September 08, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

PHONY STATISTICS FOR THE "SURGE"

The general in charge in Iraq, General David Petraeus, is going to release a report showing what progress has been made since George Bush's troop surge. The statistics the general and the administration are offering are very selective. If you look at all the deaths occurring in Iraq, it's obvious that the "surge" has been a miserable failure. Bush had the cover of the Iraq Study Group's recommendation to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq, but instead went the macho route and sent more troops. This commentary by Paul Krugman is at www.welcome-to-pottersville.com:

There are five things I hope Democrats in Congress will remember.

First, no independent assessment has concluded that violence in Iraq is down. On the contrary, estimates based on morgue, hospital and police records suggest that the daily number of civilian deaths is almost twice its average pace from last year. And a recent assessment by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found no decline in the average number of daily attacks.

So how can the military be claiming otherwise? Apparently, the Pentagon has a double super secret formula that it uses to distinguish sectarian killings (bad) from other deaths (not important); according to press reports, all deaths from car bombs are excluded, and one intelligence analyst told The Washington Post that “if a bullet went through the back of the head, it’s sectarian. If it went through the front, it’s criminal.” So the number of dead is down, as long as you only count certain kinds of dead people.

THE CHEMICALS AMONG US

This item about trains carrying hazardous chemicals strikes home because Fresno is crisscrossed by railroad tracks. It's difficult to drive in almost any part of Fresno without encountering railroad tracks and trains. It's sobering when you realize how many hazardous chemicals are transported by trains and how a derailment, either due to human error or an attack, could result in chemicals being released. This is yet another area, among a multitude of issues, that has not been addressed by the Bush administration, state, or local governments in their fixation on military solutions to terrorism. The item by James Ridgeway is at www.motherjones.com:

Yet passenger trains are in fact the least dangerous potential target on our rails. Often running along the same rail corridors are freight tracks carrying chemicals and other hazardous materials. "In my thinking," says P.J. Crowley, the director of homeland security at the Center for American Progress, "freight rail, for all intents and purposes, is an element of chemical security. You can’t separate the two."

Long lines of freight cars filled with hazardous materials often sit on sidings for days in populated areas, making choice targets. Environmentalists have sought to require that deadly chemicals not be transported through urban areas, and the 9/11 Improving America's Security Act passed in July requires the Department of Transportation to consider rerouting "security sensitive materials." The chemical industry fought the legislation, as did the Bush administration. The District of Columbia is currently engaged in a court battle against the industry to win legal approval for rerouting chemical cars around the nation's capital.