“This is just a scene from hell here. All the vehicles on fire. There are bodies burning around me, there are bodies lying around, there are bits of bodies on the ground. This is a really bad own goal by the Americans.
“We don’t really know how many Americans are dead. There is ammunition exploding in fact from some of these cars. A very senior member of the Kurdish Republic’s government who also may have been injured.”
So goes the satellite report from BBC’s world affairs editor John Simpson, who was accompanying a convoy of US special forces and Kurdish fighters when it came under attack from an American warplane. Read here for the whole story.
You can hear and listen to the actual satellite report here.

That’s what one of the signs said at the rally on behalf of Mike Hawash (who is being “detained” without due process) in Portland Oregon this morning. See b!X Portland Communique for photos and report.
STOP BUSH BEFORE HE MAKES CRIMINALS OF US ALL. (Another rally sign.)

Eric Blumrich has put together some very disturbing-because-true Flash pieces on his website.
Check out “War Crimes,” and make sure your stomach is empty before you watch “The Evil Is With Us Today.” “Dr. Bushlove” might be funny if it weren’t so scary.
Thanks to a post on Blogs Against War for the link to Blumrich.

I’m grateful to The Nation, as I was to Harper’s, for giving me opportunities to write about these matters. Major newspapers, especially the Washington Post, haven’t been nearly as receptive, says George McGovern in his Nation-published scathing analysis of Bush’s bad leadership.
He begins with
Thanks to the most crudely partisan decision in the history of the Supreme Court, the nation has been given a President of painfully limited wisdom and compassion and lacking any sense of the nation’s true greatness. Appearing to enjoy his role as Commander in Chief of the armed forces above all other functions of his office, and unchecked by a seemingly timid Congress, a compliant Supreme Court, a largely subservient press and a corrupt corporate plutocracy, George W. Bush has set the nation on a course for one-man rule.
And he goes on to explain in detail. Don’t miss it.
(Being notoriously irreligious, I love this particular statement of his:
The President frequently confides to individuals and friendly audiences that he is guided by God’s hand. But if God guided him into an invasion of Iraq, He sent a different message to the Pope, the Conference of Catholic Bishops, the mainline Protestant National Council of Churches and many distinguished rabbis–all of whom believe the invasion and bombardment of Iraq is against God’s will. In all due respect, I suspect that Karl Rove, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice–and other sideline warriors–are the gods (or goddesses) reaching the ear of our President.)

“People say this doesn’t happen in this country,” McGeady said, “but one of my neighbors has been disappeared. It’s not what he might have done that matters to me — they disappeared him. They need to question him and let him go, or charge him. It’s like Alice in Wonderland meets Franz Kafka.”
From Wired News via Blog Sister Lauren, who posts and links relevantly about her disillusionment with America and ends her post with this:
Perhaps singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco said it best: “And if I hear one more time about a fool’s right to his tools of rage, I’m gonna take all my friends, and I’m going to move to Canada, and we’re going to die of old age.”
Meanwhile, as the Wired article reports, friends of the disappeared Portland Intel programmer and American citizen Mike Hawash (who has not been charged with any crime) have set up a web site to support his release. B!X, who lives in Portland, was at the rally today for Hawash and will be posting something about it.
During the Viet Nam War we used to joke about gathering all of our like-minded friends at our hill-top home and seceding our 1 1/2 acres from the Union. Maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea after all.