Iron Lady Smelt

Sometimes the words, they just sing. It has been pretty much ignored in our press, but the son of former English PM Margaret Thatcher has carried on that legacy of imperialism, and sought his fortune with a lack of respect for law that seems to be spreading in 'civilized' nation right wings.

British mercenary Simon Mann sought leniency from a court in Equatorial Guinea on Friday, saying he was sorry for having been part of a failed coup plot to topple the president of the oil-rich West African state.

Mann, an Eton-educated former special forces officer, risks being sent to jail for nearly 32 years for his role in the 2004 conspiracy to overthrow President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. He has said he was just "an employee" in the plot.

"I apologise for what has happened and I am very happy that nothing actually happened in 2004," Mann told the court on the fourth and final day of his trial, held in a heavily guarded conference centre in the Equatorial Guinea capital Malabo.
(snip)
Equatorial Guinea's Public Prosecutor Jose Olo Obono said Mann had cooperated during the investigation and trial.

On Tuesday, he asked the court to sentence Mann to a cumulative jail term of 31 years and eight months on charges of crimes against the head of state, crimes against the government and crimes against the peace and independence of the state.

Olo Obono said Equatorial Guinea would seek the extradition of Mark Thatcher and Calil.

Defence lawyer Nvo said Mann had been lied to by Calil about the conditions in Equatorial Guinea, which, according to Mann's testimony, Calil had told him was ripe for a coup.

The persistence of profit motivation in relatives seems to be a primary object of holders of what are supposed to be public offices, and those oaths of office are discarded as soon as those offices are gained. Propaganda constitutes a weapon of these latter day coups - along with hired guns.

It seems that elections are a stepping stone up to status of coup leader. The banana republics used to be the creation of brutal - usually military - members of corrupt governments who took over the reins and the public trough by violence. Now it is using marketing firms and local voting officials. The violence comes afterwards.

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More banana republic maneuvers inside our U.S. right wing continue to echo.

The Senate report found that former Reagan administration consultant and Iran contra figure Michael Ledeen had brought two Farsi-speaking Pentagon officials—Rhode and Larry Franklin—to a December 2001 meeting in Rome with two unidentified Iranians as well as Ledeen's old Iran contra interlocutor Ghorbanifar, the subject of a CIA burn notice. Also attending the Rome meetings was at least one official with the Italian military intelligence service SISMI, which provided logistical support and a location for the Rome meetings. The Senate report found that Rhode later went to Paris for a second meeting with Ghorbanifar in June 2003—several months after then deputy national security advisor Stephen Hadley had ordered Ledeen and the Pentagon to shut down the Ghorbanifar channel.

Revelations that Iran Contra figures Ledeen and Ghorbanifar were involved in a new channel to the Bush administration set off alarm bells throughout the US government, and prompted multiple inquiries into whether the channel amounted to an unauthorized covert action and a possible counterintelligence threat. The latter issue was never resolved, after a top Pentagon official shut down the counterintelligence inquiry only a month after it had begun.

But the allegation that Rhode had hired a defense attorney raised the possibility that the issue may still be under investigation.

"The Justice Department has to decline to comment on that," a spokesperson for the department told Mother Jones Friday, after checking on a reporter’s query about a possible Justice Department investigation involving the Pentagon official.

The corruption still remains, and impeachment/resignation of Nixon only slowed the subjugation of the constitution. The need to probe deep and remove the leftovers from the Iran-Contra, Watergate years has been made all the more compelling by their cropping up in our mercenary sidecar to the reduced military.

Body Count

Listening to the news I just heard announcers say that the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq now exceeds the body count from the bombing of the twin towers.

The death toll of US soldiers in Iraq has reached 2,975, surpassing the toll from the September 11 attacks that sparked the US "war on terror".

