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Isn't it interesting the way Iraq news gets reported in our media. A Jan. 10 Associated Press story begins: "Nine American soldiers were killed in the first two days of a new offensive to root out al-Qaida-in-Iraq fighters holed up in districts north of he capital. ... "The losses came as many enemy militants fled U.S. and Iraqi forces massing in Diyala" -- a lot of those guerrillas fleeing north into the province of Salahuddin -- AP correspondent Christopher Chester continues. Read down to the seventh paragraph -- halfway through the story. There, we finally learn that our troops "killed...

A newly declassified document shows that J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty. Hoover sent his plan to the White House on July 7, 1950, 12 days after the Korean War began. It envisioned putting suspect Americans in military prisons. Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The F.B.I would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be...

Harry Reid doesn't know when to give up, or more precisely, when to give up on giving up. After spending the last several months trying to live down his declaration of America's defeat in Iraq on the Senate floor, Reid once again gave al-Qaeda a propaganda boost that sounds as if he took it from Ayman al-Zawahiri's latest video message: Indeed, Republicans have gotten their way in the battle over spending, have forced Democrats to jettison rollbacks of tax breaks for oil companies, and have beaten back attempts to pay for expanded children's health care programs with a tobacco tax...

U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin, D-Madison, and two other senior members of the House Judiciary Committee have called for the immediate opening of impeachment hearings for Vice President Richard Cheney.Baldwin and fellow Democrats Robert Wexler of Florida and Luis Gutierrez of Illinois on Friday distributed a statement, "A Case for Hearings," that declares, "The issues at hand are too serious to ignore, including credible allegations of abuse of power that if proven may well constitute high crimes and misdemeanors under our Constitution. The charges against Vice President Cheney relate to his deceptive actions leading up to the Iraq war, the revelation...

There is a disputed quote, attributed to North Vietnamese General Võ Nguyên Giáp, which states the American military would have won the Vietnam War were it not for the efforts of the American media to demoralize the nation. Giap purportedly wrote, "What we still don't understand is why you Americans stopped the bombing of Hanoi. ... We were ready to surrender! ... We knew it, and we thought you knew it. But we were elated to notice your media was definitely helping us. They were causing more disruption in America than we could in the battlefields." While this quote is...

Follow the link to read about a play making a hero out of Rachel Corrie that is running in Montreal. Corrie was a nitwit, indoctrinated by Israel-hating leftists at Evergreen State College who got flattened by an Israeli military bulldozer. Good riddance to her! Anyone dumb enough not to move out of the way of a slow moving bulldozer shouldn't be using up valuable oxygen. Does the play have a bulldozer come on stage, like the helicopter in Miss Saigon? Because watching a re-enactment of the flattening of the unlamented Rachel Corrie might be worth the price of a ticket.

In a reprise of its notorious December 2004 delivery of $600,000 in cash and humanitarian aid to the 'other side' in the then al Qaeda controlled Iraqi city of Fallujah as American forces were fighting to liberate the city from the terrorists, the anti-American group Code Pink is again raising money to send to an al Qaeda stronghold in Iraq.Several weeks ago, Code Pink announced that it was soliciting money to send to Nineveh province to aid "Iraqi orphans, widows and internally displaced people."It just so happens that Nineveh province is where al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents have recently regrouped...

Franken announced in February his candidacy as a Democratic contender for the U.S. senate seat now held by first-term Republican Sen. Norm Coleman, who many see as one of the most vulnerable national incumbents, The New York Times reports. Franken is in a competitive race for Coleman's seat with Mike Ciresi, a lawyer who has run for the job previously. Franken lobbies potential voters to support his claim the former comedian is a serious contender, arguing his political commentary as of late offers credibility. Franken and Ciresi are both impressive fundraisers, raising $1.89 million and $1.7 million, respectively, the Times...

