Surging Inhumanity

Know what I learned from Guy Raz on Saturday? The Surge™ worked! Ignore the role of ethnic cleansing, and forget about there still being 4+ million refugees and internally displaced persons (and no major improvements in sight), a death squad and human rights abusing regime in place - because, according to Guy Raz, "before the surge in Iraq, we kept hearing that there were no good options for Iraq. This is a choice between bad and worse. But the surge seemed to have worked out."

Well, how about that. Everybody thought the outcome could only be bad or worse - but the miraculous Surge™ turned out to be GRRREEEAAAT! It's not really surprising since NPR has been hawking the Surge™ , and Raz was talking to one of NPR's favorite Bushista military men, Jack Keane. Raz does seem to be feeling the love keanely when he not only compliments him on the Surge™ but also on his strategic genius:

"Jack Keane, the counterinsurgency plan you wrote for Iraq worked at the time. You were instrumental in getting David Petraeus installed as the ground commander there. Do you think that kind of plan could work in Afghanistan?" (kiss, kiss)

Hmmm, somebody must be thinking about a 2012 Petraeus-Keane dream team...with you know who for White House Press Secretary...

A real Déjà Vu

Once again NPR faced a tough choice after the talks between Iran and the US, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China resulted in Iran's agreement to open inspections of its new nuclear facility at Qum. Who should NPR turn to for expert opinion about the reliability of inspections and whether such inspections will head off hostilities between the US and Iran? NPR could look back to the run-up to the Iraq War and ask if there were any inspectors who got it right in spite of the US decision to attack Iraq regardless of what inspectors found.

Actually there was one former UN inspector who got it EXACTLY right before the Iraq war and campaigned tirelessly to stop the horrors of the Iraq war before it began. That person - Scott Ritter would be a logical person to have on a news show to talk about the Iran agreement.

-OR-

You could go with a former UN inspector, David Kay who was thumping his chest for "regime change" back in December of 2002 . Best thing is that this "expert" has lots of ties to the mililitary/intelligence/industrial complex.

God, what a tough decision. Who to choose? If only you could pop into old Déjà Vu machine and match the two inspectors in a head to head debate about inspections and war. Well, dang, what do you know? You can! Turns out that Scott Ritter and David Kay appeared with Margaret Warner on PBS in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. I know that was like two hundred years ago, but here's what each had to say:

• David Kay: "I think the age of inspection is over....as long as Saddam is in power, I think it would be foolish of anyone to believe that you could carry out effective inspections in Iraq. Now inspections are over. The Iraqis had their chance to cooperate; now is the time for another strategy."
• Scott Ritter: "The bottom line is inspection worked. That's the fact. No matter what Dick Cheney says in terms of rewriting history, inspections worked and if given a chance could work again."

So of course NPR goes with...David Kay! And Kay doesn't have to work at all to get the sabers rattling against Iran. Robert Siegel leads off with this amazing bit of pure hearsay,

"Based on the Iranians' record of not disclosing this plant near the city of Qum until it was evident that the U.S. and other countries were aware of it, can Iranian declarations about the nuclear program be accepted or be trusted?"

To this bit of unsubstantiated, unsourced propaganda, David Kay gets all nostalgic for his glory years of 1991-2002 and says,

"Well, this takes me back to a real déjà vu. I remember in 1991 explaining to very senior Iraqi authorities that if they continued deception and lying and letting us discover stuff before they declared it, eventually we would not believe them even if they started telling the truth. I think the Iranians are on the cusp of that point where even if they are fully cooperative in this inspection that is now going to be taking place at this facility, no one will be terribly satisfied about it."

Yeah, when a government lies and manipulates facts again and again, and shows that it is willing to launch wars of aggression, there just comes a point where you can't trust anything it says - takes me back to a real déjà vu, too.

Radio Games

This morning NPR revisits an old story: controversy over a video game (see this April 09 USA Today article) glorifying the US pulverization of Fallujah. If you don't recall what the US did in NPR, don't expect to ever learn about it on NPR - but others have covered it.