Three US soldiers have been killed around Baghdad, bringing the number of US fatalities in Iraq since the 2003 invasion to two more than the number killed in the 2001 World Trade Centre attacks

This is the count I get;

U.S. Deaths Confirmed By The DoD: 2957
Reported U.S. Deaths Pending DoD Confirmation: 18
Total 2975
DoD Confirmation List

In return for a terrible atrocity committed on this country, we have sent almost 3,000 American soldiers to their deaths. All the justifications this administration has given for doing that to them as individuals, to this country as a whole, to our ability to defend ourselves and to our standing in the world, and in history, all are proving to be purest fiction. Eminent Middle East authority Dr. Juan Cole took on the myths this morning in a long, detailed recount.

1. Myth number one is that the United States "can still win" in Iraq. Of course, the truth of this statement, frequently still made by William Kristol and other Neoconservatives, depends on what "winning" means. But if it means the establishment of a stable, pro-American, anti-Iranian government with an effective and even-handed army and police force in the near or even medium term, then the assertion is frankly ridiculous. The Iraqi "government" is barely functioning. The parliament was not able to meet in December because it could not attain a quorum. Many key Iraqi politicians live most of the time in London, and much of parliament is frequently abroad. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki does not control large swathes of the country, and could give few orders that had any chance of being obeyed. The US military cannot shore up this government, even with an extra division, because the government is divided against itself. Most of the major parties trying to craft legislation are also linked to militias on the streets who are killing one another. It is over with. Iraq is in for years of heavy political violence of a sort that no foreign military force can hope to stop.

There is much, much more in Dr. Cole's post, and I won't put it all up here. Of course, the major story of the day was the elimination of a police station that had been participating in its own war against rival militias in Basra. A Pentagon report last week had noted the existence of much violence instigated by militia members that had ensconced themselves in the police departments, waging war rather than keeping the peace with U.S. weapons and training.

There is only one reason that I see that we are still in Iraq, and that is the cretin-in-chief's total incapacity to recognize reality. This hardly bodes well for future actual threats that we may yet have to face with this lack of leadership. With all of you, I do hope that a new Congress with enlightened leadership can pull us back out of the swamp that we've been thrown into.

w Is Responsible

The Cretin in Chief has a new tack this a.m. - he's decided since he's wrong, he'll ask more of the citizens of the U.S. to be used to make up for his mistakes.

President Bush acknowledged for the first time yesterday that the United States is not winning the war in Iraq and said he plans to expand the overall size of the "stressed" U.S. armed forces to meet the challenges of a long-term global struggle against terrorists.

As he searches for a new strategy for Iraq, Bush has now adopted the formula advanced by his top military adviser to describe the situation. "We're not winning, we're not losing," Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post. The assessment was a striking reversal for a president who, days before the November elections, declared, "Absolutely, we're winning."

In another turnaround, Bush said he has ordered Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to develop a plan to increase the troop strength of the Army and Marine Corps, heeding warnings from the Pentagon and Capitol Hill that multiple deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan are stretching the armed forces toward the breaking point. "We need to reset our military," said Bush, whose administration had opposed increasing force levels as recently as this summer.

I suppose it is a blessing to some one who has made a horrible misjudgement to have no memory of what he said yesterday, the day before, and the day before that.

When this administration came into office, Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense instituted a plan to drastically reduce military forces and consolidate those forces, eliminating a lot of the duplication that had been accumulating over a long period of time. [A major plan was the 'Star Wars' missile defense system, touted during the campaign by candidate Bush.] Also, the Clinton administration had started some of this updating of the military before he came into office.

When the military forces were sent into Iraq, they were a slimmed-down and 'efficient' fighting force, with numbers to be kept down and General Shinseki disgraced and demoted because of his pronouncement that this was a move that could not succeed with the forces envisioned.


On February 28, 2003, Mr. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, opened a two-front war of words on Capitol Hill, calling the recent estimate by Gen. Eric K. Shinseki of the Army that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in postwar Iraq, "wildly off the mark." Pentagon officials have put the figure closer to 100,000 troops. Mr. Wolfowitz then dismissed articles in several newspapers this week asserting that Pentagon budget specialists put the cost of war and reconstruction at $60 billion to $95 billion in this fiscal year. He said it was impossible to predict accurately a war's duration, its destruction and the extent of rebuilding afterward.


Needless to say, the official administration point of view has been proved resoundingly wrong. Now the course must be reversed, and the public at large is going to be paying for this mistake in 'treasure and blood' for some time to come.

