On today, the day after September 11th, it’s worth pointing out how some people in power took advantage of a tragic moment that will live forever in the minds and hearts of Americans and in American history as an opportunity to seize power and inject the American people with a healthy dose of fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

The more frightened the American people were, the more they could keep us controlled, and slowly but surely we’re breaking out of that shell. Why? We’re coming to terms with the failures of the people who have propagated these lies, and we’re looking back in time and rethinking our frightened, knee-jerk reactions to the fear they’ve fostered. With that in mind, here’s a few myths about national security that have been repeated so often in the media that you’ve likely heard them all before.

Some of the highlights? The myth that Islamofaacism is our greatest national security threat, the myth that we have to give up some civil liberties in times of war to keep us safe, the myth that we’re “fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here,” one that makes me particularly sick, and the myth that our current strategy must be working because there hasn’t been another attack.

[ Ten Conservative Myths about National Security ]
Source: Campaign for America’s Future

Good old John McCain. In some ways, I wish the attacks against him hadn’t started so early this campaign season, but frankly, he’s making it entirely too easy to call him out for his language and his policies.

If everyone were listening, this week should have been the week that all but ended his chances at being President, but not everyone was listening, I’m afraid, which is why these 10 gaffes bear repeating, even if the author at Alternet tends to overuse the “flip-flop” label (not entirely unjustified though, it was the right that invented the term, it’s only fair they be called out when their representatives do the same):

1. McCain unambiguously called Social Security “an absolute disgrace.”

2. McCain’s top economic policy adviser calls Americans a bunch of “whiners” for being worried about the slumping economy.

3. Iraqi leaders call for a timetable for U.S. withdrawal, McCain gets caught in a bizarre denial and flip flop.

4. McCain’s economic plan to cut the deficit has no details and is simply not believable.

5. McCain’s deficit plan includes bringing the troops home represents a major Iraq flip-flop.

6. McCain campaign misled about economists support. (McCain claimed that “economists” supported his economic plan, and even included a letter signed by 300 of them…trouble was the economists that “signed” were signing on to something entirely different- NOT McCain’s economic plan)

7. McCain makes a joke about killing Iranians.

8. McCain denies, flatly, that he ever said that he is not an expert in economics.

9). McCain distorts his record on veterans benefits in response to a question from Vietnam Veteran, who then proceeds to call McCain out on it.

10.) McCain demonstrates he knows nothing about Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The trouble is, each one of these is incredibly salient, and hits McCain on every single point on which he believes he can stand out to Obama: the economy, the war, and national security and defense. In each instance, McCain proves that he’s not only out of touch with the American people and what they want from their government, but that he has this mad delusion that the policies of the past 8 years have been remotely successful.

[ 10 McCain Gaffes from This Week That Should Have Damaged His Chances ]
Source: Alternet

From the “How’s This for Ironic” Department, Senator John McCain decides that torture isn’t really that bad after all, apparently. And I think that the collective memories of the American people are short. I’m surprised at him! From ThinkProgress:

Today, the Senate brought the Intelligence Authorization Bill to the floor, which contained a provision from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) establishing one interrogation standard across the government. The bill requires the intelligence community to abide by the same standards as articulated in the Army Field Manual and bans waterboarding.

Just hours ago, the Senate voted in favor of the bill, 51-45.

Earlier today, ThinkProgress noted that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), a former prisoner of war, has spoken strongly in favor of implementing the Army Field Manual standard. When confronted today with the decision of whether to stick with his conscience or cave to the right wing, McCain chose to ditch his principles and instead vote to preserve waterboardin

I do adore their revival of a line that was used against Senator Kerry during his 2004 Presidential campaign by the swiftboaters though: He was against waterboarding before he was for it.

It’s funny because it’s true.