A year after the attack, Dahr Jamail described the many war crimes he covered during and after the assault including the use of "various odd weapons" (including banned incendiary devices) and frequent, intentional killings of civilians. Also a year after the assault, George Monibot reported in the Guardian,

"Both the invasion of Iraq and the assault on Fallujah were illegal acts of aggression. Before attacking the city, the marines stopped men "of fighting age" from leaving. Many women and children stayed: the Guardian's correspondent estimated that between 30,000 and 50,000 civilians were left. The marines treated Falluja as if its only inhabitants were fighters. They levelled thousands of buildings, illegally denied access to the Iraqi Red Crescent and, according to the UN's special rapporteur, used 'hunger and deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian population'."

Interestingly, NPR's coverage of the video game is almost identical to the same "fair and balanced" story on Fox and Friends back on June 11, 2009 - although NPR's story is - if anything - more praiseworthy of the US destruction of Fallujah. Both stories cover only the critique of the video game as offensive to the families of US soldiers killed in Fallujah - not the atrocities committed by the US military there. Like Fox's coverage, NPR's positive spin focuses on the use of the game to teach about what NPR's Laura Sydell calls "a pivotal moment in the Iraqi conflict." Like Fox she allows game consultant and Fallujah veteran, retired Marine Captain Read Omohundro to tout the educational value of the game, claiming that it "will explain the war to people in a manner that helps them associate why war is not a game." Given the complete omission of the cost of the Fallujah attack on human life and infrastructure in the city, Leyden's statement that "Six Days in Fallujah recreates the feel and look of the city as well as actual events in the battle" is painful to swallow.

As an interesting aside, if you look at this web page from Atomic Games, the company creating "Six Days of Fallujah" you can read the following in the "About Atomic Games" section:

"Headquartered in Raleigh, NC, Atomic Games is a video game development studio pioneering new kinds of Historical Action video games. Atomic is owned by a variety of employees and investors, including In-Q-Tel, a private venture capital firm funded by the United States Central Intelligence Agency."

More Blood Soup

NPR do luv them some Nagl. John Nagl, Mr. Soup with a Knife genius, has been one of their regular counterinsurgency go-to guys for a while - and they did pick the right horse. Nagl is climbing the rungs of power (to the Defense Policy board along with neo-imperialist Robert Kaplan). You can bet we'll hear a lot from this COIN snake oil soup salesman.

Yesterday on ATC Siegle had a chummy talk with Nagl about our clients in the colony of Iraq. It was the typical "training wheels" talk about whether Iraqis can manage without all the great protection and security the US military has brought to Iraq. Siegel asks Nagl, "How well prepared are the Iraqis to deal with threats to their own security?"

Nagl brags that they are capable of handling counterinsurgency, but "they certainly still need our help for deterring conventional attacks from some of their neighbors." Later in the interview Siegle picks up this thread to remind us of the Iranian threat(!?):

"Are Iraqi forces sufficiently trained and improved to deal with any interference in their country by Iran?"

That was certainly out of the blue, but Nagl doesn't miss a beat and chimes in with, "No. The short answer is no."

Yet again NPR's discussions about US counterinsurgency is an utter whitewash - never touching on the sickeningly brutal aspects of these dirty wars. Instead they allow people like Nagl to peddle their "brilliance" without challenge. Probably the best all-around dissection of the movement that Nagl represents is found in this piece by Justin Raimondo.

Update on Detained Journalist Jassam

At the end of May of this year I posted about NPR's dismal track record in covering up the US military's attacks on journalists - especially Ibrahim Jassam. This morning NPR's Quil Lawrence conducted a fairly decent report on Jassam's baseless detention. As Jeremy Scahill has pointed out, there is far more than Jassam's detention to investigate, but for NPR this was a small, though commendable step.

Tortured to Death? Ho Hum...

