Diana West

Is the Department of Defense Lying to Us Again?

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 13:04:00 GMT

The Department of Defense official announcement:

The Department of Defense announced toda annouced the death of a the death of a Marine who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.

Lance Cpl. Edward J. Dycus, 22, of Greenville, Miss., died Feb. 1 while conducting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan. He was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.

This incident is under investigation.

The Jackson Clarion Ledger's report:

Mississippi's first casualty this year from the war in Afghanistan died at the hands of an Afghan soldier who was guarding a joint operating base with him in the Helmand province, officials said. ...

"He's not just another dead soldier," said childhood friend Kayla Bevill. "He wasn't killed by 'the enemy.' He was killed by someone that was supposed to be helping him guard, and that's what hurts the most."

Next most hurtful thing is the DoD's Big Lie machine in action. "Combat operations"?

The Battle over Boykin at West Point

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:11:00 GMT

Sally Quinn thinking Georgetown thoughts ...

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This week's syndicated column:

Even after all these years, journalist-socialite Sally Quinn still embodies a Washington way of thinking – a heart-of-Georgetown, A-list set of salon-tested assumptions “everyone” knows that provides attitudes for any occasion.

Take the surreal state of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. One day, William G. “Jerry” Boykin, a highly decorated retired Army general and ordained minister, and a founding member and leader of Delta Force, was scheduled to speak at a West Point prayer breakfast. The next day, following a campaign to stop Boykin’s appearance by what the New York Times describes as “liberal veterans’ groups, civil liberties advocates and Muslim organizations,” Boykin was not scheduled to speak at West Point. “In fulfilling its commitment to the community,” West Point announced, “the U.S. Military Academy will feature another speaker for the event.”

Quinn’s reaction? West Point didn’t go far enough. Fire whoever is responsible for inviting Boykin, she wrote in her online Washington Post column “On Faith,” because his criticism of Islam makes him “notorious.” Why, it’s nothing less than blasphemy, as everyone who is anyone would agree – and who else is there?

No one, at least not at West Point. You can bet your last bullet the replacement speaker will not have identified, studied and himself experienced jihad – in military terms, the enemy threat doctrine – as Lt. Gen. Boykin has. This makes Boykin’s abrupt cancellation an information-war victory for the Muslim Brotherhood something few in Washington or West Point will even notice.

Muslim Brotherhood? Isn’t that in Egypt? How does the Muslim Brotherhood figure into a story about West Point?

Prominent in the stop-Boykin coalition is the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), known mainly for sound bite-ready spokesmen who present an Islamic point of view on TV. More important is CAIR’s place in the Muslim Brotherhood constellation of front groups as an entity founded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian franchise, the jihad terror group Hamas.

This revelation emerged during the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terror-financing trial in a document authored by the Muslim Brotherhood itself. It attests to the presence in the United States of multiple Muslim Brotherhood front groups, including CAIR, which remains an unindicted co-conspirator in that case. The FBI cut off official contacts with CAIR in 2008.

Such information is documented in “Shariah: The Threat to America,” a book Boykin and I and 17 others, including former CIA director James Woolsey and former Reagan Pentagon official Frank Gaffney, co-authored in 2010. I wouldn’t be surprised if the book played some animating role in the Battle over Boykin at West Point, won by CAIR and celebrated in all the best bastions impregnable to fact.

That includes Quinn’s Washington Post column. Not only should Boykin’s West Point sponsor be fired, she writes, “that person should … say ‘I’m sorry.’”

If Georgetown were a revival tent, a chorus of “Amen, sister” would rise over N Street. But no. Indeed, some animus toward Boykin may form in reaction to the evangelical brand of Christianity he expresses on faith and war in churches across the country. Back in 2003, following the publication of snippets of these talks, the Pentagon investigated Boykin’s invocations of “Satan” as the enemy, and his attesting to his faith in the Christian “real God” over his enemy’s “idol.” In Georgetown, this counts as full-blown culture clash – enough to deflate the bubbles in the sparkling Vouvray.

“He has said that ‘there is no greater threat to America than Islam,’” Quinn continues, building her case. Luckily, she isn’t arguing in a Shariah-run courtroom, because her testimony would then be worth half of a man’s – one reason for Boykin’s concerns about Islam’s impact.

Then Quinn quotes “Shariah: The Threat to America”: “And in a study he co-authored, (he said) ‘most mosques in the United States already have been radicalized, that most Muslim social organizations are fronts for jihadists.’ How could this happen?” She means the West Point invitation, natch.

Quinn is quoting a description of the book by others, but never mind. What’s extremely interesting here is that she isn’t contesting the veracity of these documented claims. Conventional Washington-to-West Point wisdom is conditioned to see them as so absurd as to be beneath consideration. Doesn’t everybody? Ridiculous. Stoo-pid. Just typing them out – regardless of their accuracy – elicits guffaws of programmed outrage.

I would say the Muslim Brothers have done their public-relations job well, but frankly, this information operation was over before it began.

General Boykin and the War for Muslim Outreach Redux

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:56:00 GMT

Eight years and three months ago, I wrote a column inspired by the furor over statements by General William Boykin attesting to the religious dimension of the so-called war on terror. The thought that there might be a religious dimension to Islamic terrorism is, absurdly and disastrously, the Big No-No-No of our age (as noted once or twice in my body of work). That a devout Christian might appreciate the religious dimension of Islamic terrorism and express it in Christian terms is similarly verboten. And if he dare express it in the uniform of the country that expunges this key piece of the strategic puzzle, doctrinally, historically culturally, in its official war- and policy-making capacities,. "furor" breaks out.

Back then, I decided to imagine how future historians might explain this early controversy in the "war on terror."

"The 'war on terror,' later rechristened -- sorry, renamed -- the 'war for Muslim outreach,' began on Sept. 16, 2001, the day President George W. Bush carelessly spoke of a 'crusade.' His remark was heard neither as an echo of Dwight D. Eisenhower's World War II book 'Crusade in Europe,' nor as a sober pledge to avenge thousands of American dead still smoldering at Ground Zero -- victims, as Muslims on the outer reaches would reveal, of a joint CIA-Mossad plot. Instead, the word 'crusade' was perceived as a calculated insult to all of Islam still stewing over Holy Land incursions by Really Old Europe a millennium earlier.

"Early victories in the war for Muslim outreach were small but significant, such as forcing a new name onto 'Operation Infinite Justice,' the distinctly dis-lamic moniker for the war in Afghanistan. This was necessary, of course, since it is Allah who dispenses infinite justice, not the United States military. It wasn't long before 'Islam is love' was the word from the president, and post-Sept. 16 outreach included annual Ramadan suppers at the White House. ...

"Then along came Gen. Boykin. In every war, there are generals who want to fight an earlier war. This was true of Gen. Boykin. He wanted to fight the war of Sept. 11, the attack that is now, of course, but a tiny footnote to Sept. 16th, Death to Crusades Day, the first new national holiday since Martin Luther King Day.

"Gen. Boykin saw in the emergence of Muslim terror networks a resumption of the old wars of Islamic expansion against the Judeo-Christian West. And he saw fit to explain his vision in stark religious terms when he spoke in American Christian churches. Islamic terrorists hate the United States, he said in June 2003, 'because we're a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian. And the enemy is a guy named Satan.' When such statements became public through the now-defunct Los Angeles Times, all hell, pardon the expression, broke loose, spreading a plague of damning liberal editorials, columns and statements.

"General Boykin, the New York Times editorialized in calling for his head, 'should not be ... providing ammunition for those who portray the war against terror as a war against Islam.' (Note the implicit denial of the specifically Islamic character of the terrorism aimed at the non-Islamic West -- a semantic victory dating back to early outreach.) Fareed Zakaria, a Washington columnist of the day, suggested Gen. Boykin be fired simply to assuage Arab/Islamic suspicions of the United States. Others compared the American officer's biblical perspective with that of holy war-mongering Osama bin Laden.

"But it was the president himself who may have tipped the balance when he rejected even the basis of the three-star general's worldview -- that the war on terrorism had its undeniable religious dimension in being a response to Islamic jihad on the West, a civilization with Judeo-Christian roots.

"Some say that was the point at which outreach trumped terrorism as the war's priority. Once Gen. Boykin was history it was just a matter of time before Hamas had its AWACS, and jailed Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr was installed as supreme ayatollah of the United Nations Mandate of Iraq. Soon, the [battle] for high U.S. poll numbers throughout Muslim culture -- was ours."

In retrospect, of course, I realize outreach trumped terrorism from Day 1. General Boykin survived the squall, retiring from the military in 2007. (Full disclosure: he and I and 17 others are co-authors of the Team B II report, Shariah: The Threat to America.) Hamas doesn't have its AWACS yet, although it does has the public relations equivalent in the prominence of Hamas-linked CAIR as a public voice in the US (as seen below). Sadr is a major power in Iraq, where the UN is nowhere to be seen. But the squall -- the war for Muslim outreach -- continues to intensify.

After accepting an invitation to speak at West Point's National Prayer Breakfast on February 8, General Boykin has withdrawn from the event following what the New York Times calls "a growing list of liberal veterans’ groups, civil liberties advocates and Muslim organizations called on the Military Academy to rescind the invitation." West Point issued a statement saying, “In fulfilling its commitment to the community, the United States Military Academy will feature another speaker for the event.”

No doubt "another speaker" pre-approved by the liberal veterans' groups, civil liberties advocates and Muslim organizations.

The Times story continues (links from the original):

General Boykin, a longtime commander of Special Operations forces, first caused controversy after the Sept. 11 attacks when, as a senior Pentagon official, he described the fight against terrorism as a Christian battle against Satan. His remarks, made in numerous speeches to church groups, were publicly repudiated by President George W. Bush, who argued that America’s war was not with Islam but with violent fanatics.

