“When our DoD hires bloggers to push their fictional views forward, they at least ought to pick one with some common sense. So far, most of the hilarious pro-Army crap littering the Stateside blogs sounds as if were written in a pub in Alexandria.

Recently, a series of horror stories about conditions here surfaced in a magazine and was promptly attacked by the obnoxious right wing maven, Rupert Murdoch. He has a little rag with three subscribers called ‘The Weekly Standard’ that began trashing the story, claiming it was all lies. Of course, given the huge mounds of trash you can see on Fox News, Rupert knows all about lies. Anyway, the original publisher stated they had interviewed other soldiers in their writer’s same unit and had confirmation. The Army then forced , Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp, of the 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry, the author, to recant everything he wrote.

I am a former journalist and am right in the middle of the mess on a daily basis and what Beauchamp wrote was the truth. And now we see government “friends” claiming that unless an informant gives his full name, rank and serial number, any statements of a nature considered by the Pentagon to be negative, must be a complete fake.

My advice to these paid stoolies is to cash your Treasury check, buy more kiddie porn and put a sock in your mouth. If you think about it, anyone under the physical control of the DoD who dares to make his name, rank and serial number public is asking for serious problems here. And anyone who believes to the contrary is either a paid snitch or a full-blown moron. Or considering the types working for the DoD’s PR sections, both.

I have said before that Stalin-style censorship is really in place here. All outgoing and incoming emails are inspected closely for any information that might upset Bush and his crazy Fascists. No soldier would dare to send his mother a story about gang raping a ten-year old Iraqi boy (as happened last week) or setting fire to an old Iraqi in a wheel chair (as happened in May) Also, the media ‘embedded’ here either follow the party line or out they go on the next plane.

Foreign reporters are told quietly that unless they want to get one in the head from “Arab snipers” they will watch what they put in their dispatches. In spite of the feel-good pro Bush crap the domestic American media is gushing out, the death and injury tolls are not going down but rising. The DoD cuts its reportage to the public by about half. Critical injuries are never mentioned nor are the huge number of kids with legs, arms and faces blown off. Suicides are up but desertions are rare here.

After all, where would they run to? Any GI seen running into Iran would be shot in the back before he got ten yards.

And forget the bleats from Bush that the new bombs are ‘made in Iran.’ We all know the crazy Cheney wants to invade Iran but these bombs are made up locally from parts supplied by fellow Sunnis in Saudi Arabia. And the military knows that but no one would dare tell this to Bush who would probably attack them with an ashtray.

A full-blown civil war is going on here with hundreds killed every day, whole residential blocks blown up, rival mosques destroyed, and car bombs going off like Fourth of July fireworks daily. Every so often, the warring factions take time off to blow up another truck full of GIs or shoot down (now with heat-seeking rockets, also from Saudi Arabia) another troop-carrying helicopter. Thirty two dead last week but guess what? None of this ever made the Stateside press.

And they won’t let anyone transfer out of this $!xX hole, ever. I should have left here a year ago but I’m still here, hoping a stray mortar shell doesn’t land on my quarters some night. And when I read squeals of outrage from “reputable journalists” demanding that people like me publish our names, I wonder if he has to go back to the nut house on the weekends for more electric shock therapy?

Well, a nice Treasury check buys a lot of whoring.

And one more ray of bright sunshine: The Brits are pulling out right away and from my superiors, I learn that Bush has been screaming ‘treachery’ at Brown, the new PM but the latter thinks Bush is a ‘sick **%!’ as my CO puts it, and the less he has to do with him, the better.”