repurposing and Iraq links

ok, what this is, is a personal blog that somehow got a real name attached to it. It is not, despite my initial intentions, a professional blog like Weatherson's. The new description "out of the closet as a human being" is meant to capture what it means to run a personal blog under your real name.

That said, my main audience is still Google spiders, and my main job should still be to raise the Page rank of things people should see.

First, they say political bloggers only link to the work of real journalists. That may be right, but it is also true that Seymour Hersh is the only member of the mainstream media doing any real investigative journalism anymore. Here is his recent talk at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue (via Majikthise ). Here is his article on the covert ops that have been going down in Iran without any outside oversight.

Snippets from the talk at the Free Synagogue.:

Iraq is being turn into a "free-fire zone" right in front of us. Hit everything, kill everything. I have a friend in the Air Force, a Colonel, who had the awful task of being an urban bombing planner, planning urban bombing, to make urban bombing be as unobtrusive as possible. I think it was three weeks ago today, three weeks ago Sunday after Fallujah I called him at home. I'm one of the people -- I don't call people at work. I call them at home, and he has one of those caller I.D.'s, and he picked up the phone and he said, "Welcome to Stalingrad." We know what we're doing. This is deliberate. It's being done. They're not telling us. They're not talking about it.

...

Every four-star General I know is saying, "Who is going to tell them we have no clothes?" Nobody is going to do it. Everybody is afraid to tell Rumsfeld anything

(Via Dr. B. and Majikthise)

When people talk about Vietnam, you get the impression that this kind of reporting was more commonplace. "It was the first war fought on TV" they say. Perhaps I just get too much of my news from the radio, but it doesn't seem to me like Americans are exposed often enough to pictures like this or these. (Via Dr. B. again)

And no one can talk about how war corrupts the soul anymore. New Kid points to these pictures, which are notable not only for their explicitness, but for the cruel commentary in the captions. (If the person who submitted the photos is playing by the rules of the site, the captions come either from the photographer or someone immediately acquainted with them.)

The elections are tomorrow. I hope they go well. I hope a government is elected with a shred of legitimacy. I hope they will ask us to leave and we will leave. Wouldn't it be nice.