Red State Renegade

Seymour Hersch, who exposed the My Lai Massacre in the Vietnam war, and the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq, has long insisted that the Bush administration is guilty of war crimes and maintains that the US government has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib.

Hersh, who has been described by hard-core neocons as “the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist,” spoke before the election, in the spirit of hopefulness:

“You cannot believe how many people have told me to call them on 20 January [the date of Obama’s inauguration]… [Saying] You wanna know about abuses and violations? Call me then.”

Because Cheney’s always been known as a diplomat!

Wow…King of the Neocons Dick Cheney will be sent to the Caucasus war zone as head of the diplomatic team!

You can’t make this stuff up…

Recent developments pointing to the leadup to an attack on Iran:

(1) Iran’s army designated a terrorist group:

In Mid August, the administration, in a suprisingly quiet manner, designated Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, the country’s 125,000-strong elite military branch, as a “specially designated global terrorist,” the first time any national army has been designated a terrorist group.

Traditionally a president needed authorization from Congress to go to war. This changed after 9-11, with the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) passed in 2001 by a fearful congress, authorizing the administration to attack terrorist groups and the nations that harbor them. Because two AUMFs is better than one, another AUMF was passed in 2002, which stated:

Whereas the President has authority under the Constitution to take action in order to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States, as Congress recognized in the joint resolution on Authorization for Use of Military Force

Can you connect the dots? By designating the Iranian army a terrorist group, it will make it easier for the Neo-cons to bomb Iran without an authorization from Congress.

(2) The U.S. announced new plans to build military base on the Iranian border:

No shit. Announced this week, the base will be built by November. According to the military, the base is:

“not really permanent, although it will be manned 24/7 and will be used for as long as necessary.”

(3) British Troops that were just headed home from Basra are now headed to the Iran border:

In early September, a much publicized pullout of British troops from Basra made the news, symbolically allaying concerns amongst the British people regarding contnued involvment in this quagmire. Despite British commanders absolutely ripping apart the US war policy, the news was spun into a sign of progress by the War crowd.

Now, at least some of the Basra force has been re-deployed along the Iran border.

(4) General Davis Petraeus strongly implied this week that we would need to work on the Iran threat within the borders of Iran (and not diplomatically):

General Petraeus, also called the GGS (Greek God of Surge) appeared this week in an exclusive ‘Faux’ news’ interview, which would have made the Soviet Information Ministry proud about 40 years ago.

In the exchange, ironically called ‘Briefing of America’ (how about ‘Brainwashing of America’?), the GGS was pressed by Minister of Propaganda Brit Hume:

HUME: Do the rules of engagement that you’re operating under allow you do to what you think you need to do to suppress this activity on the part of Iran, or perhaps do you need assistance from military not under your command to do this?

PETRAEUS: They allow us to do what we need to do inside Iraq.

HUME:Is that enough in your view?

PETRAEUS: Well, that’s what I’m responsible for, and again, when I have concerns about something beyond that, I take them to my boss . . . and in fact, we have shared our concerns with him and with the chain of command, and there is a pretty hard look ongoing at that particular situation.

HUME: That sounds pretty disturbing, Ambassador Crocker — that we are confronting with Iran now a situation where it doesn’t appear that we have any diplomatic possibilities to suppress this activity by Iran, or do we?

UPDATE: SECONDS AFTER I POSTED THIS, I SAW THE FOLLOWING HEADLINE:

“U.S. Officials Begin Crafting Iran Bombing Plan”

Oddly enough, Faux news blames the necessity of an Iran attack on Germany:

“A recent decision by German officials to withhold support for any new sanctions against Iran has pushed a broad spectrum of officials in Washington to develop potential scenarios for a military attack on the Islamic regime”

“How many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?”

This week video surfaced from 1994 of Dick Cheney being asked about the decision to NOT continue on into Baghdad at the end of Gulf War I.

As I understand it, he was speaking to the “Association of Wingnuts Who Feel We Should Invade The Rest of The World,” or American Enterprise Institute for short:

Q: Do you think the U.S., or U.N. forces, should have moved into Baghdad?

A: No.

Q: Why not?

A: Because if we’d gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn’t have been anybody else with us. There would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq.

Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off: part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of it — eastern Iraq — the Iranians would like to claim, they fought over it for eight years. In the north you’ve got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey.

It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.

The other thing was casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action, and for their families — it wasn’t a cheap war. And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?

Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right.

Tell the Democratic Movement that you are sick of their spinelessness!

Are you on the email lists of MoveOn, Edward Kennedy, John Edwards or (gasp) John Kerry? Perhaps you receive email (or regular mail) asking you to sign petitions, or ’send a message’ to someone regarding an issue that bothers progressives?

I just received a message from Edward Kennedy (www.democraticmajority.com) regarding Dick Cheney’s snub of Executive Order 12958, requiring accounting of classification of documents by the executive branch, which Cheney openly has ignored since 2003 and now claims his office does not fall under.

The message includes references to his other violations:

“Under Dick Cheney’s watch, some of our country’s most disgraceful moments have happened — from Guantanamo Bay to Abu Ghraib. Because of him, the Bush administration started in secrecy, marched to war in secrecy and will end in secrecy, all with great damage to our Constitution, to our government and to the American people.”

It asks me to sign (yet another) petition to:
“Tell Vice President Cheney he’s not above the Constitution. He can’t rewrite the Constitution to suit himself.”

Supposedly they will send a copy of the Constitution to Mr. Cheney along with all our signatures.

Well if Mr. Cheney is in violation of the Constitution, why are we sending him letters? We’ve been doing that for seven years now and he’s just sneering at them and piling them up in his Mosler safes so that he’ll have something to wipe his ass with when hes done wiping with the Constitution!

Cheney was blatantly and openly challenging the law here. And when the federal agency responsible for enforcing the law went after him, he officially suggested abolishing the agency!

I am SICK of hearing that all we can do is write letters or petitions. That’s pathetic (or as Alberto Gonzales said of the Geneva Conventions, that’s “quaint”).

So this time, rather than sign the letter (like a good little Dem), I unsubscribed to Kennedy’s emails, and explained why in a short letter:

I AM the democratic majority. But I am sick of this congress backing down when it comes to matters of the war, matters involving torture, wiretapping. Why would impeachment be off the table when these guys have very likely broken many laws? Let’s stop writing letters and petitions to these crooks and start investigating and indicting them. Have a spine, congress! That’s what we thought we would get when we elected you!

Maybe if we all start rebelling in this way they will actually get scared and do something.

What do you think?