[ Maverick Fails The Test: McCain Votes Against Waterboarding Ban ]
Source: Think Progress

One thing that I’m consistently appalled at is how insistent the Administration is when they believe we’re under “threat” and how the Congress should give them as much money as they want for whatever tasks they choose without asking why, and how the American people should be prepared to give up whatever freedoms and rights the government sees fit to take from us to protect us from a mysterious and ever-lurking threat using means and results that we aren’t allowed to know, and specifically aren’t allowed to hold them accountable for.

So while the Administration claims that we’re under constant and never-ending threat, even though the Administration has never seen fit to properly embrace the findings of the 9/11 Commission, and never seen fit to properly provide federal funding to state and city-level first responders like police and firefighters, and even though the Administration hasn’t even seen fit to properly fund its own security and screening programs – screening cargo at American ports, screening all luggage on flights, updated scanning technology that will speed airport lines and enhance security, or even properly train federal security staff like the TSA, even though all of that is indisputably true, the Administration is cutting anti-terror funds across the board. Likely to make room for what they call the “front-line” on the war on terror – a manufactured conflict of their own making. Namely, the war in Iraq. Not even the war in Afghanistan, which so severely needs American support and redoubled efforts but is sadly ignored thanks to the quagmire just to the west, over the other big player in the area (and a whole other topic), Iran.

The Bush administration intends to slash counterterrorism funding for police, firefighters and rescue departments across the country by more than half next year, according to budget documents obtained by The Associated Press.

The Homeland Security Department has given $23 billion to states and local communities to fight terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks, but the administration is not convinced that the money has been well spent and thinks the nation’s highest-risk cities have largely satisfied their security needs.

The department wanted to provide $3.2 billion to help states and cities protect against terrorist attacks in 2009, but the White House said it would ask Congress for less than half — $1.4 billion, according to a Nov. 26 document.

The plan calls outright elimination of programs for port security, transit security, and local emergency management operations in the next budget year. This is President Bush’s last budget, and the new administration would have to live with the funding decisions between Jan. 20 and Sept. 30, 2009.

Read it and weep America. Especially those in major American cities – which by and large, even though they’re the largest terrorist targets are usually hotbeds of the Administration’s political opposition – your funding is going to dry up instantly, and the programs that were designed to protect you will do so as well. And those expansions and additional funding that your police and fire departments desperately needed in order to complete their security planning and risk analysis after September 11th? Say goodbye to those as well.

The Administration will probably try to say that they want to spread out the funding to other potential targets, but I don’t buy that for a second. They said they would look into funding security around critical infrastructure elements like bridges, power plants, refineries, and water-treatment facilities, but they’ve done no such thing and it’s looking like that task – like all of the others – will fall to the states, which will undoubtedly have to raise taxes to support security planning that the federal government should really do (think of it – a patchwork security plan depending on what city or state you live in). If it’s not the responsibility of the federal government to protect us, whose is it?

Instead, the administration will likely funnel more money into the Pentagon towards cold-war era military projects like the Osprey and the scientifically-proven-not-to-work missile defense program that they’re trying to provoke a conflict with Russia over.

The proposal to drastically cut Homeland Security grants is at odds with some of the administration’s own policies. For example, the White House recently promised continued funding for state and regional intelligence “fusion centers” — information-sharing centers the administration deems critical to preventing another terrorist attack. Cutting the grants would limit money available for the centers.

The White House’s plan to eliminate the port, transit and other grants, which are popular with state and local officials, would not go into effect until Sept. 30, 2008. Congress is unlikely to support the cuts and will ultimately decide the fate of the programs and the funding levels when it hashes out the department’s 2009 budget next year.

The White House routinely seeks to cut the budget requests of federal departments, but the cuts proposed for 2009 Homeland Security grants are far deeper than the norm. Congress has yet to approve the department’s 2008 plan.

“This budget proposal is dead on arrival,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. “This administration runs around the country scaring people and then when it comes to putting their money where their mouth is, they say ’sorry, the bank is closed.”’

