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

Category: Terror War

  • Guantanamo Protest in DC

    Today in Washington, DC, Amnesty International and the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition, staged events protesting Guantanamo. I learned that they were in town from reading VanHelsing at Moonbattery, so I took the Blogger Urban Reconnaissance Vehicle (BURV) and headed downtown. The first thing I found was the Amnesty International’s Guantanamo Cell Tour 2008.

    A child who really needed to get a sandwich or two was handing out fliers to passers-by;

    Then there was the cell itself;

    The woman who was conducting the tour told me that it’s not representative of normal cells, but those of “Class V” prisoners. But according to Fox News, that’s not true;

    Amnesty International-USA said the cell, which contains a toilet, sleeping bunk and a small window, is meant to symbolize the U.S. government’s alleged mistreatment of detainees at the prison.

    It said the tour is designed to increase public awareness and mount pressure on the Bush administration and Congress to close down the U.S.-controlled detention center. The group planned its display in Washington to coincide with a House Judiciary subcommittee’s hearing on harsh interrogation techniques.

    But Charles “Cully” Stimson, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs, lashed out against Amnesty’s campaign, calling it a “complete fraud in misrepresenting the condition of detention at Gitmo today.”

    Not having been to Guantanamo myself, I can’t attest to either story so I’ll just go with the experts on this. Since AI has an axe to grind and funds to raise, I’ll stick with the ex-government guy. Here’s an interview I did with the “tour guide” Cicely;

    [youtube HwQMCU-0WPU nolink]

    The particular Gitmo alum who was identified as the suicide attacker in Mosul last month was Abdullah Salim Ali al-Ajm. Cicely said he was held six years at Gitmo, but that’s not true he was there three years before he was released.

    After I was done taping, we all had our picture taken – that’s Gabrielle Birchak and Rob Raffety from Project Breakout.

    Their corner of the Mall was virtually ignored by the thousands of tourists out on this sweltering June morning;

    But their cell on the Mall was a little bit more realistic than the one I found at the other event in Lafayette Park (across from the White House where there are usually more tourists);

    It seems someone should have spoken up and mentioned thats how Americans get treated, not how we treat foreign prisoners. But, oddly, no one did speak up.

    I don’t think this guy’s hunger strike began intentionally;

    Just as I got there, they formed up for their march – around Lafayette Park.

    I was doing an interview with the Washington Post so I missed the shot of them walking by the White House. It might have been part of WaPo’s plan. But the reporter assured me that he wasn’t a communist, so who knows.

    These two guys (Raoul might know who they are) were lamenting the fact that their planned protest in Denver wasn’t going to be as good as their protests at Fort Benning’s School of America or Seattle because they weren’t going to be in charge. I’m guessing they’re not happy that the umbrella organization is making them tone down their dissent.

    About that time, this guy started eye-balling me;

    And sent this woman over to take my picture;

    I just noticed this guy from the picture three photos above taking my picture;

    I don’t what that was about, but I handed all of them my card and told them if they needed to ask me anything they can reach me at this blog. We’ll see how that turns out. Here’s a video of their little march around Lafayette Park and some REALLY BAD sax playing;

    [youtube uk579SHG23c nolink]

    All-in-all it was a pretty pathetic event. They were vastly outnumbered by the apathetic tourists. I didn’t see any support for them from the tourists, hardly any asked questions, and aside from me and the Washington Post reporter, I didn’t see any media. He told me that he was so new at the Post, he didn’t have business cards yet.

    Code Pink had the event on their website, but there were none of the usual suspects there – in fact the only people I saw wearing pink were tourists.

    There were more participants at the protest in the middle of January in the pouring-ass rain. Today was a sunny June day. I think they’re losing their cache`.

    Thanks to Jammie Wearing Fool , Little Green Footballs, Nice Deb, Stop the ACLU , Gateway Pundit, The Real Revo, Inoperable Terran, Libertarian Republican, Pirate’s Cove and McClatchy Watch for the links.

    Welcome Weekly Standard readers.

