Iraq

Time now for another great episode of the Christian Crusader in "Huntin' Ragheads!":

To that end, Mr. Prince intentionally deployed to Iraq certain men who shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. Many of these men used call signs based on the Knights of the Templar, the warriors who fought the Crusades.

Mr. Prince operated his companies in a manner that encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life. For example, Mr. Prince's executives would openly speak about going over to Iraq to "lay Hajiis out on cardboard." Going to Iraq to shoot and kill Iraqis was viewed as a sport or game. Mr. Prince's employees openly and consistently used racist and derogatory terms for Iraqis and other Arabs, such as "ragheads" or "hajiis."

OK, what the hell am I talking about? That the founder of The-mercenary-army-formerly-known-as-Blackwater (now called "Xe") was more 'dirty' than you may have suspected. From The Nation:

Got an email from a friend this morning. It was short, almost despairing:

I agree with David Brooks. He makes sense. Is this some alternate reality I've fallen into and can't get up?

My friend was talking about this column from Brooks last week:

Cheney Lost to Bush

President Obama and Dick Cheney conspired on Thursday to propagate a myth. The myth is that we lived through an eight-year period of Bush-Cheney anti-terror policy and now we have entered a very different period called the Obama-Biden anti-terror policy. As both Obama and Cheney understand, this is a completely bogus distortion of history.

OK, perhaps President Bush has figured out the way to save various manufacturers:

Shoe Hurled at Bush Flies Off Turkish Maker’s Shelves

Dec. 19 (Bloomberg) -- The shoe hurled at President George W. Bush has sent sales soaring at the Turkish maker as orders pour in from Iraq, the U.S. and Iran.

The brown, thick-soled “Model 271” may soon be renamed “The Bush Shoe” or “Bye-Bye Bush,” Ramazan Baydan, who owns the Istanbul-based producer Baydan Ayakkabicilik San. & Tic., said in a telephone interview today.

“We’ve been selling these shoes for years but, thanks to Bush, orders are flying in like crazy,” he said. “We’ve even hired an agency to look at television advertising.”

***

Baydan has received orders for 300,000 pairs of the shoes since the attack, more than four times the number his company sold each year since the model was introduced in 1999. The company plans to employ 100 more staff to meet demand, he said.

Seems like the perfect solution.

Jim Downey

The problem with the current 'support the troops' mentality for me is that, simply enough, it works for every country and war no matter what the circumstances.

For Germans in 1940, it worked for the heroic defense of the fatherland from the French, where the troops, under civilian control, changed the enemy regime to a friendly ally, despite the efforts of insurgents and dead-enders like the terrorist Degaulle.

For Germans in 1914, it worked for the troops instituting the civilian policy of terrorization of occupied populations in order to secure rear areas from insurgents.

In 1956, it worked for the Red Army in restoring the lawful government of Hungary. And so on before and after.

It separates the moral consequences of participation from the actions participated in.

And if those examples seem out of line, remember this: they are MORE justified than the current conflicts they mirror because the bulk of troops in those examples were conscripts who had no choice at all, rather than well-paid volunteers and professional mercenaries, who participate willingly. (Albeit some less than others.)

The MRFF helps another atheist soldier file a suit against the Defense Department:

[link] Spc. Dustin Chalker, who has served in Korea and Iraq, is the second soldier at the northeast Kansas post to file such a lawsuit. The New Mexico-based Military Religious Freedom Foundation joined Chalker as a plaintiff in his lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Kansas City, Kan.

Here's the PDF of the "Complaint For Injunctive Relief".

I wonder how long it will be before he receives his first drunken death threat from his fellow "good Christian" soldiers?

We all know that this current war we’re in is complete bullshit. But that doesn’t stop some people from signing up anyway. This story from TBO.com details how a young man, unemployed and told to take food stamps, refused to do so and joined the Army. He then brought his orders to the apartment complex where he has lived for the past 4+ years. He attempted to break his lease with at 17 day notice. Ok, a little short, but worse case, he pays out the 30 days he’s required to and that’s it.

Truth is, it shouldn’t even get that far. Hell, they should have given him the rest of his time before basic training rent free. I’ve worked for these apartment communities. I did maintenance for a company that owned many properties in Florida for 4 years. While it wasn’t the best job I’ve ever had, I know that they would have never treated a resident this way.

