Creeping Around In The Dark

Conditions: Warmerer.



More Good News From Iraq.

Remember the American cowboys in Iraq who went around shooting up anything that moved? Well, some of them may get prosecuted. Huh.

Federal prosecutors have sent target letters to six Blackwater Worldwide security guards involved in a September shooting that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead, indicating a high likelihood the Justice Department will seek to indict at least some of the men, according to three sources close to the case.

The guards, all former U.S. military personnel, were working as security contractors for the State Department, assigned to protect U.S. diplomats and other non-military officials in Iraq. The shooting occurred when their convoy arrived at a busy square in central Baghdad and guards tried to stop traffic.

An Iraqi government investigation concluded that the security contractors fired without provocation. Blackwater has said its personnel acted in self-defense.

The sources said that any charges against the guards would likely be brought under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, which has previously been used to prosecute only the cases referred to the Justice Department by the Defense Department for crimes committed by military personnel and contractors overseas.

- washingtonpost.com

Well, they're not exactly in the dock yet, but it's a promising development at least.



Oldest Reason In The World.

Over the last few weeks, the tension between American and Russia has ratcheted up mainly over Poland agreeing to host missiles on behalf of the Americans. You have to wonder why. What really is the point of forcing Russia into a standoff over a ballistic missile shield system, that doesn't even really work and even if it did is meant to defend against a nation that doesn't have a ballistic missile offense of it's own. Money!

WASHINGTON, Aug 20 (Reuters) - Poland's agreement to host part of a U.S. missile shield for Europe should generate significant sales for American defense contractors, but critics say the whole effort amounts to a multibillion-dollar sham.
The United States has spent more than $120 billion on missile defenses over the past 25 years since former president Ronald Reagan's famous "Star Wars" speech in 1983.
The new system in Europe, which includes 10 interceptor rockets in Poland and a sophisticated radar complex in the Czech Republic, should cost another $4 billion over the next few years, according to the U.S. Missile Defense Agency.
Cost overruns typical in nearly every U.S. defense program could easily drive the price higher, said some defense analysts and critics of the missile defense program.
While details of any specific contract awards must still be worked out, the deal will clearly result in additional work for U.S. defense companies at a time when U.S. defense spending is expected to begin to level off.

- guardian.co.uk/

See ultimately it all comes down to the basics. Upsetting the delicate balances of power and pissing off a global giant still armed to the teeth is nothing compared to defense contractors losing money and having to restructure. The Machine Must Be Maintained!



Setting The Non-Date.

For literally years, the Republican white house has fought against any kind of deadline for withdrawing troops from Iraq. President Bush himself has talked of how a timetable would embolden the enemy, and so the occupation has been treated as long-term, with no inclination as to when or even if it would end. And then recently the Iraqi Prime Minster said a deadline would be nice after all, and so the President started talking about undefined and undefinable 'time horizons'. All that crap changed this week, when the white house up and finally set a date.

Washington - The US and Iraq have agreed that US combat troops would leave the Arab country entirely before the end of 2011, according to US media reports early on Friday.

The Washington Post, citing both US and Iraqi officials, reported that the two governments had settled on the 2011 date as part of a broad deal to replace a UN mandate for US forces that expires at the end of December. The withdrawal date is conditioned on security circumstances in Iraq at that time.

- news24.com/

So there we go, peace in our time, somebody call a caterer. Right?

If you are trying to figure out the state of play on what is a central foreign policy question facing the United States -- and thus central in the presidential campaign -- it got a little clearer Thursday.

And then a White House spokesman tried to walk it all back today.

On Thursday in Baghdad, American and Iraqi officials drew close to a draft agreement to see U.S. forces conditionally withdraw from Iraq by the end of 2011.

Maliki and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice played down the idea that an agreement was imminent. Still, one could be forgiven for thinking that what the officials were talking about sounded like a deadline for the troop deployment to end.

Not so, suggested Deputy White House Press Secretary Gordon D. Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council.

Speaking with reporters in Crawford, Texas, where Bush is spending a late-summer holiday, Johndroe insisted that whatever talks were taking place with the Iraqis, they were about "aspirational timelines" and "goals for more troops to come home."

But not deadlines.

- latimesblogs.latimes.com/

They will, they won't, they're breaking up, they're more in love than ever, I tell ya, if this soap was fiction it'd be *brilliant*!




Big Feet In The Mouth.

Since time immemorial, man has feared the forest. Dark, primeval, wet, we've always been scared of what's out there. That fear has no real place in our modern world, we're too busy fretting over jobs and pollution to fret about forest dwellers. So it evolves, into mythical tales, one of which is the legend of Bigfoot. Could a small group of large hairy ape-like creatures live deep in the forests of the world, unseen by anyone except the occasional kook? Well, no, but that hasn't killed the myth. This week, a couple of entrepreneurs decided to try and sell what they said was the frozen body of a Bigfoot, and they almost got away with it, of it wasn't for a lot of hot air.