Well said, Senator Boxer (she always knows what to say). It’s remarkable how the administration is willing to use fear to keep the American people in check, even drive us to war in a foreign country over nothing but smoke, mirrors, dust, and their word, but when it comes time to ante up, they’re not willing. Instead, they propose cuts that they know Congress won’t accept, or more importantly, accept blame for if they actually cut the funding.

To zero out essential Homeland Security programs which have more to do with protecting Americans and fighting the war on terror than much of the money spent in Iraq shows how warped and out of touch this administration’s priorities are,” said Sen. Charles Schumer, a Democrat.

My thoughts exactly.

[ White House Seeks to Slash Anti-Terror Funds ]
Source: MSNBC

Whether we’re discussing fiscal responsibility or social accountability, conservatives have proven time and time again that they simply can’t count. It’s not about tallying numbers and coming up with incorrect figures, it’s about fudging statistics when the numbers disagree with their perspectives, it’s about taking opt-in surveys and parading them as independent studies until someone comes along and debunks it, it’s about claiming there’s plenty of money in the tax coffers when it comes to bombing children and putting off diplomacy and accountability but claiming the coffers are empty and we suddenly need to control spending when it comes to giving children health care and protecting children from lead-covered toys being shipped in from sweatshops abroad. When it comes to the right side of the aisle, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, and they like it that way – gives them a kind of implausible deniability.

There are dozens of examples of this in the war in Iraq, from the way veterans are treated when they return home and the near squalid conditions that many of them were subjected to (the lucky ones who were even granted care – others have been booted from the service entirely for no other reason than suffering PTSD under the guise of having ‘personality disorders), but looking past the fact that our brave men and women aren’t getting the support and care they need and deserve from the military when they get back, we can see something more troubling: veteran suicides. The trend has manifested itself as an ugly number in recent months, and conservatives, typical to form, don’t think there’s a problem:

CBS news wanted to learn more about the problem of suicide among returning Iraq veterans. Here, first, is what they learned:

[I]t turns out little information exists about how widespread suicides are among these who have served in the military. There have been some studies, but no one has ever counted the numbers nationwide.

“Nobody wants to tally it up in the form of a government total,” Bowman said.

Why do the families think that is?

“Because they don’t want the true numbers of casualties to really be known,” Lucey said.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., is a member of the Veterans Affairs Committee.

“If you’re just looking at the overall number of veterans themselves who’ve committed suicide, we have not been able to get the numbers,” Murray said.

So CBS went looking itself. In return, they—and the American people—received a slap in the face. They filed a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Defense for suicide numbers for the last dozen years:

Four months later, they sent CBS News a document, showing that between 1995 and 2007, there were almost 2,200 suicides. That’s 188 last year alone. But these numbers included only “active duty” soldiers.

CBS News went to the Department of Veterans Affairs, where Dr. Ira Katz is head of mental health….

Why hasn’t the VA done a national study seeking national data on how many veterans have committed suicide in this country?

“That research is ongoing,” he said.

The “research is ongoing,” and the check is in the mail.

That sounds about right to me.

[ Conservatives Can't Count ]
Source: TomPaine.com

This piece is so shocking that it introduces itself. When you wonder if the religious extremists in the middle east have a valid complaint when they claim that religion plays a significant role in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, that the American occupation is some kind of “crusade,” these are the kinds of stories that come to mind. At the same time, I’m still skeptical of the folks who claim as such. Even so, it’s hard to refute this:

Actor Stephen Baldwin, the youngest member of the famous Baldwin brothers, is no longer playing Pauly Shore’s sidekick in comedy masterpieces like Biodome. He has a much more serious calling these days.

Baldwin became a right-wing, born-again Christian after the 9/11 attacks, and now is the star of Operation Straight Up (OSU), an evangelical entertainment troupe that actively proselytizes among active-duty members of the US military. As an official arm of the Defense Department’s America Supports You program, OSU plans to mail copies of the controversial apocalyptic video game, Left Behind: Eternal Forces to soldiers serving in Iraq. OSU is also scheduled to embark on a “Military Crusade in Iraq” in the near future.

