980s with the arrival of Ronald Reagan's presidency.

Spearheaded by intellectual policymakers now known as the neo-conservatives, the government developed a sophisticated approach - described internally as "perception management" - that included targeting journalists who wouldn't fall into line.

So, when New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner reported from El Salvador about right-wing death squads, his accounts were criticized and his patriotism challenged. Bonner then infuriated the White House in early 1982 when he disclosed a massacre by the US-backed Salvadoran army around the town of El Mozote. The story appeared just as Reagan was praising the army's human-rights progress.

Like other journalists who were viewed as overly critical of Reagan's foreign policy, Bonner faced both public attacks on his reputation and private lobbying of his editors, seeking his removal. Bonner soon found his career cut short. After being pulled out of Central America, he resigned from the Times.

Bonner's ouster was another powerful message to the national news media about the fate that awaited reporters who challenged Reagan's White House. (Years later, after a forensic investigation confirmed the El Mozote massacre, the Times rehired Bonner.)

Though conservative activists routinely bemoaned what they called the "liberal media" at the big newspapers and TV networks, the Reagan administration actually found many willing collaborators at senior levels of US news organizations.

At the New York Times, executive editor Abe Rosenthal followed a generally neo-conservative line of intense anticommunism and strong support for Israel. Under new owner Martin Peretz, the supposedly leftist New Republic slid into a similar set of positions, including enthusiastic backing for the Nicaraguan Contra rebels.

Where I worked at the Associated Press, its general manager, Keith Fuller, the company's top executive, was considered a staunch supporter of Reagan's foreign policy and a fierce critic of recent social change. In 1982, Fuller gave a speech condemning the 1960s and praising Reagan's election.

"As we look back on the turbulent Sixties, we shudder with the memory of a time that seemed to tear at the very sinews of this country," Fuller said during a speech in Worcester, adding that Reagan's election a year earlier had represented a nation crying "enough" ...
We don't believe that the union of Adam and Bruce is really the same as Adam and Eve in the eyes of Creation. We don't believe that people should cash welfare checks and spend them on booze and narcotics. We don't really believe that a simple prayer or a pledge of allegiance is against the national interest in the classroom. We're sick of your social engineering. We're fed up with your tolerance of crime, drugs and pornography. But most of all, we're sick of your self-perpetuating, burdening bureaucracy weighing ever more heavily on our backs.
Fuller's sentiments were common in the executive suites of major news organizations, where Reagan's reassertion of an aggressive US foreign policy mostly was welcomed. Working journalists who didn't sense the change in the air were headed for danger.

By the time of Reagan's landslide reelection in 1984, the conservatives had come up with catchy slogans for any journalist or politician who still criticized excesses in US foreign policy. They were known as the "blame America firsters" or - in the case of the Nicaragua conflict - "Sandinista sympathizers".

The practical effect of these slurs on the patriotism of journalists was to discourage skeptical reporting on Reagan's foreign policy and to give the administration a freer hand for conducting operations in Central America and the Middle East outside public view.

Gradually, a new generation of journalists began to fill key reporting jobs, bringing with them an understanding that too much skepticism on national security issues could be hazardous to one's career.

Intuitively, these reporters knew there was little or no upside to breaking even important stories that made Reagan's foreign policy look bad. That would just make you a target of the expanding conservative attack machine. You would be "controversialized", another term that Reagan operatives used to describe their anti-reporter strategies.

Iran-Contra
Often I am asked why it took so long for the US news media to uncover the secret operations that later became known as the Iran-Contra affair, clandestine arms sales to the Islamic fundamentalist government of Iran with some of the profits - and other secret funds - funneled into the Contra war against Nicaragua's Sandinista government.

Though the AP was not known as a leading investigative news organization - and my superiors weren't eager supporters - we were able to get ahead on the story in 1984, 1985 and 1986 because the New York Times, the Washington Post and other top news outlets mostly looked the other way.

It took two external events - the shooting down of a supply plane over Nicaragua in October 1986 and the disclosure of the Iran initiative by a Lebanese newspaper in November 1986 - to bring the scandal into focus.

In late 1986 and early 1987 there was a flurry of Iran-Contra coverage, but the Reagan administration largely succeeded in protecting top officials, including Reagan and George H W Bush.

The growing conservative news media, led by Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times, lashed out at journalists and government investigators who dared push the edges of the envelope or closed in on Reagan and Bush.

But resistance to the Iran-Contra scandal also penetrated mainstream news outlets. At Newsweek, where I went to work in early 1987, editor Maynard Parker was hostile to the possibility that Reagan might be implicated.

During one Newsweek dinner/interview with retired General Brent Scowcroft and then-Representative Dick Cheney, Parker expressed support for the notion that Reagan's role should be protected, even if that required perjury. "Sometimes you have to do what's good the country," Parker said.

