Joe Klein’s conscience @ 9

I don’t get it. Don’t people like Norm Coleman and Susan Collins see the writing on the wall? Are they that f-cking dumb that they’d risk their Senate career for the Decider? … Republican weasels in the Senate. …

… re-election. K-Street sinecure. Bush has their balls in a vise saying screw with me and you won’t work in this Repervlican party again….

Isn’t it something how people demean Democrats for being weak, but here we have the entire Republican party held in a vise grip by Dubya. Can you say WEAK?

Allegedly the polling has shown some of the diehards have returned to the ReThugs since they dropped the “Lets make the brown skinned Mex’cans indentured servants” initiative in response to their hard-core racist base. But expect Chimpy to drive an equal number out soon if he assumes too high a profile.

Chicago Todd @ 32

I looked at the NY Times website as well and nary a mention. Could not believe that as it has been out for a while. Perhaps it is not confirmed but they have seemed more than willing to print erroneous, unsubstantiated information in the past.

It seems like no one’s really clear on what actually happened. This has the potential to be a big story, and they need to get it right. I’m willing to wait for the definitive piece.

David Stout finally submitted a report online at 3:18PM EST. He writes as a “he said she said” reporter so not much there — which is typical anymore with the NY Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09…..ref=slogin

These deaths are suspicious. We need to know how this came down and what message it sends to others in the military who come to speak the truth about the war. Will they, too, meet accidents?

I suppose the GOP can’t kill them all, but if they stretch the war out long enough, they can damn sure try, can’t they?

I thot concern along those lines seemed to be strongly implied in Hagel’s forceful comments and questions on the subject – not that it was an intended consequence of staying in IQ, but that it was a logical conclusion one could make. To wit: staying kills more and more, for no good purpose. It’s an horrific, obscene, ludicrous way to [draw down an army]!

PLovering @ 93

Is anyone awake at the Times?

The Times is awake all right. NYT stock just hit a new low. Ad revenues are for shit.

The times is probably preoccupied with the coming implosion of hedge funds.

And with promoting the bombing of Iran.

Does it strike anyone other than me, that the “Times Select” idea is idiotic, and self-defeating for that august institution?!
How to turn away potential customers and go belly-up, in one easy lesson. dumbdumbdumb
- but that’s just me…

I suppose the GOP can’t kill them all, but if they stretch the war out long enough, they can damn sure try, can’t they?

at least these weren’t selective deaths

I hate to be so dark about this whole thing, but it’s not unheard-of for a committed thug to take out more than the main target, either for lack of caring, or deliberately to muddy the waters.

[totally unrelated, but example of same: the tyl*nol-killer - mainly aiming at one person, but deliberately allowing others to be hurt, simply to hide his trail]

*adjusts tin foil hat*

Peterr @ 47

One would think that the New York Times, having published the Op-ed in question, might be interested in the deaths of two of the authors. I tried searching for “Yance Gray” and “Omar Mora” and came up with nothing save the original op-ed.

Is anyone awake at the Times?

Over at the WaPo, similar searches turn up only Froomkin’s column from August on the op-ed.

Which will be first to breathlessly break the news to the Powers That Be in DC?

Is anyone awake at the Times?

The Times is awake all right. NYT stock just hit a new low. Ad revenues are for shit.

The times is probably preoccupied with the coming implosion of hedge funds.

And with promoting the bombing of Iran.

The deaths of these two morally courageous NCOs punctuates and underlines the sickening amoral irresponsibility of those in power out of harm’s way – Petraeus didn’t even have the decency to give a passing nod of acknowledgement to their good faith efforts in speaking out about their experiences, when Chuck Hagel brought up their op-ed to him. But Petraeus sure knew where those soldiers were stationed – all that he bothered to mention about them in response to Hagel was their location in Baghdad (on one of the bases located at a “fault line” between Shi’ite and Sunni, as I recall).

In essence, Members of Congress and the country witnessed, first-hand, clear evidence that our military is basically singlehandedly running Iraq – politically, militarily, and otherwise, and far more importantly, running its dissolution on American (and Big Oil corporate-profit and Israeli Lobby) terms… The goal now appears to be to separate the 18 provinces into separate fiefdoms (though admittedly such a state of affairs in Iraq never existed before), only very loosely connected to the “center” with bribes or threatened force.

No questions that I saw tried to understand what the ‘intransigent’ Iraqi “government” specifically means as used by P&C. It seemed clear to me that the “Council of Representatives” (the Iraqi parliament) is the “government” that so “frustrates” Crocker. Why? Because the members have a will and a mind of their own, unlike the bought-off, bribed, corrupt former exiles like al-Maliki and his Cabinet who run the Ministries awash in American taxpayer cash, and who P&C bring their “agendas” to and demand compliance from, at the barrel of an (implied) American gun.

And all this is somehow ‘okay’ with our Congress – the Iraqi Legislative Branch is overridden, ignored, and marginalized, just like our own, and everyone yawns or shrugs. Martial law in Iraq is an improvement over the daily existence of having Humvees and tanks and machine guns in the streets, I guess – and our Senators yawn and shrug, and figure those Iraqis deserve everything they’re getting… [Including having their capital city of Baghdad appallingly ‘transformed’ from 65% majority Sunni to 75% majority Shi’ite thanks to our occupation (per McClatchy’s Pentagon sources).]

There’re no American forces and no ‘al-Qaeda in Iraq’ in the southern four provinces of Iraq, and no ‘al-Qaeda in Iraq’ (and few patrolling Americans) in the Kurdish north. But “Iraq” as a whole is a haven for ‘al-Qaeda in Iraq,’ and will descend into (further) brutality if we leave Iraqis to their own devices?? What lies, what propaganda, what specious, contemptible inhumanity. If al-Qaeda was the problem, Baghdad and a few other provinces should’ve been our only focus long ago, and stated as such. As Senator Clinton pointedly said: “it takes a willing suspension of disbelief” to ignore the amorality underlying the sanitized cover story of what we are deliberately doing in and to Iraq.

It now seems apparent that the sprawling American infrastructure and force footprint in Iraq (including our own private roving Blackwater militias) is dismantling Iraq, one province at a time. And all this was just spelled out to a spell-bound Senate and House, and will soon be spelled out to a thus-far complicit United Nations Security Council – the Iraq “Council of Representatives” and the majority will of the horrifically-persecuted Iraqi people be ever, ever so damned.