Settings
About Us
Categories
Search
Archives
Links
Miscellany
Seriously, it’s 2008 and we can’t stop pirates. Not “quit stealing my intellectual property” pirates - though we can’t stop them either - but “quit stealing my oil tanker, ya scurvy ridden sea mutts” pirates.
It’s bad enough that it’s 2008 and I do not have a flying car, but also the high seas are flooded with pirates. More Jetsons, less Mad Max, please.
Apollo posted this at 12:30 AM EST on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 as Global War on Terror, The Past Is Never Dead--It Isn't Even Past
OTIS, Ore. — An Oregon couple received a frightening phone call from their son in Afghanistan when he inadvertently called home during battle.
Stephen Phillips and other soldiers in his Army MP company were battling insurgents when his phone was pressed against his Humvee. It redialed and called his parents in the small Oregon town of Otis.
Sandie Petee, Phillips’ mother, and her husband, Jeff Petee, weren’t home at the time of the call. They returned home to find a three-minute voice mail on their answering machine.
“His friend died a year ago in Iraq and I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, this may be the last time I hear my son’s voice on the phone,’” Petee said.
They heard shooting, swearing and shouted pleas for more ammunition on the phone call from their son.
“They were pinned down and apparently his barrel was overheating,” said Jeff Petee. “It’s something a parent really doesn’t want to hear. It’s a heck of a message to get from your son in Afghanistan.”
The three-minute call ended abruptly.
“You could hear him saying stuff like, he needs more ammo, or he needs another barrel,” said John Petee, Phillips’ brother. “At the end, you could hear a guy saying ‘Incoming! RPG!’ And then it cut off.”
As soon as the voice mail stopped playing, the Petees began trying to reach their son in Afghanistan. The family figured out Petee had tried to call home earlier that day, but he didn’t leave a message and the phone later redialed during battle.
They eventually reached their son.
“I finally got a hold of him,” Sandie Petee said. “He was embarrassed, he said, ‘Don’t let Grandma hear it.’”
Stephen Phillips is scheduled to return home next month, when his tour is complete, his mother said.
H/T: Right-Thinking
Tom posted this at 12:38 PM EDT on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 as Global War on Terror
. . . Then don’t click on this link. It explains the Middle East in tribal rather than theological terms, and it ain’t pretty. The most cheerful thing you’ll read Stanley Kurtz’s article is this:
[I]n the absence of fundamental cultural change, the feud between the Muslim world and the West is unlikely ever to end. Tribal feuds simmer on and off for generations, with negotiated settlements effecting only temporary respites. Among the tribes of Waziristan, the saying goes: “I took my revenge early. I waited only 100 years.”
Kurtz wrote a review of Salzman’s Culture and Conflict in the Middle East worth pondering. It appears that Salzman gives an intellectual explanation for hair-trigger wars and feuds that makes Jack D. Ripper look like a care bear. I’d be interested to see Theodore Dalrymple’s comments on the matter, given how closely he’s observed the tribal and Islamic immigrants to France and Britain.
Long story short: there’s no good way around the Middle East’s chaos.
Hubbard posted this at 11:13 AM EDT on Saturday, April 5th, 2008 as Global War on Terror
Once again, constitutional scholar John Yoo is making headlines, thanks to his recently declassified memo. I think this is a good opportunity to take time to revisit a classic example of Yoo’s legal argumentation.
This is what it takes to get onto the faculty of the #6 law school in the country.
Geoff posted this at 6:02 PM EDT on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 as Conservatism, George Bush Sucks!, We don't need no stinkin' Constitution, Amer-I-Can!, Global War on Terror
Since Conor has graciously accused me of Orwellian tendencies, I feel obliged to respond.
