Harry Browne's Interview with Eric Dondero

Here's an old interview with infamous "pro-war libertarian" (more like neoconservative)Eric Dondero by the late, great Harry Browne. This interview was done at the time a sick and dying Browne was delving into the mind of a Republican nutjob who supported the War in Iraq and claimed that the "Islamo-Fasicists" (a massive force of Islamists who purportedly embraced fascism) are coming through our borders.

Of course, Dondero called those who didn't support the War, who didn't support military action in Iraq, and who didn't sign on board with the "Muslims-Are-Coming" Little Chicken mentality "complete wimps" and "crazy." Dondero leveled loads of insults, screams, and accusations against Harry on one of his last radio shows.

Callers whom one can hear are the infamous http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifAlex Jones and then-(and now former) National Chair of the Republican Liberty Caucus Bill Westmiller. Bill then pointed out that Eric dropped an email to the RLC list, urging the then-Bush administration to "drop a nuclear bomb on Mecca."

Of course, Dondero accuses Harry of not being a libertarian because Harry would have responded by writing in one of his columns that the attacks were "a criminal act," yet later in the interview he says:

Look, I don't want anybody to get the impression that, you know, uh, libertarians hold a single view on foreign policy. We are all in agreement - all libertarians - that we should get out of the United Nations and end foreign aid. I think, you know, we have massive disagreements on the War on Iraq and the responding to September 11th. Harry, I consider you a comrade in the libertarian movement. You and I should be concentrating on getting the Congress to stop foreign aid and getting us out of the United Nations. You know, if we have differences on this, perhaps we can put them aside.

What a complete hypocrite he is!

*Note: Dondero claims to "care about the 3,000 people" who were massacred on 9/11, yet he didn't give a rip about them long before the September 11th attacks.

Bush Is A Liar and a War Criminal

Last week's Dateline NBC news correspondent and Today co-anchor Matt Lauer's highly-touted, highly-talked about hour-long interview with former President George W. Bush has sent attentive shock waves throughout the entire media establishment, the nation, and the world. More accurately, it has been a critical bust for the network and its show, considering it's accumulated a meager 7 million viewers, pushing it to fourth place.

More importantly, while it has been an eye-opener for the show's viewers, it hasn't been for its critics who finally see that Bush has admitted his war crimes against humanity -- waterboarding, the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, rape, sodomy, torture, homocide, and other forms of sexual assault against detained Iraqi insurgents ("freedom fighters" or "rebels" in the eyes of the Iraqi populace in their native homeland). (Sadly, President Obama has continued these atrocities which have been largely ignored by the establishment and its media cronies, but that's not a surprise because they are heavily in bed with one another.)

The Lauer-Bush interview, which was conducted to promote Bush's new book Decision Points, ought to give observers pause. (Many pundits refuse to buy into Bush's war criminal and warmongering propaganda and lies, except for the Fox News commentators who are smiling in the background.) When water-boarding is discussed, Bush responds with the following statements taken from the show's official transcript (which is available at the network's Decision Points website):

BUSH: We believe America's going to be attacked again. There's all kinds of intelligence comin' in. And-- and-- one of the high value al Qaeda operatives was Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the chief operating officer of al Qaeda… ordered the attack on 9/11. And they say, "He's got information." I said, "Find out what he knows.” And so I said to our team, "Are the techniques legal?" He says, "Yes, they are." And I said, "Use 'em."

LAUER: Why is waterboarding legal, in your opinion?

BUSH: Because the lawyer said it was legal. He said it did not fall within the Anti-Torture Act. I'm not a lawyer., but you gotta trust the judgment of people around you and I do.

LAUER: You say it's legal. "And the lawyers told me."

BUSH: Yeah.

So, Bush claims that water-boarding is "legal" because his attorney said it was. That's an outright confession of a war crime right there (which he even openly let slip in his book). Bush, while using the excuse that his "attorneys" said that it was "legal" to do it, knows that just because it was legal to do it under American law at the time of that incidents doesn't mean they were legal internationally. The U.S. like every nation is subjected to international law, whether the hawks in his administration and his supporters like it or not. (Are Bush and Co. aware that the provisions of the Geneva Conventions of 1929 and 1949 mandate that prisoners of war (POWs) are to be "treated humanely" and that all acts of torture against them as well as homocide, rape, and all other vile atrocities are illegal under international law? I supect they do, but they apparently have no compunction in violating the terms of those treaties.)