  • Iran continues support of Shi’ite radicals

    As we get news from the Associated Press that Shi’ite militants attacked a council meeting in Sadr City, the Wall Street Journal writes that US authorities continue to accuse the Islamic Republic of continuing their support of Shi’ite radicals in Iraq;

    The report reserved its harshest words for Iran, accusing Tehran of breaking its promise to curtail the flow of Iranian armaments into Iraq. It said U.S. and Iraqi forces operating in Basra found large caches of Iranian-made weapons that had been manufactured earlier this year, after Iranian officials told their Iraqi counterparts that they would take measures to curb such shipments.

    The report also noted that the number of attacks featuring a particularly lethal form of roadside bomb that the U.S. has linked to Iran reached a high in April, while the number of attacks involving Iranian-supplied rockets rose sharply over the same period.

    Iran has been facilitating the “large-scale trafficking of arms, ammunition, and explosives,” and helping to “fund, train, arm and guide numerous networks that conduct wide-scale insurgency operations,” according to the report.

    Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugs writes that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is making a special trip to meet with Israeli military heads this week;

     In a visit likely to fuel speculation about possible Israeli military action against Iran, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen will touch down briefly in Israel at the end of the week for talks with IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, top defense officials told The Jerusalem Post on Monday.

    A few weeks after Mullen’s visit, Ashkenazi will fly to Washington DC for several days on his first visit to the US as chief of staff.

    And the USAToday reports that rockets are again striking Israel from Iran-backed Hamas-controlled Gaza effectively ending the days-old ceasefire;

     The midafternoon rocket barrage, which lightly wounded two people, capped a day of violence that presented the truce with its first serious test. Just before midnight, Palestinian militants fired a mortar shell into an empty area in southern Israel. And in a pre-dawn raid, Israeli troops killed two Palestinians in the West Bank city of Nablus.

    Islamic Jihad, a small armed group backed by Syria and Iran, claimed responsibility for the rocket fire. Although the West Bank is not included in the truce, the militant group said the Nablus raid had soured the atmosphere of calm.

    All of this on the day after the Islamic Republic rejects the legality of EU sanctions against the government for ignoring pleas to stop their march towards nuclear armaments;

    Iran condemned on Tuesday fresh European Union sanctions against the Islamic Republic and made clear they would not slow the country’s nuclear activities, an Iranian news agency reported.

    “Such illegal and paradoxical behavior …. is meaningless and strongly condemned,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini was quoted as saying by the Fars News Agency.

    All of this activity a few days after UN’s Nobel Prize winning Nuclear policeman Elbaradei warned that Iran could have a nuclear weapon within the next six months, but that a strike against them would turn the Near East into an inferno. And Iran negated the effect of an Israeli attack on their facilities after Israel supposedly made a practice run of an attack on Iran’s nuclear labs.

    It seems to me that all of the planets are aligned.

  • IVAW’s Matt Howard is a dumbass

    I ran across this video last week at IVAW’s OneStop (where they go to find mean stuff being said about them on the internet – which why they always find their way here). It’s Matt Howard who is supposedly an expert of some sort on depleted uranium usage in Iraq by US forces. His IVAW profile says he aspires to be a holistic healer and work with Chinese medicine – which must be different that western medicine somehow.

    But anyway, to the video, you have to sit through 4 minutes of propaganda about the IVAW and Winter Soldier, and then another minute-a-half of some dill weed strumming his guitar and mumbling like he’s on ‘ludes to get to Howard’s insane rant;

    [youtube rVfvB95YYNY nolink]

    He begins by admitting that he’s not going to give any specifics about the use of depleted uranium in Iraq – it’s up to us to research for ourselves. He doesn’t even give any reliable sources where we can start doing our research. So what the hell is he testifying about? basically, he’s just telling us we’re a bunch of dumbasses because we don’t already know about the issue.

    I’ve had some email exchanges with some of these DU zealots – they are absolutely impervious to common sense. Howard seems to be their Grand Poobah.

    Howard says that the US is firing off tank rounds in Iraq just so we can dispose of our nuclear waste – he even mentions that we’ve got so much nuclear waste in the US, that we don’t know what else to do with it. He gets exercised because we’re “changing the genome” of the entire planet because we’re firing so many DU tank rounds in Iraq. Into what?

    He admits that there’s no purpose for using the rounds, since the enemy in Iraq has no tanks. So apparently we’re just firing the stuff off randomly just to get rid of nuclear waste. Um, if we were really going to dispose of nuclear waste in Iraq, Matt, wouldn’t it just be cheaper and easier to bring it over in barrels and bury it in the sand?

