Narus.Info

Sounds like the back door draft, civilian style, is making State Dept. workers pretty mad. First Bush and Rummy blocked all of their suggestions of how to run postwar Iraq; now the Administration wants to draft foreign service workers and put them to work outside the Green Zone in some of the deadliest areas of Iraq. These are not happy campers:

“It’s one thing if someone believes in what’s going on over there and volunteers, but it’s another thing to send someone over there on a forced assignment,� Crotty said. “I’m sorry, but basically that’s a potential death sentence and you know it. Who will raise our children if we are dead or seriously wounded?�
“You know that at any other (country) in the world, the embassy would be closed at this point,� Crotty said to loud and sustained applause from the about 300 diplomats who attended the meeting in a large State Department auditorium.

And for those who think that the State Department is somehow a better place to work than say, the DOJ:

Thomas responded by saying the comments were “filled with inaccuracies” but did not elaborate until challenged by the head of the diplomats’ union, the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), who like Crotty and others, demanded to know why many learned of the decision from news reports.
Thomas took full responsibility for the late notification but objected when AFSA President John Naland said that a recent survey found that only 12 percent of the union’s membership believed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was “fighting for them.”
“That’s their right but they’re wrong,” Thomas said, prompting a testy exchange.
“Sometimes if it’s 88 to 12, maybe the 88 percent are correct,” Naland said.
“88 percent of the country believed in slavery at one time, was that correct?” shot back Thomas, who is black, in a remark that drew boos from the crowd. “Don’t you or anybody else stand there and tell me I don’t care about my colleagues. I am insulted,” he added.

It’s not enough to leave these people without electricity or drinking water for years; now the infrastructure-neglect chickens may be coming home to roost.

The US assessment was part of a report by the US Army Corps of Engineers (ACE), which said the current probability of dam failure was “exceptionally high.”
Its comments were included in a review of dam fortification work by the US Special Inspector General for Iraqi Construction (SIGIR) dated October 29 and released on the Internet on Tuesday.
The SIGIR report also includes a letter sent in May to Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki from the US ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker and US military commander General David Petraeus in which they warned of the risk of a massive disaster if the dam breaks.
“In terms of internal erosion potential of the foundation, Mosul Dam is the most dangerous dam in the world… If a small problem (at) Mosul Dam occurs, failure is likely,” the ACE concluded.
“A catastrophic failure of the Mosul Dam would result in flooding along the Tigris River all the way to Baghdad,” the report said, noting that just 50 kilometres (30 miles) downstream is the city of Mosul, with 1.7 million people.

The Independent reports that such a flood could drown 500,000 people.

So much for Rice’s lies.

There will be a hearing tomorrow. She either knew then, and was lying, or knows now, and won’t tell the truth. Meanwhile, the DoD has won the battle over who will control “security” for State Dept. officials in Iraq. Some are saying this will make it harder for State to act independently of the DoD, thus making it harder for them to object to war plans with Iran.

They were immunized right from the start by the State Department, this was kept secret and is just now coming out.

I’m not kidding, and Faux News isn’t either. They should never, ever be let off the hook for doing this. This is a situation where it is appropriate for all sorts of hype to come out, with people everywhere demanding retractions and apologies (to the American public, for lying to them), and for people to be fired. It’s worse for example than Don Imus’ unforgivable, racist remarks, because this reporting an absolutely fabricated falsehood as the truth, not some racist spouting his sicko opinion. If CNN and MSNBC were even interested in their well-being, they would highlight this clip and run it over and over in a loop, along with an editorial demanding that Faux eat their words big time. As it is, I suspect only Keith Olbermann will bring it up.

An ugly situation that turned deadly, followed by the usual complete disconnect between the Iraqi official hospital figures of dead and wounded and their identities, compared to inflated body count claims of “bad guys only killed” by the U.S. military.

For Sadr City residents in the areas where the fighting was under way, at least some of whom appeared to have nothing to do with Mr. Sadr’s militia, the gunfire was terrifying. Two cousins, Murtada Saiedi, 8, and Ali Saiedi, 11, were walking home at 6:15 a.m. after buying fresh samoun for their families. Samoun is a triangular bread beloved by Iraqis for breakfast.

“I was holding the samoun in my arms in a big bag,� said Ali Saiedi, adding that he was taking the bread home for his eight siblings and his parents. “Then I heard a big sound and I tried to run, I wanted to reach my home, but I couldn’t.

“And then when I woke up, I was here,� he said, as he lay in a bed at the Imam Ali Hospital with bandages on his arms from shrapnel cuts.

His cousin, Murtada Saiedi, in the next bed, would not speak. He winced as he shifted his weight in the bed and looked up silently at his father and uncle, who were leaning over the child. The doctor had just come by to say that he thought Murtada might have some internal bleeding.

An official at the hospital, Abu Ibrahim, said an elderly woman whose midsection had been nearly severed by shrapnel died Sunday evening, bringing the total dead at the hospital to 16. There were 38 wounded who were admitted to the hospital, he said. Officials at a second hospital in the neighborhood reported one dead and two wounded.

The military said it did not believe there were any civilian deaths as a result of the fighting. “Ground forces reported they were unaware of any innocent civilians being killed as a result of this operation,� the military statement said.

So you see, that 8 year old and 11 year old are just liars, like that rich little brat Graeme Frost, who did a radio spot criticizing Bush’s veto of SCHIP (just because it saved his life he thinks he has something to say about the program). Note also that this massacre didn’t prevent military (aka political) spokesmen from throwing in a random swipe at the Iranians. Why would Iranians be behind a “kidnapping ring?” in Sadr City, a Shi’ite neighborhood?

Last but not least, look at the headline. Who’s “confused” about what happened other than the reporters? The U.S. military seems totally uninterested in finding out who they may have killed, and the hospital officials seem pretty certain about what happened, and have the dead and wounded women and children to prove it. Now perhaps that woman was chopped in two by an Iraqi militia grenade and not American weaponry; but everyone in Iraq knows that if the Americans had gone home by now, she would still be alive.

Chief of Operations, CIA Joint Task Force Iraq 2002
Covert operations networks and front companies blown by Bush Administration, July 2003

This is disturbing and is part of a trend in this country, thanks to Bushco, of intimidating and bullying journalists.

This is way beyond the pale. It’s also another reason why it was absolutely ridiculous that he was confirmed by the then-Republican Senate to go from the job of White House Counsel to the job of Attorney General.