“We feel the forces of heaven have encouraged us to perform multiple crusades that will sweep through this war torn region,” OSU declares on its website about its planned trip to Iraq. “We’ll hold the only religious crusade of its size in the dangerous land of Iraq.”

The Defense Department’s Chaplain’s Office, which oversees OSU’s activities, has not responded to calls seeking comment.

“The constitution has been assaulted and brutalized,” Mikey Weinstein, former Reagan Administration White House counsel, ex-Air Force judge advocate (JAG), and founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, told me. “Thanks to the influence of extreme Christian fundamentalism, the wall separating church and state is nothing but smoke and debris. And OSU is the IED that exploded the wall separating church and state in the Pentagon and throughout our military.” Weinstein continued: “The fact that they would even consider taking their crusade to a Muslim country shows the threat to our national security and to the constitution and everyone that loves it.”

This is the real and present danger; this is the threat to American credibility around the world, and it’s certainly a real problem for our soldiers in the field. When the average Iraqi sees an American solider as an occupier and an enemy, things are bad enough. When that same person sees them also as threat to their fundamental religious beliefs, it’s a huge issue.

But behind OSU’s anodyne promises of wholesome fun for military families, the organization promotes an apocalyptic brand of evangelical Christianity to active duty US soldiers serving in Muslim-dominated regions of the Middle East. Displayed prominently on the “What We Believe” section of OSU’s website is a passage from the Book of Revelations (Revelation 19:20; 20:10-15) that has become the bedrock of the Christian right’s End Times theology: “The devil and his angels, the beast and the false prophet, and whosoever is not found written in the Book of Life, shall be consigned to everlasting punishment in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.”

With the endorsement of the Defense Department, OSU is mailing “Freedom Packages” to soldiers serving in Iraq. These are not your grandfather’s care packages, however. Besides pairs of white socks and boxes of baby wipes (included at the apparent suggestion of Iran-Contra felon Oliver North, according to OSU) OSU’s care packages contain the controversial Left Behind: Eternal Forces video game. The game is inspired by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’ bestselling pulp fiction series about a blood-soaked Battle of Armageddon pitting born-again Christians against anybody who does not adhere to their particular theology. In LaHaye’s and Jenkins’ books, the non-believers are ultimately condemned to “everlasting punishment” while the evangelicals are “raptured” up to heaven.

Again, we see the evangelicals standing in the space that ordinary, every day Christians should be standing. We see the radicals speaking for the masses while the masses remain silent. I’ve said this before; while people at home claim that Islam has a “cancer to remove,” in terms of doing more to silence and suppress radical Islamic clerics and students, and that the masses should do more to renounce violence and educate their congregations that terror and violence aren’t the paths to political power, again we see a reflection at home that American Christians refuse to acknowledge. Religious Americans have their own cancer to cut out, their own blight to cure; their own irrational minority to silence.

There are more and more voices rising up to refute this evangelical mindset and bury it for what it is – an inaccurate and improper interpretation of Christianity, but it’s a shame that we’re still on the fringes and the more prominent voices haven’t taken up the banner.

[ Kill Or Convert, Brought To You By the Pentagon ]
Source: The Nation

While the President sits in the Oval Office and claims that the desire of the Democratic leadership to bring an end to this violent and bloody conflict in Iraq in a responsible and sustainable manner, and to involve the Iraqis in their own political and military future is “irresponsible,” and while he makes empty invitations to Congressional leaders to come by his office to talk when what he really means is to listen to him tirade about why the war must go on without end or accountability, it has surfaced that the real “irresponsible” actions are at the hands of the President himself and his lackeys when drafting their so-called “emergency” war-funding requests – requests that are often held over the heads of those who would like to see a greater deal of accountability, fiscal responsibility, and measured success and withdrawl from this conflict.

