jesus fucking christ.....words just fail me.
IF the rightwing blogs were smart they would shut up about this story and let it be (they could even point out that the congressman that helped get her out was a Republican).
Or they could start calling her a whore.
I am far too pessimistic to pick the first option.
Gone.
Whatever "moral authority" the United States claimed to have is now gone. No wonder a cunning thug like Putin doesn't bother to hide the smirk on his face whenever he sees Dubya.
The longer we stay in Iraq, the worse things get. The worse things get, the more the Iraqis hate us. The more the Iraqis hate us, the more America soldiers die. And as the gory numbers continue to escalate, the longer we have to stay there to "avenge" the dead soldiers who shouldn't have been there in the first place. It's a vicious circle that spins merrily along.
It's not "Us" vs. "Them" anymore. It's "Us" vs. "Us".
Ahhh, wengler, you know that she was obviously tempti... I can't even finish that, since the vomit keeps trying to push it's way out of my mouth.
Hmmm, armed men, "operating" above all authority, in an area where anything goes.
If this is what they do to the Americans, what have they been doing to the Iraqis?
These guys should be stripped of their citizenship, stripped again, and then dropped off outside the EEZ (200 miles out). They can then go anywhere they'd like.
How about the odds that they make it? Anywhere? And we can finance the whole operations by showing it on Pay-Per-View. A Good Business Solution.
If we're estimating, I say tomorrow morning, starting with "Morning Joe."
As far as any "moral authority" in this country goes, we lost that when we fought our first imperial war against Spain.
Maybe we should pull the legitimate armed forces out and leave the mercs; then maybe we'll be lucky and the GOP-Waffen-SS-wannabes will all get killed?
Tsk, I'm getting SO cynical in my old age... 
D. R.,
Ah, and another generation confronts "Pogo."
Hubris,
I quick google reveals that there are already websites that are calling her "rape bait" because she is pretty.
Welcome to the 21st Century.
Heck, Melanie, I'm 53 years old...I remember Pogo, and the little furry bastard still draws blood. You wanna bet you wouldn't find Kelly's possum in today's fishwrap?
Besides, don't you realize that if you cry "Rape", the terrorists win?
just read the comments at the ABC news website for all their disgusting, "whe deserved it" of "invited it" glory.
Two year wait for any justice - and then abritration.
This is not why I serve the country. I serve to protect people like her.
SOBs. Mercenaries need to go. Yesterday.
SP
SP,
I'm a rape survivor who didn't go to trial because I knew my attackers and knew I'd get smeared. It wasn't worth it.
They have containers for women? WTF?
So, the Congressman calls the State Department, and the State Department calls the mercs and says "hey, check the containers where you keep your comfort women, and see if there are any American girls in there. If there are, let 'em go, m'kay?"
Didn't we prosecute some WWII Japanese guys as war criminals for this kind of crap?
Well, I win. HS asked if anybody wanted to guess how soon the attacks would start, and I said, "Before I reach the end of the comments thread."
Confound me if I ever speak disrespectfully of My Country's Armed Services again. Well, in the near future, anyway. I wonder if Republicans are capable of catching on to why we have professional armed services, and why they have (nominally, and often in fact) strict discipline.
No, don't pull the Army out and leave the mercs in. Let the Army help the Iraqs hunt the fuckers down. A lot of them, I'm sure, would enjoy it.
I commented about the fix we're in the last time we talked about a particularly egregious crime by Blackwater mercs.
Bottom line is this: if it isn't Blackwater mercs, it'll be somebody else's. Getting rid of mercs altogether isn't an option anymore. After the way we've betrayed this generation of volunteer servicemen, logic informs us that we should not expect to see another anytime soon.
Iraq is our Adrianople. Largely self-inflicted, but then so was that one. The Ostrogoths were pushed into that revolt by Roman incompetents.
After this, we are going to be dependent upon mercenary armies for the mainstay of our defense for at least another generation.
If we're smart, we'll face this squarely and impose control measures out of the same sort of playbook the French use to handle the FFL. Otherwise, we'll run aground the same way the Romans did after Adrianople and the Italian city-states did in the sixteenth century.
I don't think we're that smart, collectively. Our polity is wreckage, and that's our collective brain.
Which means that this will not be the last such story we will read about. Get used to it. We're going to need strong stomachs to wade through what the coming decades will hand us.
The mercenary captains are either capable men or they are not; if they are, you cannot trust them, because they always aspire to their own greatness, either by oppressing you, who are their master, or others contrary to your intentions; but if the captain is not skilful, you are ruined in the usual way.
Can this country be saved?
>After this, we are going to be dependent upon mercenary armies for the mainstay of our defense.
No. We cannot allow this. We will not allow this.