The fact of the matter is that Bush and Co. had the legitimate power that they had given themselves to decide what is "legal" and what isn't. But, even when it was legal to employ such a horrendous technique, did it "keep America safe" as his defenders posited? Of course not! Everyone is well aware of the fact that, when a prisoner is subjected to water-boarding (which is the act of coercing the captive to believe that he or she is drowning when it is artificially, psychologically, and mentally induced, although water is sprayed or poured over his or her nostrils), no truly legitimate intelligence is extracted from the detainee. In the words of actor Jake Gyllenhaal's character CIA operative Douglas Freeman tells a U.S. government-backed Middle Eastern official in Northern Africa in the 2007 film Rendition:

In all the years you've been doing this, how often can you say that we've produced truly legitimate intelligence? Once? Twice? Ten times? Give me a statistic; give me a number. Give me a pie chart, I love pie charts. Anything, anything that outweighs the fact that if you torture one person you create ten, a hundred, a thousand new enemies.

Whether Bush, Obama, and Co. want to acknowledge it or not, he's right. As a matter of fact, the use of extraordinary rendition, which is the kidnapping of a citizen from one country and brought to another and kept at a clandestine location, as established by the Clinton administration, carried out by the Bush administration, and continued by the Obama administration has not come to a screeching halt. Although Obama has put a stop to extraordinary rendition via an executive order simply by allegedly ensuring that the practice is compliant under international and domestic law and establishing a Task Force, he has not put an end to "erroneous rendition" (the practice of kidnapping a citizen and employing extraordinary rendition due to mistaken identity).

Moreover, the use of water-boarding, even after the application of extraordinary rendition, does not result in attaining and obtaining reliable intelligence as stated above. The reason being? Captives who are held for these illegal proceedings will lie while being tortured just for the torture to stop. They will virtually say anything to get out of it. Besides, that unreliable data is inadmissible in a court of law. Japanese soldiers and officers who employed waterboarding on their American prisoners during World War II were tried for war crimes and hung in 1945, and our own courts set precedent for the criminal prosecution of those thugs by establishing water-boarding's status as torture. The real deep-seated message that Bush told Matt Lauer's viewers that night is, "Torture against our enemies is okay, as long as the state does it. If other governments do it to us, then it's not okay." This is nothing but purely blatant hypocrisy from Bush and his conspirators.

Of course, here comes this grotesque tidbit from the interview:

LAUER: Not everybody thought you should go to war, though. There were dissenters.

BUSH: Of course there were.

LAUER: Did you filter them out?

BUSH: I was-- I was a dissenting voice. I didn't wanna use force.

What's interesting is that the his following additional statements were deliberately omitted from the televised interview in contrast to the transcript that was leaked out to the press a few days before the telecast:

BUSH: I mean force is the last option for a President. And I think it's clear in the book that I gave diplomacy every chance to work. And I will also tell you the world's better off without somehow [or someone?] in power. And so are 25 million Iraqis.

(Why NBC omitted that bit from the aired interview when it was broadcast on the airwaves that night raises some eyebrows from a critical standpoint. I surmise that they didn't want the public to know that Bush was lying about giving "diplomacy a chance to work." That even includes his lie (which Bush apparently has made himself believe) that 25 million Iraqis are better off without Hussein in power.)

All of this is in reference to Bush's discussion of his claim that the CIA's "rock solid intelligence" showcasing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) were stockpiled and directly controlled by Saddam Hussein prior to and leading up to the War in Iraq. Bush purports that he wanted diplomacy "to work," which is in stark contradiction to his actions in 2002 and 2003, in which his team and he knowingly contrived a report allegedly put out by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that suggested that Saddam Hussein had violated U.N. resolutions by producing WMDs and having them in his possession, and that such weapons posed a threat to the national-security apparatus of the United States.

In his March 17, 2003 "ultimatum speech" he delivered to the American people, Bush claimed the following:

[T]he Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. This regime has already used weapons of mass destruction against Iraq's neighbors and against Iraq's people.

The regime has a history of reckless aggression in the Middle East. It has a deep hatred of America and our friends and it has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of Al Qaeda. The danger is clear: Using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country or any other.

The United States and other nations did nothing to deserve or invite this threat, but we will do everything to defeat it. Instead of drifting along toward tragedy, we will set a course toward safety.

