She’s testifying now in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. C-SPAN is covering it live, and you can watch it on their video feed.
UPDATE: If you can’t watch, FireDogLake is live-blogging the panel, and doing their usual excellent job of it.
UPDATE: If you’re having trouble with the C-SPAN feed, try this one directly from the Oversight Committee. I hear it has superior sound and clarity.
UPDATE: Thanks to PoliticsTV for putting up this clip of Valerie’s testimony.
We simply aren’t taking care of the troops.
Many thanks to Nancy Pelosi for putting up the C-SPAN clips.
Perhaps the counts of wounded soldiers are off because we’re suiting them up and sending them back whether they’re really able to serve or not.
I heard Jim Webb on This Week yesterday, and in the middle of the interview he talked briefly about how many soldiers have been wounded in Iraq. I uploaded the clip, and you can see it below. It includes a snippet from Bob Woodruff’s special on wounded soldiers.
The Private War of Women Soldiers
…The female soldiers who were at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, for example, where U.S. troops go to demobilize, told me they were warned not to go out at night alone.
“They call Camp Arifjan ‘generator city’ because it’s so loud with generators that even if a woman screams she can’t be heard,” said Abbie Pickett, 24, a specialist with the 229th Combat Support Engineering Company who spent 15 months in Iraq from 2004-05. Yet, she points out, this is a base, where soldiers are supposed to be safe.
Spc. Mickiela Montoya, 21, who was in Iraq with the National Guard in 2005, took to carrying a knife with her at all times. “The knife wasn’t for the Iraqis,” she told me. “It was for the guys on my own side.”
I know there’s a lot going on these days, but we can’t ignore this. These women are our soldiers. We’re failing them as long as they are not safe in our military. Contact your representatives and senators. Tell them this has to stop.
Several soldiers I interviewed told me that if a commander won’t tolerate the mistreatment of women, it will not happen, and studies back this up.
The commanders can make this stop, and they have to. This is a disgrace, and it’s gone on far too long already.
Does anyone really believe that Scooter Libby acted alone?
UPDATE: Booman explains why this case mattered, in a thorough fisking of today’s WashPost editorial.
Media Matters gives us facts to counter the spin.
And boy were the TV news shows full of spinners last night. Sheesh.
UPDATE: And Think Progress also fact-checks the Washington Post.
UPDATE: And a choice bit of analysis from the Guardian (emphasis added):
…The eventual trial may have fascinated the Washington Beltway crowd, to whom Mr Libby, the former CIA analyst Valerie Plame, and her husband Ambassador Joseph Wilson are seasoned and familiar figures. But why should outsiders have to take it seriously too?
For two main reasons. The first concerns the ethics of the administration of which Mr Libby, as top aide to Dick Cheney, was such a senior member. George Bush came to the White House in January 2001 pledging to “change the atmosphere in Washington DC”. By this he apparently meant two things: one, that he would govern in a dignified and rule-respecting way that supposedly contrasted with that of Bill Clinton; and, two, that he would try to end the intense partisan bitterness that had marked the Washington of the Clinton era. The Libby case is prosecution exhibit number one in support of the charge that Mr Bush never attempted to do any such thing. On the contrary. The Bush administration has been ruthlessly partisan, fuelled by enmities worthy of the Nixon era. The outing of Ms Plame was a criminal act against the wife of an administration critic. Mr Libby lied about it. He presumably did it to protect Mr Cheney, who wanted to punish the Wilsons. Mr Libby’s conviction therefore raises very direct questions about Mr Cheney’s own position.
The second reason is because, at bottom, Mr Libby’s lies concerned Iraq. The administration wanted to invade Iraq. Mr Cheney, and through him Mr Libby, was not particular about how to do it. When Mr Wilson publicly questioned the weapons of mass destruction case for war he therefore made himself a Cheney enemy. As a consequence, the White House took its revenge on him through his wife. Mr Libby lied to protect not just his boss but his boss’s unjust war. That’s why yesterday’s verdict matters. This affair is not over yet – not by a long chalk.
And the Oscars lead the way.
for An Inconvenient Truth:
He was quite eloquent last night on the News Hour discussing the Washington Post articles on the lack of care for our wounded veterans.
JIM LEHRER: Speaking of the troops, what do you think of the Walter Reed story that the Washington Post broke and has been covering?
MARK SHIELDS: Well, first of all, I’d like to say it’s a great tribute to the positive power of a free press. That Dana Priest and Anne Hull and the editors of the Washington Post put it on the front page on a Sunday and a Monday, and it got a result.
Families all over this country have been complaining about the treatment out there. It got nowhere. It didn’t get a hearing in the Congress. It didn’t get the kind of coverage it should have gotten.
And there’s a terrible political reality here. These people, these young Americans who’ve gone over there, and they’re wounded, are not — their parents do not summer in Nantucket or Santa Fe. Their mothers don’t wear designer originals. Their fathers are not friends of Bill, and they aren’t Pioneers or Rangers for George W. Bush.
These people come from modest backgrounds, and they don’t have any clout. They don’t have any lobbyists on their side. They don’t have any political action committee. They have absolutely no advocates and no voice, and, in this case, the free press was their voice.
Shame on all of us for not being there first. I mean, I haven’t been out to Walter Reed myself, and I haven’t been aware. But it’s more than Building 18. It isn’t a mold story or a mice story.
It’s a story about bureaucratic indifference, about making these — putting them in an adversarial relationship, instead of recognizing the enormous cost that you pay for going into combat, and the psychological trauma and damage and wounds that these people carry for the rest of their life.
And of course, knowledge of this has been around for a while. Salon reported on the problems a couple of years ago.
UPDATE: For more on the Army’s bureaucratic problems and how hard disabled vets have to struggle to get benefits, read today’s Washington Post cover story “Battle Worn”, by the most excellent Paula Span.
The Dixie Chicks Take Five, Including Album of the Year
LOS ANGELES, Feb. 11 The Dixie Chicks got the last laugh Sunday night. Rejected by the country establishment, the polarizing group was tickled to find itself in the warm embrace of the broader Recording Academy, which honored the Chicks with five Grammy Awards — including the three biggest: album of the year, record of the year and song of the year.
The Texas trio also won for best country group vocal and best country album. The latter award was especially surprising, since they were excommunicated from the church of country music in 2003 after singer Natalie Maines popped off about President Bush and the war in Iraq. Upon bouncing to the podium after the result was announced, Maines said what just about everybody inside Staples Center was probably thinking: “That’s interesting.” She closed her gaping mouth just long enough to grin mischievously, then said, “Well, to quote the great Simpsons, ‘HA HA!’ “
“Not Ready to Make Nice,” the group’s defiant answer to the angry country fans who’d criticized the group for criticizing Bush, won song of the year, the industry’s top songwriting award. “I am, for the first time in my life, speechless,” Maines said. …
