Antiwar.com Blog

How the Flypaper Theory is working. If you don’t understand it you’re just unenlightened, like Jim Henley.

Via Micah Holmquist, Mickey Z. on Osama bin Laden vs. Pat Tillman

zeynep zeroes in on the essential question for the US military, which tried to justify firing missiles into a crowd on Haifa Street in Baghdad last weekend:

Simply put, if you cannot tell “insurgents” and “civilians” apart then you’re in the wrong country. Something is very wrong if the “civilians,” “natives,” or “non-combatants” –however you want to name the people on whose behalf you claim to be fighting– are indistinguishable from your “enemies.”

Laura Rosen says the neocons are creating an “enemies list.” Tristero says:

Two thoughts:

1. Huh? They only got around to it now? More proof of their clueless incompetence.

2. If I’m not on that list, I’ll like totally never live it down. Where do I apply?

The competition to be on the list will undoubtedly be fierce.

Some “I was Wrong About the Iraq Invasion” posts, here and here. If anyone knows of more that should be gathered into a Hall of…well, let’s be kind…Bad Judgement or something, let me know. And anyone who feels even the slightest bit of enthusiasm for any war should read this again, and maybe this, especially the ones who are saying they’re surprised at how the Bushistas botched every thing possible, even botching things no one thought botchable. For example, who would have ever thought any bureaucrats could botch spending billions of dollars? That’s got to be a first in the history of bureaucracy.

Scandalette updates: Ken Layne on Rathergate, Rising Hegemon on FatherFReeper of the Year (see William Rivers Pitt on this one, too plus I still think the whole thing is funnier if you read some of this first) and I think we have everything on the Protest Warrior here.

The Emperor is Naked. I’ve been looking for a good place to post this picture that I stole from Sadly, No!

And don’t miss Chris Deliso’s interview with Scott Taylor, the Canadian journalist taken hostage by Ansar Al Islam just before the US attacked Tal Afar – it’s an eye opener!

Matt Yglesias says that if the US pulled out of Iraq, the following would ensue:

Many people would die. Oil supplies disrupted. Regional powers get involved. Instability. Terrorism. Death. Chaos. Destruction.

That’s different from the last year and a half how, exactly?

I posted yesterday about the blogosphere buzz over Julian Sanchez tracking down the identity of the guy at the RNC Convention who kicked a woman while she was on the ground being restrained by three FBI agents. Here are the latest developments:

Jerralyn Merritt of TalkLeft receives the following email from the alleged RNC Kicker:

Ms. Merritt,

I’m Sorry, but you must have the wrong person. (This is a little strange.) Please inform your sources. Thanks.

Scott

Julian Sanchez posting on Reason’s Hit and Run blog receives a rather more elaborate denial, complete with alibi:

Yesterday, I reported that numerous people believed that they knew the identity of the person who appears in this video, purportedly kicking a restrained protester: They believe the person on the tape is Wharton student Scott Robinson, who interned in Washington, D.C. this summer. At this point eight of them, seven D.C. interns and a University of Pennsylvania political science student who says he lived across the hall from Robinson for a year, have provided comments for attribution, claiming to be certain the person on the convention video is the student and intern they know. (Various others have sent anonymous statements to myself and other bloggers to similar effect.)

On Thursday evening (technically very early Friday), I spoke with Robinson. He conceded that he was in New York at the time, volunteering at the Republican National Convention, but says that he was not at the Andy Card speech where the incident took place around noon that Wednesday. He said he had been out late Tuesday night and didn’t wake up before midday, as he was only working evenings. He also gave me the name of the Wharton fraternity brother with whom he stayed that week, with whom he said he’d been at the time of the Card event. That person, whose name I’m omitting at his request, declined to say anything on the record when contacted via email.
Posted by Julian Sanchez at September 17, 2004 04:12 PM

A person claiming to be from the NTUF has posted on Julian’s original Hit and Run thread, as well as my blog the following disclaimer:

For the record, Scott Robinson left NTU Foundation’s internship program well before the GOP convention. Whether or not Mr. Robinson is indeed the same person depicted in the convention video, National Taxpayers Union and National Taxpayers Union Foundation repudiate violence in all forms.