When Iran-Contra conspirator Oliver North went on trial in 1989, Parker and other news executives ordered that Newsweek's Washington bureau not even cover the trial, presumably because Parker just wanted the scandal to go away.

(When the North trial became a major story anyway, I was left scrambling to arrange daily transcripts so we could keep abreast of the trial's developments. Because of these and other differences over the Iran-Contra scandal, I left Newsweek in 1990.)

Iran-Contra special prosecutor, Lawrence Walsh, a Republican, also encountered press hostility when his investigation finally broke through the White House cover-up in 1991. Moon's Washington Times routinely lambasted Walsh and his staff over minor issues, such as the elderly Walsh flying first class on airplanes or ordering room-service meals.

But the attacks on Walsh were not coming only from the conservative news media. Toward the end of 12 years of Republican rule, mainstream journalists also realized their careers were far better served by staying on the good side of the Reagan-Bush crowd.

So, when George H W Bush sabotaged Walsh's probe by issuing six Iran-Contra pardons on Christmas Eve 1992, prominent journalists praised Bush's actions. They brushed aside Walsh's complaint that the move was the final act in a long-running cover-up that protected a secret history of criminal behavior and Bush's personal role.

"Liberal" Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen spoke for many of his colleagues when he defended Bush's fatal blow against the Iran-Contra investigation. Cohen especially liked Bush's pardon of former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger, who had been indicted for obstruction of justice but was popular around Washington.

In a December 30, 1992, column, Cohen said his view was colored by how impressed he was when he would see Weinberger in the Georgetown Safeway store, pushing his own shopping cart. "Based on my Safeway encounters, I came to think of Weinberger as a basic sort of guy, candid and no nonsense - which is the way much of official Washington saw him," Cohen wrote. "Cap, my Safeway buddy, walks, and that's all right with me."

For fighting too hard for the truth, Walsh drew derision as a kind of Captain Ahab obsessively pursuing the White Whale. Writer Marjorie Williams delivered this damning judgment against Walsh in a Washington Post magazine article, which read:
In the utilitarian political universe of Washington, consistency like Walsh's is distinctly suspect. It began to seem ... rigid of him to care so much. So un-Washington. Hence the gathering critique of his efforts as vindictive, extreme. Ideological. ... But the truth is that when Walsh finally goes home, he will leave a perceived loser.
By the time the Reagan-Bush era ended in January 1993, the era of the "skeptical journalist" was dead, at least on issues of national security.

The Webb case
Even years later, when historical facts surfaced suggesting that serious abuses had been missed around the Iran-Contra affair, mainstream news outlets took the lead in rallying to the Reagan-Bush defense.

When a controversy over Contra-drug trafficking reemerged in 1996, the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times went on the attack - against Gary Webb, the reporter who revived interest in the scandal. Even admissions of guilt by the CIA's inspector general in 1998 didn't shake the largely dismissive treatment of the issue by the major newspapers.

(For Webb's courageous reporting, he was pushed out of his job at the San Jose Mercury News, his career was ruined, his marriage collapsed and - in December 2004 - he killed himself with his father's revolver.)

When Republican rule was restored in 2001 with George W Bush's controversial "victory", major news executives and many rank-and-file journalists understood that their careers could best be protected by wrapping themselves in the old red-white-and-blue. "Patriotic" journalism was in; "skeptical" journalism was definitely out.

That tendency deepened even more after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks as many journalists took to wearing American flag lapels and avoided critical reporting about Bush's sometimes shaky handling of the crisis.

For instance, Bush's seven-minute freeze in a second-grade classroom - after being told "the nation is under attack" - was hidden from the public, even though it was filmed and witnessed by White House pool reporters. (Millions of Americans were shocked when they finally saw the footage two years later in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11.)

In November 2001, to avoid other questions about Bush's legitimacy, the results of a media recount of the Florida vote were misrepresented to obscure the finding that Al Gore would have carried the state - and thus the White House - if all legally cast votes were counted.

Iraq War
In 2002, as Bush shifted focus from Osama bin Laden and Afghanistan to Saddam Hussein and Iraq, the "patriotic" journalists moved with him.

Some of the few remaining "skeptical" media personalities were silenced, such as MSNBC's host Phil Donahue, whose show was canceled because he invited on too many war opponents.

In most newspapers, the occasional critical articles were buried deep inside, while credulous stories accepting the administration's claims about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction were bannered on page one.

New York Times reporter Judith Miller was in her element as she tapped into her friendly administration sources to produce weapons of mass destruction (WMD)stories, like the one about how Iraq's purchase of aluminum tubes was proof that it was building a nuclear bomb. The article gave rise to the White House warning that Americans couldn't risk the "smoking gun" on Iraq's WMD being "a mushroom cloud".