Liane Hansen has a little chat with "Retired Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez was in charge of the ground forces in Iraq when some of those techniques were used at the Abu Ghraib prison." During the interview Sanchez relates the following:

"We got a little bit of an insight into what they [CIA] were doing when they did drop off what came to be known as Iceman at Abu Ghraib in the fall of 2003....we clearly understood that they were using some very, very aggressive techniques, and in fact had wound up with this man dead in the course of an interrogation....he was brought to Abu Ghraib and handed off to my conventional forces there at the prison, and we eventually wound up repatriating him to his family to be taken care of and interred."

HOLY CRAP! Sanchez is describing the fact that the CIA and US forces tortured a man to death. Hansen doesn't express shock, disgust, surprise...anything. She manages a brief interruption to ask who "Iceman" was, but that's it.

Another chapter in the banality of evil.

Blood & Gold

BLOOD

Yesterday on ATC Jason Beaubien's piece on El Salvador's coming election features the usual erasure and distortion of history. Block introduces the feature with this winner:

"In the 1980s, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front drew the U.S. into a bloody Cold War conflict in Central America."

And were the Serbs "drawn in" to the bloody war in Bosnia or Kosovo? Were the Janjaweed "drawn in" to the conflict in Darfur, etc?

From Beubien we get the usual blather about El Salvador being a "front" in Reagan's "battle against the spread of communism in the Americas." Oh, and by the way, "more than 70,000 people died in the war, " though he fails to mention that the vast majority were atrocities against civilians carried out by the US backed government.

GOLD

This morning Lourdes Garcia-Navarro is on for a reprise of her previous cover-up of civilian deaths in Iraq (remember the "Gold Standard"?). There's no mea culpa in this morning's report. More of the same about how unknowable the death count in Iraq is and how "controversial" the Lancet report was - although it's a bit better than her previous report in that it conveys how completely death and violence have touched virtually everyone in Iraq.

I did go ahead and drop a comment on the NPR site beneath the story. I'd recommend occasionally reading listeners' comments - as they are often quite pointed and astute.

NPR's Gold Standard = Bush's Gold Standard

Let's travel back in time to October 2006 when the Lancet published it's 2nd report on Iraqi civilian deaths and came up with the horrifying number of about 600,000. And what was the reaction of the team Bush-Blair?

• Bush: "I don't consider it a credible report."
• Blair's lackeys: (Foreign Sec. Beckett - "...there is nobody who comes up with figures on this scale" and Blair spokesperson - "...it is not one we believe to be anywhere near accurate."

But wait, as the BBC reported, UK officials were a tad more honest off the record. A Ministry of Defense science official described the report as "robust and employs methods that are regarded as close to 'best practice' in this area" while a Foreign Office official noted that "it is a tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones."

So you might think Lourdes Garcia-Navarro would be a little bit embarrassed this morning when David Green asks her, "How many Iraqi civilians have died, do we have a sense?" and she answers:

"The short answer, David, is no, we don't know. Let me go through the numbers. The gold standard really is Iraq Body Count - according to their website which we use...it's the most credible one out there for now....There was one very controversial and well known report published in 2006 by the Lancet..."

Zounds! This is about as sloppy and dishonest as it gets. As the UK officials secretly noted above, the Lancet report was anything but controversial in its methodology. Others have noted that identical studies are used to cite authoritative death estimates in places like the Congo and Darfur with no hint of "controversy." The only thing controversial about the Lancet report and the ORB report (which Garcia-Navarro doesn't even mention) was the disturbing truth that so many hundreds of thousands (now over a million) of innocent people have perished in the Bush-Blair Iraq war. Any dispassionate look at Iraq Body Count (IBC) would find it anything but a "gold standard." Media Lens has an extensive look at its shortcomings and the BBC in its coverage of the challenges to IBC from Media Lens lists many endorsements of the Lancet's findings from actual experts in epidemiological studies.

