The world deserves better toilets

I’m still hoping for more amusing stories than this one to come out of the world toilet summit in Beijing. But it did have this quote:

“People are saying ‘We want good toilets!’ because toilets are a basic human right and that basic human right has been neglected,” said Jack Sim, founder of the World Toilet Organisation, a co-sponsor of the summit. “The world deserves better toilets.”

That did lead me to that organization’s website, which should be viewed if only for the logo. And one may “join us as a toilet ambassador today.” Don’t bother downloading the song, though.

Speaking of toilet ambassadors, the real problem with changing the rules to let DeLay stay in power after he’s indicted is the claim that the prosecution is politically motivated. That claim might be marginally acceptable for the R’s to make against a district attorney, even a judge, but not a grand jury composed of citizens.

Now if there were some way to torture blasphemers using origami....

Following the model of sorryeverybody.com, there’s a new one where Californians offer amends for electing Ahnuld. No, wait, it wants to amend... the constitution ... so he can become president. Dear lord no. Still no sign of him giving up his Austrian citizenship.

From the American Prospect website: “FUN WITH NAMES. You have to hand it to George W. Bush: He has a very sophisticated sense of humor. Naming a ‘Spellings’ (his former education policy advisor in Texas, Margaret Spellings) as education secretary? Next, perhaps someone named ‘Nucular’ to replace former energy secretary Spencer Abraham?”

The Netherlands’ government thinks it has the solution to the religious violence, burning of mosques, etc, that has escalated since the murder of Theo van Gogh: revive the blasphemy laws. The law against “scornful blasphemy” was enacted in 1932 for use against a communist paper which had suggested banning Christmas. Presumably, van Gogh would have been prosecuted for saying mean things about Islam, so there would have been no need to kill him.

In a sillier but less obnoxious response to religious violence, the Thai prime minister has called on Thais to fold 60 million origami birds, to be dropped from military planes on the country’s Muslim provinces. Said PM Thaksin, “The birds will also send the message that Thais of all races and religions love peace.” I did mention that they’d be dropped from military planes, didn’t I?

The strength, the grace and the decency of our country

Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state. It is to shudder. Although to give Shrub credit, Rice is not the least diplomatic person he could have found for the job, but Rumsfeld was busy, doing such a good job fucking up Iraq. Bush said today, “in Dr. Rice, the world will see the strength, the grace and the decency of our country.” Really, that’s what they’ll see?



Speaking of the world seeing the strength, grace & decency of our country, I can’t help noticing that we haven’t heard a word from Rummy on the subject of the prisoner execution in Fallujah. Or from Bush. Or from anyone with a familiar name. That incident badly needs a name, to help ensure it doesn’t get swept under the rug. Pending somebody offering a better name, I suggest the alliterative Murder in the Mosque, with apologies to T.S. Eliot. Also, we still haven’t heard from any US member of Congress willing to go on record against the summary execution of wounded prisoners. There was a time when such a shooting bothered people just a little.

Cultural sensitivity

The military responds to the shooting of that unarmed wounded prisoner in Fallujah by taking a firm stance in favor of moral relativism. The Times says, “Pentagon officials quickly let it be known that in a separate incident the same day a Marine was killed and five were wounded by a dead body that was booby-trapped.” So that’s ok then. In fact, many of the Marines interviewed by various press people defend the killing (for example), and none express outrage of even the mildest sort.

The marine commander in Fallujah says, “The facts of this case will be thoroughly pursued to make an informed decision and to protect the rights of all persons involved.” All persons? I can’t wait to see how they protect the rights of the guy who was shot to death.

AP has a story, “Iraqis Remove Corpses under U.S. Oversight,” implying great cultural sensitivity on the part of the Marines for using Muslims to ensure the burial of the dead of Fallujah according to Muslim burial practices. Did I mention the booby-trapped corpses?

AP also brings us this stunner: “Shooting of Iraqi in Mosque Angers Muslims.”

Speaking of cultural sensitivity:

A Nigerian court has sentenced a man to death by hanging for murdering his wife so that witch-doctors could use her organs to bring him riches. Robert Ibrahim Chilaka, 42, killed Cecilia, 25, and took her body parts to the ritualists who promised him one million naira (£4,060) but fled without paying him. (AFP)

Speaking of cultural sensitivity (in as much as campaign corruption is part of Republican culture) House Republicans will tomorrow change their rules so that Tom DeLay can remain Majority Leader when he is indicted for campaign finance violations.