In February 2003, when then secretary of state Colin Powell made his United Nations speech accusing Iraq of possessing WMD stockpiles, the national news media swooned at his feet. The Washington Post's op-ed page was filled with glowing tributes to his supposedly air-tight case, which would later be exposed as a mix of exaggerations and outright lies.

The rout of "skeptical" journalism was so complete - driven to the fringes of the Internet and to a few brave souls in Knight-Ridder's Washington bureau - that the "patriotic" reporters often saw no problem casting aside even the pretense of objectivity.

In the rush to war, news organizations joined in ridiculing the French and other longtime allies who urged caution. Those countries became the "axis of weasels" and cable TV devoted hours of coverage to diners that renamed "French fries" as "Freedom fries".

Once the invasion began, the coverage on MSNBC, CNN and the major networks was barely discernable from the patriotic fervor on Fox. Like Fox News, MSNBC produced promotional segments, packaging heroic footage of American soldiers, often surrounded by thankful Iraqis and underscored with stirring music.

"Embedded" reporters often behaved like excited advocates for the American side of the war. But objectivity also was missing back at the studios where anchors voiced outrage about Geneva Convention violations when Iraqi TV aired pictures of captured American soldiers, but the US media saw nothing wrong with broadcasting images of captured Iraqis.

As Judith Miller would later remark unabashedly, she saw her beat as "what I've always covered - threats to our country". Referring to her time "embedded" with a US military unit searching for WMD, she claimed that she had received a government "security clearance".

While the 57-year-old Miller may be an extreme case of mixing patriotism and journalism, she is far from alone as a member of her generation who absorbed the lessons of the 1980s, that skeptical journalism on national security issues was a fast way to put yourself in the unemployment line.

Only gradually, over the past two years as Iraq's WMD never materialized but a stubborn insurgency did, the bloody consequences of "patriotic" journalism have begun to dawn on the American people. By not asking tough questions, journalists contributed to a mess that has now cost the lives of nearly 2,000 US soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis.

Retired Army Lieutenant General William Odom, a top military intelligence official under Reagan, has predicted that the Iraq invasion "will turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in US history".

Plame case
At the core of this disaster were the cozy relationships between the "patriotic" journalists and their sources.

In her October 16 account of her interviews with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Miller gave the public an inadvertent look into that closed world of shared secrets and mutual trust.

Libby talked with Miller in two face-to-face meetings and one phone call in 2003, as the Bush administration tried to beat back post-invasion questions about how the president made his case for war, according to Miller's story.

As Miller agreed to let Libby hide behind a misleading identification as a "former Hill staffer", Libby unleashed a harsh attack on one whistleblower, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was challenging Bush's claims that Iraq had sought enriched uranium from the African nation of Niger.

The Miller/Libby interviews included Libby's references to Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, who was an undercover CIA officer working on proliferation issues.

On July 14, 2003, right-wing columnist Robert Novak, claiming to have been briefed by two administration officials, outed Plame in a column that denigrated Wilson with the suggestion that Plame may have arranged the trip to Niger for her husband.

Eventually, this outing of a covert CIA agent prompted a criminal investigation headed by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who is examining a possible administration conspiracy to punish Wilson for his criticism. When Miller refused to testify about her meetings with Libby, Fitzgerald had her jailed for 85 days.

Miller finally relented after Libby encouraged her to do so. "Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning," Libby wrote in a folksy letter. "They turn in clusters because their roots are connected."

While the Plame case has become a major embarrassment for the Bush administration - and now for the New York Times - it has not stopped many of Miller's colleagues from continuing their old roles as "patriotic" journalists opposing the disclosure of too many secrets to the American people.

For instance, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen - who hailed George H W Bush's pardons that destroyed the Iran-Contra investigation in 1992 - adopted a similar stance against Fitzgerald's investigation.

"The best thing Patrick Fitzgerald could do for his country is get out of Washington, return to Chicago and prosecute some real criminals," Cohen wrote in a column entitled "Let This Leak Go".

"As it is, all he has done so far is send Judith Miller of the New York Times to jail and repeatedly haul this or that administration high official before a grand jury, investigating a crime that probably wasn't one in the first place but that now, as is often the case, might have metastasized into some sort of cover-up - but again, of nothing much," Cohen wrote. "Go home, Pat."

If Fitzgerald does as Cohen wishes and closes down the investigation without indictments, the result could well be the continuation of the status quo in Washington. The Bush administration would get to keep control of the secrets and reward friendly "patriotic" journalists with selective leaks - and protected careers.

It is that cozy status quo that is now endangered by the Plame case. But the stakes of the case are even bigger than that, going to the future of American democracy and to two questions in particular:

Will journalists return to the standard of an earlier time when disclosing important facts to the electorate was the goal, rather than Cohen's notion of putting the comfortable relationships between Washington journalists and government officials first?

Put differently, will journalists decide that confronting the powerful with tough questions is the true patriotic test of a journalist?

