I haven't updated
my own blog for a few days, not having had time, but I intended to today, and so I started reading around the Web.
And what to my wandering eyes should appear, but various stories of the U.S. government's negligence and deceit in Iraq.
Of course, by now you know that Iraq tried to open lines of communication with the U.S. right before the invasion, offering many concessions to prevent invasion, and the U.S. government deliberately ignored those pleas, sayng instead, "We'll see you in Baghdad." If you somehow missed these stories, they're in the NY Times and Boston Globe.
But there's so much more that I barely know where to begin, never mind summarize it, so until I finally manage to update my own blog, here are some links:
The Guardian has a devasting story about U.S. failures in Iraq. Read down to find a link to
Globalsecurity.org, which has 2 reports worth reading, both written by the government and army -- there's
one referred to in the article (PDF), which, if you're willing to slog through the jargon, states definitively that the U.S. had hardly any plan for how to establish peace in Bagdhad once the military had removed the government there. On page 17 you'll find this sentence:
[The 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized)] did not have a fully developed plan for the transition to [Stability and Support Operations] and civil military operations in Baghdad prior to entering the city.
The other interesting report at GlobalSecurity.org is a
newsletter (PDF) from the Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL), a report they quickly
removed from their public
website after
the Washington Post summarized its contents, which, they said, "uses unusually blunt language to identify the intelligence problems and to recommend solutions."
Why try to hide the report? The information is damaging, of course, and shows how inept the Bush team is, but it also points to some extremely disturbing tendencies, including the continued placement of intelligence agents in the number-two position in "door-kicking" operations -- the position where a person is statistically most likely to be killed. For some reason, the military and the government seem to be trying to kill their own spies.
Oh, there's so much else out there. The Christian Science Monitor's weblog from November 6 has links to all sorts of depressing stories about the failures and lies of the military and government.
The Memory Hole links to thousands of pages of documents which various sources have tried to suppress, including over 300 Congressional Research Service reports which have been removed from official websites.
This government is doing its best to keep information out of the hands of citizens, the people who, supposedly, the government is working for. Instead, we are being deceived. Thanks to the work of some diligent reporters and muckrakers, many attempts at suppression fail, but how much don't we know? I'm not a big fan of conspiracy theories, but it doesn't seem like there's any sort of theory here, only facts. Horrifying facts.