Bush Orders Wounded Troops Into Iraq

This guy is just fucking astonishing. No sooner than I finished my last post about Bush's VA fucking over wounded troops, I stumbled across this Salon.com article which says that Bush is ordering wounded troops into Iraq.

WHY does ANYONE still believe that this piece of crap "supports the troops"? Military veterans and families are like abused wives here... no matter how much Bush shits all over them, they love him all the more for it. It's dissociative from reality and it's extremely disturbing.

As the military scrambles to pour more soldiers into Iraq, a unit of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Benning, Ga., is deploying troops with serious injuries and other medical problems, including GIs who doctors have said are medically unfit for battle. Some are too injured to wear their body armor, according to medical records.

On Feb. 15, Master Sgt. Jenkins and 74 other soldiers with medical conditions from the 3rd Division's 3rd Brigade were summoned to a meeting with the division surgeon and brigade surgeon. These are the men responsible for handling each soldier's "physical profile," an Army document that lists for commanders an injured soldier's physical limitations because of medical problems -- from being unable to fire a weapon to the inability to move and dive in three-to-five-second increments to avoid enemy fire. Jenkins and other soldiers claim that the division and brigade surgeons summarily downgraded soldiers' profiles, without even a medical exam, in order to deploy them to Iraq. It is a claim division officials deny.

The 3,900-strong 3rd Brigade is now leaving for Iraq for a third time in a steady stream. In fact, some of the troops with medical conditions interviewed by Salon last week are already gone. Others are slated to fly out within a week, but are fighting against their chain of command, holding out hope that because of their ills they will ultimately not be forced to go. Jenkins, who is still in Georgia, thinks doctors are helping to send hurt soldiers like him to Iraq to make units going there appear to be at full strength. "This is about the numbers," he said flatly.

That is what worries Steve Robinson, director of veterans affairs at Veterans for America, who has long been concerned that the military was pressing injured troops into Iraq. "Did they send anybody down range that cannot wear a helmet, that cannot wear body armor?" Robinson asked rhetorically. "Well that is wrong. It is a war zone." Robinson thinks that the possibility that physical profiles may have been altered improperly has the makings of a scandal. "My concerns are that this needs serious investigation. You cannot just look at somebody and tell that they were fit," he said. "It smacks of an overstretched military that is in crisis mode to get people onto the battlefield."

It's exceptionally clear to anyone who's not retarded that the only things George W. Bush Jr. thinks America's soldiers are good for are (a) enriching himself and his upper class friends by sacrificing their lives for Iraq's oil, and (b) Photo Opportunities and Speech Backdrops:

President Fails To Support Troops

Yet again, we learn that Republicans are long on talk about "Supporting The Troops" but very short on action when it comes time to actually give them support, whether that be proper training, proper armor, proper equipment and now, with the Walter Reed filthy-hospital scandal, proper care.

But in all the talk in recent weeks about medical care for injured veterans, the conventional wisdom has been that despite all the shortcomings, those with the most severe injuries receive great care. Today, A Page One story in the NY Times reveals that may not always be the case. The paper talked to several families of veterans who suffered severe brain injuries who say the military health-care system either abandoned hope for their loved ones too early or failed to provide options that could improve the situation. In one case, the Army basically told a veteran that he would be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, but three months after going elsewhere for rehabilitation, he is walking again.

Nice! Bush has finally turned the VA into an HMO! So much for "support the troops" -- at least when it comes to GW Bush.

Terrorists Come In All Shapes, Colors

The Washington Posthas a story today about Europe's recent experiences with attempted racial/ethnic profiling of Terrorists, and it devastates the American right-wing's arguments about how we need to ethnically profile Americans.

Seems that European Authorities are seeing more people from different backgrounds or characteristics that don't follow the patterns that were once the norm for terrorists. Some European intelligence officials say that terrorist organizations are purposefully recruiting these types of people so they won't be the targets of unwanted attention. The suggestion of the experts that we should be focusing on suspicious behavior and not skin color probably won't sink in to the Michelle Malkin's of our political world, but one hopes that the people in charge of protecting us are paying attention anyway, though I highly doubt the FBI is.