Democrats are increasingly bailing on their previously held view that the troop surge in Iraq has been a "failure," but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid isn't ready to jump on the bandwagon with other Democrats who say the surge has worked. The Senate re-opened for business on Monday after a two-week Thanksgiving break, during which key Democrats traveled to Iraq and declared that the surge is working, at least from a security and military perspective. Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), one the top war critics, stunned fellow Democrats late last week with his statement that "the surge is working," even though...

For months, our magazine has been subject to accusations that stories we published by an American soldier then serving in Iraq were fabricated. When these accusations first arose, we promised our readers a full account of our investigation. We spent the last four-and-a-half months re-reporting his stories. These are our findings. ::very big snip:: In retrospect, we never should have put Beauchamp in this situation. He was a young soldier in a war zone, an untried writer without journalistic training. We published his accounts of sensitive events while granting him the shield of anonymity--which, in the wrong hands, can become...

Transcript: HELEN THOMAS: Does the President want no troops out from Iraq on his watch? I’m talking about all the troops. MS. PERINO: Well, 5,700 troops will be home by the end of the year, so that is some troops coming home. The President said that troop levels are going to be made by commanders on the ground, and that we’re going to have to talk about – THOMAS: Why should it be? Why can’t the American people have a say? MS. PERINO: — return on success. The American people have had a say. They elected a President who is...

Fake mug shots of President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other White House officials are on display at the main branch of the New York City Public Library, and the exhibit has caused quite a commotion. About six manipulated photographs of members of the Bush administration made to look like mug shots are lining one of the landmark building's hallways, with each current and former official holding a D.C. police date-of-arrest placard bearing the date they made "incriminating" statements about the war in Iraq, The New York Daily News reported. In addition to Bush and Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza...

What is there left to say about the Hollywood assumption that Americans are too clueless to realize that war is hell, that the war in Iraq is particularly troubling and that only moral instruction from, well, Hollywood can bring a benighted nation to its senses? Moviegoers have already signaled their disdain. Three recent antiwar pictures that reflect the film colony's imperious self-regard — "In the Valley of Elah," "Rendition" and "Lions for Lambs" — have been quickly fitted with box-office body bags. Soon they'll be joined by "Redacted," the talky, torpid, borderline-hysterical new movie by Brian De Palma. The picture's...

More on Redacted Briefings Comments (5) I called the Dallas Mavericks front office today to express my displeasure at Mark Cuban’s funding of Redacted. I started the conversation by saying, “I hope this isn’t the only phone call you’re going to receive like this, but I am a soldier and I never raped nor murdered anyone.” The woman on the other end of the line said, “Why would you blame Mark?” When I responded, “Because he funded the project,” I found myself talking to dead air. My thought is that we should all call, or write and express our displeasure....

Facts Don’t Matter! - A stunning revelation stated almost in emphatic unison from three of the most respected and read political weblog posters presenting at Blogworld & New Media Expo. This bold announcement came out at a lightly-attended conference module held as part of the “Political Track” at Blogworld last week. The module held Friday, November 9, 2007, in a Las Vegas Convention Center conference room was entitled “Right vs Left: Who’s Winning The Battle Of The Blogosphere?” It featured a discussion panel of six political commentators (three from the conservative viewpoint and three from the liberal, uh, progressive viewpoint)....

House Democrats pushed through a $50 billion bill for the Iraq war Wednesday night that would require President Bush to start bringing troops home in coming weeks with a goal of ending combat by December 2008. The legislation, passed 218-203, was largely a symbolic jab at Bush, who already has begun reducing force levels but opposes a congressionally mandated timetable on the war. And while the measure was unlikely to pass in the Senate — let alone overcome a presidential veto — Democrats said they wanted voters to know they weren't giving up. "The fact is, we can no longer...

