We now have a new general commanding forces in Fallujah. This one isn’t a reincarnation of Saddam. But check the time stamp on this post. The news could be stale within hours. Hey, the Bushies know what they’re doing. Don’t they? Don’t they??
QUOTE OF THE DAY: “In our blessed and mostly peaceful society we’re not as familiar with courage as we once were. We ascribe the virtue to all manner of endeavors that only really require skill, fortitude and a little daring, the qualities Pat Tillman showed on the football field. Pat’s best service to his country was to remind us all what courage really looks like, and that the purpose of all good courage is love.
He loved his country, and the values that make us exceptional among nations, and good. And he worried after the terrible blow we were struck on September 11th, 2001, that he had ‘never done a damn thing’ to serve her. Love and honor oblige us. We are obliged to value our blessings, and to pay our debts to those who sacrificed to secure them for us. They are blood debts we owe to the policemen and firemen who raced into the burning towers that others fled; to the men and women who left for dangerous, distant lands to take the war to our enemies and away from us, and to those who fought in all the wars of our history.” – Senator John McCain, at Pat Tillman’s memorial service yesterday.
WERE SOME PHOTOS FAKED? A debate begins in Britain about the provenance of some of the photographs of prisoner abuse by the British military. There’s apparently good reason to believe that some may have been faked. Money quote from the Guardian:
[A] former commander of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment dismissed the photographs as having “too many inconsistencies”.
Colonel David Black argued that the images were probably not even taken in Iraq. He told BBC1’s Breakfast that the vehicle shown had never been sent to the war zone and the uniforms were not the same as those worn by the regiment.
Col Black said: “[From] the evidence we have seen so far looking at the photographs, there are too many inconsistencies.”
He said the vehicle, the Bedford MK, which appears in the photographs, was “not deployed by the army to Iraq at all because of difficulties with local fuel.
“That vehicle can’t operate with fuel that was available in Iraq. So obviously the photograph was probably not even taken in Iraq.”
Col Black said the soldiers would have been wearing helmets or berets, not floppy hats as in the photographs. They would have had a regiment identification flash and a brigade flash on their sleeves and the rifle should have had a sling and an attached radio button.
See for yourself. This does not mean that other photos were faked or that there isn’t a real story here. But some of it may be fishy.
The Dish 