Deadly Disconnect: Iraq Reality vs Bush Administration Fantasy

The least we could ask of our representatives is to hold the President accountable for betraying our trust. Yet, Joe Lieberman and the Republicans refuse to face up to their responsibilities. When the president asked Congress to consent to war -- the most difficult moral judgement for it to have to have to made -- Congress needed to be able to trust the information provided by the administration. When the President asked our fighting men and women to put their lives on the line for a reason, they needed to be able to trust that the reason he gave was true. It was a betrayal of trust for the president to ask our soldiers to risk their lives under falses pretenses. It was a betrayal of trust when the American people were asked to spend money that could have been used for schools, for health care, for helping desperate people, for rebuilding infrastructure, and for economic stimulation in hard times. It was a betrayal of trust for the president to have given false impressions, and it is a shameful neglect of responsibility for our congressmen to not hold the administration accountable. - O.

From Arianna Huffington's Blog:

A bracing shot of reality: the United Nations report on Iraq [pdf] released yesterday. It paints a devastating -- and wrenchingly specific -- portrait of a country in bloody chaos. First the numbers: 14,338 civilians killed in the first half of 2006. And, according to the UN report, civilian carnage is on "an upward trend," with more than 5,800 deaths and 5,700 injuries in the last two months. Indeed, on average, more than 100 Iraqi civilians were killed per day in June -- the highest monthly total since U.S. forces took control of Baghdad.