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Banned
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Originally Posted by irateplatypus
ahh... the ever-present duo of Messieurs "U.S. Official" and "Senior Official", your insight is outmatched only by the venerable "source close to the Administration". The depth of knowledge and foresight is all-encompassing.
why do a few of the posts in this thread evoke a gleeful tone?
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Could the "tone" be the beginning of an awareness that the liars and criminals who have attempted to destroy our US of America from within, are finally being confronted by the American people....
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http://editorandpublisher.com/eandp/..._id=1000987803
Is Crackdown on Anonymous Sources Going Too Far?
By Joe Strupp
Published: July 22, 2005 8:10 AM ET
.......Getting Scotty on the Beam
While many reporters are willing to cut back on using confidential help, they also want the White House to do the same. Earlier this year, a group of seven D.C. bureau chiefs fed up with government briefings that were required to be off the record met with Press Secretary Scott McClellan and urged that he put an end to such events. In addition, the group sent an e-mail to several dozen other Washington bureau chiefs asking that when their reporters attend a background-only briefing, they ask that it be on the record and demand to know why it is not.
"I think we are making some headway," says the AP's Johnson, one of those who spearheaded the protest and acknowledged fewer off-the-record briefings since it began.
Hutcheson of Knight Ridder says the background briefings had gotten so bad that he refused to quote anything from one in April held prior to a Bush energy speech. <b>It included three White House officials, all demanding to be unidentified. "That was a marker, a low point in their use of anonymous briefings," Hutcheson says. "That pushed me over the edge, and I would not write about it."</b>.............
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that Bushco apologists and those plagued with a tendency to "shoot the messenger" first and ask questions never....are dwindling in number? Here is their <a href="http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpost.php?p=1835559&postcount=46">record</a>. If you disagree with any of it, why not pick a damaging point, and debate it. It is well established that this administration will only speak to the press unofficially. This is their practice, it is a weak tactic to use it as a criticism of what is now becoming common knowledge. The US failed to plan for the aftermath of the invasion. Iraq produces no more electricity than it did one year ago.
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http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8736966/
By Suleiman al-Khalidi
Updated: 6:31 a.m. ET July 28, 2005
AMMAN - Iraq's electricity supply has risen above pre-war levels to 5,350 megawatts (MW) despite sabotage, boosted by hydroelectric power and more imports from Iran, Syria and Turkey, the minister in charge said on Thursday.
"Now electricity has reached a record after we broke 5,350 megawatts a few days ago for the first time since the war," Electricity Minister Mohsen Shalash told Reuters......
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Quote:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/091304K.shtml
Iraq Power Grid Shows U.S. Flaws
By T. Christian Miller
Los Angeles Times
Sunday 12 September 2004
........Even today, the U.S. has not reached the goal set by L. Paul Bremer III, the former head of the U.S.-led occupation authority, to produce 6,000 megawatts of power a day by June 1. By comparison, California has about 50% more people than Iraq but produces up to eight times as much electricity, about 45,000 megawatts at peak summer demand.
Iraq's electrical production tops out at 5,300 megawatts - higher than peak generation in the closing days of Saddam Hussein's regime, but far below the estimated 7,200 megawatts needed to fulfill the rapidly growing demand. .........
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Quote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/14/in...t/14armor.html
U.S. Struggling to Get Soldiers Updated Armor
By MICHAEL MOSS
Published: August 14, 2005
For the second time since the Iraq war began, the Pentagon is struggling to replace body armor that is failing to protect American troops from the most lethal attacks by insurgents.
(Workers assembled body armor made of ceramic plates at ArmorWorks in Tempe, Ariz. Specially treated plates give troops extra protection.)
The ceramic plates in vests worn by most personnel cannot withstand certain munitions the insurgents use. But more than a year after military officials initiated an effort to replace the armor with thicker, more resistant plates, tens of thousands of soldiers are still without the stronger protection because of a string of delays in the Pentagon's procurement system.
The effort to replace the armor began in May 2004, just months after the Pentagon finished supplying troops with the original plates - a process also plagued by delays. The officials disclosed the new armor effort Wednesday after questioning by The New York Times, and acknowledged that it would take several more months or longer to complete.........
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Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...1300853_3.html
........"The most thoroughly dashed expectation was the ability to build a robust self-sustaining economy. We're nowhere near that. State industries, electricity are all below what they were before we got there," said Wayne White, former head of the State Department's Iraq intelligence team who is now at the Middle East Institute. "The administration says Saddam ran down the country. <b>But most damage was from looting [after the invasion], which took down state industries, large private manufacturing, the national electric" system</b>..............
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Quote:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontl...s/fallows.html
...........Before the war started, what basically was the argument between Rumsfeld and the uniformed military over the size of the force to fight the war?