In the same speech, Bush also declared:

In the case of Iraq, the Security Council did act in the early 1990s. Under Resolutions 678 and 687, both still in effect, the United States and our allies are authorized to use force in ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. This is not a question of authority, it is a question of will.

After listing Saddam's alleged possession of WMDs, Bush also warned at the time:

And this very fact underscores the reason we cannot live under the threat of blackmail.

This is, of course, the same Bush who also asserted the following canard in the same speech:

In one year, or five years, the power of Iraq to inflict harm on all free nations would be multiplied many times over.

More to the point, in his 2003 State of the Union speech, Bush painted Hussein as "[t]he dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons" and also concluded his anti-Saddam rant with the following:

A future lived at the mercy of terrible threats is no peace at all.

On August 26, 2002 former Vice President Cheney even peddled this political fraud by appearing before members of the Veterans of Foreign Affairs with the following assertion:

Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon.

Approximately two weeks later, with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair at his side, Bush, still peddling the lies about the WMDs, told reporters:

I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied -- finally denied access, a report came out of the Atomic -- the IAEA, that they were six months away from developing a weapon. I don't know what more evidence we need.

Cheney, appearing on NBC's Meet the Press on March 16, 2003, hocked the late show host Tim Russert the lie further with this new baseless claim:

[W]e believe [Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."

What a sham it turned to be! The IAEA made no such claims whatsoever. Mohamed ElBaradei, the Director General of the agency, told members of the U.N. Security Council at their 4714 meeting:

First, there is no indication of resumed nuclear activities in those buildings that were identified through the use of satellite imagery as having been reconstructed or newly erected since 1998, nor any indication of nuclear-related prohibited activities at any inspected sites.

Secondly, there is no indication that Iraq has attempted to import uranium since 1990.

Thirdly, there is no indication that Iraq has attempted to import aluminium tubes for use in centrifuge enrichment. Moreover, even if Iraq had pursued such a plan, it would have encountered practical difficulties in manufacturing centrifuges out of the aluminium tubes in question.

Fourthly, although we are still reviewing issues related to magnets and magnet production, there is no indication to date that Iraq imported magnets for use in a centrifuge enrichment programme.

As I stated earlier, the IAEA will naturally continue further to scrutinize and investigate all of these issues.

After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear-weapon programme in Iraq.

This is scathing proof that Bush lied to his viewers and to Matt Lauer that night, knowing full well of the lies perpetrated on his side.

Bush furthers his lies by claiming that he felt "sick to his stomach" when reports of the abuses occurring at Abu Ghraib. The transcript from the interview goes like this:

LAUER: It was the spring of 2004 when you first learned that American soldiers operating as guards at a prison called Abu Gharib had terribly mistreated prisoners. Can you just give me your first reaction, your first emotions when you heard the--

BUSH: Yeah, I--

LAUER: --news?

BUSH: Sick to my stomach. Not only have they mistreated prisoners, they had disgraced the U.S. military and stained our good name.

If that's true, Mr. President, why didn't you go after them when you had the chance? Why weren't there calls for criminal prosecutions against those soldiers when the opportunity presented itself in the first place?

Why didn't he do this? Because what he said is a lie all by itself. Seymour Hersh, a progressive writer for the New Yorker, detailed the disgusting abuses transpiring at Abu Ghraib via a report (infamously known as "the Taguba Report") by Major General Antonio Taguba. Hersh writes in his May 10, 2004 report:

Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.

It should be noted that, on the day of the publication of Hersh's article, General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Bush's administration, stated in a TV interview that he did not read the Taguba Report.

Interestingly enough, Bush and Co. implemented damage control on their end, purporting that the leaked photos revealing the abuses were nothing short of aberrations stemming from a handful of sexually deviant National Guard soldiers. What they fail to understand is that Hersh's anonymous informant, who happened to be a military consultant who worked closely with the officials at the Pentagon, went on record with Hersh, telling him that the photographs were principally and specifically intended to be be used to blackmail the abused prisoners "to create an army of informants, people you could insert back in the population." After that sentence, Hersh notes:

The idea was that they would be motivated by fear of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency action, the consultant said. If so, it wasn’t effective; the insurgency continued to grow.

Hersh even pointed out:

The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq.

That's proof that Bush didn't feel "a sickness in his stomach" when he saw the photos. He had plotted this all before the invasion and occupation of the Iraqi homeland. Again, it is more proof that Bush is a liar.

