CELEBRITY IN CHIEF BARRY O HAD 2 REVELATIONS TO INJECT HIMSELF INTO THE NEWS CYCLE TODAY.
FIRST HE ANNOUNCED HE WOULD DRESS AS GEORGE W. BUSH FOR HALLOWEEN.
"SCARY,"
HE SAID DRAWING OUT EVERY LETTER OF THE WORD. "BUT ALSO MY WAY OF
ACKNOWLEDGING THAT I AM JUST LIKE MY PREDECESSOR. I NEVER KNEW MY
DADDY, HE DIDN'T WANT A FAMILY OR AT LEAST NOT ME, SO I USED TO PRETEND
THAT GEORGE H.W. BUSH WAS MY DADDY. I'VE INVITED HIM TO THE WHITE HOUSE
AND INTEND TO HOP INTO HIS LAP BEFORE THE NIGHT'S OVER AND ASK HIM TO
TUCK ME IN."
POOKIE'S
EXACT DETAILS AND GENDER -- JUST LIKE BARRY'S -- ARE IN DISPUTE. BUT HE
WANTS IT OUT THERE THAT HE "KILLED COUSIN POOKIE BECAUSE I THINK IT
WILL GET ME SOME RESPECT. I DON'T GET NO RESPECT. I'M LIKE RODNEY
DANGERFIELD TRYING TO ACT SOULFUL."
On the second hour of today's
The Diane Rehm Show, Iraq was addressed by guest host
Frank Senso, NPR's Tom Gjelten, CNN's Elise Labott and McClatchy Newspapers' Jonathan Landay.
Frank
Senso: To Iraq now, and in a few minutes, to our phone calls, to bring
our audience into this and any other conversation that they may want to
have with respect to what's going on in the world. But in Iraq
discussions amidst ongoing, violence, intensifying violence in some
cases, about trying to fix the national election law because that is
what is looming large. Jonathan Landay, what's the landscape look like
right now?
Jonathan
S. Landay: Well they've tried for a third time to pass an election law
in time for the January elections and they've failed again. The issue
-- there are a number of issues, but the main issue has to do with the
city of Kirkuk in northern Iraq and uh a city that sits atop billions
of gallons of untapped oil. Uh, the issue has to do with the -- what
census is going to be used to register voters there. Now this is a city
that the Kurds -- now this is right now a predominately Kurdish city.
It was, the Kurds say, a predominately Kurdish city before the reign of
Saddam Hussein who ethically [ethnically] cleansed Kurds out of the
city and brought in Arabs. The issue is, do you -- since the fall of
Saddam Hussein, the Kurds have been restoring their majority in that
city and, indeed, other ethnic groups claim over uh restoring their
majority, bringing in more Kurds than there had been before. The Kurds
want voter registration to be based on the most recent census, I think
it was in fact, done this year. The Sunni Arabs and other ethnic groups
there -- the Turkomen for instance -- want the voter registration based
on the 2004 census and they have not been able to come to an agreement
on this and this has hung up the passage of this law and what it really
-- and what it really comes down to it appears is contol over that
massive amount of untapped petroleum.
Frank
Senso: And yet this-this-this dispute, this stand off over the election
law comes just after this Sunday terrible bombing in Baghdad, the worst
in two years killing more than 150, wounding hundreds more, severely
damaging three major government buildings now there's been an arrest of
some 50 odd security and there was some suggestion that this
intensifying violence might drive the politicians to nail down this
election law and drive those to some kind of political, if not
resolution, progress. Tom?
Tom
Gjelten: Well it seems, Frank, that the Iranians, I mean the Iraqis,
have become so inured to this kind of violence that just sort of
everything proceeds normally and that's true I think in both a good
sense and a bad sense. In a good sense, there has been this move
towards stability and peace in Iraq and Iraq's been filling more
confident about their future and they seem amazingly enough to have
taken this bombing in stride in a sense. I mean there have been other
bombings --
Frank Sesno: It's almost unimaginable, isn't it?
Tom
Gjelten: It's almost unaimaginable. But they have -- this is six years
that they've been through this and they seem to be able to cope with
these great tragedies. On the other hand, the negative side is that, as
you say, you know, you would -- you would hope that this would jolt
them into sort of some reality but, again, they become so used to this
that they just proceed with the same stalemate.
Frank Sesno: What's behind the uptick in violence, Elise?