...who just happened to be weaponizing mainstream, specifically Islamic teachings regarding the requirement to make war (jihad) on the infidel.

Since his retirement in 2007 and a new career as a popular conservative Christian speaker, General Boykin has described Islam as “a totalitarian way of life” and said that Islam should not be protected under the First Amendment.

I am not familiar with General Boykin's arguments regarding First Amendment protection and Islam. The short quotation attributed to him on this subject states Islam "is not just a religion, it is a totalitarian way of life," and thus not eligible for such protection. Given the "doubly totalitarian" aspects of Islam (global and personal controls) as codified, for example, in Islamic law (sharia), this point is surely debatable -- or would be in a country not already under Islamic strictures against free inquiry into Islam. But no. Boykin's opinion about a legitimate topic of discussion is cause for ejecting him from West Point. The effect is to marginalize further the quest for open debate about Islam and its threat to liberty -- and to marginalize further those who seek it.

Last week, after learning that General Boykin would be speaking at the prayer breakfast, a liberal veterans’ group, VoteVets.org, demanded that the invitation be revoked. In a letter to West Point’s superintendent, the group said General Boykin’s “incendiary rhetoric regarding Islam” was “incompatible with Army values” and would “put our troops in danger.”

Lt. Col. Sherri Reed, West Point’s director of public affairs, defended the invitation on Friday, saying that “cadets are purposefully exposed to different perspectives” and that the breakfast “will be pluralistic with Christians, Jewish and Muslim cadets participating.”

Seeking safety in pluralism. United We Stand?

Hah.

But by Monday, several other groups had condemned the invitation and concern was also reportedly being voiced by some faculty members and cadets. The Forum on the Military Chaplaincy (a liberal group of retired military chaplains), the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and the Council on American-Islamic Relations made public appeals to the Pentagon to cancel General Boykin’s appearance.

That was quick.

FYI, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is an unindicted co-conspirator in the landmark Holy Land terror financing trial in which evidence was introduced defining CAIR as a Muslim Brotherhood front organization.

A fourth-year cadet at West Point, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he feared reprisals for breaking military discipline, said in a telephone interview before the cancellation was announced that “people are definitely talking about it here.”

He feared reprisals? For what -- mopping-up operations in the war for Muslim Outreach?

“They’re inviting someone who’s openly criticizing a religion that is practiced on campus,” he said. “I know Muslim cadets here, and they are great, outstanding citizens, and this ex-general is saying they shouldn’t enjoy the same rights.”

Not to speak for the general, but the problem on campus begins when Islam's supremacist, anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, anti-female teachings are obscured and denied to a point of non-deniable parity with other religions.

The cadet asked, “Are we supposed to take leadership qualities and experience from this guy, to follow in his footsteps?”

A similar controversy erupted last week, in the days before General Boykin spoke at the mayor’s annual prayer breakfast in Ocean City, Md. The general made no inflammatory statements about Islam, instead describing how prayer had helped him through dangerous military operations.

But Peter Montgomery, a senior fellow at People for the American Way, a liberal advocacy group, said the West Point invitation was a mistake. West Point, Mr. Montgomery said, would have given “a platform to someone who is publicly identified with offensive comments about Muslims and about the commander in chief.”

Poof. Open criticism of a demonstrably aggressive and liberty-hostile religio-politico movement is reduced to "offensive comments about Muslims" and thus forbidden. And, by the way. never, ever criticize "the commander in chief." Our comissars -- CAIR, PAW, VoteVets.Org and the rest of the Islamo-Socialist Left --won't permit it.

Afghan Lawmaker to France: Quit Your Bellyaching

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 17:42:00 GMT

France has decided to pull out of Afghanistan in 2013, only one year early, following the recent killings of six French troops at the hands of their (and our) wonderful uniformed Afghan allies.

The decision hasn't gone over too well with Afghan MP Tahira Mujadedi, who argues that Afghan forces are not (all together now) ready to go it alone. As for those recently murdered sons of France, Miz Mujadedi isn't exactly overflowing with condolences or mea culpas (does that even translate into Dari or Pashto?)

"When military forces are present in a war zone, anything can happen," she said. The French troops "are not here for a holiday," she added.

Sacrebleu.

Ayaan and "Lady al Qaeda": Mirroring Moral Equivalence

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:26:00 GMT

This week's syndicated column:

No doubt Deborah Scroggins believes she just published a dual biography of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, former Dutch parliamentarian, and Aafia Siddiqui, jailed al-Qaida terrorist, and so she did. What may surprise the biographer, however, is that she also provided a third study: post-9/11 moral equivalence.

This begins with Scroggins’ outre decision to pair a peaceable writer and politician with a violent al-Qaida scientist who married Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s nephew and co-plotter after 9/11 as the “Wanted Women” of the book’s title (Wanted Women: Faith, Lies and the War on Terror: The Lives of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Aafia Siddiqui).

Wanted by whom? Hirsi Ali is wanted for violating Islamic law against apostasy (leaving Islam is a capital offense) and criticizing Muhammad, Islam’s prophet (ditto). Siddiqui was wanted by the FBI as an accomplice of al-Qaida, an operational arm of Islamic law. How to knit the two together? Scroggins writes: “Like the bikini and the burka or the virgin and the whore, you couldn’t understand one without understanding the other.”

It’s difficult not to read this as a smear of Hirsi Ali, no less visceral for its flippancy. But it’s more than a noxious personal barb. Scroggins’ binary vision offers a new look at an old kink: moral equivalence among the intellectuals via perverse yin-yang fantasy.

A little housekeeping: No, I don’t know Ayaan Hirsi Ali. And yes, I read where Scroggins writes, “That is not to say they (Hirsi Ali and Siddiqui) are equivalent figures, morally or otherwise.” But this line appears on the last page of the book, after Scroggins has made the case that Hirsi Ali’s past political fight against Islam in Europe (highlighted as her fight for Muslim women’s rights) was somehow a self-aggrandizing version of jihad, of “tribal principle” – even, most reprehensibly, of terror-triggering extremism. Meanwhile, Siddiqui’s life of jihad-obsession unspools in alternating chapters.

The cumulative effect is an effort to even the score with Hirsi Ali. As the debate over Islam and Islamic terror erupted in Holland, Scroggins writes: “Some Dutch spoke of ‘the Ayaan effect,’ a spirit of fear and rancor that seemed to have bewitched the country.” Get it? It’s not the jihad, stupid, it’s “the Ayaan effect.”

By bizarre contrast, Scroggins regards Siddiqui’s jihad with empathy-nurturing neutrality. The result isn’t so much “Islam, the West, what’s the difference?” – the trope of moral equivalence during the U.S.-USSR Cold War. It’s more: Islam, the West, who is responsible for the violence? Who is reacting to whom? Who is putting on the burka to fend off the bikini? What virgin wouldn’t hate a whore? One more time, it’s all our fault.

Or, in this case, Hirsi Ali’s fault.

Her offense? Hirsi Ali failed to submit to the never-never cant that “moderation” is a hallmark of Islam (no sacred Islamic texts support it), while she publicly flayed its teachings of conquest and supremacism. Scroggins invokes supposed Islamic reformers – including Mahmoud Mohammed Taha and Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto (one of three heads of state to recognize the Taliban), whose rhetoric reflects anything but moderation – to try to portray Hirsi Ali as “simplistic.”

But it was Hirsi Ali’s failure to kneel in appeasement of Islam, even in her early days of quasi-media-darlinghood, that bothers Scroggins to no end – far more, it seems, than anything Siddiqui ever did, up to and including WMD-tinkering on al-Qaida’s behalf.

Scroggins reports disinterest – outrage, too – from Islamic women in the Netherlands regarding Hirsi Ali’s erstwhile efforts to emancipate them from Islam’s law. Such attitudes reveal unplumbed depths in the chasm between Islamic and Western cultures. In this signal example, Islamic women in a Western country see themselves as Shariah-compliant Muslims, not repressed women yearning for Western liberty. To Scroggins, long interested in “the treatment of women in Islam,” this almost seems personally liberating. She used to think “the control of women was as fundamental to radical Islam as racism was to the old American South or anti-Semitism was to Nazi Germany,” she writes. She still does. “But” – and here’s where we perhaps approach an evolving mainstream consensus on Shariah and other Islamiana – “I also learned that Westerners who want to keep the Muslim world under Western rule also have used Islamic attitudes toward women not so much to help free Muslim women as to justify the West’s continued domination of Muslim men.”

Huh? Women-centric worldview aside, I think what Scroggins is saying is that honesty about Islam is the New Western Imperialism. No wonder Ayaan Hirsi Ali became Public Enemy No. 1.

Beastweek vs. Wilders: No Contest

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:49:00 GMT

Beastweek decided to take a swipe at Geert Wilders this month -- no particular reason, just because he's still there. It's a singularly empty piece, a selection of complaints by Christopher Dickey rattling around, anchored by an almost comically validating chorus.

Example:

There’s no such thing as moderate Islam, Wilders insists, and he’s tired of hearing that radical Islam is something different from the mainstream faith.

BTW, Beastweek, Turkey's Erdogun goes ballistic at the very notion of "moderate Islam." The Turkish PM doesn't like assimilation, either -- calling it "a crime against humanity." But never mind. You're perfect the way you are. Don't ever change.

Beastweek:

It means nothing to him that among Muslim believers there are many different sects and currents.

Chorus:

“He makes no distinctions whatsoever,” says Robert Leiken, author of the just-published study Europe’s Angry Muslims. “He wants to throw out the whole Quran because of some things that are objectionable—but you could say the same thing about the Book of Joshua.”

