A few diaries have been made exposing a controversy over Marines passing out coins in Fallujah inscribed with a verse from a Christian bible. Having spent six years in the Marine Corps reserves, and now over four years active duty US Army I KNEW this was not sanctioned by the US military. So I decided to look further and stay on top of the story. At first I suspected insurgents were gaining sophistication and implementing PSYOPS (psychological operations).

As expected there were some who automatically went into reaction mode, believing this is a larger scale, secret operation to convert the Muslim world to Christianity. PLEASE give those of us more serve more credit than that. We do have a brain, save the few idiots that can be found in any large organization.

More of the military carrying out the "crusades" and the muslim resentment of it. It is real and it is wrong. Yes there are Christian Iraqis and there are very few of them, but if they want to convert Muslims to Christianity then they should be the ones doing it, not military members of our Armed forces on security patrols or at check points anywhere in Iraq while on or off duty.

We supposedly took out the Saddam Hussein regime for WMDs which we now know did not exist, then it became to establish a democracy in the Middle East or more commoningly  known as "nation building" exactly what we are not supposed to be doing at the point of a barrel of a gun.

According to this from Dahr Jamail's site:

Sharp increases in food prices have generated a new wave of anti-occupation and anti-U.S. sentiment in Fallujah.

"This is a country that was damned by the Americans the moment they stepped on our soil," Burhan Jassim, a farmer from Sichir village just outside Fallujah told IPS. "This is Iraqi land that has always been blessed by Allah with the best production in quality and quantity, but now see how it has been turned into a wasteland."

It's time to ask: what are we really trying to "protect"?

"There are more and more dead bodies on the streets and the stench is unbearable. Smoke is everywhere. It's hard to know how much people outside Fallujah are aware of what is going on here. There are dead women and children lying on the streets. People are getting weaker from hunger. Many are dying are from their injuries because there is no medical help left in the city whatsoever. Some families have started burying their dead in their gardens."

That was Fallujah in 2004.  Bush and Petraeus are about to do the same to the slum of 2.5 million in Baghdad known as Sadr City.  1,000 civilians have already been slaughtered.  Right now 75,000 children are trapped.  

Welcome to the buzzkill.  It's called Bush's War Crimes R Us, and it's the reason most of us have been so furious for all these years now.  

They're about to do to Sadr City what they did to Fallujah, and why?  Because they're still in power, because nobody has been able to stop them.  

In San Francisco this week the Veterans Administration has been in court getting caught in their web of deceit over the treatment of veterans with PTSD. The attornies working the case "pro bono" have exposed e mail that show the VA administrators knew that the CBS reports that showed 165 veterans a week attempting suicide was accurate, despite their public denials of the rates of auicides and attempted suicides.

This story from CBS Investigates lays out the lies of one Doctor Ira Katz, the VA's head of Mental health.

Darrell Issa's (R-CA) stunning statement reducing the 9/11 attack on the United States to a "simple" plane crash is just the latest outrage from the execrable California Republican.  After all, the one-time accused car thief turned car alarm magnate attacked the families of dead Blackwater contractors, accused Valerie Plame of perjury and played a vital role in purging a U.S. attorney, just to name a few others.  Yet less than five years after he cried like a baby while announcing his withdrawal from the California governor's race, Darrell Issa mysteriously remains a force in American politics.

Here, then, are the Top 10 Moments from Darrell Issa's Hall of Shame:

Wikileaks has posted a "Confidential memo from Maj. Gen. Kelly, commander of US forces in western Iraq (MNF-W, or Multi-National Force — West), written in late February 2008."

It begins:

I spent the entire day inspecting the Fallujah city jail. I found the conditions there to be exactly (unbelivable [sic] over crowding, total lack of anything approaching even minimal levels of hygiene for human beings, no food, little water, no ventilation) to those described in the recent (18 February) FOX news artickle [sic] by Michael Totten entitled the "Dungeon of Fallujah".

and it gets worse from there.

