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We ran a story on Dec. 20th, when General Cucolo first banned pregnancies under his command. Well, he took it a step further.

The crazy that comes out of the military sometimes is breathtaking. I wonder if this General is connected to the C-Street gang known as The Family?

VELSHI: Twenty-two U.S. soldiers serving in northern Iraq have just gotten two new orders from their general. Rule one, don't get pregnant. Rule two, don't get another soldier pregnant. Break those rules and you will get court-martialed. The general, Anthony Cucolo, e-mailed CNN explaining his decision, telling us -- quote -- "I need every soldier I have got, especially since we are facing a drawdown of forces during our mission."

LISA BLOOM, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: In my view, this is patently unconstitutional, Ali. There's a long line of U.S. Supreme Court cases that says that the right to be a parent is a fundamental constitutional right. That means it's a right of the highest order and worthy of the highest protection.

Now, the military does get great deference from the courts, which means, if they want to redeploy a pregnant soldier, as they often do, they can do that in the way that a private employer could not do. But they cannot threaten with court-martial or jail a pregnant woman or a man who impregnates a woman. In my view, this will not pass any kind of constitutional muster.
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THOMAS KENNIFF, FORMER ARMY JAG OFFICE ATTORNEY: Well, first of all, I think he may be going into hiding soon, because I think this is a situation where you have a commanding general who is in charge of his own fiefdom in northern Iraq and probably thought that he could do this with the consent of his own JAG, who may -- we use a term in the military when JAGs are referred to as going native, meaning that they're basically acting as yes men for the commend.

I agree with Lisa fully that there are serious constitutional problems with this and military laws and military orders are not exempt from constitutional scrutiny. The Supreme Court weighs in on military case laws and military decisions all the time.

So, you know, I think when this gets more exposure, as it is now through the media, there's going to be some major fallout here, because there's no question in my mind this is a major violation of the right to privacy.

UPDATE: John Amato:

Four Democratic female Senators have demanded that this horrific policy by General Cucolo be rescinded immediately. This is insane stuff.

Four Democratic senators have written a letter to an Army general in Iraq asking him to rescind an order that threatened to court martial female soldiers who become pregnant while deployed in the war zone.
The policy by Maj. Gen. Anthony Cucolo III was instituted on Nov. 4, but it has triggered outrage among women's groups since it became publicly known in recent days.

"We can think of no greater deterrent to women contemplating a military career than the image of a pregnant woman being severely punished simply for conceiving a child," the senators wrote to Cucolo today. "This defies comprehension. As such, we urge you to immediately recind this policy."

The letter was signed by Sens. Barbara Boxer of California, Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York.

UPDATE II: Now the general is saying that no soldier will actually be court martialed.

The commander who instituted a policy cracking down on pregnancy among soldiers defended it Tuesday as necessary to maintain troop strength, but said no soldier would ever be court-martialed for violating the directive. The policy -- which would punish soldiers who get pregnant or impregnate another soldier -- was included in Maj. Gen. Anthony Cucolo's orders to troops regarding conduct while deployed under his command in northern Iraq.

Cucolo said that as a former public affairs officer, he realized when he created the rule that it would be controversial for those outside the military.

"When I wrote this, I knew there would be public interest, and I also knew there would be a period of time when many folks would opine and give their own personal thoughts and blog about it. And I am fine with that. That's America," he said. "But I was also willing to deal with this attention because this is important. I am responsible and accountable for the fighting ability of my task force. I've got to take every measure to preserve my combat power, and that's the reason."

Yes General, we will blog about it and you got your fifteen minutes of shame, but in the end it's just another attack on the ladies when all is said and done no matter how you care to view this issue. I didn't realize that serving in battle was a lot like "Animal House."

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I'll repeat what Jeremy Scahill said about this. "What the hell is this idiot talking about?" Another non-reality based fake debate on MSNBC with both sides spouting ridiculous talking points.

