Billmon:
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July 10, 2006
WB: Scenes From a War
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Meanwhile, our leaders like Bush and Cheney, and supporters of theirs like Barnes, live in circumstances as close to perfect safety as possible — and they choose delusion over fact. They make certain that the horrors their policies have unleashed have no way of touching them directly, so they can continue to indulge in fantasy, and to refuse to acknowledge the agonizing death spasms of an entire country. And they do all this simply because they will not question their belief system, and because they refuse to admit they were wrong.
Can there ever be forgiveness for this kind of deliberate self-blindness, or for this refusal to acknowledge the unbearable pain and suffering their actions and their policies have caused so many countless, innocent people? We are not gods; the perspective of eternity is not ours. In the human realm, where life and the possibility of happiness are the indispensable primary values, forgiveness is not possible, nor should these barely human monsters expect it. They are monsters by choice, and they may not now escape the consequences of their actions. In a tragedy beyond measure, many, many thousands of entirely innocent people will not escape those consequences, either.
Posted by: Hamburger | Jul 10 2006 18:06 utc | 1
Billmon:
I think you should change the character set encoding of your web page template to UTF-8. Currently, some unicode characters are showing as question marks in your writing, making your excellent entries a bit tough to read.
To do this little bit of web magic, replace this line in your XHTML template:
meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″ /
With this line:
meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html;charset=utf-8″ /
This was an issue with Gilliard’s place a while back.
If any web-savvy folks can pitch in or help in explaining this, it’d be great.
Oh – and thanks for the great entries.
Posted by: F'in Librul | Jul 10 2006 18:52 utc | 2
I believe that Mr. L, the KBR representative in the Dining Facility Advisory Council Meeting whose minutes are excerpted, is either woefully ignorant about what it takes to cut lobster tails in half, or really means “we don’t want to bother” – the equipment needed is minimal.
Daniel Urmann, in an article on preparing Atlantic lobster tails, advises:
Broiling Large Lobster Tails
When cooking a large lobster tail, the trick will be to cook it all the way through without scorching or drying out the top. If you do cook it too long, the meat will be tough and chewy. The best way to approach broiling a large lobster tail is to first thaw it, then cut open the top of the shell lengthwise. You will need a heavy pair of kitchen shears to do this, and you will want to cut just deep enough that you do not cut the bottom of the shell. You may need to use a large knife to cut through the meat and you will then need to split the shell open. Then, you will put it in a roasting pan just underneath the broiler. Cutting the lobster tail open like this will help expose the meat to the broiler so that it will cook evenly and prevent the shell from burning or drying out.
Posted by: Fannie Farmer (Mrs.) | Jul 10 2006 19:56 utc | 3
Well, since the government is paying, I’ll have two.
Posted by: Ms. Manners | Jul 10 2006 20:05 utc | 4
Or perhaps Mr. L’s comments reflect the fact that the lobster tails are being cooked frozen, rather than thawed – too bad, this makes them tougher.
Posted by: Fannie Farmer (Mrs.) | Jul 10 2006 20:46 utc | 5
I never liked lobsters, two sweet and not as tasty as crab meat. Ohhhhhhhh, the only way we cook lobsters here to boil then alive.
I bet they can deliver lobsters to the Green Zone than paint to all those schools.
Posted by: Cloned Poster | Jul 10 2006 21:26 utc | 7
I doubted they would have crab imperial, one of my favorites.
You have to take what they give you sometimes.
Posted by: Ms. Manners | Jul 10 2006 22:26 utc | 8
While condemning in public the sectarian death squads that gunned down 40 people on Sunday in a Sunni part of Baghdad…
What is the U.S. role in Iraqs dirty war?
The exile groups who began this dirty war in the early days of the occupation have come to form the core of successive governing institutions established by the United States. Their campaign of killing and torture has evolved and become institutionalized and their victims now number in the thousands. The State Department and U.N. reports do not address the possibility of a direct U.S. role in the campaign, but the Interior Ministry units that are most frequently implicated in these abuses were formed under U.S. supervision and have been trained by American advisors. The identities of their two principal advisors only reinforce these concerns. They are retired Colonel James Steele and former D.E.A. officer Steven Casteel, and they are both veterans of previous dirty wars.
