MIDDLEEAST.ORG - 5 April 2007

                                             MORE  LIES and DECEPTION from both PETRAEUS and McCAIN

                                            "It's a pretty good time to be in Baghdad as opposed to Washington."

5 April - If we are ever to extricate ourselves from the horrible mess the Neocons and Militarists have created in Iraq we've got to start demanding truth from our elected officials.  We've got to stop accepting their pathetic hand-outs of rhetorical candy photo-op lollipops.

Let's start with Senator John McCain's recent visit to Baghdad.  Commanding General David Petraeus personally escorted Senator McCain to a Baghdad market for a little photo-op visit.  Soon McCain was making ridiculous statements about how he could for the first time stroll around Baghdad freely.  Message to Americans:  I John McCain am a brave guy and I told you to hang on and now things are getting much better my fellow Americans!   So please you all...wake up and smell the roses!   And by the way I'd make a great President when George and Dick have departed!

After McCain's craziness (and more is on the way with exclusive videos he has saved for CBS and 60 Minutes this Sunday) General Petraeus called in the PBS News Hour team, always ready to oblige the powerful.  Once on camera Petraeus proceeded to try to trump McCain's excesses, and though Jim Lehrer (old Marine himself) tried a bit to call the General's enthusiasm,  Petraeus just kept at it:
"He (McCain) was not protected by a cocoon of security. Yup there was security... Actually he helped the Iraqi economy quite abit.  He bought a number of carpets in fact.  And he haggled with the merchants himself, with an interpreter.  And he was moving about very freely".
Here's what long-time newsman Allen Pizzey had to say about McCain...and this surely applies equally to Petraeus as well regardless of how slick he is with P.R.:
"It's disgraceful for a man seeking highest office, I think, to talk utter rubbish. And that is utter rubbish. It's electoral propaganda. It is simply not true. No one in his right mind who has been to Baghdad believes that story.

Now, McCain and some other senators were there on Sunday, and they claimed, "Oh, we walked around for a whole hour…and we drove in from the airport. Gosh, aren't we great, we drove in from the airport." Excuse me, Mr. McCain, you drove in in a large convoy of heavily armed vehicles. The last one had a sign on it saying "Keep back 100 yards. Deadly force authorized." Every single car that they approached or passed pulled over and stopped, because that's the way it is. When one of those security details goes by, every ordinary person gets the hell out of the way, in case they get shot.

If he did walk around that market, and I didn't see him do it, and he didn't announce he was going to do it, you can bet your life there were an awful lot of soldiers deployed to make sure that nobody came near that place. He's talking rubbish. And he should not get away with it. 
Actually it turns out that McCain was tightly guarded by over a hundred very heavily-armed troops, there were three Blackhawk helicopter gunships overhead plus two Apache attack aircraft and others monitoring everything and everyone in sight and beyond, plus no doubt a small army of ever-ready snipers on every building with all traffic halted for many block and hours.

Oh yes, according to General Petraeus (and yes, he actually said this, and no, though it was April Fools1April, he didn't appear to be winking):
 "It's a pretty good time to be in Baghdad as opposed to Washington."
It's Thursday now, four days since the McCain Petreaus impromptu Baghdad market stroll on a Sunday afternoon.    News reports tonight are that 8 more American soldiers have been killed in the past two days, 5 British in Basra today.

And oh yes...we've also now learned a little more about what a great help Senator McCain was to the Baghdad economy and security situation.   The day after McCain's visit 21 Shia workers from that same market that McCain visited, many young children, were ambushed, bound, and shot dead just north of the capital.  Real details and pictures are very hard to come by these days as in reality the city is far too dangerous for reporters to travel about and far far too dangerous for them to really inquire and report beyond the Green Zone.  Yet the Pentagon and Neocon spin machines just keep right on rolling along.  Let's see how 60 minutes handles all this Sunday.