This kid knows that by signing up for the Army he may be dead in a year. He did it anyway. And what thanks does he get? Hammered by a shitty apartment community over at best, about $400.

I know most of us don’t support this war or the worthless garbage that started it, but the least we can do is let the people who try and win do it with some honor. I hope that Camden Lakes never sees another resident walk into their offices. I hope the place is shut down by a building inspector who already served in Iraq and is outraged. I hope they never make another dime.

Camden Lakes is located in St. Petersburg FL. They are owned and operated by Camden Property Trust. I encourage anyone reading this to contact their corporate office using the following information:

Camden Properties Trust
Corporate Address:
3 Greenway Plaza, Suite 1300
Houston, Texas 77046
Phone: (713) 354-2500
(800) 9-CAMDEN

I intend to call them Monday and I will post the results of my call here.

Cross Posted from my blog, Common Sense

By UTI's own brilliant DarkSyde:

An Open Letter to the Media

* * *

But this diary isn't about Tim Russert, it's not about you; it's about some other people who you occasionally cover and for whom you may now feel an unwanted and yet inseparabale kinship. It's probably too early to say this, and yes, I apologize if anyone feels this is crass or inapproriate, but I'm going to say it anyway: The same intractable pain that has reached out cruelly and gripped you with despair is felt by every mother and father, brother and sister, and friend and spouse of every single soldier killed in Iraq. Those men and women died doing a job that paid peanuts, most of them at a young age. Despite whatever loyalty they may feel to their comrades in arms, odds are good that quite a few of them would have rather been somewhere else right up until the moment their bodies were ravaged by fire and red-hot lead. The gut punch, horrific beyond comprehension, is their departed died for a mistake or a campaign of intentional deception, take your pick.

Friends, this is what our war has brought:

Mother who defied the killers is gunned down

Five weeks ago Leila Hussein told The Observer the chilling story of how her husband had killed their 17-year-old daughter over her friendship with a British soldier in Basra. Now Leila, who had been in hiding, has been murdered - gunned down in cold blood. Afif Sarhan in Basra and Caroline Davies report on the final act of a brutal tragedy.

Leila Hussein lived her last few weeks in terror. Moving constantly from safe house to safe house, she dared to stay no longer than four days at each. It was the price she was forced to pay after denouncing and divorcing her husband - the man she witnessed suffocate, stamp on, then stab their young daughter Rand in a brutal 'honour' killing for which he has shown no remorse.

What he said:

And to finish:

Jim Downey

Our guys out in Iraq don't get the recognition they deserve. Placed in impossible situations, surrounded by a country in which half the population hates your infidel guts, and the other half expects you to do their fighting for them, with impossible goals set by pencil-pushing political fuckwads back in Washington - they still manage to pull it out of the fire and make progress.

Case in point. Our military units in Sadr City have been tasked with helping the Iraqi Army take the lead in the fight against the Iran-trained and equipped "Mahdi Army" Shiite militia. So, when the other shoe drops and the bullets start flying, do the Iraqis step up to the plate?

Well, some of them do. Others? Not so much. They "bravely ran away", leaving a ragged hole in the combined Iraqi/American line for the militia to exploit.

[link] Major Sattar calmly explained that he was leading the remainder of his 80-man company away from the fight. As if to underscore the point, a convoy of Iraqi vehicles piled high with furniture was parked in front of the American position.

Abandoning the stronghold, however, would allow the militias to move in again and seed the road with roadside bombs. Other Iraqi units had stood their ground through several long firefights, and Captain Veath was surprised that the major’s unit was leaving after holding off another militia attack.

“You went through a whole battle and are now removing yourself?” Captain Veath asked incredulously. “Are any of your men dead?”

Major Sattar acknowledged that his unit had several wounded but none killed. But he and other Iraqi soldiers insisted that they were poorly equipped to battle the militias. Iraqi forces, they said, were short of ammunition, had only a few armored vehicles and were up against militia fighters they said were equipped and trained by the Iranians.

“We are not afraid,” the major responded.

He also complained that he had no means to communicate directly with the American troops.

“That is an excuse, and you know it,” Captain Veath shot back. He argued that one of the major’s platoons was situated just 100 yards from some of the American Stryker vehicles and that the two sides had agreed that the Iraqis could send a runner over to the vehicles to ask for help if necessary.

The Iraqi commander returned to his convoy and Captain Veath followed, promising a Stryker escort if the Iraqi soldiers would only return to their positions.

Dozens of excited Iraqi soldiers began to join in the discussion. As tempers flared and voices rose, Sergeant Angulo ordered the company’s soldiers to stay close to Captain Veath.

The Iraqi convoy drove off, and the Americans began to scramble to find a new Iraqi unit to plug the gap.

Look, folks, I wish this damned thing never started. Thanks, President Bush. However, the cold hard facts are that we are in this thing up to our eyeballs. We need to figure out a way to disengage from this war without completely destroying the country of Iraq, leaving it to the tender mercies of the Iranian theocracy. The regular citizens there don't deserve that.

What a clusterfuck.

Ah, great - the military has a new techno gizmo to use in the Global War on Terror: a hand-held lie detector! From the article:

FORT JACKSON, S.C. - The Pentagon will issue hand-held lie detectors this month to U.S. Army soldiers in Afghanistan, pushing to the battlefront a century-old debate over the accuracy of the polygraph.

The Defense Department says the portable device isn't perfect, but is accurate enough to save American lives by screening local police officers, interpreters and allied forces for access to U.S. military bases, and by helping narrow the list of suspects after a roadside bombing. The device has already been tried in Iraq and is expected to be deployed there as well. “We're not promising perfection — we've been very careful in that,” said Donald Krapohl, special assistant to the director at the Defense Academy for Credibility Assessment, the midwife for the new device. “What we are promising is that, if it's properly used, it will improve over what they are currently doing.”

On Monday nights for the last couple of months I've been taking a beer brewing class. That part has been going well. This past Monday we had an interesting discussion about the United States policies surrounding torture. Out of 6 people I was the only one who flatly denounced the practice.

My reasons for denouncing the practice are mainly practical. If the United States uses torture or condones others using torture we can't be outraged when it's done to our citizens and military personnel. We also can't wholly rely on the information gained because the person being tortured will say anything you want them to in order to stop being tortured. You also have to wonder where the torture train stops...If it's OK to torture "terrorists" will it someday be OK to torture criminals? Will we be outraged if a possible criminal suspected of kidnapping is tortured in order to recover a missing child?

The responses I got in class weren't, in my opinion, morally sufficient. What I heard most was, "Well, 'they' are cutting the heads off of our soldiers". I don't follow the logic and if that logic were applied more widely a whole range of behaviors becomes possible based merely on the fact that other people are doing worse things.

What do you think?

A few days ago Jim wrote about Spec. Jeremy Hall, a soldier assigned to Fort Riley's 97th Military Police Battalion, who filed suit against Defense Secretary Robert Gates and a "Maj. Paul Welborne". Jeremy's suit claims that after he was given permission to hold a meeting of atheists, he was harassed by a Major, and by his fellow soldiers for being an atheist. The suit also claims that the Major threatened to block his re-enlistment for being an atheist. Lately Spec. Hall has been threatened in emails and blog posts from his fellow soldiers.

The Army replied that they could not locate anyone named "Major Paul Welborne".

Well, today the suit was amended to correct the spelling of the Major's name. It is "Major Freddy Welborn", and lawdy, lawdy, he's got a MySpace page. His "Interests" are:

The study of God's Word, Evangelism, Grandchildren and Family, and those Men called by God to Preach the Gospel.

Major Freddy describes himself like so:

MAJ Freddy & HIS Girl's Blurbs
About me:
Warrior for the Lord Jesus Christ. Currently serving w/3rd Inf Div Civil Military Operations (Governance) in Baghdad Iraq. Carla & I place all our Faith & Trust in our Savior the Lord Jesus - who provides eternal life to anyone that believes that he is the Son of God, that he was born of a virgin, lived as God in the flesh (as man) was crucified, died, and was buried then rose from the grave the third day, then acended to the right hand of the Father - True repentance (turning away from Sin to God) Being born again, Forgivness & Justification occure to the True Believer in Christ when Baptized w/God's Holy Spirit. He who has the Son has life, he who has not the Son of God has not life. Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. It is by GRACE that we are saved thru Faith - It's a free gift and can't be earned. I love the Lord Jesus more than words can express, and seeking to gain a stronger relationship w/Him. I'll finish Bible College upon returning from Opns Iraqi Freedom.

Farther down, we see this little gem of an image.

I think he's a little, um, confused about the whole "1st Amendment" thing.

Hang in there Specialist Jeremy Hall. Don't let the godbots get you down. Stay safe.

So, three weeks ago I wrote about the initial reports that the Air Force had managed to lose track of some of its nukes, and accidentally transported them across the country.

Well, the story just keeps getting better. From the Washington Post this past Sunday:

Three weeks after word of the incident leaked to the public, new details obtained by The Washington Post point to security failures at multiple levels in North Dakota and Louisiana, according to interviews with current and former U.S. officials briefed on the initial results of an Air Force investigation of the incident.

The warheads were attached to the plane in Minot without special guard for more than 15 hours, and they remained on the plane in Louisiana for nearly nine hours more before being discovered. In total, the warheads slipped from the Air Force's nuclear safety net for more than a day without anyone's knowledge.

So, Arecibo needs money. Not a lot of money. More than I have. But not a lot of money, as such things go.

Yes, the National Science Foundation has told the folks who run the Arecibo Observatory that they need to come up with outside funding to the tune of half their annual budget, or they will be shut down. How much is this? $4 million. From the news report:

But among astronomers, Arecibo is an icon of hard science. Its instruments have netted a decades-long string of discoveries about the structure and evolution of the universe. Its high-powered radar has mapped in exquisite detail the surfaces and interiors of neighboring planets.

And it is the only facility on the planet able to track asteroids with enough precision to tell which ones might plow into Earth -- a disaster that could cause as many as a billion deaths and that experts say is preventable with enough warning.

Newspapers are always happy to give column space to religious bigwigs to opine to their hearts' contents, and normally my eyes just skip past, knowing they will have nothing particularly fresh or insightful to say. But here's a column that's different. Written by a rabbi in ultra-blood-red born-again Idaho, it forcefully denounces the Bush misadministration's lies and acts of treachery that got us bogged down in the Iraquagmire. I was most impressed with the last sentence:

May we rise up together, as Christians and Moslems and Jews and other believers and atheists and agnostics, too, and demand that we, as a nation, support our troops in the only way that really matters — by bringing them home.

The full column is here, and well worth reading.

OK, you may have already heard about this. But if not, it is my pleasure to introduce yet another right-wing nut who is all for chucking out the Constitution, imposing martial law, and declaring George W. Bush to be President for Life because, see, it's all in the interests of Western Civilization.

And no, I'm not kidding. Here's a taste:

As there appears to be no sensible result of the invasion of Iraq that will be popular with his countrymen other than retreat, President Bush is reviled; he has become another victim of Democracy.

(This is a Blog Against Theocracy blogswarm post.)

There's a long article in today's Washington Post you should read, titled: A President Besieged and Isolated, Yet at Ease. It's an extensive survey of the current status of President Bush's mental condition as he suffers one downturn in popularity after another, staggers from one policy debacle after another, sees long-time aides and friends flee. It is insightful (though I do wonder at the lack of mention of Dick Cheney's role.)

But more than that, it is frightening. George W. Bush thinks that he's the Pope, or something akin to one. Confronted with a deteriorating situation on all fronts, due to his own bad decisions and the general ineptitude of his government, he nonetheless remains resolute in his convictions that he's doing God's work:

There's a surprisingly favorable review of Christopher Hitchens' new book God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything in today's Wall Street Journal Online. An excerpt:

Mr. Hitchens makes a passionate case against organized religion as well as theocratic, fundamentalist states. He writes that "religion is not unlike racism." "Literature is a better source of ethics and a better source of reflection than our holy texts," he says. "People should read George Eliot, Dostoyevsky and Proust for moral leadership."

A piece by Melik Kaylan titled "The Last Active Art Gallery in Baghdad" really hits home for me. I've mentioned before that I owned and operated a gallery of fine art for 8 years (for full info, see here), and something about some of the religious intolerance I had to deal with in that capacity.

But nothing like this:

Among the agonies imposed on Baghdad by tormentors in the guise of self-appointed religious enforcers is the proscription of fun. Novelty, convenience, any kind of post-Quranic ease from hardship infuriates them. Ice cream is an abomination, as is mechanized garbage collection, because such delights didn't exist in the time of the prophet. A story is told that last year, on a road overtaken by jihadis, a DVD purveyor was ordered to close because DVDs didn't exist in the time of the prophet. "Neither did the BMW you drove up in," he responded. "When you come back and tell me again on a camel, then I'll listen." They shot him some days later, for his insolence.