In El Salvador between 1984 and 1986, Colonel Steele commanded the U.S. Military Advisor Group, training Salvadoran forces that conducted a brutal campaign against the civilian population. At other stages in his career, he performed similar duties during U.S. military operations in Cambodia and Panama. After failing a polygraph test, he confessed to Iran-Contra investigators that he had also shipped weapons from El Salvador to Contra terrorists in Nicaragua, leading Senator Tom Harkin to block his promotion to Brigadier General. Until April 2005, Steele was the principal U.S. advisor to the Iraqi Interior Ministry�s �Special Police Commandos,� the group most frequently linked to torture and summary executions in recent reports.
Steven Casteel worked in Colombia with paramilitaries called Los Pepes that later joined forces to form the A.U.C. in 1997, and have been responsible for most of the violence against civilians in Colombia. Casteel is now credited with founding the Special Police Commandos in his capacity as senior advisor to the Iraqi Interior Ministry.
It is not possible to overestimate the cynicism and perversity of the neocons, in America or in Israel.
Posted by: John Francis Lee | Jul 11 2006 1:11 utc | 10
@JFL
the book empire’s workshop: latin america, the united states, and the rise of the new imperialism may be of interest to you. the author presents a good overview connecting up how the current players & policies we see now are the results of labwork conducted in our “backyard”, from practice in low-intensity warfare & small wars, to the conjoining of hard-right militarists, the neocons, and the christian right, to fine-tuning media control, and to perfecting the methods for getting around congressional oversight. it’s only a little over 230 pages, but is heavily footnoted, and helps to understand the patterns we see before us now.
here’s a piece that grandin wrote over at TPM back in may : The Salvadorization of American Diplomacy
Posted by: b real | Jul 11 2006 2:36 utc | 12
After spending 8 months at Camp Victory I can tell you that the food is excellent and dessert table was world class (best chocolate pie I’ve had anywhere). I can also say that after about 6 weeks I would have traded in the steaks, shrimp and lobster for an MRE if I were allowed to wash it down with a cold brewsky.
Posted by: harv | Jul 11 2006 4:35 utc | 13
I can tell you the food at Camp Kandahar (taken over now by sun-burnt NATO Canadians and Dutch) was little better than Boy Scout’s, but it sure beat the alternative of
noni flat bread, recapped bottled water, and a punched-in-the-gut Afghan belly ache.
I can also tell you, unlike the Americans who spent, cut and ran back to Kabul with
their grift, the Canadians appear intent on actually reconstructing something, even though, ironically, it was the Americans who blew everything up in the first place.
Which is even more ironic, when you consider that lobster isn’t just found in Iraq,
but in every Army base, 99% of them in peaceful duty stations in exotic countries,
where the hardest part of “be all that you can be” is waiting until 5PM to jerk off.
Which, ironically, is what this guy couldn’t wait to do.
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0121051judge1.html
And there’s your moment of Zen.
Posted by: Salvador Tutu | Jul 11 2006 5:37 utc | 14
Roget Mudd, b real
I don’t think of it as breaking news, but when even Billmon lets pass the MSM’s “they’re all primitive religionists at each others throats what’s a well-meaning, democracy-fostering, civilized nation to do” crap I have to take exception.
The Anglo-American Axis is responsible for every violent death in Iraq since their shocking, awful invasion and occupation of that country. The senseless slaughter of innocents will continue until the day and the hour the neocons leave the country lock, stock, and barrel.
Every day that dawns is the right day to leave Iraq. There is no time like the present.
Posted by: John Francis Lee | Jul 11 2006 9:53 utc | 15
@Harv:
Your remarks reminded me of an old joke.
This might offend genteel ears or eyes, so put in your ear plugs or don your blinders, whatever.
Truck driver, three weeks on the road, pulls up to a truck stop with a cat house upstairs.Parks the truck and walks in.
Gives the head waitress $100(long time ago).
Asks for a boloney sandwich, a PBR, and the ugliest girl in the house.
Head waitress protests that he can have the best for a Franklin.
Driver sighs and says:
I know young lady, but I’m homesick.
Posted by: J.B. Hunt | Jul 12 2006 3:08 utc | 16