WEB EXTRA / Readers weigh in as wounds of Vietnam are reopened again . . . I am writing in response to the article published on November 6th about U.S. Senator John Kerry. I find it hard to believe that the issue of Senator Kerry’s service to our country is being brought up yet again by one small group of people with an ax to grind. - TIMOTHY P. MURRAY, Lt. Governor, Massachusetts Dear Senator Kerry, it does not matter what dirt you have on them, what you use to prove you right and them wrong, you lost this battle,...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Government watchdogs have found that thousands of people who shouldn't have been admitted to the United States were mistakenly allowed in last year because of security lapses at legal border crossings. The number of inadmissible aliens who managed to enter through official ports of entry in 2006 was not disclosed in Monday's report from the Government Accountability Office. However, a source who has seen a full version of the report, in which those statistics were included, put the total at 21,000. The author of the GAO report, Richard Stana, said most of those who were wrongly allowed...

It doesn't matter how many Oscar winners are in front of or behind the camera — audiences are proving to be conscientious objectors when it comes to this fall's surge of antiwar and anti-Bush films. Both "In the Valley of Elah" and, more recently, "Rendition" drew minuscule crowds upon their release, which doesn't bode well for the ongoing stream of films critical of the Iraq war and the Bush administration's wider war on terror."Rendition," which features three Oscar winners in key roles, grossed $4.1 million over the weekend in 2,250 screens for a ninth-place finish. A re-release of "The Nightmare...

Caption this "representative" of American views being honored by American Atheists Kalifornia director Dave Kong.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi came under increasing pressure from members of her Democratic caucus Wednesday not to bring a resolution officially recognizing the Armenian genocide to a vote. The San Francisco Democrat, who had promised to bring the long-debated resolution to the floor, sounded uncertain about its fate as support waned in the face of angry denunciations from Turkey and fears that the symbolic resolution could disrupt U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. "Whether it will come up or not, or what the action will be, remains to be seen," she said. The Bush administration and the Turkish government...

(CNSNews.com) -The federal government is currently conducting more than 60 "stolen valor" investigations of individuals suspected of making false claims about their military records, according to the Department of Veteran's Affairs, and about 30 people nationwide have been arrested in the past year for crimes related to falsifying a military record. Stolen valor typically occurs when someone falsifies documents or produces medals and awards from the military they didn't earn in order to qualify for veterans benefits. Jeffrey Sullivan, the U.S. attorney in the Western District of Washington, prosecuted Jesse Macbeth of Tacoma, Wash., in the past year as well...

Nobody can dispute that Barack Obama opposed the Iraq war from the start and, with striking prescience, predicted U.S. troops would be mired in a costly conflict that fanned "the flames of the Middle East." But nobody should accept at face value the Illinois senator's claim that he was a "courageous leader" who opposed the war at great political risk. The truth is that while Obama showed foreign policy savvy and an ability to keenly analyze both sides of an issue in his October 2002 warnings on Iraq, the political upside of his position rivaled any risk. And, once elected...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A federal judge refused Friday to dismiss a defamation case against Rep. John P. Murtha and ordered the Pennsylvania Democrat to give a sworn deposition in the case. A Marine Corps sergeant is suing the 18-term congressman for alleging ''cold-blooded murder and war crimes'' by unnamed soldiers in connection with the deaths of Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha. The deaths became prominent in May 2006 when Murtha, who opposes the Iraq war, said at a Capitol Hill news conference that a Pentagon war crimes investigation will show Marines killed dozens of innocent Iraqi civilians in...

A federal judge refused Friday to dismiss a defamation case against Rep. John P. Murtha and ordered the Pennsylvania Democrat to give a sworn deposition in the case. A Marine Corps sergeant accuses the 16-term congressman of falsely accusing him of "cold-blooded murder and war crimes" in connection with the deaths of Iraqi civilians. The Justice Department wanted the case dismissed because Murtha was acting in his official role as a lawmaker. Assistant U.S. Attorney John F. Henault said the comments were made as part of the debate over the war in Iraq. U.S. District Judge Rosemary M. Collyer said...

In a 12-minute video posted on YouTube, an Egyptian man wearing a white shirt, khaki pants and rubber gloves explains in Arabic how to turn a toy boat into a bomb.