Settlers in Gaza will be richly compensated when/if they are ever removed. They can use the money to move to... the West Bank.

Sec of Ed. Rod Paige resigned, according to his spokesmodel, to “devote attention to a personal project”--remodeling his home.

Google special

I wasn’t sure if I would put up a link to the “unedited footage of marine shooting unarmed Iraqi,” to quote the Google search that led many disappointed punters to this site today, but I’ve seen the video in its bowdlerized (see, I said that word would come up again) form several times now, on the News Hour, BBC, etc, and the act of sanitization annoys me a little more each time, even though I have no desire to watch it. So I just hope you’re all here for the “right” reasons, and here’s the link.

I’m not sure it is in the nature of our American friends at the moment to return favours systematically

US troops are in the process of sealing off Mosul.

Bush spoke to Muslim leaders at an Iftar dinner to celebrate the end of Ramadan: “We will always protect the most basic human freedom, the freedom to worship the almighty God without any fear.” He was then immediately struck by lightning.

Tony Blair: “It is not a sensible or intelligent response for us in Europe to ridicule American arguments and parody their political leadership.” That’s just for people in Europe, right? Because if I couldn’t parody American political leadership, life would not be worth living.

In that speech, Blair pathetically explained to Europeans that Britain was a bridge between the US and Europe, and implied that Bush’s very crassness made him valuable to the Europeans: as a lightning rod for terrorism: “If America were to pull up the drawbridge, retreat from its obligations and alliances abroad, the terrorists would attack the rest of us.”

Jacques Chirac responded by pointing out that Blair has gotten nothing out of his alliance with the US: “I’m not sure it is in the nature of our American friends at the moment to return favours systematically.” Yeah, Jacko, but revenge for that sort of comment is something we still do pretty darned systematically, so unless you want a rerun of the whole “freedom fries” thing, watch it.



Oh dear lord, four more years of being his butt monkey.

“He’s fucking faking he’s dead. He faking he’s fucking dead.”

Cheery thought of the day: since 4 years of fronting policies he wasn’t allowed to help formulate has left him with no credibility, Colin Powell has a choice: either remain “loyal” and watch his memoirs go straight to the remainder bin, or say what he really thinks about Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz etc.

Powell will be replaced as chief diplomat by the least diplomatic person in the White House. Condi grew up in the South and has convinced herself that she had to be twice as good as everyone else to succeed (what does that say about everyone else?). In that as in so much else, she is deeply delusional. Should fit right in.

Expect State to be ideologically purged, just like the CIA.

Bhutan will ban tobacco sales next month.

A 93-year-old Englishwoman named Dorothy Bland has blown up her house in Newcastle. “I was only making a cup of tea,” Ms. Bland said. I’m going to hell for finding that story amusing.



The Hungarian parliament has turned down the government’s request to extend the deployment of its (non-combat) troops in Iraq another 3 months.

A Marine kills a wounded, unarmed prisoner. In a mosque. On camera. “He’s fucking faking he’s dead. He faking he’s fucking dead,” one Marine says (and try saying that five times fast), and then he or another Marine shoots him. “He’s dead now.”

As I understand this, a day or two before, one unit captured 5 wounded insurgents, and then just left them in a mosque, making no attempt to get them treated. A day later another unit came back (not to get the wounded, but because they thought the mosque had been re-occupied. By that time, 1 was dead and 3 were close, and the incident ensued. I haven’t seen the footage yet, but I gather it’s widely available, and widely censored to preserve our delicate sensibilities.

The haircut of President Ion Iliescu is not in the public interest

There is only one known German survivor of World War I.

With elections coming up in Romania, the opposition has formally protested a tv report on President Iliescu, who will be running for a senate seat, getting a haircut. “The alliance considers that the haircut of President Ion Iliescu is not in the public interest,” says the Truth and Justice Alliance.

