Earlier John McCain had forgotten we invaded Afghanistan. When talking to Katie Couric, he called Iraq the first major conflict since 9/11. Now, he has forgotten both wars. When upbraiding Russia for "invading" Georgia he made this classic mistake:




If Obama made half of the mistakes McCain has made on the foreign policy front, the press would have jumped down his throat as unfit to lead. How many passes is John McCain going to get?

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It has now come to light that the detainee abuse in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan started when the Bush administration ordered our interrogators to use a document called: "Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance."

This was a 1957 document that showed how the Chinese Communists tortured people -- in order to get false confessions! The only thing we changed was that we dropped the title of the document. Otherwise it is exactly the same. We have been using communist torture tactics that are designed to get false confessions. Meanwhile, The Bush administration has been calling it "enhanced interrogations" and saying we got "valuable intelligence" from it.

More details on the story here:




If you want to read the story of how we came to use this document for our own interrogations, you can click here. This is deplorable. Will anyone ever suffer the consequences for ordering this illegal torture? Will the press question John McCain on why he voted to allow the CIA to continue doing this? I wouldn't bank on it.

But if we do this, and no one ever gets punished for it, can we really say that America doesn't torture anymore?

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President Bush was trying to explain what success in Iraq means to him, when as usual, he embarrassed himself (and the rest of us for electing him):





By the way, I should also note that there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq before we invaded and Iran's influence in Iraq has been greatly expanded since our invasion as well. So, we are now fighting a circular war in which we are battling the forces we helped to create by attacking Iraq in the first place. George W. Bush is the worst president ever.

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Why would anyone in America arrest an eighty year-old man for wearing the wrong shirt? It's actually worse than you think. Find out why below:





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You gotta love Jesse Ventura. Look at what he says about George Bush, Dick Cheney and all the rest of the chickenhawks:





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We interviewed Prof. Juan Cole on The Young Turks. He is the preeminent expert on Iraq in the country. He explained to us what is actually happening in Iraq. This interview is a little on the long side but if you really want to know what's happening in Iraq, watching this will give you better insight than anything else you'll see in the mainstream media.





Prof. Cole should be on TV explaining this everyday. We have no idea who our enemies or our allies in Iraq are. The propaganda about Iran from the Bush administration is not only 100% misleading, it is flat out false. As Prof. Cole explains, the entity most closely aligned to Iran inside Iraq is the Iraqi government itself!

That's pretty relevant information. You would think the press might want to report on that a little bit. If they don't believe Prof. Cole, they should do their own research. But just trusting government press releases is incredibly lazy and unacceptable journalism. Do your job -- tell us who we are fighting, who controls the Iraqi Army and who is actually tied to Iran and who isn't. The American people have a right to know.

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Yesterday there was a video going around the internet of two Marines in Iraq throwing a very cute puppy to his death, or at least great harm. One Marine throws the puppy a great distance and the other one laughs along. I didn't write about this yesterday because I thought it might be fake, but now it looks like it's real. And the Marine base in Hawaii is investigating.

They have now removed the video from all the sites I've seen. People were disturbed by it obviously because it's almost like a snuff film for puppies. I never understand people like the guys in this video. What joy could you possibly get out of hurting such a defenseless animal? And it looks so damn cute that you have to overcome some serious human instinct to want to hurt it.

But I'm not writing to say what a bad guy this Marine is for throwing the puppy like he does. That's obvious. I'm not writing to implicate the whole Marine Corps for the act of two goofballs who are not representative of our troops over there. As the Marines investigating the incident wrote, "There have been numerous stories of Marines adopting pets and bringing them home from Iraq or helping to arrange life-saving medical care for Iraqi children. Those are the stories that exemplify what we stand for and how most Marines behave."

No, I'm writing about our reaction as a society. I have now seen this story everywhere from all over the internet to the local news. Everyone is outraged. Are you kidding me? We caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians and we're outraged over a puppy?!

Yes, I feel terrible for that puppy, but I feel much worse for all of the Iraq families who have had their lives ripped apart and their family members killed. But that barely measures as a blip on our moral radar screen. Look at the picture of this little Iraqi girl who has been scarred for life (don't look if you're understandably squeamish about this type of thing). Why was that not huge news? Are little Iraqi puppies more innocent than little Iraqi girls?

