Solomon Burke
A Change is Gonna Come

Am I to understand that this guy, a former Baathist Shiite Major General in Saddam’s military, and who was a prisoner of the U.S. during the 1991 Gulf war, is going to be in charge of the new coalition forces???????

BAGHDAD, Iraq: Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has named an Iraqi general who was taken as prisoner of war by U.S. troops during the 1991 Gulf war as the commander of the new security plan that aims to restore stability in the Iraqi capital, military officers said Wednesday.

Lt. Gen. Aboud Gambar was chosen by al-Maliki on Saturday the day the prime minister said Iraqi forces would launch a major drive to quell the violence in the capital, mainly the work of al-Qaida in Iraq and allied Sunni insurgent groups and the Shiite Mahdi Army militia, which has been blamed for much of the sectarian violence in the capital.

Gambar will have two assistants, one from the police and one from the army, the military officers said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to reveal the information.

Gambar will report directly to al-Maliki, the commander general of the armed forces.

The little known Gambar, a Shiite Muslim, is a former major general in one of Saddam Hussein’s infantry divisions but retired before the fall of the Baath Party regime in the April 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

Gambar was taken prisoner of war by U.S. troops that ended a seven-month Iraqi occupation of the oil-rich state of Kuwait in March 1991, the officers said. He was released shortly after the war ended.

The general also served in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq that left one million people dead on both sides.

Source: International Herald Tribune

But it’s not retro-active….. so Cunningham will continue to collect his $64,000. It’s a step in the right direction, though.

WASHINGTON - Members of Congress convicted of serious crimes would lose their taxpayer-paid pensions, sometimes totaling more than $100,000 a year, under a measure unanimously approved by the Senate Friday.

The 87-0 vote to deprive lawbreaking lawmakers of their retirement benefits was part of a comprehensive ethics and lobbying bill that the Senate has taken up as its first piece of legislation in the new Democratic-controlled Congress.

“There’s something that really grates in the notion that you can put the public’s trust and the public’s business up for sale and then walk away and have the people that you betrayed turn around and pay for you to be able to have a fat pension,” said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., author of the amendment.

Kerry said there were at least 20 lawmakers convicted of serious crimes receiving pensions, some as high as $125,000 a year.

Read more here

The escalation began before he even gave his speech. Stick a fork in democracy and call it done.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 10, 2007 - President Bush’s speech may be scheduled for tonight, but the troop surge in Iraq is already under way.

ABC News has learned that the “surge” Bush is expected to announce in a prime time speech tonight has already begun. Ninety advance troops from the 82nd Airborne Division arrived in Baghdad Wednesday.

An additional battalion of roughly 800 troops from the same division are expected to arrive in Baghdad Thursday. Eighty percent of the sectarian violence occurs within a 30-mile radius of Baghdad, so that is where most of the additional troops will be concentrated.

It is the first small wave of troops in a new White House strategy that is expected to put more than 20,000 additional U.S. troops on the ground in Iraq and likely require new call-ups of the National Guard.

The president is expected to deliver his announcement about the troop increase, a plan that has already met with stiff criticism from many members of Congress, in a speech tonight from the White House.

Source: ABCNews

Former President George H.W. Bush was named chairman of the board of the National Constitution Center on Thursday, a selection that highlights his civic leadership, museum officials said.

“One of our core values is the importance of active citizenship and no American exemplifies that ethic better than President Bush,” said Joseph Torsella, the center’s president and chief executive officer. “By a lifetime of service, he has come to occupy a special and beloved place in American life.”

Bush, who is recovering from hip replacement surgery and could not attend Thursday’s announcement, called the Constitution Center a “jewel of America that brings the message of our Constitution, a timeless document which continues to change and transform our world, to the nation,” according to a statement.

He succeeds Vanguard Group Inc. founder John Bogle, who has served as chairman since September 1999, and has been named chairman emeritus.

Bush has been associated with the National Constitution Center since its creation by the Constitutional Heritage Act in 1988, passed when he was vice president. He has taken part in public service announcements and promotional videos about the center, and has served for 10 years on the center’s National Honorary Committee with his wife, Barbara, and all living former presidents and their wives.

The Constitution Center, a nonprofit organization founded in 2003, is dedicated to increasing public understanding of the Constitution. It contains a multimedia show, more than 100 exhibits on constitutional history, and artifacts including tickets to President Andrew Johnson’s 1868 impeachment trial, tools used by the Watergate burglars and a ballot from the 2000 presidential election.

Gee, they’ll have to build a new wing just to hold all the information regarding his son’s trampling of the constitution.

Read more here

From the article:
This group has come from nowhere,” Iraq’s Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told ABC News. “They were unwilling to reveal their identity and entered the airport, which is a very sensitive area, and there was a response by the local forces.”

It is unclear where the U.S. troops came from - even local U.S. officials contacted by the Kurdish authorities had no knowledge of the armed men.

I think this is more of George’s escalation plan. Northern Iraq is stable…..so are they trying to destablize it?

U.S. troops staged two secret raids in northern [tag]Iraq today[/tag], ABC News has learned, capturing as many as six Iranians and only narrowly avoiding a gun battle with local security forces, according to the Iraqi foreign ministry and local officials in northern Iraq’s Kurdish region.

