You mean he isn't sure which of these to support most strongly?
Carrol Cox
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Actually no. I am saying that Kerry is too chicken shit to go after Bush openly on any serious issue. I suspect he is praying that Iraqis will conveniently hang Bush for him, and it looks like they are working hard on it.
I'll give K a very temporary and provisional benefit of the doubt on his rejection of outright war crimes and the rest of this crap...but only a brief one. Maybe another week. No stewing around about the UN, investigations, getting to the bottom, etc. etc.
However, the Democrats already half own the war and the illegal domestic and military gulag that's been created as the War on Terror and Patriot Act. After all most Democrats voted for the creation of both. Prior to Iraq most Democrats were peculiarly uninterested in the voting frauds and the massive utility frauds that started this administration, along with endless regulatory institutions that have been turned inside out under confirmed Bush appointees to support and cover industries the government was supposed to regulate.
I think the reason Kerry will ignore these current atrocities, is that Democrats are compliced in their creation. Although they do have a very thin rational of plausible deniability as the opposition party, they probably won't have the temerity to use it. Ironically the Right depends on Democrat conscious of shared responsibility to keep their mouth shut.
In addition to their own political cowardice the Democrats have an allegiance or loyalty to government per se. After all they are also government officials and it is their duty to stop these sorts of things from happening, since they do have the power to find out what is going on in their name. Instead, the military command and the Democrats are playing the Don't Ask, Don't Tell game to protect themselves.
No matter how hypocritical it might be, Kerry and the Democrats better get their asses over to the anti-war, out-now camp, today. They are now on public notice as directly culpable in war crimes---crimes that follow on fabricated excuses for invasion and a collapsed occupation.
As for the assumption that these are common practices of war and Vietnam had its share. Sure. But there are several significant differences with Iraq.
First Iraq was invaded against heavy domestic and international opposition, and absent any military threat or geo-political excuse. As obvious as it sounds, outright fabrications by the aggressor don't count. Also there was no UN or NATO pretext to fall back on. Both bodies vetoed the invasion, refused to support the occupation and neither has any formal mission in the country at all.
Second, within two weeks there was no Iraq government and no enemy army. So that the subsequent captured, tortured and murdered were civilians in a conquered and occupied country.
Unlike Vietnam, in Iraq with no government and no army, the US is virtually the sole occupying power. Bremer's business committee in a Baghdad bunker is not a government. It's a sick joke.
Speaking of the flimsy coalition, if I were a member of that delusional group I'd be packing last night and on the plane in this morning---putting as much jet exhaust between me and Iraq as I could. Never happened. Don't know, wasn't there...
It probably sounds like hyperbole on my part, but the Abu Ghraib expose was over the top. While you can know some policy or action is nothing but a brutal lie, it is a whole other world once that is openly demonstrated. There are such things as thresholds and those photographs were one of them.
I confess I was shocked. Naive isn't it? No matter how bad I thought and said it was, it was worse.
And then I realized that Abu Ghraib is just one island of an entire archipelago. What the fuck is this shit?
I was talking last night to my cycling buddy's wife who does death penalty cases. She started in on domestic prisoner treatment, what about San Quintin, what about Folsom? But even she didn't quite grasp it. There are no lawyers, prosecutors or judges in this labyrinth. There are only guards and interrogators.
Chuck Grimes