More than 100,000 people are expected to take part in protests against George Bush in London today.

Organisers of the Stop The War coalition predict more than 100,000 people will join the march past parliament, up Whitehall and into Trafalgar Square soon after Mr Bush's Downing Street summit with the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair. While police agreed the route for today's march because the coalition had staged entirely peaceful protests before the Iraq conflict, there are fears anarchist groups could seek to hijack the protest and force a confrontation in the heart of the capital.

Here's the details:

UK National Demonstration
Thursday 20th November
Assemble 2pm at Malet Street, Central London (nearest tubes: Goodge Street, Russell Square and Euston/Euston Sq). March to Trafalgar Square where a statue of George Bush will be pulled down. This event will continue until 7pm to allow for people coming from work.

Route: Malet St - Russell Square - Southampton Row - Kingsway - Aldwych - Waterloo Bridge - York Road - Westminster Bridge - Parliament Square - Whitehall - Trafalgar Square.

If you can't make it... participate in the Virtual March - organised by OurWorldOurSay.

Democratic Underground reports:

Read this official budget carefully and you will see that Bush is gearing up the draft--there is no longer any doubt about it. Selective Service must report to Bush on March 31, 2005, that the system is ready for activation within 75 days. So on June 15, 2005, expect the announcement that the first draft lottery since Vietnam will be held for 20 year-olds.

Here is where the DU rubber hits the road, my friends. This is a DU EXCLUSIVE as far as I know, so please read this one carefully and let me know what we are going to do about it. To put this all into context, the SSS has lain basically dormant for decades and now in the 2004 budget, Bush has added $28 million to get the whole thing ready to fly in 2005. The 4 performance goals below basically make the system ready for activation.

Their source? The Selective Service itself.

D.U. says, "VOTE FOR BUSH IN 2004, BE DRAFTED IN 2005!!

We're watching Jessica Lynch on David Letterman. Apparently, she's been on all the morning shows this week. But we don't get a chance to watch those, so we'll just report on her Letterman appearance.

Not surpisingly, she got a standing ovation.

We were struck by how pretty she is. Much prettier than in her pictures. She kind of reminded us of that "Breck Girl" for those of you old enough to remember those ads.

She talked about her home town, Palestine , West Virginia. It has 900 people. Despite its small size, she was surprised and pleased by its residents rallying around her because she never even thought half the people would know who she was--she thought they might know her family, but not her. We don't really understand that, since she grew up there, but that's what she said.

Asked about her injuries, she said she's recovering from a spinal injury and her left foot has no feeling. She has lots of rods and screw holding her feet and legs together. She said the the doctors in the Iraqi hospital didn't save her life, but they helped save it. The difference was lost on us, but she wanted to make that point.

The international health charity Medact released a new report Monday, titled Continuing Collateral Damage. It finds that between March and October, there were 9,500 civilian casualties in Iraq. It also estimates that 22,000 to 55,000 people on all sides, including in the military, died in the war and its aftermath. This number includes military on both sides.

Iraqis will suffer the health consequences of the second Gulf war "for years, maybe generations", says [the] report warning of an "information black hole" on what is truly happening in the country.

You can access the full report here.

Here today. Gone tomorrow. Last week we reported that the website for the Department of Defense featured a recruitment notice for officials to serve on draft boards. This fueled speculation by us and several media outlets that perhaps Bush was thinking of reinstating the draft. reports the notice has been taken down. But there's a mirrored copy over at Memory Hole if you're interested. We say good riddance and we hope to never see it again.

As Skippy would say, it's the war that keeps on giving. The U.S. launched a raid in Afganistan Oct. 30th that killed 6 Afghans. Here's an account:

Maulavi Ghulam Rabbani, 60, a religious leader and commander allied with the government, said American planes bombed and fired on his home on the night of Oct. 30, killing six people, including two of his children.

...."Three planes came," Mr. Rabbani said. "First they bombed the mosque. My 18-year-old son was sleeping in the mosque and he was killed. When they started bombing, the people in the village started fleeing and my 21-year-old daughter was shot down by a plane as she was running in the street." A 75-year-old woman was trying to take three of Mr. Rabbani's young cousins — ages 15, 7 and 5 — to shelter when they were all killed by gunfire from a plane or helicopter, he said. The children's father, carrying his blind mother on his back, escaped, he said.

And in the Emily Litella "never mind" department:

A United Nations official in Kabul said the Americans had bombed the village by mistake, trying to hit the house of one of Mr. Hekmatyar's commanders.

The Colorado mother and soldier who refused to return to Iraq after a Judge in a child custody case said her husband's ex-wife might regain custody if she did, received a 'compassionate reassignment' today.

Simone Holcomb was 'demobilized' today. She will be allowed to transfer to the Colorado National Guard and remain in Colorado to deal with the custody dispute. She will no longer be considered to be "absent without leave."

The army did the right thing.

More than two dozen Democrats introduced a resolution in Congress today urging Bush to fire Rumsfeld.

This resolution would make official what so many members of Congress already believe -- that the soldiers in Iraq and America's foreign policy would be helped greatly if Donald Rumsfeld would leave," Rep. Charles Rangel of New York said in a statement.

Rangel said he so far had 25 co-sponsors to the resolution who were "willing to stand up and say what so many policy makers know, that the first step to bringing our troops home is to send Donald Rumsfeld home."