My point in my reply was that I thought the 60 Minutes report was sloppy, and that as such, it would do little to persuade partisans of either side. For example, here’s a quote from one of the supporting documents in the matter:
THREAT ASSESSMENT
There is no information that KARNAZ received any military training or is associated with the Taliban or al-Qa’ida. Although he has denied being a memmber of the Jama’at al-Tabligh, his associates, travel, and religious studies contradict this denial. For these reasons, KARNAZ is believed to pose a [REDACTED] to the national security of the United States and its allies if released.
Despite a rather important redaction in this document, it is made quite clear that Karnaz has been caught lying to investigators. These are not the usual actions of an innocent man.
Consider the other memo CBS cites as its support. Go on, take a look, I’ll still be here. Huge chunks of it are redacted, which may well contain significant information regarding what level of threat he is and whether or not he should be released.
Again, I think it’s questionable reporting on CBS’s part to portray Karnaz as a complete innocent. Now, onto some of Conor’s statements:
And how chillingly Orwellian a statement — the guilty proclaim there innocence, therefore everyone arrested must be assumed guilty.
Not that everyone that’s arrested must be assumed guilty, but rather that we must be skeptical—particularly when pushing something as a news item. CBS presented the case heavily in Karnaz’s favor, which lined up rather neatly with the biases CBS has regrettably shown in its past. 60 Minutes has been less skeptical than it should have been in other matters, and I wonder if they were as skeptical as they should have been in this one. Unless they’re sitting on more documentation, I’m skeptical about them.
CBS appears to have found several people willing to leak documents to them from the pro-Karnaz members of the intelligence community, but none from the Karnaz skeptics. Since a few hundred people have been released some time before Karnaz, it’s not as though nobody ever leaves Gitmo. It looks as though CBS doesn’t know all the facts in the case, and it has presented what facts we do know to throw as much blame on America as possible.
When you’re saying that America would’ve be justified killing an unarmed civilian who has been declared innocent by our own FBI and intelligence agencies you’d damn well better revise your standard of what a justified killing is. Your statement is all the more horrifying given the way we got this man — that is, he was pulled off a bus by a Pakistani soldier apparently paid by the head to round up suspicious looking people.
Beyond that, I’ve seen no evidence that this man converted to “radical Islam” and I fail to see why his behavior is any more peculiar than any of the other religious pilgrims who travel to the Middle East every year.
And what is this nonsense about American mercy? In what way is it merciful to arrest an innocent man, to torture him and to hold him years beyond the point where even a very conservative arbiter could see that he presented no threat to American security?
Let’s walk back through several stolen bases.
1) As far as I can tell, he hasn’t been declared innocent; he has been declared “not a threat.” That’s a significant difference. In law, sometimes we come across matters where we are reasonably certain that someone is guilty but will have trouble proving so, nolle prosequi, the matter is dropped.
2) He joined a radical mosque—one with terrorist ties—and goes to the middle of a war zone for “theological studies.” He could easily have studied Sunni theology in Saudi Arabia or Shiite theology in Iran. Yet he chose Pakistan. Strong circumstantial evidence for being a convert to radical Islam.
3) “[N]onsense about American mercy?” He’s alive, released, and has a book contract. Would Russia or China have been so forgiving? For that matter, would France’s investigative magistrates? What about the British during the troubles? The only country that would have been so merciful to him is America.
4) When Karnaz was sent to American troops, he could easily have been classified as a soldier out of uniform, which would make him a spy and eligible for the firing squad. Execution would have been within the letter (if not the spirit) of the Geneva Convention. Yet we imprisoned him—quite probably for too long—then released him and allowed him to write a book. I don’t think there’s any “nonsense about American mercy,” as Conor so colorfully put it. But there’s plenty of overheated rhetoric about America’s flaws.
Hubbard posted this at 12:42 PM EDT on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 as Global War on Terror
Torture (n) tôr
ch
r: That which we do not do.
Rape (n) r
p: Any ill-intentioned action by a man that results in the sexual victimization of a woman.
Tom posted this at 7:21 AM EDT on Friday, March 14th, 2008 as Uncategorized, Politics and the English Language, Global War on Terror, Wicked Crazy Massachusetts