>Can this country be saved?
Yes, but sadly it's going to up to us.
>After this, we are going to be dependent upon mercenary armies for the mainstay of our defense.
No. We cannot allow this. We will not allow this.
This requires that we maintain recruitment levels for the volunteer army.
Or else go back to a draft.
After what's happened to the volunteer army we sent to Iraq, and, wonders never cease, what has even sometimes been reported, how do you propose that we maintain recruitment?
We cannot effectively black out stories that have already been reported. And some form of information suppression would be required. Without that, no one who is mentally competent, halfway well informed, and has any other viable choices open to them will ever sign up.
Which leaves us with a return to the draft. I don't think that's going to fly. Do you?
Well, there's one other way.
The way of the Founders, which is WE DON'T TRY TO BE A FUCKING WORLD POWER.
Alas, that option will require wresting control of our country from the corporations, which need us to be a world power so they can loot the planet.
I don't have fuck-all idea how to do that. 
>> WE DON'T TRY TO BE A FUCKING WORLD POWER
Well, that'll do for starters.
But it seems to me that it wasn't just the corporations that got us into this mess.
Read my comment in LowerManhattanite's "Jamie Leigh Jones" thread.
Google on "funston torture".
This goes back a very long way. And not being a "world power" has some implications.
If we don't have a navy strong enough to control the ocean approaches, then our coasts are vulnerable. War of 1812.
That means bases in lots of bits of real estate that have never heard of the United States and never want to.
Which leads us to the Philippines. And torture.
It lead us to Hawaii first. Our seizure of those islands wasn't exactly our most shining moment, now was it?
Interesting that it was Rep. Ted Poe who rescued the woman. As a Houston criminal court judge, he scandalized the town by saying publicly that chemical castration was a suitable punishment for rapists. This was in the 1980s. Otherwise he came off as a tough and conservative judge, but not stupid.
The only time I actually sat on a jury was when he was the judge. It was assault with a deadly weapon (5 to 99 years), and we found the guy guilty, because there was no arguing otherwise.
In the sentencing, we recommended 7 years probation, since his crime was just to wave a cocked automatic at an off-duty cop, and he had a teenaged cousin with him. Seven years was long enough for the guy to make it into his thirties and, we hoped, grow out of that kind of thing, and his cousin, who obviously looked up to him (he testified too), would see him spending that time in relative freedom.
Judge Poe agreed and indicated he'd follow our recommendation.
Last I heard of Rep. Poe, unfortunately he seems to have drunk the GOP Flavor-Aid, but one hopes after a few years of his party being in the wilderness he'll grow out of it.
The second dumbest thing they ever did was not putting Prince's Paladins under direct US Army command. The third dumbest thing was avenging the four dead mercenaries in Fallujah, Erik Prince is an ingrate.
The second dumbest thing they ever did was not putting Prince's Paladins under direct US Army command.
Yup.
Like I said earlier in this thread, the French get acceptable results with mercs because they keep their mercs on a VERY short leash. We need to do likewise, if we're going to use them at all.
UH, we have the strongest navy on the planet. I think it could defend our coasts just fine. We also have all those ballistic missiles that can hit any point on the planet. No other country is going to try to conquer us if we withdraw from our foreign bases; they'll just be relieved that we're gone.
Stormcrow: no need for mercinaries...just pull the troops back in, abandon our dreams of gklobal domination.we need a lot less troops if they are jsut for homeland defense.
Part of the point I was trying to make above was that even when your strategic intent is "defense", defense is never purely that.
Ivory Bill Woodpecker, the way naval powers defend their coasts is by making damn sure nobody can even approach them in any sort of force. If you don't have a navy powered by sail, that means bases all over the oceans you use as bulwarks.
And that means things like the Philippines in 1898.
Past this, the irreducible issues, assuming (!!!) you've managed to curb in the corporations, revolve around securing of inputs like oil. To which we seem to have a bottomless addiction.
I'm sure that Ms. Jones will soon be portrayed as a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty. Funny, when the issue was consensual sex between a grown man and a 22-year-old intern, the same people who will be slagging Ms. Jones were making it out to be child molestation . . .
The usual rule applies:
It's not a crime when we do it. But it is a crime when our enemies do it -- because it's our enemies who are doing it.
OK, Stormcrow, if you led an aggressive foreign power, and the USA withdrew to its coasts, would YOU attack those coasts, knowing the USA still had a devastating nuclear missile arsenal available?
OTOH, if you were talking about 1898 conditions, then you're correct.
And you're damn right we need to kick the oil habit.
Well if the KBR employees would do this one of their own who probably views the Iraqi occupation the same way as they do I hate to think what they have been doing to Iraqi women who are completely opposed to America's imperial aims in their own country.
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