Lastly, NPR's Iraq report today (and Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson's dismal piece last week) was somehow supposed to balance the deluge of generally prowar "Impact of War" reports that NPR has run. It was supposed to address the concern of a listener who challenged NPR,

"I would be further moved if NPR could consider any of the millions of Iraqis affected - the million dead, and the millions wounded or displaced. What effect would a story of a victim of an American bombing have."

Neither report offers a shred of intense, personal stories about innocents killed by the US. But if you are a big fan of Bush, Blair and their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, then you'd have to agree that for spin and distortion, these reports are the gold standard after all.

Shoes for Me-Shell

The one benefit of NPR's seamless (seamy) integration into the corporate media (e.g. Liasson and Williams on Fox, Roberts on ABC, and Norris on Chris Matthews) is that we get a further glimpse into the sensibilities and "character" of these characters.

Here is Michele Norris playing comedian on The Chris Matthews Show yesterday (on the clip slide forward until the counter is down to about 3 minutes, 50 seconds). After showing the video clip of the shoes being thrown at Bush, Matthews says laughingly, "Michele, this is the real world out here; this isn't even a side show; this is a carnival of 2008. What was the Chutzpah prize?"

To which all Me, all Shell answers:

"I gotta go with the flying shoes. I mean, someone who would throw a pair of Oxfords - Oxfords, it doesn't even look like he bothered to untie those shoes - at a sitting President, with the President of his own country standing next to him was [cackling and comments] that takes part of his anatomy [more laughter]..."

Yeah man, that is some funny, funny stuff. I mean a guy who "covered the U.S. bombing of Baghdad's Sadr City area earlier this year and had been 'emotionally influenced' by the destruction he'd seen" is just rich for ridicule. What Chutzpah, what a nut case! You'd think like maybe a million of his countrymen had been killed in the war or 4 million displaced - har,har...

And Oxfords! hee, hee, and not even untied! No wonder no one at NPR heard Muntazer al-Zaidi cry out "Killer of Iraqis, killer of children!" (McClatchy again) as he was being tackled and beaten after throwing the shoes at Bush.

And really, who cares if this heroic journalist (and not just a hero to Arabs, thank you very much) has been tortured - it's just so darn hilarious...

Mission Accomplished

Amazingly, the two following letters ended up by accident in my inbox:

Dear NPR,

Thanks so much for your loyal news summary this morning; I couldn't have scripted it better myself. Michele Kelemen did an excellent job representing the US State Department point of view regarding the Somali piracy issue. I've really appreciated your stellar record on muting any analysis of how our own foreign policy has lead to the dramatic rise in piracy. I also appreciate that bit about peacekeeping - nice - we definitely plan to keep Somalia in pieces for as long as possible.

Sincerely,
Condeleezza Rice

The other letter was from the big dog himself:

Dear NPR Reporticators,

I felt very gratificated for your kind warm-up for the War Collage speech that I'm going to presentify this afternoon. I just loved how Carl Kasell pointed out that there hasn't been any big terrorism attack on the Fatherland since I assumptioned to power on 9-11. He really warmed to my successful domestic security blanket successfulnesses. I definitely would like to have Carl fill out my legacy report card.

Mr. Kasell defintitely went above and out of the bounds of dutifulness in crediting my securification of America for my undisputed electoral reelection victoriousness in 2004. And it was a nice little twist of argumentation for him to note that the problem with the Iraq Freedom Campaign is weariness.

Thanks Carl, oh and I'm a big fan of the wit and suffocafistication of that Wait Wait funny show you do on NPR. I just loved the funnin' you had with CIA Hayden.

Sincerly,
George W. Bush

If you missed the news summary this morning, here are the sections that Rice and Bush were referring to:

Kelemen: "Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who was in the Security Council for the vote says the resolution goes a long way to help countries coordinate their response to what she called 'the scourge of piracy.' It authorizes nations to pursue pirates not only at sea, but on land in Somalia. Rice said the council should also address the root causes of the piracy problem: the poverty, instability and lawlessness that have plagued Somalia for decades. She said it's time for the UN to consider a peacekeeping operation though that will be a much longer diplomatic battle."