The Massacre of Fallujah involved a number of war crimes, from the shutting off of water to the refusal to let male inhabitants flee to the shooting of dogs (which may not technically constitute a war crime, but isn’t very nice). Now, the Iraqi Red Crescent is being denied access to the city, on the grounds that the US military can provide relief. The only reason for this is to force every inhabitant to be seen by the Americans, which is to make humanitarian assistance a subordinate, integrated part of the counter-insurgent operation (with a little ritual humiliation thrown in--hey, Bob Hope’s dead, they have to get their entertainment somewhere). A Col. Shupp of the Marines insisted he knew of no civilians in Fallujah, adding “We are on the radio telling them how to come out and how to come up to coalition forces.” Radio? The electricity was cut days ago.

So where’s the outrage? Is there a single Democratic politician complaining about the needless deaths of Fallujan children from diarrhoea, or any of the rest of it? I said days ago that Fallujah would enter the ranks of places whose names are transferred from places to events, like Dresden. Now I think it will be ignored and quickly forgotten, a little speedbump to roll right over, just like...

(That is indeed a dead body everybody’s just ignoring like a fart in church.)

We still haven’t seen a figure for how many of the Iraqi soldiers who were supposed to participate in Operation Dawn of the Dead actually showed up. They did no actual fighting, just searched a few buildings the Americans had already cleared, and stood around looking all Coalition-of-the-Willingy for the cameras. Once again, they have proven that if the US pulled its troops out tomorrow, Allawi would be swept away within days.

At least the Iraqi soldiers, I assume, didn’t bring their dolls, excuse me, “action figures.”

What, not even his deep-fried Mars bar?

The Bible, which has already been translated into Cockney rhyming slang and Yorkshire dialects, will soon make it into Scots. Here’s the 10th commandment: “Ye maunna covet yer neibour’s hoose; ye maunna covet yer neibour’s wife, nor his sairvant chiel, nor his sairvant lass, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor onything that is yer neibour’s.”

Ah, Republican values! Linda Schrenko, the first woman elected to a statewide office (school superintendent, of the creationist/prayer-in-school type) in the backward state of Georgia in 1994, is being indicted for misappropriation of funds. She stole money intended to buy computer services for deaf children to pay for her cosmetic surgery when she ran for governor.

So Bush is ordering an ideological purge of the CIA. Just when I thought it was impossible for the Bushies to disappoint me, there they go again. I had hoped for the sake of the country that the absolute refusal to admit mistakes was just an electioneering stance, and they would quietly work to correct the conditions that led them to get it consistently wrong on WMDs, yellowcake, being greeted as liberators, etc etc. But no, they really don’t want to be told uncomfortable truths. Not only are they unwilling to learn from their mistakes (or incapable of doing so), but Junior is also unwilling to learn from his father, who was quite upset that Jimmy Carter didn’t keep him on as director of central intelligence. That post was traditionally supposed to be non-partisan, like the FBI director, because intelligence is not supposed to be politicized. So Richard Helms, appointed DCI by Johnson, didn’t give Nixon a letter of resignation in 1969.

Stop and think about what sort of people would prefer not to have objective analysis (not that the CIA was truly objective, but on the big issues of the last few years it’s been right much of the time): the answer I come up with is people who don’t believe in the existence of objective facts separate from ideology.

No casualties

Correction: it wasn’t the US that said the fighting in Fallujah was over, it was the Iraqis. The Americans say that there are still pockets of resistance, adding “you know, like pockets in the pants of a really fat guy, like Fallujah-sized pockets.”

And “Comical” Allawi says that there have been “no casualties among civilians” in Fallujah. None. For that single statement, that outrageous denial of the human cost of a massive assault on a city, he deserves to be driven out of public life. The sort of person who could utter a lie like that does not care two shits for the people of Iraq.

Some mission. Some mop.

The US is declaring mission accomplished in Fallujah except for the, you know, mopping up.

AP reports that the GAO found that for some of the newly “trained” Iraqi troops, their only “training” consisted of putting on the uniform.

Bush’s Saturday radio address, a speech so Panglossian as to give a bad name to Panglossian speeches, talks of 115,000 “trained and equipped Iraqi soldiers, police officers and other security personnel ... serving their country”. It’s that “other” you have to wonder about.

