Friday, May 07, 2004

In case we hadn't screwed up enough

We are now storming the holy Shi'ite city of Najaf.

Perhaps you know how I feel about it. I don't think these are screw-ups per se. Well, they are definitely screw-ups from my point of view, but I think they are absolutely part of the plan to make certain an all-out holy crusade continues. Part of the same plan that has the prisoner "abuses" focus on humiliation. This is the place where the neocon-Israel agenda meets the Bush-fundamentalist objective.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Update: I see Josh Marshall is considering something along those lines...

In many of the articles on this emerging Iraqi prisoners story, it has been claimed that some of the key instigators or enablers of bad acts were military intelligence officers.

Now, who's the head of military intelligence? 'Head' is too vague. There's no such post per se. But what comes pretty close is the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence.

And who's that? Lt. Gen. William G. "Jerry" Boykin.

Remember him? He's the one who got in trouble last year for describing his battle with a Muslim Somali warlord by saying "I knew that my God was bigger than his God. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol", saying President Bush was chosen by God, and generally that the war on terror is an apocalyptic struggle between Christianity and Satan.

Last fall, after Boykin's efforts to channel Charlemagne or perhaps Urban II became known, he asked Don Rumsfeld to initiate an 'investigation' into whether his comments "violated any Pentagon rules or procedures" whatever that might mean. Just this week it was reported that the 'investigation' still continues; and Boykin has not been disciplined in any way.

In any case, I doubt very much that all this mess we've gotten ourselves into is attributable to this one man. But at what point in this scandal does someone ask whether some of this might have some connection to the fact that the guy running military intelligence believes the war on terror is a literal holy war pitting Christian America against Satan and his Muslim minions?

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