* * *

Kasell: "President Bush speaks today at the US Army War College in Carlyle Pennsylvania. He plans to return to the theme that helped him win a second term: preventing another terrorist attack against the United States. The President is expected to point to his record on national security emphasizing that terrorists have not struck again since the 9-11 attacks when Homeland Security became his focus. The President is also expected to promote the steps the administration has taken such as reshaping the intelligence community and disrupting terrorist financing. Mr. Bush won a tough reelection battle in 2004 largely because of his advantage among voters on the national security issue. Since then a turbulent second term has eroded his public approval, the country has grown weary of the war in Iraq, and more recently the staggering economy."

Tampering with a Crime Scene

Sometimes there's silence when war crimes are being covered up - and sometimes there's just plain old disinformation. This morning Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, reporting on Bush's trip to Iraq opts for the latter:

"In many ways the Iraq War defined Mr. Bush's presidency....more than 4200 US service members have died, not to mention tens of thousands of Iraqis..."

Imagine the firestorm of criticism that would result if NPR reported that "hundreds of US service members have died." And imagine how galling it would be if NPR continued to do this not once but over and over. The outrage would be immediate and well deserved.

And yet, NPR reporters feel completely comfortable reducing the Iraq death toll by a factors of ten. In June of 2007 John Ydstie silently accepted the low figure of 75,000 deaths "on both sides of the Iraq War," and in August of 2007 Robert Siegel used the comforting rhetoric of "tens of thousands of Iraqis" having died in the war. And sometimes it's simply deafening silence or distortion when reality intrudes on the fantasy of Iraq that NPR and the US government is trying to sell. As Media Bloodhound points out, NPR is right in the mainstream on this coverup of the slaughter that the US has wreaked on Iraq - but that doesn't make it any less criminal...

As always, for more on the well researched Iraqi civilian death toll take a look at Just Foreign Policy.

Mission: Whitewash #1

A reader noted in the Q Tips section below that the AP reported (and the NYT and the Voice of America and...) on the Senate Report on Torture which tied the US torture of detainees to Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon officials. The reader noted having searched NPR's site for coverage of the report, but come up empty handed!

Also, as I noted in a post on Wednesday, NPR relegated the damning testimony of a leading US interrogator to its Talk of the Nation program. In contrast, a spot on Friday's Morning Edition is given to US Army interrogator, Eric Maddox, who has co-authored a book (Mission: Blacklist #1) about his role in capturing Saddam Hussein. Maddox makes the US interrogations in Iraq from the summer through December of 2003 sound like they were being run by the Boy Scouts.

Inskeep: "Did you end up like those detectives on television with a bulletin board of some kind covered with photographs and names and lines connecting...?"

Maddox: "We did."

On a positive note, in the interview, Maddox advocates non-brutal interrogations ("...does me no good to be threatening or to be brutal...") - although he does use the threat of unending detention as pressure ("the situation of undetermined, long term detention" as he puts it.) But given the the disgusting and systematic US torture and abuse of detainees during that time period, any fool claiming to be a journalist would have a few questions for Good Cop Maddox.

Inskeep could have asked, "What did you know of the torture and abuse that was occurring in Iraq at the time you were stationed there?" If denied, a follow-up might be "You say you 'interrogated several hundred prisoners' and yet you never found evidence of abuse?" In fact what Jack Bauer Inkseep asks reveals a lot about his character:

"There must have been people who immediately cooperated with you and people who were extremely uncooperative - which makes me wonder if you ever did get close to a moment where you really wanted to hit the guy?"

Yep, nothing about rampant torture by US forces (noted by AI as early as June 2003), nothing about massive roundups of innocent Iraqis, nothing about the very tactics that were inflaming the insurgency - no consideration of the possibility that what made Maddox's prisoners so malleable was the knowledge of what awaited them during that "undetermined, long term detention" facing the uncooperative. Instead just Inskeep fantasizing about hitting detainees and a comic book portrayal of the good guys getting their man.