Also, remember the phrasing Shrub used in the 2003 State of the Union address, “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa” and how Condi Rice would claim that Shrub’s clearly false statement was “accurate” because of the attribution to British intelligence? Well, today he said, “An Iraqi general has described hostage slaughter houses, where terrorists have killed innocent victims and proudly recorded their barbaric crimes.” My bullshit detector just went off.

I don’t think any press source has asked this question: those quarter-million Fallujans who supposedly evacuated the city before the Massacre of Fallujah began--where did they all go?

The London Sunday Times has seen records of a Gulfstream executive-type jet hired by the CIA & Pentagon to fly prisoners to countries that will torture them, including Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Syria and Uzbekistan. Over 300 flights. They also have a 737.

Let the bowdlerization begin

Senate Democrats seem likely not to oppose Alberto Gonzales’s nomination, because setting the legal groundwork for Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib is nowhere near as significant as, for example, hiring an illegal immigrant as a nanny. Remember Zoe Baird? Remember Kimba Wood? If not, go have a look, and remember the standards nominees of a Democratic president were expected to meet. At the time, I thought that Baird had disqualified herself from being attorney general (Wood was another matter), but Nannygate somehow doesn’t compare to the disregard for the rule of law Gonzales has demonstrated.

The LA Times has a good editorial on the Saving Private Ryan incident, which, like the legal work of Mr. Gonzales, shows the dangers when the predictable application of the rule of law is replaced by the whim of the executive:

the FCC’s refusal to provide advance guarantees to affiliates that it wouldn’t take action if they aired “Saving Private Ryan” makes it look as if the commission’s main priority is to tailor its response to whatever level of pressure it feels from self-appointed morality guardians.

A more sinister interpretation (and the LA Times may be right that it’s just weak-minded opportunism) would be that maintaining ambiguity about what standards it would apply, and applying them unevenly, induces self-censorship, as we just saw happen, which isn’t the PR problem that overt censorship would be, but gets the job of bowdlerization done at least as well. (If you don’t know the word bowdlerization, look it up, because I guarantee you will see it again as the puritans settle into their work with the special sort of glee seen only in those who are improving everyone else’s morals, whether they like it or not.

Democracy will have spoken

Karl Rove weighs in on the “bulge” under Bush’s jacket: “there was nothing there.” See, I’ve been calling Shrub an empty suit for years.

London Times headline: “Funeral Exposes Arafat’s Failings.” You’d think if there was one thing he couldn’t be blamed for...

Colin Powell: “We know that, in the eyes of the Palestinian people, Arafat embodied their hopes and dreams for the achievement of an independent Palestinian state.” I like how he doesn’t quite say that the Palestinian people are idiots for believing that, but nudges right up to the line.

Indeed, many are asking how a people could stick with a leader who constantly failed. But enough about George W. Bush....

A couple of days ago I castigated Bush for saying, “There will be an opening for peace when leadership of the Palestinian people steps forward and says, ‘Help us build a democratic society.’” I thought he meant they should ask the US for help. It’s actually stupider than that, because today he said a Palestinian state would depend on “the Palestinian people’s desire to build a democracy and Israel’s willingness to help them build a democracy.” So they’re supposed to ask Ariel Sharon for help, even though he has done so much for them already.

There’s an amusing exchange in the same press conference in which Bush is asked what would happen, in Iraq as well as Palestine, if a non-democrat is elected, and Bush rejects the whole premise of the question:

Well, first of all, if there’s an election, the Iraqis will have come up with somebody who is duly-elected. In other words, democracy will have spoken. And that person is going to have to listen to the people, not to the whims of a dictator, not to their own desires -- personal desires. The great thing about democracy is you actually go out and ask the people for a vote, as you might have noticed recently. And the people get to decide, and they get to decide the course of their future. And so it’s a contradiction in terms to say a dictator gets elected. The person who gets elected is chosen by the people. ... And if they don’t -- the people of the Palestinian Territory don’t like the way this person is responding to their needs, they will vote him or her out.

It’s a contradiction in terms to say a dictator gets elected. HITLER, you moron, short fella, funny mustache, you must have heard tell of him at some point.

The coup government of Haiti plans to issue an arrest warrant for ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. For corruption.

Picture from Fallujah, prisoners captured by Marines. Say, when Tom Ridge told us to stockpile duct tape, do you think this was what he had in mind?

