IRAQ: ONE BIG FUCKED UP MESS

How bad are things over there?

We know there's a bloody insurgency causing mounting US casualties. We know about the abuses of Abu Ghraib. We know the invasion was founded on lies and the imperial ambitions of the neo-cons in the Bush administration. We know the war has taken advantage of raw and painful American emotion in the wake of 9/11. But now it's really starting to sound like Catch-22 or Paths of Glory. That is, beyond all reason.

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Reserve unit defies order to deliver fuel in Iraq

The Army is investigating members of a Reserve unit in Iraq who refused to deliver a fuel shipment to a town north of Baghdad under conditions they considered unsafe, the Pentagon and relatives of the soldiers said Friday. Several soldiers called it a "suicide mission," relatives said.

About 18 members of the 343rd Quartermaster Company were detained at gunpoint for nearly two days after disobeying orders to drive trucks that they said had not been serviced and were not being escorted by armed vehicles to Taji, about 15 miles north of Baghdad, relatives said after speaking to some of the soldiers.

Jackie Butler of Jackson, Miss., the wife of Staff Sgt. Michael Butler, 44, said she was awakened about 5:30 or6 a.m. Thursday by a call from an officer from Iraq. He told her "that my husband was being retained for disobeying a direct order," Butler said, "and he went on to tell me that it was a bogus charge that they got against him and some of those soldiers over there, because what they were doing was sending them into a suicide mission, and they refused to go."

Click here for the rest.

Meanwhile, Bush and Kerry debate the best way to continue the war, and most people don't seem to have any problem with it. America is completely insane.

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