Robert Leiken, an old friend of mine, is the man who brought us all "The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood," which is kind of like the Edsel, or even the Titanic, for intellectuals. "Abrogation" doesn't seem to have entered the syllabus yet.

Back to Newsbeast:

Wilders refuses to concede the point. ...

Frankly, it's not Geert's point to concede. No sacred text of Islam supports "moderate Islam."

Newsbeast:

You start to wonder if Wilders really believes what he says or if he’s just staked out a position that suits him politically. The fight against Islam, he once told a protégé, is “our core business”—and Wilders has developed it for all it’s worth. His extremist stance often smells of cynicism and self-indulgence.

Here we go, ad hominem invective substituting for brain activity.

Cue up chorus:

“His weakness is that he plays the renegade, he still wants to position himself as being outside the establishment,” says Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an author and former Dutch parliamentarian whose critiques of Islam have been ferocious in their own right.

Hirsi Ali?

“Once upon a time it was necessary for him to distinguish himself by saying, ‘I take a stand, and I am a man of clarity.’”

I guess taking stands and clarity are out of fashion. Funny, I just wrote this week's column dissecting a very, very similar book-length attack on Hirsi Ali's seemingly former self.

Newsbeast continues.

That was then. These days the country’s ruling coalition stands or falls at Wilders’s discretion. And his antipathy toward Islam goes so far that when Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands wore a headscarf during a royal visit to the Gulf monarchies last week, Wilders complained that the Dutch government should have stopped her.

It's opposition to dhimmitude -- about which Newsbeast has zero clue.

“He has to move to the middle,” urges Hirsi Ali. “He has to distinguish between violent Islamists and nonviolent Muslims. You know, there are so many shades of Muslims right now, and he could use some of them as his allies.”

Newsbeast:

But it’s as if the rhetoric has taken control of the speaker.

Chorus:

“He has always loved attention and power,” says his largely estranged brother, Paul Wilders. “He has ruled out any sense of doubt.”

Blah, blah, and so it goes. To what end? I think the answer lies in the subtitle: "Can't Someone Tell Geert Wilders to Stop His Anti-Muslim Diatribes Before Someone Gets Hurt?" Speaking out about Islam, its laws, its history, its culture, is the cardinal sin of our age. It must be demonized as "diatribes." Wilders must be slandered as cynical and self-indulgent -- just as Hirsi Ali is, by the way, in the book I mentioned above (Wanted Women). The truth must be rendered as toxic as the truth-tellers.

To that end, the acolytes of Islamic appeasement blame discourse, debate, analysis, cartoons for causing people to get hurt, putting the acolytes (dhimmi) in compliance with Islamic law. Whether it's Pope Benedict at Regensberg or Pastor Jones in the Florida scrub, the acolytes live to make them all, pope, pastor, politician, shut up -- again, in compliance with Islamic law. Most of the time they succeed. Even Hirsi Ali seems to have "evolved," certainly since she made the statements and stands cited in Wanted Women, which I discuss in this week's upcoming column as a treatise in post 9/11 moral equivalence.

But I don't think any of them can touch Wilders. Beastweek swipes in vain.

Kajaki: COIN Central

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:08:00 GMT

Soccer in Kajaki Sofla

Click "read more" to see DoD video from Kajaki Sofla bazaar, November 2011. Don't miss the motorcycles whizzing by, a chilling prefiguring of last week's suicide bomb attack.

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Military censorship only goes so far. Now we know, contrary to official reports, at least two US Marines were hit by the bomb driven into the Kajaki Sofla bazaar by a suicide-bomber on a motorcycle on January 18, 2012. Corporal Phillip McGeath, 25, was killed; Corporal Christopher Bordoni, 21, was critically wounded.

Why the official silence? And why the frustration, almost palpable in the public affairs office emails yesterday, over reports that break the silence?

Maybe it's because Kajaki is supposed to be, has been reported as a shining COIN success story. On January 12, 2012, for example, six days before the suicide bomb in the bazaar, the US government spelled it all out in a story headlined: "Soccer field, symbol of hope to Kajaki Sofla children":

Operation Eastern Storm began in October, when the men of 1st Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment conducted a large-scale, helicopter-borne insertion aimed at routing insurgents from the valley.

The Marine casualties in the bazaar attack were from the 1st Battalion, 6th Regiment.

The happy talk continues:

Now, 3 months after the outset of the operation, the children of this small oasis, tucked between the mountains, can be seen playing soccer on a sparse patch of dirt, within Patrol Base Pennsylvania, the headquarters, for Company B., 1/6. ... Marines and members of the Afghan National Civil Order Police stand by to coach and referee, while village elders rest on the rocks or piles of sand constituting sidelines

COIN heaven, in other words. Never mind an Afghan National Army member shot and killed a US Army private playing volleyball elsewhere in Afghanistan on January 8. Kajaki Sofla was the real COIN deal.

The story continues:

Felber Field, where the daily soccer games are held, was named after Lance Cpl. Brian Felber, who was critically wounded in an IED strike shortly after the company arrived in Kajaki, explained Capt. Paul Tremblay, company commander, Company B.

The piece goes on to detail the COIN thinking that went into what the Marines saw as an effort "to build rapport and keep the positive momentum they had gained" -- setting up "Felber Field."

“We sat down and thought about what we did as kids. What were some of the most memorable things we did as children that we can do to continue the momentum for the children and hopefully, inspire the parents, said Tremblay.

Hmm. Let's see. Did you memorize the Koran? Become a child bride of an old married man?

“What’s most important to the average [person here] is perception. The kids, they’ve seen soccer on the TV in Pakistan; it’s a national past time. So for them to get excited about coming to play soccer, by default it makes their fathers and elders in the villages take ownership of their own security.”

It makes them take ownership? Captain, you can't make someone "take ownership of their own security," whatever that means, and particularly not through what sounds like the syrupy plot of a feel-good summer movie. They either want "their own security," or they don't.

As the influence of the insurgency steadily waned; soccer balls, books, coloring pencils and a host of other recreational items began to appear in the bazaar. Every afternoon, children could be seen in their family’s fields playing catch, while Marines patrolled past

Kajaki became COIN Nirvana, or Mecca, as the case may be.

“It’s a very regimented life for the kids,” explained 1st Lt. Dennis Graziosi, 2nd Platoon commander from Altoona, Pa. “When the Taliban came in here, they stopped the school, sports activities, all of that. It’s just amazing to go from Taliban kicking all that out, regimenting their life, to seeing it crop back up. Their patrolling effort has allowed the kids future to get a lot better, to establish a brighter future for the children here.”

Beyond generating goodwill among the local citizenry, the ability to host an event like this within their company position, with approximately 50 children in attendance serves as a marker for how security has increased in the unit’s area of operations. ...

It's pure COIN, by the book.

Then, disaster struck -- a suicide bomber attacks a crowd including Marines.

Now what does Felber Field, named for a Marine who died in an IED blast way back when things were bad, signify if Marines are still dying in the bazaar of "hearts and minds"?

To me, of course, it signifies the COIN strategy to win (buy) hearts and minds is still fundamentally flawed. The bazaar, the soccer field, even after successful combat operations, remains a dangerous battleground.

So don't mention American casualties in the bazaar. Maybe no one will notice the cracks in COIN: Is that the military's thinking?

Meanwhile, The Tompkins County Trust Company has set up a fund to collect donations to support Christopher Bordoni and his wife Jessica.

Donations can be mailed to:

Tompkins Trust Company
c/o USMC CPL. Christopher D. Bordoni Fund
Attention: Scott Albanese
P.O. Box 460
Ithaca, NY 14851

Camp Leatherneck Reaches Out

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:09:00 GMT

The Kajaki Sofla "bazaar"

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From the emailbag this a.m.:

Ms. Diana West,

My name is LT Joe Nawrocki. I am a Public Affairs Officer in Regional Command Southwest, at Camp Leatherneck, Afghanistan.

I just read your article titled, “Uncle Sam Hides the Truth about Kajaki” and wanted to ask whom did you try to contact at Camp Leatherneck? We never received any word that you were trying to contact us, so I apologize for that.

If you have any further questions, please send them my way and I will do my best to answer.

R,
LT Nawrocki

LT Joseph M. Nawrocki (USN)

Regional Command Southwest Public Affairs
Camp Leatherneck, Afghanistan

So thoughtful! So polite! And, more interesting, no beef with my facts as written. I replied:

Dear Lt Nawrocki,

How nice of your to "reach out."

No, I am simply trying to make sense of the news as it released by the
military authorities and reported, as all Americans must do.

But now that I have you on the line, am I correct to have deduced that
Cpl. McGeath was killed in the suicide blast at Kajaki and, if so, why
wasn't that fact included in the official report that he "died in
support of combat operations"?

Were there any other NATO forces killed
or wounded in the blast?

Also, was the Afghan official quoted by the AP correct to say that NATO
forces "were also working at the construction site"? What does that
mean?

Best wishes,
Diana West

His response:

So what you are saying then is you never tried to attempt to contact
anyone in RC(SW) and your article is all opinion, based on military
authorities and what is available in open source media? Is that
correct?
R,
LT

My post couldn't be clearer about what sources are under discussion. But say, wait a minute: Who's interviewing whom?

I replied:

Is that your answer to my questions, Lt.?

(If you have any further questions, please send them my way and I will
do my best to answer...)