The Iranian government has made an official complaint to the government in Baghdad, which the Iraqi Foreign Ministry has relayed to the U.S. Embassy. In the first raid, the U.S. troops stormed a building that houses the Iranian liaison office in the northern city of Irbil at 3 a.m. local time, where they detained at least five Iranians and also confiscated computers and documents.

Read more at ABCNews

WASHINGTON, Jan. 11 - The Bush administration has set up a secret war room in a Virginia suburb where it is assembling evidence to prosecute high-ranking detainees from Al Qaeda including the man accused of being the mastermind of the September 2001 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, government officials said this week.

The effort to sift the classified files of the Pentagon, F.B.I., C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies amounts to the first concrete steps that the government has taken to press ahead with war crimes trials of high-level terror suspects under a plan announced by President Bush in a speech last September.

At the time, Mr. Bush said that Mr. Mohammed and 13 other high-level terror suspects had been transferred from secret prisons around the world to the military detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where they would be held pending trial.

Read more at the NYTimes

A good read with great links.

If you want to see the depravity and filth that festers in the core of the Bush Administration made plain , read the story below. The regimen of torture and suffering being inflicted on captives in Bush’s War of Terror is not some sort of aberrant overreaction to concerns about national security and public safety: these specifically designed, deliberately induced tortures are the expression of the President’s deepest desires and clearly stated wishes. Just as the war of aggression in Iraq is his war, these crimes against humanity are his crimes. They are happening because he wants them too.

The only possible response of a sane society to the depredations of this man is his impeachment and removal from power. There is no other course of action for any responsible, patriotic member of Congress to take. Unfortunately, the American Establishment has clearly gone insane - so deranged from decades of bloated power and privilege that it can no longer act even to save itself from the general ruin that Bush is bringing upon the country. Unfortunately, there are very, very few responsible, patriotic members of Congress.

Witness the empty bluster behind the latest Democratic “opposition”: in the face of Bush’s imminent escalation of the war - with a “surge” that cannot possibly succeed in doing anything but increasing the bloodshed and hatred in the other nation he has ruined - they are offering a “series of symbolic votes” that “would do nothing in practical terms” to stop or even hinder this insane course, as the NY Times reports. The ever-hapless hairpiece hero, Joe Biden, believes this witless flapping of arms will “demonstrate to the president that he’s on his own” - a realization that will somehow “spark real change.”

But Bush already believes he is on his own - and he likes that way. He has already asserted that he will continue his course in Iraq even if he is deserted by everyone but his wife and dog. And his little mouthpiece, Tony Snow, has just announced that the President is an autocrat who cannot be restrained by any action of Congress whatsoever: “The President has the ability to exercise his own authority if he thinks Congress has voted the wrong way.” (Via Cenk Uygur by way of Steve Gilliard.)

“Symbolic votes” won’t stop Bush. Even substantive actions - such as cutting off funding - will not stop him. He will clearly provoke a constitutional crisis and continue the war (and the tortures in his gulag) by any means necessary. He is probably willing to attempt to overthrow the government altogether with a military coup if he feels he is being thwarted in his “sacred duty as Commander-in-Chief to protect the nation,” which, in his mind, means waging aggressive war, torturing people, spying on us all and looting the treasury on behalf of his cronies. The only possible way to derail his destructive and criminal course is impeachment.

Read the rest of this article here
Please do follow this link and be sure to read Guantanmo’s Lost Souls.

Tears run from the eyes of U.S. President George W. Bush during a ceremony in honor of Medal of Honor winner Marine Cpl. Jason Dunham in the East room of the White House in Washington, January 11, 2007. Cpl. Dunham was killed when he jumped on a grenade to save fellow members of his Marine patrol while serving in Iraq. REUTERS/Jim Bourg (UNITED STATES)

America is crying too, thanks to this man. The difference is that he and his ilk have profited personally from the blood of others without sending their family members to war. Even the Royal Family in England said they were thinking of sending their princes Harry and William to Iraq. How much have his family and friends made off the war? I know how many people from the US have died and generally how many Iraqis have died. I would like to divide the money made by the lives lost and find out what a life cost in this war. Believe me the world has been crying for a while now and we see no end in sight. This is the man that can stop it, but he won-t. This is a picture of one sad example of a man. I hope he cries a lot more but I doubt it.

H/T Joe for this post

I might add, I heard a VietNam vet on Keith Olbermann who had received the Medal of Honor, and he was disgusted by this ceremony. He stated they made a big tadoo about introducing the Senators who were there, and it was not what it should have been. A ceremony to honor THE SOLDIER, not the congress people or Bush. Sickening……

So let me get this straight…….someone attacked the toilets?

ATHENS, Greece - An anti-tank shell was fired at the U.S. Embassy early Friday, striking the front of the building but causing no injuries. A senior police official said the blast was an act of terrorism, raising fears of a resurgence of far-left Greek militant groups.

Police cordoned off streets around the heavily guarded building after the explosion shortly before 6 a.m. The shell struck the third floor and smashed glass in nearby buildings.

Investigators were examining what they believed was the device used to fire the rocket shell from a construction site near the embassy.

“This is an act of terrorism. We don-t know where from,” Attica Police Chief Asimakis Golfis said. “There was a shell that exploded in the toilets of the building … It was fired from street level.”

Read more at MSNBCNews