What They Don't Carry

You've got to love all the coverage NPR News gives to the US interrogator who tracked down al-Zarqawi and recently wrote an explosive piece for the Washington Post on how the Bush, Cheney, Rice, Gonzales torture programs helped kill thousands of US troops.

Can you say, "Memory Hole"?

Extreme Makeover

Introducing Lourdes Garcia-Navarro's piece on some Iraqi families returning to the divided neighborhood of Ghazaliyah in Baghdad, Melissa Block chirps:

"Millions of Iraqis fled their homes over the past few years; now with violence receding, some families are coming back - especially in Baghdad...but while many neighborhoods are relatively calm, sectarian tensions remain."

Yep, violence has really receded and things are relatively calm in Iraq. After the Extreme Makeover of their country - compliments of Uncle Sam - joyful Iraqis are streaming home.

Killing Husbands and History

In the Q Tip section below, a reader of this blog noted that Lourdes Garcia-Navarro had a troubling section in her feature on widows in Iraq. In her report she states the following:

"Some estimates put the number of widows in Iraq at 1 million - women who've lost their husbands to Iraq's endless succession of wars: Iran-Iraq, the invasion of Kuwait, the recent civil war..."

I don't know if the omission of any mention of US responsibility for the widow tragedy of Iraq is the work of Garcia-Navarro or of an editor - but it is outrageous (and typical for NPR).

One could argue that at least NPR is reporting on the human cost of the war, but if that illegal, aggressive war of invasion isn't even mentioned as one of the causes of the problems, then how much value can such a report have?

For a contrast, it's interesting to consider how other reports have covered the plight of Iraqi widows.

IRIN, the humanitarian news and analysis service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reporting in April 2006:

"Thousands of Iraqi women lost their husbands during the ten-year war with Iran in the 1980s. This number rose further during the 1991 US-led war with Iraq following the latter’s invasion of Kuwait.

Local NGOs say the situation has become even more critical since the 2003 US-led invasion of the country, which has given rise to increasing violence and sectarian killing."

IPS in December of 2006:

"Widows are the flip side of violence that has meant more than a million men dead, detained or disabled, Iraqi NGOs estimate. These men's wives or mothers now carry the burden of running the families."

"The violence since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 is not the first to have taken its toll. Hundreds of thousands of men were killed, taken prisoner or disabled during the 1980-1988 war between Iran and Iraq."

Reuters in January 2008:

"No-one can give an exact figure for the number of widows left by the brutal reign of Saddam Hussein, the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, the 1991 Gulf War and in sectarian bloodshed since the 2003 invasion."

"Whatever their number, both parliamentarians say the women who have lost male family members since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq are increasingly lacking the means to provide for themselves."

As you can see, it takes a conscious effort to leave out a mention of US culpability when talking about the massive numbers of widows in Iraq.

No One Doubts

Linda Wertheimer apparently never listened to the Lourdes Garcia-Navarro's report that she introduced on Friday morning. Garcia-Navarro does a commendable job reporting on factors besides the Surge™ that have decreased the slaughter in Baghdad, but that doesn't stop Wertheimer from opening with this salvo:

"...the impact of the troop Surge™. The last of the troop reinforcements left Iraq this summer and no one doubts that they helped improve security in Baghdad..."

That's odd, since Garcia-Navarro's report takes a brief look at several of those non-existent doubts. She interviews a Sunni who talks about the ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods (confirmed in the NPR-ignored satellite report), the pre-Surge™ realignment of Sunni insurgents with the Americans (which Juan Cole over at Informed Comment has repeatedly credited to the Sunni realization that they had lost the sectarian war against the Shia), and the cease-fire of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi army.

These factors all point to many doubts about US troops improving security in Baghdad - and Garcia-Navarro's report doesn't even cover some of the more disturbing aspects that are implied in her report. For example, in the (NPR-ignored) satellite study of ethnic cleansing in Baghdad, the authors conclude that the Surge™ had no positive effect on security (unless you count the ethnic cleansing that the Surge™ accelerated). Garcia-Navarro's report also doesn't mention that the Mehdi army ceasefire was largely achieved by...Iran! And finally Garcia-Navarro doesn't even mention the city of walls that has "improved the security" of Baghdad's inmates.

