I’ve been following Sidney Blumenthal’s guardian.uk piece all over the web—It’s a fucking novel. He’s written a novel, Death of A Prime Minister and Attention Must Be Paid.

Okay, so the saga is morphing into George’s Long Day and its sloooow Journey Into Night, but so much the better. Blumenthal has picked us a juicy peach, worth memorizing. Worth clasping to your (figurative) bosom. Tragedy is nothing if not … compelling. Read the rest of this entry »

“ ‘insurgancy’ as the americanas call it, is the natural responce”

The trouble starts when you go looking to connect precisely what abuse and lies-in-power broke in the first place. Oh, the connections are healthy, as is the desire to make them; that drive is all that’s best about us. I don’t know if it’s possible—but the work is worthy: to focus not upon what is destroyed, not even upon your own woundedness, your own death, but just wrench that glare loose. There’s a way to reflect back suffering endured, tilt that lens just so … just blind ‘em. Simply by being—by being and remaining—good.

link: secrets in baghdad

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11 held in Iraq over death of Irish-born aid worker US and Iraqi forces yesterday detained a group of men suspected of abducting and murdering Irish-born aid worker Margaret Hassan last year

no matter what you think of it nor how useless, nor that there aren’t any answers, the question beats on and on and on and on

until i am quite sure what you hear is the exactly the beat of the human heart. no more, no less.

“I think that this tells us first that our base facilities are totally infiltrated by insiders who are passing the word on when and where we are most vulnerable to attack.”

“This sure isn’t playing out like I thought it would.”

“Twenty-one months is not a long time to tame the tribal warfare expected there. My guess is that this will take ten years.”

Washington speaks.

“Before yesterday, the worst incidents were the deaths of 17 soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division in the November 2003 collision of two UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, also in Mosul, and, two weeks before that, the loss of 15 soldiers when a CH-47 Chinook transport helicopter crashed west of Baghdad.

All three occurred after President Bush’s May 2003 declaration that major combat operations in Iraq had ended.”

link: Washington Post

The young Marine wrote about the Fallujah offensive: ‘I fear it’s a fight for my life. Dad, I need your prayers and advice more than ever.’ About an hour later, there was a knock on the door …

I would lay his body across Rumsfeld’s desk. I would wrap him in the flag and lay him there. I would bring him home to those empty, wretched people, marry his death to their ideas. I would have Karen Hughes to wash his feet, Karl Rove to seal his eyes. You must close his eyes forever, Rove. You must feel his skin against your own …

One of Zinni‘s responsibilities while commander-in-chief at Centcom was to develop a plan for the invasion of Iraq. Like his predecessors, he subscribed to the belief that you only enter battle with overwhelming force.

But Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld thought the job could be done with fewer troops and high-tech weapons.

Read the rest of this entry »