CAMP PENDLETON – Charges against the commander of a Marine unit accused of killing 24 Iraqi men, women and children in Haditha nearly two years ago have been dismissed. Capt. Lucas M. McConnell was charged late last year with two counts of failing to properly investigate and report a Nov. 19, 2005, incident that also left one Marine dead.....[snip] ....Only three of the original defendants – Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani and Lance Cpl. Stephen B. Tatum – face possible court-martial anytime soon. A fourth, Lt. Andrew A. Grayson, has reportedly rejected a government plea...

Sure, it was just an acceptance speech at some silly awards ceremony. However, when Hollywoodans say ridiculous things on television that media applaud along with the Hollywoodans in attendance, someone's got to point out the inanity. As such, when Sally Field said at Sunday's Emmy awards ceremony as reported by the MRC's Tim Graham, "And, let's face it, if the mothers ruled the war, there would be no (expletive) wars in the first place," I can't sit idly by without contesting such nonsense. After all, it appears Field has never heard of some famous female leaders who brought their nation's...

HAVANA (Reuters) - Ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro said the U.S. government misinformed Americans and the world about 9/11, echoing conspiracy theories about the terror attacks against the United States six years ago. In an essay read by a Cuban television presenter on Tuesday night, Castro said the Pentagon was hit by a rocket, not a plane, because no traces were found of its passengers. "Today one knows there was deliberate misinformation," wrote Castro, who has not appeared in public since July of 2006 when life-threatening surgery for a secret illness forced him to hand over power to his brother...

Move over Oprah! Welcome to the Osama Bin Laden Book Club. In his most recent video message, Bin Laden extols the works of the leftist author Noam Chomsky and he also directs Americans to read the book Imperial Hubris written by former CIA analyst and Bush critic Michael Scheuer. Scheuer places the blame for the turmoil in Iraq and the Middle East squarely on Bush, and Chomsky wrote of 9/11, "As atrocities go it doesn't rank very high." Indeed for Chomsky the only significance of 9/11 was that usually it is America that is responsible for mass atrocities while "for...

Schumer Disparages U.S. Military; Democrats Attack David Petraeus September 6, 2007 BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: The Petraeus Report is coming out next week. The Democrats are not waiting for the Petraeus Report. In fact, they're not even going to call it the Petraeus Report. They're calling it the "Bush Report." Dingy Harry and Nancy Pelosi are calling it the "Bush Report" in an effort to discredit it. You know, I guess a couple weeks ago I detected -- and I was certain that I was right about this -- that there had been some adults somewhere in the Democrat Party who...

Once again, we are expected to believe a handful of patsies—excuse me, “terrorists”—were capable of taking out a U.S. military base, this time the Ramstein air base in Germany, but thanks to the diligent work of Germany’s “special police officers,” these America-hating miscreants were apprehended before they attacked. In addition to Ramstein, reports the New York Times, these would-be terrorists plotted “massive attacks” against the Frankfurt international airport and “several sites frequented by Americans, including discos [and] bars…. German and American officials said that such indicators made them suspect (sic) connections to Al Qaeda.” Monika Harms, the German federal prosecutor,...

There is an article appearing in the August 15 edition of the Washington Times that should alarm every citizen of the United States. According to Washington Times reporter, Sara Carter: "A criminal investigations report says several U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services employees are accused of aiding Islamic extremists with identification fraud and of exploiting the visa system for personal gain. "The confidential 2006 USCIS report said that despite the severity of the potential security breaches, most are not investigated 'due to lack of resources' in the agency's internal affairs department.” Carter went on to quote an internal document obtained by...

Encouraged by widespread opposition to the conflict in Iraq, Hollywood film-makers are preparing to unleash an unprecedented wave of war movies on cinema-goers. In a notable break with the past -- where anti-war films were released several years after the conflict in question -- a whole new genre has been created even while US troops remain on the front lines of the "War on Terror." The release in the United States next month of "In the Valley of Elah", a gritty drama from Oscar-winning director Paul Haggis about the murder of an Iraq war veteran, signals the start of the...

