Bush wins, we lose.

Well, I guess that last post is pretty much moot at this point. Good lord, what is wrong with this country?

Hungary to pull out of Iraq

From the BBC:

Hungary will withdraw all of its 300 troops stationed in Iraq by the end of March 2005, the country's prime minister has said.
Ferenc Gyurcsany made the announcement at a military ceremony in the capital Budapest on Wednesday.

He said Hungary was obliged to keep its troops, who have a non-combat role, in Iraq until after elections in January.

There has been intense pressure from the public and opposition groups to pull them out.

The main conservative opposition party initially supported the war but changed its position and now favours withdrawal.

Mr Gyurcsany, who was chosen as prime minister in August, made the announcement at a ceremony marking the end of compulsory military service in Hungary.

Source: globalsecurity.org
"We are obliged to stay there until the [Iraqi] elections," he said. "To stay longer is an impossibility."

TROOPS CURRENTLY IN IRAQ
(Probably not for much longer.)

US - 142,000
UK - 8,361
Italy - 3,169
South Korea - 2,800
Poland - 2,400
Ukraine - 1,400
Netherlands - 1,345
Australia - 920
Romania - 700
Japan - 550
Denmark - 496
Bulgaria - 485
El Salvador - 380
Hungary - 300

The Rehnquist question

If Bush loses he can still appoint a justice to replace the ailing William Rehnquist. Judging by the seriousness of the Chief Justice's health, is it too hard to invision Bush sticking it to us by putting a real nut-job into the court to do some damage as a recess appointment?

If the election were to come down again to the supreme court, without Rehnquist there could be a 4-4 tie. So, Bush can put in the winning vote.

Maybe, I'm being paranoid but the timing is very disadvantagous to Kerry in case of a close vote.

The Post reports the situation is very bleak:

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist did not appear as planned at Supreme Court oral arguments yesterday, announcing that his pledge to do so after receiving a cancer-related tracheotomy 10 days ago was "too optimistic," and that he would remain at home while receiving radiation and chemotherapy treatment.

A diagnosis of anaplastic thyroid cancer, the most serious of four forms of the disease, would account for Rehnquist's situation, several experts on thyroid cancer said yesterday.

And no other diagnosis would adequately explain his doctors' treatment decisions, the experts said.
Rehnquist's doctors' approach, in sharp contrast to techniques usually used for milder cancers, suggested the physicians were throwing everything they had at the illness, the experts said.

More pie in the sky. (Man, these bastards are really shameless.)
Don't worry, there's no danger of Osama Bin Laden launching a ICBM at us! W is spending a butt load of money to make damn sure it doesn't happen.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon is set to declare operational [Ha!] soon a multibillion dollar system intended to defend America from attack by ballistic missiles, but which critics say will not work.

And to think I thought "Mutual Assured Destruction" (M.A.D.) was crazy!

"We say to those tyrants who believe they can blackmail America and the free world -- you fire, we're going to shoot it down," President Bush August.

Take that Kim Jong-il!

Hey, Ayatollah! Suck it! You fire at us, we'll shoot it down!

The Guardian says:

This has nothing to do with terrorists, repeatedly described by Bush and Blair as the greatest threat to the west. The al-Qaida network of terrorists may want to get their hands on biological or chemical weapons, or a dirty bomb, but they are unlikely to be able to launch a long-range intercontinental ballistic against the US, or anywhere else.

Duck and cover.

Budgeted at more than $50 billion over five years, it is built on the simple concept of blasting one missile out of the sky with another.

With a country like North Korea developing nuclear weapons and honing missile capabilities, advocates argue, America would be foolish not to guard against ballistic missiles.

Pentagon officials said the system will get better with time -- and that even a limited missile defense is superior to none at all. [Yeah, that makes sense.]

Rummy says:

I think there are any number of things that you benefit greatly by getting it out there, playing with it, working with it, testing it, evolving it, learning about it, showing people what it can do, learning what it can do and what it can't do,"

"And that is not rush to deployment, that's a rush to learning, by my standard."

No Donald, thats 50 billion dollars a year pissed down the toilet!

Metro Center bracing for Iraq vets with mental problems.

This is a heart warming story from the Post. Once again the military is showing the same kind of weird disconnect the White House has with their perceptions of what is going on in Iraq versus what the real situation is.

They act like we're still in peace time. They can't maintain the troop levels and have any chance of success in Iraq, or in Afghanistan. We are headed toward disaster. Our military cannot keep on this track and survive.

