This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Author: Jonn Lilyea

  • Hussein/al Qaida links

    In this week’s Washington Times column “Inside the Ring”, Bill Gertz actually read the Pentagon’s IG report (unlike some other journalists) and relates parts of Eric Edelman’s rebuttal of the report in the report’s appendix;

    The rebuttal is contained in the appendix of the IG report that criticized the alternative, pre-Iraq war intelligence assessment done by a Pentagon policy group on ties between Iraq and al Qaeda as “inappropriate.”
        Mr. Edelman stated that the policy group’s work on the issue was not only appropriate and legal, but directed by both former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.
        “Apart from the numerous factual inaccuracies, omissions and mischaracterizations identified throughout these comments, the [IG] report suffers from a basic analytical flaw in attempting to paint the work under review as ‘inappropriate’ even though no laws were broken, no DoD directives were violated and no applicable policies were disregarded,” Mr. Edelman wrote in his counter to the February IG report made public April 5. 

    Mr Gertz goes on to relate Edelman’s recharacterization of the links between al Qaida and Hussein. So why would the IG report misrepresent the findings of the study? According to Mr. Gertz;

    The IG report was released by Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, who defense officials say for years has quietly recruited agents within the Pentagon inspector general’s office to produce reports and audits sympathetic to the liberal Michigan Democrat’s views.

    Nice. We need people spying on our own defense establishment from Congress.

  • Army told “Hurry up and wait”

    Now all of the Democrats who whined so loudly and so long about the condition of OUTPATIENT facilities at Walter Reed Army Medical Center are trying to block the expansion of facilities at Bethesda Naval Hospital to accomodate the Walter Reed move. According to Steve Vogel of the Washington Post;

    A review panel’s recommendation that the Pentagon accelerate the expansion of the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda drew a wary reaction yesterday from local officials and neighbors concerned about traffic problems.

    * * * * *

    The report says the Pentagon should speed up the 2005 decision by the Base Realignment and Closure Commission to consolidate medical care at the Bethesda facility. It recommends that money to break ground for the expansion be released as soon as possible and that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates “accelerate or waive” an environmental study being conducted by the Navy.

    But Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who represents Montgomery County in Congress, said yesterday, “We shouldn’t be cutting any corners.

    “Some people are saying let’s slam on the brakes; others are saying we should hit the accelerator,” Van Hollen said. “I think we should proceed in a deliberate way.”

    Yes, that’s my Congressman. He’s quick to hit at the Bush Administration, but slow to act in the interests of our nation and our troops.  A few weeks ago, the troops were a “priority”, now the priority is the poor dregs who’ll be stuck in traffic on Wisconsin Avenue because they’re too damn lazy to take the bus or the subway to work.

    But he’s not the only one. Jim “Fighting Drunk” Moran;

    But some members of Congress, including Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.), insist that Walter Reed be kept open. “What you’re doing is changing horses in the middle of the stream at a time when soldiers need the best medical care,” Moran said yesterday.

    According to what Democrats were saying a few weeks ago, that’s what they wanted to happen – they wanted to change horses in mid-stream.

    And from the ugliest woman to walk the floor of the Senate;

    Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) also expressed concern about closing Walter Reed, “given the current strain on patient care for our soldiers.”

    So let me get this right – Democrats want everything to change for the troops, except everything must remain the same. This is classic Democrat double talk. they’ve done the same thing on the war, on education, on welfare reform, on Social Security, on nearly every issue before them. They want everything done yesterday – but only as long as nothing changes.

    So why do the Democrats want to slow down on Walter Reed? Because the District stands to lose 6,000 jobs when the medical facility moves 10 miles away to Bethesda (keep in mind driving ten miles through the District and southern Maryland can take two hours depending on the time of day). Most of those jobs are menial kitchen and jantorial labor. There’s nothing in that area to attract businesses that could replace such an employer.

    The District wants the Army to just turn over the buildings to the city, so the city can turn the buildings, which are too dilapidated for outpatients, into low-rent apartments so the District can have some more slums to warehouse the il-educated denizens of DC. At this time the Army is resisting that plan – so Demorats are waiting for a friendlier administration that will let them become the Mid-Atlantic’s slum lords. 