This is the enemy that we fight

US Gen. Richard F. Natonski accuses the insurgents of storing weapons in mosques and schools in Fallujah. He does not say where he would consider it legitimate to store weapons. He says, “This is the enemy that we fight. It doesn’t respect the religious mosques or the children’s schools.” 1) mosques: Under the Same Sun has a picture of US soldiers wearing boots in a mosque and lounging around on prayer rugs. 2) schools: to repeat myself, when American occupied Fallujah for the first time a year and half ago, they took over schools and shot people who protested that take-over.

There have been a spate of articles criticizing the US’s Fallujah strategy, it’s belief that it could beat the insurgents in one set-piece “Battle of Fallujah” in which a geographic territory was captured, like this was World War II, or cowboys & Indians. The Pentagon seems to be surprised and annoyed that the guerillas aren’t playing their assigned roles. This is how it’s been for 3 years. The Onion soon after 9/11/01 had an article, something like: US to Give Al Qaida a Country So We Can Invade It. Soon after, Bush decided that Afghanistan would do as a proxy for AQ, and then Iraq. Fallujah is mimetic of a larger failure of understanding, as the US continues to think geographically and fights a take-that-hill war against enemies that do not think geographically (although they would prefer it if Americans kept their dirty boots out of their mosques and schools).

Searching for role models in the wrong places

Update: There is, after all, a link to the Atlantic article I mentioned yesterday about Gonzales’s death penalty memos, which I’ve added to that post.

WAR CRIME ALERT: The NYT reports that refugees fleeing Fallujah “were detained by American military patrols, who allowed the women and children to continue but tested the men for explosive residue. All tested negative, and were sent back to Falluja in accordance with procedures established by the American military to maintain the city’s isolation while fighting continues inside”. American procedures are to send males back into an active war zone, where anything that moves is shot, where the population is running out of food and water and electricity have been cut off.

The Iraqi pseudo-government is issuing orders to the media on how news should be slanted, for example that they should “differentiate between the innocent Falluja residents who are not targeted by military operations and terrorist groups that infiltrated the city and held its people hostage under the pretext of resistance and jihad.”

And the Russian Duma votes to ban all depictions of violence from tv between 7 am and 10 pm, including in news programs.

Rumsfeld says that a good model for Iraq to follow would be...El Salvador.

A chance to vote on a president

Shrub, on why the Iraqi elections will be a success in spite of everything: “Well, I’m confident when people realize that there’s a chance to vote on a president, they will participate.” In fact, there will no such chance: the president will be chosen by the national assembly. Not a details man, is GeeDubya.

OK, looking beyond that little mistake, what are we to make of the sentence? Is Bush saying that Iraqis would be interested in voting for a president but not for a national assembly, implying that they really want a strong-man rather than a representative democracy?

The US military is increasingly admitting that the leaders of the resistance have long since escaped Fallujah. So why is no one asking whether it’s worth laying waste to an entire city in pursuit of a few low-level gunmen?

The NYT notes that “because the American marines have seized the hospital in Falluja, television and newspapers have not been able to show pictures of bleeding women and children being taken into emergency wards.” Now does that mean that they are preventing the pictures being taken, or that women and children are bleeding, but not being treated?

I’m thinking of starting a pool on which Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, unfamiliar with the whole concept of Hispanics, will be the first to refer to the attorney-general-designate as “Albert O. Gonzales.” Or possibly as Speedy.

It’s not like it’s “Shaving Ryan’s Privates”

ABC affiliates covering 1/3 of the country have decided not to air “Saving Private Ryan,” because of fears that the FCC would fine them for its 3 dozen plus (according to Daily Variety) uses of “fuck”--contractually, and good for Dreamworks, the movie must air unedited. Fines weren’t the issue for the affiliates--ABC promised to pay--rather, the stations were afraid of losing their licenses at renewal time. Now, this isn’t just tv stations running scared and preemptively censoring themselves, post-Janet Jackson: the FCC could easily have stopped this nonsense by giving an advance waiver. Considering that the FCC already ruled in 2002 that Saving Private Ryan is not indecent, in response to a complaint by idiot puritan Donald Wildmon, this should have been a no-brainer, but the FCC instead told the stations to exercise their own judgment and risk the consequences. As far as I’m concerned, that decision to leave the threat of a multi-million-dollar fine hanging over the stations’ heads amounted to an act of state censorship. Tom Coburn, who so objected to Schindler’s List, would be proud.

