Posts from — May 2005

You didn’t need to know the difference between “disassemble” and “dissemble” to understand that the press corpse was ready for a nap and didn’t want to bother the grown-ups by asking George real questions and pursuing real answers.

Amnesty International describes the US detention facility at Guantánamo Bay as a gulag, a reference to the infamous Soviet prison system.

Hypocrisy, an overarching war mentality and a disregard for basic human rights principles and international legal obligations continue to mark the USA’s “war on terror”. Serious human rights violations are the inevitable result.

Incurious George called that “absurd” because everyone knows the US is promoting “democracy”. And he claims that the reports of abuse are based on information from former detainees trained to lie, and, further, that Amnesty International has no standing to make its claims.

Michael of the newly relocated Musing’s musings tells us in his post, Get me rewrite!, that in March, 2003, George’s own Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, cited reports from Amnesty International to help justify the invasion of Iraq. Perhaps George had assumed that all of the information he used to support the invasion of Iraq was fabricated.

Some of the detainees might be lying, of course, but it was my experience in law enforcement that the people who really hate the police are those who are innocent of any crime, but find themselves arrested. Criminals tend to be professional about it – people just doing their job – but the innocent really get pissed off. When you wander around the world scooping up innocent people, lock them up for months, and subject them to multiple indignities, those people tend not to care why you did it. The fact is you were wrong and they were injured because you were incompetent. When you refuse to apologize, refuse to offer compensation, and leave them under a cloud of suspicion, they will hate your guts forever, and will tell the rest of the world about it.

You can’t go around convicting people of abuse at military facilities and then claim no abuse took place. Organizations are using the Freedom of Information Act to make more of the abuse public. More reports and pictures are now available; the problem is wide spread.

People have died as a result of “interrogation techniques” used by the American government, which is direct evidence of torture: if it kills people, it is definitely torture.

Our government is not being honest with us, or the world. They don’t want the true extent of the problem known, but the lump under the rug is way too big to remain hidden. If Guantánamo Bay was as pure as George claims, career military JAGs wouldn’t be filing “friend of the court” briefs in Federal cases.

Maybe George should ask Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn to visit Gitmo and give his opinion; he is something of an authority on gulags.

NTodd, Riggsveda, RJ ESKOW, and the Vestal Vespa contributed to this rant whether they wanted to or not.

The Culture Ghost presents:

Sunday Brunch

What caught my ear when listening to the BBC World Service last night was the alignment of the two sides in the vote. The French EU vote was cast by 70% of registered voters with 55% voting Non and 45% Oui. The Yes/Oui voters represent the political center of French politics; the No/Non voters were both extremes.

The constitution was a compromise, as any such document must be, and it was rejected by people who refuse to compromise. I don’t see a “Plan B” in this situation. The reality is that to achieve such a result, the constitution must have been nearly perfectly balanced, apparently too balanced to be accepted by anyone except the center.

This is a troubling result in regard to US politics as it points to a situation where compromise is not possible. You have to wonder if we are moving the same way: that we can no longer live together in the same country.

This is a picture from one of the columbariums at the Arlington National Cemetery, the final resting place of many of those who served the United States since the middle of the 19^th century.

That is my Father’s marker. He didn’t know those located around his marker, but they all shared service to their country as part of their life.

The country continues to ask for service and people still respond to that call. As you think about the sacrifices represented by Arlington and other cemeteries, ask yourself if you have done what you could to prevent misuse of the willingness of some to serve.

It is rather for us the living, we here be dedicated to the great task remaining before us–that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion–that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

The insurgents will attack reporters as “collaborators with the occupation forces”, and coalition forces will attack them because they aren’t coalition forces. Being a “neutral observer” is not a viable option under these conditions. It’s not that they are reporters, it’s that they are bystanders.

This is a guerrilla war: an attack could come from any side. The insurgents are a collection of groups with individual goals. The goals of one group may be diametrically opposed to other groups, and they may shoot each other if they come in contact. The only thing they agree on is killing coalition and Iraqi government forces.