    Read all of the Washington Post’s genuine frontpage concern for the troops here, before the Democrats started stonewalling the process and got this particular story moved to page 3 while the frontpage is reserved for really important stuff like Rove’s missing emails and FEMA’s wasted food.

  • Summits, summits everywhere…

    Washington Times reports two summits happening for the benefit of Iraq in the next few weeks. One in Egypt on May 3rd for the “Arab Street” and one in the White House for the Democrat leadership next week.

    From WashTimes David Sands, Iraqi hopes are pinned to the outcome of their Egypt meeting;

    “It would be a real slap in the face” if the May 3 gathering at the Egyptian resort city of Sharm el Sheik failed to produce concrete offers, Ibrahim Gambari, the U.N. undersecretary-general overseeing the Iraq-reconstruction program, said in an interview Tuesday with The Washington Times.
        “It could undermine the vision of [Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri] al-Maliki and his government to take the steps needed to restore Iraq’s economy,” the veteran Nigerian diplomat added.
        Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh warned on a Washington visit yesterday that Iran is ready to expand its clout inside Iraq if Arab rivals like Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait fail to support Iraq’s economic recovery.
        “If the Arab countries do not step up, Iran’s influence in Iraq will grow,” Mr. al-Dabbagh said. 

    Later on in the story, Sands tells us that the US and the “Paris Club” are forgiving substantial portions Iraq’s $120 billion debt, but the Arabs aren’t so forthcoming on forgiving the debts of their Arab neighbor.

    Isn’t that what started this mess in the first place? I remember Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 because he was deeply indebted to his Arab brothers after fighting off the Iranians and preventing the spread of fundamentalism throughout the Gulf region. Kuwait wouldn’t give him any concessions or breaks on repayment so he took their oilfields (a REAL war for oil). Well, I guess no one has ever accused the Arabs of learning from history.

    The other summit, according to Joseph Curl and S.A. Miller, is the meeting in the White House that President offered to the Democrats the other day and they spent all day yesterday feigning outrage that the President was sticking to his principles rather than caving in to their $20 billion graft-ridden defense supplemental bill.

      “We will listen to his position, but in return we will insist that he listen to concerns of the American people that his policies in Iraq have failed and we need to change course,” they said.
        Earlier in the day, Mr. Reid balked when the White House announced that the Nevada Democrat had agreed to attend the meeting and discuss the $100 billion war-funding bill that Mr. Bush has vowed to veto.
        Reid spokesman Jim Manley had said the Nevada Democrat would rebuff offers to talk until he gets “a signal from the White House that they are prepared to drop their demand that this meeting is a listening session only and this meeting will not include negotiations.”
        Mrs. Pelosi, California Democrat, also began the day declining Mr. Bush’s invitation — reiterating the stance the leaders took Tuesday after the White House characterized Congress’ role in the meeting as listeners not negotiators.
        There was no indication from the White House last night that the president had altered the terms of his invitation.

    I guess the Democrats workshopped their response and found out they’d be holding the brown end of the stick. That “concerns of the American” people crap is wearing a little thin. I’ll say it one more time for those of you not paying attention; if you spoke for the American people, we would have elected enough of you that you wouldn’t have to worry about the President’s veto.

    I hope whichever way these meetings break, it’s in the best interest of the iraqi people – who really do need a break from all of this posturing and politicking.

  • Biden vs. McCain

    Joseph Biden takes issue with John McCain’s “The War You’re Not Reading About” piece in the Washington Post last Sunday and writes a rebuttal in the Washington Post;

    McCain wrote that the president’s strategy is beginning to show results but that most Americans don’t know it because the media cover the bad news, not the good news. Of course, reporting any news in Iraq is an extraordinary act of bravery, given the dangers journalists must navigate every day. But the fact is, virtually every “welcome development” McCain cited has been reported, including the purported anti-al-Qaeda alliance with Sunni sheikhs in Anbar, the establishment of joint U.S.-Iraqi security stations in Baghdad and the decision by Moqtada al-Sadr to go to ground — for now.

