You’ve got to be a realist and understand that those kind of things do happen

Yesterday I asked, “Isn’t the president of the United States supposed to have other sources of information than old magazines?” Well, never mind, sorry I even brought it up. On Tuesday Bush was briefed by “Iran experts,” among them “hero in error” (as Chalabi liked to describe himself) Amir Taheri, the man responsible for the story about Iran requiring Jews to wear yellow pieces of cloth (and many, many other lies in the past).

There are now 89 hunger strikers in Guantanamo (using the Navy’s 9-missed-meals-in-a-row standard), of whom 6 are being fed by force (3 of those for 10 months now).

Earlier today I quoted Gen. Peter Chiarelli about Haditha (Bruce in comments noted that if 99.9% of 150,000 COW troops were doing their jobs blamelessly, as Chiarelli said, that leaves 150 running amok). The WaPo has more from the general, who may or may not be part of the 99.9%: “you’ve got to be a realist and understand that those kind of things do happen.” Now read that again and ask yourself what his intentions were in uttering that sentence, just what form he expects this realistic understanding to take.

The article says that the “core warrior values” training will last between 2 and 4 hours. Guess there aren’t that many core warrior values. There will be 36 slides, which I dearly hope will wind up online (“This is a child. Try not to shoot one of these. Click. This is a pregnant woman. Try not to shoot her in the head...”)

The Kenyan parliament passed a law to increase the penalties for rape and outlaw child prostitution, but it dropped provisions to criminalize marital rape, sexual harassment, gang rape and forcible female genital mutilation. MP Kenneth Marende explains the logic behind the former decision: “Kenyans can still have sex with their partners even when they are asleep so long as they are married.” So that’s okay then. They also added an intimidatory provision: women falsely accusing men of rape are to receive the same sentence as rapists.