[Warning: Video contains graphic violence.]

Dan Froomkin observes:

Calling it a case of “collateral murder,” the WikiLeaks Web site today released harrowing until-now secret video of a U.S. Army Apache helicopter in Baghdad in 2007 repeatedly opening fire on a group of men that included a Reuters photographer and his driver — and then on a van that stopped to rescue one of the wounded men.

None of the members of the group were taking hostile action, contrary to the Pentagon’s initial cover story; they were milling about on a street corner. One man was evidently carrying a gun, though that was and is hardly an uncommon occurrence in Baghdad.

Reporters working for WikiLeaks determined that the driver of the van was a good Samaritan on his way to take his small children to a tutoring session. He was killed and his two children were badly injured.

In the video, which Reuters has been asking to see since 2007, crew members can be heard celebrating their kills.

“Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards,” says one crewman after multiple rounds of 30mm cannon fire left nearly a dozen bodies littering the street.

A crewman begs for permission to open fire on the van and its occupants, even though it has done nothing but stop to help the wounded: “Come on, let us shoot!”

Two crewmen share a laugh when a Bradley fighting vehicle runs over one of the corpses.

And after soldiers on the ground find two small children shot and bleeding in the van, one crewman can be heard saying: “Well, it’s their fault bringing their kids to a battle.”

I just signed this petition to help push Congress to carry out its 2006 mandate to end the occupation in Iraq. It’s clear that our leaders, journalists, and so-called experts in DC aren’t going to do anything about this war unless they hear massive public outrage.

It’s our duty as citizens to express our anger at their open flouting of our will. Please join me by signing this petition:

http://action.openleft.com/page/petition/dc/pqk

Bush doesn’t care how many American soldiers die. He doesn’t care how many billions of taxpayer dollars he’s pissing away. All he cares about is somehow making himself look decisive and resolute, even if he’s on entirely the wrong course. There’s no amount of blood and money that he won’t sacrifice in his desire to never have to admit he’s wrong.

Worst President ever.

Heard the Word of Blog?

Of course, since I’m in the United States, this wouldn’t risk quite the same consequences that it would for a U.K. blogger, but I thought I’d add my name to the list anyway. You can be counted too by going here.

Mr. Bush, I don’t recognize the world you paint. I find your speech a form of sheer propaganda, having almost no relationship to reality. And I am very, very worried that you will allow to happen to the Oil Gulf what you allowed to happen to New Orleans. After watching you for five years I have become convinced that you don’t have the slightest idea what you are doing in Iraq, that you are just reacting and playing it by ear. You can’t do that, George. This Iraq thing is extremely complex. It needs serious, concerted thought by high-powered people, not just your cronies and yes-men and ideologues of various stripes (from Right to far-Right). You might just need the help of Iran and Syria to get Iraq right. Did you ever think of that? Iraq is the biggest policy failure in US history so far. You need to get a handle on it, the way you do on tax cuts for the billionaires (you’ve been very effective in making your rich friends richer). Otherwise all that extra treasure you’ve thrown to your tuxedoed “base” is going to go right down the tubes, drowned in a world of $20 a gallon gasoline.

You can’t “stay the course” because you don’t have a course. Get one.

Cole goes through the text of Bush’s remarks and debunks most of his ill-informed arguments about how we should be dealing with both al-Qaeda and Iraq. This one’s definitely worth a read.

The death toll in Wednesday’s eight bombings in Baghdad rose to 150, with one bomb in Kadhimiyah accounting for about 114. I can only imagine that hundreds were wounded. It is the second biggest one-day toll in guerrilla violence since the fall of Saddam (only March 2, 2004, was worse). Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of Monotheism and Holy War, announced a “war” on Iraq’s Shiites by radical Sunni Salafis. The operation was apparently in part revenge for the US/Iraqi government attack on the largely Sunni Turkmen city of Tal Afar in the north.

Although Iraqi government officials tried to put the best face on the disaster, saying that it demonstrated that the Tal Afar operation had in fact deeply threatened the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement, I fear I would draw the opposite conclusion. The guerrillas in Tal Afar cleverly slipped away, and the US troops never even fought a major battle with them. The use of Kurdish troops and Shiite informers leant an ethnic cast to the campaign. Most people in Tal Afar just left the city, for all the world like New Orleans refugees in Texas and Mississippi. So as an operation, it did not amount to much, though it displaced a lot of innocent civilians. And while the US and Kurdish troops were chasing down empty streets in Tal Afar, the guerrillas blew up Baghdad.

If you don’t control your capital, you control nothing. If the events of Black Wednesday were not so very tragic (those poor Shiite laborers! and their families), the situation would be absurd in a surrealist sense. The US military off in a small desert town with nothing to do but play fight club amongst themselves, while hundreds of innocent Iraqi Shiites in Kadhimiyah are massacred at will.

And the guerrillas’ ability at this late date to mount such a shatteringly effective operation in the capital itself is why the pitiful and arrogant Project for a New American Century fantasy of just crushing the Sunni Arabs of Iraq is a K Street wet dream generated by intellectual adolescents, not a realistic policy. (And of course the same thing could be said of virtually everything the PNAC has ever said).

The worst part of all this is probably the fact that the Bush administration apparently has no plan to do anything differently, instead preferring to just leave American troops in Iraq as it slides farther into bloody civil war. After all, better for hundreds or thousands of Iraqis to die than for Bush to admit he’s wrong.