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GK19Aa01.html

Check out today's very important Five Minutes A Day--

at the World Can't Wait meeting this weekend, Jim Oberg, from Portland Oregon, stated that he believes we have, at the most, six months to deal with the issues that face us, including climate change.

Here's how we destroy the Republican agenda and advance a progressive agenda.

To take action browse http://tinyurl.com/8ghl8

Krugman today - "Time to Leave"

Not long ago wise heads offered some advice to those of us who had argued since 2003 that the Iraq war was sold on false pretenses: give it up. The 2004 election, they said, showed that we would never convince the American people. They suggested that we stop talking about how we got into Iraq and focus instead on what to do next.

It turns out that the wise heads were wrong. A solid majority of Americans now believe that we were misled into war. And it is only now, when the public has realized the truth about the past, that serious discussions about where we are and where we're going are able to get a hearing.

--snip--
Mr. Murtha - a much-decorated veteran who cares deeply about America's fighting men and women - argued that our presence in Iraq is making things worse, not better. Meanwhile, the war is destroying the military he loves. And that's why he wants us out as soon as possible.
--snip--
Some administration officials accused Mr. Murtha of undermining the troops and giving comfort to the enemy. But that sort of thing no longer works, now that the administration has lost the public's trust.

Instead, defenders of our current policy have had to make a substantive argument: we can't leave Iraq now, because a civil war will break out after we're gone. One is tempted to say that they should have thought about that possibility back when they were cheerleading us into this war. But the real question is this: When, exactly, would be a good time to leave Iraq?

The fact is that we're not going to stay in Iraq until we achieve victory, whatever that means in this context. At most, we'll stay until the American military can take no more.

--snip--
So the question isn't whether things will be ugly after American forces leave Iraq. They probably will. The question, instead, is whether it makes sense to keep the war going for another year or two, which is all the time we realistically have.

Pessimists think that Iraq will fall into chaos whenever we leave. If so, we're better off leaving sooner rather than later. As a Marine officer quoted by James Fallows in the current Atlantic Monthly puts it, "We can lose in Iraq and destroy our Army, or we can just lose."

And there's a good case to be made that our departure will actually improve matters. As Mr. Murtha pointed out in his speech, the insurgency derives much of its support from the perception that it's resisting a foreign occupier. Once we're gone, the odds are that Iraqis, who don't have a tradition of religious extremism, will turn on fanatical foreigners like Zarqawi.

The only way to justify staying in Iraq is to make the case that stretching the U.S. army to its breaking point will buy time for something good to happen. I don't think you can make that case convincingly. So Mr. Murtha is right: it's time to leave.

(You have to have NYTimes Select to access the entire article at
http://select.nytimes.com/2005/11/21/opinion/21krugman.html?hp

Even when they're innocent, Bush Administration officials are still guilty of incompetence.

November 21, 2005
Weapons Defense of Phosphorus Use Turns Into Damage Control
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, Nov. 20 - On Nov. 8, Italian public television showed a documentary renewing persistent charges that the United States had used white phosphorus rounds, incendiary munitions that the film incorrectly called chemical weapons, against Iraqis in Falluja last year. Many civilians died of burns, the report said.

The half-hour film was riddled with errors and exaggerations, according to United States officials and independent military experts. But the State Department and Pentagon have so bungled their response - making and then withdrawing incorrect statements about what American troops really did when they fought a pitched battle against insurgents in the rebellious city - that the charges have produced dozens of stories in the foreign news media and on Web sites suggesting that the Americans used banned weapons and tried to cover it up.

The Iraqi government has announced an investigation, and a United Nations spokeswoman has expressed concern.

"It's discredited the American military without any basis in fact," said John E. Pike, an expert on weapons who runs GlobalSecurity.org, an independent clearinghouse for military information. He said the "stupidity and incompetence" of official comments had fueled suspicions of a cover-up.

"The story most people around the world have is that the Americans are up to their old tricks - committing atrocities and lying about it," Mr. Pike said. "And that's completely incorrect."

Daryl G. Kimball, director of the Arms Control Association, a nonprofit organization that researches nuclear issues, was more cautious. In light of the issues raised since the film was shown, he said, the Defense Department, and perhaps an independent body, should review whether American use of white phosphorus had been consistent with international weapons conventions.

"There are legitimate questions that need to be asked," Mr. Kimball said. Given the history of Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons in Iraq, he said, "we have to be extremely careful" to comply with treaties and the rules of war.

At a time when opposition to the war is growing, the white phosphorus issue has reinforced the worst suspicions about American actions.

The documentary was quickly posted as a video file on Web sites worldwide. Bloggers trumpeted its allegations. Foreign newspapers and television reported the charges and rebuttals, with headlines like "The Big White Lie" in The Independent of London.

Officials now acknowledge that the government's initial response was sluggish and misinformed.