He wrote:

The investigating authority would be the best resource to answer the question about Cpl McGeath, our office did not conduct the investigation. Therefore it would be inappropriate to comment as to why something was or was not placed in an official report, because I would just be guessing. I can tell you that we take EVERY investigation we conduct very seriously, especially those that deal with the death of a service member. Our men and women in uniform are our greatest assets and we owe it to them to ascertain every detail of the events that transpired up to their sacrifice. Our thoughts and prayers goes out to the families of Cpl McGeath as they deal with this tragedy.

Then he restated one of my questions:

Question: Was the Afghan official quoted by the AP correct to say that NATO forces "were also working at the construction site"? What does that mean?

His answer:

I am sure the official was correct in his statement. We have many projects that are being worked at the same time, and have multiple agencies that are involved in these projects. There are USMC Engineering Battalions, USAID, and the State Department, all working very hard to provide a better future for the people of Afghanistan. We have civilian experts that assist us, and we work on many projects with our Afghan counterparts. Only by working together can we accomplish our mission and improve the lives of Afghan civilians.

Hopefully I have been able to provide some clarity to your questions. Thank you very much for contacting RC(SW). I was happy to provide you with the answers to your questions.

LT Nawrocki

LT Joseph M. Nawrocki (USN)

Regional Command Southwest Public Affairs
Camp Leatherneck, Afghanistan

Well, that was unenlightening. I wonder why the PA office bothered?

I will note, sadly, that local media in Ithaca, New York have reported today that Marine Cpl. Christopher Bordoni, 21, was critically injured in the January 18 suicide attack on the Kajaki bazaar, which also took the life of Marine Cpl. Phillip McGeath, 25. Today's update on Kajaki posted at the RC (SW) website, however, still omits mention of any American casualties. I can't claim to know why.

C-SPAN "Q & A" Follow-Up

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:55:00 GMT

I've received kind feedback on last night's interview with Brian Lamb on CSPAN, as well as some questions related to a couple of items covered in the show.

The book I consider more instructive to non-Muslims than the Koran regarding the exercise of Islam on society is the Sunni sharia book Reliance of the Traveller.

Peter Braestrup's magnus opus on the widespread misreporting of the Tet Offensive is called The Big Story. Sadly, it is long out of print, but fairly inexpensive used copies are available here.

My thoughts on Walter Cronkite are here.

The New "Twinkie Defense"

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:21:00 GMT

Flash:

KABUL: An Afghan soldier who shot dead four French troops says he did it because of a recent video showing US Marines urinating on the dead bodies of Taliban insurgents, security sources say.

The attack on the soldiers, who were unarmed, happened last week at a base in eastern Afghanistan and left 15 other French troops wounded, eight of them seriously.

Cause and effect? Case closed? NATO, ISAF, the White House, and, probably, France's Sarkozy (above) wish.

What a relief it would be to pin the murders of four French troops and the additional wounding of 15 (all unarmed) onto a video of four Marines urinating on the bodies of dead Taliban. The solution to the "problem" -- the epidemic of Afghan Muslim security forces murdering Western infidel troops and contractors -- then becomes so simple: more cultural sensitivity training. More submission to Islam's law.

( See this, this and this.)

Maybe the Marines should bring back to Afghanistan Shafiq Mubarak, the Afghan Muslim contractor currently advising pre-deployment Marines on official Islamic urination law here in the States. While serving as "cultural advisor" to Marines in Afghanistan last summer, Mubarak was singled out for praise to General Petraeus himself, hailed by Marine Colonel David Furness as "my right hand ... I can't do anything without him. Mr. Shafiq directly assists in direct engagements with Afghan leaders and political decision makers. He has been instrumental in the pursuit of the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, the winning of hearts and minds."

If there's one thing the slaughter of over 50 Western troops and contractors by their Afghan counterparts inside the wire tells our leaders, it's this: "We need more `hearts and minds' strategy. We need to make an example of those Marines whose urination video caused the Afghan Army soldier (unclaimed by the Taliban to date) to gun down 19 unarmed French troops, killing four."

This would be ridiculous if there weren't so much blood involved -- which is why this mindset is so dangerous. It is the same mindset that blames the burning of a copy of the Koran -- even the suggestion that a Koran will be burned -- for indiscrininate murder and mayhem; that blames a cartoon, a political speech, a papal sermon, a novel, a movie, a teddy bear named Mohammed for Muslim acts of bloodletting in the name of Islam. According to this line of thought, stopping or preventing the violence becomes an exercise in submission to Islamic law prohibiting ridicule, dissent, or debate. It is the thinking of dhimmitude.

Meanwhile, is it at all odd that the ANA murderer (to date not claimed by Taliban) regarded a non-lethal act of disrespect toward enemy soldiers he has himself presumably been trained to kill as cause to slaughter his own "allies," trainers and benefactors?

No.

I'll Be on "Q & A" with Brian Lamb ...

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 15:03:00 GMT

... on C-SPAN on Sunday, January 22, 8pm and 11pm (after which the interview is available online).

It is a one-hour conversation, the subjects of Brian Lamb's choosing from a stack of my columns going back some years. I could see the yellow highlighting on the page from where I was sitting, which was, of course, quite flattering but also rather intimidating: as in, Whatever did I write next?!

Uncle Sam Hides the Truth about Kajaki?

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 11:25:00 GMT

AP photo and caption: "An Afghan man stands at the scene of Wednesday's suicide attack in Kajaki, Helmand province south of Kabul, Afghanistan, Thursday, Jan. 19, 2012. The suicide bomber blew himself up at a bridge under construction in Kajaki district of Helmand province, according to Mohammad Ismail, the deputy of the Afghan security forces coordination office in the area. Ismail said NATO troops also were working at the construction site, but it was unclear whether any were injured or killed."

Unclear?

Fortunately, my friend the Marine Mom is keeping a close eye on news out of Afghanistan. This week, holes in the news the military is releasing -- as she flagged, for example, in this AP report below on the week's terrible casualties -- seem bigger than usual, seemingly reflecting more than just a chaotic environment.

The cause of the crash is still being investigated. The coalition did not disclose the nationalities of those killed. ...

It was the second suicide bombing in as many days in southern Afghanistan, officials said. The coalition said no NATO troops were killed. It [the coalition] does not disclose information about injured troops. ...

Late Wednesday, NATO reported that one coalition trooper had been killed in an explosion in southern Afghanistan, but [NATO] would not say whether the service member died in the Kajaki bombing, or some other incident. ...

Remember that last bit about the Kajaki bombing, the January 18 attack on a bazaar in which a suicide bomber on a motorcycle wrought bloody havoc on the crowd. The question is, why wouldn't NATO say whether a service member died in the Kajaki bombing? Another question: Why is NATO permitted to make these rules?

More intense scrutiny of the government's war information policy is overdue particularly after USA Today reported this week that it is ISAF policy to withhold information regarding so-called "green-on-blue" shootings -- jihad inside the wire against "infidel" troops by their Muslim "allies," an ongoing murder spree Uncle Sam thinks is OK (France's Sarkozy does not). More than 50 Western troops and security contractors have been killed in the past two-plus years at the hands of such "allies." It is this body count, alongside the greater Afghanistan body count, that is the bloody and concrete testament to the abysmal conceptual and operational failure of US counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy to win "hearts and minds," and train and arm an Afghan army and police force as a means of stabilizing and perpetuating the fighting and "nation-building" of the past decade.

This is why ISAF -- which last time I looked was largely under civilian control out of Washington -- has taken these sinister means to stop this flow of facts to Us, the People. It is an authoritarian power grab.

It was easy to see ISAF censorship in operation this month with the murder of Army Pfc. Dustin Napier, killed by a shot to the head while playing volleyball on his base in Afghanistan by Shafiullah, an Afghan Army member known for his mosque attendance. Those were the spare details gleaned by media and bless them for once; the official story was that Napier died as a result of "small arms fire." It's not that DoD ever exactly overflowed with information on these Muslim-on-infidel shootings, but the suppression has gotten noticeably worse.

And not just about "green-on-blue" violence. We are getting the same runaround on other casualty reports.

On Wednesday, January 18, the AP posted this early report on a large-scale suicide bombing in Kajaki:

KABUL, Afghanistan — Dozens of civilians, NATO coalition troops and Afghan security forces were killed and wounded Wednesday when a suicide attacker blew himself up in a bazaar, according to the top commander of international troops in Afghanistan, who alleged that the Taliban’s leader had “lost all control” of his footsoldiers. ...

Daud Ahmadi, a provincial spokesman, said a suicide bomber on a motorcycle killed 12 Afghans, including two policeman, and wounded at least 23 other people.

A statement released late Wednesday by NATO headquarters in Kabul said the explosion killed and injured dozens of Afghan civilians, Afghan national security forces and coalition troops. The statement did not disclose further details about how many foreign troops had been killed or wounded.

Coalition troops killed and injured -- true or false?

On Thursday, January 19, the Marine Corps Times blog Battle Rattle reported on the Kajaki suicide bomb attack, calling it an "eye-opener for Marines," noting:

The International Security Assistance Force that Allen heads initially reported that dozens of Afghan civilians, Afghan national security forces and coalition troops had been either killed or wounded.

The Marine Corps released an additional story today stating that the dead include three Afghan policemen and 10 civilians. An additional two Afghan policemen and 20 civilians were wounded and transported to a military hospital aboard Camp Bastion, a part of the Camp Leatherneck complex where II Marine Expeditionary Force (Forward) headquarters is based.

I’ve reached out to Marine officials at Leatherneck for any details that may be available about Marines in the area as it relates to this incident. If there’s an update, I’ll post it here.

No update there, or, really anywhere. Subsequent stories I've read about the Kajaki blast say nothing about US Marine or other NATO casualties.

Then this AP report of early morning, January 20:

PHOENIX (AP) -- A 25-year-old Marine from Arizona has died during combat operations in Afghanistan.

