Still fighting the wrong war:

"The feeling among US soldiers I've spoken to in the last week is also that 'the gloves are off'. Many of them still think they are dealing with people responsible for 9/11."

- A former British officer on the issue of Iraqi prisoner abuse and torture

And I wonder who may have been cultivating this false connection between al-Qaeda and the Iraq War? Hmmm.

Impeach them all. Let Dennis Fucking Hastert run the White House until November. Or the Postmaster General. It's only a matter of time before the next war is also wrapped up in the 9/11 flag for domestic consumption - these bastards have to be run out of Washington on a rail before that's allowed to happen. Shame on Bush and Cheney for continuing to insist on The Lie; shame on the U.S. Military for propagating it; and shame on the rank-and-file military men and women who swallow it without question. We're a better country than this - or at least, we used to be.

The only silver lining about the Abu Ghraib prisoner scandal is that the evidence is visual. Had this merely been a series of written reports, however damning, the impact would not have been even one percent of what it's been, both here and around the world. The average American can't be bothered to read anything longer than a horoscope or the sports page, and is loath to get his news from anyplace other than the major television networks or his local affiliate, but it only takes a moment to view a picture - in this case, one awful sickening moment. Whereas it's easy to deny the veracity of a written report or to accuse its authors of bias or exaggeration, only the red-meat Red Staters (cf. Limbaugh, Coulter, and their ilk) are willing to defend such behavior when captured on film or tape.

In his testimony to the Senate yesterday, Rumsfeld alluded to "even worse" evidence kicking around that has yet to surface in the media, perhaps in an attempt to soften its blow when it does emerge, or maybe to try and convince the American public that it doesn't want to see what's yet to come so that it won't. But now is not the time for flinching. If we as a nation could spend the better part of an election cycle listening in graphic detail to lurid accounts of a White House intern being pleasured with a Presidential cigar, we damned well better pay attention to a real scandal when it breaks. And if the average American finds that he or she cannot stomach what is being done in our names by our armed forces overseas, then perhaps it's time we started asking the Bush Administration why the hell we're there.

And no, it's not because of 9/11...