There have been many estimates of how many civilians have been killed in this absolutely unnecessary war. Some range from a little under a hundred thousand to several million. I think the most reliable one had the estimate at about 225,000 innocent Iraqis killed. And we're outraged over a puppy?

Where's our moral center? Those are real people who died. Daughters, uncles, grandpas, moms. Some of them were killed "accidentally" by our bombs and some were killed by the sectarian violence we carelessly unleashed (I put "accidentally" in quotes because how accidental could it be when we started a war we knew would have a tremendous amount of "collateral damage"). And yes, believe it or not, even though they're Iraqis, they were completely innocent (these civilian casualty counts don't include any hostile forces killed fighting us or each other).

We're a democracy. That means we're responsible for the actions of our government. Where's the outrage about this hideous, murderous war we started for no good reason? And now we get upset about an Iraqi puppy. It almost seems like a cruel joke.

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McCain and Obama clashed on Iraq today. And Obama whooped him bad. Check out the dueling quotes here:




Obama can do this all day long during the general election campaign. Hillary can't, because she voted with John McCain to drive us into the ditch in Iraq as Obama said the other night in the debate. This alone is an overwhelming reason to vote for Obama in the primaries. And it will also be an overwhelming reason to vote for Obama over McCain in November.

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BAGHDAD, IRAQ - FEBRUARY 1: An Iraqi man, injured in a bombing at a pet market, on February 1, 2008 lies on a hospital in Baghdad, Iraq. At least 64 people were killed and many other were wounded when two female suicide bombers blew themselves up at a two separate pet markets in Baghdad, Iraq. (Wathiq Khuzaie, Getty Images)

The title is the idea of Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison. After doing some math Keith found out that right now Americans are spending about 2.5 Billion a week to occupy Iraq. The amount Minnesota alone has paid is over $11 Million, they could have paid for 1.2 Million scholarships with that money. Meh, no need for eduction when there are evil dictators in the world.

With that said our video today is from Nobel Peace Prize winning AFSC.org and their video message of what can be done with the daily amount Americans are currently paying for the ongoing war. They ask you share the video with friends and sign their petition.

- For Comedy watch Jon Stewart explain your Tax Dollars at war.

Today is the 7th Anniversary of our favourite online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. Using this wonderful website I decided to peruse and cherry pick other relevant events have happened on this according to the Wikipedia page dedicated to January 15th.

588 bce: Nebuchadrezzar II of Babylon invaded Jerusalem and eventually destroyed the Temple of Solomon, from what I hear the region hasn't seen much peace since. You can watch this segment of Iraq History presented by the History Channel.

You can also read my article "How Torture Cost Lives" to see evidence of how torture cost us countless American lives, rather than saving them.

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This is a real story. I have to preface it by saying that because it is so remarkable and unbelievable. ABC News is reporting that a 22 year old American woman was gang-raped in Iraq by employees of KBR, a Halliburton subsidiary at the time.

What makes it even worse is that the US government has done nothing about it for two long years. She has a Republican Congressman from Texas fighting for her and she still can't get the Justice Department to press charges or even comment on the case. This is maddening.

The terrible details of the case are explained in the video below.

Girl Gets Gang-Raped: Cover-Up by U.S., Halliburton/KBR

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The rape kit was mysteriously turned over to KBR security personnel, the same company whose employees were accused of the rape. Unsurprisingly, the rape kit is now "missing." A lot of that going around lately. And KBR claims she must go into arbitration instead of a US courtroom because ... that's what's in her contract!

Are they kidding? Is this some sick joke? I think you might have been in slight violation of that contract when you allowed her to be raped and covered up the crime. Now, they have the audacity to cite her contract.

My God, look at what they're doing to American citizens and getting away with. When is all this going to be enough for you? If Iranians had done this to a 20 year old American girl, we would have invaded that country by now. But as long as it's the Vice President's company, it's all okay? Do people have no conscience? What if it was your daughter? We can't let them get away with this.

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