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Jeremy Scahill joined Ed Schultz to discuss the recent column in the New York Times--Blackwater Guards Tied to Secret C.I.A. Raids:

WASHINGTON — Private security guards from Blackwater Worldwide participated in some of the C.I.A.’s most sensitive activities — clandestine raids with agency officers against people suspected of being insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and the transporting of detainees, according to former company employees and intelligence officials.

Several former Blackwater guards said that their involvement in the operations became so routine that the lines supposedly dividing the Central Intelligence Agency, the military and Blackwater became blurred. Instead of simply providing security for C.I.A. officers, they say, Blackwater personnel at times became partners in missions to capture or kill militants in Iraq and Afghanistan, a practice that raises questions about the use of guns for hire on the battlefield.

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Schultz asked Scahill if we had any idea of what kind of resources Blackwater had committed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Scahill: Ed, this company was a plausible deniability machine. Erik Prince the owner of that company built a parallel infrastructure to the U.S. military. He had an air force with his own aircraft. He had a maritime division. He had Blackwater Select which was providing special operations guys. They were guarding and still do guard U.S. diplomats and ambassadors, including the U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan right now.

Ed I also understand that Blackwater, because it’s owned by such an incredibly wealthy individual did some operations for free. That’s the ultimate deniability under the Bush administration. There were arrangements with Cheney, the C.I.A. and Special Forces where Blackwater’s guys were essentially working for free in operations funded by the owner of that company Erik Prince.

The story here though Ed that everyone seems to be missing is that Blackwater wasn’t just working for the C.I.A. They were working for the Joint Special Operations Command—the U.S. military and we talked about this on your show recently, including in Pakistan where Blackwater simultaneously worked for the C.I.A. and for JSOC. That story is a scandal that needs to be investigated much more thoroughly Ed.

Schultz: Is this relationship between Blackwater and the C.I.A. and the use of Blackwater still in existence under the Obama administration.

Scahill: It certainly is. In fact news breaking as I came on tonight that Leon Panetta the C.I.A. Director is trying to cancel Blackwater’s participation in the C.I.A. drone bombing campaign which has put its operatives on the ground not only in Pakistan but in Afghanistan as well. And so my understanding from both within Blackwater and from outside is that Blackwater remains very active with both U.S. Special Forces and the C.I.A.

Scahill tweeted this before going on Ed's show: #Blackwater is leaking the CIA ops for a reason. It also distracts from ongoing ops that are not CIA.

He also noted that ABC News confirmed his report tonight-Mercenaries? CIA Says Expanded Role for Contractors Legitimate.

You can find more from Scahill at his blog Rebel Reports.

Among the qualities that uniquely define Sarah Palin is that she doesn't know what she doesn't know. But as her confusion about climate change, the First Amendment and even Alaska's energy production showed, Palin's ignorance of a subject is no barrier to her speaking out with great conviction about it. So it is once again with talk of potential tax increases to fund the escalating war in Afghanistan. War time taxes are never necessary, Sarah Palin seemed to suggest this week, because during World War II "many Americans gave what little money they had to buy the war bonds that funded it all."

As Andrew Sullivan noted here and here, the Quittah from Wasilla used this week's anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to invent a new myth about how the United States mobilized and paid for the war which followed it. Palin wrote this December 7:

The attack on Pearl Harbor launched America into the Second World War, and our Greatest Generation did not hesitate when asked to sacrifice for their country. American men enlisted in droves, American women went to work in the factories that became our "Arsenal of Democracy," and many Americans gave what little money they had to buy the war bonds that funded it all.

Of course, in reality Americans funded the war through massive debt and massive tax increases (above).

As NPR recalled in August, Americans starting in 1942 began paying dramatically higher taxes, with the richest paying the most of all:

During World War II, tax rates for the wealthy soared as high as 94 percent. But poor and middle-class families also paid taxes at rates substantially higher than today's. Despite those high taxes, the vast majority of Americans surveyed by Gallup back then said the taxes they paid were fair.