"There's so much inaccurate information out there now that I'm not sure we can unscrew it," Lt. Col. Barry Venable, a Defense Department spokesman who has handled many inquiries about white phosphorus, said Friday.

The State Department declined to comment for the record, but an official there said privately that the episode was a public relations failure.

The Italian documentary, titled "Falluja: The Hidden Massacre," included gruesome images of victims of the fierce fighting in the city in November 2004. American and Iraqi troops recaptured the city from insurgents, in battles that destroyed an estimated 60 percent of the buildings.

Opening with prolonged shots of Vietnamese children and villages burned by American use of napalm in 1972, the film suggested an equivalence between Mr. Hussein's use of chemical weapons in the 1980's and the use of white phosphorus by the American-led forces.

It incorrectly referred to white phosphorus shells - a munition of nearly every military commonly used to create smoke screens or fires - as banned chemical weapons.

The film showed disfigured bodies and suggested that hot-burning white phosphorus had melted the flesh while leaving clothing intact. Sigfrido Ranucci, the television correspondent who made the documentary, said in an interview this month that he had received the photographs from an Iraqi doctor. "We are not talking about corpses like the normal deaths in war," he said.

Military veterans familiar with white phosphorus, known to soldiers as "W. P." or "Willie Pete," said it could deliver terrible burns, since an exploding round scatters bits of the compound that burst into flames on exposure to air and can burn into flesh, penetrating to the bone.

But they said white phosphorus would have burned victims' clothing. The bodies in the film appeared to be decomposed, they said.

In their first comments after the Nov. 8 broadcast, American officials made some of those points. But they relied on an inaccurate State Department fact sheet first posted on the Web last December, when similar accusations first surfaced.

The fact sheet said American forces had used white phosphorus shells "very sparingly in Falluja, for illumination purposes, and were fired "to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters."

The Americans stuck to that position last spring after Iraq's Health Ministry claimed it had proof of civilian casualties from the weapons.

After the Italian documentary was broadcast, the American ambassadors to Italy, Ronald P. Spogli, and to Britain, Robert H. Tuttle, echoed the stock defense, denying that white phosphorus munitions had been used against enemy fighters, let alone civilians. At home, on the public radio program "Democracy Now," Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, an American military spokesman, said, "I know of no cases where people were deliberately targeted by the use of white phosphorus."

But those statements were incorrect. Firsthand accounts by American officers in two military journals note that white phosphorus munitions had been aimed directly at insurgents in Falluja to flush them out. War critics and journalists soon discovered those articles.

In the face of such evidence, the Bush administration made an embarrassing public reversal last week. Pentagon spokesmen admitted that white phosphorus had been used directly against Iraqi insurgents. "It's perfectly legitimate to use this stuff against enemy combatants," Colonel Venable said Friday.

While he said he could not rule out that white phosphorus hit some civilians, "U.S. and coalition forces took extraordinary measures to prevent civilian casualties in Falluja."

Ian Fisher contributed reporting from Rome for this article.

Posted by: Matthew Carnicelli at November 21, 2005 08:29 AM

Matt's article is from today's NY Times...

Here's the link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/21/international/21phosphorus.html

Just for keeping up-to-date, here's a poster from dailykos who attended a speech by Richard Clarke...

Richard A. Clarke Speaks Out
by Limelite
Sun Nov 20, 2005 at 09:23:23 PM PDT

Speaking today in front of an audience of several hundred at the Miami Book Fair International, in Miami, Florida, Richard A. Clarke, former National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism in the Clinton and Bush II administrations disclosed details of the inner operations and attitudes regarding national security in both.

Clarke is the author of the current not-too-distant futuristic novel The Scorpion's Gate and is also the author of Against All Enemies:Inside America's War on Terror.

Here's a summary of some of his more interesting remarks.

http://www.dailykos.com/hotlist/add/2005/11/20/232323/42/displaystory//

He has some interesting comments on the current administration tactics.

DEMOCRATIC CHALLENGERS FOR 2006 - THIS LIST FOUND IN THE FORUM SECTION AS WELL.

Patrick Murphy
Pennsylvania's 8th Congressional District
Date: November 1, 2005
Audio: Play
Website: www.murphy06.com www.murphy06.com

Paul Hackett
U.S. Senate - Ohio
Date: October 25, 2005
Audio: Play
Website: www.hackettforohio.comwww.hackettforohio.com

Bryan Lentz
Pennslyvania's 7th Congressional District
Date: October 18, 2005
Audio: Play
Website: www.lentzforcongress.com www.lentzforcongress.com

David Ashe
Virginia's 2nd Congressional District
Date: October 11, 2005
Audio: Play
Website: Click Here

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Eric Massa spent 24 years as an active duty Naval Officer serving all over the world. He also served as Special Assistant to General Wes Clark, in Washington DC, Panama, and in the European Theater of Operations.

