Without BushCo, "Hurt Locker" wouldn't have won Oscars

By GottaLaff

Via letters to the L.A. Times Calendar section:

"The Hurt Locker" was a good movie and well written but I find it strange that no credit was given to ex-President Bush and Vice President Cheney for starting the Iraq war. Without their orchestration, "Hurt Locker" and Kathryn Bigelow would not be holding those Oscars.

That's some honor, eh BushCo?

Iraq: All UK'd up

By GottaLaff

Here are two headlines that caught my attention:

Claims: UK interrogators ‘routinely’ used sexual abuse against Iraqi prisoners

Former UK prime minister slams motives for Iraq invasion

Can't get more UK'd up than that, unless of course you were a member of the Bush administration.

Let's start with the first headline:

Five individual prisoners singled out one female guard in particular, known to them as "Katy," according to British publication The Times. The paper said that prisoners alleged the sexual abuse was used "routinely."

The allegations, which range from the use of pornography, masturbation, sexual humiliation and even male rape, bring the total number of complaints against the British army's Joint Forward Intelligence Team (JFIT) to 40.

Sound familiar? No wonder BushCo and the UK-ups were BFF. They engaged in the same extra-curricular activities.

Let's toddle over to headline #2:

Former prime minister John Major said Saturday that the Iraq war inquiry appeared to be showing that the invasion was more about regime change than finding weapons of mass destruction. [...]

"The argument that someone is a bad man is an inadequate argument for war and certainly an inadequate and unacceptable argument for regime change." [...]

"I supported the Iraq war because I believed what the prime minister said."

The more we learn, the more validation we get for demanding answers and the appropriate consequences.

One. Big. Cl-US-ter-UK.

As for torture, need I even bother to remind you of all this:

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All my previous posts on this subject matter can be found here; That link includes one specific to only Fayiz al-Kandari's story here. Here are audio and video interviews with Lt. Col. Wingard, one by David Shuster, one by Ana Marie Cox, and more. My guest commentary at BuzzFlash is here.

Lt. Col. Barry Wingard is a military attorney who represents Fayiz Al-Kandari in the Military Commission process and in no way represents the opinions of his home state. When not on active duty, Colonel Wingard is a public defender in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

If you are inclined to help rectify these injustices: Twitterers, use the hashtag #FreeFayiz. We have organized a team to get these stories out. If you are interested in helping Fayiz out, e-mail me at The Political Carnival, address in sidebar to the right; or tweet me at @GottaLaff.

If you'd like to see other ways you can take action, go here and scroll down to the end of the article.

Then read Jane Mayer's book The Dark Side. You'll have a much greater understanding of why I post endlessly about this, and why I'm all over the CIA deception issues, too.

More of Fayiz's story here, at Answers.com.

Tony Blair: WMD? Feh.

By GottaLaff

If Boy Georgie and his poodle had come out and said, "We are going to bomb the hell out of Iraq no matter what, to hell with all of you, try and stop us", then the world might have-- Oh wait. They did:

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said he would have found a justification for invading Iraq even without the now-discredited evidence that Saddam Hussein was trying to produce weapons of mass destruction.

Good thing they weren't arrogant. Oh wait. They were.

It was a startling admission from the onetime British leader, who was President Bush's staunchest ally in the decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

Blair's comments were immediately denounced by critics who accused him of using false pretenses to drag Britain into an unpopular war that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of allied troops and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

Well, at least the fraudulent invasion of a sovereign country that hadn't attacked us first produced all the positive results that Bush II and Bush III had promised. Oh wait. It hasn't.

Hans Blix, who led the United Nations team of inspectors looking into the claim, said that Blair's remarks gave "the strong impression of a lack of sincerity."

"The war was sold on the weapons of mass destruction [argument], and now you . . . hear that it was only a question of a 'deployment of arguments,' " Blix told the BBC.