The Department of Defense announced Thursday that Cpl. Philip McGeath of Glendale died Wednesday while supporting Operation Enduring Freedom in Helmand Province.

He and 13 others reportedly were killed by a suicide bomber. The DOD has not released any details about McGeath's death.

McGeath was assigned to 1st Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Devision, II Marine Expeditionary Force, based at Camp Lejeune, N.C.

McGeath's mother told 3TV, her son was supposed to come home from Afghanistan in just two weeks.

McGeath is survived by his parents, his wife and five brothers, two of whom are also Marines. ...

The DoD story: McGeath was killed "during combat operations...while supporting Operation Enduring Freedom" on Wednesday (the day of the Kajaki suicide bombiing).

The AP story: McGeath was killed by a suicide bomber. Thirteen others were killed with him.

Hmm.

Also on January 20, a second story about McGeath's death appeared at myFOXphoenx.com:

WASHINGTON - A young Arizona Marine had died while supporting Operation Enduring Freedom and the news hits close to the FOX 10 News family.

25-year-old Corporal Phillip McGeath of Glendale died Wednesday while conducting combat operations in Afghanistan.

That's the DoD story.

He's the nephew of FOX 10 Producer Karen McGeath.

She said Phillip was apparently killed in attack by a suicide bomber. The family says he was standing with a group of people when someone on a motorcycle cut through the crowd and set off explosives, killing him and a few civilians.

He was assigned to 1st Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.

On Friday, Governor Jan Brewer ordered flags to be flown at half-staff for McGeath.

Cpl. McGeath was supposed to come home in two weeks.

No mention of Kajaki. But both the timing and the motorcycle detail fit.

Here's a recap of the Kajaki attack from the AP today (January 21), noted above in the photo caption:

The suicide bomber blew himself up at a bridge under construction in Kajaki district of Helmand province, according to Mohammad Ismail, the deputy of the Afghan security forces coordination office in the area. Ismail said NATO troops also were working at the construction site, but it was unclear whether any were injured or killed.

It seems reasonable to conclude that Cpl. McGeath was killed in the Kajaki bazaar suicide blast. (Afghan bazaars can be fatal to US military, as this December 2010 report on two Americans killed by an ANA soldier-- two more to add to the jihad body count -- demonstrates.)

Why doesn't the US government want us to know the circumstances of McGeath's death? Plus, what does the Afghan deputy mean when he says, "NATO troops also were working at the construction site"? Were Marines working construction in Kajaki when the suicide bomber drove up on his motorcycle? Is that what the DoD considers "combat operations"?

In a COIN world, yes. It's quite possible McGeath was engaged not in combat operations, as DoD puts it, but in some advanced "hearts and minds" busy-work operations -- building a bridge in Kajaki (?) or some other stupid thing for a Marine to be ordered to do in a danger zone (the bazaar).

This is the kind of thing Uncle Sam doesn't want us to know, because we might make it stop.

We might even want to investigate those (Bush, Obama) whose horrendous idea it was to nation-build (bad idea) in the Islamic world (impossible) on the backs of the US military (Petraeus, Mullen, McChrystal and on down the senior brass line), and how to make sure it never happens again.

Meanwhile, Back in Brussels ...

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 15:01:00 GMT

Always love to hear from UKIP's Nigel Farage, particularly when full-blasting the authoritarians at the EU (EUSSR). Via Vlad Tepes.

Breaking News: 4 French Soldiers Killed, Surround Base against ANA (Updated 1/21/12)

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 11:25:00 GMT

Another attack by an Afghan service member has killed four French troops and wounded 16.

This brings my unofficial tally of the grim toll to 52 Western personnel killed by Afghan security forces in the past 26 months since the November 2009 attack by an Afghan policeman that killed five British troops inside the wire.

But looking back, I find that on October 3, 2009, two Americans were killed and two others wounded as they slept by an Afghan Army soldier on duty.

To the best of my caclulations, that makes 54 infidels murdered by Muslim "allies" in Afghanistan in the past 27 months.

Make that 56. (I previously neglected to add in this December 2010 double murder at a bazaar.)

This figure is almost certainly low not only because I may have missed a report, but it's quite possible that other incidents, particularly in action, have gone undetected, unreported. The total also doesn't take into account non-fatal incidents, such as the September 2009 attack on an American soldier for drinking water during Ramadan by an Afghan policeman in Kabul. The American was "only" seriously wounded.

Today's attack on the French is different from all of the others in that it has elicited a healthy reflex in the French: the survival reflex.

From the AFP report:

French troops had surrounded their base in Kapisa and were not allowing any Afghan soldiers to approach, a security source told AFP.

The AP reports:

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Friday that France is suspending its training programs for Afghan troops after the killings, which he announced in a speech after the U.S-led coalition said an Afghan soldier shot and killed four NATO troops.

Sarkozy said it was "unacceptable" that Afghan troops would attack French soldiers. He said French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe is heading to Afghanistan after the attack, which is among the most deadly for French forces in the 10 years they have been serving in the NATO-led international force in Afghanistan.

When Will We See Red Over "Green-on-Blue" Murder in Afghanistan?

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 11:15:00 GMT

Pfc. Dustin Napier

This week's syndicated column:

Is there a single public official who is examining – who cares about – the murder spree by Afghan security forces against Western troops and security contractors in Afghanistan? I can list well over 40 such murders in the past two years. These incidents even have their own phrase in military jargon – “green-on-blue” shootings – but the color we should all be seeing is red. Does Obama see red? Pelosi? Romney? Newt? Anyone?

In the last several months, there have been ~~five~~ six separate attacks on Western forces by uniformed Afghan army members. The toll includes three Australian soldiers killed (as they ended a regular weekly parade) and 10 wounded; two members of France’s elite parachute regiment killed (on patrol by an Afghan “ally”) and (update) four more French troops killed today and sixteen wounded; and one American killed and seven wounded. The American fatality, 20-year-old Army Pfc. Dustin Paul Napier of Kentucky, was shot in the head earlier this month by an Afghan service member during a game of volleyball on base.

The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) didn’t offer that painfully vivid detail about the volleyball game; the media did. Official details on these shootings are scarce, and, according to ISAF’s “new policy” reported this week by USA Today, will become nonexistent now that ISAF plans to withhold information on such Afghan shootings of Western forces. (Outrageous!) Meanwhile, follow-up investigations are practically unheard of. Only a Freedom of Information Act request by the Air Force Times pried from the Pentagon’s clutches the September 2011 report on the murder of nine Americans at Kabul Airport in April 2011 by an Afghan air force officer.

The military’s findings? The killer, Ahmed Gul, 46, “acted alone.” Reading through the Air Force report, I get the impression that collaboration with “the Taliban” is the only hypothesis the investigators consider worth exploring. It is as though the military believes infiltration by hostile forces is the only conceivable threat posed to U.S. and other allied personnel on their bases in Afghanistan. Having failed to dig up concrete evidence of a more or less conventional enemy conspiracy, military investigators close their eyes to anything else – such as good, ol’-fashioned Islamic jihad. As Muslims, Afghans and Taliban alike are subject to its call. Fact. Sorry about that, but I didn’t write the Quran.

The report states: “The information collected regarding SUBJECT (shooter) and his background does not support his involvement in insurgent activity. (Air Force) analysts, in concert with other analysts and agencies, have reviewed multiple intelligence documents, investigative reports, and Open Source reporting to determine SUBJECT’s motive for the attacks. This analysis is not stating that there are no insurgent connections to SUBJECT, but that none have been established thus far during this investigation. Additionally, there are multiple reports that indicated SUBJECT may have had mental issues that were possibly compounded by alleged financial problems.”

I may not have read every word of the 436-page report this statement sums up, but I’ve already picked up a few clues to support the hypothesis that Gul was simply on a jihad.

Gul was said to have returned from Pakistan in 2008 because he “wanted to kill Americans.”

Gul frequented a mosque known for being anti-American and pro-Pakistan. (Reminds me of Shafiullah, the volleyball jihadist.)

Gul stayed up all night before his rampage, praying and cleaning his gun. (Reminds me of Maj. Hasan, the Fort Hood jihadist.)

During the melee, Gul shouted to Afghan security forces from a window: “Good Muslims – please stay away! Muslims don’t come close or you will be killed!” (Reminds me of the Mumbai jihadists.)

In a hallway outside the carnage, Gul dipped his finger in blood and wrote on the wall in the Afghan tongue of Dari: “Allah is one,” and “Allah in your name.”

One witness apparently heard the gunshots as Gul committed suicide, then a voice moaning, “Allah, Allah,” then silence.

Silence is right. According to our Inspector Clouseaus with wings, money problems and other stress must have been the murder motive. Some 1,500 Afghans turned out to pay respects to Gul at his funeral. No doubt they all shared similar financial setbacks.

Shame. Jihad is the secret these investigators are keeping, but only from themselves. It drives the murder spree against infidel troops. It also is part of the culture that renders U.S. utopian plans to train an Afghan army and police force dead on arrival. Not saying so doesn’t make it go away. It just wastes the lives of our people. Does anyone care?

The New ISAF Order

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 14:47:00 GMT

Having declared its policy of censoring information about Afghan-on-Western attacks inside the wire, ISAF now seems to be censoring information about every other kind of troop casualty, too.

From the AP today:

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP) — A suicide attacker set off a vehicle laden with explosives Thursday outside a gate at a sprawling base for U.S. and NATO operations, killing seven civilians in a second suicide bombing in as many days in southern Afghanistan, officials said...

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the afternoon attack at a crowded entrance to Kandahar Air Field, claiming they were targeting a NATO convoy.

