“Not since the Vietnam War has the Army punished a soldier for being too scared to do his duty.

But on Friday, Sgt. Georg Andreas Pogany will appear in front of military court here to face charges he was a coward.

The Army says he is guilty of ‘cowardly conduct as a result of fear’ and not performing his duties as an interrogator for a squad of Green Berets in Samarra, Iraq.

But Sergeant Pogany says he did not run from the enemy or disobey orders. The only thing he is guilty of, he says, is asking for help for a panic attack.

On his second night in Iraq, one month ago, Sergeant Pogany, 32, saw an Iraqi cut in half by a machine gun. The sight disturbed him so much, he said, he threw up and shook for hours. His head pounded and his chest hurt.

‘I couldn’t function,’ Sergeant Pogany said in an interview on Tuesday in his lawyer’s office in Colorado Springs, not far from Fort Carson. ‘I had this overwhelming sense of my own mortality. I kept looking at that body thinking that could be me two seconds from now.’

When he informed his superior that he was having a panic attack and needed to see someone, Sergeant Pogany said he was given two sleeping pills and told to go away. A few days later, Sergeant Pogany was put on a plane and sent home.” —New York Times

It is not precisely true, from a psychiatrist’s perspective (and with the caveat that one does not diagnose sight unseen from a distance) that this soldier had a ‘panic attack.’ It is more likely he is suffering from acute post-traumatic stress, of which panic-like symptoms are a facet. PTSD develops when a person is inescapably exposed to something beyond the pale. This is precisely why the Army had better rush to perfect those drugs to stop soldiers from incorporating traumatic memories about which I wrote several months ago here so they can get back to functioning like the unfeeling automatons they are supposed to be on the battlefield. We are routinely going to expose them to things beyond that which any human nervous system was designed to withstand, and they had better learn to feel nothing in response.

Toddler Lives After Being Declared Dead: ‘A toddler who was revived nearly two hours after she was believed to have drowned — and 40 minutes after doctors had declared her dead — was responding to touch and sound Saturday, hospital officials said.

Mark Langdorf (search), chairman of the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of California, Irvine, said it is not uncommon for toddlers to survive drownings after showing little or no signs of life, especially if the water is cold.

What was unusual in Mackayala’s case, he said, was the time involved.

“If you had said she came back to life after 10 minutes I would be surprised, but 40 minutes is just exceptional,” he said.’ —Fox News

“The Bush White House, irritated by pesky questions from congressional Democrats about how the administration is using taxpayer money, has developed an efficient solution: It will not entertain any more questions from opposition lawmakers.” —Dana Milbank, Washington Post. This is, of course, on top of the White House initiative several weeks ago to bypass pesky questions from more critical national news sources, such as the Washington Post and the New York Times, and go directly to the regional press in the heartlands to plead its case. This is one of the most outrageous manipulations this dysadministration has pulled off, but where is the outraged response? More evidence of how easy it is for an anti-democratic cabal to completely and rapidly subvert democratic processes once they hoodwink the complacent and gullible polity to cede them power. The beerhall putsch, 21st-century-style, continues. Will the public awaken in time for November ’04?

“In my attempt to realize ‘death’, I have decided to watch the dead body of a dog continuously at the coast.” Photographs and commentary by Manabu Yamanaka [spelling correction by FmH].

• 1st day

  – I patted him on head wondering if his life was happy one.

• 2nd day

  – His face seemed to be sad. I felt the odor became stronger.

• 5th day

  – Many crows crowded at the spot and were pecking his eyes and
  
  anus.
  

It goes on from there, with a stark unflinching zen-like photograph of the dog’s status each day. —[thanks, gary]

An interesting story surrounds this weblog of a courageous 24-year-old Iraqi woman (“Girl Blog from Iraq… let’s talk war, politics and occupation.”) to which I was pointed by an FmH reader [thanks, gary]. Riverbend offers realtime commentary on events in Baghdad, inside perspective on Western analysis of the situation, and a humane introduction to Iraqi Islamic mores and customs. She is even going to start posting some recipes, she has decided while laboring preparing the evening meals that break each day’s fast during Ramadhan.

But ‘riverbendblog.blogspot.com’ is being spoofed by someone at ‘riversbendblog.blogspot.com’ (note the ‘s‘) who also called his weblog Baghdad Burning but, as she describes in her Oct. 29th post (scroll down) ‘Riverbend and Multiple Personalities’ , is rife with errors of fact about Iraq, an antithetical political philosophy supported by cutting and pasting posts from US government sources, and grammatical errors she speculates are designed to sound like his idea of an ignorant Iraqi ‘hajji’. The spoofer, she discovers, is a retired US Air Force veteran of the Korean War and a ‘GOP Team Leader’, whatever that is. Two other sites (here and here) have been digging into the fraud. Skip the fine print if you are not that interested in the intricate details:

The story begins on Sept. 2, 2003. The retirees on soc.retirement were giving “Solerito” Troy, Korean War vet and GOP Team Leader, a hard time over a blog he suggested. It was called solerito.blogspot.com. He’d recommended it as a welcome antidote to the negative blogging coming out of Iraq. “Here is one that’s not supportive of Saddam and is interested in a better future for Iraq,” he wrote.

“And this one sounds exactly as if you wrote it, Troy,” a poster responds. “C’mon, fess up.”

He doesn’t. The Solerito blog has begun in the thick of things with the death of David Kelly, described as a friend of the blogger — who goes under the name “river.” But she is quick to adapt to our American ways, and before long has already achieved scorn for Hillary. “I long for the day we can watch FoxNews in Iraq,” she pines.

The Solerito blog has sort of run out of steam by then. But Troy/Diego, who has also been accused of being an infamous soc.retirement mischief-maker named Sordo/Bodine , and is also the kind of guy who tells people they are traitorous “basteds” who belong in hell — has moved on to stage two of the Doppleblogger Project, a cheeky new blog called Riversbend.

Except that Troy/Diego accidentally leaves, on the URL of his hit counter page, a reference to his nickname — “Solerito” (as spotted by Claude, a keen Atrios reader).

Many of his Usenet posts end with the nickname, which is Spanish for “saltshaker.” His signature:

El Solerito Troy,

Artist, HAM, Korean War, Reg. Army & USAF Retired, MOPH L38342 Unit 1849, Phi Theta Kappa, RNC 146441197-D186, GOP Team Leader, NRA 040959746 —John Gorenfeld

Interesting discussions on the two sleuthing weblogs arbout the ethics of posting the identity and the email address of the spoofer, of defacing the fake weblog, etc. Under pressure, the spoofer has modified his spot to be less of an infringement on the original, removing fake archives and stolen graphics, no longer claiming to being written by a “girl from Iraq”, no longer calling it Baghdad Burning (for awhile, calling it Baghdad’s Not Burning, duh). The spoofer violates several of the Blogger terms of service, and the author of the original Riverbend complained to them but was brushed off politely. The spoofer has apparently started two other ‘smearblogs’ with varying degrees of similarity to the genuine Riverbend.

…to Bonnie Raitt, Bonnie Bramlett and Rickie Lee Jones today.