With all of these points put into their proper perspective, Bush is a definite candidate for prosecution for committing war crimes against humanity. He's a liar and a war criminal. Case closed. End of story.

Hypocrisy and Absurdity Reign in This Election Season

Today is Election Day, and nothing can be worse than the incessant impetus of the state-worshiping electorate swarming into their local voting precincts, whether they are public "government" schools, firehouses, and other state-approved municipalities, to cast their state-sanctioned, state-endorsed, and state-approved votes for their preferred candidates for public "government" office. This even entails their votes for or against state-approved measures on the ballot.

The Tea Parties' call for constitutional government, tax-and-spending cuts, no cap and trade, fiscal accountability, and a repeal of the recently-passed, Obama-approved health care program, as stated in its recently-circled "Contract from America" document which has been pushed and lobbied by many of its backers, rings hollow in comparison to their steadfast backing of the establishment's Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and controlling and their need to militarize the borders between the U.S. and Mexico. One must include their lack of condemnation of the former Bush administration's profligate spending (although some of them like conservative The Dana Show host Dana Loesche have skewered W.'s domestic agenda). Last but not least, they have not even bothered to deplore the Department of Homeland Security's Transportation Security Administration checkpoints' thoroughly invasive search and frisking procedures commonly known as "enhanced patdowns" along with its utter disregard and violation of passengers' privacy and civil liberties via its screeners' use of naked body scanners at nearly every airport across the country. (Ironically, the Bush and Obama administrations "informed" us that the scanners wouldn't record our images, but the recently-leaked photos of the scanners prove otherwise. Even the U.S. Marshalls Service admitted it.) Given that the conservatives' "revolutionary" movement has put Congressmen John Boehner and Mitch McConnell and nearly the entire GOP in the House and the Senate "on probation," should we seriously take them at their word?

The "Contract from America" document is a de facto embarrassment and fraud on the American electorate, its semi-libertarian undertones notwithstanding. It's nothing more than a descendant of Newt Gingrich's 1994 "Contract with America," although a number of GOP'ers more or less liken the GOP's "Pledge to America" document to it. No where in this newest proposal does it tacitly say anything about repealing nearly every federal agency, regulation, and a host of entitlement programs. There is no call to end the U.S. federal government's disastrous energy and foreign policies (which go hand-in-hand in reality). For example, the manifesto calls for an "Pass an 'All-of-the-Above' Energy Policy," which mandates the following:

Authorize the exploration of proven energy reserves to reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources from unstable countries and reduce regulatory barriers to all other forms of energy creation, lowering prices and creating competition and jobs.

Even worse, there is no call to repeal the federal income tax, the capital gains tax, the estate tax, and repeal all the federal spending (which constitutional scholars on the laissez-faire/minarchist side would deride as "unconstitutional"). Only a mention of a "moratorium on all earmarks" unless a balanced budget appears, but why a moratorium? Why not outright abolition of the earmarks and the spending? In the interim, a gutting of the spending would be much preferable to that option, but obviously this is done specifically to pander to a base of conservatives who really don't want cuts in or repeal of entitlement, pork, and defense spending out of fear that such moves would affect their piece of the welfare-warfare pie. After all, there's nothing better than a conservative politician who is buying votes from blocs of welfare-worshiping, warfare-worshiping Tea Party activists and their voting base who are primarily interested in and defensive of propping up and maintaining their hegemonies of the Middle East.

One would think that the Tea Parties would field GOP candidates who are solid on pro-peace, pro-civil liberties platforms. With the possible exception of Ron Paul, the idea of said candidates is an oxymoron in terms. The vast majority of the Republican establishment is a warmongering outfit, and one can include all the Tea Parties on that column. Republican congressional candidates running on anti-war and national-security state platforms might have been worthy of consideration for the electorate (despite the likelihood of grumblings from the Tea Partiers), given that it might have energized scores of Americans who have been increasingly viewing the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as both fiscal albatrosses and embarrassing quagmires. But don't count on that. The Tea Party is fundamentally opposed to that idea, and their conservative underlings would scream bloody murder at the prospect of an anti-war, anti-state Republican in their midst. Thank you Tea Partiers and Republicans. Your pro-war, anti-civil liberties records have emboldened President Obama to magnify his assaults on the peoples in Afghanistan, Iraq, the entire Middle East, and on our own shores as well and bolster international support for global hegemony. Obama's barbaric policies, which were carried over from the Bush administration and made into his own, ought to incite anger from every American.

