No updates until 2-3 Jan. I expect to post a large amount of material at that time.
(nothing follows)
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On vacation at the moment, and updating the site is very difficult. Here is a photo I took from Christmas Day 2006, before I had this blog (no, that's not me in the picture). For a joke, I put the red stocking on one of our trucks, and it looked so good we decided to leave it.
Just a reminder that there are hundreds of thousands of servicemembers in Iraq and Afghanistan who are not able to be home with their families for the holidays. Not only US military members, but from 25 other nations as well. Specifically, in no particular order:
Australia
Canada
Denmark
Estonia
France
Netherlands
Norway
Portugal
United Kingdom
Poland
South Korea
Romania
El Salvador
Czech Republic
Azerbaijan
Georgia
Mongolia
Albania
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Macedonia
Moldavia
Bulgaria
Armenia
Latvia
Slovakia
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This is a continuation of my earlier post here. In the United States in an election year, how can we expect anything less than partisan hyperventilation over every miniscule issue?
Christopher Hitchens is an author with whom I alternately agree and disagree on many issues. He was born in the UK, and became a US citizen earlier this year. And what better way to celebrate this than to engage in the age-old American tradition of political hyperbole with this article in Slate?:
It's time to abolish the CIAI agree with him on a few points here, for example that we cannot entirely trust the CIA estimation that Iran is not pursuing any nuclear weapons. But abolish the CIA over two tapes that the agency had no duty to make in the first place, much less preserve? And "mutiny"? "Treason"? C'mon.
Destroying the interrogation tapes amounts to mutiny and treason...The system is worse than useless—it's a positive menace. We need to shut the whole thing down and start again.
Torture Tapes are the Watergate of Our Times"Had discussed". That's all? And even if it happened, is that a crime? Moreover, the NYT article claims that some, not all, of the attorneys suggested destroying the tapes. In fact, White House counsel Harriet Miers advised against it. Since there is nothing illegal here, are these discussions truly worthy of another "Watergate"?
As I write these words on the morning of Wednesday, Dec. 19, high- and low-level officials of the Bush administration involved in torture, and the destruction of the torture tapes, are consulting their criminal lawyers as The New York Times reports that highest-level lawyers in the administration had discussed the destruction of the tapes.
Iraq 'torture complex' discoveredDoes anyone really think we shouldn't be fighting psychopaths like this?
Intelligence provided by local Iraqis led the troops to the torture centre
US and Iraqi forces have discovered a "torture complex" in an al-Qaeda safe haven near Muqdadiya in central Diyala province, the US military has said.
Three buildings containing chains on the walls and ceilings, and a metal bed connected to a power supply were found during an operation on 9 December.
Mass graves containing 26 bodies were uncovered...
Maj Gen Mark Hertling, said he believed the torture facility had been run by al-Qaeda in Iraq as it was located in one of their strongholds.
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The story of the mother who taught her child to hate a perfect strangerI'll mercifully spare you from having to read the whole thing which is sappy beyond belief, and an obvious publicity statement to draw more sympathy to the "victimized" band (which was also the entire theme of their film "Shut up and Sing"). Essentially, one anonymous woman was caught on video holding her young son, protesting the band's political statements on Bush and Iraq, and smashing their Cd's. Somehow this greatly upset Natalie Maines, the band's lead singer:
On the afternoon of May 5, 2003, Andrea S. was stomping on Dixie Chicks CDs and instructing her 2-year-old son to say, “Screw the Chicks!”
Unbeknownst to her at the time, her life changed forever at that moment — and so did the lives of the Dixie Chicks.
“That just made me bawl because I just witnessed someone learn[ing] to hate and I didn't know that kind of hatred existed.”OK, so the Dixie Chicks are sensitive women. What is the problem? Read on...
In other interviews, the Chicks stated that the darkest moment of the controversy was watching Andrea teach her son to hate. They felt it was worse than receiving a death threat.
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Well, no, he's not really an expert, but because he's one of the most successful bloggers there is, he thinks he is. A recent posting by Andrew Sullivan drew a lot of attention from Ron Paul fans because he publicly endorses the candidate for President. I don't really care much about who he endorses, but his statements on the war are irresponsible:
Let's be clear: we have lost this war. We have lost because the initial, central goals of the invasion have all failed: we have not secured WMDS from terrorists because those WMDs did not exist. We have not stymied Islamist terror - at best we have finally stymied some of the terror we helped create. We have not constructed a democratic model for the Middle East - we have instead destroyed a totalitarian government and a phony country, only to create a permanently unstable, fractious, chaotic failed state, where the mere avoidance of genocide is a cause for celebration.We have lost the war? That's certainly news to our troops on the ground, where every indication is that the war is improving.