After retiring from the Navy, he became a staff member to the House Armed Services Committee, where he expressed grave concerns about the administration’s plans to invade Iraq, and wrote several dissenting documents to Republican lawmakers. When Congress voted to invade Iraq – Massa decided to campaign for real change in Washington.

Massa will challenge Representative Randy Kuhl ® in New York’s 29th District.

Check out his website: www.massaforcongress.comwww.massaforcongress.com

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Andrew Duck’s army career began as a private, working as a Company Clerk. He trained as a Korean linguist, and was eventually commissioned as a Military Intelligence Officer.

A veteran of the Iraq war, Duck served as an intelligence liaison in both Iraq and Kuwait. He currently works for Northrop Grumman as an advisor to the Pentagon on army intelligence issues.

Duck will challenge Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett ® in Maryland's 6th Congressional District.

Want more? Go to Andrew’s website at http://duckforcongress.orghttp://duckforcongress.org

lET ME PUT THE LINKS IN:

Patrick Murphy
Pennsylvania's 8th Congressional District
Date: November 1, 2005
Audio: Play
Website: www.murphy06.com
http://www.murphy06.com

Paul Hackett
U.S. Senate - Ohio
Date: October 25, 2005
Audio: Play
Website: www.hackettforohio.com
http://www.hackettforohio.com

Bryan Lentz
Pennslyvania's 7th Congressional District
Date: October 18, 2005
Audio: Play
Website: www.lentzforcongress.com http://www.lentzforcongress.com

David Ashe
Virginia's 2nd Congressional District
Date: October 11, 2005
Audio: Play
Website: http://www.davidasheforcongress.com/

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Eric Massa spent 24 years as an active duty Naval Officer serving all over the world. He also served as Special Assistant to General Wes Clark, in Washington DC, Panama, and in the European Theater of Operations.

After retiring from the Navy, he became a staff member to the House Armed Services Committee, where he expressed grave concerns about the administration’s plans to invade Iraq, and wrote several dissenting documents to Republican lawmakers. When Congress voted to invade Iraq – Massa decided to campaign for real change in Washington.

Massa will challenge Representative Randy Kuhl ® in New York’s 29th District.

Check out his website: www.massaforcongress.com http://www.massaforcongress.com

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Andrew Duck’s army career began as a private, working as a Company Clerk. He trained as a Korean linguist, and was eventually commissioned as a Military Intelligence Officer.

A veteran of the Iraq war, Duck served as an intelligence liaison in both Iraq and Kuwait. He currently works for Northrop Grumman as an advisor to the Pentagon on army intelligence issues.

Duck will challenge Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett ® in Maryland's 6th Congressional District.

Want more? Go to Andrew’s website at http://duckforcongress.org http://duckforcongress.org

Thanks for the info - still in San Diego.
TV is on here at the hostel & so heard about a mass murder in Tacoma, near where I live - guns are everywhere in America so we have this.
Then Bush came on with his ugly mug - in Mongolia - I couldn't watch. The kid laughed as I made a vomitous face & rushed out of the room.
Then heard about a US convoy being blown up after US killed Iraqis returning from a funeral.
Lovely day start.
Email from Bert telling me that "Curveball" was a sex molester cab driver - on his "water cooler gossip" we based this war.

All is not lost (I hope) - headed for Five Mins. A Day to see what Karen referred to. Liked the photo on the main page.

Thanks to those who posted Krugman & also Richard C. Clarke. Too bad more didn't listen before the war but I will say we all tried!!

There is a Community Journal here at the hostel:
I love this excerpt:

Will those of you who are travelling PLEASE spread the word that many, many people of the USA feel great sadness - for the suffering that has been caused unnecessarily in Iraq - for the arrogance of GW Bush and the results of his decisions - for the philosophy that the USA has the "good" life and that others are lacking (or should be more like us)
-- I believe people are people and that GOODNESS and LOVE CANNOT EVER BE BROUGHT ABOUT BY WAR. When we harm others we only harm ourselves. Happy, safe travels to you all. Peace be with you.

Everyone,

Thanks for the links to these candidates. I once interviewed a person with HAVA who really emphasized the need to really LEARN about the candidates and the issues before you vote.

But just a reminder: the DCP does not formally endorce any candidates.

Citizen Alert!
Can you make a phone call or send an email?

HELP save Louisiana and New Orleans!
Please read this excellent dkos diary:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/11/21/10833/046

ACTION ALERT: call WH & Congress every Tuesday to save Louisiana
by NOdiaspora
Mon Nov 21, 2005 at 08:08:33 AM PDT
Louisiana will die. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. But in the next year or two, if the White House and Congress refuses to commit (and soon!) to a comprehensive Category 5 levee system and coastal restoration plan.

We Louisianians need your help NOW. We need your help to keep the federal government from flipping our property over to oil and gas companies for pennies on the dollar. We need your help to keep south Louisiana from becoming an industrial wasteland.

