OUR WHOLE NATION SHOULD WEAR BLACK TODAY FOR KRISTIAN MENCHACA AND THOMAS TUCKER

I had a suspicion when I started hearing about the capture of two young American soldiers in Iraq the other day that the Iraqi insurgents had a point they wanted to make. The only possibility of "good news" would have been if they kidnapped them (as the Pentagon referred to the incident) in order to exchange them for some captured Iraqi colleagues.

Unfortunately, that isn't what they had in mind. Instead, what they seem to have had in mind was revenge for the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. And maybe more. The two young men were beheaded and tortured. Bush's shredding of the Geneva Agreements and his Regime's blithe dismissal of the horrible and criminal use of torture as "quaint" might have also been answered in the minds of these rebels. An Arab website referred to the nightmare as "slaughtering the two captured crusaders," a very emotion-laden word in the Arab world, one Bush stumbled and bumbled into using as he launched his unprovoked attack on Iraq.

The thought of more of our young men being killed in Iraq under any circumstances infuriates me and simultaneously fills me with deep grief. The idea of these two kids being dragged away and abused, tortured a beheaded is beyond my capacity to process calmly. I'm way too empathetic for that. All I can think is "why these 2 brave boys?" Why should these two families be struck so horribly and brutally? And why couldn't it be Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Frist and every single Republican senator and congressman and Lieberman and all the other Democrats who have acted as a rubber stamp for Bush's criminal agenda in Iraq?

These weak and cowardly men only know how to send other people's children to fight and die in their avaricious quest for more wealth and power. Today my friend Bob exposes their weakness and corruption and their utter incapacity to protect our country from real threats.

If we as a people don't stop them, whatever we get from their policies is what we deserve as a people and a nation. The young men brutalized today and their families traumatized deserve nothing of this tragedy, this inevitable tragic orchestrated by crass, weak con-men.

And keep in mind that Bush's disastrous inability as, Commander in Chief, to complete the mission in Afghanistan, a mission the whole country and most of the world was united behind, is leading to further catastrophe there, a catastrophe that could have been avoided if we had even a minimally competent leadership instead of the human detritus we have installed in Washington.