The view of the military that concluded it could be trimmed down, updated, sharpened up instead of enlarged, which prevailed back in the '90's and into the early 00's, did not envision an out of control aggressive use of force instead of the traditional uses of diplomacty. The principles behind the formation of the U.N. were that force, violence, world conflict, was horrible and should be avoided. These simple and understandable principles kept down conflict because it is not in the public interest, in any way.

This administration took the opposite view. It has thrown us into wars that were unneccessary, and wasted our resources of life, limb and hard-earned money.

This administration has failed because its presumptions were based on values it neither understood nor practiced. The destruction it has achieved will take a long time, and a lot of responsible public service, to correct.

Not Making Nice

U.N.Secretary General Kofi Annan is one major figure the press won’t have to kick around anymore, to paraphrase Richard Nixon’s famous belligerent remarks after losing the CA gubernatorial election. While he has himself been cleared of charges, the fact that his son actively entered into shadey dealings in the oil for food program the U.N. misadministerd has left a blot on his record for many critics of the U.N. and its officials.

Held at the Truman Library last hour, the setting echoes the high regard Truman had for the universality of its representation. We are not going to hear anything from Mr. Annan that exactly would make members of this administration happy, either. At no point has the relationship between the C-I-C and Secretary General been especially good, but since John Bolton was sent as U.S. representative to the U.N., very little has been going well between them.

Recently, the humanitarian crisis which is forcing Iraqis to flee in large numbers to neighboring countries has produced a cry for steps to be taken which Washington has not shown much attention. Of course, the same crisis was anticipated by refugee agencies before the war was started, notably in June of 2002 in a paper produced by Gil Loescher of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, with similar lack of interest by our leaders. In November, the increasing high numbers of fleeing Iraqis proved that paper correct, as reported by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

Nearly 100,000 Iraqis are fleeing each month to Syria and Jordan, forcing the United Nations to set aside its goal of helping refugees return home after the U.S.-led invasion, officials said Friday.
Instead, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees has drawn up plans to deal with the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who are desperate to escape the violence, chief spokesman Ron Redmond said.

"Much of our work in the three years since the fall of the previous regime was based on the assumption that the domestic situation would stabilize and hundreds of thousands of previously displaced Iraqis would be able to go home," Redmond said. "Now, however, we're seeing more and more displacement linked to the continuing violence."

It is hardly helpful to the U.N. in its mission to give peace and stability by providing a forum to international discussion that this country ignored it in its rush to the catastrophe the war on Iraq has become. That we are now not able to stanch the growing violence, and growing exodus from Iraq is another tragedy that we have no way to handle.

Like the Iraq Study Group, Mr. Annan is also asking the president to follow a sensible, peacemaking role, that will be of much better use to the world than the present bullheaded nonsense of keeping on with a policy that has not worked, and shows no sign of working in the future. I am equally certain that there will be commenters not at all pleased that the Secretary General is taking a parting shot at the person who’s made the peacemaking, and supportive role the U.N. should play impossible, who has done nothing to quell the wars we have named ‘genocide’ in Darfur, nothing to ensure the future health of the planet and its people, and only added more poverty and suffering at home and abroad. There will no doubt be reflections soon following that the criticism is ill-behaved. I am joining those who find it rude to kill, maim, and impoverish this country's people.

Slate today early excerpts from the speech, as follows.

Annan has never kept secret his dislike for several of Bush's policies, including the war in Iraq, but the speech is unusually tough, and, according to experts, unprecedented in the history of the United Nations. Annan will talk about the importance of "respect for human rights and the rule of law" and will warn that when the United States "appears to abandon its own ideals and objectives, its friends abroad are naturally troubled and confused." Referring to the war in Iraq, Annan will say the world only considers military action legitimate when "it is being used for the right purpose … in accordance with broadly accepted terms."

We can only hope that instead of his usual brutish ignorance, the representative of our country who is being sent this message will respond with wisdom, with positive action, and with well-considered policies. I can hear you out there in reality-based land laughing now. What are the odds?