The coalition and Iraqi forces are so on edge that they react with violence to any change in their environment. For them the goal is staying alive until tomorrow. If you have never been in the situation it is hard to understand that prison looks like an acceptable alternative to their current situation. Three meals a day and a safe place to sleep looks good to someone who is getting shot at daily and eating MREs.

The failure to hold to rotation dates is a major problem. That exit date is what holds many people together; it a goal. When you lose that goal, when you don’t know how long you are going to be in the situation, you lose hope. Stop-Loss orders and tour extensions destroy morale.

Not even Johnson and McNarmara were that stupid and out of touch with the military.

Ms. Patrick is under attack because she is good. She started in fourth position and ended the Indy 500 in the same position because she was running on fumes and couldn’t both drive aggressively and finish the race. She led for 19 laps but had to work through traffic after two rookie mistakes: she stalled the car in the pits, and she had an accident that damaged the front of the car. With a little more experience she is in line for the milk. [Indianapolis gives the winner milk instead of champagne.]

Ms. Patrick has a lot in common with Ellen MacArthur, another woman who does what she does very well indeed because she loves it.

Patrick has rolled Electrolite into Teresa’s Making Light, which is nice as it saves a few clicks after adjusting the blogroll.

Folks, the only people who think the Republican Party has ever been a leader in security matters are those who have never bothered to study American history. The Republicans do a lot of blustering and send billions to military contractors, but they don’t have a consistent military or foreign policy.

People have been led to believe that the Republicans fought Communism. If you define fighting as calling people bad names, fine, but the Republicans forced President Wilson to withdraw an American division from Russia after World War I. The division was providing a safe corridor for people fleeing the civil war, and blocked the Bolshevik forces from southern ports on the Black Sea. These are the same people that blocked American entry into the League of Nations.

They didn’t want the US to support South Korea, and they halted the Korean War with a truce. The Korean War is still officially in progress, not settled, and we didn’t get all of our POWs back.

No need to go into Vietnam and Nixon’s withdrawal.

A couple of hundred Marines died upholding Reagan’s decision to intervene in the Lebanese civil war, and Ronnie tucked tail. The closest he came to combating Communism was the SWAT raid on Grenada.

George H.W. Bush made a decent recovery when his puppet, Saddam Hussein, got carried away, but he and his Secretary of Defense, Richard Cheney, began gutting the combat arms of the US military before the smoke had cleared. I was in San Diego for Gulf War I and read the letters in the San Diego Union Tribune from the combat pilots returning from the Gulf who had received their “Reduction In Force” letters.

Clinton slowed things down a bit from the Republican push to strip the military, but when Clinton wanted to move against Milosevic and bin Laden the Republicans started chanting “Wag The Dog” and made effective use of the American military nearly impossible.

Dubya broke with the Republicans’ generally isolationist attitude and has gone whole hog to swagger around the world. He has been in search of glory, not competence alarming other governments and the professional military who prefer accomplishing missions, not merely saying you did.

The Republicans don’t like treaties or international organizations. They prefer that people simply blindly trust the intentions of the United States. Unfortunately most countries do study history and don’t think much of the US record of abiding by treaties or agreements under Republicans.

The neo-cons and their media apologists will talk about the world being against the US, but a closer study shows that the rest of the world is fed up with self-serving reinterpretations of treaties and agreements. They also object to the US claiming others are violating provisions while the US is violating the same agreement in the same manner.

The good news is that a lot of students will be able to get doctorates by trying to explain what the hell caused Dubya to be re-elected.

Dave’s Friday Question™

He’s at it again.

[™ Kevin Drum]

The Ringo Kid

I wasn’t going to steal it!

[Edit: Ringo refused to stop climbing into the undercarriages of cars, so she’ll have to adapt to the inside. Her name is derived from the case of ringworm she has on her tail, and the fact that I’ve been naming cats for cowboys lately.]

Friday Ark

Schools can determine what kind of educational program they want, but they must hold one every year on the now-named “Constitution Day and Citizenship Day.” And if September 17 falls on a weekend or holiday, schools must schedule a program immediately before or after that date.

Senator Robert Byrd thinks people should know what’s really in the Constitution, and I agree with him.