    Of course, bigger dumbasses than Matt Howard are in the room applauding like imbeciles on cue and you can see some of them in the video doing the famous VFP/VVAW bobble-head routine that tells everyone around them that they’re veterans and they’re not surprised that the government is poisoning the planet with tank rounds.

    How can the anti-war crowd expect to be taken seriously with performances like this? And how does it add to the credibility of Matt Howard when he makes idiot statements like this (as quoted from Obiter Dictum);

    “During the initial invasion we killed women. We killed children. We senselessly killed farm animals. We were the United States Marine Corps…and we left a swath of death and destruction in our wake all the way to Baghdad…”
    Matt Howard, Iraq Veterans Against the War

    “We would declare zones ‘weapons-free’…and shoot everything that moved…weapons-free means you can shoot anyone and that’s exactly what we did…tanks went in and shot everything that moved: men, women, children, donkeys—it was a turkey shoot.”
    Matt Howard, Iraq Veterans Against the War

    And he writes idiot essays about the “surge” last year when he hasn’t even been in Iraq for the last four years. How would he know the surge is failing? Just like how would a future “holistic healer” know that we’re changing the “genome” in Iraq by disposing of our nuclear waste with tank rounds?

  • Gopher vs. Supreme Court

    I’m sure you all remember Fred Grandy who played the character “Gopher” on the TV series “Love Boat”. You probably know he went on to become a Republican Congressman, and now he has a conservative radio program here in DC on WMAL 630 with a co-host Andy Parks, a local radio icon.

    The other day, Fred took on the Supreme Court’s decision to grant Fifth Amendment rights to terrorists in a remarkable essay on the subject;

    …it was 1950 and the Supreme Court ruled in Johnson v. Eisentrager that non-Americans (in this case German nationals) held in a prison in then American-occupied Germany did not have a Fifth Amendment right of habeas corpus. In fact in a 6-3 decision the high court held  that to rule otherwise would effectively give enemy aliens engaged in “unlawful hostile action against us” immunity from military trials, putting them in a more protected position than our own American soldiers.  Here’s how they expressed it.

    But even by the most magnanimous view, our law does not abolish inherent distinctions recognized throughout the civilized world between citizens and aliens, nor between aliens of friendly and of enemy allegiance, nor between resident enemy aliens who have submitted themselves to our laws and non-resident enemy aliens who at all times have remained with, and adhered to, enemy governments.

    So here is my question to the five eminent justices who saw fit last week to effectively overturn Johnson v. Eisentrager  and extend Fifth Amendment protections to enemy combatants which will, of course, grant them access to civilian courts, allow them to lawyer up, seek favorable venues, file motions to delay, and otherwise manipulate the American legal process to their own advantage:

    The piece is worth a thorough read. Communists, hippies and terrorists have all used our system against us to some degree, depending on the magnanimity of our civil rights commitment and the fairness of our court system – which is why we’ve become like the world’s school nerd. Everyone knows they can pick on us and get away with it. hell, this morning, I read that Ahmadinejad  bragged that he foiled a US plot to kidnap him while he was in Iraq and that the Islamic Republic has faced down the US in a nuclear standoff and won. As if….

    Now we’ve decided we’re going to give these filthy animals Fifth Amendment rights so they can get another shot at killing more Americans? Hell, give them a shot at killing their own people trying to bring civilization to their own countries. I think we’ve reached the limits of our generosity. But, if a Democrat gets to appoint Supreme Court judges for the next four years, I’m sure we’ll get to see a lot more wrong-head and ill-fated decisions in our future.

  • How things change overnight

    As late as yesterday, the media was predicting a big upset for the Afghan Army
    in Kandahar.

    Hundreds of Taliban fighters yesterday swarmed into a strategically important district just outside Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city, in an apparent push for control days after 400 Taliban members escaped in a spectacular breakout from the Kandahar prison.

    But, my buddy, Jammie Wearing Fool illustrates how far the media is behind on events;

    Just two days ago the media told us the Taliban were stronger than ever and were flexing their muscles around Kandahar. Funny, but they have a strange way of flexing when they’re getting their heads kicked in.

