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

Category: Terror War

  • Think of the Children/Afghanistan version.

    It seems that Rethink Afghanistan is claiming that it has a exclusive story that prove that NATO forces were responsible 50 civilian deaths to include women and children. But given that the first images of the area are from Al Jazeera is enough to give pause considering their past actions. DC wrote a post about it that talks about it in more detail.

    The video goes into several interviews from people that claim that say what exactly happened/ But considering what the Taliban does to people that oppose them I find that these are suspect. Like the video of Al Jazeera recording the Taliban arresting people who voted in the 2009 Afghanistan election. In this case the fate of the people is not good. Also considering the Taliban is threatening to behead anyone who it considers a “informer”

    The Taliban in Afghanistan has threatened to behead informers who have been revealed following the explosive disclosure by WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks has put out over 90,000 uncensored intelligence documents, causing a security scare.

    So is this still a victimless crime now?

  • Who’s killing Afghans?

    We’ve all heard the Karzai Administration complain about Americans not using enough caution and as a result, innocent Afghans die in military engagements. But has anyone heard him complain about the number of civilians that the Taliban kill intentionally?

    There have been 1,859 civilian deaths from improvised explosive devices (IEDs) this year across Afghanistan. That compares with 1,057 in the same period last year.

    In the Taliban stronghold of southern Afghanistan, where thousands of U.S. forces have been brought in to protect Afghans, civilian deaths from roadside bombs have soared 132% since last year, the reports show.

    Associated Press reports that 10 members of a medical team in Afghanistan were ambushed by Taliban and murdered while they were making their way back to Kabul after a two-week mission in the Badakhshan province. Six of the 10 were Americans.

    Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid told The Associated Press in Pakistan that they killed the foreigners because they were “spying for the Americans” and “preaching Christianity.”

    Frans said the International Assistance Mission is registered as a nonprofit Christian organization but it does not proselytize.

    “This tragedy negatively impacts our ability to continue serving the Afghan people as IAM has been doing since 1966,” according to a statement released by the charity. “We hope it will not stop our work that benefits over a quarter of a million Afghans each year.”

    I guess it’s just more profitable to complain about Americans.

  • I thought this was a war

    The Associated Press reports that the Bush Administration engaged in a sort of shellgame with detainees (in another time they’d be called prisoners of war) from Guatanamo, shifting from the island POW camp to “black prisons” before the courts and lawyers could sink their claws into them;

    The transfer allowed the U.S. to interrogate the detainees in CIA “black sites” for two more years without allowing them to speak with attorneys or human rights observers or challenge their detention in U.S. courts. Had they remained at the Guantanamo Bay prison for just three more months, they would have been afforded those rights.

    “This was all just a shell game to hide detainees from the courts,” said Jonathan Hafetz, a Seton Hall University law professor who has represented several detainees.

    Removing them from Guantanamo Bay underscores how worried President George W. Bush’s administration was that the Supreme Court might lift the veil of secrecy on the detention program. It also shows how insistent the Bush administration was that terrorists must be held outside the U.S. court system.

    So? What’s the big deal? I may be confused here, but I thought that the treatment of POWs is regulated by the Geneva Conventions not US courts. In fact, I’ve never seen the words “prisoners of war” in the Constitution. Is there any record of the trials of those sailors killed last week? Yeah, please don’t defend the lawyers and courts with “we’re better than they are” – we are, and we’ve yet to be worse than “they are”.

  • Can’t Imagine Why.

    It seems that the reporter that leaked private conversations is wondering why his request to be embedded with Military in Afghanistan was rejected according to Army Times.

    The author of the Rolling Stone article that ended the military career of Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former top commander in Afghanistan, has been denied permission to join U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan, the Pentagon said Tuesday.

    Defense Department spokesman Col. David Lapan told reporters that freelance writer Michael Hastings was rebuffed when he asked to accompany, or “embed,” with American forces next month.

    I mean this is a total shock right, I mean posting angry comments about why support has taken over a year to get to Afghanistan and expects to be accepted there again?

    The inspector general is considering whether officers were insubordinate and how far up the chain of command responsibility for decisions involving the Hastings interviews extended, officials said. Defense officials outlined the investigation on condition of anonymity because it is ongoing and has reached no conclusions.

    On a side note we need to make a drinking game that sates that if anyone says “Not authorized to speak to the Press.” or something we drink. Because I see this happen way too much in our and Foreign news.