Louisiana MATTERS! We deserve better. We deserve to continue to call home the vibrant, irreplaceable communities we scratched from the wilderness 200-300 years ago. We are Americans, and we matter.

Starting tomorrow (Tuesday), call and email the WH and Congress. Every single Tuesday until they DO SOMETHING. Flood them with demands that Louisiana be saved. Please.

story & links here:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/11/21/10833/046

Senate GOP kills two bills that would have helped veterans and soldiers

http://bobgeiger.blogspot.com/2005/11/senate-republican...

An amendment (S.Amdt. 2616) sponsored by John Kerry (D-MA) and Barack Obama (D-IL) would have extended the poverty-reducing, earned-income tax credit to the combat pay earned by soldiers on active duty in Iraq.

Posted by: OTV4D at November 21, 2005 10:56 AM

It's good to see your name on the blog. I've wondered how you were doing.

Thanks for the heads up and the link to the diary.

It has lots of good info. Give it a recommend if you have a kos membership.

POLL: HACKETT LEADING DEWINE IN OHIO::

For the third consecutive month, the latest Wall Street Journal "Zogby Battleground State Poll" shows Democrat Paul Hackett, trouncing Incumbent Republican Senator Mike DeWine in a head to head General Election match-up.

The Ohio Iraq War Veteran, Hackett, garners 45.2% while DeWine receives just 35.3% of the vote. This most recent poll shows Hackett with a lead of 9.9%, up from his 5.2% lead in September and 8.3% in last month's poll.

Oncall, have missed you.

You speak with conviction. Immediately, or systematically, our troops must be brought home.
And by systematically, I don't mean a long drawn out process that takes a few years. Six months sounds optimum, as Murtha suggested.

Otherwise we run the risk of politicians manipulating the pullout for political advantage, on both sides of the aisle.

I am very leery of a politician wanting to not give a concrete plan of withdrawal.

Posted by: Truth Shall Prevail at November 21, 2005 12:24 AM

=======================================

Murtha's plan called for a withdrawal of troops over a six month period.

Kerry's plan calls for troops to be out of Iraq by December 2006.

Posted by: dwahzon at November 21, 2005 11:03 AM

Thanks, D!
We're still so busy here in south LA, almost 3 months post-Katrina....don't have the luxury of posting too much yet, but I still take time to browse & read various sites, esp. this one.

The NOLA Times Picayune editorial yesterday was EXCELLENT:::
http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/editorials/index.ssf?/news/content/editorial112005.html

It's time for a nation to return the favor
Sunday, November 20, 2005
The federal government wrapped levees around greater New Orleans so that the rest of the country could share in our bounty.

Americans wanted the oil and gas that flow freely off our shores. They longed for the oysters and shrimp and flaky Gulf fish that live in abundance in our waters. They wanted to ship corn and soybeans and beets down the Mississippi and through our ports. They wanted coffee and steel to flow north through the mouth of the river and into the heartland.

They wanted more than that, though. They wanted to share in our spirit. They wanted to sample the joyous beauty of our jazz and our food. And we were happy to oblige them.

So the federal government built levees and convinced us that we were safe.

We weren't.

The levees, we were told, could stand up to a Category 3 hurricane.

They couldn't.

By the time Katrina surged into New Orleans, it had weakened to Category 3. Yet our levee system wasn't as strong as the Army Corps of Engineers said it was. Barely anchored in mushy soil, the floodwalls gave way.

Our homes and businesses were swamped. Hundreds of our neighbors died.

Now, this metro area is drying off and digging out. Life is going forward. Our heart is beating.

But we need the federal government -- we need our Congress -- to fulfill the promises made to us in the past. We need to be safe. We need to be able to go about our business feeding and fueling the rest of the nation. We need better protection next hurricane season than we had this year. Going forward, we need protection from the fiercest storms, the Category 5 storms that are out there waiting to strike.

Some voices in Washington are arguing against us. We were foolish, they say. We settled in a place that is lower than the sea. We should have expected to drown.

As if choosing to live in one of the nation's great cities amounted to a death wish. As if living in San Francisco or Miami or Boston is any more logical.

Great cities are made by their place and their people, their beauty and their risk. Water flows around and through most of them. And one of the greatest bodies of water in the land flows through this one: the Mississippi.

The federal government decided long ago to try to tame the river and the swampy land spreading out from it. The country needed this waterlogged land of ours to prosper, so that the nation could prosper even more.

Some people in Washington don't seem to remember that. They act as if we are a burden. They act as if we wore our skirts too short and invited trouble.

We can't put up with that. We have to stand up for ourselves. Whether you are back at home or still in exile waiting to return, let Congress know that this metro area must be made safe from future storms. Call and write the leaders who are deciding our fate. Get your family and friends in other states to do the same. Start with members of the Environment and Public Works and Appropriations committees in the Senate, and Transportation and Appropriations in the House. Flood them with mail the way we were flooded by Katrina.