    After a day of airstrikes and ground operations against a surge by Taliban fighters, provincial authorities here said Thursday that hundreds of militants had been killed or wounded in the valleys and villages of the strategic Arghandab region on the approaches to Kandahar.

    […]

    Asadullah Khaled, the governor of Kandahar Province, told a news conference in the Arghandab district compound on Thursday: “Hundreds of militants have been killed and wounded, their dead bodies have been left on the ground, with numbers of light and heavy weapons.”

    I guess that’s what happens when they depend on second hand reports in the comfort of their Islamabad hotels.

    From Drew M. at Ace of Spades;

    Also seriously wounded in the fighting was the conventional wisdom that we are losing in Afghanistan and that operations in Iraq are making it easier for the Taliban to regain power.

  • WaPo calls Obama’s Iraq plan outdated

    The lead editorial in the Washington Post this morning characterizes Barack Obama’s position on the war in Iraq as “badly outdated”;

    SEN. BARACK OBAMA told Iraq’s foreign minister this week that he plans to visit the country between now and the presidential election. We think that’s a good thing, not because Sen. John McCain has been prodding the candidate to do it but because it will give Mr. Obama an opportunity to refresh his badly outdated plan for Iraq. To do that, the Democrat needs to listen more to dedicated Iraqi leaders like Hoshyar Zebari, the foreign minister — who, it seems, didn’t hold back during their telephone conversation.

    Mr. Obama laid out his current strategy for Iraq in November 2006, shortly before announcing his candidacy for president. At the time, Iraq appeared to be on the verge of a sectarian civilian war, and Mr. Obama was trying to distinguish himself in the Democratic primary race by offering a timetable for withdrawal. Nineteen months later, the situation in Iraq has changed dramatically, with violence down 75 percent from its peak and the Iraqi government and army in control of most of the country. But Mr. Obama has not altered his position:

    Not only is it outdated, it’s been wrong since he formulated his intellectually shallow “plan”. If Obama had the opportunity to enact this “plan”, Iraqis would be suffering the consequences of that wrong-headed and ill-conceived shot at pandering to his anti-war base. Of course, we wouldn’t know about it, just like many Americans are surprised when they discover that Somalia and Haiti are still embroiled in violence a decade after they stopped being newsworthy here in the US.

    Just as a few new commenters here haven’t updated their arguments on the legality of our involvement in Iraq, Obama’s current policy needs to be updated considering recent successes there. But I wouldn’t hold my breath awaiting any coherent thoughts coming from either our resident commenters or Obama and his acolytes. They seem to have super powers that make them impervious to facts.

    Earlier this week, Obama said that he hasn’t “seen any evidence” that tax cuts help the economy, nor has hr seen any evidence that we’re safer because of Iraq just yesterday. As long as the left fails to “see any evidence” that’s contrary to the party line, they’ll find themselves at odds with the truth and the actual facts. And in the minority in Congress…and not in the White House.

    They repeat the false McCain quote about staying in Iraq for a hundred years and the retarded mischaracterization of opposition to the Senator Webb version of the GI Bill because they won’t look at facts – and they don’t see any reason that Obama should look at the facts either. They’re comfortable finding easy and non-intellectual reasons for supporting Obama because it makes them feel good about themselves. To Hell with what damage they do to the country.

  • Lawyers will fight Barack’s war against terror

    In an interview the other night Barack Obama, the candidate of change, suggested we return to the Clinton way of dealing with terrorists as a law enforcement issue, rather than accept that we’re really at war (Evening Standard link);

    The comments from his camp came hot on the heels of a TV interview on Monday in which Mr Obama insisted the U.S. government could successfully crack down on terrorists ‘within the constraints of our Constitution’.

    He backed a Supreme Court ruling last week that said detainees at Guantanamo Bay have a constitutional right to challenge their indefinite imprisonment in U.S. civilian courts – a ruling derided by Mr McCain as ‘one of the worst decisions in the history of this country’.

    Obama suggested we should depend on law enforcement agencies to track down perpetrators (after they’ve committed a crime) and put them in prison to negate their future attacks.

    [Obama] said that he believed that “we can track terrorists, we can crack down on threats against the United States, but we can do so within the constraints of our Constitution,” and noted that the United States had been able to arrest, try and jail the culprits in the first World Trade Center bombing.