Elise
Labott: Well, we saw -- first we saw an uptick in violence in August
and there were also some massive bombings at the Foreign Ministry, at
the Finance Ministry and this seemed to be kind of a way to sew
sectarian tensions once again and they thought that maybe this would
lead Iraq down the path it was in 2006, 2007 with major sectarian
tensions. Now what officials says is they think that these foreign
fighters are [or?] the real hard core al Qaeda in Iraq are trying just
at anything, they tried at religious targets, now they're just trying
at softer targets to kill a lot of people. They think maybe it can
effect the election in January. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has been
running as the security candidate. He's the one that's bringing
stability to Iraq, he's the one that got US forces out of the city. The
question is now is this going to effect his standing as the security
candidate.
Jonathan
S. Landay: There may be also something else going on here. The more
instability, I think perhaps the insurgen -- whoever is behind these
bombings create, in their mind, it delays perhaps the departure of
American forces and what do you get from that? Well you get a delay or
perhaps problems coming up with additional American forces to send to
Afghanistan and there may very well be that thinking going on on the
part of those who are responsible for these massive bombings.
On the above. Jonathan S. Landay used the term census. That is incorrect. There has been no census. The issue, which
McClatchy's Sarah Issa and Hannah Allem and which the
New York Times' Timothy Williams
have outlines, is where the voting rolls for 2009 or the voting rolls
for 2004 will be used. There has been no census. "Census" is a concrete
term. And, in fact, a census in Kirkuk is mandated -- as is a
referendum -- by Iraq's 2005 Constitution. No census has been
conducted. This is not a minor issue and it goes to the dispute over
Kirkuk. "Census" was the wrong term to use. There is NO census thus
far.
That's (A). (B) Tom Gjelten.
What the ___ was that? I'm reminded of when Goodtime Gals Linda
Robinson and Gwen Ifill decided to discuss Blackwater's September 17,
2007 slaughter (
see the October 8, 2007 snapshot)
-- a discussion noteable for its appalling ignorance and gross lack of
concern for human life. Gjelten can argue that some of his remarks were
intended to be about officials. But he can only argue that about some
of his remarks. And what exactly does he want Iraqis to do? They're
shell shocked and just because he hasn't reported on the multitude of
studies, THE MULTITUDE OF STUDIES, on the effects this illegal war has
had on Iraqi children doesn't mean the damage isn't real and doesn't
exist. So his happy talk bulls**t was embarrassing. That was really a
shameful moment for NPR. The 'good' and the 'bad' of the bombings? How
appalling. What made it worse for NPR was that it wasn't a guest from,
for example, NBC News. It was an NPR reporter. That's shameful. The
good and the bad of bombings? Pay attention, Tommy.
Our
children are surrounded by violnce. Most of them are traumatized. I
call them the silent victims. Our Iraqi childeren are the silent vctims.
From
January to March of last year, the World Health Organization worked
with Iraqi psychiatrists on a series of studies on the mental health of
children in the cities of Baghdad, Mosul and Dohuk. (Watch the effects of war on children 
) One
of the studies on primary-school-age children in Baghdad found that
nearly half of the 600 children surveyed had experienced a major
traumatic event since the war began. Just over one in every 10 suffered
from post-traumatic stress disorder, the study found.
Another
of the studies found that older children in Mosul suffered even worse.
Thirty percent of the 1,090 children surveyed showed signs of
post-traumatic stress disorder. Nearly all of those with PTSD symptoms,
92 percent, had not received any treatment, according to the study.
In
fact, the doctors aren't immune to the dangers of the conflict. Fifty
percent of Iraq's psychiatrists have fled the country or been killed
since the war began, said Dr. Naeema Al-Gasseer, the WHO's
representative for Iraq.
A month after CNN filed that report,
NPR's Linda Wertheimer spoke with Dr. Mohammed al-Aboudi about the mental stress Iraqi children were under.