    The problem is that for every welcome development, there is an equally or even more unwelcome development that gives lie to the claim that we are making progress. For example:

    So Biden begins by sucking up to the brave journalists who are apparently in greater danger than our troops. Those brave journalists who call reporting explosions from their hotels in the Green Zone journalism. But, see, that’s how Biden makes his point that Iraq is dangerous. Of course it’s dangerous, numbnuts – that’s why its a war.

    Old Hair Plugs calls the President’s strategy a “failing strategy”. How’s that possible? It hasn’t even reached fruition, yet. If you want to call the old strategy a failure, go ahead, have at it. But how can you call the current strategy a failure when it hasn’t even happened yet?

    The administration hopes that the surge will buy time for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government to broker the sustainable political settlement our military views as essential to lasting stability in Iraq.

    But there is no trust within the government, no trust of the government by the people it purports to serve and no capacity on the part of the government to deliver security or services. There is little prospect that the government will build that trust and capacity anytime soon.

    In short, the most basic premise of the president’s approach — that Iraqis will rally behind a strong central government that looks out for their interests equitably — is fundamentally and fatally flawed.

    So we should just quit, Joey? Just stop? Oh, no. He has a plan;

    I cannot guarantee that my plan for Iraq (detailed at http://www.planforiraq.com) will work. But I can guarantee that the course we’re on — the course that a man I admire, John McCain, urges us to continue — is a road to nowhere.

    The same old Joe Biden partitioning of Iraq. Is there a reason that Iraqis haven’t arrived at that solution by themselves? Afterall, it’s their government, their constitution. Now if we imposed that plan on the Iraqis, that would be a puppet government, it would be an occupation.

    And we don’t need more of your doom and gloom stories from Iraq, Joe, we get them everyday from the Washington Post. In fact, we can hardly call your opinion news at all – it’s more of a “dog bites man” story. It’s not news that you and your buddies have a problem with this particular while a Republican administration is fighting it. And it’s not news that you think a strategy that hasn’t happened yet is failing.

  • Where is shame?

    A conversation I had with a co-worker the other day got me to thinking about this. I know it’s outside what I usually post here, but two articles on Drudge Report this morning struck me as similar and in the same vein as the discussion my friend and I had.

    The first article on Drudge was from the Guardian – not usually my favorite read – about Tony Blair catching flak because he dared to say that the recent spike in violence in Britain was caused by Black youths.

    His remarks angered community leaders, who accused him of ignorance and failing to provide support for black-led efforts to tackle the problem.

    One accused him of misunderstanding the advice he had been given on the issue at a Downing Street summit.

    Black community leaders reacted after Mr Blair said the recent violence should not be treated as part of a general crime wave, but as specific to black youth. He said people had to drop their political correctness and recognise that the violence would not be stopped “by pretending it is not young black kids doing it”.

    Imagine that! Having the audacity and temerity to mention that Black culture is affecting civil society! How dare he. But, seriously, that’s the problem – we can’t fix the problem of violent youths if we can’t isolate the cause, and it appears that the culture is the problem. 

    Ignoring the root causes only encourages the offenders – they’re kids looking for boundaries and as long as society makes excuses for their bahavior, they’ll continue being sociopaths. If the reason that they’re supposedly misbehaving is a perceived racism that’s directed against them, why can’t we admit in public the race of the perpetrators?

    And not to equate being black with same-sex sex, the other story (from Breitbart – AP in drag) was about police catching an unusual number of men in Atlanta’s airport bathrooms having sex;

    At the world’s busiest airport, plainclothes officers patrolling public restrooms in search of luggage thieves have instead uncovered a rash of other, more sordid crimes.

    The new restroom dragnet has led to the arrests of more than 30 people in three months for indecent exposure and public sex acts at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

    Now, what does one story have to do with the other? Well, this line;

    “Police have far better things to do with their time than to arrest people for this,” said Kenneth Sherrill, professor at Hunter College of The City University of New York. “Being ‘sex police’ in bathrooms strikes me as a perversion of rational law enforcement activities.”

