The Psychogeezer™ is lucky that Iraqis can’t vote in our election:

In an interview with Der Spiegel released on Saturday, Maliki said he wanted U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible.

“U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.” […]

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Working at home today, and MSNBC is all atwitter about this:

“In the area of security cooperation, the [U.S.] president and the [Iraqi] prime minister agreed that improving conditions should allow for the agreements now under negotiation to include a general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals,” the statement said. It said those goals include turning over more control to Iraqi security forces and “the further reduction of U.S. combat forces from Iraq.”

A “general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals.”  Have you ever seen so many fucking qualifiers?

It is endlessly amusing that the Iraqis continue to believe the Dear Leader and the Dark Lord will give them back their country.  Or their oil.

Bush, Maliki Agree on ‘Time Horizon’ for U.S. Troop Withdrawals [Washington Post]

Despite the MSM blackout on his book - which argues the Iraq war was premeditated murder, opening the door for local prosecutors to indict BushCo for felony homicide - sales of Vincent Bugliosi’s learned polemic and instruction manual are skyrocketing, fueled by the aching hunger of Americans to see Caligutard and his wanton goons brought to justice.

ABC Radio refused to air advertisements for the book during Don Imus’ radio show, probably because it would not be of interest to people who tune into Imus to hear him shout racial epithets. Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and MSNBC both declined to book Bugliosi, author of the seminal Helter Skelter on their programs. Why is an intriguing and provocative angle on the greatest war crime of the 21st Century of no interest to the MSM?

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And the hits just keep coming from the Bush Crime Syndicate:

On Monday at the White House press briefing, Press Secretary Dana Perino declined to answer when I asked her whether the White House would apologize for last Friday’s raid by U.S. forces in Iraq that reportedly killed a relative of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

The slain man, Ali Abdul Hussein al-Maliki, was described as the prime minister’s cousin in recent reports by McClatchy and the Washington Post. According to McClatchy, at the time of his death, the man was working as a security guard in a villa owned by the prime minister’s sister in Janaja, a town in Karbala Province. Responsibility for security in Karbala Province was supposedly handed over to the Iraqi government in October 2007, but Iraqi officials have claimed that last Friday’s raid was conducted without their knowledge or approval.

Here is my exchange with Ms. Perino:

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Another in our series of letters to the Iraq War architects and cheerleaders to ask them whether they’ve sent some of the money they’ve made off the war to help the families of the soldiers and innocent Iraqis they helped to kill. Today, David Broder.

Dear Mr. Broder:

You’ve been a supporter of the Iraq War since the beginning. As even you will admit, it now looks like the whole thing was a waste of time - Saddam’s Iraq turned out to be a third-rate military power with no WMD and no nuke program.

Unfortunately, the war has cost the lives of thousands of our soldiers and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis. Sure Saddam was a brutal dictator, but there would have been a lot less death and destruction had we left him in power.

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Nobody could have predicted that two sociopathic former oil executives, when put in charge of the only superpower in the world, would invade a sovereign oil-rich Middle Eastern nation for the benefit of oil companies:

BAGHDAD — Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.

Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat.

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The goal is to contact all the Iraq War architects and cheerleaders to ask them to consider sending some of the money they’ve made off the war to help the families of the soldiers and innocent Iraqis they helped kill. For no particular reason, we start with Richard Cohen of the Washington Post.

Dear Mr. Cohen:

You’ve been a supporter of the Iraq War since before it started. You even described our killing of innocent Iraqis as “therapeutic” as recently as November of 2006.

At this point we can all pretty much agree that the war was sold to (most of) the nation by a pack of lies promulgated by the Bush Administration. Sadly, you fell for it and helped start and sustain the war.

I’m guessing you’ve made some money (salary, speaking fees, perhaps more) writing about and discussing the Iraq War. Have you donated any of this money to the families of the soldiers and innocent Iraqis whose lives you helped end?

Please let me know: email is photonyc@gmail.com. Thanks.

Of course, I’ll let you know what happens. Please feel free to suggest others I should contact.

Patriot dockers defied an arbitrator’s admonition today, leaving cranes idle all along Pacific Coast as an estimated 25,000 members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) left their jobs in a “No Peace, No Work” mobilization.

In all, the dockers denied the Boy Fuhrer and his war machine the use of 29 ports in California, Oregon and Washington, from which most of the munitions from the war are shipped. San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center quoted Clarence Thomas of the ILWU executive board today saying, “The rank and file action against the war is indeed happening right now”, he said. And today the workers will write history. Read the rest of this entry »

Posts on this blog usually fall into a few reliable categories - the Dear Leader’s stupid war, the hooker usage of politicians, the Barry Hussein/Hillary cage match, the Psychogeezer, and assfucking.  So it’s nice when we can economize and hit more than one of these themes at a time:

Some explosive testimony this afternoon from a panel of whistleblowers testifying before a Senate committee on contractor abuse in Iraq.

A contractor died when a DynCorp manager used an employee’s armored car to transport prostitutes, according to Barry Halley, a Worldwide Network Services employee working under a DynCorp subcontract.

“DynCorp’s site manager was involved in bringing prostitutes into hotels operated by DynCorp. A co-worker unrelated to the ring was killed when he was travelling in an unsecure car and shot performing a high-risk mission. I believe that my co-worker could have survived if he had been riding in an armored car. At the time, the armored car that he would otherwise have been riding in was being used by the contractor’s manager to transport prostitutes from Kuwait to Baghdad.“ 

More contractor recklessness after the jump.

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Five years and a month ago George W. Bush launched a war to get rid of Saddam and make the Iraqi people’s lives better. How’s that working out?

BAGHDAD — Even as American and Iraqi troops are fighting to establish control of the Sadr City section of this capital, the Iraqi government’s program to restore basic services like electricity, sewage and trash collection is lagging, jeopardizing the effort to win over the area’s wary residents.

For weeks, there have been reports that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is preparing to move ahead with a multimillion-dollar program to rebuild the southern swath of Sadr City, which is currently occupied by Iraqi and American troops.

But almost a month after American and Iraqi forces pushed into the area, there are no signs of reconstruction. Instead, the streets are filled with mounds of trash and bubbling pools of sewage. Many neighborhoods are still without electricity, and many residents are too afraid to brave the cross-fire to seek medical care. Iraqi public works officials, apparently fearful of the fighting, rarely seem to show up at work, and the Iraqi government insists the area is not safe enough for repairs to begin.

No one could have predicted ….

And now Condi’s gone and called Muqtada al Sadr a coward.

In Baghdad, Struggle Ties Security to Basic Services [NYT] via Atrios