Madrid, London, Bali and all over Iraq.But except for Iraq, that's apples and oranges. Is the US responsible for the entire world? Isn't that the same arrogance that Mr. Sullivan and others criticize Bush for? And Bali is a particularly weak example anyway. The incident was in 2002, before the war in Iraq. Additionally, Osama Bin Laden claimed the motive was not just support for the US War on Terror, but also for Indonesia's support of Australia's operations in East Timor.
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Hamburg - The winning picture comes from the American photographer Stephanie Sinclair and shows an unhappy married couple: the groom Mohammed appears like an old man, the bride, the girl Ghulam, is just eleven years old. This is part of a photoseries recording child marriages, that Sinclair has photographed in the past two years in Afghanistan, Nepal, and Ethiopia.Later, a caption in the photo essay (with several other striking pictures) reads:
During a stopover in Afghanistan it was apparent to the 34-year old freelance photographer, that many girls were married with much older men. She decided to draw attention to this topic with pictures. "How do you feel today?", Stephanie Sinclair asked the girl Ghulam on the day of their engagement. The somewhat confused girl said "nothing". "I do not know this man - what should I feel?"
"The UNICEF Photo of the Year 2007 draws attention to a worldwide problem. Millions of girls are married while still in childhood - a life of self-determination will remain forever denied to most of these child brides," said UNICEF patron Eva Luise Köhler at the award ceremony in Berlin. According to UNICEF, worldwide more than 60 million living young women were married before they hit the age of maturity, half of them in South Asia.
Desperate engagement: He is 40, she eleven. "we needed the money", say parents of the girls. Her husband-to-be maintains that he wants to send her to school. But the women in the village Damarda in the province Ghor know it better: "our men do not want educated women." They predict that the child will soon have a baby on the way.
Bukhari vol. 7, #88:"Narrated Urwa: "The prophet wrote the (marriage contract) with Aisha while she was six years old and consummated his marriage with her while she was nine years old and she remained with him for nine years (i.e. till his death).""
Surveys of five Afghan refugee camps on the Pakistan border of girls aged 8 to 13 indicate rates of marriage that exceed 50 percent, with the largest concentration of marriages occurring between 10 and 11 years.It gets worse:
The girls’ primary school of about 150 students, run by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, forms a sort of oasis. Classrooms, though spare, are made of cement and brick. Floors are stone rather than dirt. If only for a few hours a day, laundry, cooking and husbands seem far away for this second grade class.
Husbands?
According to Mrs. Habiba, the second grade teacher, and Mrs. Q’rmrun, the principal, over two-thirds of the nine-year-old girls sitting on the stone floor in a classroom an hour from Tora Bora were either already married or soon to become wives. Almost all of the older children were married, and only about one-third of the children who attended school in second grade continued to sixth grade.
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I am not joking. Good Lord, what is wrong with some people?
An elementary student in Marion County was arrested Thursday after school officials found her cutting food during lunch with a knife that she brought from home, police said.
The 10-year-old girl, a student at Sunrise Elementary School in Ocala, was charged possession of a weapon on school property, which is a felony.
According to authorities, school employees spotted the girl cutting her food while she was eating lunch and took the steak knife from her.
The girl told sheriff's deputies that she had brought the knife to school on more than one occasion in the past.
Students told officials that the girl did not threaten anyone with the knife.
The girl was arrested and transported to the Juvenile Assessment Center.
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Lou Dobbs is a CNN commentator who doesn't go along with the News Network's left-wing ideology. He's not particularly right-wing either, but he is very outspoken about his opposition to illegal immigration. And for the sin of believing that the laws on the books should be enforced, he is vilified to no end by the open-borders lobby.
He's on the air nearly every day, and like any other human sometimes he makes mistakes. He once misquoted the percentage of illegal immigrants in prisons (he should have made it clear he was speaking about federal prisons, not all prisons) and he quoted a much higher than accurate figure for leprosy cases among immigrants, basing it on a source that he believed was credible at the time.
Armed with this information, two interviewers all too obviously tried to ambush him on a program called "Democracy Now" earlier this month. His response is a lesson in how you can turn away wrath and remain an absolute gentleman at the same time. A sample of the conversation is below. Mrs. Goodman tries to smear the "Minutemen" (a private border-watching group) by innuendo, and Mr. Dobbs doesn't let her get away with it for a second:LOU DOBBS: Pro-illegal immigration, pro-open borders, both of you, ideologically—I understand that, and I can deal with that.
