President Bush will give a televised speech tonight to try to drum up support for his increasingly unpopular war in Iraq. Should he be getting free network time for spin? David Corn shares his thoughts.

I usually blast the broadcast networks when they do not air presidential addresses. But this time around I would find it tough to insist that they displace their usual assortment of sleazy reality shows and loaded-with-gross-details crime dramas for the latest White House word games.

If one state passes such a resolution, it's an event. If 25 of the 50 states pass one, it will be a movement. Contact your state legislators and encourage them to do what legisators in Oregon are proposing:

A group of nineteen Oregon Democrats unveiled a bill Monday that asks the Bush administration to come up with a timeline for withdrawing US Forces from Iraq. Their move comes after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Sunday that US troops could be in the country for up to twelve years.

The Homeward Bound Act of Oregon piggybacks on a bill introduced in Congress earlier this month. It is co-sponsored by Republican Walter Jones of North Carolina, renowned for his efforts to rename French Fries, Freedom Fries.

Jones has changed his views on the war and now wants to force President Bush to announce a withdrawal plan by the end of 2005. Northeast Portland Democrat, Chip Shields, says the Oregon bill may be symbolic, but it could be powerful.

Apparently believing we can never have enough prisons, the U.S. plans to expand the number of prisons throughout Iraq.

The U.S. military said Monday it plans to expand its prisons across Iraq to hold as many as 16,000 detainees, as the relentless insurgency shows no sign of letup one year after the transfer of sovereignty to Iraqi authorities.

The plans were announced on a day three U.S. Army soldiers were killed - two pilots whose helicopter crashed north of Baghdad and a soldier who was shot in the capital. At least four Iraqis died in a car bomb attack in the capital.

As if the U.S. military didn't have enough scandals going between Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and the ghost detainees, now we learn it is abusing its own recruits:

The recruits of Echo Company stumbled off the bus for basic training at Fort Knox to the screams of red-faced drill instructors. That much was expected. But it got worse from there.

Echo Company's top drill instructor seized a recruit by the back of the neck and threw him to the ground. Other soldiers were poked, grabbed or cursed. Once inside the barracks, Pvt. Jason Steenberger says, he was struck in the chest by the top D.I. and kicked "like a football." Andrew Soper, who has since left the Army, says he was slapped and punched in the chest by another drill instructor. Pvt. Adam Roster says he was hit in the back and slammed into a wall locker.

Eventually, four Army drill instructors and the company commander would be brought up on charges. Four have been convicted so far.

Count me among those that think Sen. Dick Durbin owed no one an apology for his remarks (pdf) about our treatment of the detainees and that the frenzy over them was just an attempt by Republicans to distract the public from the real issue. Nonetheless, he apologized again yesterday, this time to troops:

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin apologized to war veterans Saturday for his remarks earlier this month comparing interrogators at an American-run prison camp in Cuba to Nazis and other historically infamous regimes.

"I think when you've done something hurtful to people you have to stand up and say I'm sorry," Durbin said at a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Peoria, five days after he apologized for the comments on the Senate floor.

Durbin was correct in his remarks. The techniques used by the U.S. on prisoners are torture. He never blamed U.S. servicepeople to begin with. He was blaming the top brass who approved the techniques.

We need to keep the discussion going and raise the heat level on the Administration. They shouldn't get a pass on this issue.

Last week Dick Cheney said the Iraq insurgents are in their "last throes." Today on Meet the Press, Donald Rumsfeld said it will take 12 years to beat them, and U.S forces won't win. He claims the "win" will come after U.S. forces have left.

Rumsfeld, addressing a question about whether U.S. troops levels are adequate to vanquish the increasingly violent resistance, said, "We're not going to win against the insurgency. The Iraqi people are going to win against the insurgency. That insurgency could go on for any number of years. Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, 10, 12 years.

"Coalition forces, foreign forces are not going to repress that insurgency," the Pentagon chief told "Fox News Sunday." "We're going to create an environment that the Iraqi people and the Iraqi security forces can win against that insurgency," he said.

