Official Army History: BushCo Neglected Afghan War, Diverted Resources to Iraq

By GottaLaff

Global Research, January 1, 2010

Heh. As if we needed more proof:

Contradicting Rove and Rumsfeld, the historians blame the Iraq war for the lack of resources in Afghanistan, as well as top Bush officials and the president himself:

The historians say resistance to providing more robust resources to Afghanistan had three sources in the White House and the Pentagon.

First, President George W. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had criticized using the military for peacekeeping and reconstruction in the Balkans during the 1990s. As a result, “nation building” carried a derogatory connotation for many senior military officials, even though American forces were being asked to fill gaping voids in the Afghan government after the Taliban’s fall. [...]

Third, the invasion of Iraq was siphoning away resources. After the invasion started in March 2003, the history says, the United States clearly “had a very limited ability to increase its forces” in Afghanistan.

The historians also note that, as was the case in Iraq, Bush officials had neglected to properly plan for what to do after the government fell.

Think Progress has a whole lot more, but that's the gist of it.

Please see my last post for commentary. It would be redundant to post it all again. I will add that this just compounds BushCo's problems and um, "complicates" their legacy.

Then again, BushCo would find a way to diminish and demean the conclusions of even the most credible sources. The one thing they excelled at was ignoring vital information and plowing ahead with whatever nefarious plans they were hatching. Nothing has changed in that respect.

Clinics may have infected veterans

By GottaLaff

This is inexcusable:

Thousands of military veterans are waiting to find out if they were exposed to infectious diseases by government clinics that performed colonoscopies and other procedures with equipment that wasn't properly sterilized.

Veterans Affairs spokeswoman Katie Roberts said officials are working to determine if mistakes that may have exposed patients to infections at medical centers in Tennessee and Florida and a clinic in Georgia could have happened at other VA facilities too.

The VA recently warned some veterans who had colonoscopies as far back as five years ago at its hospitals in Murfreesboro, Tenn., and Miami that they may have been exposed to the body fluids of other patients and should get tested to ensure they haven't contracted serious illnesses.