Marine Adviser Recuses Himself From Case By Associated Press 10:32 PM EDT, August 14, 2007 : CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. - A top legal adviser at Camp Pendleton who was accused of making "inappropriate and imprudent" comments recused himself from the case against a Marine charged with murdering Iraqi civilians in Haditha. Lt. Col. Bill Riggs is a senior legal adviser to the general overseeing the prosecution of five Marines charged in the slayings. Riggs recused himself from the case against Lance Cpl. Stephen Tatum, a military spokesman said Tuesday. His action came after he contacted Lt. Col. Paul Ware, the...

Clinton, Kerry & Boxer Introduce Legislation Requiring Pentagon to Prepare for Iraq Redeployment Washington, DC – During a press conference this afternoon on Capitol Hill, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY), John Kerry (D-MA) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) introduced legislation that would require the Pentagon to prepare a report and briefing for Congress on contingency planning for redeploying troops from Iraq. A transcript of Senator Clinton’s remarks is below: Senator Kerry and I and our co-sponsors for this legislation are here today because we believe strongly in the vital role that Congress has played throughout our history in holding administrations accountable...

Army medical examiners were suspicious about the close proximity of the three bullet holes in Pat Tillman's forehead and tried without success to get authorities to investigate whether the former NFL player's death amounted to a crime, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. "The medical evidence did not match up with the, with the scenario as described," a doctor who examined Tillman's body after he was killed on the battlefield in Afghanistan in 2004 told investigators. The doctors - whose names were blacked out - said that the bullet holes were so close together that it appeared the...

The phrase is a cliché & buried in the cliché are a pair of pernicious ideas: 1) That individual soldiers are without moral, existential, responsibility for their acts; 2) that to argue the Iraq war is wrong, misguided, ill-conceived, badly managed, stupid, indecent, horrifying, & damaging to US interests is to somehow wish harm to “the troops.” Each “troop” is a moral agent & though we make certain allowances for individuals acting under military orders, one of the benchmarks of civilization is that we hold soldiers to a moral standard of responsibility. (Unless we secretly wish the “troops” to carry...

Per Fox News, Sen. Hillary Clinton recently sent a letter to an assistant SECDEF condemning the war and Bush and demanding to know what plans the Pentagon has for our inevitable defeat. The Pentagon replied that she was out of line and that it was unacceptable to be discussing a defeat when the US is involved in winning the war. Hillary has just send a huffy note to SECDEF Gates demanding that his subordinate be punished for not kissing her ass. LOL!

Over the past several months The Nation has interviewed fifty combat veterans of the Iraq War from around the United States in an effort to investigate the effects of the four-year-old occupation on average Iraqi civilians. These combat veterans...described a brutal side of the war rarely seen on television screens or chronicled in newspaper accounts. ... I mean, you physically could not do an investigation every time a civilian was wounded or killed because it just happens a lot and you'd spend all your time doing that," said Marine Reserve Lieut. Jonathan Morgenstein, 35, of Arlington, Virginia. ... Veterans said...

July 11, 2007 One Haditha hero cleared David Allender The Investigative Officer in in the LCpl. Sharratt Article 32 hearing has recommended that murder charges be dropped. This clears one of the defendants in the so-called "Haditha massacre." One innocent man and brave soldier has been spared further agony in this disgraceful prosecution. I posted a copy of the IO's report here. LCpl. Sharratt was charged with three murders in house number four (Sgt. Wuterich was charged with a fourth murder in that house). The four dead Iraqis, the Ayed brothers, were described by Iraqi "witnesses" as having been herded...