Dream on.

Bush may be fighting a losing battle. According to the latest poll numbers:

Some 53 percent of people surveyed say the United States made a mistake going to war in Iraq in March 2003, according to an AP-Ipsos poll released Friday. That is the highest number in AP-Ipsos polling who have said the war was a mistake.

In December 2003, almost two-thirds of those questioned said the United States made the right decision in waging war.

How many more vets are we going to see come home without limbs?

Some drink to escape the pain. Others do drugs. And a number sink into a deep depression that ends in suicide. Life for triple amputees can be rough.....On the lawn outside the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., a mother spoke on her cell phone in between puffs on a cigarette.

"I feel like I'm on a roller coaster," Doris Smith of St. Augustine, Fla., said on the phone to her family. "At night, when I get home, I can't sleep." After hanging up, Smith explained: Her 21-year-old Army son, Chad Smith, was injured by an improvised explosive device while he was in Iraq.

"There is a lot of tragedy up on that floor," she said, gesturing toward the hospital. "So many families have been disrupted because of it, and the public is unaware of it. ... They look at the casualties, but the wounded has been astronomical."

Let's hope that in another three months, the numbers will be as high for those who say bring the troops home now.

by TChris

It's fun to watch Sen. Kennedy tell Donald Rumsfeld that he's incompetent, but if he had seen this story, Kennedy might have called Rumsfeld a coward as well. The administration's incompetence leaves soldiers traveling in vehicles that lack adequate armor, while Rumsfeld -- during his rare visits to Iraq -- travels in "a rolling fortress of steel called the Rhino Runner."

Whatsamatta Donald? Are you afraid to entrust your life to the same Humvee you provide to the men and women whose lives are entrusted to you?

Six American soldiers killed today by a suicide bomber.

Bush refuses to set a timetable to leave Iraq

Most Americans oppose a return to the draft.

It's time to put the pressure on Republicans and Congress.

The Republican leadership is biting their fingernails off over this. This Congress has been negligent with regard to its duty on Iraq. We didn't ask the right questions before the war. Now, no one is being held accountable. [U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern]

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire.

In the day's most dramatic confrontation, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), a leading critic of the Iraq campaign, told Rumsfeld that the war has become a "seeming intractable quagmire." He recited a long list of what he called "gross errors and mistakes" in the U.S. military campaign and concluded with a renewed appeal for Rumsfeld to step down.

"In baseball, it's three strikes, you're out," Kennedy said before a standing-room-only session of the Armed Services Committee. "What is it for the secretary of defense? Isn't it time for you to resign?"

Rumsfeld paused, appearing to collect his thoughts and composure.

Update: Jeanne D'Arc at Body and Soul writes to Senator Durbin. Don't miss it and read the comments there too.

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Original Post

People may disagree about whether Sen. Dick Durbin should have apologized. We should stay focused on the real problem: the administration’s torture and indefinite detention policies, which are un-American and make us less safe.

The media has spent the last week focusing on one paragraph of Sen. Durbin’s speech, instead of responding to the right-wing noise machine. The rest of his speech, which the right-wingers didn’t bother to read, gets to the crux of the real issue:

by TChris

For all the posturing the Bush administration has done with regard to Saddam Hussein, it seems the administration is reluctant to let Hussein have his day in court.

Iraq's justice minister on Tuesday accused the United States of trying to delay Iraqi efforts to interrogate Saddam Hussein, saying "it seems there are lots of secrets they want to hide."

Those secrets, according to Justice Minister Abdel Hussein Shandal, include the money that the U.S. funneled to Hussein to support him during the years mass graves were being filled with bodies. Those graves became the retroactive justification for invading Iraq in the absence of weapons of mass destruction or evidence that Iraq was involved in the attack on the World Trade Center.

"There should be transparency and there should be frankness, but there are secrets that if revealed, won't be in the interest of many countries," [Shandal] said. "Who was helping Saddam all those years?"