Incompetent Bush Administration Facing Hell On The Hill and Everywhere Else.

WaPo

Iraqi special operation forces and British troops swept into an Iraqi intelligence ministry building Sunday morning in the southern city of Basra and found prisoners with signs of torture, British officials said.

All 30 prisoners escaped during the surprise raid, which was triggered by information gleaned from suspects arrested hours earlier in another sweep, a British military spokesman said Monday morning.

Incompetent Bush With No Backup Plan In Iraq

During a White House meeting last week, a group of governors asked President Bush and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about their backup plan for Iraq. What would the administration do if its new strategy didn't work?

The conclusion they took away, the governors later said, was that there is no Plan B. "I'm a Marine," Pace told them, "and Marines don't talk about failure. They talk about victory."

Pace had a simple way of summarizing the administration's position, Gov. Phil Bredesen (D-Tenn.) recalled. "Plan B was to make Plan A work."

Iraq Slogger

Walter Reed Hospital -- and beyond

"It is just not Walter Reed," Ray Oliva, a veteran in Kelseyville, Calif., wrote to the Post after the recent outpatient care scandal emerged. Anne Hull and Dana Priest, who opened the Walter Reed story in their investigative series two weeks ago, describe the flood of hundreds of emails and phone calls that the Post received from veterans all around the country, in which they describe abusive or neglectful conditions in other veterans’ hospitals. While some refer to problems in the system that go back to the Vietnam era, others warn of the system’s inability to cope with the tide of returning wounded soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan. "The hammer is just coming down, I can feel it," wrote one veteran, describing his struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder after his time in Iraq -- and the inability of the veterans’ health system to support him. Many veterans also said that they had made appeals before but felt that their concerns were neglected. "I have been trying to get someone, ANYBODY, to look into my allegations" at the Dayton VA, Darrell Hampton pleaded.

bush administration, joint chiefs of staff, iraq, walter reed hospital, veterans

Will John Murtha and The Democrats Get Their Troop Readiness Passed

    John Murtha was on Meet The Press  yesterday speaking to host Tim Russert about his plans for our troops and the US in dealing with Bush and his escalation and/or troop readiness.

March 4, 2007

MR. RUSSERT: What are the Democrats going to do to try to stop the war in Iraq?

REP. MURTHA: Well, the, the details haven’t been released yet. Until the members see it, we’re not going to talk about the details of what’s going to happen. That will be released tomorrow. But let, let me talk about what, what I think needs to be done. The other day, General Pace said, the chief of the Joint Chiefs said, look, you’re going to hurt the troops deployment overseas if you do what Murtha wants to do, what he’s recommended to the committee. And I said what he didn’t talk about was our strategic reserve, what he didn’t talk about, we’re sending troops back without a year at home, what he didn’t talk about was the fact they’re going in without the equipment they need to fight in combat. That’s unconscionable, and the Congress is going to stop that. The White House is finally beginning to recognize they don’t have the troops, as I predicted they wouldn’t have, to sustain this deployment. They certainly don’t have the troops to increase and to have a surge without breaking every rule that they set, Tim.

MR. RUSSERT:...And you referred to Peter Pace. He responded to you, and this is what he said before the committee on Tuesday: “If the one year rest at home, the no-extensions in the battlefield and the no stop-loss were implemented,” we’ve “done our homework on that ... if those are the rules, that instead of being able to have the 20 brigades on the ground in Iraq that we require, ... we would have somewhere between 14 and 19 brigades, at most. ... It would have enormous effect on the battlefield with regard to what’s required versus what’s available. ... I can simply tell you what the effect is. And the effect is damaging on the battlefield.”

REP. MURTHA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. What, what he’s saying, in answer to a leading question by a Republican senator—they kept badgering him to answer this question. Now, what is he doing? He’s violating every rule, every, every rule they set up for themselves. The troops have to be home for a year. Is it wrong to insist they have equipment? Is it wrong to insist they have training before they go into Iraq?

MR. RUSSERT: You are going to withhold the money unless those troops were—had readiness or were prepared, but now you’ve changed your view. You will allow those troops to go to Iraq in that situation or condition, as long as the president certifies that. Correct?

REP. MURTHA: Well, he’s got to certify that—at least this is what I’m recommending to the committee—he’s got to certify that these troops are equipped, and they are trained, or it’s in the national interest. I am absolutely convinced the public and I agree, and the Congress agrees, we don’t send one troop into combat that doesn’t have the training they need.

john murtha, us troops, congress, washington, iraq