Now we can go through various reports and studies. We can enlarge and
look at other segments of the country's population. But the above alone
demonstrates how offensive Tom's statements are. The population is
shell shocked and the illegal war has caused that trauma. The bombings
that he thinks have good and bad are the same violence responsible for
creating the world's largest refugee crisis. And the UN has already
advised that Sunday's bombings will most likely results in Syria and
Jordan receiving some additional Iraqi refugees. I'm not seeing any
"good and bad" to the bombings. And Tom's statements were inarticulate
and offensive. Frank Senso did a fine job this week filling in for
Diane but had Diane been present, she probably would have said
something. She generally does when gas baggery replaces discussion --
when human beings are removed from the issue, she generally brings them
back into the picture even if it means she has to disagree with a
guest. (She did that most recently with a guest gas bagging -- and
glorifying -- the drone strikes in Pakistan when she made a point to
note the civilian deaths the man was dismissing.) Tom's statements were
offensive and it's only more so because he works for NPR. He declared
that "you would hope that this would jolt them into sort of some
reality" -- Tom, we'd hope the reality of the violence in Iraq and the
fact that it is an inhabited country would jolt you into some sort of
reality but there's no evidence, as yet, that it has.
[. . .]
Violence
was kind-of, sort-of an issue yesterday in the US House Armed Services
Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. The hearing was about
IEDs and the money spent on studying them. The Pentagon's James Schear
and Lt Gen Thomas Metz as well as the GAO's William Solis were the
witnesses, Vic Snyder is the Subcomittee Chair.
Subcommittee
Chair Vic Snyder: IEDs remain the number one cause of casulities to
coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although IEDs are not a new
threat, they have been used with unprecedented frequency in Iraq and
Afghanistan. While the decrease in successful attacks in Iraq is
encouraging, that success has not been replicated in Afghanistan which
has seen an increase in success in fatality attacks with our increase
in forces there. Since former CENTCOM commander General [John] Abizaid
called for a Manhattan Project like effort 5 years ago to defeat IEDs,
Congress has provided nearly $17 billion to DoD's efforts. This effort
has grown from a twelve-man army task force to the Jointed IED Defeat
Organization, or JIEDDO, which currently employs a staff of about 3600
dedicated government, military and contract personnel.
Lt
Gen Thomas F. Metz declared, "What's really different in the two
theaters is that over time in Iraq, as we were experiencing 1500, 2500
IEDs a month -- and finding and clearing half of them, we were gaining
an enormous amount of forensics and biometrics information. We use that
in the COIC [Counter-IED Operations Integration Center] to our
advantage It is our asymetric advantage."
US House Rep Duncan Hunter noted a lack of mobilization. He referred to
NPR's report
on IEDs this week and how, despite all the money being spent, it was
human beings noting, for example, "that corpse wasn't there yesterday"
and guessing that it appeared to hide an IED. He noted that Marines in
Afghanistan report they have only rarely seen predator drones and that
instead they rely on "hand held mine sweepers -- a version of which
people use on the beach to find coins." He also showed a child's
innocence or foolilshness as he lived in a world where only the
'guilty' were killed.
US
House Rep Duncan Hunter: This doesn't make me feel comfortable that we
are truly doing everything that we can right now. Once-once more, if
Secretary Gates said, "No more IEDs to be buried" -- I understand that
there are tons in Afghanistan and they can be turned on like that at
any point in time. But we could do that. We could stop IEDs from being
buried if we mobilize to do it. And -- and if we want to politically
about this war too -- it would fall off the map if nobody was dying.
Iraq's not in the paper anymore because nobody's dying. One reason is
we've knocked off IEDs, huge in 2007 and 2008, with [Gen William] Odum
by killing over 3,000 IED placers. Project Odom with IEDS killed more
people than every single other person in Iraq put together -- with all
the offensive operations, Odom killed more and they were all bad guys
-- not one single civilian, they were all inputting IEDs.
"Not
one single civilian." Just "bad guys." Because a drone is judge and
jury. So if a drone says it's "bad guys" that's all the proof Duncan
Hunter needs. (And, to clarify, this is Duncan Hunter the younger, the
32-year-old elected to his father's seat. Still wet behind the ears and
with a child's wide-eyes, he needs correcting, not the blanket approval
Snyder gave him when Snyder followed Hunter. And someone might have
bothered to inform Hunter that, despite his claims that "nobody's
dying" in Iraq, Iraq saw at least 155 people die on Sunday alone.
"Nobody's dying"? That didn't require a correction? Did he mean no US
service members? If so, even that's wrong because there are 8 announced
dead in Iraq so far this month -- granted 2 of them were announced
today so, at the time of the hearing, only 6 had been announced. And
it's a good thing to Duncan Hunter that the news media walked away from
Iraq? Really? (Hunter is a veteran of both the Iraq and Afghanistan
Wars, FYI.) Congress had time for that nonsense yesterday. Not for
anything important, but they had time for that.