The "Pledge to America" manifesto is worse than the above-mentioned one. It gives lip service to slashing spending and paring down the deficit, but it barely elaborates on some specifics. The Republicans' conservative base and the Tea Party are heavily putting an enormous amount of stock in the GOP to retake the House (which is very likely after today) and possibly conquer the Senate to carry their agendas, but they are foolish to do such a thing. The GOP is asking the Tea Party and their conservative supporters to have faith in their fiscal restraint, but what do they have to show for it after Bush's rampant spending during his years in the Oval Office? After being wiped out politically in 2008, their credibility and respectability have been virtually obliterated beyond repair. Even their support for the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, and other pervasive government programs have never wavered. What will it take for the Tea Party candidates to wake up and realize that, despite one of their concerns is cuts in entitlement spending (despite the fact that 63 percent of the movement is opposed to that), Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are also government programs? Even the Pentagon and the Military Industrial Complex are programs too.

And what of the Democrats? The Democrats have come off as absurd hypocrites on the home and war fronts without question. President Obama has broken more than a handful of promises to the American people, promises that he made to his constituency and his base who backed him to deliver his promise of "change" to the U.S. His promises, such as making his administration transparent to an already-skeptical, already-cynical American public, ending the Bush-propped, Bush-backed War in Iraq (which he's failed to do twice in a row), digging the economy out of the Bush-imposed recession, and ending Washington's culture of interest interests and lobbyism, were never intended to be delivered. After all, he has already backpedaled on his intentions to end the military's old "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy (twice in a row, point of fact), and his appeal to a federal appeals court that overturned that Clinton-era executive order has already enraged his gay progressive Democratic base. Oh, and his expensive stimulus and Cash-for-Clunker programs and bailouts of GM and Chrysler have really bloated the deficit even further, which have become fodder for the right-wing talking heads on Fox News.

Obama has already embroiled the nation further in the Iraqi and Afghani conflicts than Bush ever had. After all, we are talking about the same current president who has proceeded with Bush's war policies by amplifying his genocidal killings in the Muslim nations and blatantly declared war on our civil liberties and the Constitution. Unlike Obama, Bush did not so much possess a morsel of authority to engage in assassinations of Americans in the name of the War on Terror without a shred of due process. His pledge to pull the plug on Guantanamo Bay -- that is, releasing all Americans imprisoned as "enemy combatants" who would be tried by a an American criminal court in New York (given that they are constitutionally accorded with the right to due process and a right to a speedy trial) in lieu of a U.S. military tribunal without the presence of a jury of their peers and the right to a defense by an attorney on their behalf -- was rescinded due to conservative outcries because expressions of sympathy and empathy for "terrorists" would be tantamount to appeasing and treason. Such a move would give the loopy fringe right wing plenty of ammunition, thereby denouncing Obama as a supporter of terrorism. Obama's backpedaling on reversing Bush's foreign policy would enable the Republicans to brand the President sympathetic to the terrorists' cause. Can you imagine how that would play out for Obama's re-election chances? Those labeled slapped on him and the Democratic Party would make the Democrats' chances for re-election to the House and the Senate more problematic than it is now.

Americans who are convinced that the country is moving towards the wrong direction should realize that the GOP's power grab of the House and possibly the Senate won't do anything to unroot the manifestation, cause, and flow of statism in this country and abroad. The state's tentacles have reached every facet of American and international lives as we know it. Republicans who claim that this election is about a "referendum against Obama" are deluding themselves because it's truly a referendum to exact more control of American lives and wiping away more of our freedoms than ever Republican-style. The Democrats are at least honest about not being in favor of laissez faire and individual liberty; after all, they have never believed in the individual, just only in the collective. But the Republicans' incessant claims of championing those values are not worth the campaign literature on which they are printed. Every statist action from exacting conquest of other nations (including the Muslim world) to engineering government-mandated pensions and medical care for retired and poor people must be scrapped. The much-worse welfare-warefare state that has inundated the United Kingdom and Europe will soon metastasize to our soil. The welfare-warfare statism in our homeland is untenable and unmanageable.