Between the Army, in particular, and the civilian leadership in the Pentagon -- Donald Rumsfeld especially, but also Paul Wolfowitz -- there was a basic philosophical difference about how you sized the force to go into Iraq. Donald Rumsfeld, through his career in the Pentagon, had been pushing very much for lean, mean, agile forces. By that logic, he said the U.S. should not over-prepare, overstaff, overload for the job of beating Saddam Hussein's regime.................
.......Explain the reasoning of the head of the U.S. Army, Gen. Shinseki, on how important the first days after the fall of Baghdad would be.
Shinseki of the Army drew not only on his experience in the Balkans, trying to administer a fractious region postwar. [He also drew from] all the corpus of evidence that had been produced by the Army War College, by every other group that looked into this, to say that there was a crucial moment just after the fall of a regime when the potential for disorder was enormous. So there would be ripple effects for years to come, depending on what happened in those first days or weeks when the regime went [down] ….
The Army War College study had worked out a very detailed checklist for how the military, and the Army in particular, should start thinking about the postwar, well before it actually went to war. One of their conclusions was that it was best to go in heavier than you actually needed to be, so that at the beginning of the postwar period your presence would be so intimidating that nobody would dare challenge you. You'd set a tone that would allow you then to draw down the forces very rapidly. So it was better to go in heavy and then draw down, than the reverse.
Shinseki based the need for more troops in part on his experience in Kosovo and Bosnia. Explain how he extrapolated.
Shinseki had been in charge of occupation logistics in Kosovo in particular. He said when in the Pentagon, "Well, let's assume the world is linear. If we required a certain amount of troops per 25,000 population in the Balkans, [and] if the world is not radically different, something of the same extent is going to be needed in Iraq." When he used that kind of extrapolation logic, he got to a number much, much larger than Donald Rumsfeld was thinking of for the troop presence.
In the tensions existing between the Pentagon and the military, Shinseki seemed a particular target. Explain.
Shinseki's last, say, year and a half in office was a series of apparently calculated and intentional insults from the civilian leadership, especially Donald Rumsfeld. The episode that got the most public attention was when Rumsfeld announced Shinseki's successor as chief of staff, about a year and a half before his term was up. Usually this announcement is made right at the last minute to avoid turning the incumbent into a lame duck.
Three weeks before the war, Shinseki testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Describe what happened.
Shinseki has been, through his career, a real by-the-book guy. So he would not go out of his way to make public disagreements that were clearly going on inside the Pentagon. But in the hearing where Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan was sort of drawing him out on what he expected the troop levels to be, Shinseki finally said, based on his own past experience, that he thought it would be several hundred thousand troops. This became a real arcane term about, what did several hundred thousand mean? But let's say 300,000 and up. His real level, internally, had been in the 400,000 range.
Several days later, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, appeared before a different committee. [He] went out of his way essentially to slap Shinseki in the face, to say there had been some recent estimates that had been wildly off the mark -- using the term, "wildly off the mark." Then he went on to say that it was almost impossible to imagine that it would be harder, and take more troops, to occupy Iraq than it had taken to conquer them; whereas that point, that it would be harder to occupy than conquer, was in fact the central theme the Army had been advancing before the war.
Was this public rebuke surprising?
The public rebuke of Shinseki by Wolfowitz was probably the most direct public dressing-down of a military officer, a four-star general, by a civilian superior since Harry Truman and Douglas MacArthur, 50 years ago. This public confrontation between Wolfowitz and Shinseki must have reflected the really deep disagreements going on within the Pentagon then, and a sign of the civilian leadership's impatience with what they viewed as the lack of cooperation from the uniformed military.
A couple of days later, Paul Wolfowitz was testifying before another congressional committee. He went out of his way, in a gesture that everyone involved recognized as being directly addressed to Shinseki, to say, "Let me address some of the ideas that have been floating around recently." He went on to say there had been suggestions of the levels of troops that might be required that were, quote, "wildly off the mark."
This was not the way that generals and Pentagon superiors talked to each other.................
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Originally Posted by djtestudo
Sounds to me like this is what happens when people panic and put pressure on the government to speed everything up instead of letting things work out.
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I am sorry to inform all "apologists" for this administration who read or post on TFP Politics, that it is no longer acceptable to transfer the source of the responsibility for the unprecedented foreign and domestic policy failures that our country is currently experiencing.........onto those critical of the administration or onto those who report the truth about the status and the results. It won't work.....the damage is too severe, and the evidence shows that Bush, Rumsfeld, et al, and those complicit via their support of them, have accomplished needless, death, division, weakening of US credibility and security, at great fiscal expense....all by themselves. Face it.....work to reverse it....stop attempting to transfer the blame from where it rightfully belongs.
Last edited by host; 08-14-2005 at 06:18 PM..
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