Antiwar.com Blog

Helping to ensure passage of the Iraqi Constititution, the Iraqi government has failed to put any voting stations in the Sunni cities of Haditha, Hit, Rawa, Qaim, Ana, Baghdadi and the villages around them.

“There aren’t actually any voting centers or even voting sheets in these cities … Nobody knows how and where to vote if they decide to,” said Mahmoud Salman al-Ani, a human rights activist in Ramadi.

In Ramadi, a group of residents said they had walked around their neighborhood looking for a voting center and not found one.

The Bush crew has done it again (remember the plastic turkey on Thanksgiving?): (via Think Progress)

Earlier today, President Bush held an “impromptu” public teleconference with a group of U.S. soldiers based in Tikrit, Iraq.

Pentagon communications aide Allison Barber “insisted the questions were not rehearsed. The military had been told ahead of time only about topics the president might want to talk about, not specific questions. ‘We just knew broad themes,’ Barber said.”

Yet reporters could clearly hear White House handlers, including Barber herself, prepping the troops for President Bush’s photo-op:

WH Pooler Geoff Earle of the New York Post writes of the teleconference: “The soldiers, nine U.S. men and one U.S. woman, plus an Iraqi, had been tipped off in advance about the questions in the highly scripted event. Allison Barber, deputy assistant to the Secretary of Defense for internal communication, could be heard asking one soldier before the start of the event, “Who are we going to give that [question] to?”

Read the rest here. Some of the audio in question here.
Update: It turns out the Turkey was real, just not for sharing with the soldiers. And the PR stunt was still pathetic.
Thanks to some jerk for the correction.

Boy, the liberventionists sure picked a great time to become conservatives. Howard Fineman at MSNBC says the “conservative coalition” has had it. Wouldn’t that be great? The oddball grouping of fundamentalist crazies, the warfare mercantilists, fiscal conservatives and libertarians was in jeopardy after the fall of Communism when quite a few on the right who had believed William F. Buckley, when he said that the “totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores” was strictly a temporary measure found themselves disappointed.

The imperial rule of Bill “burn and machine gun and call it suicide” Clinton helped keep the structure of the right intact temporarily, but the damage had already been done. George W. Bush and his neoconservative cronies’ “strategic disaster” of a war in Iraq, as former Reagan-era NSA director William Odom has called it, has finished the job.

The neocons, having created the war in Iraq, have now turned on Bush for having it waged, and officially abandoned him:

“Their neo-Wilsonian theory is correct, they insist, but the execution was botched by a Bush team that has turned out to be incompetent, crony-filled, corrupt, unimaginative and weak over a wide range of issues.

The flight of the neocons – just read a recent Weekly Standard to see what I am talking about – is one of only many indications that the long-predicted “conservative crackup” is at hand.”

Fineman is adding the neocons to the religious crazies who are mad about Harriet Myers’ nomination to the Supreme Court, businessmen (presumably from companies other than Halliburton) who are embarrassed by the disastrous handling of Hurricane Katrina, fiscal conservatives worried about funny money, and those he calls “isolationists” (the old smear term against those who advocate political “independence“).

Traditional establishment chessboard types like Zbigniew Brzezinski haven’t liked him since he went to Iraq instead of taking over all of Central Asia.

So who are the 40% of people left supporting George W. Bush and the stupidest foreign policy since McKinley waged aggressive war in the Philippines to Christianize the Catholics?

This seems like a pretty good sample: American government school graduates who think Iran is a continent in the South Pacific.

Hey, Everybody! Check out Antiwar.com’s new regular writer Charles Pena. He is just the kind of heavy hitter we like to have around here: a senior fellow with the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, an adviser to the Straus Military Reform Project and an analyst for MSNBC television. Pena is the co-author of Exiting Iraq: Why the U.S. Must End the Military Occupation and Renew the War Against al-Qaeda, and author of the upcoming Winning the Un-War: A New Strategy for the War on Terrorism.

His new column is called Dispatches from the Un-War, and today’s, A New York State of Mind, deals with the hoax terror threat in New York last week.

Score one for Anti-interventionism!

You’re going to indict Michael Ledeen and his CIA buddies for forging those Niger uranium documents, right?

As quoted in the Wikipedia entry for Yellowcake forgery:

In an interview on July 26, 2005, Cannistraro’s business partner and columnist for the “American Conservative” magazine, former CIA counter terrorism officer Philip Giraldi, confirmed to Scott Horton that the forgeries were produced by “a couple of former CIA officers who are familiar with that part of the world who are associated with a certain well-known neoconservative who has close connections with Italy.” When Horton said that must be Ledeen, he confirmed it, and added that the ex-CIA officers, “also had some equity interests, shall we say, with the operation. A lot of these people are in consulting positions, and they get various, shall we say, emoluments in overseas accounts, and that kind of thing.” [9]

In a second interview with Horton, Giraldi elaborated to say that Ledeen and his former CIA friends worked with Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress. “These people did it probably for a couple of reasons, but one of the reasons was that these people were involved, through the neoconservatives, with the Iraqi National Congress and Chalabi and had a financial interest in cranking up the pressure against Saddam Hussein and potentially going to war with him.” [10]

Or is it a crime to lie a country into war?

Short mp3 of the relevant Giraldi quotes here.

Your one stop shop for analysis of the denouement of Patrick Fitzgerald’s grand jury investigation is Jane Hamsher’s blog firedoglake. ReddHedd has been a posting machine the last few days.

The news is flying fast and furious this evening: Raw Story has an excerpt from tomorrow’s WSJ saying that the investigation may have broadened to include the whole of the White House Iraq Group.

Is Fitzgerald moving ever closer to the Niger uranium scammers? We can hope. As Josh Marshall says:

But this WHIG thing is a whole ‘nother level of hurt.

This group was the organizational team, the core group behind all the shameless crap that went down in the lead up to the Iraq war — the lies about the cooked up Niger story, everything. If Fitzgerald has lassoed this operation into a criminal conspiracy, the veil of protective secrecy in which the whole operation is still shrouded will be pulled back. Depositions and sworn statements in on-going investigations have a way of doing that. Ask Bill Clinton. Every key person in the White House will be touched by it. And all sorts of ugly tales could spill out.

Digby connects the dots. Pass the popcorn!

Here’s an extra helping of schadenfreude, as Jonathan Schwarz oh-so-cruelly interrupts Colin Powell’s attempted image rehabilitation:

Yesterday I quietly and calmly explained that COLIN POWELL IS A GIGANTIC ERUPTING GEYSER OF LIES. Today I thought it might be fun to soberly and carefully describe why POWELL’S REAL NAME IS MR. BULLSHIT GOT-LIES PINOCCHIO.

Go, Jonathan! Kick ’em while they’re down! Don’t let ’em get up!