    Yes, police do have far better things to do. I agree that public officials shouldn’t have to range the restrooms for people who can’t control themselves in public. Which brings me to my point.

    Where is shame these days? I hate to sound like the old coots from my youth, but when did criminal behavior become the norm? When did people start making weak and petty excuses for what used to be acts that stayed on the fringes of society – out of our public restrooms and off of the front pages of our newspapers?

    When I was a non-commissioned officer, one of our tenets was that we would never turn our backs on a deficiency – that we’d correct problems on the spot. I’ve tried to carry that same nugget with me to civilian life. I’ve stopped mugging, I’ve stopped winos from harrassing innocent people , I’ve broken up youths fighting, I’ve chased down people who’ve lost their wallets and purses, reported crimes to police as they were happening and reported drug dealers. Of course, I could make that a full time job here in Washington, DC.

    The reaction I get from the police as well as my friends is that I must be crazy. I’m just trying to be a good citizen, and I’m ashamed as an American to see what’s happening to my community. But I’m more ashamed that no one else, or very few people, here are doing their part.

    Maybe if we all were a little more ashamed of what we’ve let this society become, we can start doing our part.

  • Sadr-ites back withdrawal timetable

    According to Washington Post’s Qassim Abdul-Zahra Sadr’s allies in the Iraqi legislature are threatening to leave the government if the Iraq government doesn’t support a withdrawal timetable for US troops;

    Iraqi Cabinet ministers allied to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr threatened Wednesday to quit the government to protest the prime minister’s lack of support for a timetable for U.S. withdrawal, according to a statement.

    Such a pullout by the very bloc that put Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in office could collapse his already perilously weak government. The threat comes two months into a U.S. effort to pacify Baghdad in order to give al-Maliki’s government room to function.

    Al-Sadr’s political committee issued the statement a day after al-Maliki rejected an immediate U.S. troop withdrawal.

    “We see no need for a withdrawal timetable. We are working as fast as we can,” al-Maliki told reporters during his four-day trip to Japan, where he signed loan agreements for redevelopment projects in Iraq.

    “To demand the departure of the troops is a democratic right and a right we respect. What governs the departure at the end of the day is how confident we are in the handover process,” he said, adding that “achievements on the ground” would dictate how long American troops remain.

    I guess that’s a bit treasonous because the Sadr-ists are just anxious to get the Americans out of their way so they can seize the government by force, since the electoral thing isn’t happening for them.

    It also indicates that Sadr is sweating the American destruction of his forces in Iraq. They’re in a hurry to get us out before there is no militia with which to take over the government. They at least want a timetable they can use to raise the morale of the militias instead of sending them into the US meatgrinder.

    Maybe Pelosi and Murtha can go over there to buck up the Sadr troops. Well, what’s left of them.

  • Syria’s martyrdom superhighways

    In today’s DC Examiner, Rowan Scarborough tells us that Syria is the entry-point for suicide bombers in Iraq;

    Al-Qaida in Iraq is operating three main entry routes for suicide bombers coming into Iraq from Syria, despite more than three years of U.S. efforts to control the border and convince Damascus to evict the jihadists, an American military officer said Tuesday.

    A bomber struck again in Iraq Tuesday, this time a woman who detonated a bomb under her black abaya, killing herself and 16 others at a police recruiting station. It could not be learned if she was an Iraqi or an imported terrorist. But the U.S. command says the vast majority of suicide bombers — al-Qaida’s principal means of attack — are foreigners.

    This should delight Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi who just last week announced to the world that Syria is the key to peace in the Middle East (if only the US and Israel would trust President Bashar Asad). Now she and Holocaust survivor Tom Lantos hinted that they’d be willing to go to visit Holocaust-denier Ahmadinejad and do for Iran what they did in Syria – lend legitimacy to rogue entities in the Middle East.

