Still on vacation

No updates until 2-3 Jan. I expect to post a large amount of material at that time.

(nothing follows)





Interested in reading more? Click on any label below to read related articles, bookmark this site, or subscribe to my  RSS Feed

Click here to continue reading...

Christmastime at war

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

Interested in reading more? Click on any label below to read related articles, bookmark this site, or subscribe to my  RSS Feed

Click here to continue reading...

Turkey: We have a "natural right" to EU membership

A five Euro note

Look at the map on the Euro note above. This picture is from the back of the 5 Euro, but I could have used any denomination with the same result. The map is dominated by Europe, but you also see parts of Turkey (at the lower right) and North Africa (lower left) in the picture. You also see a difference between the two: Europe is shaded a dark blue with highlights for mountainous areas, while Turkey and Africa are a flat shade of light blue. The wavy lines in the picture make this a little more difficult to see, but they are not nearly as pronounced on the actual bill (they show up far more strongly in photographs, perhaps as an anti-counterfeiting measure). If you happen to have a Euro note, I recommend you look at it instead.

The point is, the picture's colors make clear what Europe seems to know but Turkey does not: Turkey is not a European country. Only 3% of its land across the Bosporus is actually located in Europe, and more importantly, while Istanbul is on the European side, it's capital city, Ankara, is on the Asian side.

But Turkey is a formal candidate of the European Union, which it has been impatiently trying to join for many years. Talks are still progressing, and will take at least another decade. But what is rather disturbing now is the Turkey's foreign minister's statements that Turkey was "promised" membership (which is untrue), and that "Turkey has a 'natural right' to EU membership", an incredibly arrogant statement.

Where did he get that from? Why would any country have a "natural right" to join? Moreover, he bases this on what exactly? There are many, many reasons why Turkey as a nation is completely incompatible with the EU, and no it's not all because of religion, Turkey's common complaint.

To start with, it simply fails the first accession criteria, which according to the Maastricht Treaty means that you must be a European nation to join. And, of course, there are other problems, which I could write about all day, but I'll try to summarize into a few bullets:

1) Europe hasn't even come close to coping with the last round of EU additions.

2) Turkey's national debt is massive; its been a regular customer of the IMF for decades. According to the CIA world factbook, it's debt stands at 59.8% of it's GDP (almost as high as the USA).

3) If it joins the EU, the EU will suddenly see their security concerns escalate, as they now will share borders with Iran, Iraq, and Syria, as well as inherit the Kurdish problem.

4) Turkey still occupies Northern Cyprus in defiance of UN resolutions. In other words, they forcibly occupy the EU superstate that they wish to join.

5) To be realistic, Western Europe is already having enough troubles with integrating their Muslim populations as it is. Do I really need a link for this? Turkish membership would add a population flood unprecedented in European history, if its migration patterns of Turkey's past, as well as present Eastern European countries like Poland are any clue.

6) Polls across Europe show very strong opposition to Turkey's membership in the EU. According to Eurobarometer 66 (the last barometer to ask this question), only 28% of Europeans support Turkish membership into the EU, with 59% against (p. 223).

Maybe, someday, Turkey would qualify as a member without having to beg. But I am not hopeful of this. Why? Turkey's economy has historically simply grown at a far slower pace than European countries. Here's just one illustration of this: In 2004, just before Poland joined the EU, it's per capita income stood at $13,275 in US Dollars, far below the EU average. But Turkey stood far below this at only $7,400. How could this be? The difference is even more striking when you consider that Poland was devastated during WWII and then suffered 45 years of communist rule over the economy. Turkey, on the other hand, had neither of these problems yet it's per-capita wealth still stood at just more than half that of Poland. The reasons for this are many, but it could probably be boiled down to the issue of culture and religion. Although it's officially a secular country, 99% of Turks are Muslims, and universally, Muslim nations tend to be quite poor unless they have huge oil deposits to draw from (author Bernard Lewis highlighted many of these problems between Islam and the economy in his excellent book, The Crisis of Islam).