BIGFOOT lived in northern Georgia and his cousins are still there. At least that's what a pair of hunters and a Californian Bigfoot expert cum promoter continue to claim.

But if they have definitive evidence to prove it, it wasn't presented at a press conference on Friday where they had said they would make believers out of everyone.

A second round of DNA testing on what the men claim is a dead 2.13-metre, 250-kilogram Bigfoot they say they stumbled on while hiking in Georgia in June is still being completed.

Of three samples in a preliminary DNA test, one came back inconclusive, one contained traces of human DNA and one had traces of opossum DNA, probably from something the creature ate, they claimed.

They didn't produce a Bigfoot corpse; that is in a hidden location, they said, after being moved from a freezer that broke down a couple of times. They will not say exactly where they found the creature and claim they saw a band of other Bigfoots watching them. Neither will they allow anyone other than their own hand-picked scientists to examine the body of the dead animal.

- smh.com.au

Now, for some reason, this was taken seriously by a few people. One of which is named Steve Kulls.

Steve Kulls, who maintains the SquatchDetective Web site and hosts a similarly named Internet radio program, first interviewed Dyer on July 28 for the radio program. On August 12, Kulls said, Dyer and Whitton "requested an undisclosed sum of money as an advance, expected from the marketing and promotion."

Two days later, after signing a receipt and counting the money, Dyer and Whitton showed the Searching for Bigfoot team the freezer containing what they claimed was the carcass: "Something appearing large, hairy and frozen in ice," Kulls wrote on the Web site.

It was, as many had suspected, an ape-like costume stuffed with entrails.

After the news conference last week, Dyer and Whitton disappeared from view. The truth came out over the weekend.

In a Web posting this week, Kulls wrote that "action is being instigated against the perpetrators."

- edition.cnn.com/

I'm tempted to go with the old caveat emptor routine here, but when you go to such lengths to make a hoax, including freezing it solid so the victim has to spend time thawing it out, time you can use to get away, this seems like a failure on all fronts. The gullible for falling for an obvious fake, but also the fakers for going to such lengths in the first place. The skeptics are only really skeptics due to distance and experience, but the same holds true for fakers as well. We all want to believe Bigfeet roam the forest, and we don't want to believe that they do not.



Film Review: Wanted.

The problem with a film about assassins hunting each other is that at the end of the day, they're assassins. Who gives a shit about assassins, really? You can respect a wolf, but you can't really cheer for one. Wolf's don't need cheering. So, meet Wesley. A loser who's stuck in a dead-end job with a lousy boss, an awful girlfriend and an anxiety problem. Wesley is our ticket into the world of the super-assassins, and his indoctrination is meant to make his journey our own. Apparently his long-absent father was killed by a rogue agent, Wesley is next on the list, so the Fraternity, or the Familiarity, or the Fatherhood, or whatever the hell they call themselves, have decided to clue in Wesley on who he really is.

All of which isn't too bad, as far as setups go. The whole point of the film is the old cliche about not leading a life of miserable pointlessness. Stand up for yourself and make a difference, blah blah blah. For a theme it's pretty standard fare, because it's the philosophy that justifies Hollywood's excesses, and all those who sail in her. Here the example is being a hired killer, which is where it falls apart for this particular film. I don't see how 'following your dream' lines up with 'shoot anonymous people when we tell you to'. However of course there's more to it than just that. Wesley is being set up, and it takes a long-ass time for him to put it together. Once he's finally figured it out, it prompts a finale so ridiculous you wonder if you've perhaps fallen asleep in the theater and dreamed it. Simple physics, already by now lying on the ground in a pool of it's own blood anyway, is then beheaded and thrown out the window, followed quickly by logic and common sense. I understand there's meant to be a bit of the comic-booky general fantasy-like feel to this property, but when you start the film with good actors giving important speeches about history and honour and the assassins code and then you finish with everyone acting like mindless puppets, there's a bit of a breakdown along the way.

So. What is this film? It's somewhat exciting, the action sequences are clever, well done and even fresh. The shaky cam is kept to a minimum. The performances aren't bad, although it feels a little like Angelina Jolie is slumming it. She's a better actress than her role allows for. The hero has his journey, such as it is. But in the end, the wolves eat each other, and leave the mess for us to clean up. Like, yay? And if that's not enough, the last wolf even then have the gall to challenge us, as if he's so great. What have I done lately? Hey, at least I haven't been jerked around like an idiot, slapped around like a bitch, and killed people as indiscriminately and as pointlessly as a robot. Don't stand there in the pit you dug for yourself and berate me for my altitude. Two Duelling Pistols out of Five.



- Peace out