Just two weeks ago, former Reagan Treasury Department economist Bruce Bartlett quantified those war time taxes and how that vast new burden was shared across the Greatest Generation:

During World War II, federal revenues roughly tripled as a share of the gross domestic product (GDP) and the number of people paying income taxes expanded tenfold, from 3% of the population in 1939 to 30% by 1943. In 1940, a family of four needed close to $80,000 of income in today's dollars before it paid any federal income taxes at all. By the war's end, it saw its effective tax rate rise from 1.5% to 15.1%. (Today such a family only pays a federal income tax rate of about 6%.) But taxes weren't the only way the war was paid for. Spending on nondefense programs was cut almost in half, from 8.1% of GDP in 1940 to 4.4% in 1945.

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SHORTER Fred Hiatt:

"There is no difference between GW Bush's Iraq surge in 2007 and Barack Obama's Afghan surge in 2010. Only silly Democrats could object to one but support the other."

Actually, Fred, there's a big difference between the two. The Bush administration and its supporters saw (continue to see?) Teh Surge 1.0 as essential to "winning" in Iraq, while most left-of-center military analysts saw it as a measure to protecting US troops but not really the central or sole contributer to stabilizing the country. With Teh Surge 2.0, once again, it isn't that this troop increase will allow the US government to "win" but it might be (again) one measure among many needed to stabilize Afghanistan. (no, Karl, it isn't to "fight terrorists." ).

But nuanced arguments about the reality of military operations aren't what Fred's all about. He'd rather continue his man-crush on GW and dream about the "success" that Iraq has become. And when the RNC supports the Afghan surge, you can be sure that it's more because they are still defending Teh Surge 1.0 of Iraq and not really thinking about how to finish operations in Afghanistan after Teh Surge 2.0.

Tom Hartmann does something you never hear him do on his radio show. Completely loses his cool with a wingnut caller who insulted him a number of times before he'd finally had enough of him. I agree with the second caller completely. It's easy for people like that wingnut Jason to care less about these useless wars and the toll they take when you don't even look at the people who's heads we're dropping bombs on as human beings. One of the commenters over at DU where I saw this posted said Thom apologized on the next show for this outburst.

I don’t think he needed to. I think the bigger problem is that more people are not as equally outraged about the human suffering that’s gone on in our name and that too many Americans could care less about the number of refugees and widows and orphans that have been created from Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. I’m not any happier with the Obama administration for continuing way too many of Bush’s policies, but Obama didn’t make the decision to invade either Afghanistan or Iraq. Bush did. Now Obama is stuck trying to figure out how to clean up Bush’s mess. That’s one job I sure as hell would not want and don’t envy anyone else having to take on.

I’m just so disgusted right now with what’s happened in both countries that I’m exhausted from it. I’m tired of the killing in our name and with our tax dollars and wondering when it’s ever going to stop. I don’t think we should be escalating in Afghanistan and think we should be getting the hell out of Iraq. I’m grateful there’s someone like Thom Hartmann out there expressing how much all of this pisses me off as well and how outraged anyone should be over the death and destruction the invasion of Iraq has caused if you’re willing to actually take a look at the numbers as Thom did here. It’s just appalling. And our media in this country has completely ignored it. As far as they're concerned, the "surge" has worked and we can move along now. Never mind the carnage we've left behind.

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Ed Schultz awards Sean Hannity his Psycho Talk segment of the day for allowing Palin and Perino to go unchallenged on his show when they spout B.S.

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November 19, 2009 CBS David Letterman

I'm totally against the Afghanistan war, as C&Lers know, and it was lost as soon as Bush and Cheney decided to attack Iraq. Any chance to stabilize that region was lost immediately thereafter. The world had rallied around Afghanistan in such a way that that country could have been reconstructed and repaired by now.

So President Obama finds himself in a bad situation caused by conservative beliefs and now there really is only one strategy left: When do we leave? That being said, Fred Thompson, in a hatchet-job fashion, says the Afghan war is lost too, because Obama just isn't into it. Wow, aren't Republicans into fighting endless wars for profits?

