Pen-Elayne on the Web

Iraq and a Hard Place, Part Umpteen

Hard on the heels of all the well-deserved mockery (we kid, but we kid with love!) of the Fatherland Security website (see here for more), Atrios (link at sidebar) tells us that CNN's cynical little scare-mongering Iraq Tracker has been dead-on parodied by the good folks at Take Back the Media. Turn down the sound on your computer speakers, click on the original first and then on the spoof; good stuff.

Meanwhile, General Hussein Kamel is still dead. Oh yes, he's an ex-general. He's passed on, kicked the bucket, shuffled off his mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible. And yet, sometimes dead men do tell tales. From what I can figure, his goes something like this: Apparently Kamel didn't like his father-in-law, Saddam Hussein, so he defected in '95, ran to the IAEA and UNSCOM, and basically said that "after the Gulf War, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them." In other words, I hate my wife's father and I'm gonna stick it to him by revealing him for the blustering bully idiot he's always been; he might talk a good game and still be able to inflict suffering on Iraqis but as a threat to other nations he's laughable. So of course Kamel goes back to Iraq the next year and gets killed. No word on what was up with his wife (Saddam's daughter) during all this, but even in a relatively secular place like Iraq it's not like women are heard from that often. Anyway, his UNSCOM/IAEA debriefing was excerpted as proof that Saddam still had WMD even though what he actually said was that they'd all been destroyed. You know, creative editing and all that. So then Glen Rangwala, who revealed last month that the infamous "intelligence dossier" referred to by Tony Blair and in turn praised by Colin Powell was plagiarized from a student thesis, apparently got his hands on a complete copy of the debriefing transcript. If Rangwala thought he merited official scrutiny before, I gotta figure he's in a heap of trouble now. Maybe Salmon Rushdie's looking for a roommate. Full story here.

In other news, the best euphemism I've come across lately has to be "Personal Respiratory Defense System" (check out the top of your browser after you click). For us oldsters, I believe that means "gas mask."

Oh, and white rabbits, everyone. Let's hope this March brings more marches against war rather than marches towards it.