It doesn't matter how many billions they pump into the "military-industrial complex;" unless the big shots at Boeing and Ratheon are willing to mount up and kick some insurgent ass, we're screwed.

Soldier to be punished for going to hospital:

1st Lt. Jullian Philip Goodrum, U.S. Army Reserve, is being prosecuted because he did not request the appropriate military leave before checking himself into a civilian psychiatric hospital last fall, during a mental breakdown. He is suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.

According to the Post " An Army survey, completed last December, found that 17 percent of soldiers and Marines who'd returned from duty in Iraq reported symptoms of major depression, anxiety or PTSD.

The number is expected to go higher with time, as more soldiers return from duty in this conventional war that has become a harsh counterinsurgency campaign.

And Matthew J. Friedman, executive director of the National Center for PTSD, predicts that many more PTSD cases will go unreported; the Army survey also found that soldiers still are intensely reluctant to divulge their symptoms because of fear of being stigmatized as weak."

This is just the beginning. Go down to Metro Center in D.C. when it gets really cold and see all the Vietnam mental casualties rolled up in sleeping bags.

You'll be happy to know however, according to ABC News

"Oct. 14, 2004 -- Following inquiries by ABC News, the Pentagon has dropped plans to force a severely wounded U.S. soldier to repay his enlistment bonus after injuries had forced him out of the service.

Army Spc. Tyson Johnson III of Mobile, Ala., who lost a kidney in a mortar attack last year in Iraq, was still recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center when he received notice from the Pentagon's own collection agency that he owed more than $2,700 because he could not fulfill his full 36-month tour of duty.

Johnson said the Pentagon listed the bonus on his credit report as an unpaid government loan, making it impossible for him to rent an apartment or obtain credit cards.

"Oh man, I felt betrayed," Johnson said. "I felt, like, oh, my heart dropped."

Great, now he can stop living out of his car. See, the military really is getting up to speed on this problem. And that multi-billion dollar boondoggle called Star Wars will protect him from ICBMs some time in the distant future. Rummy is busy testing it and rolling it and playing with it.

Higher fuel costs with Bush win?
LONDON (Reuters) - Oil prices fell sharply on Monday on speculation that a U.S. election win for Senator John Kerry could ease the geopolitical friction that has helped fuel this year's record-breaking rally.

"Under a Kerry administration we'd likely have a much more interventionist SPR policy," said Jamal Qureshi, market analyst at PFC Energy in Washington.

"And when you look out a bit further, Bush is more likely to be aggressive in the Middle East, particularly in Iran."

The Bush administration continues to add crude to the SPR, the national strategic petroleum reserve, despite high prices.

Kerry says he would stop filling the reserve at current prices to keep more crude on the market. That difference is important for a world oil market suffering a shortage of light, sweet crude, which makes up about 40 percent of the SPR.

"A Bush status quo results in somewhat higher oil prices both in the short and the longer term, in my view," said Tim Evans, senior analyst at IFR Energy Services.

Predictions:

Hmmm...wonder why Bush isn't concerned about souring oil costs? Last I heard Saudi Arabia had an $80 billion budget surplus. Any connection there? That's in contrast to our 7 billion dollar debt, by the way.

Note the reference to Iran. On the 17th of Nov. things are going to come to a head over Iran's nuclear program, where a decision about sanctions may be made. Cheney I hear doesn't think much of sanctions, in particular the ones on Iran, the ones that prevent Halliburton from doing business there.

Maybe, the Bush administration after 4 years, finally comes up with a policy regarding Iran?

Maybe, whether he gets elected or not, the neocons finally win the argument and we attack Iran?

If W gets elected we declare victory after the Iraqi "elections" and move on to Iran. (Real men still want to go to Tehran}

No doubt, Wolfowitz and Co. will convince Bush if we only stop Iranian meddling in Iraq everything will be alright, and naturally Israel will be happy. (By then Netanyahu will probably be running things anyway.)

(Newt will become the Secretary of State, so there'll be no more negative nabobism from that quarter.)

If he doesn't get elected he'll invade out of desperation and leave Kerry with a much bigger mess than Daddy did in Somalia.

Iran is next on the list, I have no doubt. We'll clobber them with air power and shock and awe for a while and by then the draft will be rolling so man-power won't be such a big issue.

Bush and the pentagon make a lot out of the volunteer army's value of being full of motivated highly skilled soldiers but the evidence so far is that they treat them like cannon fodder, just like the drafted army of the Vietnam era.