Fred Thompson must know that Bush abandoned Afghanistan and forged his move to attack and remove the Taliban as nothing more than a chess move to attack Iraq.

Former Sen. Fred Thompson today intensified his party's criticism of President Obama's long deliberation over policy in Afghanistan, announcing that Obama's delay signals that "the war has been lost" and that nothing the president now does will "make any difference."

"It really doesn't matter how President Obama divides the Afghan baby, how he splits the difference between McChrystal and Biden. Because the war has been lost," Thompson said on his radio show today. "I say this because of one sad and simple fact. The president does not have the will and determination to do what's necessary to win it. His heart's not in it, and never has been. The Taliban knows it. Al Qaeda knows it. Our allies know it. And the American people know it.

Americans turned against these two wars a long time ago and public opinion will only keep declining. Vermin like Thompson only look for opportunities to cut up the president as often as possible. And they are using this conflict like the blade. They are a sad movement.

Thompson has the nerve to suggest that a sitting President doesn't care what happens in a war that is taking place now. These conservatives have no shame and that's why conservatism is a sham.
Remember the Faux outrage over Harry Reid?

This morning on Fox News Sunday, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol said that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-NV) remark that the Iraq war is lost is “much more disgraceful” than Sen. Trent Lott’s (R-MS) 2002 claim that the country would be much better off if it had maintained racist segregation policies.

“What Harry Reid said is much more disgraceful than anything Trent Lott said, and I do think Democrats should ask Harry Reid to step down,” Kristol said.

Spencer Ackerman has done a yeoman's job digging into the details as to whether the 40-44,000 troop estimate by Gen. McChrystal is even realistic to consider, when one counts the number of troops still in Iraq and Gen. Odierno's glacially slow deployment out of that country, the number of troops who have just returned from Iraq or Afghanistan (or Kosovo or the Phillipines or Egypt or any number of other deployments), numbers of troops assigned in Germany and S. Korea, and the number of troops that are left available. It's a pretty close thing.

Obama would have something of a cushion, but not much, in the early months of 2010. An additional five brigades will finish their 12 months of so-called “dwell time” at home between deployments by April 2010, providing an additional 22,600 troops, but by that time, about 10,200 troops will be scheduled to leave Afghanistan, leaving available a net gain of 12,400. More brigades become available in the summer and fall, although others currently in Afghanistan will be ending their scheduled deployments then as well. Under current Pentagon policy, dwell time for the National Guard varies, but can be no shorter than two years, and so it is possible but not certain that two National Guard brigades composed of 6,800 National Guard soldiers might be available for deployment by March 2010 as well, beyond the 24,000 theoretically available now. Pentagon leaders had hoped to extend dwell time this year, but that was before McChrystal’s request for additional troops.

There will undoubtably be a Marine regiment or two included in the mix, but (for all the noise and thunder) the Marines are a small part of the overall "boots on the ground" needed by McChrystal's projection. You can't count on increases from NATO - the Brits may throw another 500 troops into the mix, Germany just announced that its troops would stay another year but didn't commit to increases, and Canada's counting on next year being its last. I sincerely doubt that the other countries are going to do anything different. And I am sure not going to count onany sudden near-term increase of professionalism or competency in the Afgan army.

So my question is this: Did McChrystal select, and the Joint Chiefs endorse, a 40-44,000 troop increase in Afghanistan because it was the right number, or because it was in fact the upper limit of available active duty troops (assuming that the White House will not ask Congress to authorize the call up of more Reserves and National Guard units)? The authorized increase in troops that Congress allowed a few years ago isn't going to kick in enough replacements to really count in any significant way. As I and others have noted, increasing the US troop strength to 102,000 or so still is going to be insufficient to be successful in securing Afghanistan in any time less than several years. If this is the upper limit, that there will be no other active troops available in brigade-size units, then we're really limiting our strategic options to "influence" anyone else in the world.