All the odious signs of the Republicans are there. Once they are in power (and after tonight, they will be), they will proceed with the War on Drugs and be more aggressive with their xenophobic, nationalistic, and jingoistic anti-immigration zealotry. All the campaign rhetoric notwithstanding, the Tea Parties and their Republican operatives will conquer and rule the American people like their Democratic counterparts in a statist conservative Republican manner.

Hypocrisy and absurdity surely reign in this election season. Especially on Election Day today.

Collateral Murder in New Baghdad, Iraq

WikiLeaks has just unveiled a new yet highly-classified U.S. Military video that depicts the slaying over a dozen people, two of them being Reuters news staff.

According to the website:

Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.

The website further reveals:

The military did not reveal how the Reuters staff were killed, and stated that they did not know how the children were injured.

After demands by Reuters, the incident was investigated and the U.S. military concluded that the actions of the soldiers were in accordance with the law of armed conflict and its own "Rules of Engagement".

Consequently, WikiLeaks has released the classified Rules of Engagement for 2006, 2007 and 2008, revealing these rules before, during, and after the killings.

WikiLeaks has released both the original 38 minutes video and a shorter version with an initial analysis. Subtitles have been added to both versions from the radio transmissions.

WikiLeaks obtained this video as well as supporting documents from a number of military whistleblowers. WikiLeaks goes to great lengths to verify the authenticity of the information it receives. We have analyzed the information about this incident from a variety of source material. We have spoken to witnesses and journalists directly involved in the incident.

WikiLeaks wants to ensure that all the leaked information it receives gets the attention it deserves. In this particular case, some of the people killed were journalists that were simply doing their jobs: putting their lives at risk in order to report on war. Iraq is a very dangerous place for journalists: from 2003- 2009, 139 journalists were killed while doing their work.

Here's the 17-minute and 47-second clip in its entirety. I advise parents and everyone who are about to watch this may not suitable for your children, as it does contain graphic, obscene violence:



If Americans are shocked by this when they see this, my question to them will be, "Why?" What the U.S. federal government has done to the people of Iraq and the rest of the Middle East does not surprise me, but that does not mean it does not disgust me further.

Color me both unsurprised and sickened at the same time.

Obama’s Iraq Withdrawal Plan Calls for Drawdown on August 31, 2010

Obama's "Iraq withdrawal plan" calls for a pull out of the 142,000 U.S. forces (comprising of Marines and Army personnel) on August 31, 2010.

Here's the Fox News story which, in part, describes the unveiled plan to congressional lawmakers yesterday:

The Iraq war will come to an end on Aug. 31, 2010, senior officials said, following President Obama's decision to end all counter-insurgency missions by that time.

Obama told top leaders in Congress on Thursday that he will transition the mission in Iraq to training, advising and engaging in limited counter-terrorist operations, according to congressional sources.

The president is expected to deliver a speech Friday at the Marine base in Camp Lejeune, N.C, in which he will order the immediate drawdown of the 142,000 Marines and Army personnel in Iraq.

Obama's decision reflects his belief that "there have been real advances" in the country and, as result, the U.S. military should now be ordered to carry out "a fundamental change in mission," senior administration officials said.

With 142,000 U.S. forces in Iraq now and counter-insurgency operations conducted on a near-daily basis, "it is a war, no question," a senior adviser said.

And this war, senior officials said, will officially come to an end on Aug. 31, 2010, when the president orders all U.S. troops to focus their efforts on advising, equipping and training Iraqi security forces as well as assisting in reconstruction and political reconciliation.

"This is a plan that responsibly ends the war in Iraq," said a senior official who participated in the deliberations. "He is living up to a commitment he made as a candidate but is doing so in a way that has the support of the inter-agency task force on Iraq."

The president will order U.S. military commanders to leave a residual force of between 35,000 and 50,000 troops in Iraq. Under the Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi government, the U.S. must remove all military personnel by Dec. 31, 2011.

This is going beyond the 16-momth plan that Our Great Leader set forth throughout his campaign and even after he was elected to and inaugurated into office, even though some thought it would be "difficult" to implement it. 19 months? It's no secret that he had soft pedaled and somewhat backed off from his plan in the beginning of his term last month, despite what the Obamameter on PolitiFact.com shows.

I'm not confident that the war in Iraq will end or that Obama will pull the troops out. Perhaps he'll prove me wrong in the final analysis, but I'm not counting on that.

[Cross-posted to The Freeman Chronicles.]