The U.S. army is on the verge of collapse, the only way to keep it viable at this point is the draft.

Freedom is still on the march.
It is really getting hard to keep up with the multiple disasters that occur everyday that freedom marches on but:

Only a day after the Brits moved up to watch our backs:

BBC: Rockets have been fired at the base south of Baghdad used by British troops from the Black Watch battle group.

There were four explosions at the base, known as Camp Dogwood, early on Sunday but no-one was reported injured.

BBC correspondent Nick Springate, who is with the troops, said those in the base were busy filling sandbags to build up defenses.

The troops have come under attack every night since their arrival on Friday and on Saturday the Black Watch's commanding officer, Lt Col James Cowen, took part in reconnaissance patrols to survey the area around the camp.
Camps and vehicles in Basra have also been attacked overnight.

NY Times:

Eight marines were killed and nine others wounded west of the capital on Saturday when a suicide car bomb rammed into their convoy, military officials said, resulting in the deadliest day for the American forces in half a year.
[The Marines later reported a ninth combat death on Saturday, The Associated Press reported,

...the insurgents who have seized the offensive in recent weeks, and the number of attacks per day has risen by 30 percent or more since mid-October, at the start of the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan, military officials say.

Freedom is on the march, for the insurgents at least:

The relentless assaults have driven a wall between the foreign presence here and the rest of the country, with soldiers, diplomats and contractors holed up in their fortified hotels or bases while guerrillas move freely and strike at will.

Another hostage killed:

A decapitated body wrapped in an American flag and found in an insurgent-controlled section of Baghdad was that of a Japanese man kidnapped by Islamic militants, a Japanese official said Sunday, The Associated Press reported. Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura said in Tokyo that the government had confirmed that the body found Saturday was that of Shosei Koda, 24, a Japanese traveler being held by the militant group of Jordanian fighter Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

The Iraqis probably need a little more training before the election:

On Saturday, Iraqi police officers and National Guardsmen fired wildly at civilians on a road south of Baghdad after insurgents attacked an American convoy, The Associated Press reported.

The Iraqi forces shot at and threw grenades at three minibuses and three vans, killing at least 14 people and injuring 10 others, witnesses and a doctor said.

Video from Associated Press Television News showed bodies riddled with bullet holes inside buses and on the road near Haswa, a town 25 miles south of the capital. An interior ministry spokesman, Sabah Kadhum, confirmed in an interview that Iraqi forces had fired on six vehicles.

[And of course of whole bunch of car bombs that killed at least 15. BNut that's so mundane now at days its almost not worth mentioning.

We need Bush to keep us safe from all the weapons he let slip through his hands.

On to Fallujah. And remember, real men still want to go to Tehran!]

Donald Rumsfeld: Desperate.

Seriously, is this man insane?

WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld suggested Thursday that the removal of 377 tons of explosives from an Iraqi munitions base probably took place before U.S. forces arrived, saying any large effort to loot the material afterward would have been detected.

[No one would have seen 377 tons of explosives being moved before the invasion, of course. Between Jan. 2003 when the IAEA sealed the facility and March the U.S. wasn't watching. Certainly they wouldn't have noticed hundreds of trucks kicking up a bunch of dust, right?]

"We would have seen anything like that," he said in one of two radio interviews he gave Thursday at the Pentagon. "The idea it was suddenly looted and moved out, all of these tons of equipment, I think is at least debatable."

[Oh, by the way, that report about ABC seeing the munitions after the invasion is just an illusion.]

Bush not one to jump the gun...

After two days of ignoring the story of the missing high explosives in Iraq the president shot back today:

"Our military is now [19 months later] investigating a number of possible scenarios, including that the explosives may have been moved before our troops even arrived at the site."

Unfortunately there's a little problem with that statement:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -

ABC News on Thursday showed video that appeared to confirm that explosives that went missing in Iraq not disappear until after the United States had taken control of the facility where they were stored.

ABC said the video was shot by an affiliate TV station embedded with the 101st Airborne Division when members of the division passed through the facility on April 18, nine days after the fall of Baghdad.

ABC said experts who have studied the images say the barrels seen in the video contain the high explosive HMX, and U.N. markings on the sealed containers were clear.

The barrels were found inside locked bunkers that had been sealed by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency just before the war began, ABC reported.

Bush didn't look before he lept.