The demographics of those being arrested are so diverse that many European counterterrorism officials and analysts say they have given up trying to predict what sorts of people are most likely to become terrorists. Age, sex, ethnicity, education and economic status have become more and more irrelevant.

European authorities said the trait patterns of those arrested on terrorism charges are constantly shifting. In the Netherlands, officials said they are seeing an increase in the number of young teenagers and people of Turkish descent, two groups that used to be low on their radar. Among the key players in the Hofstad group, a cell of Islamic radicals that targeted Dutch politicians and cultural figures, was Jason Walters, the teenage son of a U.S. soldier.

In neighboring Belgium, people are still perplexed over what drove Muriel Degauque, 38, a blond, white Catholic, to convert to Islam and travel to Iraq to blow herself up in November 2005. Nizar Trabelsi, convicted two years earlier of plotting to bomb a NATO base in Belgium, had been a European soccer star before going to Afghanistan to attend al-Qaeda training camps.

In Britain, three of the suspects arrested in last summer's alleged transatlantic airline hijacking plot were religious converts who grew up in north London's affluent suburbs. One was the well-to-do English son of a Conservative Party activist; he worked in a bar and loved the movie "Team America."

It's all true... just look at THIS surveillance photo of the most dangerous Terrorists in the United States:

White House Admits Karl Rove's Involvement in Firing US Attorneys

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Rove relayed complaints from Republican officials and others to the Justice Department and the White House counsel's office. She said Rove, the chief White House political operative, specifically recalled passing along complaints about former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias and may have mentioned the grumblings about Iglesias to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Iglesias says he lost his job as the top federal prosecutor in New Mexico after rebuffing Republican pressure to speed his investigation of Democratic officials in the state.

Rove said he did not suggest that any of the U.S. attorneys be forced to resign, Perino said.

The new details about Rove's involvement in the firings emerged as the top Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee declared their interest in talking to him. The committee is trying to determine whether the firings were part of an effort to exert political influence over federal prosecutions.

This is a smoking gun which ties Rove (and thus Bush) directly to the firings of United States Attorneys for refusing to engage in partisan witch-hunts, and for firing US Attorneys who dared investigate Republican criminals... clear Obstruction of Justice. So why is the White House releasing this information?

Two reasons: (a) they're off their game because they have no idea how to spin a hostile Congress, having never faced one before, and (b) because the Senators, Congressmen and state Republican apparatchiks involved have already spoken out that they delivered their findings to Rove... the White House is just trying to get ahead of the story and desperately trying to spin this entire event as "disgunted ex-employees" who got fired for "just causes" and "who cares anyway, it's an internal Human Resources issue" -- when it's clearly politically motivated and illegal.

Several of the prosecutors who were fired were fired because they investigated Republicans with connections to the White House. Two of them were STILL investigating well-connected Republicans when they got fired. That's obstruction of justice, hindrance of a federal prosecution and a whole slew of other FELONY crimes. The kind of felony crimes that can take down Alberto Gonzales & Karl Rove at the bare minimum.

Not to mention that the President's men secretly rewrote the Patriot Act in the middle of the night stripping Congress of Federal oversight of US Attorney hiring without telling ANYONE, including the Republicans in the Senate. That's enough power-play to infuriate any Senator who might be willing to hinder this investigation.

This is it. This is this Administration's Watergate, Monicagate, Iran-Contragate, etc. We've just begun to skin this onion, and each layer is going to reveal a new, seamier, more rotten layer beneath. Using this one crime, we can finally leverage out all of the wrongdoing these scumbags have accomplished since they took office, and EVERYONE can understand this one: They fired some guys who were investigating them. That's what finally woke up America during Watergate, the "Saturday Night Massacre" when Nixon fired everyone at the Justice Department to prevent them from investigating him. That's what we're really talking about here... these prosecutors were on the trail of guys connected to the White House, so they had to go. Even an idiot could understand it.

Now let's just see if the morons in the Corporate Media get it and if they're able to frame it in such simple terms.