Mr. Robinson was a summer intern with NTU. He participated in a fellowship program, which was sponsored by an outside organization. That program brought him to Washington in mid-June of this year. That internship ended–as planned–in early August, several weeks before the alleged incident in New York City.

If you have additional concerns, you should contact the law enforcement agencies that may be involved to determine the status of any legal proceedings.

It is a shame that the original source of this story, Reason Hit and Run, didn’t adequately clarify the fact that Mr. Robinson was long gone from our organization before the GOP convention and this chain of blogged events occurred.

Pete Sepp
Vice President for Communications
National Taxpayers Union and Foundation

Posted by: Pete Sepp | September 16, 2004 10:55 PM

The above post by Mr. Sepp is from my blog. The post on Hit and Run is substantially the same, but Hit and Run doesn’t have permalinks to comments, so you’ll have to find it in the thread. As you page through the Hit and Run thread, you might watch for a poster who claims to be Dave Stanley, CEO of the NTUF, saying Sepp was the photo cropper who trimmed Mr. Robinson right out of the intern group photo on the NTUF’s website – before – after. From this, we might suspect Pete of believing the intern in the picture was the kicker.

Anyway, researching Mr. Robinson has been educational. Did you know there’s a group called The Protest Warriors, motto: Fighting the left….doing it right. Robinson belongs to the Penn chapter of this organisation:

Anyone who wants to is welcome to join our U of Penn chapter for the periodic updates. There are numerous other towns and colleges with chapters. You can browse by state. Just go to this link and click on “register”. There are no obligations and if you decide to, I’m sure that you will be glad that you did. Pass this on the word to fellow anti-protesters…..”
posted by Scott Robinson at 12:35 PM | 0 comments

which has this to say on it’s homepage about the RNC:

Operation Liberty Rising

On August 29th, the RNC will begin, and ProtestWarrior will be there to take on the hordes of leftists whose entire goal is to silence, to hate, to scream out of existence the idea that freedom can flourish throughout the world. Details to come…

Who knew?

The Protest Warriors have a manly logo that prevents anyone mistaking them for lefty peacenik types.

So, just because a Protest Warrior was at the RNC convention and a bunch of his friends and coworkers say they think it’s him in the kicking video doesn’t mean it’s true.

Here’s what Bush’s WMD hysteria is reduced to:

U.S. weapons inspector to find Iraq had no WMD, only intentions

Drafts of a report from the top U.S. inspector in Iraq conclude there were no weapons stockpiles, but say there are signs the fallen Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had dormant programs he hoped to revive at a later time, according to people familiar with the findings.

So, I guess this quote from the ScareMonger-In-Chief: “….dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities…” should properly read ….dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related dormant program inactivities.

Can one person’s vote make a difference for President?

West Virginia GOP elector Richard Robb says he is ready to prove it can.

As a Republican elector, Robb will get to vote as one of 538 members of the Electoral College in actually deciding who becomes President. According to polls, West Virginia is currently floating along in the Bush column. If Bush wins, Robb is not ready to vote for him.

Robb, who has served for the past 28 years as mayor of South Charleston, said he has long had concerns about the administration’s fiscal policies and the decision to go to war in Iraq.

The neocon New York Sun has an excellent and surprisingly favorable article on Robb.

Thanks to Richard Winger of Ballot Access News for this item.

It looks like Julian Sanchez has got the goods on the guy at the RNC who kicked the female protester who was already on the ground. Turns out he’s a hard-core Republican Bushista who interns at the National Taxpayers Union. Check out the links in Julian’s post, especially the one that shows how the NTUF just cropped Scott “Kicking Women for Bush” Robinson out of the intern picture on their website.