This is probably a good indication of why the White House is really trying to understand what the options are and what the implications are. As Mark Grimsley notes, there is a general consensus that there is no need for a quick decision in a military sense, given that the situation is stable - AQ is contained, the Taliban aren't about to take Kabul, and our troops aren't on the edge of re-directing the Taliban's growth any time soon.

The real division of opinion is about whether completion of the strategic review is time urgent in a political sense.  Does the length of the review reflect deliberation or vacillation, strength or weakness?  Where people come down on this essentially reflects their opinion of Obama.

Which is why the Republicans are already set to take cheap shots at the White House no matter what the decision is, and despite any rationale for the final direction that President Obama identifies. I can understand Obama's focus on the economy and on health care - these domestic issues capture the attention of the public and he needs the political capital from the presidential election that is running out.  But now we're finally in that point in time where Obama will have to announce his final decision. There's a lot riding on this decision, and I hope that Obama has the sense to identify his exit strategy and timeframe as justification for that decision.

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November 17, 2009 C-SPAN

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November 06, 2009 C-SPAN

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October 27, 2009 C-SPAN

Congressman Walter Jones lays out an impassioned plea for his colleagues to "please move very carefully with a fully defined plan on what the military is supposed to accomplish in Afghanistan"--a great speech.

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From Democracy Now--Judge Rejects Blackwater Attempt to Dismiss Cases Filed by Iraqi Victims:

A federal judge has rejected a series of arguments by lawyers for the private military contractor Blackwater who were seeking to dismiss five war crimes cases brought by Iraqi victims against the company and its owner, Erik Prince. We speak to award-winning investigative journalist and Democracy Now! correspondent, Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to talk about Sudan in a minute, but right now we turn to a major decision here in the United States. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan Gonzalez. Juan?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, a federal judge has rejected a series of arguments by lawyers for the private military contractor Blackwater who were seeking to dismiss five war crimes cases brought by Iraqi victims against the company and its owner, Erik Prince. At the same time, the judge ruled that lawyers for the Iraqi plaintiffs need to amend and re-file their cases to provide more specific details on the alleged crimes before a decision can be made on whether the lawsuits will proceed.

Susan Burke, the lead attorney for the Iraqi victims, told The Nation magazine she was “very pleased with the ruling.” While Blackwater’s spokesperson, Stacy DeLuke said, quote, “We are confident that [the plaintiffs] will not be able to meet the high standard specified in [the judge’s] opinion.”

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by Democracy Now! video stream by award-winning investigative journalist and Democracy Now! correspondent, Jeremy Scahill, author of the international bestseller Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. His article on the ruling is available online at TheNation.com.

Jeremy, welcome to Democracy Now! It’s being played by the mainstream media as a huge defeat for those who are taking on Blackwater, but you have a very different take. Explain.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I mean, when I got up yesterday morning and saw all these headlines from the Associated Press and other media outlets saying that a federal judge had tossed out all of the lawsuits against Blackwater, I was actually quite stunned. I mean, that would have been a devastating development for the Iraqi victims of the company.

But then I actually got the fifty-six-page ruling from Judge T.S. Ellis, who, by the way, is a Reagan appointee, and I read it. And actually, what you see in this document is that it’s a very well-thought-out legal argument by Judge Ellis, where he’s essentially saying to Blackwater, “Your argument that you can’t be sued as a private company under the Alien Tort Statute is false. Your argument that private individuals or companies cannot commit war crimes is false.”

AMY GOODMAN: Whoops. Looks like we just lost Jeremy. Jeremy is speaking to us by video stream. We’re going to try to get him back on, and we’ll try to get him on the phone. But right now—we’ll do that for the end of the show—we will turn to our next guest. That, consider just a tease for the rest of that subject.

[...]

AMY GOODMAN: We go back right now to Jeremy Scahill to try to complete that conversation on the issue of a federal judge rejecting a series of arguments by lawyers for the private military contractor Blackwater, who were seeking to dismiss five war crimes cases brought by Iraqi victims against the company and its owner, Erik Prince.