Both presidents Clinton and Bush strongly supported Turkish EU membership, mainly in a desire to keep Turkey firmly in the NATO camp and out of a fear that rejection by the West might fuel a slide toward Islamic extremism. But if that is a concern, isn't that a red flag in itself? That's akin to remaining married to an abuser because you fear he will get worse if you leave. Turkey should join on its own merits, not by threats or the fears of others.





Interested in reading more? Click on any label below to read related articles, bookmark this site, or subscribe to my  RSS Feed

Click here to continue reading...

Two destroyed tapes - overreact much?

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 CIA

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.

I 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.

And even if you did abolish the CIA, the organization that replaced it would be made up of largely the same people, doing the same things, and eventually people would call for it to be abolished too. Meanwhile you rack up millions upon millions of dollars in costs during the transition (I'm not joking here either - even simply replacing the CIA logo from buildings, ID cards and letterheads could cost millions by itself).

In another example of supreme melodrama:

Torture Tapes are the Watergate of Our Times

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.

"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"?

While the political pundits are obsessing over this, and the media at large are obsessed with the pregnancy of Britney Spear's younger sister, real issues are being ignored...

I wonder if we'll hear the worldwide community condemn this?:

Iraq 'torture complex' discovered

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.

Does anyone really think we shouldn't be fighting psychopaths like this?

Incidentally, Major General Mark Hertling is the commander of the 1st Armored Division, my Division commander (I stayed behind with the rear elements of the Division back in Germany, because I just came back from deployment earlier this year).





Interested in reading more? Click on any label below to read related articles, bookmark this site, or subscribe to my  RSS Feed

Click here to continue reading...

The Dixie Chicks reap what they sow

Magazine cover of the band - part of a deliberate effort to portray themselves as victims

I found this story on the front page of Reddit.com. The irony here is incredible. The Female Country Band, the "Dixie Chicks" have an article on their MSN web site:

The story of the mother who taught her child to hate a perfect stranger

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.

I'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:

“That just made me bawl because I just witnessed someone learn[ing] to hate and I didn't know that kind of hatred existed.”

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.

OK, so the Dixie Chicks are sensitive women. What is the problem? Read on...

The problem is that Natalie Maines, the lead singer, is the same woman who publicly said she was ashamed of the President of the United States, that President Bush is a "dumb F**k", and publicly wore a T-Shirt with the letters "FUTK", which stood for "F**k you Toby Keith", a reference to a rival country singer.

So where did Andrea learn to hate? Maybe from the Chicks themselves. The pot calls the kettle black because she has no reflection to see herself.





Interested in reading more? Click on any label below to read related articles, bookmark this site, or subscribe to my  RSS Feed

Click here to continue reading...

Military expert: "we have lost this war" - but how is the enemy doing? [Updated]

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.

Now, granted, there will never be any clear-cut victory in Iraq or Afghanistan because these are not clear-cut wars. For the same reason, you won't have a clear-cut defeat either. Even in non-war zones like Algeria, Pakistan, and Turkey (to name a few) have all suffered major terrorist bombings this year, even though the United States is not occupying any of those countries. Are they winning or losing? Should they stop fighting?

So what would be a victory then? Maybe it would be something like weakening terror groups like Al-Qaida so badly that they cannot mount another major attack, and its few surviving elements remain in hiding and on the run. Which is, in fact, exactly what has happened. When Mr. Sullivan states "We have not stymied Islamist terror" I wonder if he would like to point out any attacks like the Cole bombing, Embassy bombings, or 9/11 that have occurred since the war on terror started.

And that leads to my next point. In any case, if you want to know who is "winning" it is only fair to also compare how well the enemy is doing on their objectives. There is more than one enemy involved here, so let's take a broad look:

1) End US support of Israel and force the US to shut down its military bases in Saudi Arabia (Al Qaida's reasons for attacking us on 9/11) - Failed [or partial success, see update below].

2) Hold on to Taliban power in Afghanistan - Failed.

3) Defend Saddam's regime - Failed.

4) Drive coalition forces out of Iraq or Afghanistan - Failed.

5) Set up Shia/Sunni religious theocracies in Iraq - Failed.

6) Force the US to at least drawdown their forces in Iraq or Afghanistan - Failed. (we gave them a surge instead).