But the reality is, there is such a thing as the national interest. There is such a thing as the common good. And it’s not ethnocentric. It’s not group and identity politics. It’s all about this country, because this political system makes this economy possible. And the fact that people are starving in Mexico—and my heart goes out to them—the reality is there are five-and-a-half billion people in the world who are more impoverished than those folks in Mexico. And that land bridge does not give Felipe Calderon or Vicente Fox or any other group of activists the right to dictate the US immigration policy. That’s the reality.
AMY GOODMAN: Are you concerned with, among others, one of the founders of the Minutemen being found with a gun, patrolling the border; issues like these? This is of concern, when there are so many immigrants who are found in the desert dead, not clear why they die.
LOU DOBBS: Oh, are you implying that the Minutemen are killing them?
AMY GOODMAN: No. But just—
LOU DOBBS: Then why would you say such a thing?
AMY GOODMAN: My question is—
LOU DOBBS: That’s terrible, Amy. I mean, good Lord!
AMY GOODMAN: My question is, when—
LOU DOBBS: Let’s answer one question: has there ever been a single incident of violence recorded on the part of the Minutemen on the border?
AMY GOODMAN: I believe—wasn’t there—
LOU DOBBS: There has never been.
AMY GOODMAN: I’m not—haven’t there been cases of immigrants who come over the border, who have been chased, who have been shot at, who have been beaten?
LOU DOBBS: That would be an incident of violence. That would be an incident of violence, wouldn’t it? To my knowledge, there has never been an incident of violence on the part of the Minutemen.
AMY GOODMAN: But the idea of armed men on the border—
LOU DOBBS: Oh, come on!
AMY GOODMAN: —not authorized by the United States?
LOU DOBBS: Does it bother you that there are armed drug cartel members firing on law enforcement officers on the border, killing Mexican citizens, US citizens?
JUAN GONZALEZ: Absolutely.
LOU DOBBS: Does any of this bother you?
JUAN GONZALEZ: Absolutely does, yes.
LOU DOBBS: I would hope to heck it bothers you. Why would the Minutemen even be under discussion by comparison to that issue?
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At Slate.com, there is an advice columnist named "Prudence". One letter from last week's "Dear Prudence" was a classic:
Dear Prudence,I'm not a Republican (nor am I a Democrat) but I sympathize. I cannot believe how many people assume that because I'm in the military I must be against the War on Terror.
I am a woman in my 30s living in Portland, Ore. My husband is black. For some reason, at dinner parties, bars, you name it, people assume we're Democrats. We are not! Comments range from "Why do Republicans exist?" to "I hate conservatives" to worse. I've lived in highly conservative areas of the country, and never seemed to encounter such annoying habits from conservatives; neither did my husband. Do people assume this because of his skin color? Why do people assume everyone within earshot agrees with them? What is the correct response?
—Not a Democrat
On the monorail on the way home from the Pajamas Media party last night, I ran into a large family from England. The grandfather was left without a seat near the family, so he came and sat by me. We chatted and joked about Las Vegas and differences he had noted between the US and England and also Canada, where he lives now. And then he said something that he thought the US was a nice country, and then he did that speaking-out-of-the-side-of-his-mouth fake whisper thing and said something like, "We aren't really so fond of that president of yours, but other than that it's a good country." Then he went on to say how the rest of his family was happy to get rid of Blair since he was in bed with Bush.I love France, but I agree with her point. I'm not wild about the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, but I would never express this to a Russian I just met on the street.
...
I mean, really, who does this? Who thinks it's appropriate to insult the leader of a country in the first five minutes of meeting someone from that nation? I would never dream of doing this if I met a foreigner, and especially not in his country! I hated every aspect of living in France, and still I would never start bashing the country to a Frenchman I just met. It took me three years to tell my French relatives that I had a horrible experience in their country. Telling someone you just me is just so rude it's beyond my understanding.
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We have moved, our internet service provider has changed, and I am still unable to access this site from my work computer. So that's why there haven't been any updates in the last couple of days. By tomorrow I will have caught up with a lot of new material.
Of course, since this site is 100% free, with no advertising, and I still have my full time job as a soldier, I'm sure you are all very understanding :)
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This is a follow-up to the destroyed video tape story I wrote about earlier. When a CIA officer publicly speaks, you know that no matter what they say, somebody, somewhere, is going to put a political spin on the story. This one is no exception.