Responding to John Kerry's attacks on him that he blew it on the lost weapons Bush said:

"A political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief."

Too bad W has no sense of irony. I should think a Commander in Chief who "jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts" is much more dangerous somehow. 1,105 troops and dead and 20,000 wounded later he's yet to admit one mistake!

Put at risk for corporate gain?

Since we can't hold onto conventional weapons why not go for the full Monty?

LONDON, Oct. 25 -- Biological weapons that can wipe out entire populations pose one of the biggest threats to the world today, yet remain almost completely uncontrolled, the British Medical Association said on Monday.

The association urged the United States to end what it called efforts against strengthening the 1972 international Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention when it comes up for renewal in 2006.

He warned that the development of biological weapons designed to target specific ethnic groups was becoming increasingly possible, and said it was already theoretically possible to re-create devastating viruses such as the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 that killed as many as 40 million people.

Dando said the Bush administration had turned its back on many international accords, which he asserted was the key reason the convention remained weak.

The powerful U.S. biotechnology industry has put pressure on the administration not to back strong international monitoring and enforcement mechanisms, arguing that they could stifle research, Dando said.

Liability in Russia

Half the world's stockpile of plutonium and highly enriched uranium is in Russia. About 600 metric tons are warehoused in some form. Of that quantity, the Department of Energy reported at the end of 2003 that 22 percent is satisfactorily secured with U.S. technical and financial assistance.

The department predicted that such "comprehensive" upgrades would cover 26 percent of the stockpile by the end of this year.

Securing the materials is laborious, expensive and dangerous work. Bush decided to let two of the major programs lapse because Russia declined to accept a change in the agreement that would shield U.S. firms from liability for worker safety.

Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), who asked to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on June 15, noted Bush's emphasis on the "immense threat" of nuclear terrorism and said acidly, "I wonder if he has been advised that liability -- that the liability issue is preventing destruction of enough plutonium for about 10,000 weapons?"

So, now, the missing weapons at Al-Qaqaa may have not been there at all according to the Bushies.

"It is not at all clear that those explosives were even at the weapons facility when our troops arrived in the area of Baghdad," Dick Cheney said Tuesday.

Naturally, this is another example of Cheney's world the way it would be if he or W knew what the F they were doing. Unfortunatly, this is the way the story really goes:

Associated Press Correspondent Chris Tomlinson, who was embedded with the 3rd Infantry but didn't go to Al-Qaqaa, described the search of Iraqi military facilities south of Baghdad as brief, cursory missions to seek out hostile troops, not to inventory or secure weapons stockpiles.

One task force, he said, searched four Iraqi military bases in a single day, meeting no resistance and finding only abandoned buildings, some containing weapons and ammunition.

The enormous size of the bases, the rapid pace of the advance on Baghdad and the limited number of troops involved, made it impossible for U.S. commanders to allocate any soldiers to guard any of the facilities after making a check, Tomlinson said.

Pentagon officials could not be reached for comment Wednesday night. A spokesman for the 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Ga., said the unit was checking on whether any of its troops was at Al-Qaqaa.

NBC correspondent Lai Ling Jew, who was with the 101st, told MSNBC, an NBC cable news channel, that "there wasn't a search" of Al-Qaqaa. "The mission that the brigade had was to get to Baghdad," she said. "As far as we could tell, there was no move to secure the weapons, nothing to keep looters away."

She said there was no talk among the 101st of securing the area after they left. The roads were cut off "so it would have been very difficult, I believe, for the looters to get there," she said. Wellman, the 101st Airborne spokesman, said the facility was in the unit's sector at that time but that he does not know if any troops were left at the grounds of the facility once the combat troops from the 2nd Brigade left.

Lt. Gen. William Boykin,[God put W in the White House] the Pentagon's deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, said that on May 27, 2003, a U.S. military team specifically looking for weapons went to the site but did not find anything with IAEA stickers on it.

The Pentagon would not say whether it had informed the IAEA that the conventional explosives were not where they were supposed to be. Boykin said that the Pentagon was investigating whether the information was handed on to anyone else at the time. [Its only been about 19 months, take your time.]

The explosives had been housed in storage bunkers at the facility. U.N. nuclear inspectors placed fresh seals over the bunker doors in January 2003.

The inspectors visited Al-Qaqaa for the last time on March 15, 2003 and reported that the seals were not broken -- therefore, the weapons were still there at the time. The team then pulled out of the country in advance of the invasion later that month.