Man accused of trying to help al-Qaida sought US public rebellion MICHAEL RUBINKAM The Associated Press SCRANTON, Pa. - A man charged with trying to help al-Qaida blow up U.S. energy facilities described in chilling detail a plan to target a natural gas refinery and wrote that it would lead to "instant rebellion" by an American public disgusted over the Iraq war... Michael C. Reynolds, 49, of Wilkes-Barre, is on trial here on federal charges of providing material support to terrorists. He was arrested in December 2005 after he tried to meet a purported al-Qaida contact near a hotel where...

BAGHDAD, June 30 (Reuters) - Media reports attributed to Iraqi police of 20 decapitated bodies found south of Baghdad this week were untrue and may have been planted by insurgents to provoke revenge attacks, the U.S. military said on Saturday. "Coalition and Iraqi officials began investigating to determine if the reports were true. Ultimately it was concluded the reports were false," the military said in a statement. Local police, speaking off the record, said on Thursday that the bodies had been found dumped on the banks of the Tigris River near Salman Pak, about 30 km (19 miles) south of...

It seems that saying the Iraq war was already "lost" was just not quite enough for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV). Apparently he and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) sent a letter to President Bush saying, "...the escalation has failed to produce the intended results." So final judgment has been passed, as far as Reid and Pelosi are concerned, even though the last of the so-called "surge" troops involved in the President's security plan for Baghdad and al-Anbar Province have just arrived in Iraq's capital. Breitbart.com quotes the two Democratic congressional leaders as saying, "The increase in...

Man who lied about actions in Iraq admits faking forms By David Bowermaster Seattle Times staff reporter Jesse MacBeth stoked opposition to the Iraq war in 2006 when he spoke out about atrocities he committed as a U.S. Army Ranger serving as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. MacBeth, 23, of Tacoma, claimed to have killed more than 200 people, many at close range, some as they prayed in a mosque. He spoke at an anti-war rally in Tacoma and appeared in a 20-minute anti-war video that circulated widely on the Internet.

June 7: A new online propaganda effort by jihadists focuses on stirring anti-war sentiment among Americans. NBC's Lisa Myers reports.

Phony Soldier Charged With Making Up Claims of Atrocities in Iraq Sunday , May 20, 2007 AP SEATTLE — A man who tried to position himself as a leader of the anti-war movement by claiming to have participated in war crimes while serving in Iraq is facing federal charges of falsifying his record. Jesse Adam Macbeth, 23, formerly of Phoenix, garnered attention on blogs and in some alternative media after he began claiming in 2005 to have been awarded a Purple Heart for his service, which he said included slaughtering innocents in a Fallujah mosque. His story was contradicted by...

SPOKANE, Wash. - Thursday a U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Washington, announced that a grand jury issued a two count indictment against 23-year-old Travis Riehl of Spokane. The Indictment charges Travis Riehl with two counts of destruction of government property. Travis Riehl is alleged to have thrown a rock through the window of the United States Army Recruiting Station located on 29th Avenue in Spokane, on October 16, 2005. It cost in excess of $1,000 to repair the damages. Additionally, Travis Riehl is charged with throwing a rock through the window of the Washington Air National Guard office...

Filmmaker Michael Moore has asked the Bush administration to call off an investigation of his trip to Cuba to get treatment for ailing Sept. 11 rescue workers for a segment in his upcoming health-care expose, "Sicko." Moore, who made the hit documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11" assailing President Bush's handling of Sept. 11, said in a letter to U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson on Friday that the White House may have opened the investigation for political reasons. "For five and a half years, the Bush administration has ignored and neglected the heroes of the 9/11 community," Moore said in the letter, which...

An East Bay congresswoman will co-sponsor a forthcoming bill that would restore a time-honored civil liberty curbed last year by an anti-terrorism law. Rumors began circulating through dozens of blogs Tuesday that the House Armed Services Committee might add into the huge Department of Defense Authorization Act a section restoring the right of habeas corpus to noncitizen prisoners detained by the government as unlawful enemy combatants, such as those now held in the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Habeas corpus essentially is the right to be brought to court for a determination of whether one is imprisoned lawfully, and...