Two witnesses told The Associated Press that they suspect the suicide car bomber was trying to hit U.S. forces because he detonated his explosives just as two pickup trucks, which they say are often used by American special forces, were leaving the base.

The coalition said no NATO troops were killed. It does not disclose information about injured troops. ...

Since when?

On Wednesday, 13 civilians, including three Afghan policemen were killed when a suicide attacker blew himself up in a bazaar in neighboring Helmand Province.

The Helmand governor's office said 22 others were wounded in the blast in Kajaki district.

The coalition said some international troops were killed and wounded in the attack, but did not disclose details.

Late Wednesday, NATO reported that one coalition trooper had been killed in an explosion in southern Afghanistan, but would not say whether the service member died in the Kajaki bombing, or some other incident. ...

DANGER: ISAF Runs Amok

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 02:43:00 GMT

ISAF HQ in Kabul

---

The story below, concerning ISAF's alarming and quite sinister decision to supress information regarding Afghan security force shootings of NATO troops and military contractors in Afghanistan, is a time bomb. It started ticking yesterday in USA Today. Today, the Air Force investigation into Afghan Air Force Colonel Ahmed Gul's murder of nine Americans last April 2011 hit the news, thanks to a FOIA request by the Air Force Times (the subject of this week's upcoming column). I'm not sure whether this genie goes back so easily into the bottle.

From USA Today, January 17:

"ISAF limits details of troops killed"

Military commanders in Afghanistan have stopped making public the number of allied troops killed by Afghan soldiers and police, a measure of the trustworthiness of a force that is to take over security from U.S.-led forces.

The change in policy comes after at least three allied troops have been killed by the Afghan troops they trained in the past month and follows what appears to be the deadliest year of the war for NATO trainers at the hands of their Afghan counterparts.

The International Security Assistance Force in Kabul had responded to previous requests for details on cases where Afghan troops — screened and trained by ISAF and Afghan officials — have turned their weapons on NATO troops.

Navy Lt. Cdr. Brian Badura (below) said ISAF has a new policy to release only limited information about casualties, leaving the responsibility for detail to the troops’ home countries. The policy went into effect in the latter half of 2011, he said.

Since 2005, more than 50 troops had been killed and 48 wounded by Afghan troops, according to data released before the policy changed and USA Today research. In 2011, Afghan troops killed at least 13 ISAF troops.

I count ~~over 40~~ nearly fifty killed in the past two years.

Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said information about the killing of U.S. troops by Afghan troops or police is important because it shows whether the U.S. withdrawal plan is realistic.

“It’s not just a matter of the number of ISAF or U.S. troops getting attacked. The real question is will this force be loyal to the government?” he said. “The constant question has to be, ‘Did you rush out to set impossible levels of quantity without addressing the quality of Afghan security forces?’“

Answer: YES.

President Obama has said he intends to hand off security responsibility to the Afghan government in 2014. NATO forces train Afghans to fill the ranks of the country’s military and police forces to keep the Taliban insurgency from regaining power.

There are about 306,000 Afghan soldiers and police, and the force is scheduled to grow to 352,000 by October. The United States has spent $11 billion to train and equip those forces in the past year.

In 2012, Afghan security forces have killed at least one ISAF member. In the latest incident, a man wearing an Afghan army uniform killed a coalition soldier, ISAF said Jan. 8. Two days later, the Pentagon said Pfc. Dustin P. Napier, 20, of London, Ky., had died from small-arms fire on Jan. 8 but released no further details.

Nope. Pfc. Napier was playing volleyball when he was shot in the head by an ANA soldier.

This supression of these essential facts is the power grab of a dictatorship.

Haditha: Where Are They (the Accusers) Now?

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 15:14:00 GMT

Tim McGirk, source of the Haditha myth-acre.

---

Eight charged; seven cleared; one, please, let's hope, to go.

Finally, the last "Haditha" trial is in progress, and, thanks to Nat Helms at Defend Our Marines, everything you need or want to know about the proceedings, the witnesses, the facts about the case of SSGT Frank D. Wuterich, the last of the Marine Mohicans, is here.

Of course, I still have a few questions -- the exact same questions I had when I first looked at the case back in late 2007/early 2008. That was just about one year after all the charges related to claims of a 2005 Marine massacre of civilians in Haditha had come down. Even by early 2008, however, the case was already turning into a big flopola for prosecutors, media and other champions of the massacre myth, including the late Rep. John Murtha (D-PA).

From my January 2008 column:

What a difference a year has made since charges came down at the end of 2006. The New York Times in October mourned -- I mean, noted -- the shift: "Last year, when accounts of the killings of 24 Iraqis in Haditha by a group of Marines came to light, it seemed that the Iraq war had produced its defining atrocity, just as the conflict in Vietnam had spawned the My Lai massacre a generation ago."

No "defining atrocity"? Gee, that's too bad. The Times went on to lament that the presiding military investigator recommended that murder charges against the ranking enlisted Marine, Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, be dropped. And this, the newspaper bellyached, "may well have ended prosecutors' chances of winning any murder convictions in the killings."

No murder convictions? Well, boo-the-heck-hoo.

In the end, of course, it has been Wuterich who has remained in the hot seat the longest.

And the accusers?

A quick recap, from my 2008 column:

Who can forget the March 19, 2006, Time magazine story by Tim McGirk entitled "Collateral Damage or Civilian Massacre in Haditha?" The story answered its own question by describing a vengeful, Marine "rampage."

On May 17, 2006, Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., piled on to say what happened at Haditha was actually "much worse" than the Time story. Official investigations were still underway, but the ranking member of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee repeatedly condemned the Marines for having "killed innocent civilians in cold blood."

As if to underscore the point, on May 25, 2006, then-commandant of the Marine Corps Michael Hagee announced he would embark on a grand tour of Marine bases to "reinforce standards and core values." This didn't exactly come off as a vote of confidence in his men.

As 2008 begins, Haditha hysteria still blights the lives of all the men who were implicated, not just the soldiers remaining in legal limbo. But what about the accusers who trumpeted the worst of the charges? Are they accountable for tarnished reputations? Terminated careers? Legal bills? Outrage? Night sweats?

Dream on. McGirk has moved on to a plummy new assignment as Time Jerusalem bureau chief, even as Time has moved away from signal points in the initial report. Via subsequent "corrections," Time asserted that the identity of a key source was grossly misrepresented, and admitted that allegations about a photograph reported as "one of the most damning pieces of evidence investigators have" was based on information from a source who later said "he had no firsthand knowledge" of it.

Murtha refuses to comment on the matter publicly or otherwise; as a defendant in a civil libel suit filed by Staff Sgt. Wuterich, he's appealing a federal court order to be interviewed by Staff Sgt. Wuterich's attorneys.

Hagee, whom Murtha has ID'ed as his source (Hagee denies this), has retired.

So, where are they now?

Murtha died in 2010, age 77. A federal appeals court ruled in 2009 that due to congressional immunity Murtha did not have to face defamation charges brought by Wuterich for Murtha's disgracefully inflammatory remarks, made in advance of an investigation, that the Haditha Marines had killed civilians "in cold blood." Never heard tell of any deathbed apologies from Murtha to the Marines he slandered.

General Hagee retired (2007), but he is busy, busy, busy. In addition to joining the board of SGI in 2008, "Mr. Hagee is a Director for DynCorp International since July 2010. He is also a Non-Executive Director at Cobham Plc. He is on the Board of Directors at Remington Arms Co., Inc., IAP Worldwide Services, Inc., Bushmaster Firearms International LLC, Freedom Group, Inc., National Interest Security Co. LLC and Silicon Graphics International Corp.Mr. Hagee joined Rackable Systems as a board member in February 2008. He was previously a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as the 33rd Commandant of the United States Marine Corps."

And Tim McGirk? Above all, the Time correspondent was the source of the scandal and also the military investigation, as it came out in one of the trial investigations. No apparent bumps in the road for him; after the Haditha scandal broke, as noted above, he became Time magazine's Jerusalem bureau chief. Still a Time contributor, in 2010 McGirk snagged "special in-residence support" at UC Berkeley's School of Journalism -- naturally. He is now managing editor of the investigative reporting program there. I don't know whether that counts as an honor, or being put out to pasture where he can do no 'arm -- except further twist young minds, of course. I notice in this December 2011 interview with Democracy Now's Amy Goodman, the Left of the Left, it is Goodman who uses the word "massacre" and "slaughter" by Marines to describe Haditha; in his surprisinly soft voice, McGirk talks repeatedly and only about "terrible things." And no, he doesn't offer any correction or callibration to Goodman.

If you watch the clip, don't miss the Arab gal-anchor's pronunciation of "Wuterich," which she gives the Germanic (Nazi?) "ich."

Terrible things, indeed.

Choice at the UN, Part 2

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:40:00 GMT

It was when anti-abortion advocate Austin Ruse explained to his audience that because his sturdiest allies at the United Nations were Muslims countries, his international anti-abortion coalition could not also be an international religious freedom coalition that my dhimmitude-meter kicked on -- dhimmitude in this case meaning appeasement of Islam. (This is what I first wrote about it.)

Ruse was describing a classic example of the divide-and-conquer reversals that ensue when the Free World seeks common ground with totalitarian Islam. In isolating the subset of commonality -- in this case, opposition to abortion -- the greater set of Western principles abjured by Islam must be bracketed away. The thinking is, concessions as a matter of course are required to form a coalition with Islam. Thus, bedrock Western principles of religious freedom, freedom of conscience, and freedom of speech, etc. must, in effect, be suspended if representatives of the umma (Islamic community), which outlaws such liberties under Islamic law (sharia), are to be lured into political alliance. It's never, ever the other-way round. That is, it's never the Muslims who must hold their collectivist nose to overlook the freedoms they abhor for, in this case, the sake of helping to protect unborn life. It's always the West that willingly loosens its attachment to its defining principles for fear of offending Islam. That's the culture of dhimmitude. As a measure of the vital signs of these respective cultures, the West is clearly weaker.