Jeremy, we’ve got you back on the Democracy Now! video stream. Very quickly, explain the significance of the case.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I mean, basically, these are five cases brought by Iraqi civilians that were allegedly wounded by Blackwater and the families of Iraqis that were killed by Blackwater. These are very high-stakes cases. Blackwater is fighting passionately to have them thrown out. They’ve made arguments that they, as a company, can’t be sued, that it would violate the rights of the President of United States to make battlefield decisions, and if Blackwater was prosecuted, that would infringe upon the President’s rights. They’ve said that they, as a company, can’t be sued for war crimes, because war crimes can only be committed by state actors or nations. And what we saw here is that this conservative Judge Ellis said to Blackwater, “No, none of that is valid.”

What he did do, though, is he referenced a Supreme Court decision in May, Ashcroft v. Iqbal, which really reversed decades of case law and made it very, very difficult, more difficult, for plaintiffs to have their cases moved to the trial phase. In other words, the bar was set much higher to proceed to trial. So what the judge said to Susan Burke and the Center for Constitutional Rights, the lawyers representing these Iraqis, “You need to re-file your cases with more evidence, and then we’ll take it from there.”

So, while it’s being portrayed by the corporate media as a judge tossing out these cases, that quite clearly is not the case. This was actually a pretty significant defeat for Blackwater and a victory not only for the Iraqis in this case, but also for those lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights that have spent decades trying to apply US laws to crimes committed abroad.

Blackwater remains in very, very hot water, not only because of this case, but also the US Justice Department is going to begin its prosecution of five Blackwater operatives for manslaughter charges relating to the Nisoor Square massacre in September of ’07. This is very high-stakes stuff, and the corporate media got it basically absolutely wrong.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill, we’ll leave it there. I want to thank you for being with us, award-winning journalist.

Seemingly with each passing day, General Stanley McChrystal grows in the esteem of President Obama's conservative foes. After having savaged General Eric Shinseki for his pre-Iraq war testimony that the occupation would require "several hundreds of thousands" of American troops, Republicans have seized on McChrystal's public demands for more forces in Afghanistan as their latest battering ram to bludgeon Obama on national security. And as it turns out, McChrystal's inadvertent leak earlier this month regarding a classified CIA analysis puts him in the same company as Republicans John Boehner, Pete Hoekstra, Pat Roberts and, of course, Dick Cheney.

McChrystal in his leaked report and unprecedented public speech in London has put tremendous pressure on President Obama to quadruple the Bush-era commitment to the Afghan conflict. General McChrystal didn't merely announce that short of deploying as many as 60,000 more troops, the U.S. effort in Afghanistan "will likely result in failure." He also set out to demolish straw man alternatives to his escalated counterinsurgency plan, including:

"A paper has been written that recommends that we use a plan called 'Chaosistan', and that we let Afghanistan become a Somalia-like haven of chaos that we simply manage from outside."

But as Newsweek reported, that "paper" to which General McChrystal casually referred is almost surely a classified CIA assessment:

Two U.S. intelligence officials, who asked for anonymity when discussing a sensitive matter, say that the reference almost certainly comes from a recently published, and secret, CIA analysis titled "Chaosistan" (not "Chaostan"). Prepared by a "red team" of CIA analysts, the document, says one official, picks apart conventional analyses of the war and explains how forces inside Afghanistan--from hostile ethnic groups to intrusive neighbors to societal damage caused by past Taliban rule--work against the notions of a central Afghan government. The paper is not quite the policy proposal McChrystal implied it was, say the officials, since intelligence analysts don't generally recommend policy options.

Of course, the same Republican voices which lauded the leak of McChrystal's report and his UK grandstanding will doubtless remain silent now. Because while many in the GOP called for the prosecution of those behind the publication of the NSA domestic surveillance story, they themselves selectively leaked classified national security information for partisan political purposes.

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