We now know a little more now about Zubaydah, the subject of the destroyed tapes, because John Kiriakou, a retired CIA agent, recently granted an interview with ABC New's Brian Ross (full transcript here: part 1, part 2). This was a rather unique interview because, as far as I know, no CIA official ever admitted to actually witnessing a waterboarding or describing it as "torture". And maybe they still haven't. Because here's the problem - Mr. Kiriakou was not present during Zubaydah's interrogations (although he was present at his initial capture and questioning), and despite the sensational ABC News headline ("CIA Spy Calls Waterboarding Necessary But Torture"), he never actually calls it "torture". Here is his exact quote:
But like a lot of Americans, I think I-- I'm involved in this-- this internal, intellectual battle with myself weighing the idea that water-boarding may be torture, versus the quality of information that we-- that we often get after using the water-boarding technique.Andrew Sullivan, of course falls for it hook, line, and sinker, and shows that he didn't even bother to read the article or the interview. Then he goes on to quote Ron Suskind to supposedly bolster his argument, even though Kiriakou directly contradicts Suskind at every turn. For those that don't know, Ron Suskind is a journalist-turned-author who has written several books highly critical of the Bush administration's War on Terror, such as the One Percent Doctrine. However, he has no actual experience in the war, and uses anonymous sources to bolster many of his arguments. Nevertheless pundits like Sullivan and Kevin Drum eat this stuff up because simply because it confirms their own political beliefs. Dig a little and they might not like what they see. For example, Suskind:
Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be....Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda's go-to guy for minor logistics...That completely contradicts John Kiriakou's account from the interview transcript (and unlike Suskind, he was actually there):
JOHN:And a little later:
One of the reasons why it was of such-- importance to us that night is the room where-- where he was when the raid began had a table in it. And on the table Abu Zubaydah and two other men were building a bomb. The soldering arm was still hot. And they had the plans for-- for a school on the table. So we knew that there were-- immediate threats that he could-- he could help us with.
BRIAN ROSS:
A school where?
JOHN:
In Lahore. In Lahore, Pakistan.
JOHN:
But what he was able to provide was information on the al Qaeda leadership. For example-- if bin Laden were to do X-- who would be the person to undertake such a-- such an operation? "Oh, logically that would be Mr. Y." And we were able to use that information to kind of get an idea of how al Qaeda operated, how it came about conceptualizing its operations, and-- and how it went about tasking different cells with carrying out operations.
BRIAN ROSS:
And in terms of the actual planned future attacks?
JOHN:
Yeah, we disrupted a lot of them.
They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety -- against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."But that also totally contradicts Kiriakou:
BRIAN ROSS:
And people were valuing what he said?
JOHN:
They were.
BRIAN ROSS:
Was he ever caught in a lie?
JOHN:
No.
BRIAN ROSS:
An exaggeration?
JOHN:
No. And we-- we really ran down everything that he said. Obviously, there are other sources to-- to corroborate-- things. And this is one way that you're able to vet the people that you're speaking with. And to the best of my recollection, he never led us down the wrong path.
"A former colleague of mine asked him during the conversation one day, 'What would you do if we decided to let you go one day?' And he said, 'I would kill every American and Jew I could get my hands on...It's nothing personal. You're a nice guy. But this is who I am.'"
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A short quiz: You are working as a news editor. Two stories pop up on the wire at the same time. Which one would you headline first?
a) A female suicide bomber detonates herself and kills 16 people in Muqdadiya, Iraq
b) The CIA destroys two videotapes that possibly recorded illegal interrogation on two suspects
If you were me, you would choose (a) (story here). If you are CNN, the BBC, Fox News (yes the "conservative" Fox News), and virtually every other major media outlet, you pick (b) instead; the CIA videotape story dominated all headlines on Friday, Dec 7, and continued as a major story throughout the weekend. I suppose the reasoning goes: who cares about the deaths of 16 nameless Arabs when you can hint at another Bush scandal?
But who am I to argue - according to all the experts, this "scandal" (even though it has nothing to do with Bush - yet) is really, really important. It may be the biggest scandal of all time. It may just turn our nation upside down. Really. Just ask the "pros". In no particular order:
1) According to Andrew Sullivan, this means the USA is now a "banana republic" and in order to "prove" his point, he posts a photo of a prisoner Abu Gharaib - the same one he has posted to his site no less than a dozen times!