7) Make territorial gains - Failed.

8) Openly control any terrritory at all - Failed.

9) Win popular support of the population of Iraq or Afghanistan - Failed.

9) Turn world opinion against the US - Partially Succeeded.

10) Terrorize people - Succeeded.

So overall, America's enemies are not doing very well. One might even be tempted to say they are losing...

Incidentally, I am not endorsing any candidate at this time, nor am I likely to. I believe it is not productive toward trying to remain objective on the issues. I think it's better to simply say what I like and/or dislike about them, and leave it at that.


UPDATE 2007/12/20 12:01:00 PM:
Andrew Sullivan wrote me to say: "didn't we pull the bases in saudi arabia?"

This is mostly true, so I should make a partial correction. We did pull (by official numbers) about 4500 troops from Saudia Arabia, most were Air Force personnel that relocated in Qatar. But about 500 US military personnel still remain in the Saudi Kingdom, most of them belong to the 64th Air Expeditionary Group in Eskan Village, which is about 20k SE of Riyadh (that official page is very sparse, more on their wiki page). So I suppose that by Al-Qaida's viewpoint, this is a partial success of one of their key objectives, even though the bases were closed more due to redundancy and disagreements with the Saudi government than anything else.


SECOND UPDATE 2007/12/20 05:57:00 PM:
Mr. Sullivan mentioned me on his blog, which I appreciate, but he misses my point. To my statement "When Mr. Sullivan states 'We have not stymied Islamist terror' I wonder if he would like to point out any attacks like the Cole bombing, Embassy bombings, or 9/11 that have occurred since the war on terror started.", he responds:

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.

In any case, I was only speaking about US interests. I wasn't talking about places like Madrid, London, or Bali, which, btw, have a far greater percentage of Muslims in their populations than the US does. Not because I'm not concerned about these nations too (and I have written about them, plus I live in Europe), but simply because the US is not actively engaged in fighting terror in those countries, nor does it have the right to do so. Even if we were 100% successful in destroying Al-Qaida in the Middle East, we can't do anything about terrorists who are beyond our reach under the theory (sometimes true, sometimes not) that our allies are better at policing themselves instead of having US soldiers do it. I understand that we should be conscious of the effect that a war in the Middle East may have elsewhere, but Spain and the UK were full-fledged members of the coalition in Iraq, no one forced them to join.

But in the larger point, if you want to claim that the US's War on Terror should have the goal of making the entire world safer, then the entire world, or at least all the world's leaders, would have to get on board with it. Of course, I don't have a crystal ball, and I can't see what would have happened if the US had pulled its support for Israel and/or and decided to seek compromise with Saddam or Al Qaida instead of war. But I would be willing to bet the result would have been very unpleasant. At the very least, some of the terrorist objectives above labelled "failure" would now read "success" instead.





Interested in reading more? Click on any label below to read related articles, bookmark this site, or subscribe to my  RSS Feed

Click here to continue reading...

UNICEF's photo of the year: This is wrong

Mohammed, 40, Ghulam, 11. Embedded from Spiegel

I found this story at Spiegel Online. A 40 year old man marries an 11 year old girl. And this is not unusual in Afghanistan. I hardly know what to say, except that this disgusts me to no end. Translated from German:

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.

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.

Later, a caption in the photo essay (with several other striking pictures) reads:

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.

I'll put this in my own perspective; I am 40 years old (although I look a heck of a lot younger than this guy). And I could never, in my wildest dreams imagine getting married to someone that age - a girl who likely has not even hit puberty yet, and has no idea what she's getting into. Even when I was 20, even when I was 16... heck, for that matter, even when I was 11 it never even crossed my mind to get married to an 11 year old girl. Furthermore, I have a daughter 9 years old - only two years younger than this "bride". Do these parents value this girl so little? No amount of money is worth this kind of disgrace, and nothing will bring another stolen childhood back.

Since I am not desperately poor, I know that it is presumptive to put myself in the shoes of Ghulam's parents. There are a lot of things I might do if I were poor enough. But since my children are my greatest treasure, I know I would never sell them. No matter what. Moreover, even in a poor country, there are plenty of adult women who would like to find a husband. Why does this man need a child, unless pedophilia is his thing? Why does his society condone it?

Unfortunately, Mohammed is just following the example of his namesake, the prophet Mohammed. From the Sahih Bukhari Hadith:

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).""

In other words, Mohammed was 52 and had sex with a 9 year old girl. Not surprisingly, this is a topic that is not often openly discussed among Muslims today. But as the article says, these marriages are not as rare as you might think.

According to a UNICEF report:

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.

In Iran, the legal age of marriage is nine years old (14 for boys), and it is widely believed that the Ayatollah Khomeini married a ten year old girl when he was 28.





Interested in reading more? Click on any label below to read related articles, bookmark this site, or subscribe to my  RSS Feed

Click here to continue reading...

10 year old girl arrested for cutting food

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.

If you have a zero-tolerance policy, and all students have been made aware of it, then I can understand suspending this girl, even though I would still see it as a gross overreaction. But to call the police??

Don't police have anything better to do than arrest 10 year old kids for using a kitchen utensil the way it was intended to be used?

Fine, let's play that game. If I were the parents of this girl, I would insist that the school call the police for every violation of the law on school grounds. To do anything less would be discrimination. Schoolyard fighting = Assault & Battery. Unwanted touching = Sexual harassment/Sexual assault. Swiping someone's pencil = Theft of Private Property. Of course, it's not entirely a joke. It really does happen sometimes.

If they had decided to do this in my day, I would have gone to jail at least one hundred times. So would every student I knew. What ever happened to schools handling this kind of thing themselves? Then again, once upon a time, teachers were allowed to actually discipline students without getting sued (such as here). Go even farther back, and they were allowed to use canes on the student's backsides. OK - maybe that's too far back. Why don't we just split the difference and set the clock back halfway and leave it at that? Not all progress is good progress, and sometimes our parents and teachers of the previous generation knew what they were doing.

Some more comments on this story can be found here.





Interested in reading more? Click on any label below to read related articles, bookmark this site, or subscribe to my  RSS Feed

Click here to continue reading...

Lou Dobbs fights off critics

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?

Interested in reading more? Click on any label below to read related articles, bookmark this site, or subscribe to my  RSS Feed

Click here to continue reading...

Assuming a stranger's political views

At Slate.com, there is an advice columnist named "Prudence". One letter from last week's "Dear Prudence" was a classic:

Dear Prudence,

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

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.

People will complain in front of me about the "illegal war" and the "chickenhawks" and "fighting keyboardists" who support it. When I point out that I support it, and I've been there, then they are usually polite, but obviously disappointed. But sometimes the responses are less than polite, and other times they turn into lunacy. On a mailing list I used to contribute to (before I started this blog) a couple of people accused me of being paid to spread propaganda supporting the war!

Sara at Trying to Grok brings up a good point in a similar assumptive encounter with an Englishman:

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 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.

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.

For countries that have no voice in choosing their leadership (Cuba, North Korea, etc) I might make an exception - if I was out of the reach of the secret police...





Interested in reading more? Click on any label below to read related articles, bookmark this site, or subscribe to my  RSS Feed

Click here to continue reading...

Access difficulties

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 :)

Interested in reading more? Click on any label below to read related articles, bookmark this site, or subscribe to my  RSS Feed

Click here to continue reading...

A CIA officer speaks on Zubaydah

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:
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.

And a little later:

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.

Suskind also claimed that Zubaydah was making up information, sending us on wild goose chases:

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.

At least Steve Benen at Carpetbagger Report was astute enough to notice the discrepancy, but remarks: "At this point, I have no idea who’s right about this".

Yes, it must be hard to decide between a CIA officer who was actually there in 2002, vs. an ivory tower journalist with an axe to grind. I know these decisions are tough.

Finally, just so we know what we're up against, this quote from Zubaydah is particularly enlightening:

"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.'"

Interested in reading more? Click on any label below to read related articles, bookmark this site, or subscribe to my  RSS Feed

Click here to continue reading...

Destroying two video tapes = end of democracy?

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...





Interested in reading more? Click on any label below to read related articles, bookmark this site, or subscribe to my  RSS Feed

Click here to continue reading...

A short post on Celtic/Solar/Odin crosses

Inside the Chapel of St. Birgid

If you are a regular reader of Little Green Footballs (like me), then you may have followed this controversy. If not, you may be a little lost, but bear with me.

Recently, LGF, an anti-Islamic terror blog (and one of the most popular web sites in America, if not the world), has had a running dispute with Gates of Vienna, Brussels Journal, and several other conservative sites over the issue of whether the "Vlaams Belang", a Belgian political party that is critical of Islamic immigration, should be considered a white supremacist group or not. This issue has come up recently because the recent electoral crisis in Belgium, which has still failed to form a governing coalition even after five months of negotiations following the last election.

I really disliked this dispute, because normally these web sites are all on the same side of 99% of the time. It's like watching two good friends fighting with one another, and I frankly don't want to choose between them. If there is any bright side here, it demonstrates that many people who are calling for a slowdown to Islamic immigration in Europe are not all racists, and vigorously do not want to be associated with supremacist groups in any way. I haven't taken any sides regarding the Vlaams Belang (yet), except that I believe one of their popular symbols, the Celtic cross, is being misrepresented. Part of the controversy revolves around the cross (also known as a "solar cross", "Odin's cross", "Caddo cross", and other names) and whether it is necessarily a symbol for white supremacism.

I would vote no, since one hangs in our local Church, the Catholic Church of St. Birgid, in Wiesbaden-Bierstadt, Germany. In fact, until this controversy, I didn't even really notice it until mass today. Since the congregation includes people of many different races, is heavily involved in missionary/charity work in Africa, and has treated myself and my own mixed-race family (my wife is Asian) with nothing but friendship and consideration, I can confidently state that it isn't a front for white supremacism. In fact, the Church itself has been a target of intolerance; just last month a group of unknown persons broke into the chapel and severely vandalized it, causing many thousands of euros worth of damage.

So why do they use this particular cross? It was probably more of a style issue than anything else. As described in the Wiesbaden tourism website:

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 Evangelists

In 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.

Wider view of the Chapel, the ladder and coverings are from repainting over recent vandalism

Interested in reading more? Click on any label below to read related articles, bookmark this site, or subscribe to my  RSS Feed

Click here to continue reading...

Marine Corps Officer charged with citizenship fraud

Samar Spinelli

This was today's headline in the European Stars & Stripes:

Okinawa Marine pleads guilty to faking marriage to gain citizenship

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.

As 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.

Certainly, she has to lose her citizenship, since her paperwork was invalid. And this leads to a kind of domino effect. As a non-US citizen, she can't hold a regular security clearance, which means she can't be a commissioned officer any more. In turn, this means she must leave the Marine Corps. Unfortunately there is nothing that can be done about this, although theoretically, since she is now in a legitimate marriage with a US citizen (another Marine captain) she could apply for citizenship again. But it's very unlikely it would be approved anytime soon.

In addition to all of the above, she faces the possibility of months of jail time, deportation, and a bar to re-entry into the United States. Unlike the above, these are all things that do not need to happen.

If all this is done, it seems like both sides really lose. Considering her service to this country, is jail really warranted? And deporting her from the country will put an additional strain on her children and the life/career of her Marine husband.

Here's an alternate idea. Instead of going to jail, how about something more productive, such as requiring her to serve out the remainder of her obligation as an enlisted Marine (enlisted personnel do not need security clearances)? But unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. As far as I know, there is no legal mechanism in the armed forces that lets you demote an officer down to an enlisted rank. All I can do is wish her the best. She made an unfortunate choice many years ago, and now has to live with the consequences of that decision. But I would also hate to see her go.

Samar Spinelli was caught as part of a wider investigation of a friend of hers who joined the FBI under similar false pretenses and another woman, whose husband was charged with tax evasion in a scheme to conceal more than $20 million destined to go to people in Lebanon, some of whom had ties with Hezbollah. I do not advocate leniency for anyone involved in that nonsense. I'm not privy to all the facts of the case, but from what I've read, Spinelli had not had ties to any of those people for years, and there was no reason to question her loyalty or her service record. Other right-of-center sites are not quite so generous as I am, but they do have reason to be concerned. I suspect that this is something that happens far more often than most people realize.





Interested in reading more? Click on any label below to read related articles, bookmark this site, or subscribe to my  RSS Feed

Click here to continue reading...

Two tales of violent crime and children

To this story, I am absolutely speechless:

Girl, 7, shot 6 times saving mom

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.
...
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.

Miraculously, 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.

This is also the kind of story that makes Europeans feel superior to the violent, crazy gun culture in America. But while you don't hear much about it in the press, similar happens in Europe too, even worse sometimes. And even without guns.

Here's one such story from Germany today, reported in Der Spiegel today (in German):

Police find five children's corpses - Mother prime suspect (Polizei findet fünf Kinderleichen - Mutter dringend tatverdächtig)

To give a brief summary: In Plön district in the German state Schleswig-Holstein, officials visited a woman's home after her children hadn't shown up for school in some time, and found the bodies of the children, all boys between 3 and 9 years old. The 31 year-old mother had a history of mental illness, and police claimed she said she had killed them, but no details were available yet. The initial report was that they were poisoned and/or suffocated with a plastic bag.

Stories like this are terribly depressing. But they happen more often in Europe than some people think.





Interested in reading more? Click on any label below to read related articles, bookmark this site, or subscribe to my  RSS Feed

Click here to continue reading...

TNR apologizes (sort of)

In regard to the Beauchamp/TNR scandal a few months back, Frank Foer, editor of The New Republic, makes a reluctant retraction and now claims that "we cannot stand by these stories". Unfortunately, we have to sift through no less than 14 pages of excuses and snide remarks against his critics before he even gives us that grudging non-apology.

Essentially, Foer gives a dozen excuses, blaming it all on the difficulties of the circumstances and on the Army's lack of cooperation (in fact the article is even titled "Fog of War"). Nowhere does it occur to him that it wasn't the Army's job to disprove Beauchamp's stories, but rather TNR's job to prove them!

He also claims that the magazine tried to do the right thing all along. Since I don't work for TNR, I couldn't tell you if that is true or not. But to my mind, doing the "right thing" would include a real apology, with the actual words "I apologize" or "we're sorry" in it. And that apology could extend to his critics (like me) whom he relentlessly attacked. He also demanded an apology himself, so now that he knows he was in the wrong, why doesn't he apply that same standard to himself?

After all, this was the same man who said:

I just wish that ... those in the blogosphere who kind of move from one reckless allegation to another reckless allegation for once apologize when they get something wrong.

Speaking of apologies, here's a couple other Ivory Tower folks who could stand to do so as well:

Andrew Sullivan:

Can we now expect apologies from the people who smeared and maligned the magazine and its soldier-reporter? I doubt it. The attackers are not the kind to acknowledge their own errors.

Or his twin at the Atlantic, Matthew Yglesias:

as best I can tell nobody has yet brought forward any serious reason to doubt his story...
All these people [Beauchamp's critics] need to stop. They need to take a deep breath. They need to apologize to the people at TNR who've wasted huge amounts of time dealing with their nonsense.

Well, instead of simply saying "I'm sorry" or "I was wrong", Yglesias takes Foer's lead of obfuscation, and calls the whole thing "hardly significant", the TNRs critics "crazed hawks", and then tries to change the subject to a recent fake story scandal at the conservative NRO, which is also regrettable incident, but one doesn't make up for the other.

In fact, while Yglesias rips into the NRO with one insult after another, he gives us not even a single derogatory term directed at the people who actually wrote or published the bogus TNR story. Translation: He believes it's scandalous when the political right does it, but understandable when it comes from a left-wing sympathetic view. Personally, I thought all dishonest reporting was equally reprehensible, no matter what side of the political spectrum it comes from. But that's just me.

Gawker.com also has a good take on the TNR's "apology".





Interested in reading more? Click on any label below to read related articles, bookmark this site, or subscribe to my  RSS Feed

Click here to continue reading...