"It sounds a bit like a fig leaf that was held up, and if the fig leaf had not been there, then they would have tried to put another fig leaf there."

What a relief that there will be justice done, and those responsible for this fiasco will be appropriately punished.

Oh wait. They won't.

45-minute WMD claim 'came from an Iraqi taxi driver'

By GottaLaff

Next time you're out on the street screaming, "Taxi!", consider this:

An Iraqi taxi driver may have been the source of the discredited claim that Saddam Hussein could unleash weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes, a Tory MP claimed today.

Gee, I hope he was at least licensed. But I digress:

Adam Holloway, a defence specialist, said MI6 obtained information indirectly from a taxi driver who had overheard two Iraqi military commanders talking about Saddam's weapons.

And then he divulged that one commander was in the middle of a messy affair and was leaving his wife. But MI6 didn't think he was credible on that score, so we never heard any of the juicy details.

Oh, but I kid the MI6.

After the war the dossier became hugely controversial when it became clear that some of the information it contained was not true. An inquiry headed by Lord Butler into the use of intelligence in the run-up to the war revealed that MI6 had subsequently accepted that some of its Iraqi sources were unreliable, but his report did not identify who they were.

That would have been too embarrassing. It's a good thing it didn't leak out. That wouldn't have ended well.

Oops.

Holloway, a former Grenadier Guardsman and television journalist who is now a member of the Commons defence committee, wrote:

"Under pressure from Downing Street to find anything to back up the WMD case, British intelligence was squeezing their agents in Iraq for information. One agent did come up with something: the '45 minutes' or something about missiles allegedly discussed in a high level Iraqi political meeting.

"But the provenance of this information was never questioned in detail until after the Iraq invasion, when it became apparent that something was wrong. In the end it turned out that the information was not credible, it had originated from an émigré taxi driver on the Iraqi-Jordanian border, who had remembered an overheard a conversation in the back of his cab a full two years earlier.

"Indeed, in the intelligence analyst's footnote to the report, it was flagged up that part of the report probably describing some missiles that the Iraqi government allegedly possessed was demonstrably untrue. They verifiably did not exist.

"The footnote said it in black and white ink. Despite this glaring factual inaccuracy, which under normal circumstances would have caused the reliability of the intelligence to be seriously questioned, the report was treated as reliable and went on to become one of the central planks of the dodgy dossier."

Bus drivers are so much more reliable. Had they been smart, they would have gotten more bang for their buck, er, pound, er, Euro, had they relied on public transportation.

There is much more here.

H/t: DCPlod

Former MI6 chief says Britain was 'dragged' into Iraq war

By GottaLaff

But... But... but BushCo and the Rushpublics say that the intel from al-l-l-l those other countries was the same as ours, and they all pointed to bad, bad things like imminent threats and WMD. Now Nigel had to go and open his big mouth and ruin everything:

Britain was "dragged into a war in Iraq which was always against out better judgment" the former deputy head of MI6 has claimed, in a remark that will reignite the debate over political interference in the war.

The comments, made by Nigel Inkster, who was deputy director of MI6 at the time, make clear there were reservations over the war at a very senior level within the Secret Intelligence Service.

MI6 was blamed for the failure of intelligence that took Britain to war after helping produce a dossier in which Tony Blair claimed that Iraq was ready to use weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes.

The dossier, said to have been "sexed up" by Downing Street, also mentioned controversial intelligence that Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium from Niger.

In a speech at the Institute for Public Policy Research, Mr Inkster blamed weakness at the Foreign Office for allowing Britain to get dragged into a war over which officials had serious doubts. [...]

His views on Iraq, expressed for the first time in public, may also explain why he was passed over as the head of MI6 in favour of Sir John Scarlett, who took responsibility for the dossier during the Hutton inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly. [...]

The Butler Report into the intelligence that took Britain to war, concluded that "more weight was placed on the intelligence than it could bear", and that judgements had stretched available intelligence "to the outer limits".

So many investigations, so little time.