And of course Wertheimer's "no one doubts" doesn't even consider the opinions of the Iraqis, and why should she when NPR can't even report on how many of them have died between "liberation" and the Surge.

Turning the Lights Off

I'm still waiting for NPR to report on the satellite evidence that debunks NPR's routine touting of the amazin' success of The Surge™. The Reuter's report on the satellite evidence quotes the team that analyzed the evidence:

"Our findings suggest that the surge has had no observable effect, except insofar as it has helped to provide a seal of approval for a process of ethno-sectarian neighborhood homogenization that is now largely achieved."

Science Daily, covering the report quotes its authors:

"By the launch of the surge, many of the targets of conflict had either been killed or fled the country, and they turned off the lights when they left."

Pretty sad and horrible. And NPR? Seems like they like the lights off, too.

One Important Question

Consider this assessment of Iraq offered by Bob Siegel on Tuesday's ATC:

"Despite recent security gains in Iraq, one important question remains: 'If American troops leave, is the Iraqi army ready to assume responsibility for the country's security?'"

The unstated premise of Siegel's question is that American troops have brought security to Iraq. Let's just say that 5 years (and counting), 5 million refugees (and counting) and one million (and counting) dead Iraqis is one a hell of a legacy of security for the Iraqi army to maintain. No wonder Siegel questions whether it is up to the task.

The reduction of the eventual exit of American forces from Iraq (hopefully sooner rather than later) to just one question is pretty silly (and continues the McCain lie of selling of the Surge as some kind of great success). There are actually endless questions remaining; I'll suggest a few of the obvious:

• Will the people responsible for the war crime of invading Iraq ever be brought to justice?
• Will the US ever pay reparations for the destruction of infrastructure that it wreaked on Iraq?
• Will the corporations who swindled the US and Iraq out of "reconstruction" billions ever be held to account?
• How many foreign extremists have been created by the Iraq War?
• Will the US soldiers physically and psychologically wounded in Iraq ever receive the services they deserve?
• Will Baghdad ever be a religiously, ethnically mixed city again?
• How will the sectarian divides created by the US war play out in the next several years?
• Will the Shia-dominated government of Maliki seek to crush the Sunni minority once the US forces are gone?

You can probably come up with a few of your own...

Fair and Balanced

On Sunday afternoon's hourly news summary with Barbara Klein, she said, "Security is high in Denver....a wide range of protesters are preparing to demonstrate....This morning about a
thousand people showed up for an antiwar rally on the steps of the state capital. NPR's Jeff Brady is there."

Somehow, poor Jeff was a bit confused. Observing a thousand antiwar protesters and a handful of counter-demonstrators, he figured he'd even things out by sympathetically repeating the slogans and arguments of the counter-demonstrators so that we'd get a Fair and Balanced™ report:

"There were a few folks standing on one corner with "Support Our Troops" signs and mothers of servicemen who were killed in the wars, uh, kind of counter-protesting, saying that their sons had died for the freedoms of the protesters, but it was very peaceful as the march walked by, very respectful, both sides shouted their message and that was it."

Barbara Klein closes it with: "NPR's Jeff Brady reporting from Denver." That's generous.

Vaccinate Yourself

Take a pass on all the NPR coverage being served up on the anthrax investigation and death of suspect Bruce E. Ivins. The really important story that is getting no playtime on NPR is the one that is being dutifully covered by Glenn Greenwald. Is it any surprise that NPR isn't following Greenwald's lead - a story of media manipulation, protection of fraudulent and probably criminal sources, and anti-Muslim, pro-Iraq War hype)?

Over on the side I've added a permanent link to Greenwald's column; if you haven't read him, you've missed some of the finest progressive journalism on the web.