    Oh the same reporter has a book deal that he s going to talk about him leaking these conversations, I mean why in the world would you not want him back.

    Oh on the subject of Generals and Politics here is one for a good laugh.

    General Pace – you have the power to fulfill your responsibility to protect the troops under your command. Indeed you have an obligation to do so.

    You can relieve the President of his command.

    Not of his Presidency. But of his military role as Commander-In-Chief.

    You simply invoke the Uniform Code Of Military Justice.

    There is only one possible response for something like this.

  • Manning in trouble before

    Our little Wikileaks rat, Bradley Manning, has been in trouble before his current well-known crimes according to Wired which was quoted on CNN’s website;

    Wired.com recently reported that he was punished for uploading videos on YouTube in which he talked about classified buildings at the base and classified materials he saw.

    Manning did not disclose classified information in the videos, but did discuss the rooms where secure information was held, which was considered a security risk, Wired.com reported.

    Despite the punishment, Manning graduated from his training in August 2008 as an intelligence analyst with security clearance.

    So he put sensitive information on YouTube and someone thought that letting him continue his training and give him a security clearance was a good idea? Later on he was busted a stripe for some sort of altercation and no one thought he’d hold a grudge and take out the reduction and loss of pay on the Army?

    This is beginning to sound exactly like the Nidal Hassan case. Disgruntled people who showed outward signs of some sort of social disorder which the Army ignored and it came back to bite them (us) in the ass.

    Now Newsweek (in my opinion, vastly overpriced at Washington Post’s $1 asking price) reports that Taliban is using the Wikileaks documents as an excuse for revenge killings.

  • Wikileaks in Baghdad trash dump

    There’s an article in The Nation written by Sarah Lazare and Ryan Harvey entitled “Wikileaks in Baghdad” that has really tested my strength to avoid punching my poor, innocent laptop. The article begins;

    One by one, soldiers just arriving in Baghdad were taken into a room and questioned by their commanding officers. “All questions led up to the big question,” explains former Army Spc. Josh Stieber. “If someone were to pull out a weapon in a marketplace full of unarmed civilians, would you open fire on that person, even if you knew you would hurt a lot of innocent people in the process?”

    It was a trick question. “Not only did you have to say yes, but you had to say yes without hesitating,” explains Stieber. “In refusing to go along with the crowd, it was not irregular for somebody to get beat up,” he adds. “They’ll take you in a room, close the door and knock you around if they didn’t like your answer,” says former Army Spc. Ray Corcoles, who deployed with Stieber.

    According to these former soldiers, this was a typical moment of training for Bravo Company 2-16 (2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment), the ground unit involved in the infamous “Collateral Murder” video, which captured global headlines when it was released in April by WikiLeaks….

    A few points that the least bit of research would have revealed about those first paragraphs; Beating a soldier won’t change his answer to that question. Just by slamming him around in room doesn’t make him react differently in the real situation. Soldiers aren’t dogs and have their own minds.

    Another point; Any “commanding officer” who took the least part in such ineffective conditioning would lose their jobs…and no such incident would go unreported. Give us the names of these “commanding officers” and watch how swiftly justice comes to them.

    A third point; In the video to which they refer, the soldiers of B 2/16 Infantry didn’t do anything out of line. It’s the actions of two helicopter crewmembers which led to the killing of those insurgents and journalists on the street corner. Those helicopter crew members aren’t on the roster of B 2/16, so they wouldn’t have had this supposed conditioning that Steiber describes. The soldiers of B 2/16 are the folks who showed up later and rushed the two children to medical treatment. So even if the above story was true, what could it possibly have to do with the events which unfolded in the video?

    We return to the article;

    Now three former soldiers from this unit have come forward to make the case that the incident is not a matter of a few bad-apple soldiers but rather just one example of US military protocol in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, where excessive acts of violence often stem from the chain of command.

    Except that the “excessive violence” came from the helicopter crew members, not members of B 2/16 – the unit from which those three former soldiers came. And there are about a hundred men in an infantry company – where are the other 97?

    The three go on to make vacuous charges against their leadership and peers without naming names, without providing dates and places. Lazare and Harvey were suckered – but I suspect it doesn’t bother either of them. Lazare writes with Dahr Jamail, the lead propagandist of the Left who completely disregards facts that get in his way and constructs mountains from molehills. Lazare also writes and works with Courage to Resist, so she’s pretty familiar with using hyperbole as facts.