2) Sen. Edward Kennedy compared the incident to the Watergate scandal, and along with other Democrats, demanded (another) official investigation. On the Huffington Post, he calls the news "startling" and, of course he's going to "demand answers", because you can't make a good show of faux outrage without "demanding answers" from somebody.
3) The World Socialist Web Site calls it "the brazen criminality of the Bush administration" and underscores the "immense dangers [the Bush administration] represents to the democratic rights of the people".
4) And of course, Crooks and Liars & Keith Olbermann, those ever-objective searchers for justice, do everything they can to link this to the Bush administration, and claim "multiple levels of crimes in play".
5) I can always count on John Cole at Balloon Juice to overreact by several degrees of magnitude, and he doesn't disappoint here. Of these two destroyed tapes, he says: "Welcome to the DPRK" (Democratic People's Republic of Korea - aka North Korea).
6) Think Progress appears to be astonished that Bush claims he didn't know the tapes were destroyed. Doesn't the President handle every document, every photo, and every tape of every interrogation?
7) Finally, kind of a groupthink of "experts" on Digg.com, which has covered this story on their front page no less than three times (maybe more).
Anyway, aside from the ludicrous theory that Bush is personally responsible for managing the disposition on every single prisoner we hold, there is another fly in the ointment for people trying to pin this all on the President. The White House counsel advised the CIA against destroying any tapes. Ooops! Better find another high-level target; I know, let's blame Rove for this one...
Look, here's the reality. If the CIA was ordered not to destroy those tapes, or if there was any reason to believe the tapes would be subpoenaed or entered into court evidence, then destroying them would be a crime. But keep in mind that classified materials are normally disposed of after a certain amount of time. According to the Washington Post, the tapes were destroyed three years after they were made - plenty of time to be entered into evidence if anyone had asked for them. Moreover, has anyone pointed to a legal theory over why the CIA was required to keep them in the first place? If they aren't required by law to tape all interrogations, then certainly they aren't required to hold on to those tapes either.
And changing the subject, I have another question - what about responsible use of government resources? Why destroy the tapes? Why not just copy over them and use them again?
Or why not just get with the 21st century and go digital?
For those of a conspiracy theory bent, David Frum at Free Republic comes up with an alternate theory about why the tapes were destroyed. It's a little far-fetched, but far less so than some of the grandstanders above...
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The altar cross, an adaptation of the Irish High Cross, comprises two equally long crossbeams through the sun wheel. Christ is portrayed as the risen Christ on the cross, surrounded by the symbols of the Four EvangelistsIn the end, it's better to focus on what people say and do, rather than that symbols they carry, since these can be misrepresented a dozen different ways, even by those who only mean well.
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Okinawa Marine pleads guilty to faking marriage to gain citizenshipAs anyone who reads this blog knows, I don't exactly come down soft on illegal immigration. I'm about has hard-core against it as someone can possibly be. And people who try to cheat the system usually make my blood boil. But this is one of the few times I would lean toward leniency. This was no welfare queen, having one baby after another and living off the government dole. Nor was this a drug dealer, or a terrorist (as far as we know). This is a woman who, by all accounts, honorably served in the US Marine corps for 15 years (9 as an officer, 6 as enlisted), including two tours in Iraq.
CAMP FOSTER, Okinawa — A Marine captain assigned to the Okinawa-based 1st Marine Aircraft Wing pleaded guilty Tuesday to faking a marriage to gain U.S. citizenship.
According to the U.S. Justice Department, Capt. Samar Khalil Nabbou Spinelli, 39, formerly of Lebanon, admitted in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan that she paid a Detroit-area man in 1990 to marry her so she could stay in the U.S. after her student visa expired and eventually become a citizen.
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To this story, I am absolutely speechless:
Girl, 7, shot 6 times saving momMiraculously, the child survived. To give a little more perspective on this courageous girl, she has a weak left eye and learning disability brought on by a stroke(!) she had as an infant. She is absolutely amazing.
DETROIT -- A 7-year-old-girl is being hailed as an "angel from heaven" and a hero for jumping in front of an enraged gunman, who pumped six bullets into the child as she used her body as a shield to save her mother's life.
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Before Tillie could fire again, Alexis jumped over the seat between her mother and the gunman and begged him not to shoot her mother.
The police report said Tillie "without hesitation" pumped six shots into the child.
Police find five children's corpses - Mother prime suspect (Polizei findet fünf Kinderleichen - Mutter dringend tatverdächtig)
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