The resolution said Rumsfeld misled the American public on assessments of progress in the war and occupation, sent U.S. forces to Iraq "without adequate planning and sufficient equipment," and "demonstrated a lack of sensitivity" in statements on the war and U.S. casualties.

It's doubtful the resolution will come up for a vote before Congress recesses at the end of the month. Too bad.

Reuters interviews the doctors who treated Jessica Lynch in Iraq. They are unanimous in their assertions that she was not raped. Lynch does not recall being raped. Yet author Rick Bragg's publisher is standing by the charge in his book that she was sodomized.

Dr Jamal Kadhim Shwail was the first doctor to examine Lynch when she was brought to Nassiriya's military hospital by Iraqi special police. Shwail said Lynch was lying in the crowded reception of the hospital, unconscious and in shock from blood loss.

She was wearing her uniform including a flak jacket, military trousers and boots, none of her clothes had been unbuttoned or removed, as the book claims, he said. .... He said her flak jacket was removed and her clothes were cut away to expose the injured sites. The anesthetist cut away an area around her groin to insert a catheter to drain urine....Her clothes were not torn, her boots had not been removed. There is no way (she could have been raped)."

So could it have happened at the next hospital?

This is a very interesting comment left today on one of our earlier Jessica Lynch posts:

I came upon this page by accident, however I read some of the comments and therefore am compelled to respond. I was a member of the G2/G3 staff that planned the ops for the Lynch mission. There were some J2 types from Washington, at least one was an NSA agent, involved too. All total there were about 50 people involved with the planning phase and execution phase, these were compartmentalized for security so the left hand did not know what the right hand was doing, which is part of the confusion. It was carried out under a code-name, like most operations, "blue-reel" was the name of the planning code.

The actual operation was not only staged, it was reheased like a stage show, complete with two videographers, a primary and a backup. We used an Iraqi CIA agent, I say CIA, he could have been NSA, I don't really know. He now is in Washington and he is also making money off the Lynch story. He is phony. We even supplied a folded U.S. flag on the chopper so she could be filmed with a flag. Of course flags are not normally standard equipment on choppers or special ops raids, but neither is a video crew. According to what we were told by psyops, the fake, or staged, operation had a nice basis of truth and that the embellishment would be used as propaganda against the Iraqis. Unfortunately it was used against Americans to bolster support for the war.

Recall this was in the first phase at the time when support was waning, we needed a boost because we still had to push into Baghdad. The Lynch rescue provided the needed boost. There are some other details too, but I'm sure they will come out.

The CID did a good investigation which proves that alot of the rescue was fraudulent. I recommend that you read it, you will be shocked at how the truth was covered up or changed. This operation was known by the highest levels of DOD. I'm sure Sec Rumsfeld knew about it. Those involved were all on TDY, or detached from their units, following the success of the mission, us were transferred back to our parent units. I was NOT on the raid, just the planning.

More people are beginning to compare Iraq and Vietnam.

Today, comparisons of the Iraq war to Vietnam are growing louder and steady reports of American troops killed on the battlefield are having a corrosive effect on public opinion of President Bush.

One of the most telling numbers of late: four in 10 Americans, 39 percent, think the United States made a mistake by sending troops into Iraq - roughly the same number that said that about Vietnam in the summer of 1967.

Early on, people approved of Johnson's handling of Vietnam by a 2-1 margin, according to Gallup polls from 1965. By the summer of 1967, four in 10 thought Vietnam was a mistake, and people were evenly divided on Johnson's handling of the war. Public support then slipped steadily.

The decline in public opinion about Iraq has come more quickly for Bush. In April, three-fourths approved of the way Bush was handling the war. In a CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll released Thursday, 54 percent disapproved and 45 percent approved. The number who say it was a mistake to send in troops has almost doubled from the 22 percent who thought so in July.

It may be only a matter of time until someone comes up with the sequel to the infamous chant we remember so well, "Hey, Hey, LBJ, How many kids did you kill today?"

Update: SSGT Pogany believes he's being pressured to quit and experts say someone should have recognized he needed help.

*****************

As we've previously reported, the cowardice charges filed against SSGT Pogany, the soldier who asked for counseling after seeing a dead Iraqi lying on the ground whose body was cut in half, have been dropped and a lesser charge of dereliction of duty has been lodged in its place.

Former Navy JAG officer and blogger Len Clevelin (Musings of a Philosophical Scrivener) examines the old charge and the new charge and thinks the Army will have a tough time proving the new one.

First, the Army is going to have to allege and prove the specific duties that SSGT Pogany is alleged to have been derelict in the performance of. Getting around that, the critical issue at trial seems to me to be whether SSGT Pogany was derelict in the performance of those duties either willfully, or through culpable negligence. The facts of the case, as presented in the media up to this time, seem to be clear that SSGT Pogany went to his chain of command and informed them that, due to the psychological trauma of seeing the severely mutilated body of the dead Iraqi, he felt that he was no longer capable of doing his duties without psychological assistance. I don't see how the Army can prove that this is either willful refusal to perform (assuming that SSGT Pogany isn't malingering (which is another offense under the UCMJ) as he has no control over his psychological reaction to seeing the horribly mutilated corpse of an enemy combatant), or "culpably negligent" (since it's clear to me under general principles of criminal liability that psychological factors interfering with one's ability to perform one's duty in no way rise to the level of "culpable negligence").

Clevelin hedges his bets somewhat, so go over and read the whole thing.

[link via Democratic Veteran]