This is highly alarming. So, too, is this political advance of proponents of Islamic law -- which apparenly protects the unborn, but also sentences to death those who leave or insult or criticize Islam as "apostates" -- into respected religious and moral circles in the West. (I say "apparently" because this is the conventional wisdom, but I can't find any reference to abortion in the subject index of my trusty Islamic law book, Reliance of the Traveller; there are multiple entries on "apostasy" and "apostates.")

Ruse, reponding here, and, now, in a second piece titled, "Working with Muslims to protect the unborn," has taken something of a rolling pin to my concerns, flattening them out thus:

Some will say it is not worth protecting the unborn child if we have to make common cause with the Muslim states. Recently, at Andrew Breitbart’s “Big Peace” website, respected columnist Diana West suggested that in working with the Muslims, pro-life Christian NGOs help spread Sharia and radical Islam. She believes that religious persecution is a more important issue than protecting unborn babies from their own holocaust.

Many individuals and groups would agree. They work on religious freedom and ignore the plight of the unborn. That is their right. Groups must choose their mission. But West and, I suspect, others go further. They actually want us to stop our work because the cost is too high if it includes Muslims.

I haven't suggested, nor would I, that Ruse (or his Muslim partners) "stop our work" in the arena of international law, or that it is "not worth protecting the unborn child." Nor have I atempted to construct a calculus to rank Islamic or other depredations against humanity. This really wasn't the area I was trying to mine in my initial post. Nor did I accuse pro-life Christian NGOs of helping spread sharia law because such a charge overlooks what they are actually doing: I believe they are elevating proponents of sharia to heights of unmerited respectability, which is a little different. In providing entree to proponents of sharia law they have the effect of softening natural Western reflexes against it.

Making "common cause" with Muslim states to vote down pro-abortion law at the UN becomes dangerous if and when it means constructing a Trojan Horse by which proponents of sharia make their stealthy advance into regions of respectability in the West that would otherwise be closed to them as sworn enemies of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This is what happens when the inevitable etiquette of political alliance supresses pointed discussion of sharia's anti-Western precepts. For example, in his recent essay, Ruse attributes the sharia-dictated persecution of non-Muslims to "governments that allow the persecution of our co-religionists." (Emphasis added.) Such generic imprecision has the effect of letting the specific laws of Islam that dictate the persecution of non-Muslims off the hook. I am afraid this is one result of making "common cause." Meanwhile, if Islamic law prohibits abortion, nothing is going to stop Islamic representatives from working to prohibit abortion.

Ruse opens by lionizing an Islamic diplomat for his relentless, table-pounding declamations against a "universal right to abortion" at the UN. Incidentally or not, I, too, oppose such a "universal right," only not out of compliance with sharia. I must say Ruse's description of the diplomat's performance reminds me of a host of performances by other Islamic UN representatives whom I've watched in action on video as they promote and defend sharia -- the laws that outlaw speech and conscience and women's and children's rights, health and safety, and even any discussion of sharia.

Here is a short video; here is a longer video. Please watch one or, preferably, both before you decide how "common" our "cause" with Islam really is, or should be -- or, for that matter, how common our cause with the United Nations itself should be. (I think we should remove ourselves from it; and it from New York City.)

While I certainly appreciate Ruse's despair over post-Christian Europe's institutional enshrinement of abortion rights -- in my bailywick I despair over Europe's simultaneous enshrinement of speech codes and other restrictions on conscience and political liberty -- "common cause" here tends to mean more than just voting in accord on a particular issue; all too easily it lends the cloak of respectabilty to a totalitarian creed.

Short-term, can this possibly do more good than harm? Not if it closes our eyes to the fact that down this same road lies submission.

Incoming ... from Ourselves

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 13:27:00 GMT

This week's syndicated column:

Granted, it’s not civil, palace etiquette, or, more important, U.S. military doctrine to urinate on battle-killed enemy fighters – in this case, three dead Taliban in Afghanistan. But could we just move on?

That’ll be the day. Get set for Abu Ghraib 2, a national wallow in a wholly manufactured and inflated evil, the kind of masochistic frolic our twisted elites, safe on their sound stages, find so extremely pleasurable. Get set for the exclusion of any and all context related to heat-of-battle conditions, battle fatigue or Taliban depredations. We have met the enemy and he is us, again – and thank God. Or is that thank Allah?

Most distressing is watching the International Security Assistance Force’s PR machinery crank up. The desecration of Taliban bodies – killed according to ISAF orders and assorted United Nations-NATO-focus-group preferences – is of immeasurably greater concern than the recent cold-blooded murder of a 20-year-old U.S. soldier in Afghanistan, shot in the head while playing volleyball by an Afghan army member. (Three other Americans were wounded.) By my unofficial count, this makes Kill No. 43 of NATO forces by Afghan security forces inside the wire over the past two years.

Also distressing is the fact that such deadly Afghan assaults against the very nations that shore up Hamid Karzai’s crummy government don’t get a rise out of the Afghan leader. This freak videotaped incident, however, does. Years of all-too-faithful sacrifice by U.S. and allied forces to end the jihad in Afghanistan count for nothing; years of restrictive rules of engagement designed to save Afghan lives at the expense of Western lives are disregarded. And forget about the billions of dollars spent by the West to build an Afghanistan of unimaginable grandiosity. Karzai has.

Rather than calm passions, Karzai stokes them: “The government of Afghanistan is deeply disturbed by a video that shows American soldiers desecrating dead bodies of three Afghans.”

Afghans, Taliban – no distinction.

Karzai continued: “This act by American soldiers is simply inhuman and condemnable in the strongest possible terms. We expressly ask the U.S. government to urgently investigate the video and apply the most severe punishment to anyone found guilty in this crime.”

But don’t mention the frequent Afghan shootings of U.S. and other infidel soldiers. Their wounds and deaths (not indignity after death) are not worth condemning. Or noticing. They’re just what happens in war (“counterinsurgency”); what happens on the battlefield (volleyball court); what happens to men who break down in battle under stressful conditions (watching a volleyball game).

The four American service members videotaped somewhere on patrol, quite possibly after a harrowing firefight, however, are “inexplicable” monsters. ISAF said as much in language that, for an official press release, verges on the hysterical. “ISAF Denounces Deplorable Act Portrayed in Video” is the headline. The release says:

“A video recently posted on a public website appears to show U.S. military personnel committing an inappropriate act with enemy corpses.

“This disrespectful act is inexplicable and not in keeping with the high moral standards we expect of coalition forces. ISAF strongly condemns the actions depicted in the video, which appear to have been conducted by a small group of U.S. individuals, who apparently are no longer serving in Afghanistan.

“Nevertheless, this behavior dishonors the sacrifices and core values of every service member representing the 50 nations of the coalition.”

I strenuously object to this grotesque inflation of such an incident to the magnitude of dishonoring all ISAF forces, up to and including their immense “sacrifices” – nearly 3,000 dead and tens of thousands more wounded and damaged. It doesn’t dishonor their “core values,” either. In fact, it has nothing to do with such values, which beat the Taliban’s every time, from child rape (sanctioned by polygamous “marriage”), to normalized pederasty (dancing boys), beheadings, Islamic male supremacism and zero freedom of conscience. I would bet that these Taliban values – shared, by the way, by average Afghans – played some role in the videotaped act of contempt.

The ISAF reaction, however, is to grovel. In so doing, it does more to weaken the morale and safety of troops than anything I can imagine. Except, of course, making a global disciplinary example of these haplessly outed military personnel.

I’m afraid that’s coming. The ISAF release concludes: “Therefore, a United States Criminal Investigatory agency has launched an investigation. It will be thorough, and any individuals with confirmed involvement will be held fully accountable.”

Look out. Incoming fire from ourselves.

Get Set for a Wallow

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 11:34:00 GMT

Granted, it's not civil, acceptable, palace etiquette or, more important, US military doctrine to urinate on battle-killed enemy fighters -- in this case, three dead Taliban in Afghanistan. But could we just move on?

That'll be the day. Get set for Abu Ghraib 2, a national wallow in a wholly manufactured and inflated evil, the kind of masochistic frolic our extremely twisted elites, safe on their soundstages, find so extremely pleasurable. Get set for the exclusion of any and all context, either related to heat-of-battlefield conditions, battle fatigue, or Taliban depredations. We have met the enemy and he is us, again -- and thank God. Or is that thank Allah?

What is most distressing is watching the ISAF pr machinery crank up. The desecration of Taliban bodies -- as in already dead, according to ISAF's own orders and assorted United Nations-NATO-focus-group preferences -- is of immeasurably greater concern than even the murder of a 20-year-old Kentucky-born soldier while playing volleyball on a US-Afghan base in Afghanistan, shot in the head in cold blood last Sunday by an Afghan Army member -- Kill No. 43 by Afghan security forces inside the wire over the past two years.

Also distressing is the fact that this deadly pattern of Afghan assault against the very nations that shore up Hamid Karzai's crummy government doesn't get a rise out of the Afghan leader; this freak incident does.Years of all-too-faithful service and sacrifice by US and allied forces to end the jihad in Afghanistan count for nothing; years of restrictive ROEs designed to save Afghan lives at the expense of American and allied lives are disregarded; and forget about the billions of dollars spent by the West to to build an Afghaninstan of unimaginable grandiosity; Karzai has.