While many progressives crow about an immediate needs to withdraw from the Iraq conflict, I think cooler heads prevail, even in the progressive community, and understand that the situation in Iraq cannot have a military solution. You can’t just kill all the bad guys, when the bad guys keep popping up, and entire communities support the bad guys more than they support you. There needs to be a vested political interest by the Iraqi government in making their own nation theirs, and the government needs to stand up to meet the expectations and the needs of the people, instead of the US government. The sooner this happens, the sooner the Iraqis can reconcile themselves and build a real coalition, secular government, the sooner our brave men and women can stop being the buffer between warring factions and can stop spilling their own blood for a war without end and can come home to be with their families and loved ones.

But back to point – these “emergency” war funding resolutions that are so often held over the heads of politicians who dare to speak out against the Bush Administrations “endless war” policy, have turned out, thanks to a new government report, to be anything but emergency, and are primarily funding efforts that can hardly be classified as an emergency:

A large portion of the emergency funding, according to the report, would be used by the administration to pay for non-urgent matters unrelated to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, calling into question whether the supplemental request represents a true emergency.

According to a copy of the supplemental bill, $695 million in emergency funding would be used to send an additional aircraft carrier and Marine Expeditionary Force to the Persian Gulf, which many critics interpret as sending a hostile message to Iran. Furthermore, the Bush administration intends to use $10 million of the supplemental to help the State Department finance the US-established Alhurra Television (the free one) into 22 Middle Eastern countries. The channel, which broadcasts a wide variety of programs in Arabic from a studio in Springfield, Virginia, is seen as a propaganda tool whose messages are controlled by the Bush administration, according to a report in the Columbia Journalism Review.

The report added that “the request asks for additional authority for DOD to help Iraq restart factories that could be controversial.” However, when asked to elaborate, CRS could not provide further details and Congressional representatives did not return calls for comment.

The Congressional Research Service report says the non-urgent items the administration included in its emergency supplemental request and is asking Congress to pay for “appears to be based on a new and expanded definition of war costs that permits the services to fund not only operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also the ‘longer war on terror.’”

“There is no specific definition of the ‘longer war on terror,’ now one of the core missions of the Department of Defense,” the report says. “This new guidance may be the primary reason for the 40 percent increase over [fiscal year] 2006 funding that DOD is proposing for [fiscal year] 2007. The new definition constitutes a significant shift from long-standing DOD financial regulations that require that costs be necessary to carry out specific operations.”

…

Finally, the Defense Department has also included a request for $500 million to expand its inventory of spare and repair parts, a “reflection of DOD’s decision to expand the scope of costs permitted in supplemental requests to include costs of the ‘longer war on terror’ and not just emergency war costs.”

Now why would the Administration do such a thing? Other than a pathological fear of oversight and the nasty thought that someone who doesn’t agree with them might have a say in what they can and can’t do, let’s put it this way:

“When the president submits an emergency supplemental request, the authorizing committees are bypassed,” said Ryan Alexander, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan federal budget watchdog group. “The request goes directly to the appropriations committees, and they are pressured by the need to act quickly so that troops in the field do not run out of funds. The result is a spending bill that passes Congress with perfunctory review.”

“Since 9/11, Congress has passed at least one emergency bill to cover war costs, making supplemental spending the method of choice for the majority of funding for operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the war on terror,” Alexander added. “Of the $510 billion spent thus far, $331.8 billion (about 65 percent) has come from supplemental spending legislation. If the so-called “bridge fund” included in the fiscal year 2007 appropriations bill is included, the total rises to $401.8 billion. That means nearly 80 percent of all funding for these wars was the result of emergency and supplemental spending, not regular budgetary means.”

Well that explains it.

[ Government Report Slams "Emergency" War Funding Request ]
Source: TruthOut

The editor of this piece at ConsortiumNews has a fine intro to this one man’s open statement to the American people about what their government was really interested in doing after uncovering the facts about Abu Ghraib, and the fact that they were more interested in hushing up the entire scandal to the degree that war criminals wound up getting wrist-slap sentences in prison and the heroes of the story wound up losing their shirts.

