Catfish-and-Grits

Still not telling the truth about whats going on in Iraq, apparently the "patched" together Iraqi parliament has taken some political pointers from Bush&Co, namely lie your ass off.......but if that doesn't work then [ massage statistical figures ].

By all accounts, Iraqi families who fled their homes in the past two years are returning to Baghdad.

The description of the scope of the return, however, appears to have been massaged by politics. Returnees have essentially become a currency of progress.

On Nov. 7, Brig. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi, the Iraqi spokesman for the American-Iraqi effort to pacify Baghdad, said that 46,030 people returned to Iraq from abroad in October because of the "improving security situation."

[snip]

But in interviews, officials from the ministry acknowledged that the count covered all Iraqis crossing the border, not just returnees. "We didn't ask them if they were displaced and neither did the Interior Ministry," said Sattar Nowruz, a spokesman for the Ministry of Displacement and Migration.

As a result, the tally included Iraqi employees of The New York Times who had visited relatives in Syria but were not among the roughly two million Iraqis who have fled the country.

[snip]

Some Iraqi lawmakers said that overly broad figures were being used intentionally.

"They are using this number because they want to show that Maliki is succeeding," said Salim Abdullah, a lawmaker and member of the largest Sunni bloc, known as the Accordance Front, referring to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. "But this does not make the number correct. I think dozens of Iraqis return home daily, but not 1,600."

A half-dozen owners of Iraqi travel agencies and drivers who regularly travel to Syria agreed that the numbers misrepresented reality.

A United Nations survey released last week, of 110 Iraqi families leaving Syria, also seemed to dispute the contentions of officials in Iraq that people are returning primarily because they feel safer.

The survey found that 46 percent were leaving because they could not afford to stay; 25 percent said they fell victim to a stricter Syrian visa policy; and only 14 percent said they were returning because they had heard about improved security.

Hear that republicans / neocons, 60% of Iraq foreign militants come from U.S. allies, specifically Saudi Arabia.

Around 60% of all foreign militants who entered Iraq to fight over the past year came from Saudi Arabia and Libya, according to files seized by American forces at a desert camp.

NOT IRAN.

So stop the sable rattlin'

The U.S. Military is demanding that thousands of wounded service personnel give back signing bonuses because they are unable to serve out their commitments.

To get people to sign up, the military gives enlistment bonuses up to $30,000 in some cases.

Now men and women who have lost arms, legs, eyesight, hearing and can no longer serve are being ordered to pay some of that money back.

One of them is Jordan Fox, a young soldier from the South Hills.

[snip]

Fox was seriously injured when a roadside bomb blew up his vehicle. He was knocked unconscious. His back was injured and lost all vision in his right eye.

A few months later Fox was sent home. His injuries prohibited him from fulfilling three months of his commitment. A few days ago, he received a letter from the military demanding nearly $3,000 of his signing bonus back.....

One word CAPITULATION, CAPITULATION, CAPITULATIONNNNNN!!!!!!!!

Everytime a progressive democrat tries to stand up and challenge this ass we have running our country, the democratic leadership lays a "bear trap" to chop off the foot. We can't have any of that, leadership, now can we......nosiree.

Just replace "Gummy Bear" with the word "Democrat"

BlackWater, a mercenary army masquerading as a private security company in Iraq, is feeling the heat. As well they should. First, [ our military can't stand BlackWater ] (will discuss one of the reason why, below), the Iraqi people don't like them (there was an accident that BlackWater was responsible for, in which they watched a woman, that their vehicle struck, burn to death in her own vehicle; they made no attempt to help her as she screamed), the current head of BlackWater, Erik Prince, was once in the administraion and in charge of monitoring BlackWater. They are an American company yet most of the mercenaries employed are not. Infact they employ huge numbers of former Serbian mercenaries that killed Muslims in Kosovo, and former racist South African military men that upheld aparthied when whites controlled the country. They were caught selling M-16s to PKK, a violent kurdistan group designated a terrorist organization by the US, NATO, and the EU.

Doesn't BlackWater sound like a company just exuding democracy, upholding liberty, and allowing the pursuit of happiness.......um....NOT.

Now, we get reports from some very pissed colonels in Iraq, that [ BlackWater actually pulled guns on our troops ]:

The colonel was furious. "Can you believe it? They actually drew their weapons on U.S. soldiers." He was describing a 2006 car accident, in which an SUV full of Blackwater operatives had crashed into a U.S. Army Humvee on a street in Baghdad's Green Zone. The colonel, who was involved in a follow-up investigation and spoke on the condition he not be named, said the Blackwater guards disarmed the U.S. Army soldiers and made them lie on the ground at gunpoint until they could disentangle the SUV. His account was confirmed by the head of another private security company.

WOW.....That's all I can say.......