While reports are buzzing about the health of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, The BBC points out that experience shows that Zarqawi is more important as a symbol for the Bush administration than for the conduct of the Iraqi insurgency or al Qaeda.

The ever vigilant Australian Broadcasting informs the world: Mill dispute sparks a run on toilet paper.

Shoppers in Finland have raided shelves for toilet paper in fear of it running out as a lockout of workers keeps the Nordic country’s paper mills shut.

The inhumanity of it all. A note to the management of the paper mills: you are not gaining public support for your position by endangering the supply of toilet paper.

The US wasn’t wrong to consider Syria other than a friend of the US. There were major differences between the US and Syria over the Palestinians and Lebanon and Syria wants the Golan Heights back from Israel. There were numerous points of conflict and the former President, Hafez al Assad, was not a nice person.

In 2000, Bashar al Assad became President on the death of his father, and he started to open up the country. With a little support he might have opened up more, but in any case, this isn’t “his father’s Syria”. Now, the BBC reports that Syria ends co-operation with US.

Syria was cooperating to the extent it could, but it wasn’t getting anything in return from the US. The Iraq invasion caused major problems for Assad, but he kept things under control. The US has killed Syrian border guards in cross border raids, but Assad has kept things under control. Now the US is ratcheting up the rhetoric against Syria, so Assad has said “enough”.

People have compared Syria and Iraq because they are neighbors and both were controlled by the Baath Party. The Parties were both dominated by a minority, which suppressed the majority. Both were dominated by “strongmen”, who were bent on establishing hereditary Presidencies.

Assad and Saddam hated each other and both hated al Qaeda. Al Qaeda hated Saddam because he was a secularist, and Assad because he was a Alawite Shia, neither the fundamentalist Sunni that was required by the Wahhabi vision of the world.

The Iraqi Baathist were Sunni Arabs ruling over Shias, while the Syrian Baathists were Alawite Shias ruling over Sunni Arabs. This is the reason for Syria’s ties to Iran and support for Hezbollah.

Syria has been playing “nice” recently, but the Busheviki keep pushing. The Syrians had to stop dealing with the US or face internal problems with its citizens. A lost opportunity to have another “non-enemy” in the area.

To be eligible for either of the two Nursing Homes you have to have 20 years of military service and duty in a combat zone.

Jillian at skippy tells us about Congressman Gene Taylor (D-MS), and Coast Guard Reservist, who wants to provide health care for Reservists and the National Guard who are being used for Federal duties.

This is really a security issue. Many people who have been called up are not medically fit for duty due to a lack of health coverage.

Duncan Hunter, the representative of yacht owners in Coronado, California and Chairthing of the Armed Services Committee says it’s too expensive. He also thinks people are stupid not to understand why women can’t really serve in combat or crew their own boats.

[Yes, Duncan is a Republican. Yes, he thinks he’s a conservative. Yes, he thinks going to cocktail parties with retired Admirals is the same as military service. Yes, I know him. Yes, he is an obnoxious jerk.]

During Vietnam equipment failed to work properly at first and there were a lot of minor annoyances, but fixes were found and implemented within a reasonable time frame. You pulled a one-year tour and didn’t go back unless everyone else in your specialty at your rank had already gone or you volunteered. If you went on a temporary basis, you were out of there in less than 179 days. Except for a tiny number of specialties in which there were real critical shortages, when your active duty enlistment was up, you got to turn in your uniforms and go home with a benefit package that wasn’t as good as World War II, but not terrible. If you stayed in you could retire with 50% of your base pay after 20 years, 75% if you stayed for 30.

The guys mired in the sand still don’t have the right body or vehicle armor. No one knows how long a tour will be, or how many you’ll have to pull. The temporary duty time limit is now 269 days. Thousands of people are being blocked from going home through “Stop-Loss” orders and people who have completed their active duty are being recalled from the Reserves. The benefits suck. If you stay in for 20 years you get 37.5% of base pay, 50% comes after 30 years.

The big difference between the two conflicts is how badly the troops are being treated in this one.

Apparently the people in charge of this mess don’t see the need to treat volunteers as well as draftees were treated.

The kind of people who would do this probably blow up frogs or beat their dogs; they are real trash.