Bush has given us the worst of all possible worlds– a half-finished job against al-Qaeda, an Iraqi imbroglio that could still explode into civil or even regional war– and which serves as an al-Qaeda recruiting tool–, a government starved for funds, an enormous windfall for the rich at the expense of the middle class (which saw average wages actually fall recently), and an inability to respond effectively to a major urban catastrophe.

Four years after September 11, al-Qaeda’s leadership should have been behind bars or dead. Four years after September 11, Afghanistan should have been stabilized. Four years after September 11, the government should have been ready to save lives in an urban disaster.

Bush recently started likening his poorly conceived and misnamed “war on terror” to World War II.

What his handlers have forgotten is how long World War II lasted for the United States.

Four years.

In four years, Roosevelt and allies defeated Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. In four years, Bush hasn’t managed even to corner Bin Laden and a few hundred scruffy terrorists; or to extract himself from the deserts of Iraq; or to put the government’s finances in good order so that it can deal with crises like Katrina.

Four years. I think about the victims of 9/11, and now 7/7. We have let you down.

Go and read the whole piece for an excellent overview of how Bush has bungled the so-called “war on terror” since 9/11/2001.

Nothing that happens on the ground in Iraq can turn around the fate of this war in America: not a shotgun constitution rushed to meet an arbitrary deadline, not another Iraqi election, not higher terrorist body counts, not another battle for Falluja (where insurgents may again regroup, The Los Angeles Times reported last week). A citizenry that was asked to accept tax cuts, not sacrifice, at the war’s inception is hardly in the mood to start sacrificing now. There will be neither the volunteers nor the money required to field the wholesale additional American troops that might bolster the security situation in Iraq.

What lies ahead now in Iraq instead is not victory, which Mr. Bush has never clearly defined anyway, but an exit (or triage) strategy that may echo Johnson’s March 1968 plan for retreat from Vietnam: some kind of negotiations (in this case, with Sunni elements of the insurgency), followed by more inflated claims about the readiness of the local troops-in-training, whom we’ll then throw to the wolves. Such an outcome may lead to even greater disaster, but this administration long ago squandered the credibility needed to make the difficult case that more human and financial resources might prevent Iraq from continuing its descent into civil war and its devolution into jihad central.

Thus the president’s claim on Thursday that “no decision has been made yet” about withdrawing troops from Iraq can be taken exactly as seriously as the vice president’s preceding fantasy that the insurgency is in its “last throes.” The country has already made the decision for Mr. Bush. We’re outta there. Now comes the hard task of identifying the leaders who can pick up the pieces of the fiasco that has made us more vulnerable, not less, to the terrorists who struck us four years ago next month.

As Kos notes:

Frank Rich becomes the first mainstream columnist to say out loud what we have been saying for some time — there are no more corners to turn in Iraq. There are no solutions to this Debacle. Bush has failed. Now we must find a way out that best serves the interests and the security of the United States and the world. A time for new leadership, which long since arrived, remains the most important imperative — because BushCo has no clue and has no resolve. The control of this situation must be snatched from them. By public pressure and by electing Democrats with starch in 2006.

The idea that Democrats shouldn’t take on Bush over the terrible mess in Iraq is what cost Kerry the election, and there are those in the party who apparently still haven’t learned that lesson. Let’s hope that as the polls show less and less support for Bush’s handling of the war, more and more Democratic politicians will remember where they put their spines. If not, then they need to be replaced with Democrats who still have theirs.

An Associated Press survey of longtime students of international terrorism finds them ever more convinced, in the aftermath of London’s bloody Thursday, that the world has entered a long siege in a new kind of war. They believe that al-Qaida is mutating into a global insurgency, a possible prototype for other 21st-century movements, technologically astute, almost leaderless. And the way out is far from clear.

In fact, says Michael Scheuer, the ex-CIA analyst, rather than move toward solutions, the United States took a big step backward by invading Iraq.

Now, he said, “we’re at the point where jihad is self-sustaining,” where Islamic “holy warriors” in Iraq fight America with or without allegiance to al-Qaida’s bin Laden.

While Bush continues to spout off about how we’re bravely fighting the war on terror, he’s actually making things worse and worse by motivating the very extremists he claims to want to stop.

[via Daily Kos]

Tens of thousands of people are dead in Iraq, including more than 1,600 U.S. soldiers and Marines, because of false allegations made by President George W. Bush and Di Rita’s more immediate boss, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, about Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and equally imaginary active nuclear weapons program. Bush, Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice repeatedly made unfounded allegations that led to the continuing disaster in Iraq, much of which is now an economic and military no man’s land beset by bombings, assassinations, kidnappings and political gridlock.

And we now know, thanks to a leaked British memo concerning the head of British intelligence, that the Bush administration — contrary to its explicit denials — had already made up its mind to attack Iraq and “fixed” those bogus allegations to support its decision. In short, Bush and his top officials lied about Iraq.

Take the time to sit through the brief ad at Salon and read the whole thing. The mainstream American media doesn’t apparently doesn’t consider this to be front page news, so it looks like they’re determined to give our Great Leader the same pass they gave him in the run-up to the war. Of course, if I had been manipulated the way the U.S. press was, maybe I wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time talking about the latest proof that I was wrong either.