Viewers in the affected regions will be treated to less f-word-laden fare such as Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in “Far and Away,” “Return to Mayberry” (!), and in Austin, schizophrenically, an episode of Oprah followed by “Lethal Weapon III.” Honestly, I don’t know whether Return to Mayberry or Lethal Weapon III is the better ironic commentary on the whole affair. At least I hope they’re intended as ironic commentary. Happy Veteran’s Day.

Help us build a democratic society

Bush, in his condescending, white-man’s-burden mode: “There will be an opening for peace when leadership of the Palestinian people steps forward and says, ‘Help us build a democratic society.’” For a man who keeps saying that freedom is a gift from God, he sure acts like he thinks it’s a gift the United States can give.

I could almost have believed that troops really found a “hostage slaughterhouse” in Fallujah (and didn’t the term slaughterhouse spread rapidly through the media?), but my credulity was strained by the CDs of beheadings and the uniforms, and then they claimed also to have found records with the names of foreign fighters, and, according to an Iraqi general, “huge amounts of weapons and records detailing which country had offered it as a gift,” and I found my intelligence being insulted in a major way.

Remember Afghanistan, that country we brought freedom to? Its supreme court just banned cable tv, because of criticism of Bollywood films and Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments (ok, that one I can understand). A supreme court spokesman specifically cited a criticism from the ulema (clerics) council as reason for the ban. Something I missed: the supreme court tried to ban one of the presidential candidates for questioning whether polygamy was Islamic.

In France, where 22% of male prisoners were convicted of sex crimes, the government will introduce voluntary chemical castration. Insert your own obvious but somehow satisfying joke here.

NYT story on members of Colombia’s congress who support the death squads.

Bush nominates Elian Gonzales, the little Cuban boy with the magic dolphins who won our hearts, to be attorney general. Oh, all right, Alberto Gonzales with his own connection to Cuba, or at least Guantanamo Bay. Here’s a longer version of the “quaint” quote from his memo to Bush (long pdf here) which you will be hearing a lot: “As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war. In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions”. It’s the dismissiveness of the word quaint that makes this quote so obnoxious. After an election that Karl Rove tells us was won by R’s because they support eternal moral values, Gonzales’s view of civil and human rights, as well as international law, is that they are situational and revocable at the will of the executive.

Gonzales has worked with Bush for a long time, so there’s quite a record. One part of it was examined by the Atlantic Monthly in the July-August 2003 issue, the written summaries of 57 death penalty cases prepared by Gonzales for Governor Bush, on which Shrub, made the decision to execute or to...well, okay, he only decided to execute. The memos were cursory, assumed no mistake could ever be made by the legal system, and left out any mitigating evidence, information about ineffective counsel, witnesses with conflicts of interest, mental retardation, evidence of actual innocence, etc. They never included the defense’s clemency petitions, so Bush effectively only heard from one side. Now, Bush always claimed that his philosophy was that the governor shouldn’t second-guess the courts, so the information Gonzales failed to provide him was, arguably, information Bush had no interest in acting on. But does that “philosophy” sound like Bush? Does he seem overly scrupulous about checks and balances?

It's hard work

Bush praises American soldiers for doing “the hard work necessary for a free Iraq to emerge.” Or possibly the free work necessary for a hard Iraq to emerge.

The president is not a panel

A federal judge has ruled against the Bush claim that he can act by himself in tossing people into Guantanamo without a proper hearing, saying “The president is not a panel.” He is thick as two planks of wood, but I guess that’s not close enough.

So remember:

≠

Speaking of his nibs, today he said that the goal in Fallujah was to “bring to justice those who are willing to kill the innocent”. I’m telling you, he has absolutely no self-awareness.

I must quote the Guardian, solely because of the colonel with the hilarious name.

“My concern now is only one - not to allow any enemy to escape,” said Colonel Michael Formica, commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division. “I want them killed or captured as they flee.”

This one doesn’t seem to be fleeing.



Nor these guys, the Fallujah Theater Troupe doing an adaptation of the classic Italian Neo-Realist film “The Bicycle Thief.”