Former Army Sgt. Sam Provance was one of the heroes of the Abu Ghraib scandal, the only uniformed military intelligence officer at the Iraqi prison to testify about the abuses during the internal Army investigation. When he recognized that the Pentagon was scapegoating low-level personnel, he also gave an interview to ABC News.

For refusing to play along with the cover-up, Provance was punished and pushed out of the U.S. military. The Pentagon went forward with its plan to pin the blame for the sadistic treatment of Iraqi detainees on a handful of poorly trained MPs, not on the higher-ups who brought the lessons of “alternative interrogation techniques” from the Guatanamo Bay prison to Abu Ghraib.

The Congress, which was then controlled by the Republicans, promised a fuller investigation. Provance submitted a sworn statement. But Congress never followed through, leaving Provance hanging out to dry.

Provance has written his experiences down, and they’re compelling to read. He was, as I have been in several organizations, a “computer guy,” the guy who has to see everything and knows more than he probably should, and the type of person in a horrible position when it comes to whistle-blowing; they know the truth and they have an ethical obligation to break the information to the appropriate authorities, but if they do they’re also the most vulnerable. Provence explains how he tried to tell his commanding officers what was going on and was summarily threatened, demoted, and punished for even daring to bring it up:

In Germany, I had the surreal experience of being interrogated by one of the Army-General-Grand-Inquisitors, Major General George Fay, who showed himself singularly uninterested in what went on at Abu Ghraib.

I had to insist that he listen to my eyewitness account, whereupon he threatened punitive actions against me for not coming forward sooner and even tried to hold me personally responsible for the scandal itself.

The Army then demoted me, suspended my Top Secret clearance, and threatened me with ten years in a military prison if I asked for a court martial. I was even given a gag order, the only one I know to have been issued to those whom Gen. Fay interviewed.

But the fact that most Americans know nothing of what I saw at Abu Ghraib, and that my career became collateral damage, so to speak, has nothing to do with the gag order, which turned out to be the straw that broke this sergeant’s back.

It’s remarkable – and soldiers generally have little to no real whistleblower protections, no way to shield themselves from the wrath of commanders who know the injustices occurring on their watch and who have little interest in seeing them rectified. Provence’s story extends to former General Janis Karpinski, who was also scapegoated to a degree over the abuses at the prison. His entire account, including the reactions of the politicians involved who said one thing to him and something completely different to the cameras, is an astounding retelling of one of the darkest periods of the Iraq War.

[ The American Ghosts of Abu Ghraib ]
Source: ConsortiumNews

In the wake of the horrific story of the conditions that outpatient soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center have to go through (blogged here) published in The Washington Post, a senior Pentagon official came out and made several public statements that he’s planning on overseeing the renovation and reconstruction of the outpatient facility first hand, and that the chain of command at Walter Reed will recieve a shuffle to ensure similar things don’t happen ever again. In fact, the scaffolding and renovations are already underway at Building 18, so there’s some good news there.

On the other hand, there’s the bad news; that part of the Pentagon’s campaign to make sure everything is ship shape and cleaned up, wounded soldiers and their families are being forbidden to speak to the media about the conditions they live in, essentially stifling soldiers from bringing to light the kinds of issues and complaints that made Building 18 so notorious, and subsequently forced the Army to both suffer the bad press and make sure they fixed it.

Soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center’s Medical Hold Unit say they have been told they will wake up at 6 a.m. every morning and have their rooms ready for inspection at 7 a.m., and that they must not speak to the media.

“Some soldiers believe this is a form of punishment for the trouble soldiers caused by talking to the media,” one Medical Hold Unit soldier said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

It is unusual for soldiers to have daily inspections after Basic Training.

Soldiers say their sergeant major gathered troops at 6 p.m. Monday to tell them they must follow their chain of command when asking for help with their medical evaluation paperwork, or when they spot mold, mice or other problems in their quarters. [...]