    This Op/Ed appeared in the Washington Times (h/t Dadmanly)on February 20th – well before Pelosi headed to Syria – I wonder if she confronted Assad about this intelligence;

      Regional intelligence services and inside sources from within Sunni officer corps opposed to the Assad regime have identified major foreign-fighter training camps in northern Syria and just outside Damascus overseen by Syrian Military Intelligence and run by former Iraqi Ba’athi Generals and senior Saddam Fedayeen commanders.
        One major foreign fighter camp exists in the Latakia province in northern Syria, a mountainous area replete with Syrian Military Intelligence facilities and wide swaths of ostensibly government property closed to the public. The Iraqi officer in charge there is one Maj. Gen. Majid Sulayman. Yet another such camp exists 40 kilometers to the west of the border town of Qamishli, which lies in the Kurdish area in the northeastern tip of Syria bordering Iraq and Turkey; it is run by Maj. Gen. Qays al-Adhami. The al-Shaybani camp lies 30 kilometers south of Damascus and also trains foreign fighters. The al-Ikhals camp lies in the heart of the Qaysun mountain range near Damascus.

    Please read the entire details of the Op/Ed piece.

    And AP reports that the Mahdi Army commanders admit they’ve trained their troops and receive material support in Iran;

    Iranian intelligence operatives have been training Iraqi fighters inside Iran on how to use and assemble deadly roadside bombs known as EFPs, the U.S. military spokesman said today.
        Commanders of a splinter group inside the Shi’ite Mahdi Army militia have said that as many as 4,000 members of their organization were trained in Iran and that they have stockpiles of EFPs, weapons that cause great uneasiness among U.S. forces here because they penetrate heavily armored vehicles.
        U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell would not say how many militia fighters had been trained in Iran but said that questioning of fighters captured as recently as this month confirmed many had been in Iranian training camps.
        “We know that they are being in fact manufactured and smuggled into this country, and we know that training does go on in Iran for people to learn how to assemble them and how to employ them. We know that training has gone on as recently as this past month from detainees? debriefs,” Gen. Caldwell said at a weekly briefing

    So Pelosi and Lantos are hinting at a trip to Iran while Iran is supplying the militias that are keeping us involved in Iraq. How much sense does that make?

    This why Americans don’t trust Democrats with our foreign policy. Their refusal to accept the realities of the world color their politics. They’re like children playing mock-UN in grade school.

    The reason the President called Hussein, Iran and Kim Jong IL the Axis of Evil is because you can’t trust them. They talk out of both sides of their mouths and make public statements that they have no intention of following through. I guess that’s why Democrats have such a kinship with them – Democrats do the same thing before elections. Which might explain why Pelosi’s approval numbers are plummeting.

  • Webb; we can’t call ourselves Americans

    Spoiled brat, Senator Jim Webb told a group of University of Virginia students that we should shut down the Guantanamo detention facility because it’s un-Americans according to the Washington Examiner and AP;

    Webb said he agreed early in the war on terrorism that such a facility was needed. “But there comes a point where people need to be dealt with through the legal system,” Webb said. “I think that time has come.”

    People? Sure, Jim, people should be dealt with through the legal system. But the only people at Guantanamo are our troops who are guarding a pack of rabid creatures who want to kill women and children.

    After speaking to the students in professor Larry J. Sabato’s class on American politics, Webb told reporters that the detainees should either be declared prisoners of war or charged in the American judicial system if the U.S. continues to hold them captive.

    “We can’t just continue to hold people in limbo without charges for this period of time and still call ourselves Americans,” Webb said.

    Then what are we? Sitting ducks? In my opinion, as valueless at it might be, we’ve never been threatened by an enemy like this before, so our response calls for a unique response. Much like Bill Clinton’s unique solution to the haitian immigrant problem – he put Haitians escaping Haiti on Guantanamo in a tent city for an undetermined amount of time. Did Webb have a problem with that?

    Webb admits that he was in favor of the detention of the creatures at Guantanamo before he succumbed to Bush Derangement Syndrome, why has he suddenly lost his way? Maybe because it’s not politically expedient? Declaring these creatures POWs will only make their lives better – that’s not what they’d do for us if given an opportunity. Putting them in our legal system will only unneccessarily overburden untrained civilian personnel.

    Webb also went on to complain to the students that his job is hard because he has to vote on stuff and he’s tied down to his office. How can we treat a US Senator like that and still call ourselves Americans?