Remind them that this is a singular American city and that this nation still needs what we can give it.

. . . . . . .

• For contact information for key lawmakers click here
http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/editorials/index.ssf?/base/news-2/113247354275600.xml

Suz
Best to Eric but I just met an Iraqi from London who has just visited his country. He stayed 40 days - lst time he could go since Saddam was taken down, but he now says the country is destroyed - holes in the roads, not enough water or electricity. He had alot of family to visit - he has a big family. So he stayed the 40 days, but the visit was in some ways interminable. He had not been able to go there since 1991 and it was completely different (worse).

He said he felt for our soldiers & those from Britain - who sign up for one period of commitment but have to stay longer. We talked about how politicians use religion as a marketing tool, whether Bush in Mongolia or Saddam with a Koran at his trial, & how it's really about oil, companies, holdings.

He is one person that I taught to make pancakes. There were pitchers of batter, containers of syrup, nuts, raisins, chocolate chips, butter - but they had to know how hot the grill, how thick the batter, when to turn the pancakes.

The Iraqi guy made two pancakes but gave me one. One little guy was from Japan (not too old).
I felt such a sense of peace & connection, yet sadly disturbed. We should not be at war - that was not the way to solve this problem.

The young man who is going to Iraq thinks he is doing his duty but he is cannon fodder for rich stupid white men. I for one do not feel one bit safer with US citizens fighting "over there" some place. It makes me horribly angry & frustrated & I think it's unfair to everyone. Someone is doing a good job of brainwashing.

Young men and women are sometimes made to feel guilty or unpatriotic if they don't sacrifice themselves for a greater principle - and they are not doing what they think they are doing. Then the justifiers compare war to war - Bush compares what is going on in the middle east now to WW2. My dad would roll over in his grave.

There is not one war that could not have been avoided had people known how to communicate. I am convinced. Where are the leaders - why do we not learn about geography, language, culture? The Pew survey shows Americans are now becoming more isolationist but even then, there is a selfishness.

I wish I had a dollar for every time I've heard someone talk about solving things here first - it's not possible any more to separate domestic and international - it's a false dichotomy. We are all connected. The Londoner from Iraq is travelling to Mexico today. He will see the poverty that I saw yesterday - juxtaposed with relative affluence here. He will take that perception back to London with him & mull it around in his head with the picture he saw of his country in shambles. He'll have to make sense of it.

We need to be doing the same mental process, especially people like young Eric. & our education & media do not make it easy.

Posted by: ralpheh at November 21, 2005 10:11 AM

Which forum is this candidate info listed? thnx

Folks, we need to stop swinging our blows out here left or right. Frankly, everybody, the fact that people all have presented plans is GREAT NEWS!

The conversation has shifted from "Staying the course" to "WHEN and HOW do we get out!"

You have to give credit to everyone for pushing this issue out there. AND frankly, the fact is that people are making plans does NOT make one plan better than the next. IT makes it a great time to get Congress and the pResident to stop their "unpatriotic" crap and get our troops home!

Deans plan from an interview:
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2005/11/21/122636/38

The Korb article about leaving Iraq:
http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-toptruk4515718nov17,0,7373450.story?coll=ny-viewpoints-headlines

Biden says there aren't enough troops:
http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Biden_delivering_speech_on_Iraq_1121.html

Cindy Sheehan...Maxine Waters...Kerry's plan...
Murtha's plan...Edward's says Bush Lied...DSM...John Conyers...etc..Bush Defends Iraq policy and tries to claim the Democrats had the same evidence.

You might think of this as the equivalent of Boyle's Law (Gas cools off when it expands and heats up when it is compressed. It's Endothermic (absorbs heat) or exothermic (gives off heat).

So...let's attempt to put Boyle's law into polysci.

ALL of these current events started from separate little sparks here or there. You might call them endothermic energy. Because they sure absorbed a lot of energy from the world around them before these little voices out there became self-sustaining heat. These sparks represent different people: us, Kerry, Edwards, Kennedy, Murtha, (listed above)...On their own they were endothermic and not able to sustain enough heat to start a fire in the media and the warmongering administration.

But...after all their separate ideas, their plans, their conferences, their resolutions, they became self sufficient enough to actually PRODUCE heat. It took ALL of them TOGETHER to produce this heat. How was this done? By maintaining constant pressure and constant heat, it has now given them the combustion to become exothermic--meaning they're giving off heat BIG TIME!

One might say they've lit a bonfire under a lot of peoples' butts--including the White House, including the media, and including the people who prior to this sat on the sidelines undecided.

Given Boyles Law and the physics of endothermic and exothermic, I think it's high time to start CONGRATULATING every single one of them for keeping the flame alive and the pressure on. And to stop trying to blow out the flame by eliminating one of the sparks.