The soldiers said they were also told their first sergeant has been relieved of duty, and that all of their platoon sergeants have been moved to other positions at Walter Reed. And 120 permanent-duty soldiers are expected to arrive by mid-March to take control of the Medical Hold Unit, the soldiers said. [...]

The Pentagon also clamped down on media coverage of any and all Defense Department medical facilities, to include suspending planned projects by CNN and the Discovery Channel, saying in an e-mail to spokespeople: “It will be in most cases not appropriate to engage the media while this review takes place,” referring to an investigation of the problems at Walter Reed.

It’s more than unusual for soldiers to have to line up for inspection after Basic, it’s literally unheard of unless it’s a combat situation or a base abroad where soldiers are living in barracks, and even then.

The whitewash goes on, I’m afraid, with a little hilarity:

Mission accomplished?

Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley thought so. After the media tour of Building 18, the Army’s surgeon general gave a news conference. “I do not consider Building 18 to be substandard,” he said of a facility Priest and Hull found full of “mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses” and other delights. “We needed to do a better job on some of those rooms, and those of you that got in today saw that we frankly have fixed all of those problems. They weren’t serious, and there weren’t a lot of them.”

Kiley might have had a stronger case if men wearing Tyvek hazmat suits and gas masks hadn’t walked through the lobby while the camera crews waited for the tour to start, or if he hadn’t acknowledged, moments later, that the entire building would have to be closed for a complete renovation.

At least the facilities are being renovated. But the resultant clampdown and whitewash is severely depressing. It seems like everyone involved here at the Pentagon is doing their utmost to avoid any responsibility or accountability, instead rushing some changes without examining the systematic problems that were at work here. This wasn’t about a few dead cockroaches, it was about a systematic breakdown of care for our wounded and recovering brave. It’s a nightmare that after we ask them to go abroad and fight a war without credibility and evidence, we then bring them home after making some of the greatest sacrifices anyone can make for their homes and treat them with such disrespect.

[ Pentagon: Wounded Troops at Walter Reed Forbidden from Speaking to the Media ]
Source: AlterNet

update: At least there’s some accountability, albeit not enough to end my unhappiness with the crackdown. The commanding general responsible for Walter Reed just lost his command:

[ Walter Reed General Fired After Failures ]
Source: The New York Times

update: Well then, never let it be said that people weren’t at least sometimes held accountable for their actions; The Army’s Surgeon General, General Kevin Kiley, and the Secretary of the Army, Francis Harvey, have both resigned in the wake of the Walter Reed story, the former of which reportedly asked to clean out his desk.

[ Army Surgeon General Resigns ]
Source: ABC News

[ Walter Reed Fallout: Army Secretary Resigns ]
Source: MSNBC News

The House has certainly been busy, while the Senate has been bogged down by procedural tricks the Republicans are pulling in order to stem a real debate about the Iraq War. The issue I have here isn’t so much with the procedural tricks, but instead with the fact that it’s obvious that Republicans are shying away from having to take a stand on the war, knowing their constituents fully support the resolution but themselves not wanting to march out of step of the party’s war-hawk message. It’s frightening how far they’re willing to take their consistent denial of reality.

Even so, senate Democrats should let the Republicans have their way, and press them into a full on filibuster of the resolution, forcing them to continually state their support for the war and the troop escalation out loud-the more they’re forced to, the likely less they will. We all know politicians prefer to speak less if possible, especially when they know they’re on the wrong side of the line. Let the Republicans be forced to defend their position, and you’ll hear the same old taglines and talking points, but eventually they’ll realize that all of those talking points will be used against them in their 2008 re-election campaigns.

Regardless, as much as some are dissapointed with the new Democratic congress for not doing enough about the Iraq war, I actually do believe that this is a first, even if it is symbolic, step towards truly shifting the debate on this war from pro/con to “let’s fix this mess and come home as soon as possible.”

[ House Passes Iraq Resolution With 17 Votes From G.O.P. ]
Source: The New York Times