  • ADL Announces Opposition to Mosque Near Ground Zero

    This admittedly surprised me. The ADL isn’t exactly a red-blooded conservative and while they do criticize some of the opponents of the Mosque for “bigoted” speech, they do use some of the talking points that the conservative blogosphere has been using for awhile in regards to this mosque:

    In recommending that a different location be found for the Islamic Center, we are mindful that some legitimate questions have been raised about who is providing the funding to build it, and what connections, if any, its leaders might have with groups whose ideologies stand in contradiction to our shared values.  These questions deserve a response, and we hope those backing the project will be transparent and forthcoming.  But regardless of how they respond, the issue at stake is a broader one.

    Proponents of the Islamic Center may have every right to build at this site, and may even have chosen the site to send a positive message about Islam.  The bigotry some have expressed in attacking them is unfair, and wrong.  But ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right.  In our judgment, building an Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain – unnecessarily – and that is not right.

    The ADL wouldn’t have waded into this unless they know some real scary people are behind this mosque. I wonder if this will change the narrative of how the MSM has been reporting this story or if the left-wing media will start lumping the

    By the way, if anyone has any video or a statement of Mark Potok or anybody else from the SPLC commenting on or defending the mosque, plus post the link in the comment section.

  • Small and Strange World this is.

    I found out that one of the people that I went to Basic training at Fort Lenard Wood is/was part of the IVAW. I had found here back in 2007 when we had the exact same video about our Basic on MySpace. She was part of the 82d as a truck Driver. She went to Iraq in December 2006 at FOB Summerall with the Easy Company 1-505th, 3rd Battalion, 82nd Airborne Division. She stayed there until about May of 2007 when she was put on Rear Detachment for medical reasons. Later she gets outs and joins the IVAW’s 53 Chapter in Las Vegas. But this is were it starts to get interesting.

    She made a post on June 18, 2008 in the IVAW members speak out that could be seen in two ways. See for yourself.

    So this is the email I recieved today on Myspace from A guy that was in the Army back in the 90’s and has never deployed….

    “I’m deleting you from my friends list. I don’t dislike you, but I don’t need rubbish like this video being brought to my attention. It’s unfortunate you are so naive, even after all you have seen. It seems, after all, that some are unteachable.”

    So funny how he calls me “unteachable” yet he is the one who has never been to Iraq and doesn’t know anything other than what is in the news. He seems to think he knows so much about what is going on over there. Give me a break, he is just ignorant like a lot of Americans that think this War is for the better. I wish there was some kind of a program like a foreign exchange type deal where we can send these ignorant people to Iraq so they can see first hand what is exactly going on. My Own husband is on the fence on this subject he thinks that the war was started on lies which we all know it was. Yet he isn’t sure if we should leave yet or not….Now I love my husband but he was a 25 F and he spent a year in Iraq stuck on a Fob he wasn’t going out and doing missions in the city so he never saw the things most of us saw and I think that is why he thinks the way he does. I am trying to get it across to him that we need to end this occupation, maybe with some time he will be with me on this. If not oh well. I just pray that Iraq doesn’t end up like Kuwait that is now a duty station. If they ever turn Iraq into a duty station I am moving to Canada!

    Kinda takes it’s own perspective when considering the people in IVAW who have never seen Iraq. But this is the part that is confusing to me. In her blog she is very vocal about her dislike of the Army and her excitement about getting out with her new Husband. Not to mention that she was against the Iraq War in a comment she left to Casey Porter in August 31st of 2008.

    Thanks for the Add!! I Love your videos and the way you speak out against the occupation! IVAW all the way!

    So it is surprising that when I looked her up on AKO that it showed her being in the Army Reserves for Nevada. Her Blog also confirmed that her and her husband had re-enlisted in November of 2008.

    I am back in the Army reserves and that is going well, everyone in my unit is really nice. Nate joined to hahaha he couldn’t stay away. So I am changing my MOS from 88M truck driver to 42A Human resource spc….thank god because I don’t wanna drive anymore damn trucks lol.

    I just thought it odd considering that with the IVAW is vocal about supporting troops that do not want to deploy, why would you join the Army reserves? I mean the IVAW’s Las Vegas is using your photo as a poster picture for it’s MySpace page. The second thing is how was she able to get back in the Military if she was Med-Boardedout for a heart condition? I just do not get it.

    What a strange World.