One Utah

The history of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is a sordid tale of bigotry, ignorance and fear-mongering. The Clinton Administration tried to do the right thing and got blown out of the water. Congress - stampeded by a bunch of raving homo-bigots - decided to set military policy. DADT was the result.
DADT has […]

By Warren P. Strobel | McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing “war crimes” and called for those responsible to be held to account.

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Sometimes others say it better than I. I’d like to add one more culprit…OK, about fifty million culprits; every uninformed idiot that voted for him the second time too.
Sorry, Mr. President, But Your Legacy Is More Awful Than You Think
Posted June 11, 2008 | 04:57 PM (EST)
h/t Huffington Post
Rest assured, Mr. President, that […]

Chris Hedges, former Middle East Bureau Chief of the New York Times, has written a courageously truthful essay on Asia Times Online. Not all of the information is new, but it goes into uncomfortable detail that helps explain the current epidemic of PTSD among Iraq veterans.
Our soldiers and marines are waging a […]

Large lies fries anyone?

Yesterday, nine members of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) testified about the dehumanization of the Iraqi people, the abuse of detainees, the changing rules of engagement and the killing of innocent civilians before members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Unless you watched C-SPAN 3, you probably didn’t hear about it (my Comcast cable […]

Via Talking Points Memo and other sources, today we got to read the infamous torture memo that sought to justify the horrifying abuses of detainees at the hands of the U.S. government at Guanatanamo, Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib and CIA secret “black site” prisons. It was written on March 14, 2003 by John Yoo, then […]

This post is part three in my series on good and evil.
In The Lucifer Effect Philip Zimbardo explores the way in which situational factors play a role in individual behaviors. 
Zimbardo sums up his argument:
“Bad systems” create “bad situations” create “bad apples” create “bad behaviors” even in good people.
The point of course is simple - I […]

The Stanford Prison Experiment strongly suggests that moral and immoral behavior are hugley influenced by environment. It’s not so much that we change our morals from setting to setting but that the setting in which we function has the power to put our morality into neutral.
The Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted by Philip Zimbardo, suggested that in […]

Remember when Americans were outraged that the military was buying toilet seats and hammers for six hundred dollars and passing the bill onto the taxpayers. Ah, the good old days!
I set my alarm clock to the Diane Rehm show on NPR at 9:00 a.m. every morning. If you live in Utah, it is one of […]

In Harper’s, Scott Horton writes about The Great Guantanamo Puppet Theater. The problem with the military commission trials is that they are really political tribunals controlled by Vice President Dick Cheney. The trials of six “high-value detainees” linked to the attacks on 9/11 are timed to coincide with the 2008 election, and the […]

Read the whole thing but here are my favorite passages:
The staggering losses we’ve sustained from three decades of increasingly authoritarian, non-reality-based, Daddy-knows-best deciding are mounting up. On 9/11, in New Orleans, in Minneapolis, in Iraq, in a planet-sweeping range of diplomatic failures, in the debacles around a Homeland Security department that was apparently designed for […]

Over a Orcinus, Sara has a great series on leadership that has gotten me thinking about America’s history of leadership. Read it here, here, here and here.
Sara makes an important point. Political systems have a life cycle - they begin as a solution to a set of problems. They function well for […]

Randi Rhodes of Air America, speech to the 50th Anniversary party of “PEACE ACTION of Michigan” on November 11, 2007.
DO not miss this. It is the most honest REAL discussion of what is really happened over the past seven long years.

“Redacted” is a fictional film by Brian De Palma based on a real atrocity in Mahmudiyah, the rape, murder, and burning of Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi, a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, in March 2006 by U.S. soldiers who also killed her parents and younger sister.

Scene from “Redacted” (the tank is a Jordanian Army Challenger-1)
The movie’s title […]

Guess who?
Whether someone made phone calls on his behalf to get into the national guard: “No I don’t think so.”
“They should have probably called up the National Guard in those days. Maybe we would have done better in Vietnam.”

Few people get the opportunity the Patraeus had to speak the truth and put an end to this sick political, economically motivated war which has killed at LEAST 750,000 Iraqis.  Oh well. Fuck You Patraeus.  You suck!
Download:
In case you missed it. Word has it, the phrase was first coined by troops serving in Iraq.

Problem […]

Warning. The following video are not for the pollyannish.
I used to respect the hell out of our troops, all of them. I guess I was being naive.
In the process of writing the post below this one, I spent some time looking for video’s that support the thesis of the post. Much to my disappointment, […]

What day is it?
I rolled over in bed this morning and tuned on the radio. NPR’s “Radio West” program wasn’t on. Instead, there was a congresswoman railing against the audacity of  MoveOn.org to call General David Petraeus “General betray us.” It was immediately obvious that the congresswoman wasn’t on a radio talk show because her […]