    […]

    “And, you know, let’s take the example of Guantánamo,” Obama said in the interview. “What we know is that, in previous terrorist attacks — for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center — we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial.”

    To his credit John McCain’s camp hit back with his big guns (International Herald Tribune link);

    The McCain campaign asserted that Obama wanted to go back to treating terrorism as nothing more than a criminal matter, called him naïve and argued that the World Trade Center case was an example of how insufficient that was. “Once again we have seen that Senator Obama is a perfect manifestation of a Sept. 10 mindset,” Scheunemann said on the call.

    Former CIA director James Woolsey, who is advising the McCain campaign, said Mr Obama, 46, had ‘an extremely dangerous and extremely naive approach toward terrorism … and toward dealing with prisoners captured overseas who have been engaged in terrorist attacks against the United States’.

    Obama struck back by saying that there’s no proof that the Bush Doctrine has been successful. Well, other than the fact that we haven’t been attacked here or abroad. The proof that the Clinton method was a failure is the countless attacks on us and our assets abroad.

    Everything that reflects negatively on Obama is a distraction;

    Mr Obama responded sharply to yesterday’s comments from the McCain camp.

    ‘These are the same guys who helped to engineer the distraction of the war in Iraq at a time when we could have pinned down the people who actually committed 9/11,’ he told reporters on board his campaign plane.

    I guess all of those al Qeada lying in graves in Iraq are just a distraction, too. The best Obama camp could do is drag out Richard Clarke and John Kerry (Tahoe Daily Tribune);

    The Obama campaign countered with its own conference call in which Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Richard Clarke, a counterterrorism official in Republican and Democratic administrations, argued the McCain campaign was emulating Rove.

    “I’m a little disgusted by the attempts of some of my friends on the McCain campaign to use the same old, tired tactics … to drive a wedge between Americans for partisan advantage and to frankly frighten Americans,” Clarke said.

    Kerry accused McCain of “defending a policy that is indefensible” by siding with Bush’s policies, particularly with respect to the Iraq war.

    Obama said Republicans could be counted on to do “what they’ve done every election cycle, which is to use terrorism as club to make the American people afraid to win elections.” He said he didn’t think it would work this time.

    More of that “fear-mongering, chickenhawk” sloganeering. Since there’s been no attack, there won’t be one ever, as I wrote earlier today – it’s terribly naive and it’s raw political pandering. If Obama becomes president, you can count on criticism of Obama over the imminent terrorist attack to be called a distraction from his social policies. That should make the victims feel better.

  • Americans bored with terrorism?

    In the Washington Post’s Planet War discussion forum, Peter Feaver asks readers if we’re bored with terrorism;

     …the failure to find the large stockpiles of WMD in Iraq, and the discovery that Saddam Hussein was pursuing a complex bluffing game, and the various revisions in intelligence estimates about Iranian nuclear programs — all of these things have led some to argue that the United States, or more particularly the Bush Administration, has exaggerated the threat of WMD terrorism. Do you agree? I am not asking whether you agree with the policy responses of the Administration. Rather, I am asking whether you think the threat is more grave than, less grave than, or roughly as grave as the Administration has claimed?

    He gets the usual responses from the signature readers of the Washington Post; Bush lied, the planet died, etc…. More steeped in their own politics, the commenters would prefer to take cheap shots at the administration rather than take into account the countless terrorist attacks that were halted before they came to fruition. If you’d asked Americans about terrorism on September 10th, 2001, they’d have placed their worries somewhere behind the economy and tax cuts.

    So here we are closing in on seven years since the attack and there have been none on American soil, because the Bush Administration has made it too costly for terrorists to successfully prosecute their nefarious plans here or overseas. Instead they’ve targeted our allies, hoping to split us. Does that mean we won’t be attacked – no, certainly not. When you plug a hole in a dike, another leak springs, but the Bush Administration has done a yeoman’s job staying ahead of the leaks.

    And that’s their downfall – Americans have become complacent about the terrorist threat because there have been no attacks. Of course when it does happen again, it’ll be instantly blamed on the Bush Administration. But, did anyone truly believe we’d have gone seven years with no successful attacks on September 12th, 2001?

    I think it’s less boredom and more complacency, unfortunately, the only cure for that is another attack.