Once Again, Our Country Needs Winter Soldiers

Which presidents and political parties were responsible for America's deadliest wars? To what extent can you blame a president or a political party for choosing to go to war? This map may hold some answers. It illustrates the history of American war from 1775 to 2006. War is a necessary evil. Politics, however, shouldn't be.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

As a consequence of the current theaters of war being halfway around the world from the United States, we Americans are forced to rely on progress reports; the words of military officers, visiting political dignitaries and the press – none of whom it seems, unfortunately, have a significant stake in reporting on the real state of affairs.

For going on five years now, successes [no matter how small] have been touted; failures [no matter how large] marginalized, and the lives, deaths and everyday existential fears of the besieged populace remain obscured; with only truncated, controlled images afforded the enquiring minds of the general public.

Fallujah, Iraq is one such example of those lofty distortions of reality, wrapped in an aesthetic facade but packed with confetti, then force fed down the throats of the American public.

No matter how they spin it, Fallujah is a complete and utter failure, it’s beleaguered population of 400,000 forced to struggle through everyday life while suffering the ill-effects of unthinkable humanitarian conditions.

This is one show that you don't want to miss!
interviews  Jeremy Scahill who reports on Blackwater in  details no other media has matched.
He wrote the book on it.

Jeremy Scahill

is an independent investigative journalist who wrote this recent bestselling book: Blackwater: The Rise Of The World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.

Jeremy Scahill is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute. He's reported from Iraq, the Balkans and Nigeria, among other places, he's a co-winner of the George Polk Award For Investigative Reporting.

Bill Moyers invites us to ask questions  at the Companion Blog to his weekly "Bill Moyers Journal" broadcast.

Updated #1 to change the name
Updated #2 to change the name back
More below the fold

Erik Prince does NOT get really challenged by Congress.  

Michael Mukasey says the president is not bound by some laws and yet will be confirmed overwhelmingly

Despite Dodd's noble threat to filibuster, the horrid bill agreed to by the likes of Jay Rockefellar will probably be approved

The Treasury Department intervenes to bail out Citibank's multibillion dollar exposure because of really bad decisions

The FCC is moving to give media conglomerates even more ability to concentrate ownership

And all that is the tip of the iceberg, because EVERYTHING is being privatized.  You should have watched Jeremy Scahill on Bill Moyers last night.  I did, and hence this diary.

One of the snipers charged with placing "bait" out to draw Iraqis into their killzone is quoted as saying

"If you've never been outside the wire, you really have no basis -- you don't have a basis to judge what I do or what I don't do. You've never been in a life-or-death situation, where you've had to count on the guy to your left and right,"Hand said.

"People who stay back here, in my opinion, are not mentally in the game. They've never been out there."

The problem is what happens "outside the wire" has become a freezone. Free from accountability for anything a Soldier does. We have seen over and over when brought up on charges for things like murder and rape, the punishment is a slap on the wrist if that. There is too pat a pattern not to believe the same thing that is happening in Washington, is happening in Iraq.

Everybody knew that Blackwater was the reason four Americans were dragged from their car in Fallujah beaten and burned to death. Now Congress is officially blaming the incident on Blackwater's rushed procedures which led to their employees driving into a heavily fortified area.

With that the US Military was forced to enter Fallujah and kill thousands and thousand of innocent civilians.

(At least!). To the surprise of no one who has been paying attention, and with the usual alacrity that the U.S. Congress follows up on such matters (that is to say, none), a Congressional Committee has concluded:

Blackwater USA triggered a major battle in the Iraq war in 2004 by sending an unprepared team of guards into an insurgent stronghold, a move that led to their horrific deaths and a violent response by U.S. forces, says a congressional investigation released Thursday.

Here's what was said about the Battle of Fallujah on Dailykos at the time.

No civilian deaths in Fallujah

I was outraged to read the following.  Not to blame the troops, really, but the planning or lack thereof was certainly for shit.

From Thomas Ricks' Fiasco, p. 339-340: