DeCapiGate

The Associated Press, Reuters, and a small Iraqi Independent news agency called Voice of Iraq released stories Thursday about the massacre of 20 men near Salman Pak, who were supposedly found decapitated on the banks of the Tigris River.

But something seemed inherently wrong with the accounts I read from the Associated Press. The only two sources for the Associated Press article were anonymous police, not located in Salman Pak, but from Baghdad (more than dozen miles away) and Kut (more than 75 miles away).

Because of this odd sourcing, I asked Multi-National Corps-Iraq and the PAO liaison to the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior to investigate.

I published their preliminary findings as they came out in Bring Me The Head of Kim Gamel.

This morning, MNF-I PAO published an official denunciation of this story:

June 30, 2007 Release A070630c

Extremists using false media reporting to incite sectarian violence

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Friday, news media reported a mass killing in a village near Salman Pak where 20 men were allegedly found beheaded. It now appears that the story was completely false and fabricated by unknown sources.

Upon learning of the press reports, coalition and Iraqi officials began investigating to determine if the reports were true. Ultimately it was concluded the reports were false.

Anti-Iraqi Forces are known for purposely providing false information to the media to incite violence and revenge killings, and they may well have been the source of this misinformation.

“Extremists promote falsehoods of mass killings, collateral damage and other violence specifically to turn Iraqis against other Iraqis,” said Rear Admiral Mark Fox, spokesperson for MNF-I. “Unfortunately, lies are much easier to state, the truth often takes time to prove,” said Fox.

Not all media reports can be immediately substantiated by Government of Iraq or Coalition Forces. They must go through a process to verify such claims, to include checking with various Iraqi Ministry’s, local police and security forces. Meanwhile, extremists have achieved their goal of spreading false information aimed at intimidating civilians and destabilizing Iraqi security.

Ultimately, media reporting based on verifiable sources will reduce the possibility of misinformation unnecessarily alarming citizens.

The Associated Press, Reuters, and Voices of Iraq should immediately apologize for publishing this completely false story, and push for immediate retractions. The Associated Press should admit full responsibility for not following good journalistic practices of verifying a story though legitimate responsible sources, as they were in a headlong, reckless rush to publish.

Update: Something somewhat related, from StrategyPage:

...the Japanese psychological warfare effort during World War II included radio broadcasts that could be picked up by American troops. Popular music was played, but the commentary (by one of several English speaking Japanese women) always hammered away on the same points;

1. Your President (Franklin D Roosevelt) is lying to you.
2. This war is illegal.
3. You cannot win the war.

The troops are perplexed and somewhat amused that their own media is now sending out this message.

(Thank Ace for the title of this post)

Update: AFP is now carrying the story.

The US military accused the international media on Saturday of exacerbating Iraq's violent tensions by reporting false claims of massacres which it said were deliberately fabricated by extremist groups.

This week several newspapers and agencies reported that Iraqi police had found 20 beheaded corpses in Salman Pak, just south of Baghdad.

AFP did not carry the report after its sources were unable to confirm the rumour.

Wouldn't it be nice if the Associated Press had those same standards?

Car Bomb Discovered in London

Luckily, alert paramedics called to a nightclub to attend a sick patron alerted police to a smoking car, who were able to diffuse it on scene.

The Guardian has the details:

A bomb made from gas cylinders, petrol and nails was found in an abandoned car in central London today, sparking a major terrorism alert. Peter Clarke, the Scotland Yard head of counter-terrorism, said the device, discovered in Haymarket - one of the capital's main nightlife districts - could have killed or injured many people.

"Even at this stage, it is obvious that, if the device had detonated, there could have been serious injury or loss of life," he said. "It was busy, and many people were leaving nightclubs."

Mr Clarke added that police had gathered CCTV evidence, but said it was too early to speculate about who could have been responsible.

[snip]

Mr Clarke said experts called to the scene found "significant quantities of petrol, together with a number of gas cylinders". "I cannot tell you how much petrol was in the car as we have not had a chance to measure, it but there were several large containers," he added.

Earlier, witnesses said they saw the light metallic green saloon car being driven erratically. It then crashed into bins before the driver ran away.

Police are searching landmark sites across London for further explosive devices, and are unsure whether the bomb was a lone device or one of several deployed across the capital. No warnings were received.

The attempted bombing in one of London's busiest districts is the first major challenge for Gordon Brown, who just succeeded Tony Blair as Britain's Prime Minister.

At this time, police have not associated the bomb with any specific group.

Closed-circuit security cameras posted in the area may have captured images of the bomber. Unverified witness accounts state that the vehicle had been driven erratically before crashing into trash bins, at which point the driver abandoned the vehicle on foot.

Because the vehicle crashed, I'm not certain that we can assume that the location the vehicle was found was the original target. If the eyewitnesses are correct--and we know that sometimes, eyewitness accounts can be contradictory--it sounds as if the bomb may have begun smoldering, causing the driver to panic, crash, and flee the scene.

I'm sure we'll know more as this story develops.

Bring Me the Head Of Kim Gamel

Many of us awoke this morning to a disturbing Associated Press account of extreme barbarity coming out of Iraq:

Twenty beheaded bodies were discovered Thursday on the banks of the Tigris River southeast of Baghdad and a car bomb killed another 20 people in one of the capital's busy outdoor bus stations, police said.

The beheaded remains were found in the Sunni Muslim village of Um al-Abeed, near the city of Salman Pak, which lies 14 miles southeast of Baghdad.

The bodies all men aged 20 to 40 had their hands and legs bound, and some of the heads were found next to the bodies, two officers said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.

Another version of the Associated Press story provided a bit more detail about the two anonymous Iraqi police officers who were the sources for the story.

Shockingly, they weren't there at all:

One of the police officers is based in Baghdad and the other in Kut, 100 miles southeast of the capital. The Baghdad officer said he learned of the discovery because Iraq's Interior Ministry, where he works, sent troops to the village to investigate. The Kut officer said he first heard the report through residents of the Salman Pak area.

I'm not Associated Press reporter Sinan Salheddin, nor am I Kim Gamel, AP's Baghdad news editor, but if I was investigating a story about a 20-corpse mass murder in—let's say, Manhattan—then I'd try to find a local police officer at the scene to interview about the case.

I wouldn't rely on a desk sergeant in Staten Island who merely heard reports of other officers being dispatched to check to see if there was such a crime, nor would I rely on a beat cop in Albany Fishkill who is only reporting rumors of what he heard from friends of relatives in Queens.

But the Associated Press didn't rely on the local police. Instead, they blatantly presented hearsay as the truth, and as a result, ran a story about a brutal massacre that currently appears to have never taken place.

Shortly after reading the AP's dubious "cousin in Kut" sourcing, I contacted several sources of my own, and which led to the following being released to me via email this evening from Multi-National Forces-Iraq:

We've been working on this query here at the Multi-National Forces Iraq Press Desk throughout the day and have been unable to confirm any of these reports of the 20 bodies at Salman Pak. After communicating with the Iraqi police and searching the area with some of our helicopters, we've been unable to find any evidence that proves the initial "report".

You were also very observant and correct to notice that these initial statements were from areas nowhere near the claimed location of the discovery which also leads us to question the validity of this report.

Until we turn up any clear evidence, we've concluded that this is an unsubstantiated claim but we'll let you know if we hear anything otherwise in the next 24 hours.

The email was signed by LCDR K.C. Marshall, U.S. Navy.

For the second time in less than year, the Associated Press seems to have run a story of a horrific massacre involving 20 or more people, using police officers not assigned to the area as their primary sources. For the second time in less than a year, it appears that there is no physical evidence that so much as a single person has died.

This time, if 20 heads cannot be recovered near Salman Pak, perhaps an equal number should roll at the Associated Press.

6/29 Update: In addition to MNF-I in researching the AP claim, I contacted Ron Holbrook, assigned to the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior Transition Team Public Affairs Office (the MOI runs the Iraqi Police).

This morning, he states via email:

I can not confirm anything at this time.

While more ambiguous than LCDR Marshall's statement, I take this to mean that the Iraqi Police have been unable to confirm the existence of any decapitated bodies in Um-al Abeed.

It is very much starting to look like the Associated Press has falsely reported yet another non-existent massacre, using a sourcing methodology that reports unconfirmed hearsay from anonymous off-site sources as facts.

If this story is conclusively debunked, (meaning no bodies are found), the Associated Press will owe it to their readers and the news agencies they provide with information a full accounting of why they continue to fail to verify claims before presenting them as news.

Further Update: Via email, Eason Jordan, formerly of CNN, notes that both Reuters and Voices of Iraq have also made this same claim as the Associated Press.

I can't find the Reuters account (if you do, please drop it in the comments), but the VOI account seems to use the same sort of anonymous police sources as does the AP.

Further MNF-I Update: LCDR Marshall again:

Sir, we still have no further information that would substantiate the initial "reports". I believe that there's going to be a statement in the next day that will emphasize this; I will send it to you when it's released.

You heard the man: an official denial may be released as early as tomorrow.

Things are not looking good for the Associated Press, who has now twice allowed shoddy reporting methodology and incredibly poor sourcing to damage the credibilty of the Associated Press and those news organizations that rely upon the AP to deliver timely, accurate information.

In related news, CY commenter Dusty Rafferty has found the Reuters article noted by Eason Jordan. You can read it here. It appears Reuters has also fallen for the same, or similar, anonymous police sources. Should we be calling for Rueters to explain how they allowed themselves to fall for the same apparently false story?

You bet.

07/06/07 Update: Ever able to miss the overall point, an observant liberal snarks via email that the distance from Albany to New York City is 130+ miles, and so my analogy is geographically inaccurate--as if a cop in Fishkill, NY would be any more knowledgeable about an event in NYC than the cop in Albany would. Whatever. I'm sure you all understand the analogy just so much more now that it is geographically precise. Right?

Something or Nothing Open Thread

Yeah, I know that the amnesty Bill has gone down in flames and that other things of importance are happening in the world, but I'm attempting to run something down that may either be nothing, or something, and don't have time to really get into too much else at the moment.

As I'm going to be a slacker, enjoy yourself: I this is going to be the first open thread here, ever (at least as far as I recall).

Touch gloves, come out swinging, and please keep all punches above the belt.

Quietly Making Noise

It is with such mundane, rarely reported stories such as these, that counterinsurgencies take hold.

Thanks for stepping up, guys:

For a second time this week, a large cache consisting of improvised explosive device-making material and mortar rounds was turned over to Coalition Forces by the "Neighborhood Watch" in Taji, Iraq.

The Taji neighborhood watch contacted Coalition Forces June 25, after the driver of a truck fled the scene when the volunteers stopped a suspicious vehicle moving through the rural village of Abd Allah al Jasim. The vehicle contained 24 mortar rounds, two rockets, spare machine gun barrels, small arms ammunition and other IED-making material.

"This grassroots movement of reconciliation by the volunteers is taking off all around us. The tribes that had once actively or passively supported al-Qaeda in Iraq now want them out," said Lt. Col. Peter Andrysiak, the deputy commander of the 1st "Ironhorse" Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division.

The neighborhood watch is made up of a group of 500 volunteers, from a number of tribes in the area, who want reconciliation with the Coalition Forces and the Iraqi government. The volunteers are currently being vetted for possible future selection for training as Iraqi Police or some other organization within the Iraqi Security Forces.

Taji, 20 miles north of Baghdad, is perhaps most infamously known as the town where ABC News co-anchor Bob Woodruff and cameraman Doug Vogt were seriously injured in a 2006 IED explosion, and under the Hussein regime, the site of Iraq's long-range missile program. On Saturday, four U.S. soldiers based at Fort Hood died in an IED attack there.

While our soldiers are still battling Sunni insurgent IED cells in Taji, it is worth noting the seeds to a successful counterinsurgency are being sown in Taji and elsewhere, as noted yesterday in Small Wars Journal (h/t Instapundit):

On June 15th we kicked off a major series of division-sized operations in Baghdad and the surrounding provinces. As General Odierno said, we have finished the build-up phase and are now beginning the actual "surge of operations". I have often said that we need to give this time. That is still true. But this is the end of the beginning: we are now starting to put things onto a viable long-term footing.

These operations are qualitatively different from what we have done before. Our concept is to knock over several insurgent safe havens simultaneously, in order to prevent terrorists relocating their infrastructure from one to another, and to create an operational synergy between what we're doing in Baghdad and what's happening outside. Unlike on previous occasions, we don't plan to leave these areas once they're secured. These ops will run over months, and the key activity is to stand up viable local security forces in partnership with Iraqi Army and Police, as well as political and economic programs, to permanently secure them. The really decisive activity will be police work, registration of the population and counterintelligence in these areas, to comb out the insurgent sleeper cells and political cells that have "gone quiet" as we moved in, but which will try to survive through the op and emerge later. This will take operational patience, and it will be intelligence-led, and Iraqi government-led. It will probably not make the news (the really important stuff rarely does) but it will be the truly decisive action.

When we speak of "clearing" an enemy safe haven, we are not talking about destroying the enemy in it; we are talking about rescuing the population in it from enemy intimidation. If we don't get every enemy cell in the initial operation, that's OK. The point of the operations is to lift the pall of fear from population groups that have been intimidated and exploited by terrorists to date, then win them over and work with them in partnership to clean out the cells that remain – as has happened in Al Anbar Province and can happen elsewhere in Iraq as well.

The "terrain" we are clearing is human terrain, not physical terrain. It is about marginalizing al Qa'ida, Shi'a extremist militias, and the other terrorist groups from the population they prey on. This is why claims that "80% of AQ leadership have fled" don’t overly disturb us: the aim is not to kill every last AQ leader, but rather to drive them off the population and keep them off, so that we can work with the community to prevent their return.

It is this kind of working within the community that makes this one small story in a large war worth noting.

The "neighborhood watch" that captured this cache is composed of 500 men from various tribes in the Taji area that once supported al Qaeda and the Sunni insurgency. As Dave Kilcullen notes above, it is the human terrain that matters, and the fact that these men are now actively working against al Qaeda and the insurgency, are attempting to join the political process and the Iraqi security forces, that is far more important than an increasing body count.

Ah... The Good Life

Yesterday, while scanning Memeorandum.com to see what other bloggers were discussing, I was amused to find a post called "Starting a War" that shows the vast disconnect between reality and fantasy as it relates to ever-changing situation in the Middle East, and with Iran in particular.

Let's see what Cernig has to say:

In an email this morning, Mr M at Comments From Left Field asked me "What happens if Iran DOES make an overt war act on the US?" Of course, the rightwing meme is that Iran has been carrying out both covert and overt acts of war for some time now - but any time someone who doesn't really want a war with iran looks at their evidence it ends up looking contrived, conspiratorial and, in essence, fabricated.

I know a "little something" about debunking questionable claims of Iranian involvement, having (as thoroughly as one can) debunked a claim by the U.K. Sun tabloid yesterday that Iranian Revolutionary Guards were helicoptering into Iraq to kill British soldiers. This was not the first claim of Iranian interference I debunked either; just 11 days ago, I proved that a February 12 claim made in the U.K. Telegraph that "more than 100" precision long-range .50 BMG rifles purchased by the Iranian government had been captured in Iraq by American forces, was unsubstantiated.

A liberal blogger acquaintance of mine, upon reading the second post, quipped to me via email, "Is George Soros sending you checks? I need to now if Soros is paying you more than he pays me."

I am an "honest dealer" on the subject of Iran.

Cernig, in my opinion, is not correct in implying that all the evidence "ends up looking contrived, conspiratorial and, in essence, fabricated."

It is true that many are ideologically opposed to accepting charges that Iran is involved in supplying ordnance, training, and even personnel to anti-government forces within Iraq.

The claims made, however, are as solid as one could possibly make without actually capturing uniformed Iranian soldiers firing weapons at American forces within Iraq.

We know, for example, that Iran has been supplying EFPs--explosively-formed penetrators--to Shia militias. EFPs are not a new technology, having been used for decades by militaries around the world. These are not, in theory, difficult weapons to build, and we have indeed captured indigenously-made EFPs and even captured facilities within Iraq where EFPs were being assembled. Making them effective against heavily-armored vehicles, however, is not a skill Iraqi machinists have the capability to replicate.

Iraqi fighters have been making their own versions of the weapons, but so far none has been effective against U.S. forces, Odierno said. The Iraqi-made projectiles, using brass and copper melted on stoves, have failed to fully penetrate U.S. armor and are more likely to be used against Iraqi forces, whose vehicles often have thinner armored protection than U.S. vehicles, U.S. military officials said.

"We have not seen a homemade one yet that's executed properly," Odierno said, adding that such weapons are not a major concern "as of yet."

Correctly machining to precise tolerances the copper disk that becomes the projectile is not a skill Iraqi elements have, and recovered projectiles--and in many instances, captured intact EFPs that failed to go off--have provided strong, finger-print-like clues as to the kind of machinery used to produce the more effective copper disks. The machining marks are said to indicate Iranian manufacture, as does chemical analysis of the C4 explosives used to form the projectile, and the specific construction of the passive infrared (IR) electronic triggers that detonate the weapons.

In addition to EFPs, Iranian-manufactured mortar shells of recent manufacture have been recovered, as well as Fajr-3 medium-range rockets, developed in and manufactured exclusively by Iran, that have been fired into Baghdad's Green Zone. Some even bear markings of the Iranian military:

In Iraq, Iranian 240mm rockets, which have a range of up to 30 miles and could significantly change the battlefield, have been used recently by Shiite extremists against U.S. and British targets in Basra and Baghdad, the officials said. Three of the rockets have targeted U.S. facilities in Baghdad's Green Zone, and one came very close to hitting the U.S. Embassy in the Iraqi capital, according to the U.S. officials.

The 240mm rocket is the biggest and longest-range weapon in the hands of Shiite extremist groups, U.S. officials said. Remnants of the rockets bear the markings of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps and are dated 2007, those sources said. The Tehran government has supplied the same weapon, known as the Fajr-3, to Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia.

We also know Iran has been training anti-government insurgent groups in Iraq, as captured Shia militiamen have readily confessed, and as have their commanders, who freely confirmed that information to the Associated Press:

Commanders of a group inside the Shiite Mahdi Army militia told the Associated Press that there are as many as 4,000 members of their militia who were trained in Iran and they have stockpiles of EFPs. The commanders spoke to AP on the condition of anonymity because the U.S. military considers their group illegal and giving their names would likely lead to their arrest and imprisonment.

Further, we have captured Iranian military personnel in Iraq, including senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) officer Mohsen Chizari in Baghdad on December 21, 2006. Also captured in Iraq--and still in U.S. custody, along with four other Iranian operatives--was Baqer Qabshavi, a colonel in the IRGC.

Contrived? Conspiratorial? Fabricated?

To someone with an apparent interest in denial at almost any cost, certainly, but not to anyone who retains objectivity, especially at a time when Iranian weapons shipments and training are not only on-going, but apparently increasing.

But Cernig's disconnect goes beyond questioning Iranian ordnance, training, and personnel, to an almost delusional of view of life within Iraq that echoes communist claims of just how great life was inside the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

My first reaction was "why the f**k would the do that? They may be theocrats but mostly they have a rational wish to keep their good lives intact and ongoing." Its undoubtably true that a war on Iran would be a disaster for the U.S. and its allies - it would accomplish none of the warmongers objectives except revenge for a decades-old insult at an embassy and would be highly counter-productive to U.S. and allied interests globally.

"Good lives?"

Somehow, I think their rioters may disagree:

Motorists set fire to petrol stations in Tehran today in an angry backlash against the Iranian government's decision to impose rationing.
One station in Pounak, a poor area of the capital, was set alight while another in eastern Tehran was partially burnt and two of its pumps were completely destroyed.

"Last night, there were a lot of fights, people were furious due to the sudden decision," a 55-year-old pump attendant told Reuters.

[snip]

The scenes of disorder put further political pressure on the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is already under fire for failing to deliver on promises to improve the economy after his election in 2005.

In May, the government reduced subsidies for petrol, causing a 25% jump in prices.

The government had been planning to implement rationing for weeks. It was supposed to begin on May 21 but was repeatedly put off amid fears that Iranians would react badly as they are used to cheap and plentiful petrol.

"This man, Ahmadinejad, has damaged all things. The timing of the rationing is just one case," said Reza Khorrami, a 27-year-old teacher who was queuing at one Tehran petrol station last night.

You'll note that the rioting was proximately caused by government-imposed mandatory fuel rationing, but an underlying cause of this rationing is Iran's stagnating economy, and no doubt the massive crackdown against anti-regime groups:

Iran is in the throes of one of its most ferocious crackdowns on dissent in years, analysts say. with the government focusing on labor leaders, universities, the press, women's rights advocates, a former nuclear negotiator and Iranian-Americans, three of whom have been in prison for more than six weeks.

[snip]

The hard-line administration of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the analysts said, faces rising pressure for failing to deliver on promises of greater prosperity from soaring oil revenue. It has been using U.S. support for a change in government as well as a possible military attack as the pretext to hound his opposition and its sympathizers.

If this is the "good life," I'll pass.

But the blissfully unaware description of Iran's domestic situation is no more disconnected than are Cernig's thoughts on why the United States may have cause to take action against Iran:

Its undoubtably true that a war on Iran would be a disaster for the U.S. and its allies - it would accomplish none of the warmongers objectives except revenge for a decades-old insult at an embassy and would be highly counter-productive to U.S. and allied interests globally.

Unless Cernig can compose a hasty rationalization to explain away these sentiments, it appears that he or she is firmly convinced that our current crisis with Iran is based solely upon "revenge" for the 1979-81 hostage crisis.

What?

The fact that Iran is supplying weaponry and training that the U.S. military claims has killed more than 170 American soldiers, and seems to be escalating their pace of doing so, might just be seen as more proximate cause to most rational people, as would Iran's continued eliminationist rhetoric toward the United States and U.S allies.

The continuing development of a suspected nuclear weapons program, and the proven and even bragged about development of intercontinental ballistic missiles and MIRV warheads is also a very real concern. While technically being capable of launching conventional warheads, in practice, almost all MIRVs mounted on ICBMs in the world's arsenal are nuclear in nature, and so it is irrational to assume Iran has developed these weapons systems for any other purpose.

While no doubt comforting to Cernig, these rationalizations fail to address either actual present reality or the concerns of the immediate and near-term future.

I'll skip past Cernig's next paragraph, which merely reiterates the laughable Iranian "good life" claim, and studiously seeks to deny any possible Iranian nuclear threat... actually, I'll skip the rest of the post entirely (though you might find Cernig's explanation of how we economically forced the Japanese to bomb Pearl Harbor somewhat amusing).

The rest of the post merely continues down a path built upon a shoddy foundation.

Sadly, we knew Cernig is probably not alone on the left or right, in attempting to create a docile, "artificial reality" Iran to ignore. Sadly, the inabilty of some to deal with actual reality versus a preferred reality may yet lead us into a far more lethal future.

James Earl Jones Counts All Non-Senatorial Americans Supporting Amnesty

Actually, I think he counted one guy twice...

...and that was probably (a disguised) Lindsey Graham running from one end of the line to the other.

Bryan's got the rest, and Glenn suggests a third party is becoming a better option as a result of Senators refusing to listen to their base.

Child Abuse?

Drudge is alarmed over a picture on Rosie O'Donnell's blog that apparently shows her daughter in some sort of military fatigues, festooned with a a bandoleer of small caliber ammunition.

Presumably, this is some sort of anti-war protest on the part of O'Donnell, but she seems unable to write anything more coherent than the headline, "A picture says a thousands posts."

Considering her storied track record of being unable to write complete sentences or even complete words (the Big Ro seems to think the blogosphere charges by the letter, like some demented form of text messaging), I suppose this could be considered at least a grammatical improvement.

But what, precisely, is the message is she trying to send?

Based upon the reaction of her readers, it seems to be either "I'm willing to pimp my child for a cheap political stunt," or, "I'm so nutty, even my own demented fans are disturbed over how I'd use my child."

Whatever her point, few seem to understand it, and I wonder if that cluelessness extends to O'Donnell herself.

Anonymous Sources: Iranian Forces Invade Iraq

Well, we saw this coming:

Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces have been spotted by British troops crossing the border into southern Iraq, The Sun tabloid reported on Tuesday.

Britain's defence ministry would not confirm or deny the report, with a spokesman declining to comment on "intelligence matters".

An unidentified intelligence source told the tabloid: "It is an extremely alarming development and raises the stakes considerably. In effect, it means we are in a full on war with Iran -- but nobody has officially declared it."

"We have hard proof that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps have crossed the border to attack us. It is very hard for us to strike back. All we can do is try to defend ourselves. We are badly on the back foot."

The Sun said that radar sightings of Iranian helicopters crossing into the Iraqi desert were confirmed to it by very senior military sources.

No doubt, certain harpies will "question the timing" before the sun comes up.

Jimmy Buffett Update: Searching for that lost shaker of salt.

Preferably, that salt will come in large grains.

I was careful last night when this claim was made to note in the headline that this story was linked to anonymous sources within the British government, and now that the Sun article has been published, I see nothing solid to which we could hang a credible claim on, other than the names of two British soldiers said killed by Iranian-placed bombs, Corporal Ben Leaning, 24, and Trooper Kristen Turton, 27.

According to Defence Internet these two soldiers were part of The Queen's Royal Lancers Battle Group, in Maysan Province, Southern Iraq, on Thursday 19 April 2007.

The story there reads:

Corporal Leaning was commanding and Trooper Turton was driving a Scimitar Armoured Reconnaissance vehicle which was providing protection for a convoy.

At approximately 1120 hrs local time, the vehicle was struck and badly damaged by an improvised explosive device attack, which killed Corporal Leaning and Trooper Turton and injured the Scimitar's gunner and two other members of the troop.

All casualties were taken by helicopter to Tallil airbase in Dhi Qar Province where they are receiving the best possible medical care for their injuries.

As it so happens, Michael Yon was there, and wrote about the attack in his dispatch, Death or Glory:

We had taken off nearly three hours earlier at 0830. At about 1120, the convoy entered the ambush. Eight of the 46 bombs detonated. EFPs tore through metal, ball bearings puncturing the vehicles, peppering them with holes. Major Edward Mack, who was at least six vehicles behind detonation in the convoy, heard two distinct explosions. He was approximately 40 meters from the nearest blast, and he reckons there was about 8 to 10 meters between the two.

WO2 (SSM) Steve McMenamy was about seventh vehicle back, 50 meters or so from the initial explosion. He felt the detonations and saw a massive black cloud. McMenamy cocked his weapon, jumped off the vehicle and took a knee, trying to assess what was happening. As the dust cloud cleared, McMenamy saw an injured soldier sitting down, shuffling himself away from the vehicle. McMenamy ran forward to check for casualties, but realized he was also running into contact, so he veered to the right and ran into culvert. He found Sergeant Jenkin kneeling and still alive.

“Are you all right?” asked McMenamy.
Jenkin grinned and answered, “No.”
McMenamy said, “Jimmy, look at me: I need to know if you are all right because I need to move forward.”
“I’m okay,” Jenkins said.

Trooper Callum McDonald helped Trooper Thompson into a drainage ditch where he was laying and moaning. Other soldiers rushed to help the wounded or to set up security. McMenamy moved forward to the stricken Scimitar, shouting to the crew, asking if anyone could hear him. He climbed onto the vehicle and saw that Turton, the driver, was dead. Climbing onto the turret, he searched for Corporal Leaning, the commander. As McMenamy crossed into the top of turret and looked into gunner’s side, he saw that Corporal Leaning was also dead.

Nothing in Yon's account of that day or his follow-up dispatch mentioned suspected Iranian involvement.

Independent of Yon's account, I contacted a senior U.S. officer in Iraq last night, and he was unable to confirm anything about the Sun story, other than that he had read it.

Like the "smoking gun" story I burned as groundless from the Independent Telegraph , this story does not have any credible supporting evidence to date.

I'll post more updates as I have them.

Another Update: Just heard from Yon via email. "48 IEDs, 46 were EFPs." He had to run (he's in a war right now, after all), and couldn't provide more info.

I have no context for this, so I'll leave you to draw your own inferences.

German Newspaper: Threats are Torture

I guess guys from a country that killed 12 million in ethnic cleansing campaigns and the occasional beastly human "medical experiments" in World War II would be experts on the subject, right?

A German newsmagazine reported Sunday that two of its journalists embedded with troops from the North Carolina-based 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan witnessed Afghan and American soldiers involved in abusing prisoners.

The weekly Focus reported that, while on patrol with troops this month southwest of Kabul, reporter Wolfgang Bauer and photographer Karsten Schoene witnessed an incident they said amounted to torture.

And what, precisely, did they see that amounted to torture?

When the suspect refused to talk, the magazine said, the platoon leader tied one end of a rope to the suspect's foot and the other end to a vehicle, then threatened to drag the man unless he told the truth.

Focus reported that the platoon leader then had an American soldier start the motor. The magazine printed a picture of what it said was the prisoner tied to the vehicle, with a soldier standing nearby.

After idling for two minutes, the vehicle's motor was shut off. The man was not dragged, the magazine reported, and the suspect was set free.

In other words, there was no torture, and it appears the suspect was set free without a scratch on him. But, as the world media continues to lower the bar on what amounts to torture to include empty threats as torture, this journalist sees evidence of a "fake execution."

Funny, how tying a rope around a guy's foot is now equated with drilling kneecaps, amputating limbs, beheadings, and gouging out eyes, which incidentally, is not uncommon at all among Islamic extremists.

Damn the Reality, Full Meme Ahead!

Undaunted by the facts, Glenn Greenwald attempts to shore up his demonstrably false claim that, "...the enemy is referred to, almost exclusively now, as 'Al Qaeda.'" with an update to his already debunked post:

Posts from other bloggers who previously noticed this same trend demonstrate how calculated it is and pinpoint its obvious genesis. At Kos, BarbInMD noted back in May that Bush's rhetoric on Iraq had palpably shifted, as he began declaring that "Al-Qaida is public enemy No. 1 in Iraq." The same day, she noted that Bush "mentioned Al-Qaida no less than 27 times" in his Iraq speech. As always, a theme travels unmolested from Bush's mouth into the unexamined premises of our newspapers' front pages.

Separately, Ghillie notes in comments that the very politically cognizant Gen. Petraeus has been quite noticeably emphasizing "the battle against Al Qaeda" in interviews for months. And yesterday, ProfMarcus analyzed the top Reuters article concerning American action in Iraq -- headline: "Al Qaeda fight to death in Iraq bastion: U.S" -- and noted that "al qaeda is mentioned 13 times in a 614 word story" and that "reading the article, you would think that al qaeda is not only everywhere in iraq but is also behind all the insurgent activity that's going on."

Interestingly, in addition to the one quoted above, there is another long article in the Post today, this one by the reliable Thomas Ricks, which extensively analyzes the objectives and shortcomings in our current military strategy. Ricks himself strategy never once mentions Al Qaeda.

Finally, the lead story of the NYT today -- in its first two paragraphs -- quotes Gen. Odierno as claiming that the 2004 battle of Falluja was aimed at capturing "top Qaeda leaders in the city." But Michael Gordon himself, back in 2004, published a lengthy and detailed article about the Falluja situation and never once mentioned or even alluded to "Al Qaeda," writing only about the Iraqi Sunni insurgents in that city who were hostile to our occupation (h/t John Manning). The propagandistic transformation of "insurgents" into "Al Qaeda," then, applies not only to our current predicament but also to past battles as well, as a tool of rank revisionism (hence, it is now officially "The Glorious 2004 Battle against Al-Qaeda in Falluja").

You'll note that Greenwald's supporting "evidence" for his comes in the form of links to liberal blogs, letters to Salon.com, selected articles from the Washington Post, and the New York Times, and yet, he completely fails to address the fact that Multi-National Corps-Iraq's own press releases debunk his claims on a daily basis.

Sadly, like a dog returning to re-ingest its own vomit, Greenwald cannot get enough of his own rotting bile. Greenwald continues to insist that there is a conspiracy by the government, the world media, and the U.S. military to turn all enemy forces in Iraq into al Qaeda, and stands by his claim that:

...every time one of the top military commanders describes our latest operations or quantifies how many we killed, the enemy is referred to, almost exclusively now, as "Al Qaeda."

Again, this daft claim is hardly supported by the facts, and is easily refuted by the military's own primary means of information dissemination about the War in Iraq, the MNF-I PAO press release system.

Today, Monday, June 25, MNF-I has 13 listed press releases. Of those, one is a duplicate post, while the remaining 12 press releases break down enemy activity in Iraq for the day as follows:

• four releases discussing Sunni insurgent activity;
• one release discussing Shia militia "Secret Cells;"
• four where a specific group enemy group is not named;
• ...and only two where Al Qaeda is mentioned.

Far from making the enemy "almost exclusively" al Qaeda, MNF-I PAO's releases for the day link less than 17% of their stories to al Qaeda activity.

Greenwald ignores the key source that would prove or disprove his "all of our enemy's are being labelled al Qaeda" meme, which are the archives of press releases, of press briefings, Pentagon briefings, daily news, and feature stories from the U.S. military, which make it clear that al Qaeda is not the only extremist group being fought by Coalition and Iraqi forces in Iraq.

Instead, he bumbles forward, doggedly bucking reality, insisting upon some grand conspiracy being orchestrated by the White House, international news services, the American press, and the United States military to repaint all extremist activity in Iraq as being orchestrated by al Qaeda.

As the links above clearly show, Multi-National Corps-Iraq is failing to uphold their end of this alleged conspiracy by consistently citing other extremists groups in their daily press releases and news stories.

Whoever is in charge of this grand conspiracy (perhaps the Freemasons? Maybe the Illuminati? Yale's secretive Skull & Bones Society? Boy Scout Troop 111 in Arlington, Virginia?) should also castigate the media, as they are failing to insist that everything in Iraq is "all al Qaeda, all the time," including this story in the Boston Globe where a suicide bomber targeting Sunni tribal sheiks aligned against al Qaeda was the perfect opportunity to flog this claim, if such a conspiracy was indeed "on." Sadly, the media is failing to uphold their end of the bargain.

Glenn Greenwald seems doggedly intent on descending into his own brand of "trutherism" regarding a grand government, media and military conspiracy to re-brand the Iraq War.

In doing so, he may finally get the notoriety he so desperately craves, if not for the reasons he'd hoped.

Update: I hardly find it surprising that the empty heads at Editor & Publisher lap up Greenwald's bile, with nary a thought to whether or not it's true.

Considering that E&P editor Greg Mitchell has his own track record of manufacturing news and indeed, wrote a post advocating that the media should attempt to undermine the Presidency, I'm not exactly shocked they'd grasp at any straw they could to support their nakedly partisan political objectives.

SockPuppet Strikes Out Again

Glenn Wilson McEllensburg has suddenly become a terrorism expert, and can't wait to get a conspiracy off his chest:

Josh Marshall publishes an e-mail from a reader who identifies what is one of the most astonishing instances of mindless, pro-government "reporting" yet:

It's a curious thing that, over the past 10 - 12 days, the news from Iraq refers to the combatants there as "al-Qaida" fighters. When did that happen?

Until a few days ago, the combatants in Iraq were "insurgents" or they were referred to as "Sunni" or "Shia'a" fighters in the Iraq Civil War. Suddenly, without evidence, without proof, without any semblance of fact, the US military command is referring to these combatants as "al-Qaida".

Welcome to the latest in Iraq propaganda.

That the Bush administration, and specifically its military commanders, decided to begin using the term "Al Qaeda" to designate "anyone and everyeone we fight against or kill in Iraq" is obvious. All of a sudden, every time one of the top military commanders describes our latest operations or quantifies how many we killed, the enemy is referred to, almost exclusively now, as "Al Qaeda."

Actually, that isn't obvious, Glenn. What is obvious is your own industrial-strength ignorance, which apparently seems to be quite contagious among the more irrational actors of the far left.

The reason that we've been reading more over the past few days about attacks directed against al Qaeda—more than Sunni insurgents, more than Shia militiamen—is that elements of al Qaeda have been specifically targeted by U.S. and Iraqi forces in Operation Arrowhead Ripper in Diyala Province, in Operation Commando Eagle southwest of Baghdad, Operation Marne Torch southeast of Baghdad, and in other operations throughout the country.

If Glen Greenwald or Josh Marshall weren't above a Sullivaneque "floating of a theory" by a conspiracy-minded reader (to excuse their own inherent distrust of our military, of course), they might have bothered to recognize, or God forbid, research a few key facts.

The first of those facts is that we are in offensive operations surrounding and targeting al Qaeda cells specifically, often with information provided by their former allies in the Sunni insurgency.

Second, the military is consistently releasing stories about contacts with both Sunni insurgents and Shia militiamen, and our military is calling them such as they contact them.

Let's got back "10-12 days" and see what Multi-National Force-Iraq has been saying in their press releases. According to Greenwald, the enemy the military talks about is "almost exclusively now" al Qaeda.

And yet, when we go back 12 days to Monday, June 11, we find that in MNF-I's three combat-related press releases, only one addresses al Qaeda. The following day, U.S. forces raided an insurgent weapons cache, came under attack from an insurgent VBIED, and engaged "enemy fire" coming from a mosque, without ever specifying who that was.

On Wednesday, June 13, MNF-I published 17 press releases. Of those a Grand total of four mentioned al Qaeda. Five others mentioned Sunni insurgents, five more couldn't specify the attacker, and one wrote about Iranian-affiliated Shia militias.

I invite Greenwald, Marshall, and others who seem to like this meme to do their own digging through MNF-I's archive of press releases, where they'll find more days very similar to this.

As the offensive operations cited above--part of an overall operation called Phantom Thunder--are specifically targeting al Qaeda cells, we will be reading about those terrorists that our soldiers are directly targeting. But as accounts from Saturday show that we are still encountering Shia militias and Sunni insurgents even today, the theory being aired by Greenwald and his conspiracy-minded followers is shown—with only passing research—to be complete and utter bunk.

Update: Undaunted by the facts, Greenwald attempts to shore up his flimsy argument by citing other liberal conspiracy theorists and letters to Salon.com, forcing yet another debunking of his claims.

Reality. He should check into it sometime.

No Conflict of Interest Here: Liberal Talk Show Founder Seeks To Profit From Center for American Progress Attack on Conservative Talk Radio

Back before he was governor of Minnesota and was still prowling the squared-circle as the villainous heel "The Body," Jesse Ventura used to growl, "Win if you can, lose if you must, but always cheat!"

That maxim seems to have been taken to heart (and wallet) by the progressive Center For American Progress (CAP), which released a document called "The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio," which advocates the return of the failed "Fairness Doctrine" in talk radio, in an attempt to censor and stifle the dominance of conservative talkers.

What the Center For American Progress won't tell you is that one of the authors of the liberally-biased "report," Paul Woodhull, is a founding partner of not one, but two liberal talk radio show companies, Big Eddie Radio Productions, LLC (BERP), which produces The Ed Shultz Show, and Bill Press Partners, LLC, producers of The Bill Press Show.

It was perhaps fitting that this self-serving conflict of interest was discovered by Mark Levin, a conservative talk radio show host in his blog at National Review Online.

If Congress reintroduces the so-called "Fairness Doctrine," as CAP suggests, broadcasters will be forced to balance their airtime between conservative talk radio shows and liberal talk radio shows. There are only a handful of successful, established liberal talk radio shows from which broadcasters who have to choose from, and Woodhull has a financial stock in two of those.

This liberal organization is not only attempting to regulate free speech for political gain, but also, in the case of at least Woodhull, they intend to profit from the loss of your First Amendment rights as well.

Pelosi: We Support the CANADIAN Troops

From QandO, where they can tell a difference between U.S. and Canadian uniforms.

Hey, it could be worse...

She could have instead used the photo of her meeting with this weak-chinned ophthalmologist, with whom she may not be visiting with any more.

(Via Hot Air), where they note that Democrats have a history of not knowing what our uniforms look like.

Arrowhead Ripper: Surrender or Die

So Michael Yon entitles his latest post from the front lines of Operation Arrowhead Ripper in Baquba, which to date, has killed 51 members of al Qaeda and led to the capture of 20 more as of yesterday, June 21.

Source:Explosion in Baquba on June 12, 2007. Photo by Michael Yon.

Yon reports that the larger media organizations are finally showing up, but are having communications problems that make reporting on the battle difficult (I cleaned up the hanging HTML tag in Mike's post; I hope you don't mind):

Alexandra Zavis from Los Angeles Times is down in the heat of the battle bringing home information. Michael Gordon from New York Times is still slugging it out, and his portions are accurate in the co-authored story, "Heavy Fighting as US Troops Squeeze Insurgents in Iraqi City." (Long title.)

CNN has joined the fight. AP came but will stay only a few days. Joe Klein from TIME was here on the 21st and his story posted the same day and was accurate. We rode together in a Stryker. Like magic, Joe’s story was out before I got back to base. Joe took a helicopter out and filed from elsewhere. I’m having comms problems here which is greatly slowing the flow. My Thuraya satellite phone and RBGAN satellite dish are not working for hours each day. The AP reporter is having the same problems. The signal degradation is caused by a special sort of RF interference. Moving our antennas around won’t work. We simply get cut off for long periods.

If these communications problems sounds familiar, it should: Yon and other journalists have faced these issues for years:

Valuable stories about our soldiers and the battle are being lost and will never be filed because reporters, after a long day of being on the battlefield, cannot make a simple phone call, or file a story. Why be here? It’s pretty dangerous, and insurance is expensive. I had to skip a mission this morning because I cannot make communications, and am down to filing stories on the fly again without time for editing. There is no other way to keep the flow open, and if you are reading this, it’s only after I’ve wasted hours trying to upload it. Hours I could have been with our soldiers, telling about their days in one of the most important battles of this war.

Frankly, the military has had since 2003 to work on these issues, but setting up communications for reporters has always seemed to be an afterthought, if thought of at all. In a war where media access and coverage driving public opinion is as important to success as combat and humanitarian operations on the ground, there is simply no good excuse for this.

I suspect that a lot of the interference reporters are encountering with their comms are directly the result of ECM jamming to keep al Qaeda from communicating, but as U.S. military comms work, they should be able to dedicate one line or frequency for media reporting. Hopefully, the PAO will get these problems resolved, ASAP.

Otherwise, while Yon is very impressed with U.S. forces and the level of access he and other reporters have been afforded to cover the battle. He is far less impressed with local Iraqi military commanders, who have a tendency to act like state officials in Louisiana:

I’ve seen them in meeting after meeting, over the past few days, finding ways to be underachievers. The Iraqi commanders have dozens of large trucks and have only to drive to our base to collect the supplies and distribute those supplies to the people displaced in the battle. Our troops are fully engaged in combat, yet the Iraqi leaders were not able to carry that load without LTC Johnson supplying the initiative. The Kurds would have had this fixed yesterday. The Iraqi commanders in Mosul would have fixed this. The local Iraqi command climate is disappointing by comparison.

As for his impressions of how our soldiers are performing in Baquba, I'll send you over to Mike's site to read the rest.

As noted above by Yon above, reporters are finally flooding into Baquba to cover Operation Arrowhead Ripper, but communications problems seem to be limiting the information getting out.

One story that did get out, from Reuters reporter Alister Bull, highlights the depravity of the enemy we are fighting:

Bednarek said U.S. forces were making some grisly discoveries as they scoured Baquba. He said residents led soldiers to a house in the western part of the city that appeared to have been used to hold, torment and kill hostages. Soldiers destroyed it.

"When you walk into a room and you see blood trails, you see saws, you see drills, knives, in addition to weapons, that is not normal," Bednarek said.

That soldiers uncovered an al Qaeda torture house is unsurprising; soldiers in another part of Operation Phantom Thunder, in a sub-operation called Operation Commando Eagle, captured an al Qaeda torture manual on CD when they captured several terrorists yesterday. We've seen these before.

Like yesterdays' account from Joe Klein of TIME, Bull reports that members of the insurgent 1920s Revolutionary Brigades are helping U.S. forces route al Qaeda.

Source:Soldiers assigned to the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, move down a neighborhood street during Operation Arrowhead Ripper, June 19, 2007, in Baqouba, Iraq. U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Armando Monroig.

This sounds familiar.

MNC-I release an account this morning that may provide anecdotal evidence that al Qaeda in Baquba was truly surprised by the swiftness and effectiveness of how quickly American forces were able to cordon off Baquba and trap them inside, as al Qaeda fighters desperately attempted to use an ambulance to escape:

Coalition Forces intercepted an ambulance carrying seven suspected al-Qaida operatives attempting to circumvent security elements operating in Baqouba, June 19. Local doctors called the Diyala Provincial Joint Coordination Center and reported five children injured near Khatoon, a neighborhood in southwest Baqouba, Iraq. The PJCC dispatched an ambulance to that location.

Later, the ambulance was seen heading north on a road northwest of New Baqouba when it bypassed the road that led to the hospital.

The ambulance was stopped by alert Soldiers from 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, from Fort Lewis, Wash., who are conducting missions in the area as part of Operation Arrowhead Ripper.

Soldiers checked the ambulance and found a driver and six men, who appeared to be in their 20s and 30s, two of which were injured. There were no children in the ambulance.

CF provided medical treatment to the wounded men and detained all seven.

If this sounds familiar, Hezbollah and Hamas terrorists have frequently used ambulances and even media vehicles to transport men and munitions in their ever-present conflict with Israeli forces.

Another MNC-I release states that U.S. attack helicopters have killed at least 13 al Qaeda terrorists and leveled their compound, and found a Baquba school rigged with explosives:

In a separate engagement, CF Soldiers discovered an empty school complex rigged with explosives in Baqouba, the capital city of Diyala province, Thursday, during Operation Arrowhead Ripper. Soldiers of 1st Battalion, 12th Cavalry Regiment discovered the booby-trapped school complex. An investigation of the area determined the school and surrounding buildings had been abandoned. CF had to destroy the school due to risk to the community. CF were unable to disable the explosives because of instability. Ground forces effectively coordinated a precisions guided munitions strike and successfully destroyed the school-borne IED.

The release concludes:

As Arrowhead Ripper continued through June 21, at least 51 al-Qaida operatives have been killed, with 20 al-Qaida operatives detained, seven weapons caches discovered, 21 improvised explosive devices destroyed and nine booby-trapped structures destroyed.

Hopefully we'll be able to update this developing story as more media are able to file reports.

Update: A.J. Strata has his own roundup posted here.

Update: A short email from Mike Yon:

They are in trouble here, Bob. Operation Arrowhead Ripper is going very well. This is a problem for Al Qaeda here.

Based on what Yon has said both in his emails to me and Glenn, and probably others, and what he has said in his posts from Baquba stating his near unfettered access to the Operation Arrowhead Ripper tactical operations center (TOC) for U.S. and Iraqi forces, he is obviously privy to information that shows al Qaeda in Baquba has every appearance of having been successfully surrounded and cut-off.

Yon noted in his latest post that he and other journalists cannot send out reports via cell phone or satellite, indicating that the military is probably jamming non-military electronic transmissions in the area (I'm sure al Qaeda already knows that their phones don't work, or I wouldn't post it).

This means that al Qaeda, which typically carries cell and/or sat phones for communications, is hampered from cummunicating position-to-position within Baquba, and is probably cut off to external cells in surrounding towns and villages as well. It also probably means that their long-standing tactic of using cell phones to rig command-detonated IEDS has been either eliminated, or at least severely hampered.

It seems that U.S. forces may have learned from Fallujah and other operations where the weaknesses in their earlier cordon operations have been, and have closed those gaps in Baquba.

Allen: Fallujah to be Clear of al Qaeda by August

I wonder how much it pained AP's Kim Gamel to write this:

A U.S. Marine commander in Anbar province predicted that al-Qaida fighters will be expelled from Fallujah by August as the military moves to cut insurgent supply and reinforcement lines into Baghdad and surrounding areas.

Brig. Gen. John Allen, the deputy commander for American forces west of Baghdad, said al-Qaida in Iraq has largely been pushed out of population centers in much of the Anbar province.

He cited the success in turning Sunni tribes against the organization and an influx of American troops to chase al-Qaida out of Iraqi and regions around the capital.

"The vast majority of them have been pushed out of the population centers," Allen said Wednesday in an interview with The Associated Press. "The surge has given us the troops we needed to really clear those areas, so we cleared them and we stayed."

He said U.S. and Iraqi troops were trying to repeat recent success in calming Ramadi, the provincial capital, using the same neighborhood-by-neighborhood tactics in Fallujah -- a Sunni insurgent bastion that was first cleared by a massive American assault in 2004.

Allen also stated Karmah would be clear of al Qaeda by July.

Over at TIME, Joe Klein helicoptered his way into Baquba, and unleashed a surprisingly objective post showing that Sunni Awakening movement that has largely led al Qaeda to flee their one time stronghold in al Anbar province has spread to Diyala province as well, where American forces were getting help from Sunni insurgents:

A lieutenant colonel named Bruce Antonia told Odierno about preparing to attack the Buhritz neighborhood a few nights earlier when he was approached by local Sunni inusurgents—members, they said, of the 1920 Revolutionary Brigades—who were streaming out of the neighborhood. "They said they'd been fighting al-Qaeda but had run out of ammunition and asked us to supply them. We told them, 'Show us where AQ is and we'll fight them.'" The insurgents did and the neighborhood was cleared.

A second lieutenant colonel named Avanulis Smiley picked up the story from there, "Sir, they've also showed us seven buried IED sites. They gave us specific information—description of the houses, gate color, tree trunks."

After the briefing I asked Colonel Antonia if he'd asked the Sunnis why they had turned against al-Qaeda. "They said it was religious stuff," he said. "AQI demanded that the women wear abayas, no smoking and they preached an extreme version of Islam in the mosque. They'd also spent the winter without food and fuel because of the violence al-Qaeda was causing. One guy said to me, 'We fought against you because you invaded our country and you're infidels. But you treat us with more dignity than al-Qaeda,' and he said they'd continue to work with us. I've been involved in many operations here and this is a first—usually everybody's shooting at us. This is the first time we've had any of them on our side." (In web postings, the 1920 Revolutionary Brigade has denied it is cooperating with the Americans.)

Sadly enough, the majority of the media has chosen to focus on the tragic deaths of 14 American troops in combat, instead of what the operations these men were a part of are attempting to accomplish. As is so often the case, Allahpundit puts the media's choice in stark relief.

Another 48 Hours

Michael Yon has a new post up, Operation Arrowhead Ripper: Day One. The military is allowing him full access to the battlefield and to the TOC headquarters. Civilian casualties are occurring, as the terrorists are using civilians as human shields when they engage our forces. The number of civilian casualties is as yet unknown.

Yon notes that only Michael Gordon of the NY Times is with him, making them the only two members of the media in the battle. CNN, TIME, Reuters, etc are apparently working their way to the battlefield now, making me wonder just who and how they're getting their stories to date.

I'm not going to steal all of Mike's thunder; go to his site to catch up on the rest of his account, and remember he is reader supported.

I will say this: I've been reading him since his embed with the "Deuce-Four" Stryker Brigade and have been corresponding regularly with him for most of a year, and I've rarely seen him so confident of an on-going operation. If he's correct—and he's rarely wrong, even when being right is unpopular—then al Qaeda in Baquba is living on borrowed time.

According to a press release from MNF-I PAO yesterday, "41 insurgents have been killed, five weapons caches have been discovered, 25 improvised explosive devices have been destroyed and five booby-trapped houses have been discovered and destroyed."

Other operations are underway as part of an overall operation called Phantom Thunder, but some are not getting as much media attention as Arrowhead Ripper is beginning to attract, so you may not be aware of them.

Operation Commando Eagle has been launched as joint U.S Army-Iraqi Army air-ground assault targeting al Qaeda cells southwest of Baghdad. Twenty-nine suspects have been detained, and multiple weapons caches were reported captured.

According to the MNF-I PAO release:

Troops of the 2nd Battalion, 14th Infantry Regiment, 2nd BCT, detained three men when their truck was found to contain documents requesting rockets as well as a spool of copper wire, commonly used to build improvised explosive devices.

I'm going to try to track down who that document was requesting rockets from, as while it could be nothing conclusive, it could be quite interesting if a source of the rockets could be identified.

Southeast of Baghdad, Operation Marne Torch is joint U.S. Army-Iraqi Army operation clearing the Arab Jabour area. More than sixty suspects have been detained, and 17 boats used to ferry explosives across the Tigris River have been destroyed, as have 17 weapons caches.

No Agenda Here

It in the past 48 hours, more than 40 al Qaeda terrorists (including a Libyan) have been killed, more than 100 have been captured in these and other on-going operations, and tons of munitions have been captured or destroyed in weapons caches.

What does CNN focus on? You already know the answer:

Fourteen U.S. troops have been killed in attacks over the past two days in Iraq -- 12 soldiers and two Marines -- according to the U.S. military.

In the deadliest attack, a roadside bomb struck a military vehicle on Thursday in northeastern Baghdad, killing five U.S. soldiers, three Iraqi civilians and an Iraqi interpreter.

A U.S. soldier and two civilians were wounded.

Also Thursday, a rocket-propelled grenade struck a U.S. military vehicle in northern Baghdad, killing a soldier and wounding three others.

On Wednesday, a roadside bomb killed two U.S. Task Force Marne troops and wounded four others southwest of Baghdad.

A similar attack in western Baghdad on Wednesday killed four U.S. soldiers and wounded a fifth.

In addition, two Marines were killed in combat operations in Iraq's Anbar province on Wednesday.

There was zero--ZERO mention of the successes of the operations above mentioned by CNN. If you read this, their featured story on the war for today, you'd be left to understand that American and Iraqi forces, as well as Iraqi civilians, are suffering significant casualties, and al Qaeda terrorists, Sunni insurgents, and Shia militiamen got away with barely a scratch for the carnage they created. The CNN account reported a grand total of one dead terrorist, and he was a suicide bomber.

Propaganda is as much about what you chose not to print, as much as it is about the angle from which you pursue what do decide to print. Not that many years ago, CNN took a vow of silence not to report the torture being committed by Saddam Hussein's brutal regime in order to maintain a Baghdad office.

I'm beginning to wonder exactly what CNN gains now by refusing to tell all of the truth of this current Iraqi war.

Nah. Couldn't be.

Anybody Hiring?

The six-month contract I was hired into in 2005 is finally closing at the end of this month after three extensions, and a few folks have suggested that I should investigate attempting to find a new media journalism gig, either here in the Raleigh area, or one from which I could telecommute.

I know via Sitemeter that a few media outfits check in on this site on occasion, so I'm wondering...

Any takers?

The Silence of the Lambs

Support the Marines

This just in via email from Blackfive:

With combat operations in Iraq as kinetic as they've ever been, the Marines could use your support. No links, just please use the info below at your discretion. At Blackfive, we have been trying to improve our relationship with the Public Affairs Officers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, the Marines have begun a really intense exchange of ideas with us. One Marine Combat Commander embraced our offer of support. One of the requests that they had of us was to attempt to get 6,000 positive and supportive emails - one for each Marine, Sailor and Soldier in the Marine Regimental Combat Team - 6. Grim, our resident thinker and former Marine at Blackfive, has taken responsibility for this project. From Grim's interview with Marine Colonel Simcock, Commander of RCT-6: http://www.blackfive.net/main/2007/06/roundtable_with.html

COL. SIMCOCK: (Chuckles.) I'll tell you what, the one thing that all Marines want to know about -- and that includes me and everyone within Regimental Combat Team 6 -- we want to know that the American public are behind us. We believe that the actions that we're taking over here are very, very important to America. We're fighting a group of people that, if they could, would take away the freedoms that America enjoys. If anyone -- you know, just sit down, jot us -- throw us an e- mail, write us a letter, let us know that the American public are behind us. Because we watch the news just like everyone else. It's broadcast over here in our chow halls and the weight rooms, and we watch that stuff, and we're a little bit concerned sometimes that America really doesn't know what's going on over here, and we get sometimes concerns that the American public isn't behind us and doesn't see the importance of what's going on. So that's something I think that all Marines, soldiers and sailors would like to hear from back home, that in fact, yes, they think what we're doing over here is important and they are in fact behind us.

The Marines have set up a special email address to send a supportive message to the Marines is: RCT-6lettersfromh@gcemnf-wiraq.usmc.mil . The emails are being scanned by the PAO before being printed and distributed to individual Marines.

And, guess what?, the RCT-6 has a blog at http://fightin6thmarines.vox.com/

AFTER A FEW DAYS, WE HAVE ONLY GOTTEN THE MARINES ABOUT 2,000 EMAILS. WE COULD USE SOME HELP IN GETTING THE WORD OUT.

Thanks!

Best,

Matt

You're waiting for what, exactly?

Intrepid L.A. Times Reporter Uncovered Second Diyala Campaign

Operation Arrowhead Thunder? Who knew?

Soldiers conducting Operation Arrowhead Thunder also have uncovered more than 1,000 roadside bombs around the provincial capital, Baqubah, where the offensive is being conducted, Iraqi security officials said.

I'm sure that the Times' crack reporters and editorial staff will soon provide us with an exclusive interview with General Perseus himself.

(h/t Hot Air's new headline thingy)

Recycling the Dead

Just eight days ago, in advance of the now-engaged campaign in Baquba, Italian-based "news" site Uruknet re-posted in full an article by The Peoples Voice, a site dedicated, according to the masthead, to "Environmental, political, and social justice issues."

The People's Voice post attempts to re-raise the specter of the "illegal" use of Mark 77 firebombs and white phosphorus ordnance that they and other questionable media outlets claimed were used against civilians in the 2004 assault on Fallujah and in the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003. The article features three graphic pictures of victims that the site intones were killed with firebombs and white phosphorus.

There's a funny thing about at least two of those three pictures, however.

The first image they use in line with comments about the use of Mark 77 firebombs in 2003 was actually taken in Fallujah in 2004, following the American assault on that city, and was featured in the Italian-made documentary Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre that I roundly debunked in November of 2005.

As I stated at the time about this photo:

Body 3. 9:38 Extremely decomposed remains, cause of death undetermined. No apparent burn marks on the body or clothes.

Body 3 referred to the order of appearance of the remains, and 9:38 corresponds to when the photo was shown in the documentary. Interestingly enough, while the People's Voice leave the reader to infer that this body was the victim of a firebomb, the Italian documentary claimed that this body had been killed by white phosphorus. Details, details...

While the photo is of extremely low quality (and therefore easy to spin any way you desire), it is clear the corpse is clothed. Something that burns as hot as napalm or firebomb would likely have burned the clothing completely away, if not most or all of the body as well.

The fact of the matter is that we don't know what killed this suspected insurgent in Fallujah, and the attempt by the RAI documentary to claim he/she was a victim of white phosphorus is equally irresponsible as the People's Voice attempt to link the corpse to a a strike by a Mark 77 at any point in the war, much less a period in time that doesn't coincide with the claims made in the article's text.

The next body shown in the People's Voice article was also lifted from the RAI documentary, and led the reader to believe this body was the dead suspected insurgent was killed by white phosphorus.
Really?

As I noted when I first saw this picture in the RAI documentary:

Body 18. 19:40 Military-aged male, moderately decomposed. No sign of burns on face or clothes.

Once again, (like every single photo in the RAI documentary) there is no physical evidence on this corpse consistent with white phosphorous wounds.

Chris Milroy, professor of forensic pathology at the University of Sheffield (England), after seeing these bodies in the RAI documentary, said:

..."nothing indicates to me that the bodies have been burnt". They had turned black and lost their skin "through decomposition".

It might also be worth noting that the author of the Guardian article cited above made false claims regarding the use of thermobaric weapons in Fallujah (to the best of my knowledge, precisely one thermobaric weapon has been dropped in wartime, and that was used against a cave in Afghanistan).

The third body shown in the People's Voice article, point or origin unknown, also shows a badly decomposed body, cause of death unknown and partially skeletal, as some sort of incendiary weapons victim as well, without any pathological proof presented.

As for the actual charges made in the People's Voice article...

Well, to call them "highly selective" in nature would be fair, as would be calling them "inconsistent" with the military use of white phosphorus even on personnel, "ignorant" as to its actual effects of such weapons on the human body (it would burns holes in a person that did not brush or shake it off; it does not engulf them), and "misleading" overall.

In other words, the entire article is unreliable, but as People's Voice is concerned with environmental issues, we can at least commend them for recycling the dead.

Arrowhead Ripper: In Your Face

MNF-I released comments this morning regarding the opening day of Operation Arrowhead Ripper, targeting al Qaeda elements in Baquba, capitol of Iraq's Diyala Province.

The 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division launched the offensive with a quick-strike night air assault early Tuesday morning.

"The end state is to destroy the al-Qaeda influences in this province and eliminate their threat against the people," said U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mick Bednarek, deputy commanding general of operations for the 25th Infantry Division. "That is the number one, bottom-line, up-front, in-your-face task and purpose."

About 10,000 Soldiers, with a full complement of attack helicopters, close-air support, Strykers and Bradley fighting vehicles, are taking part in Arrowhead Ripper, which is still in its opening stages. Elements of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division; the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division and the 25th Combat Aviation Brigade are also participating in the operation.

The MNF-I release claims 22 terrorists killed; VOA News now puts the count at 30, while Earthtimes says 13 other suspect members of al Qaeda were captured, along with weapons caches and roadside bombs.

Soldiers from the 2nd Brigade, 5th Iraqi Army also engaged al Qaeda targets in Baquba, killing four suspected terrorists and capturing two more.

One U.S. soldier has been killed and two have been injured thus far in the operation.

I'd remind readers that this operation, just underway, will no doubt result in an attempt by al Qaeda propagandists and journalists with questionable sources to allege war crimes, as similar debunked charges were brought up during and after the battle of Fallujah.

Some ersatz media sites sympathetic to jihadists are still running these already debunked claims, and will no doubt attempt to recycle these claims for Operation Arrowhead Ripper (Gee, do the pictures of bodies linked here look familiar to those in the UrukNet photos? They've mysteriously transformed from the bodies of innocent victims of white phosphorus "poison gas" to being victims of napalm or Mark 77 firebombs, even though none were used in Fallujah).

As a side note, white phosphorus has already been used in Baquba...as a screening agent for American forces to move behind and through to avoid enemy fire, which is one of its primary battlefield uses.

Tough Choices

So South Carolina, who will you choose in the next Republican Senate primaries, Lindsay Graham, or an indicted coke dealer?

I'm guessing that the coke dealer will at least close the border to other cartels, so that's at least a minor improvement

The Declining State of Taliban Education

How can they call it a "graduation" when it is obvious that not a single student has taken the final exam?

I demand accountability.

Heh. In the comments at Hot Air, "Those who can, bomb. Those who can't, make videos. "

Major Surge Op Underway in Diyala

Up to 10,000 U.S. Troops have mounted an air and ground assault in Baquba:

Up to 10,000 U.S. soldiers backed by armored vehicles and helicopter gunships fought their way into an al Qaeda haven in Iraq on Tuesday, killing at least 22 extremist fighters, the military said.

Operation Arrowhead Ripper, involving Strykers and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, was aimed at dismantling al Qaeda operations around Baquba, a hotbed of unrest north of Baghdad, a military statement said.

Baquba is the capital of Diyala province, a mixed region located north and east of Baghdad and bordering Iran. Military officials believe some al Qaeda in Iraq elements have recently migrated from Baghdad and Anbar province to Diyala.

The 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division kicked off the operation "with a quick-strike nighttime air assault earlier today," the military said Tuesday.

Ground troops joined the attack helicopters in engaging the militants, 22 of whom were killed by daylight, the military said.

Michael Yon is on the ground with U.S. forces, and writes via email:

We just attacked Baqubah (or let's say it's just begun) and I am here. Very, very busy. US forces appear to be meeting objectives so far. There is fighting and casualties on both sides, but mostly I am seeing order so far.

He posts about the opening stages of the operation in Diyala on his latest dispatch:

The doctor has made a decision: Al Qaeda must be excised. That means a large scale attack, and what appears to be the most widespread combat operations since the end of the ground war are now unfolding. A small part of that larger battle will be the Battle for Baquba. For those involved, it will be a very large battle, but in context, it will be only one of numerous similar battles now unfolding. Just as this sentence was written, we began dropping bombs south of Baghdad and our troops are in contact.

Northeast of Baghdad, innocent civilians are being asked to leave Baquba. More than 1,000 AQI fighters are there, with perhaps another thousand adjuncts. Baquba alone might be as intense as Operation Phantom Fury in Fallujah in late 2004. They are ready for us. Giant bombs are buried in the roads. Snipers—real snipers—have chiseled holes in walls so that they can shoot not from roofs or windows, but from deep inside buildings, where we cannot see the flash or hear the shots. They will shoot for our faces and necks. Car bombs are already assembled. Suicide vests are prepared.

The enemy will try to herd us into their traps, and likely many of us will be killed before it ends. Already, they have been blowing up bridges, apparently to restrict our movements. Entire buildings are rigged with explosives. They have rockets, mortars, and bombs hidden in places they know we are likely to cross, or places we might seek cover. They will use human shields and force people to drive bombs at us. They will use cameras and make it look like we are ravaging the city and that they are defeating us. By the time you read this, we will be inside Baquba, and we will be killing them. No secrets are spilling here.

Read that again, "Baquba alone might be as intense as Operation Phantom Fury in Fallujah in late 2004."

The "Mahogany Ridge" media is tied up in the latest suicide bombing in Baghdad (simply look at the title, lede, and focus of the CNN article cited above as an example), and even those who chose to feature the Baquba assault clearly don't understand the magnitude of the just-joined battle.

Once reality slowly dawns on the media that they are misunderestimating the scope and scale of the assault, steel yourself for a rush of inaccuracies as they seek to get something, anything published, much of it based upon rumor, some of it based upon outright propaganda and lies.

We saw the same during and after Fallujah, when the U.S. military was accused of using napalm on civilians. We don't even have napalm.

The ignorati claimed that white phosphorus was a "chemical weapon," or a "poison gas" and ascribed horrible wounds to it. These claims turned out to be completely untrue.

There may also once again be claims that using .50-caliber machine guns and the cannons of Bradley IFVs and helicopter gunships against terrorist personnel somehow violates the Geneva Conventions. It doesn't.

We'll be hearing and seeing much more from Diyala Province, Baquba proper, and other areas surrounding Baghdad as full-scale surge operations seek to envelop and destroy al Qaeda.

Read smart.

Update: Over at Captains Quarters Ed Morrissey adds some good analysis, and Glenn Reynolds features a longer email from Yon.

Silky Pony: I'll Win More Than One Southern State

Or so he boasts in Men's Vogue.

Men's Vogue?

I'm sure copies are flying off the shelf at Tractor Supply Company as we speak.

Burning the Smoking Gun: Steyr Responds

Last week I published Burning the Smoking Gun, which rebuffed/debunked a claim made by Thomas Harding in a February 12, 2007 U.K. Daily Telegraph article, which made the claim that "more than 100" HS50 .50-caliber long-range precision sniper rifles purchased by the Iranian government from the Austrian company Steyr-Mannlicher were captured in Iraq by U.S. forces.

I confirmed via U.S. Army LTC Christopher C. Garver, Director of the Combined Press Information Center for Multinational Corps-Iraq that no such rifles had ever been documented as being recovered by American forces.

30 minutes ago, Reinhild Wohltan, acting on behalf of Dr. Viktor Bauer PR GmbH, sent along a press release regarding my story. Below is the press release, as copied into a GIF format from the original PDF:

Steyr-Mannlicher once again denies the rumor published as fact in the Daily Telegraph article, and notes that were these rifles to be used for anthing other than "legitimate and important law enforcement purposes," that Steyr's agreement with the Iranian government would be breached, and intones that if the Iranian-purchased HS50 rifles were captured for "non-legitimate use"--i.e., sniping at Coalition forces within Iraq--that they would "offer support to clarify matters," which I would interpret to mean as offer to compare the serial numbers of any rifles recovered to serial numbers of those purchased by Iran.

The Daily Telegraph has not updated their original article to note that their charges are unsupported, and there is no intention that they will.

SO much for those multiple layers of fact checkers and professional media accountability.

Brit Ambassador: We Joined Invasion to Keep Cowboy Bush from Nuking Afghanistan

Actually his words were "nuke the shit out of the place," but you get the drift:

Britain joined the United States' invasion to oust the Taliban in 2001 because it feared America would "nuke the shit" out of Afghanistan, the former British ambassador to Washington reportedly told a television documentary to be screened Saturday.

In comments printed in advance in the Daily Mirror tabloid on Monday, Christopher Meyer said that fear explained why Prime Minister Tony Blair chose to stand with US President George W. Bush in his decision to invade Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks -- to temper his aggressive battle plans.

"Blair's real concern was that there would be quote unquote 'a knee-jerk reaction' by the Americans ... they would go thundering off and nuke the shit out of the place without thinking straight," Meyer reported told the documentary, according to the Mirror.

This makes perfect sense, of course, considering our history. We nuked Iraq after Abdul Rahman Yasin detonated a sodium cyanide-laced bomb in the first attack on the World Trade Center complex in 1993 and fled to that country, did we not? It was the first attempted WMD attack on the United States, and we responded accordingly. Didn't we?

Previously, we'd nuked Lebanon after the 1983 Marine Barracks bombing and Iran during the Hostage Crisis.

We're just a bunch of nuke-crazy fools!

Except that we aren't...

Frankly, this strikes me as the same kind of hyperventilating we heard over the self-debunking collection of seven British documents known as the "Downing Street Memos." Conspiracy theorists live citing the first, but shun mentioning that the David Manning Memo and the Iraqi Options Paper (PDF), two other documents in the series, indicate that a decision to invade was not the foregone conclusion they claimed.

You'll note that the British Christopher Meyer ambassador makes these claims, but at least in this account, doesn't seem to have any evidence to support his claim. How convenient.

The fact that Afghanistan's Taliban was not concentrated into an area where deploying a nuclear weapon would be a feasible option, that any fallout would potentially affect China, Pakistan and India, and that such a strike would fail to root out al Qaeda and Taliban elements somehow didn't factor into this article, or into Meyer's thinking.

I'd love to see what evidence Meyer can produce to show that we seriously considered using nuclear weapons against a largely mountainous, largely rural country in a dramatic over-response that would not likely produce the results of eliminating the Taliban and al Qaeda without also eliminating a much larger non-involved civilian population. I'd like to see documents supporting that we seriously considered what would be nothing less than visiting upon Afghanistan the kind of nuclear genocide Iranian President Mamoud Ahmadinejad keeps promising to deliver to the state of Israel. I suspect we won't get it.

Like the original Downing Street Memo that is the staple of Iraq War conspiracy theorists, this claim is likely the result of not "even fourth-hand" knowledge.

Liberal Senators Seek To Equate .50 BMG Rifles To Poison Gas, Grenades, Mines

If ever there has been a bill introduced in Congress to ban something based completely on fear and in the complete absence of any actual problem, S.1331, the so-called "Long-Range Sniper Rifle Safety Act of 2007" may be a perfect example.

The bill, introduced to the Senate on May 8 by Dianne Feinstein and co-sponsored by Senators Kennedy, Levin, Menendez, Mikulski, Clinton, Durbin, Boxer, Lautenberg, Shumer and Dodd (Democrats all), seeks to classify all firearms chambered for .50 BMG and similar calibers as "destructive devices" under the Gun Control Act of 1968 and the National Firearms Act of 1934.

Presently, the "destructive device" ban in both laws refers to poison gas, bombs, grenades, rockets, missiles, and mines.

These Senators are attempting to equate large caliber target rifles with poison gas and bombs under the law. Why?

Fear and Ignorance:

U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), today introduced legislation to regulate the transfer and possession of .50 BMG caliber sniper rifles, which have extraordinary firepower and range (more than a mile with accuracy, with a maximum distance of up to four miles). These combat-style weapons are capable of bringing down airliners and helicopters that are taking off or landing, puncturing pressurized chemical storage facilities, and penetrating light armored personnel vehicles and protective limousines.

[snip]

"These are combat-style weapons designed to kill people efficiently and destroy machinery at a great distance. This legislation would regulate these dangerous combat weapons, making it harder for terrorists and others to buy them for illegitimate use," Senator Feinstein said. "This legislation doesn't ban any firearms; it would only institute common-sense regulations for the sale of these dangerous sniper rifles."

Capable of bringing down airliners and helicopters? A .50 BMG rifle must make huge holes in aircraft to do that, wouldn't you think?

Not so much.

Thi is the rough difference between the diameter of a .50-caliber bullet (left) and the extremely common .30-caliber rifle (right).

Now, take into account that a typical .50-caliber rifle is roughly five-feet long weighs around 30 pounds, requiring them to be shot from a bipod or some other sort of support, and virtually all .50-caliber rifles use telescopic sights. Most are also single-shot, bolt-action firearms.

Feinstein and the other Democrat Senators sponsoring this bill are asking you to believe that a terrorist "super-sniper" can somehow heft a 30-pound gun and wingshoot an airliner like a clay pigeon.

The odds of a sniper hitting an airliner moving in three dimensions faster than a NASCAR stock car is infinitesimal; the odds of Feinstien's hypothetical terrorists actually bringing down a plane verge on the impossible.

What of the threat of a terrorist using such a rifle to penetrate a chemical storage tank or rail car?

According to a builder of such pressurized vessels, also virtually impossible:

When asked about the alleged threat of .50cal rifles to his railcars, Mr. Darymple said that they have long tested their cars against almost every form of firearm, to include .50BMG and larger. When asked what happens when a .50 hits one of his tanks he said with a shrug "It bounces off." He went on to point out that railcars are designed to survive the force of derailing, and collision with other railcars at travel speeds. By comparison the impact of a bullet, any bullet, is like a mosquito bite.

It also goes without saying that if terrorists did desire to take down an airliner, or blow up a railcar or chemical storage tank, they are far more likely to acquire smaller, less obtrusive, more accurate, purpose-built or improvised devices already covered under federal law.

So what is the true purpose of the bill, when the stated purposes simply don't make sense?

Only the Senators themselves know for certain, but I’d be willing to bet it comes wrapped in a cloak of fear and ignorance.

Hurry, Before This Land is Completely Sold Out!

For Sale: Prairie Chapel Ranch. 1583 acres, just seven miles northwest of beautiful Crawford, Texas. Seven scenic canyons dot the landscape, and water-lovers will enjoy three miles of frontage along Rainey Creek and the Middle Bosque River. Nature lovers will thrive in the wide open spaces.

The main house is a unique 4,000 sq/ft energy efficient limestone ranch encircled by a impressive ten-foot wide wrap-around porch. Additional quarters include guest houses and Secret Service barracks. Property includes a stocked 11-acre bass pond and large swimming pool. Asking $4,500,000.

Send offers to the email address in the sidebar.

Please note that while the law regards me as an "undocumented owner" of this property, I will graciously accept payment, and I am assured that the present occupant welcomes all "newcomers," regardless of legal contracts or boundary limitations.

Reid Attacks Petraeus... Again

Because, of course, he knows better:

Sen. Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) charged that Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, who took command in Iraq four months ago, "isn't in touch with what's going on in Baghdad." He also indicated that he thinks Petraeus has not been sufficiently open in his testimony to Congress. Noting that Petraeus, who is now on his third tour of duty in Iraq, oversaw the training of Iraqi troops during his second stint there, Reid said: "He told us it was going great; as we've looked back, it didn't go so well."

Bill at INDCJournal (who has been to Iraq), had this to say:

Harry Reid considers himself more "in touch with what's going on in Baghdad" than Petraeus? Beyond the mindblowing, bizarro hubris of such an assertion, this comment is made sinister or incompetent by the fact that Reid misrepresents the meaning of Petraus's comments:

Go to Ardalino's site for the detailed takedown.

Harry Reid, is once again willing to question General Petraeus' honesty because what Petraeus says he is seeing on the ground—in Baghdad, where he is—doesn't match up with what Reid wants to assert, namely, that the "war is lost" and that the "surge has failed."

Reid has staked out his position, and won't back down from it. Some might call that "integrity."

I'd call it "blatant dishonesty," as the last contingent of soldiers arrive for the surge just today.

Soy Bomb

Considering they supplied arms, training and men against us in wars in Korea and Vietnam in the latter half of the last century, I guess we shouldn't be too surprised at reports that China is arming our enemies today:

New intelligence reveals China is covertly supplying large quantities of small arms and weapons to insurgents in Iraq and the Taliban militia in Afghanistan, through Iran.

U.S. government appeals to China to check some of the arms shipments in advance were met with stonewalling by Beijing, which insisted it knew nothing about the shipments and asked for additional intelligence on the transfers. The ploy has been used in the past by China to hide its arms-proliferation activities from the United States, according to U.S. officials with access to the intelligence reports.

Some arms were sent by aircraft directly from Chinese factories to Afghanistan and included large-caliber sniper rifles, millions of rounds of ammunition, rocket-propelled grenades and components for roadside bombs, as well as other small arms.

The Washington Times reported June 5 that Chinese-made HN-5 anti-aircraft missiles were being used by the Taliban.

According to the officials, the Iranians, in buying the arms, asked Chinese state-run suppliers to expedite the transfers and to remove serial numbers to prevent tracing their origin. China, for its part, offered to transport the weapons in order to prevent the weapons from being interdicted.

The weapons were described as "late-model" arms that have not been seen in the field before and were not left over from Saddam Hussein's rule in Iraq.

U.S. Army specialists suspect the weapons were transferred within the past three months.

As bad as it is, that China is working with Iran to supply weapons to our enemies isn't the worst part of the story.

This is.

The Bush administration has been trying to hide or downplay the intelligence reports to protect its pro-business policies toward China, and to continue to claim that China is helping the United States in the war on terrorism. U.S. officials have openly criticized Iran for the arms transfers but so far there has been no mention that China is a main supplier.

I want to be very careful and not jump to conclusions here, but it seems that Gertz is making the claim that the Bush administration is trying to cover-up the Chinese sale and transfer of weapons used to target American and allied soldiers at the behest of American companies doing business with the Chinese.

If this claim can be substantiated...

Reid Betrays the Selective Memory-Based Community

At Daily Kos, "BarbinMD" went to bat this afternoon for an embattled Harry Reid:

Since its inception a few short months ago, Politico, the online soul-mate to the Drudge Report, has gotten into the habit of creating news stories through innuendo, omission, outright error, and now today, out of thin air.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "incompetent" during an interview Tuesday with a group of liberal bloggers, a comment that was never reported.

Reid made similar disparaging remarks about Army Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said several sources familiar with the interview.

Of course the reason this comment was never reported is quite simple: the bloggers on the call don't remember this quote. I, along with mcjoan and Kagro X, participated in that conference call and none of us heard Reid say it. And of the four other bloggers who were there, Joe and John from AMERICAblog and Jonathon Singer, have no recollection of it.

Please make note: according to this Kos frontpager, she and two other prominent Daily Kos bloggers never heard Harry Reid call General Pace "incompetent," and of the other four bloggers on the call, the two representing Americablog, and one from MyDD, didn't recall anything, either. "Ain't nobody heard nothin,'" as it were, from six of the seven highly respected liberal bloggers on the conference call with the Democrat Senate Majority Leader. But don't question their integrity.

The last man standing, Bob Geiger, recalled things a bit differently, but still attempted a fanboy's "I don't think that word means what you think it means" defense of Reid:

Here's exactly what Reid said:

"I guess the president, uh, he's gotten rid of Pace because he could not get him confirmed here in the Senate… Pace is also a yes-man for the president and I told him to his face, I laid it out to him last time he came to see me, I told him what an incompetent man I thought he was."

So, did Reid utter the word "incompetent" in the same sentence with General Pace's name on the conference call? Yes, he did.

Geiger then went on to make a pathetic attempt to wrangle Reid's mangled syntax into an attack on President Bush instead of Pace.

The seven liberal bloggers on the conference call with Harry Reid either suffered from a convenient form of group amnesia, or from the inability to honestly parse the English language, but perhaps what was important from their perspective is that they rallied together for Harry with strongly-worded claims of "I can't recall," and "I don't remember," and "It depends on what the definition of the word 'is,' is."

But sometimes irony and justice come hand in hand, and Harry Reid soon did to these radical anti-war bloggers what they are collectively trying to do to the American military and the Iraqi people: he cut and ran:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid confirmed Thursday that he told liberal bloggers last week that he thinks outgoing Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Peter Pace is "incompetent."

Reid also disparaged Army Gen. David Petraeus, head of Multinational Forces in Iraq.

But Reid, whose comments to bloggers first appeared in The Politico, also told reporters: "I think we should just drop it."

For the Selective Memory-Based Community, Reid's betrayal must have been awful.

Guns and Madness

I'm assuming that many of you saw that the House of Representatives passed an NRA-supported gun control bill yesterday that aimed to close some dangerous loopholes, requiring states to more quickly and fully provide information to check the criminal and mental health records of potential gun buyers.

Congressional Quarterly reports that the bill faces an uncertain future in the Senate, due in part to resistance by Gun Owners of America and unidentified mental health advocacy groups.

As someone who uses the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) to check the status of potential gun purchasers, I have reservations about the proposed changes, even though I strongly believe that neither felons nor the mentally ill should have access to firearms. Actually, it is my concern over the mentally ill potentially accessing firearms that has me worried.

One provision of the bill that was described thusly:

The senator suggested earlier this week that he was pleased with negotiated language that would explicitly protect the ability of veterans designated as having psychological conditions, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, to buy guns. The measure would also authorize procedures that would allow those successfully treated for mental illness to regain the ability to buy guns.

I'm neither a psychologist nor a psychiatrist, and I do not have anything beyond a layman's understanding of how the human psyche is damaged nor healed. Frankly, based upon what I've seen of people who have been to psychologists and psychiatrists, I'm none to certain that the experts have any idea, either.

For this reason, I'm extremely leery about how they might determine whether someone who was once determined to be mentally ill is now "cured."

My secondary concern deals with reality and the law of unintended consequences.

While a NICS background check is an important tool in sorting out those who should not be allowed to purchase firearms, it is simply one tool based upon documented information.

In my opinion—and I believe that I share this opinion with many who sell firearms on the retail level—one of the best tools to determine whether someone should be allowed to purchase a firearm is an employee trained to look for certain "red flag" characteristics in a buyer. For every high-profile killer like Seung-Hui Cho, there are many potential purchasers without a criminal or mental record who should not be allowed to purchase firearms for other, less technical but still reasonable concerns.

I have, on more than one occasion, turned down a transaction after a NICS background check came back allowing the sale to proceed simply because something "wasn't quite right" about the purchaser. Displayed maturity, firearms safety, certain mannerisms, personality traits, or other suspicious behavior can all be reasons to deny a sale that a database simply cannot account for.

Some gun sellers may become too over-reliant upon the more powerful proposed NICS system, and may forego some of the "human checks" as a result, while we at the same time rely on a less-than-precise mental health system to determine when someone is "cured" and once more able to purchase a firearm.

Somehow, I don't think this bill will change much.

Too Little, Too Late

Via Fox News

President Mahmoud Abbas will dissolve the Palestinian Authority's government Thursday after fighting between rival parties Hamas and Fatah consumed the Gaza Strip and was expected to call for a state of emergency, sources close to Abbas confirmed to FOX News.

Hamas fighters took control from two of the rival Fatah movement's most important security command centers in the Gaza Strip, and witnesses said the victors dragged vanquished gunmen into the street and shot them to death execution-style.

Now he's expected to call a state of emergency?

This is kind of like jotting a note to requisition more lifejackets after you've hit the iceberg and the ship's already gone down.

The Declining Media Influence of the Association of Muslim Scholars

Formerly a staple of reports in the Associated Press and other news organizations, the credibility of the Iraqi group known as the Association of Muslims Scholars (also known as the Muslim Scholars Association) seems to have fallen on hard times.

The al-Qaeda-aligned group's credibility may have begun to diminish when it claimed that 18 people died in an inferno at the al-Muhaimin mosque in Hurriyah, Baghdad, as part of a highly-disputed series of AP stories claiming that up to 24 people died and four mosques were "burned and blew up" on November 24, 2006. A photo taken the next day from inside the mosque rebutted that claim.

The Associated Press again used the Association of Muslim Scholars as a source for a dubious account on April 10, 2007, as the AMS made the following inflammatory charge:

The Muslim Scholars Association, a Sunni group, issued a statement quoting witnesses as saying Tuesday's battle began after Iraqi troops entered a mosque and executed two young men in front of other worshippers. Ground forces used tear gas on civilians, it said.

These charges were never substantiated.

I asked at the time, "Why does the Associated Press continue to use an organization with an obvious political agenda, ties to al Qaeda, and a documented history of providing false information as a source?"

Apparently, someone at the major media organizations had similar misgivings about the credibility of the Association of Muslim Scholars at roughly that time, or shortly thereafter.

A Google News search for "Association of Muslim Scholars" and a search for "Muslim Scholars Association show that no prominent news organizations have used the AMS as a source for over a month, even as links from lesser news sources (primarily blogs) show that the organization are still issuing press releases.

Apparently, it only took four years of publishing the propaganda of the AMS as news for the professional media to finally realize they were being had.

How encouraging.

Silky Pony's New Plan to Tax You to Pay Pharmaceutical Companies and Raise Insurance Costs

This idea seems ever bit as dim as his plan to rely on a re-branded Peace Corps to fight terrorism.

Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards wants to reduce the cost of U.S. health care by removing patents for breakthrough drugs and requiring health insurance companies to spend at least 85 percent of their premiums on patient care.

The former North Carolina senator was expected to discuss details of a universal health care proposal he released in February during an appearance Thursday at the Riverside Health Center.

Edwards' plan would remove long-term patents for companies that develop breakthrough drugs and then reap large profits because of the monopolies those patents provide, according to a statement by Edwards obtained Wednesday evening.

Edwards said offering cash incentives instead would allow multiple companies to produce those drugs and drive down prices.

By reducing pharmaceutical companies ability to make a profit from patented drugs, Edwards would be encouraging them to spend less money on researching and developing new cures. After all, these are drug companies, and companies exist to make a profit. Why would companies spend time and billions of dollars developing new and more effective drugs, when Edwards is going to strip away their ability to recoup development costs and turn a profit by forcing these new drugs to become generic by stripping away patents?

But he already has a solution.

Edwards promises to pay companies to keep developing new drugs with "cash incentives." We all know where these incentives would come from. To make good on his promise, Edwards will foist new taxes upon the American taxpayer.

As a result, the cost of new drugs won't actually go down, you'll just be paying from them whether you need them, or not, through your federal taxes.

The other part of Edward's "brilliant" health care plan is to force insurers to spend 85% of their premiums on patient care. this sounds great, until once again economics comes into play. Insurers are in business to make money, and if they can't within the framework you're paying for now, you can expect the premium costs to skyrocket until that 15% is large enough to cover their operating costs and keep their shareholders happy.

I don't know whom the Edwards campaign keeps paying to come up with these hare-brained schemes, but they are obviously paying them far too much.

The Seditious Senator Reid

Comfortable among his own kind, Democrat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has dropped all pretenses of the insincere "...but we support the troops" mantra utterly by the far left, the Politico reports:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "incompetent" during an interview Tuesday with a group of liberal bloggers, a comment that was never reported.

Reid made similar disparaging remarks about Army Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said several sources familiar with the interview.

This is but the latest example of how Reid, under pressure from liberal activists to do more to stop the war, is going on the attack against President Bush and his military leaders in anticipation of a September showdown to end U.S. involvement in Iraq, according to Democratic senators and aides.

The report of Reid's attacks on key military commanders comes one day after Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent a letter to President Bush claiming that the "surge" in Iraq has failed, just weeks after claiming they would wait until September to evaluate the success of the surge, and despite widespread and growing Sunni uprisings against al Qaeda in al Anbar and Diyala provinces, in Baghdad's Sunni-dominated Amiriyah district, and elsewhere.

According to U.S. Code, Title 18 > Part I > Chapter 115 > § 2387 Activities affecting armed forces generally:

(a) Whoever, with intent to interfere with, impair, or influence the loyalty, morale, or discipline of the military or naval forces of the United States:

(1) advises, counsels, urges, or in any manner causes or attempts to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty by any member of the military or naval forces of the United States; or
(2) distributes or attempts to distribute any written or printed matter which advises, counsels, or urges insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty by any member of the military or naval forces of the United States—

Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both, and shall be ineligible for employment by the United States or any department or agency thereof, for the five years next following his conviction.

(b) For the purposes of this section, the term “military or naval forces of the United States” includes the Army of the United States, the Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, Naval Reserve, Marine Corps Reserve, and Coast Guard Reserve of the United States; and, when any merchant vessel is commissioned in the Navy or is in the service of the Army or the Navy, includes the master, officers, and crew of such vessel.

Marine General Peter Pace is still the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and an active duty officer and leader in the United States military. U.S. Army General David Petraeus is the Commanding General of Multi-National Force - Iraq (MNF-I), in command of all U.S Army, Marine, Navy and Air Force military units in Iraq. Petraeus was confirmed to that position confirmed to that position by the Senate in an 81-0 vote less than five months ago on January 26, 2007.

Senator Harry Reid, please explain to us how your apparent utterances calling serving generals "incompetent" while they are engaged in command duties as general officers of the United States during wartime does not amount to interfering with, impairing, or attempting to influence the loyalty, morale, or discipline of the military or naval forces of the United States.

You'll note, Senator Reid, that Chapter 15 of U.S. Code covers "Treason, Sedition, and Subversive Activities," and I find it very hard for you to argue—though you and your supporters certainly will—that words uttered against the competence of active duty commanding generals during wartime does not amount to an attempt to "interfere with, impair, or influence the loyalty, morale, or discipline of the military or naval forces of the United States." Your offense, coming from your position of United States Senate Majority Leader, is particularly egregious when it is considered that these comments are directed to a group of opinionmakers that claim to hold such sway over Democrat Party politics.

Gaza Civil War Over Before It Began; Summer Campaign Dominoes Falling Into Place

I wrote on June 5th in a post called The Sliding War that "...the factions in Gaza are almost in, sliding into, on the brink of, and verging on being in a civil war, but they aren't there quite yet... and have been for over a year."

Now, it appears that the Gaza Civil War may be all but over, even before the media could recognize it.

From today's Jerusalem Post:

Hamas fighters overran Fatah-allied Preventive Security headquarters in Gaza City on Thursday, a key target in their battle to control the entire Gaza Strip, witnesses and a security agency official said.

One witness, Jihad Abu Ayad, said Hamas gunmen were bringing Preventive Security men out of the building and executing them in the street.

The headquarters was the last Fatah stronghold in Gaza City, and Fatah appears to be demoralized and all but collapsing.

If Hamas—an Iranian-supported terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel—wrests complete control of Gaza, it is indeed an ominous development.

A member of the Syrian Parliment, Mohammad al Habash, has already told al Jazeera that Syria is preparing for a summer war against Israel, and Hezbollah's deputy secretary Sheikh Naim Kassem has already stated that Hezbollah—rearmed by Iran and Syria after last year's battle with Israel in Lebanon—is also preparing for another summer "adventure" with Israel as well.

A map of the region shows why these claims are of such concern.

If the ominous rumblings by Syria and Hezbollah of a summer campaign against Israel are credible, then most if not all of northern Israel could be a potential battleground. If Hamas can consolidate power in Gaza, then they have the possibility of opening a weaker, but still lethal second front in the event of a summer war, diverting or dividing Israeli ground forces.

I strongly doubt that even a combined Syrian, Hamas, and Hezbollah offensive would have any strong chance of success, and hope that whatever their endgame strategy is, they realize that as well.

Acute Politics Comes Home

Teflon Don of Acute Politics is back in the world:

After another long stretch in the plane, we landed in Dallas. The people in Dallas are great- my first glimpse of America included a fire truck spraying an arc of water over the plane to welcome us home. Inside, the terminal was almost bare, but there was a still a small crowd that went to the airport at 6am to greet us. A quick run through immigrations and customs put us back in the world- a place where we are much less soldiers, and much more kids trying to make our cell phones work.

My group flew standby, trying to get home just a few hours quicker. Everywhere we went, we had a few people come up and thank us. In my experience, most of those that did had a relative or friend in the military. Most people payed no more attention to us than to anyone anyone else. No one was rude.

The First Immigration Debate

Beware the Crackers.

It's Time To Consider Bombing Republican National Headquarters

On second thought, nevermind. They seem quite intent on imploding it themselves.

Burning the Smoking Gun

On February 12, Thomas Harding, Defense Correspondent of the U.K. Daily Telegraph, published what many regarded as evidence of the literal "smoking gun" proving Iranian government involvement in Iraq:

Austrian sniper rifles that were exported to Iran have been discovered in the hands of Iraqi terrorists, The Daily Telegraph has learned.

More than 100 of the.50 calibre weapons, capable of penetrating body armour, have been discovered by American troops during raids.

The guns were part of a shipment of 800 rifles that the Austrian company, Steyr-Mannlicher, exported legally to Iran last year.

The sale was condemned in Washington and London because officials were worried that the weapons would be used by insurgents against British and American troops.

Within 45 days of the first HS50 Steyr Mannlicher rifles arriving in Iran, an American officer in an armoured vehicle was shot dead by an Iraqi insurgent using the weapon.

Over the last six months American forces have found small caches of the £10,000 rifles but in the last 24 hours a raid in Baghdad brought the total to more than 100, US defence sources reported.

The find is the latest in a series of discoveries that indicate that Teheran is providing support to Iraq's Shia insurgents.

Other Iranian ordnance, such as explosively-formed penetrators designed to slice through armored vehicles and Iranian-manufactured mortar and artillery shells had previously been captured in Iraq, though with little solid evidence implicating the Iranian government.

Capturing more than 100 of the 800 Austrian rifles shipped to the Iranian government—over twelve percent of their entire purchase—would be the most direct evidence yet of the Iranian government supplying Iraqi insurgents with weapons to kill coalition forces.

But the U.S. military says not so much as a single Steyr-Mannlicher HS50 .50-caliber sniper rifle has ever been documented as having been captured from Sunni insurgents or Shia militias in Iraq.

In an exclusive to Confederate Yankee, U.S. Army Christopher C. Garver, Director of the Combined Press Information Center for Multinational Corps-Iraq, stated that no such rifles have ever been confirmed recovered by American military forces in Iraq.

"Ever since that article, we have queried our units to see if anyone can find any evidence of those Steyr-Mannlicher sniper rifles," said Garver.

"To date, we have not found one unit that has any knowledge of that find.

"I can't tell you that this didn't happen -- the possibility that the cache of rifles was destroyed before being completely documented does exist, though the chance of that happening is small -- but we have been able to find no evidence of it."

Independent embedded combat journalist Michael Yon, who has perhaps spent more time in Iraq than any member of the western media, also discounts the likelihood of the Daily Telegraph story as being consistent with his experience in Iraq.

Yon, a former Green Beret weapons specialist, wrote, "I've been on many raids and seen literally tons of munitions captured. RPGs, small arms and machineguns of many sorts, hand grenades of many sorts, surface to air missiles, artillery and mortar rounds by the thousands if not tens of thousands between places like Baquba and Mosul (the largest weapons ASP I have seen was in Baqubah at FOB Gabe), but I have never seen a .50 caliber sniper rifle in Iraq that did not belong to Americans."

Michael Fumento, another independent journalist who has spent time embedded with Coaltion forces in Iraq and NATO forces in Afghanistan, likewise stated, "I heard nothing about the use of .50 cal enemy sniper rifles."

For it's part, Steyr-Mannlicher, the Austrian company that sold the HS50 rifles to the Iranian government and was embargoed by the U.S. and British government as a direct result, posted a press release in March disputing the Daily Telegraph story.

Dozens of media outlets and blogs (including this one) had reported the Daily Telegraph story as proof of Iranian government involvement in Iraq. To date, there is no indication that the Daily Telegraph has issued a retraction for their apparently false claims.

(Author's note: A special thanks to Mark Tapscott, editorial page editor of the Washington Examiner and blogger at Tapscott's Copy Desk, and U.S. Army Col. Steven A. Boylan, PAO for MNF-I Commanding General David Petraeus, for their assistance in researching this story.)

At It Again

President Bush is already working the phones for round two of the illegal alien amnesty bill.

Jeep Jihadi Apologizes, Requests Life... in California

His defense attorney claims he has "a severe mental illness."

The man accused of striking nine people when he drove a vehicle on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill last year has apologized in a letter sent to the court.

In the letter dated May 20 and sent to Orange County Superior Court, Mohammed Taheri-azar said he is "very sorry for the crimes which I committed in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on March 3, 2006. I sincerely regret what I did on that day. Please release me from state custody so that I may pursue my goal of living a productive life in California."

Taheri-azar has pleaded not guilty to nine counts of attempted first-degree murder and nine counts of felonious assault.

The Next Protest Slogan?

"No War For Beer!"

Still Just Factional Fighting

Hamas is threatening to overrun Fatah positions in Gaza, one day after attacking the home of Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniya and killing the top Fatah official in northern Gaza, Jamal al-Jediyan.

According to Global Security's handy dandy Civil War Checklist, there are five critieria for a civil war:

civil war: A war between factions of the same country; there are five criteria for international recognition of this status: the contestants must control territory, have a functioning government, enjoy some foreign recognition, have identifiable regular armed forces, and engage in major military operations.

Does each faction control territory? Check.

Does Gaza have a functioning government? Check.

Do Fatah and Hamas enjoy some foreign recognition? Check.

Do they have identifiable armed forces? Check.

Do they engage in major military operations Check, and with two attacks directed against Haniya in two days and the new threat issued by Hamas against Fatah, the violence is getting more pronounced each day.

At some point, Rueters, AFP, the Assocaited Press, and other news organizations should begin identifying this clear civil war for what it is.

That day, however, is not today.

A Call to Arms

Citing "an increasingly lunatic society that is armed more than ever," The U.K. Daily Express is taking the radical step of calling for British citizens to take up arms.

Did I say citizens?

I meant police:

Michael Winner, founder of the Police Memorial Trust which commemorates officers killed on duty, said the dangers faced by PCs everyday are greater than ever.

He said: "We live in an increasingly lunatic society that is armed more than ever. There are knives, there are guns. There are the sorts of weapons out there which were not there when I was a young person.

"The fact that officers are not armed is shocking. Of our 33 memorials, I think 28 officers would be alive if they had been armed."

Victor Bates, whose jeweller wife Marian was killed by robbers in Nottingham in 2003, said: "It is long past the time to arm all our officers."

They're still a very long way from allowing British citizens to defend themselves, but I suppose this could be seen as progress, if you squint.

Cheney Worst Veep Evah

So says John W. Mashek, retired Beltway journalist of four decades and U.S. News and World Report blogger. I'm sure he was completely objective in his reporting, and didn't develop any strong opinions until he began blogging.

And yet as horrible as the Veep is, Cheney's approval numbers are twice that of Harry Reid.

How disconcerting.

Is Hyperventilating a Team Sport?

If so, I think this guy is shooting for MVP:

Gov. Huckabee, who wants to be President, seems to have no problem with the gulag known as Gitmo. In fact, he says that prisoners would rather be in Gitmo then in the prisons right here in the USA...

[snip]

If Gitmo is better then state prisons in the USA, then we need to shut down every prison in the United States. Gitmo is a gulag, plain and simple. People there are being tortured, and some are dying. There are constant hunger strikes, and no international human rights groups are allowed to monitor the situation down there.

I covered this ground almost two years ago.

There are indeed prisons in America far worse than Guantanamo Bay, and to label the detention facility there a "gulag" is an abject display of ignorance, showing just how little the excitable author knows about real Soviet gulags, where millions of prisoners were worked, starved, and tortured to death.

Four prisoners have commited suicide at Guantanamo, since 2002, less than one a year, while 400 prisoners in American prisons commit suicide each year.

New Euphemism Deployed in Gaza

Don't worry; there is zero chance of escalation.

Via The Australian:

A Member of the Palestinian Fatah movement was thrown off the roof of an 18-storey building today amid renewed clashes between rival factions across Gaza, as Israel vowed to continue its strikes.

Mohammed Suwerki was kidnapped near the seafront in Gaza moments before he was flung to his death from the roof of a building by fighters loyal to the Islamist Hamas movement, which has been locked for months in a power struggle with President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement.

It's now a "power struggle."

I've got to hand it to the media. Apparently tired of 13 months of saying that the Palestinian groups are engaged in "factional fighting," the media has come up with a new and interesting way of avoiding the fact that Hamas and Fatah are engaged in a civil war.

Shaped Charge Captured in Afghanistan

They don't say "EFP" or "explosively-formed penetrator," but based upon how the story is composed and allusions to Iraq, it seems like that is what they are probably talking about here.

A hi-tech bomb, similar to the ones used by militants in Iraq, has been found in the Afghan capital, Kabul.

Afghan intelligence sources say the bomb can penetrate heavily armoured vehicles and was set up by a road to target a high-level government convoy.

There is increasing evidence that sophisticated explosives technology is crossing into Afghanistan from Iraq.

Police and government officials say they believe Iran is the source of these so-called "shaped charges".

'Shaped charges'

They have been used widely in Iraq and now it seems they are on the streets of Afghanistan.

These "shaped charges" are designed to explode in a specific direction, to concentrate the force into one point, and their discovery in Kabul is a worrying development for security forces.

To be fair, EFPs are just one kind of shaped charge, and the device found in Kabul may not be an EFP. It is worrisome that the media so quickly tied this device to Iran, and I'd like to know how they made that determination. I suspect that EOD specialists noted characteristics of this device that mimic those devices captured in Iraq to make that determination, but don't know for certain.

Needless to say, it bears watching to see if more charges thought to be of Iranian origin show up in Afghanistan, which could indicate that Iran is attempting to spread its influence eastward.

Information Underload

Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman's comments yesterday on Face the Nation have drawn him quite a bit of attention:

"We've said so publicly that the Iranians have a base in Iran at which they are training Iraqis who are coming in and killing Americans. By some estimates, they have killed as many as 200 American soldiers...if there's any hope of the Iranians living according to the international rule of law and stopping, for instance, their nuclear weapons development, we can't just talk to them...He added, "If they don't play by the rules, we've got to use our force, and to me, that would include taking military action to stop them from doing what they're doing."

"They can't believe that they have immunity for training and equipping people to come in and kill Americans," he said. "We cannot let them get away with it. If we do, they'll take that as a sign of weakness on our part and we will pay for it in Iraq and throughout the region and ultimately right here at home."

People from the right and left have been quick to issue judgement on his pronouncement.

On National Review Online, Michael Ledeen states he thinks Lieberman should be our new Secretary of State because of this comments, while a whole host of liberal blogs have taken the opportunity to use these words against the former Democrat (now Independent) Senator, labeling him "a tool," a "neocon," a "warmonger," and far worse.

Sadly, while both the right and left have quickly jumped on their respective and predictable bandwagons to either support the Senator or condemn Lieberman’s comments, I've read precious little issued forth in concern for the American military forces ostensibly being attacked with Iranian weapons, or by militiamen that are rumored to be trained at facilities within Iran.

Shouldn't we be debating whether or not to attack Iran based upon the threats to American servicemen? This simply is not a conversation being had.

It doesn't seem that either side wants to ask the hard questions that must be asked.

We've heard time and again that Iran is shipping precision-made EFPs (Explosively-Formed Penetrators) into Iraq to militias targeting American armored vehicles. We've heard from the military that the homemade EFPs manufactured in Iraq are not made with enough precision to perform properly against American armor, and that only those EFPs made professionally in Iran can cut through the armor of even our main battle tanks.

Shouldn't we in the blogosphere be asking for details, asking the military to completely explain, in excruciating detail, the technical characteristics of these EFPs that identify them as being Iranian in origin? Shouldn't we be asking for this conclusive proof that the Iranian government must be behind the manufacture of such weapons?

We've heard time and again that other Iranian ordnance, from mortar shells to artillery rounds to sniper rifles to surface-to-air missiles, has been captured in Iraq. Shouldn't we be asking characteristics identify these weapons as exclusively Iranian in origin, and then ask if they could be filtering into Iraq in any other way than with the assistance of the Iranian government?

We've heard time and again that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Qods Force is actively engaged in training and equipping militias in Iraq; shouldn't we be pushing for hard evidence of such a connection, and debating whether or not the evidence of such connections is indeed an act of war worthy of a political, economic, or military response?

What precisely is Senator Lieberman asking for? Is he asking for American special operations units to insert into Iran to capture evidence from suspected EFP manufacturing centers? Is he asking for American air assets to attack and destroy the suspected terrorist training facilities at Imam Ali base near Khorram Abad, or for strikes on Revolutionary Guard bases, training facilities, or leadership targets?

We should be asking these questions, but it seems too many in the blogosphere are siloed into their positions, firmly for or against a strike against Iran based not on the threat posed to American, British, and Iraqi forces, but based upon their own domestic political objectives and agendas.

The questions we should be asking should revolve around the mortal threat Iranian weapons and training either do or do not pose to our troops and that of our allies. We should be asking for hard evidence that such weapons and training are being provided by the Iranian regime. We should be pushing the military, the media, and our leaders to provide us as much information as possible, so that we can intelligently discuss whether or not the Iranian government is either directing or allowing actions against our forces in the region, and what an appropriate response to such a threat would be.

But we aren't doing that in the blogosphere, or in the media.

We've chosen our positions, and have determined our support or opposition to actions against Iran based upon very little but our own preconceived notions and political ideologies, and with little regard to the threat posed to our national security, the security of Iraq, and the security of our troops who may be facing Iranian weapons and Iranian-trained militiamen and insurgents.

Should we consider attacking Iranian personnel and facilities for their involvement in Iraq? I, for one, don't have enough information yet to make a judgement for or against such a strike.

I wish my fellow bloggers and members of the media would pressure our politicians and the military to produce the answers we require to develop an informed opinion, though apparently, many don't feel that being informed is necessary at all.

High School Refuses To Let Marine Wear Uniform to Graduation

In the Raleigh News & Observer:

Pfc. Eric Hile, 17, graduated from the school in January, but returned from his training to walk across the stage and take his diploma.

He wanted to wear his dress blues under his gown, but Principal Jerry Smith insisted he follow school rules, which require that all graduating students wear khaki pants, a dark tie and a white shirt.

"We have a standard policy," Smith said. "Everyone dresses the same for graduation."

But Elizabeth Hile, Eric's mother, said wearing his uniform is an important show of patriotism.

"I can understand that some kids want to wear shorts and a T-shirt. I get that," Hile said. "But he is a United States Marine. It's a show that he is so proud to be in the U.S. military."

I've been to several high school graduations in North Carolina, and I've never seen school officials enforce graduation dress code policies rigorously. Principal Smith could have very easily granted Pfc. Hile an exception, and I think most here would feel that such an exception in this case is well deserved for a proud young Marine.

Should anyone politely like to tell Principal Smith what they think of his decision, he can presumably be contacted at Clayton High School: (919) 553-4064.

More Bloodshed on The Way In Iraq

JD Johannes makes some predictions about the "surge" in Iraq leading to a wider war before peace is achieved.

I don't think he's probably too far off the mark.

Silky Pony's Six-Point Plan Against Terrorism

Democratic Presidential Candidate John Edwards has posted a six-point outline of his strategy for combating terrorism on his campaign Web site.

Let's take a look at what he's offering, point-by-point.

"Rebalance our force structure for the challenges of the new century"

• Force Structure: The force structure of our military should match its mission. The Administration's mismanagement of the military has not only breached the faith at the highest levels—it has led to a very dangerous situation for our security. We are sending some troops back to Iraq with less than a year's rest. Edwards believes we need to ensure that our force structure is well equipped for the challenges of the new century. We must have enough troops to rebuild from Iraq; to bolster deterrence; to decrease our heavy reliance on Guard and Reserve members in military operations; and to deploy in Afghanistan and any other trouble spots that could develop. As president, Edwards will also double the budget for recruiting and raise the standards for the recruiting pool so that we can reduce waivers issued for recruits with felonies, which have skyrocketed under President Bush.

Stripping the politics out of this statement (if that can actually even be done) and looking solely at the policy, Edwards is suggesting that our troops need a full year's rest between deployments, that our troops need to be "well-equipped," that our standing military needs to be larger, that we need to deploy more troops to Afghanistan, and that we need to significantly increase recruiting and standards for those recruits.

Correct me if I am wrong, but as I recall history, the idea of our soldiers needing a year between deployments seems to be a modern phenomenon. Our soldiers in the Continental Army did not get year-long rest breaks in the Revolutionary War, the World Wars, or any other conflict in this nation's history until the current war in Iraq. I seem to recall that units were sent into battle, fought, and took brief "R&R" breaks of much shorter durations during a major conflict, sometimes lasting just a few days or weeks, and other times lasting months.

By way of example, World War II's "Band of Brothers," Easy Company, 506th PIR, went through several weeks or months of combat, with several weeks or months of training or R&R between combat deployments.

Most books I've read on military history (most of which were of this time frame) followed similar patterns. Unless pulled from combat for extensive training for a fresh assault, most units I recall reading about rarely, if ever, received a year off after a tour of combat. Is a full year between deployments truly needed?

I'm not the person to answer that question, but I can tell you that I cannot easily find a record of any large unit in any military in world history that consistently got a year off between combat tours. It would seem to me (admittedly as a civilian) that a year's rest would leave troops rusty, and in the kind of counter-insurgency operations we are now fighting where relationships with local communities are key, it means that the troops would have to start over and establish new relationships with every deployment. To me, sending home entire units for a year at a time seems very unwise.

I don't think anyone will argue with Edwards' platitude that our troops need to be "well equipped." How can you argue with that? But the simple fact of the matter is that our soldiers are already by far the best-equipped military in world history. Period. Edwards presumably want to make them bullet-proof, to avoid criticism when soldiers die. But soldiers with enough armor to be impervious to enemy fire are soldiers that lack the mobility to be effective in combat. Well-equipped does not mean making our soldiers over-armored to the point of being ineffective.

I do agree with Edwards on several points, holding the same opinion that our military should be larger than it currently is, and that we should seek higher quality recruits, and spend the extra money to attract them.

Now, on to point two.

"Ensure our intelligence strategy adheres to proven and effective methods"

• Intelligence Strategy: We must aggressively gather intelligence in accordance with proven methods. Valuable information can be gained through interrogation, both about past and future attacks, and we must do everything we can to gather this information to keep us and our allies secure. At the same time, we must avoid actions that will give terrorists or even other nations an excuse to abandon international law. As president, Edwards will immediately address the issues that have become blemishes on America's image in the world by closing Guantanamo Bay, restoring habeas corpus, and banning torture.

Against, once we strip out the politics from this statement we are left with something like policy, and that policy is...don't be evil.

Well, that’s all well and good if you're running to be president of Google, but the reality of the matter for POTUS is a bit more complex that perhaps "Senator Gone" misunderestimates. I don't know of anyone who advocates wholesale, widespread torture, but for Edwards to intone that waterboarding of senior level operational commanders is wrong if a major attack is imminent, is nothing less than moral abandonment, stating that principles are more important than American lives in any and all circumstances. This is simply wrong.

Further, Edwards betrays a childlike misunderstanding of our enemies if he actually thinks terrorists have ever given any consideration to international law, or that by treating terrorists with kid gloves, we will somehow influence their actions. Frankly, this platitude shows him to be an unserious, lightweight candidate, and perhaps somewhat dangerous.

His "blemishes" comment simply affirms he is far more interested in symbolism than results.

"Hold regular meetings with top military leadership"

• Meetings with Military Leadership: The past few years have brought the biggest crisis in civil-military relations in a generation. The mismanagement of the Pentagon has been so severe that many of our most decorated retired officers are speaking out. As president, Edwards will institute regular, on-on-one meetings with top military leadership. He will also reinstate a basic doctrine of national security management that has been demolished by the Bush Administration: military professionals will have primary responsibility in matters of tactics and operations, while civilian leadership will have authority in all matters of broad strategy and political decisions.

This is apparently meant as a swipe at George W. Bush and Don Rumsfeld, and perhaps one that they deserve.

What it does establish is that Edwards seeks to be very "hands on" if elected. As I recall, that didn't work very well with LBJ. Edwards comment here is, of course, also directed at the fact that many generals have disagreed with how the current war has been fought.

Edwards indicates that he will try to listen to most or all generals. If Edwards sincerely means to listen and attempt to assuage the misgivings and differences of opinions among all generals, he will "lead" us into paralysis, and that the bold stokes of a Patton or a Grant will be ignored over a safe, consensus position... a self-imposed Pentagon quagmire. I do not find that encouraging in the least.

"Create a "Marshall Corps" to stabilize weak and failing states"

• "Marshall Corps": Weak and failing states create hotbeds for terrorism and create regional instability that creates security dangers for the U.S. and our allies. As president, Edwards will create a "Marshall Corps" of 10,000 professionals, modeled on the Reserves systems, who will work on stabilization and humanitarian missions. He will also implement new training for future military leadership and create a undersecretary for stabilization and a new senior stabilization position within the Joint Staff.

We've already seen the opposition for such as unit; Iran calls their version the Qods Force of the Revolutionary Guard. Edwards wants to impose an opposing Girl Scouts-Lite version of this to spread peace, joy, and puppies. Yea! A slightly more charitable interpretation is that he envisions a cross between the Corps of Engineers and the Peace Corps, or the creation of something like the Navy Seabees, but populated with social workers. I'm not sure what he is actually proposing here, and suspect he isn't sure, either.

"Rebuild equipment"

• Rebuild Equipment. Over 1,000 vehicles like tanks and helicopters have been lost in Iraq, and our equipment is being used at a rate of five to six times its peacetime use. Our forces are not equipped to meet the challenges presented to them. As president, Edwards will re-invest in the maintenance of our equipment so our strategy against terrorists is as effective as possible.

Edwards has latched onto the concept that stuff gets blown up in war, and he wants to reinvigorate the motor pool. Such insight.

His statement "Our forces are not equipped to meet the challenges presented to them" means one thing to me; as threats emerge, Edwards will constantly push our military procurement branches to rush willy-nilly after the Threat of the Day.

We're being hit with IEDs? Up-armor our Humvees, and buy billions of dollars in new armored trucks (like MRAPS). When the enemy builds larger IEDs, Edwards will rush to upgrade to larger MRAPS or like vehicles, and so on, and so forth, until we are left with battlefield battleships that lack the mobility to go anywhere quickly or stealthily, and by the way, are too expensive to justify sending into combat. And just so you know, EFPs tend to make those inside such heavily armored vehicles more likely to die than vehicles with no armor at all, due to spalling.

We do try to reduce the threats to our soldiers as much as possible of course, which is why our soldiers are the most heavily armored force in terms of both personal and vehicle armor in human history, but Edwards and many other candidates on both sides don't want to deal with the reality that soldiers die in war, nor do they seem to understand that there are many circumstances where armor can and should be sacrificed for mobility and flexibility for soldiers to be effective. I don't think Edwards grasps that concept in the least.

"Create a National Security Budget"

• National Security Budget: The military budget itself also needs substantial reforms to keep us as safe as possible and to deal with 21st century threats. Today, dozens of agencies perform overlapping tasks, and there is no central, overall accounting of all security activities performed by all relevant agencies. We have nuclear proliferation programs in the Defense, State, and the Energy departments, and more than 15 different security assistance programs, running out of both the State Department and the Defense Department. As president, Edwards will implement a new National Security Budget that will include all security activities by the Pentagon and the Department of Energy, and our homeland security, intelligence, and foreign affairs agencies.

Nowhere in this statement does Edwards pointedly say he will consolidate any of these over-lapping programs, he just insists that we need another layer of bureaucracy inserted on top of it. Were Edwards actually willing to consolidate some of these activities and streamline elements, I could actually get behind him on this. that isn't his intention, however. He simply betrays a belief that more government is a more effective government.

Hold on to your wallets.

Update: Captain Ed notes that Edwards' Marshall Corps" is a modern day Children's Crusade, and may face the same results. The NY Sun is similarly harsh.

Breaking Memo: Trapped in Fruitless Quagmire with Insurgents, President Considers Withdrawl

Oh, wait a minute. I might have read that too quickly.

It seems that the memo was from 1864, the President was Lincoln, and he told Meade to attack-attack-ATTACK until Lee's Army of Northern Virginia was destroyed, even as "peace Democrats" (gee, this sounds familiar) advocated for surrender and withdrawal.

I wonder if there is some sort of lesson to be learned here.... nah.

Fred! Grabs Lead in NC Primary Poll

Via WRAL:

According to a recent survey, Fred Thompson, who has not yet announced his presidential candidacy, has jumped into the lead in the North Carolina Republican primary.

The survey, released by Public Policy Polling, shows 37 percent of likely Republican primary voters would vote for the former senator from Tennessee -- a 12 percent increase from May.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani dropped to second place with 25 percent of likely Republican voters. Former Arizona Sen. John McCain and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney both garnered 14 percent.

Nine percent of Republican voters said they supported a candidate other than Thompson, Giuliani, McCain and Romney and 1 percent said they were undecided.

Not a bad showing at all, especially from someone who has yet to officially declare.

I must also confess that I'm a bit surprised at the strength of Fred!'s showing, leaping to a twelve-point lead over second-place Rudy Giuliani at a time that I didn't think he yet had made significant media penetration outside of the political junkies in the blogosphere.

In the same poll, John Edwards (30-percent) was leading the Democratic herd ahead of Hillary Clinton (26-percent) and Barack Obama (22-percent), suggesting that the recreational use of crystal meth is far more widespread in North Carolina than was previously believed.

Cheap Shot

Infuriated at Paris Hilton's early release from jail, Sean Mullen of the Moderate Voice uses the opportunity to take a swing at Fred! as well:

There are rumors that the nascient Fred Thompson presidential campaign is interested in bringing her [Hilton] on as a spokesmodel.

I'm not sure where Mullen is intending to go with this.

Is he saying that a tipsy tart like Paris Hilton is the kind of person Thompson associates himself with, and if so, isn't that yet another Scarborough-esque cheap shot at Jeri Thompson, wife of the undeclared Republican candidate?

Is a Summer Proxy War Brewing To Protect Iranian Nukes?

And so the build-up begins:

Israeli intelligence officials have been warning for weeks that Syria is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in anti-tank weapons, antiaircraft rockets, and other missiles, and bolstering its presence along the Israeli border.

Mohammad al Habash, a Syrian parliament member, meanwhile, told the Al Jazeera satellite channel this week that his country was actively preparing for war with Israel, which he said he expected to break out this summer.

I'd suggest taking that bit of news in this context:

A senior member of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's government suggested that his country is running out of patience with a US-backed diplomatic overture to head off Iran's nuclear ambitions, The Associated Press (AP) reported.

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has already threatened the U.N. Security Council after threatening the destruction of Israel in the near future just days ago.

We also know that in the wake of last summer's battle in Lebanon that Syria and Iran moved rapidly to rearm the stockpiles of their Hezbollah proxies with over 20,000 short-range missiles and a significant quantity of small arms and ammunition.

According to Defense Update, Hezbollah's deputy secretary Sheikh Naim Kassem intoned that the terror group was preparing for another "adventure" with Israel this summer, and has been receiving anti-aircraft missiles and training directly from Islamic Revolutionary Guards at Iran's Imam Ali base in Tehran.

It seems that we are witnessing is a deliberate and calculated build-up of forces by Syria and Hezbollah for a probable summer campaign against Israel, an attempt likely orchestrated by Iran.

What would be the goal of such a campaign?

Any Israeli response to a summer war would necessarily involve the use of the IDF's strike fighters to hit enemy armor, troop concentrations, or rocket firing areas that are beyond the range of Israeli artillery.

With the recent build-up in training and equipment for both Hezbollah and Syrian anti-aircraft units, it seems possible that the goal of a summer war would be to draw Israel aircraft into an engagement so that they could be ambushed and shot down.

If Syrian and Hezbollah forces could draw Israel aircraft into range, volleys of anti-aircraft missiles could potentially bring down some of Israel's premier strike aircraft and pilots, including the long-range strike fighters that have been training for a possible Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear facilities.

If Israel loses a significant number of pilots and aircraft (Israel only has 25 F-15I "Ra'am" fighters, thought to be their preferred method of delivering "bunkerbuster" bombs against hardened Iranian facilities), then the probability of success of any Israeli air strike against Iran's nuclear facilities decreases.

The coming summer war may be designed for the sole purpose of buying the Iranian program the time it needs to come to fruition and produce a nuclear warhead.

Those Wonderful Layers of Professional Editorial Oversight...

... have blown it yet again. From AFP's lede this morning (my bold):

One Palestinian was killed on Thursday as deadly clashes between rival Fatah and Hamas gunmen erupted for the first time in the Gaza Strip since the latest truce came into effect nearly three weeks ago.

Really?

I guess this nearly three-hour assault by an estimated 50-100 Hamas gunmen on Fatah's "key Presidential Guard position" just two days ago doesn't count:

Hamas and Fatah forces fought a major gun battle on Tuesday in the Gaza Strip near the Karni commercial crossing, the most serious flare-up in factional fighting in two weeks.

An officer with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Presidential Guard said a "large number" of Hamas fighters attacked a key Presidential Guard position near the crossing, wounding at least one guard member.

Or is AFP keying on the distinction "deadly," implying that if no one dies, then the violence doesn't count?

Perhaps the new AFP standard is "no body/no battle."

Somehow, I don't think that is quite accurate.

Update: Is "No Blood, no Foul" the new media standard for reporting combat? Or is it an old standard I'm just noticing?

Reuters is only slightly better than AFP in their reporting of the most recent outbreak of violence in the Gaza Civil War:

Rival Hamas and Fatah forces clashed in the Gaza Strip on Thursday, killing at least one person and injuring 12 others, in the worst flare-up of factional fighting in almost three weeks.

Like AFP, Reuters doesn't seem to consider Tuesday's three-hour battle worth noting as a serious fight. They seem to be of the opinion that the number of casualties that can be noted determines the seriousness of the conflict.

While casualties can be used to a certain extent to determine the severity of a battle, it should hardly be the only criteria, and is completely devoid of any tactical or strategic gains made by one side or the other. As it currently stands, we don't know if either side gained a strategic or tactical advantage in either of these two engagements, because neither news organization is providing that depth of coverage.

By their apparent casualty-only standard, the D-Day invasion of Normandy (where Allied forces suffered an estimated 10,000 casualties, including 2,500 dead, and the Germans suffered between 4,000-9,000 casualties), was far less important than the battle of Iwo Jima, where American forces suffered 27,909 casualties (including 8,226 combat-related deaths) and the Japanese lost more than 20,000 killed.

I don't think any sane person would dare make that argument.

Both battles were extremely costly and important for different reasons, and yet, the apparent criteria in use by these media organizations would make Iwo Jima the far more important battle based on casualty figures alone.

Casualty figures are an important indication of the scale of a battle or conflict, but they are only one indicator... unless someone is willing to argue that the inconclusive Battle of Spotsylvania Court House in May of 1864 where Lee inflicted nearly over 18,000 casualties and nearly 3,000 dead on Grant's Army will be judged as historically important to Americans as the first several years of the Iraq War.

I'm not willing to buy that flawed line of reasoning.

Blotter Claims Iran Caught Red-Handed, Ignorant Critics Deny Reality of Sunni/Shia Terror Relationships

Here's the Blotter story, which I'll take with a Prudential rock-sized grain of salt, as I've personally caught Brian Ross being dead wrong on the facts before.

That said, I'm already sick and tired of the smugly ignorant (check out the Blotter's comment thread as well) who repeat the delusion that Iranian Shias will not work with or support Iraqi insurgents, Afghan Taliban, or al Qaeda terrorists, merely because these groups are Sunni.

I hate to break this fabrication with a dose of reality, but does anyone remember who Iran's primary ally is? Sunni Baathist Syria. Iran has also long supported Sunni terrorist groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, just to name two more.

Iran has a long and concrete history of allying with Baathist Syria and Sunni terrorist groups to support their foreign policy goals.

It's time to put this self-serving bit of "common sense" to bed as the abject ignorance it actually is.

A Link in a Great Chain [Repost]

"Be Seated."

"Men, this stuff we hear about America wanting to stay out of the war, not wanting to fight, is a lot of bullshit. Americans love to fight - traditionally. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle. When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble player; the fastest runner; the big league ball players; the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise cowards. Americans play to win - all the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost, not ever will lose a war, for the very thought of losing is hateful to an American."

"You are not all going to die. Only two percent of you here today would die in a major battle. Death must not be feared. Every man is frightened at first in battle. If he says he isn't, he's a goddamn liar. Some men are cowards, yes! But they fight just the same, or get the hell shamed out of them watching men who do fight who are just as scared. The real hero is the man who fights even though he is scared. Some get over their fright in a minute under fire, some take an hour. For some it takes days. But the real man never lets fear of death overpower his honor, his sense of duty to this country and his innate manhood."

"All through your army career you men have bitched about "This chickenshit drilling." That is all for a purpose. Drilling and discipline must be maintained in any army if for only one reason -- INSTANT OBEDIENCE TO ORDERS AND TO CREATE CONSTANT ALERTNESS. I don't give a damn for a man who is not always on his toes. You men are veterans or you wouldn't be here. You are ready. A man to continue breathing must be alert at all times. If not, sometime a German son-of-a-bitch will sneak up behind him and beat him to death with a sock full of shit."

"There are 400 neatly marked graves somewhere in Sicily all because one man went to sleep on his job -- but they were German graves for we caught the bastard asleep before his officers did. An Army is a team. Lives, sleeps, eats, fights as a team. This individual heroic stuff is a lot of crap. The bilious bastards who wrote that kind of stuff for the Saturday Evening Post don't know any more about real fighting, under fire, than they do about fucking. We have the best food, the finest equipment, the best spirit and the best fighting men in the world. Why, by God, I actually pity these poor sons-of-bitches we are going up against. By God, I do!"

"My men don't surrender. I don't want to hear of any soldier under my command being captured unless he is hit. Even if you are hit, you can still fight. That's not just bullshit, either. The kind of man I want under me is like the lieutenant in Libya, who, with a Lugar against his chest, jerked off his helmet, swept the gun aside with one hand and busted hell out of the Boche with the helmet. Then he jumped on the gun and went out and killed another German: All this with a bullet through his lung. That's a man for you."

"All real heroes are not story book combat fighters either. Every man in the army plays a vital part. Every little job is essential. Don't ever let down, thinking your role is unimportant. Every man has a job to do. Every man is a link in the great chain. What if every truck driver decided that he didn't like the whine of the shells overhead, turned yellow and jumped headlong into the ditch? He could say to himself, "They won't miss me -- just one in thousands." What if every man said that? Where in hell would we be now? No, thank God, Americans don't say that! Every man does his job; every man serves the whole. Every department, every unit, is important to the vast scheme of things. The Ordnance men are needed to supply the guns, the Quartermaster to bring up the food and clothes to us -- for where we're going there isn't a hell of a lot to steal. Every last man in the mess hall, even the one who heats the water to keep us from getting the GI shits has a job to do. Even the chaplain is important, for if we get killed and if he is not there to bury us we'd all go to hell."

"Each man must not only think of himself, but of his buddy fighting beside him. We don't want yellow cowards in this army. They should all be killed off like flies. If not they will go back home after the war and breed more cowards. The brave men will breed brave men. Kill off the goddamn cowards and we'll have a nation of brave men."

"One of the bravest men I ever saw in the African campaign was the fellow I saw on top of a telegraph pole in the midst of furious fire while we were plowing toward Tunis. I stopped and asked what the hell he was doing up there at that time. He answered, "Fixing the wire, sir." "Isn't it a little unhealthy right now?," I asked. "Yes sir, but this goddamn wire's got to be fixed." There was a real soldier. There was a man who devoted all he had to his duty, no matter how great the odds, no matter how seemingly insignificant his duty might appear at the time."

"You should have seen those trucks on the road to Gabes. The drivers were magnificent. All day and all night they rolled over those son-of-a-bitching roads, never stopping, never faltering from their course, with shells bursting around them all the time. We got through on good old American guts. Many of these men drove over forty consecutive hours. These weren't combat men. But they were soldiers with a job to do. They did it -- and in a whale of a way they did it. They were part of a team. Without them the fight would have been lost. All the links in the chain pulled together and that chain became unbreakable."

"Don't forget, you don't know I'm here. No word of the fact is to be mentioned in any letters. The world is not supposed to know what the hell became of me. I'm not supposed to be commanding this Army. I'm not even supposed to be in England. Let the first bastards to find out be the goddamn Germans. Someday I want them to raise up on their hind legs and howl, 'Jesus Christ, it's the goddamn Third Army and that son-of-a-bitch Patton again.'"

"We want to get the hell over there. We want to get over there and clear the goddamn thing up. You can't win a war lying down. The quicker we clean up this goddamn mess, the quicker we can take a jaunt against the purple pissing Japs an clean their nest out too, before the Marines get all the goddamn credit."

"Sure, we all want to be home. We want this thing over with. The quickest way to get it over is to get the bastards. The quicker they are whipped, the quicker we go home. The shortest way home is through Berlin. When a man is lying in a shell hole, if he just stays there all day, a Boche will get him eventually, and the hell with that idea. The hell with taking it. My men don't dig foxholes. I don't want them to. Foxholes only slow up an offensive. Keep moving. And don't give the enemy time to dig one. We'll win this war but we'll win it only by fighting and by showing the Germans we've got more guts than they have."

"There is one great thing you men will all be able to say when you go home. You may thank God for it. Thank God, that at least, thirty years from now, when you are sitting around the fireside with your grandson on your knees, and he asks you what you did in the great war, you won't have to cough and say, 'I shoveled shit in Louisiana.' No, Sir, you can look him straight in the eye and say, 'Son, your Granddaddy rode with the Great Third Army and a Son-of-a-Goddamned-Bitch named George Patton!'"

"That is all."

God Bless the veterans of the Great Crusade launched on this day in Normandy, France in 1944, and the soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen that today carry on that same fighting spirit.

Duke Lacrosse Judge Takes Aim at Nifong

As if having the case thrown out and ethics charges brought against him by the N.C. State Bar weren't enough, now Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong may face action from the judge presiding over the now dismissed Duke lacrosse rape case:

Superior Court Judge W. Osmond Smith III wrote that significant concerns about evidence arose during a Dec. 15 hearing, months before the state Attorney General's Office dismissed the charges. At the hearing, DNA expert Brian Meehan testified that he and Nifong agreed to withhold test results from the defense, including the fact that DNA from unidentified men was found in and on the accuser's body.

The N.C. State Bar has charged Nifong with a number of ethical violations, including withholding DNA evidence favorable to the defense.

Under North Carolina law, the State Bar and trial court judges both have the power to discipline lawyers for misconduct, so Nifong faces the prospect of punishment from both.

Trial judges such as Smith can take a wide range of actions in disciplining lawyers; Smith could scold Nifong, disbar him or even send him to jail for contempt of court.

Another judge in Durham is awaiting the results of the N.C. State Bar ethics case against Nifong before considering a request by a Durham native to have Nifong stripped of his office.

It couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

Did AP Float a Turkey of an Invasion Story?

You know that AP story that Drudge linked this morning about several thousand Turkish troops crossing the border into Iraq?

Several thousand Turkish troops crossed into northern Iraq early Wednesday to chase Kurdish guerrillas who attack Turkey from bases there, two Turkish security officials said. Turkey's foreign minister denied its troops had entered Iraq. Two senior security officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media, characterized the action as a "hot pursuit" raid that was limited in scope. They told The Associated Press it did not constitute the kind of large incursion that Turkish leaders have been discussing in recent weeks as Turkish troops built up their force along the border.

Well, maybe not so much:

Turkey has denied a report that several thousand troops had been sent into northern Iraq to combat Kurdish separatists hiding there.

"There is no incursion into any other country at the moment," Abdullah Gul, Turkey's foreign minister, said on Wednesday.

Earlier, the DEBKAfile website said 50,000 men had been deployed to the area.

Ankara described the report as "disinformation".

Hoshiyar Zebari, Iraq's foreign minister, said that there was no evidence that Turkish troops had entered Iraq.

"We have checked all along the border and there hasn't been any incursion or military operation inside Iraqi territory," he said.

"Iraq will not tolerate any military incursion. There is always room for dialogue."

A White House spokesman, in Germany for a G8 summit, also said that "no new activity" had been detected in northern Iraq.

An update of the AP article states that their anonymous original source still stand by their claims.

Who would you believe, three anonymous sources apparently in contact with a solitary reporter, or the two named foriegn ministers of the countries in question, and a named National Security Council spokesman?

With no other corroboration, it looks like this reporter has cried fowl foul.

Update: Looking back through the archives, it seems possible that someone other than the Turks are capable of accidental invasions. Anybody checked on the Swiss lately?

New RAF Nose Art Approved

(click image for larger picture)

Because you never want to offend anyone before you kill them.

Ahmadinejad Claims Iran's Nuclear Drive Can't be Stopped

Nuclear chicken, anyone?

Iran's nuclear program cannot be stopped, and any Western attempt to force a halt to uranium enrichment would be like playing "with the lion's tail," President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tuesday.

In Berlin, Germany's foreign minister reported no progress in talks with Iran's chief nuclear negotiator ahead of the Group of Eight summit. And with the U.N. Security Council preparing to debate a third set of sanctions for Tehran's refusal to suspend enrichment, Britain raised the possibility of adding curbs on oil and gas investment to the limited measures against individuals and companies involved in Iran's nuclear and weapons programs.

"We advise them to give up stubbornness and childish games," Ahmadinejad said at a news conference. "Some say Iran is like a lion. It's seated quietly in a corner. We advise them not to play with the lion's tail."

Added Ahmadinejad: "It is too late to stop the progress of Iran."

In Washington, State Department Spokesman Sean McCormack responded: "It isn't."

McCormack is of course referring to diplomatic efforts by the United States and other nations in the international community to coax Iran into giving up their suspected nuclear weapons program.

Like any nuclear weapons program, the Iranian nuclear weapons program must have multiple minimum components, those being the ability to acquire raw uranium ore, the ability and facilities to process and enrich the uranium to "weapons grade," the ability to develop a warhead, and the ability to deliver a warhead.

Iran has as many as 10 functioning uranium mines according to GlobalSecurity.Org, so acquiring the raw uranium ore has never been an issue. Iran also has at least 11 known facilities to process and enrich their raw ores, with Natanz and Bushehr perhaps being the most well known. Iran is also developing a parallel plutonium-based program out of Arak.

As for the warheads, the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency (IAEA) stated that they were aware that Iran has acquired documents and drawings on the black market, and there has been speculation that Iran may have acquired dual-use components from western countries in the 1990s, as well as warhead technology from North Korea.

Iran is said to have developed long-range missiles such as the claimed Fajr-3 with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV) capability typically used only with nuclear warheads, and the proven Shahab-3, which can carry a singe conventional, chemical, biological, or nuclear warhead.

Based upon this information, it seems Iran has the technical capability to build a viable nuclear weapons threat. Based upon the continued threats and rhetoric issued from Iran through President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran also has the political will and strategic goal of becoming a nuclear power.

Western nations that feel threatened by Iran's apparent drive for nuclear weapons essentially have three options:

• Let Iran continue to develop their nuclear program and hope they are not developing a nuclear weapons program as well;
• Attempt to convince Iran not to develop a nuclear through political and economic pressures and incentives;
• Take covert and overt intelligence and military operations to undermine or remove Iran's nuclear capabilities.

We are well past the point where any reasonable nation can assume that Iran is not attempting to develop a nuclear weapons program. They have been caught with warhead plans by U.N. inspectors, and have developed nuclear-capable delivery systems.

The present efforts are primarily diplomatic and economic in nature, hoping to force Iran to the bargaining table, but as Ahmadinejad's most recent threats and rhetoric attest, they have no intention of slowing nuclear development. If they cannot be persuaded to stop their nuclear program through peaceable means, that leaves only the use of intelligence and military forces.

There has been some speculation and a few indications that covert efforts are already underway, some mirroring efforts used against the Soviet Union in the Cold War, such as providing flawed plans through double agents and spies, and at least one top Iranian nuclear scientist has died within the past year.

These covert efforts, however, can at best slow the Iranian nuclear program. There is no way to be sure that any compromised systems will go undiscovered and uncorrected, and the accumulated knowledge is difficult to eradicate with the death of a few occasional scientists, even if they are prominent.

Sadly, with continued defiance by Iran's government and their apparent belief that nuclear capability is in their nation's best interests, a military solution may yet prove that Iran's nuclear drive can indeed be stopped through force of arms.

The IAF Air Force has 25 F-15I "Ra'am" and 102 F-16I "Sufa" long-range strike fighters with the capability of hitting hardened targets with "bunker-buster" bombs in Iran without refueling. If they can arrange in-air refueling, there are no potential targets in Iran out of range.

There seems to be a common misconception that our ground combat in Iraq precludes a strike on Iran if one is warranted, but that supposition has no basis at all in reality. The U.S. assets available for a strike on Iranian nuclear facilities are literally too numerous to name. While the U.S. military's ground forces are heavily involved in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. Air Force and Naval units are virtually free for involvement.

At least three U.S. carrier strike groups carrying more than 240 aircraft are thought to be within range of Iran, and an unknown number of submarine and surface fleet vessels armed with cruise missiles are within range of Iran or can be relatively stealthily deployed to the region.

With mid-air refueling capabilities, the U.S. Air Force fleet of B-1B, B-2, and B-52 bombers and the U.S. strike fighter fleet of F15s, F-16s, and F-117 and F-22 stealth fighters can bring to bear literally thousands of precision-guided bombs if needed in single or multiple sorties.

Should it be determined that the military strike is warranted, precedent indicates that President Bush does not need Congressional approval for such a strike. All U.S. Presidents of the past three decades (yes, even Jimmy Carter) have launched military operations without needing or seeking congressional approval, from Carter's botched attempt to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran, to Reagan's strikes on Libya and Grenada, to Bush 41's invasion of Panama, and Clinton's strikes on Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Sudan.

There is some debate over whether such air strikes by U.S. and Israeli aircraft could destroy or significantly damage Iran's nuclear capability. Even with the recent purchase of Soviet anti-aircraft missile systems, Iran's anti-aircraft capability is second-rate, their aging and obsolete Air Force would probably never get off the ground, so their ability to successfully oppose such a strike through is very unlikely.

I would posit that both the Israeli and the U.S. military have munitions capable of destroying or severely damaging Iranian nuclear sites (even hardened underground bunkers), if those sites can be accurately identified. The attacks would only be likely to fail if the targets cannot accurately be identified and targeted.

The obvious downside of any attack by Israel or the United States upon Iranian nuclear facilities is the very real possibility, if not probability, of an Iranian counterattack by both conventional and unconventional forces.

Iran would certainly target U.S. Navy ships in the Persian Gulf in the wake of any attack on Iran, and may also possibly target civilian shipping as well. Some experts anticipate that Iran may also attempt to invade southern Iraq in retaliation. If such an attack takes place, out-gunned and out-manned British forces are severely under threat, and there is a distinct possibility that units could be overrun before coalition airpower annihilated Iranian conventional forces. Iran may also fire missiles at U.S. bases and Iraqi cities. Shia militias loyal to Iran would be directed to rise up against U.S. forces in Iraq, and the resulting battles would potentially be very bloody. Several dozen to several hundred U.S. soldiers could become fatalities, and no doubt thousands of Shia militiamen and civilians would probably perish on the other side.

Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terrorist groups would probably fire barrages of rockets into Israeli civilian populations, and there is some concern--I'm not sure how serious to take these--that Syria would attack and attempt to retake the Goal Heights, with the predictable disastrous results to Syrian forces.

There is also a credible threat of Hezbollah-directed terrorist attacks again U.S. interests worldwide and possibly in the United States as a result.

Make no mistake: Iran has the capability to hit back in retaliation after their nuclear facilities are struck, and depending on how these attacks are executed in Iraq, Israel, the united States and elsewhere, casualties could be significant.

What the U.S government, the Israeli's, and perhaps other western and Middle Eastern powers have to take into account is whether or not the threatened Iranian retaliation is a greater threat that the Iranian nuclear program. If Iran is allowed to develop nuclear weapons and their continuous threats are sincere and not just rhetoric, then quite literally, millions of lives are at risk. The result of attempting to use military force to destroy Iran's nuclear program could result in the deaths of thousands. While both options could be avoided by an internal revolt in Iran or a sudden change of course by their government, I fear this bloody drama will be played out by January of 2008, one way, or the other.

6,301,084,228 undocumented Americans want their piece too

Uncle Harry's a helluva a guy. Between he and Ma Pelosi they're running the most ethical government ever. Those first couple of months in office got off to a rough start, what with President Bush stonewalling them at every turn. But now, now they've got the power. Harry and Nancy, they're the modern day He-Man and She-Ra and Harry, he's the Master of his Domain.

On the first day of the 110th Congress, Democrats introduced bills reflecting the ten priorities that America sent us here to address. Last Friday we concluded a seven week work period, and we have taken action on seven of those ten priorities:

• We passed the toughest ethics and lobbying reform in our nation’s history.
• We passed a much deserved and long overdue raise in the federal minimum wage for working people, which was signed into law last week.
• We attempted to give Medicare the power to negotiate lower drug prices, but this effort was filibustered by Republicans.
• We passed the recommendations of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, after they had been pushed aside for years.
• For the second year in a row, we voted to give the hope of stem cell research to millions of Americans who suffer, and will soon send that bill to the President.
• We passed a balanced budget that restores fiscal discipline and puts the middle class first – cutting their taxes while increasing investment in education, veterans’ care and children’s health care.
• And we began debate on the complex and crucial issue of immigration reform.

This week, we will vote on cloture and final passage of a comprehensive bill that will strengthen border security, bring the 12 million undocumented Americans out of the shadows, and keep our economy strong. In the days ahead, we will work to improve the bill to protect and strengthen family ties while improving the structure of the temporary-worker program.

Harry Reid has a plan for world peace, unfortunately it involves adopting every American adopting at least 20 refugees from impoverished nations, like England, France and Germany. That way we can take care of all the 6,301,084,228 undocumented Americans. Personally I'm cool with that just so long as none of mine are those damned dirty scandis. If I had my preference it'd be an even split of hot Latino and Asian chicks. Of course I might have to change my name to Woody Allen.

BFirst I guess we have to deal with those 12 million undocumented Americans, you know the one's doing the jobs the Americans with "papers" won't do. Sure a great number of those undocumented Americans entered our country illegally, forged documents to get work and steal the benefits our tax dollars are paying for; but they're mostly our neighbors and what are you a damned racist? Plus Harry and Nancy need pool-boys and cabana-girls.

No worries about them only focusing on bringing the world under our care though. They've got plans to screw up lots of things.

Following immigration, we will turn our attention to the three remaining bills from our original ten:

• An energy bill that will take a crucial first step toward weaning our country’s addiction to foreign oil.
• A reauthorization of the Higher Education Act that will address the skyrocketing costs of college.
• And a Defense Authorization bill that will make critical investments to address troop readiness problems in the military caused by the President’s flawed Iraq policy.

We will also reconfigure our national security strategy to better meet the threats and challenges we face today and the President is overlooking.

Yay, he's gonna reduce our dependence on oil. Which means prices are going to drop so I can keep pouring oil into my four-wheel-drive F-150. I sure hope they start their focus on education tommorrow, 'cause a great number of today's kids are morons that can barely operate the intertubes.

I wonder if by Defense Authorization bill he means a draft? Or maybe he's going with robots, flesh-eating, fire-breathing robots.

h/t: Michelle Malkin

The Republican Willie Horton

This is Michael Caldera De Latorre, or as fingerprints taken from when he was twice captured trying to sneak into the United States from Mexico in 2004 indicate, Ricardo De Latorre.

He is one of the millions of undocumented illegal aliens George W. Bush and many Congressmen and Senators would like to grant amnesty.

Yesterday morning, while driving a Chevy Tahoe reported stolen in Charlotte, Latorre careened across the median of I-40 in Raleigh, and stuck a Kia driven by George Alwyin Smith, a 54-year-old computer programmer at Duke University, before slamming into a car driven by Carolyn Hageman.

Smith died in the wreck, and Hageman was injured. Pulled from the wreckage reeking of alcohol, De Latorre has been charged with DWI, felony death by motor vehicle, two counts of assault with a deadly weapon, no operator’s license and careless and reckless driving.

Perhaps if our federal government had done a better job securing our southern border, Latorre would still be in Mexico, and George Smith would still be alive. But our President, our Congress and our Senate seem primed to allow De Latorre and millions more illegals like him to slip across a border they refuse to defend.

As the Smith family suffers, the Senate is pushing an immigration bill that the Congressional Budget Office says will barely make a dent in the number of illegal aliens flowing into our country.

When you look at Ricardo De Latorre's face, I want you to see John McCain. I want you to see George Bush. I want you to see the congressmen and Senators from both parties who want to bankrupt our nation with a continued flow of illegal aliens that fill our prisons and emergency rooms, that sap social programs and educational opportunities designs for native-borne Americans and legal immigrants while driving wages for low-skilled workers ever lower.

This is Ricardo de Latorre, a twice-caught illegal, apparent car thief, and drunken killer.

Until yesterday, President Bush and many RINOS wanted to grant him amnesty.

I wonder how they feel about that now.

Update: Dan Collins says via email that serial killer Angel Resendez would probably be a better example of what our country's pathetic border security allows, and with nine alledged murders and at least five deportations, and an unknown number of illegal borders crossings that likely numbered in the dozens, he makes a strong case.

Osama Obama Goes Race-Baiting

Via Breitbart:

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Tuesday that the Bush administration has done nothing to defuse a "quiet riot" among blacks that threatens to erupt just as riots in Los Angeles did 15 years ago. The first-term Illinois senator said that with black people from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast still displaced 20 months after Hurricane Katrina, frustration and resentments are building explosively as they did before the 1992 riots.

"This administration was colorblind in its incompetence," Obama said at a conference of black clergy, "but the poverty and the hopelessness was there long before the hurricane.

"All the hurricane did was to pull the curtain back for all the world to see," he said.

Apparently, though, the hurricane didn't pull the curtain back far enough for Obama to see the root of the problem.

If Obama wanted to really expose the core of Louisiana's problems, he'd have to travel back in time no further than yesterday, when William "Cold Cash" Jefferson was finally indicted. Jefferson's family runs political machines that funnel power and corruption through two Louisiana parishes.

Or if Obama wanted to go back a bit further, he could travel back to 1985, when three-time Louisiana governor Edwin W. Edwards was indicted and later convicted for racketeering and fraud after being investigated by nine previous grand juries.

From Huey Long to Leander Perez to the modern day political machines controlled by "Cold Cash" Jefferson and the Landrieu family, most of the problems of New Orleans can be traced back over a century of corrupt political machines in Louisiana.

The fact of the matter is that all Louisiana voters should be on the verge of rioting for the way they have been treated by decades of corrupt politicians. The problem for Obama is that those politicians most to blame, black or white, are overwhelmingly Louisiana Democrats.

The War Lovers

Experts continue to state that anti-war politicians will spill more blood, not less, in the Middle East.

For months, professional journalists, combat soldiers, defense experts, intelligence analysts, regional governments, and bloggers have been warning about the consequences of the disastrous retreat from Iraqi being orchestrated by the radicalized left wing of the Democratic Party.

Writing in WSJ's OpinionJournal today, Dan Senor ties it all together, showing through the words of experts that the precipitous headlong retreat favored by so many Democrats will only result in American combat forces returning to the region in greater numbers and facing a far more bloody and destabilized Middle East dubbed "Iraq Plus."

Consider Brent Scowcroft, dean of the Realist School, who openly opposed the war from the outset and was a lead skeptic of the president's democracy-building agenda. In a recent Financial Times interview, he succinctly summed up the implication of withdrawal: "The costs of staying are visible; the costs of getting out are almost never discussed. If we get out before Iraq is stable, the entire Middle East region might start to resemble Iraq today. Getting out is not a solution."

And here is retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, former Centcom Commander and a vociferous critic of the what he sees as the administration's naive and one-sided policy in Iraq and the broader Middle East: "When we are in Iraq we are in many ways containing the violence. If we back off we give it more room to breathe, and it may metastasize in some way and become a regional problem. We don't have to be there at the same force level, but it is a five- to seven-year process to get any reasonable stability in Iraq."

A number of Iraq's Sunni Arab neighbors also opposed the war as well as the U.S. push for liberalizing the region's authoritarian governments. Yet they now backchannel the same two priorities to Washington: Do not let Iran acquire nukes, and do not withdraw from Iraq.

A senior Gulf Cooperation Council official told me that "If America leaves Iraq, America will have to return. Soon. It will not be a clean break. It will not be a permanent goodbye. And by the time America returns, we will have all been drawn in. America will have to stabilize more than just Iraq. The warfare will have spread to other countries, governments will be overthrown. America's military is barely holding on in Iraq today. How will it stabilize 'Iraq Plus'?" (Iraq Plus is the term that some leaders in Arab capitals use to describe the region following a U.S. withdrawal.)

Among the people on Iraqi soil cited by Senor is NY Times Bureau Chief John Burns, who has made comments equating an American pullout with the onset of a regional conflict and violence without limits.

CNN's Michael Ware and Kyra Phillips have echoed similar sentiments, saying a U.S. pullout "would be a disaster."

U.S. secretary of Defense Robert Gates is even more blunt:

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Wednesday warned that limiting troops' activities in Iraq and withdrawing from Baghdad could lead to "ethnic cleansing" in the capital and elsewhere in the country.

Gates' comment followed a proposal from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to end most spending on the Iraq war in 2008, limiting it to targeted operations against al Qaeda, training for Iraqi troops and U.S. force protection.

"One real possibility is if we abandon some of these areas and withdraw into the countryside or whatever to do these targeted missions that you could have a fairly significant ethnic cleansing inside Baghdad and in Iraq more broadly," Gates said.

The general premises of anti-war groups is that they wants a U.S. military pullout in Iraq seem based upon the following primary arguments:

• There were no WMDs/the reasons for the War were a lie (the playground mentality "I want a 'do-over'" argument).
• The U.S. military is causing tremendous civilian casualties in Iraq (the "remove the babykillers and the bloodshed will stop" argument).
• Leaving American troops in Iraq without a firm withdrawal date with only allow the various factions to continue fighting without coming to a political solution (the "they're all savages until we disappear and they’ll be forced to negotiate with each other" argument).
• The various Sunni, Shia and Kurdish factions are going to slaughter each other anyway, so why place American troops in the middle where they can be killed as well (the "they're all savages, let them die/kill each other" argument)

Obviously, there are variations of those major themes, but those are their general arguments.

The common failure of all of these arguments is the purposeful refusal to recognize what many (if not most) experts think will happen in the wake of the arbitrary and precipitous U.S. withdrawal, which are those predictions of a much wider regional war, a phenomenal increase in civilian casualties, the possible attempted genocide of some factions, and the re-entry of the U.S. military into the same region under far worse conditions and the threat of far greater casualties.

Anti-war politicians claim that they want to stop the war in Iraq, but the policies to which they subscribe are akin to throwing water on a grease fire. They would spread the flames of war, and create far more deaths.

Anti-war? No, it is a far wider war they will cause.

The Sliding War

According to professional media organizations and politicians, this is only factional fighting:

Hamas and Fatah forces fought a major gun battle on Tuesday in the Gaza Strip near the Karni commercial crossing, the most serious flare-up in factional fighting in two weeks.

An officer with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Presidential Guard said a "large number" of Hamas fighters attacked a key Presidential Guard position near the crossing, wounding at least one guard member.

The Presidential Guard officer said the Hamas fighters attempted to infiltrate the position but were pushed back by the Presidential Guard, a Fatah-dominated force which receives U.S. backing.

Hamas, which leads a Palestinian unity government with Abbas's Fatah faction, confirmed the nearly three-hour-long gun battle near Karni but said the Presidential Guard initiated the exchange.

According to Global Security, there are five recognized criteria for a civil war:

civil war: A war between factions of the same country; there are five criteria for international recognition of this status: the contestants must control territory, have a functioning government, enjoy some foreign recognition, have identifiable regular armed forces, and engage in major military operations.

1. Both Hamas and Fatah control territory.
2. Both Hamas and Fatah have their own political organizations and function (dysfunction) as part of a recognized government.
3. both enjoy some foreign recognition via support from governments such as ours (Fatah) and Iran (Hamas).
4. both have identifiable and mostly uniformed armed forces.
5. both have engaged and continue to engage in major military operations.

By this definition (and others), the Palestinian Civil War in Gaza is clearly underway, and has been for some time.

A supermajority of the world media organizations refuse to recognize this conflict as the civil war that it is.

Instead, we consistently see accounts that the factions in Gaza are almost in, sliding into, on the brink of, and verging on being in a civil war, but they aren't there quite yet... and have been for over a year.

A few examples:

Abbas acts to halt slide into civil war in Gaza. The U.K. Guardian, May 22, 2006.

Political Violence in Gaza Sparks Fears of Civil War. NPR May 24, 2006.

Gaza sliding into civil war. The U.K. Guardian, October 11, 2006.

Fighting in Gaza Sparks Fears of Civil War. NPR December 17, 2006.

Gaza on brink of civil war as cleric is killed. The U.K. Telegraph, January 8, 2007.

Gaza on brink of civil war. Canada.com, January 29, 2007.

The march toward civil war. The Boston Globe via the International Herald Tribune, February 12, 2007.

Gaza on brink of civil war. The (U.K.?) Times via the Australian, May 17, 2007.

A last chance to avert civil war in Palestine. The U.K. Independent, June 5, 2007.

Abbas: Palestinians verging on civil war. Boston.com, June 5, 2007.

The war in Iraq is widely described in the world's professional media organizations as a "civil war," even though it clearly fails to satisfy the five criteria noted for international recognition as cited by Global Security above, having no formal armies, no functioning governments, nor major battles, instead revolving around kidnappings, bombing, and other random violence.

The Gaza Civil War, on the other hand, satisfies all five criteria for a civil war, and has met these criteria for roughly a year.

Why does the media refuse to recognize the conflict between Hamas and Fatah for the civil war that it is?

I have no easy answers for that question, but is a question that deserves an answer.

Hillary tries to convince us she isn't the devil...

...but we all know she'd burst into flames the minute a priest sprinkled her with holy water.

Faith saved her marriage says Mrs. Clinton.

In a rare public discussion of her husband's infidelity, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday that she probably could not have gotten through her marital troubles without relying on her faith in God.

Clinton stood by her actions in the aftermath of former President admission that he had an affair, including presumably her decision to stay in the marriage.

"I am very grateful that I had a grounding in faith that gave me the courage and the strength to do what I thought was right, regardless of what the world thought," Clinton said during a forum where the three leading Democratic presidential talked about faith and values.

"I'm not sure I would have gotten through it without my faith," she said in response to a question about how she dealt with the infidelity.

Knowing that she'll get to roast Billy Jeff over an open fire for all eternity probably helps to calm her nerves.

For some reason this story reminds me of a scene in The Devil's Advocate where Al Pacino sticks his finger in a bowl of Holy Water and it starts boiling. Not sure why though. At least I think that's the movie.

A Step Too Far?

I disagree with Adam Kokesh of Iraq Veterans Against the War, but I think I disagree with the Marine Corps decision to punish him even more:

A military panel recommended that an Iraq war veteran who wore his uniform during an anti-war protest should lose his honorable discharge status, brushing away his claims that he was exercising his right to free speech.

Marine Cpl. Adam Kokesh, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, argued that since he removed his name tag and military emblems from his uniform, he did nothing wrong by participating in the March protest in Washington, D.C.

After a daylong hearing Monday, a three-person Marine board recommended he receive a general discharge under honorable conditions, one step below an honorable discharge. It would let Kokesh keep all of his benefits.

Kokesh had already been discharged from active duty and is a member of the Individual Ready Reserve, completing his eight-year military obligations on June 18.

I'm sure that the Marine board knows far better whether or not Kokesh's decision to wear his MARPAT fatigues was technical violation, but as Kokesh did not wear his name tape or other identifying military insignia, I think they're pushing it when they decided to recommend removing the honorable discharge status he'd previously received.

I suspect if he was on active duty and reported without wearing his name tape and identifying rank and unit insignia, that he would be likely be judged "out of uniform." It therefore seems that a double standard may be in place here.

I'd be very interested in the opinions of any active-duty or veteran Marines on this. I don't agree with his politics, but that does not mean he should be held to a different standard, if indeed he is.

Not Having What It Takes

Combat journalist J.D. Johannes has decided he doesn't have what it takes to be a New York Times journalist.

Welcome to the club.

I leaned up against the humvee and cried in the parking lot of Fallujah Surgical.

I knew right then I was not cut out for this type of work.

It was even worse a few weeks later on a rainy night in Baghdad...

On Memorial Day a column ran in the NY Times (Not to see the Fallen is no Favor) about the rules for photographing an injured Soldier or Marine.

The author whined about how he had to seek permission from the wounded before using the photo.

The editors obviously thought this column was perfect for Memorial Day.

I disagree. The times I have been around injured Marines I pitched in to help. I ran to get the stretcher. The only photos I have taken of an injured person were of a Soldier treating an Iraqi man for shrapnel wounds. You see the soldier doing his job, but not the face of the Iraqi man.

If I were to be wounded while embeded with Soldiers, Seabees or Marines they would provide medical attention and likely risk their lives to protect me and save my life.

I feel I should reciprocate because these young men and a few women I roll with outside the wire would not stand around snapping photos of me while I bled out--they would do what they do best Save Lives.

I think I might be able to relate.

While I've never seen combat, I've been an inadvertent first responder to an accident while a nominal member of the media. I was working at the university newspaper when a student crossing the street in front of me was hit broadside as she attempted to cross against the light. She cartwheeled through the air and hit the asphalt face first in front of the concrete divider beside me.

I jumped out of my car, and started trying to provide first aid as well as I could, reassuring the injured student as best I could as I directing others to call 911 and check on the condition of the driver. It never occurred to me to try to snap pictures or start composing a story as this student lay on the ground, bleeding from her mouth. The only thought in my head was to do what I could to help a shocked, scared, and injured fellow human being.

If basic humanity has to come second to the job, perhaps I don't have what it takes to be a professional journalist, either.

Ironclad Senate Immigration Bill Will Slow Illegal Immigration by 75-Percent, Provide Hogs With Pilot Licenses

Or maybe I read that wrong.

The Senate's immigration bill will only reduce illegal immigration by about 25 percent a year, according to a new Congressional Budget Office report, Stephen Dinan will report Tuesday in The Washington Times. The bill's new guest-worker program could lead to at least 500,000 more illegal immigrants within a decade, said the report from the CBO, which said in its official cost estimate that it assumes some future temporary workers will overstay their time in the plan, adding up to a half-million by 2017 and 1 million by 2027. "We anticipate that many of those would remain in the United States illegally after their visas expire," CBO said of the guest-worker program, which would allow 200,000 new workers a year to rotate into the country.

Oh, so what the CBO is actually saying is that 75% of illegal alien traffic will continue under the Senate's bill.

I'm glad to see they're on the job.

It's a Slow News Day, so Why Not A Little Indignant Stupidity?

Many of us have heard the term "spearchucker" used as a racial slur against African-Americans, so when I saw via Memeorandum that Fox News anchor Brit Hume used the term, my immediate reaction was to cringe.

The context:

Hume: …he had a mixed record in the Senate and he's a man who always seems somewhat frustrated and bored by the Senate...I particularly remember an investigation that occurred after the Clinton/Dole campaign. We were new here at FOX news and we carried a lot of the hearings live. It was in the campaign finance alleged irregularities with monies supposedly seeping into the American political campaign of Bill Clinton from Chinese sources and so on—it was pretty juicy stuff it looked like a very big deal.

Fred Thompson was the chairman of the Investigating committee and it went absolutely nowhere. he was effectively buffaloed in that investigation by none other than John Glenn—who was a wonderful man, but not somebody normally you would think capable of being a real partisan..ahh…ahh.. spearchucker, who could, who could undo an investigation. So it didn't go very well and I think Fred Thompson has acknowledged since then that it wasn't his finest hour...

But how could Crooks and Liars get all indignant considering the comment was directed at this guy?

To put it mildly, it seems a stretch, but any chance to slur a conservative--especially one on the hated "Faux News" network--on even the flimsiest of grounds is a good one, isn't it?

John Amato, after making the weak case that Hume (an older white guy) was being a racist for calling Glenn (an even older white guy) a spearchucker, then goes on to provide the word Hume was must likely looking for all along, a spear-carrier. That Hume was fumbling for the right term was obvious in the transcript that Amato provided (my bold this time):

...he was effectively buffaloed in that investigation by none other than John Glenn—who was a wonderful man, but not somebody normally you would think capable of being a real partisan ..ahh..ahh.. spearchucker, who could, who could undo an investigation.

Hume fumbled, and produced an embaressing slip, but a purposeful slur? I don't think so.

What should be embarassing...but obviously won't be... is Amato's probable little "white lie" about why he wrote this entry to begin with.

I had to watch it a few times for it to sink in. I looked up "spearchucker," on Dictionary.com, but they didn't recognize it so I wonder how he will explain this one away?

Really, John? You had to look up the term to know it was offensive?

If you didn't know it was offensive, then why did you key in on it in the first place, instead of letting it waft by as the one of the dozens of idiomatic expressions one hears in an average week that most normal people never bother to look up?

No, I suspect that Mr. Amato was well aware of what that slur meant all along, and that he was well aware of what it meant long before Brit Hume spoke it on Fox News.

What is far more likely is that Mr. Amato, as a representative of the politically correct progressive blogosphere, instead decided to play dumb and act as if he had to look it up. Why?

Hume made a mistake, and grabbed the wrong term.

John Amato, on the other hand, acted as if he didn't know what "spearchucker" meant, when clearly he knew it was a slur all along, or he wouldn't have keyed in on it.

Here's another word for John Amato to look up: "honest."

2008 Race for the Whitehouse becomes an enzyte commercial...

Goose meet Gander, Gander this is Goose.

We know Fred! likes the ladies, and the ladies like him. But I had no idea, none what-so-ever, that Denny Kucinich pull in the ladies like Fred!.

Meet Smiling Bob. His game?
Spreading the gospel of male enhancement.

Aren't you guys impressed, I mean, I could have gone the Joe Scarborough route and inferred that she used to be a "lady of the evening". But no I choose the high road. Plus, nobody would believe I saw her turning tricks in exchange for carbon offsets behind the waffle house a couple of weeks back, nobody.

What his means? Since I'm kind of partial to redheads, Denny is now my sworn enemy.

h/t: Dave @ A Dark Planet.

William Jefferson may get an extended vacation.

Maybe Paris can give him a couple of prison fashion and survival tips.

Via Faux Nooz.

WASHINGTON — Rep. William Jefferson, D-La., was indicted Monday on 16 counts related to a long-running bribery investigation on counts including racketeering, obstruction of justice and conspiracy...

The 94-page indictment is more than an inch thick, and Jefferson could face a maximum prison term of more than 230 years.

Banks, they're for suckers, what with their interest bearing accounts and the easy access to cash with an ATM card. Me, I always keep my cash reserves in the Freezer right next to the toenail clippings. If Howard Hughes taught us anything its that the feds are going to clone us all one day and I'm not about to make it easy for them.

In grave times though, we have to fall back on the knowledge passed down from previous generations. Those who have paved the way before us. And so Mr. Jefferson, you'll need to build up your "street cred". "How to make a prison shank from toilet paper for dummies", it's easy reading with easy to follow diagrams. You could listen to 50 Cent (pronounced Fiddy-Cent yo), to pick up on the lingo. But most of all Mr. Jefferson, I'm imploring you'll need a mentor. I'd suggest you pick somebody with some notoriety. Like Tookie Williams. Sure he's taking a bit of a nap, but you should follow his lead, 'cause Tookie never "took it lying down", if you know what I mean.

So Mr. Jefferson, when you find yourself in one of those "sticky situations" don't be all uppity like Joe Francis was. Ask yourself, What Would Tookie Williams Do?

Really Mr. Jefferson, it's sound advice and don't be afraid to stick a shank in somebody's kidney on the first day of your visit to Club Fed. Otherwise, well, you'll find yourself singing this little ditty.

Cold Cash Jefferson Formally Indicted

You remember William Jefferson, don't you? He's the Louisiana Congressional Democrat that hijacked a National Guard unit in New Orleans searching for Hurricane Katrina survivors so that he could check on his personal property... presumably including the $90,000 cash bribe hidden in his freezer.

His frozen chickens have finally come home to roost:

Rep. William Jefferson, D-La., was indicted Monday on 16 counts related to a long-running bribery investigation on charges including bribery, racketeering, obstruction of justice and money laundering.

The indictment was handed up in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va. A press conference is scheduled for later Monday in Washington to discuss the case.

The 94-page indictment is more than an inch thick, and Jefferson could face a prison term of 235 years if he was convicted on all charges, and given the maximum sentence — although that is unlikely.

Jefferson was re-elected to office in 2006 despite widespread public knowledge of the investigation, proving once again the mental acuity of people who think it's a bright idea to live below sea level on sinking land surrounded by massive bodies of water.

Nancy Pelosi, chairwoman of the Most Ethical Congress evah, could not be immediately be reached for comment.

Thanks Again, Jorge

Traffic was tied up for hours this morning thanks to a fatal wreck that the local media is attributing to another suspected drunk-driving illegal alien.

Read between the lines:

Authorities believe alcohol was a factor in a fatal accident on Interstate 40 in Raleigh.

According to the Highway Patrol, a 54-year-old man in a Chevrolet Tahoe crossed the median onto westbound I-40 near the Wade Avenue exit, striking another vehicle. Troopers said the driver of the second vehicle died in the accident.

Investigators said the Tahoe then struck a Ford Mustang. The driver of the Mustang was injured.

According to the Highway Patrol reconstruction team, tire tracks left by the Tahoe suggest the vehicle was going so fast through the median that it was turned sideways.

The driver of the Chevrolet Tahoe was taken to WakeMed. His extent of his injuries is not yet known. There is no word yet on his blood-alcohol content. The Highway Patrol is also looking into the driver's immigration status.

For those of you not familiar with North Carolina's immigrant problem, 65% of all Hispanics in the state--more than 300,000--are illegal.

That population has contributed heavily to drunk driving accidents in our state, including some high-profile local accidents.

Three were killed in November in Sanford by a drunk illegal who had already been arrested once for driving without a license, and another illegal with two previous DWI convictions killed a father and son in early March. These are just three local examples of American families shattered by drunken illegals that got behind the wheel. I could provide more from other parts of the state and other states without Google breaking a sweat.

Our federal legislators, and President Bush fail to stop these criminals at the border. Our state legislators and governors make policy decisions that turn some states (including my own) into magnets for illegal immigration, essentially inviting illegals into our cities and towns, and for what, cheap labor?

Well, I hope that lower payroll for the casket makers and grave diggers is passed along to the victim families.

I'm sure that saving money on burying their loved ones will make everything okay.

I'm Back

My wife and daughter and I begrudgingly left Orlando yesterday morning and rolled back into North Carolina late yesterday afternoon. It was fun to visit with my sister-in-law's family in West Palm Beach for a couple of days before introducing my wife and seven-year-old daughter to Uncle Walt's dream. My only regret that we couldn't stay longer. Things have changed a lot in the 24 years since I last visited ORlando, but the experience of this past week is one I'll treasure for years to come.

Here's a picture we snapped of ourselves in Epcot at the Kodak Incredible Picture Lab in Epcot.

I'm just as ugly as ever, but the wife and kid sure are cute.

I'll be back online and back up to my normal posting frequency within the next 48 hours or so, and will try to get something out later this afternoon.

I want to thank my brother and blog designer extraordinare "phin" for keeping you all entertained with his guest-blogging. Should you ever want a web or blog design or your own, consider contacting him and his partners in crime at Apothegm Designs.

Tommorrow starts here Todday

I'm thinking whoever typed in the banner had best be looking for a new job todday. 'cause that sppell checker deal, it ain't working out so hot.