Gathering of Links

Who is this woman? See the 8th item below

Not as much time available for blogging right now, so I make up for it with this marvellous gathering of links you may have missed from this past week:

FRANCE: The immigrant riots in France are receiving little exposure in the US media. They are smaller in scale, but already far more violent than anything in 2005. Rioters are using guns and makeshift cannons on police officers. One police chief was beaten and nearly killed by a mob of “youths”. Of course, the usual politicos are taking the usual sides, but can we at least acknowledge that the problem is not entirely French racism? Can we consider that the widespread refusal of Muslims to assimilate into European society has something to do with this?


NORTH KOREA: The Weekly Standard points out several recent reports that hint at an imminent collapse of the North Korean government. Would be wonderful, if true, although it's still likely this appalling regime will drag out for dozens of more years. Thinking out loud, sometimes I wish we would just attack and get it over with. I have a question for true pacifists: should war always be avoided at all costs? Knowing what we know now, are the at least hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of North Koreans killed over the last 50 years due to slow starvation and mass imprisonment, preferable to the dead we would have in a relatively short war?


USA: George Borjas gives a synopsis of a recent comprehensive study of illegal immigration. Bottom line, (as I have said many times myself), immigration is at a historic high in US history. Money quote:

what we have been seeing in recent years is the "foreignization" of poverty. This is a trend with long-term consequences that are not yet fully appreciated.

SAUDI ARABIA: Pot and Kettle. In the same week a Saudi woman is threatened with 200 lashes for the crime of being a rape victim, the Saudis complain to US congressmen about the “harassment” of Saudi students living in the United States. Not mentioned in the article, are the actions of a few other well-known Saudi students who were last seen alive on Sep 11, 2001.


USA: “Redacted”, an anti-war film by Brian De Palma, bombs big at the box office. This falls right in line with my previous predictions here.


GERMANY: After only 60 years, a vast archive of Holocaust-related documents is released to the public in Germany. To say this “begs a question” is the understatement of the year: what took them so #$%&*@ long?? Gee whiz, don’t you think this might have been a little more useful for families of the victims back in the 20th century instead of the 21st? Oh, and here’s the kicker – it’s not the German government that was dragging its feet here, but the International Red Cross!


IRAN: A window on the little-known world of drug use and child prostitution in Iran. Even when forced into prostitution at age 9, the Iranian government later sentences such girls to death. Thankfully, some have won their appeals and managed to get their lives back on track.


UK: One woman’s experiment to see whether people treat her differently when she goes from a 36A to a 36DD bust size. The results are rather predictable, but amusing nonetheless. Even women react poorly...


WORLD: Some good news on trees (for a change). If you believe the official UN report, almost a billion trees were planted across the world in 2007. One place that desperately needs them, Indonesia, planted 80 million.


TURKEY: Three converts to Christianity are on trial in Turkey, a country that is supposedly so progressive that it's on track to join the European Union one day.


USA: Richard “Dickie” Scruggs, probably the wealthiest and most powerful trial lawyer of all time, has been indicted for bribery charges and faces up to 75 years in prison. This hasn’t received much play in the media (maybe because he's a major fundraiser for the Democratic Party.) This is a man who got billions suing tobacco companies, and won huge settlements against insurance companies who wouldn’t pay for flood damage from hurricane Katrina. The NYT, his biggest fan, has been rather silent on the issue – it’s a far cry from earlier glowing profiles such as this one, that tried to portray the man as another victim who lost his house to the hurricane, as if he were one of the homeless poor. What they don't mention is that this was just one of many homes for him. Recent coverage of the indictment here.


USA: Professors at Columbia University are upset about the September visit by the President of Iran. They aren’t upset about the Iranian Presidents statements about Jews, the Holocaust, or the status of human rights in Iran, but rather that the President of the University was actually harsh with such a man. Someone please explain this to me, because I can't understand it either.


AFRICA/EUROPE: Africa’s sun and deserts to be harnessed for electrical power in Europe? We’re not quite there, and there are certainly terrorism concerns, but on a basic level the idea is pure brilliance.





Interested in reading more? Click on any label below to read related articles, bookmark this site, or subscribe to my  RSS Feed

Click here to continue reading...