Rather than calm passions, Karzai arouses them: "The government of Afghanistan is deeply disturbed by a video that shows American soldiers desecrating dead bodies of three Afghans. This act by American soldiers is simply inhuman and condemnable in the strongest possible terms. We expressly ask the US government to urgently investigate the video and apply the most severe punishment to anyone found guilty in this crime."

But don't mention the alarmingly frequent shootings by Afghan security forces of US and other infidel soldiers. Their wounds and deaths (not indignity after death) are simply not worth condemning, deploring or denouncing. Or even mentioning. These things are just what happens in war (COIN); what happens on the battlefield (volleyball court); what happens to men who break down in battle under stressful conditions (watching a volleyball game).

These four American service members, however. are dead meat; ISAF said so, in language that verges on hysterical:

"ISAF Denounces Deplorable Act Portrayed in Video'

KABUL, Afghanistan (Jan. 12, 2012) -- A video recently posted on a public website appears to show U.S. military personnel committing an inappropriate act with enemy corpses. This disrespectful act is inexplicable and not in keeping with the high moral standards we expect of coalition forces.

ISAF strongly condemns the actions depicted in the video, which appear to have been conducted by a small group of U.S. individuals, who apparently are no longer serving in Afghanistan.

Nevertheless, this behavior dishonors the sacrifices and core values of every service member representing the fifty nations of the coalition.

Therefore, a United States Criminal Investigatory agency has launched an investigation. It will be thorough and any individuals with confirmed involvement will be held fully accountable.

How Dumb Do They Think We Are? (Really Dumb)

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 19:03:00 GMT

Trust us.

---

Ever wonder how Taliban "re-integration" in Afghanistan works?

The Stars and Stripes reports on one case, which started after a tribal elder with (an "oyster-grey beard") paid a call on the US military at an Afghan government center.

“We would like Zareef to be released,” he said. “We do not think the military should be holding him.”

[LTC] Wilson knew the name. Coalition soldiers detained the insurgent in October after finding him with a large stash of automatic weapons, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars.

“Before we can do anything,” Wilson said, “we need you and the rest of the elders in your tribe to be willing to be accountable for him.”

They arranged to talk further the next day at Forward Operating Base Bostick, about 15 miles north of Nishigam, where the 2-27 is stationed. The man arrived with a band of elders to meet with Wilson and area commanders of the Afghan military and police.

The group reached an agreement several hours later. The insurgent was to be freed in late December, after a public ceremony in which he and the tribal elders announced their intent to work with coalition forces in defeating the Taliban.

Uncle Sam Plays Three-Card-Mohammed and Guess Who Wins?

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:11:00 GMT

The Secretary of State wears clothes, all right, but is she really ready to deal?

---

The Wall Street Journal reports:

JANI KHEL, Afghanistan—In the American war against the Taliban, on whose side are the Afghan police? For many U.S. soldiers serving in the insurgent heartland, the answer is: both.

"They smile to our face when we're here, giving them money and building them buildings," says U.S. Army Capt. Cory Brown, a provost marshal officer helping to oversee Afghan security forces here in volatile Paktika province. "But they've given insurgents money, food and even rides in Afghan police cars."

Worse, he says, some policemen are also suspected of selling their U.S.-provided weapons to the Taliban.

The rest of the story lies behind a subscription wall, but it's not necessary to read more. Anyone could write the rest. In fact, it writes itself, another iteration of the relationship between the US and the Islamic world in which a culture steeped in the expectations derived from Thou Shalt Not Lie meets a culture authorized to lie to advance, protect, and burnish Islam a matter of Islamic law. Guess who wins every time?

It's important to realize that the experience of the army captain is repeated ever thus and on all levels, from his desolate corner of the umma to the shuttling conferences of the "peace process," to the US-military-"village-elder" shuras of Afghanistan, to any conversation with Hamid Karzai, to the US-Pakistani conference tables in Islamabad. Whether a captain or a secretary of state, any official from the Occident is going to experience the exact same double-dealing from the Orient. And beg for more.

Mumbai Strategy Revealed by LeT Terrorist David Headley

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 13:46:00 GMT

Somehow, the face of American-born Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist Daood Sayed Gilani, aka David Coleman Headley, comes as news to me. Don't know how I missed it, but it strikes me that news stories detailing his poisonous international career as a star facilitator of jihad in Mumbai, in Copenhagen and elsewhere generally carry photos of someone else, a more distinctly Pakistani-looking accomplice -- often AQ jihadist Illyas Kashmiri.

Anyway, there Headley is (top photo), son of a Pakistani employee of Voice of America who also worked in the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, and, on his American mother's side, grandson of a University of Maryland football star (or so says Wikipedia) named L. Coleman Headley. This terror-thug, who declares his allegiance to Pakistan, was a most effective instrument of global jihad until his arrest in Chicago in 2009 before jihad-jetting off to Pakistan. I'm not up on his plans for this thwarted trip; earlier in 2009, shortly after the Mumbai attacks, he returned to India to scout out Jewish targets -- El Al offices, Chabad houses frequented by Israeli backpackers -- for another synchronized multi-site terror attack on India. As The Hindu reported last month, Headley then traveled to Pakistan where he was able "to hand over details of his recce activities of Jewish houses to Illyas Kashmiri."

India's National Investigation Agency (NIA), created in the wake of the November 2008 Mumbai attacks (which Headley played a lead role in planning), has now compiled a voluminous case against Headley and eight others for making war on India by planning and executing the Mumbai attacks.

The Economic Times sums up the status of NIA case:

The NIA had on December 24 last year filed charge sheet against 51-year-old Headley, his Pakistani-Canadian accomplice Tahawwur Rana and founder of Lashker-e-Taiba terror group Hafiz Saeed.

Besides them, two serving Pakistani Army officials - Major Iqbal and Major Sameer Ali - believed to be working for ISI, were also named in the charge sheet filed before the court.

Al-Qaeda operative Illyas Kashmiri, Sajid Malik, handler of Headley, and Abdul Rehman Hashmi, former Pakistani Army officer, were also named in the charge sheet filed against the nine for waging war against the country and other relevant sections of Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.

The Dehli court has deferred hearing arguments until January 21.

In excerpts from the NIA charge sheet published in Outlook India, Headley himself is quoted explaining the jihad strategy behind the Mumbai attacks.

The Reason For The Strike:

A debate had begun among the terrorist outfits as to whether to fight in Kashmir or in Afghanistan. The clash of ideology led to splits in many outfits. The decision of Abdur Rehman and Haroon (top LeT operatives) to split from LeT and fight in Afghanistan was part of this trend. Zaki (Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, chief military commander of LeT) had serious problems in holding the LeT and convincing them to fight for Kashmir and against India. With the Lal Masjid attack in 2007, something had to be done to keep the group involved in Kashmir.

I understand that ISI was under tremendous pressure to stop any integration of Kashmir-based jehadi organisations with the Taliban-based outfits. It is always in the interest of the ISI to keep these two sets of outfits poles apart, so Zaki was only reiterating the ISI official line. However, the aggression and commitment to jehad shown by the several splinter groups in Afghanistan influenced many committed fighters to leave Kashmir-centric outfits. I understand this compelled the LeT to consider a spectacular terrorist strike in India.

The ISI, I believe, had no ambiguity in understanding the necessity to strike India. It essentially would serve three purposes. First, it could stop further split in the Kashmir-based outfits. Second, it would provide them a sense of achievement, shifting and minimising the theatre of violence from the domestic soil of Pakistan to India. Also, after the Lal Masjid incident (which was stormed by the Pakistani army in 2007), something had to be done.

Zaki would always justify jehad in Kashmir on the grounds that the ratio of deployment of force in Kashmir compared to the general population is very high. So it was legitimate to fight the occupation forces in Kashmir.... During this period, I realised that Captain Khurram (of the 6th Baloch and an LeT sympathiser) had died on March 30, 2007, in a drone attack. I remember the date as my son was also born on the same day. During this period, I met Zaki in Muzaffarabad. I had dinner with him. My country, Pakistan, was undergoing an identity crisis in the wake of the happenings in Afghanistan and the FATA areas of Pakistan. I understand this accelerated the Mumbai attack project. Earlier, it was a limited plan to attack only the hotel in Mumbai. But now it seemed to be a grand plan to strike Mumbai at multiple locations.

In Headley's narrative, it is Pakistan's ISI that is orchestrating -- or trying to orchestrate, direct, guide, influence -- jihad terror as it metastisizes throughout Af-Pak. To this end, the ISI-supported Mumbai attacks, killing 166 in an Islamically inspired terror spectacular of grisly brutality, were ordered up not only "to strike terror in their [infidels'] hearts," but to stir the jihad pot: to prevent the jihad on India via Kashmir from dying down as jihad flourished against Western forces in Afghanistan; to provide the Kashmir jihadists with "a sense of achievement"; and to help cure Pakistan's "identity crisis."

This is how the jihad revolution is advanced from the top, and, don't forget, with Uncle Sucker's (your) money.

I Support Mitt Romney for President

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:57:00 GMT

The way the GOP field is attacking Mitt Romney by attacking free enterprise has now torn it for me with this latest lowdown distortion of the Romney's "firing people" comment. This is something to expect from the Left, the media, the Obama campaign (one and the same), not the Republican Party. Folllowing up on Gingrich's anti-capitalist attacks, now we have Perry and Huntsman piling on Romney by willfully distorting Romney's obvious pitch for choice for consumers of services as though they were channeling Rachel Maddow. Since Santorum's non-reflective, reflexive Bush-mongering leaves me cold and Paul is not my cup of tea, Romney it is.

Go Romney. Beat Obama.

NYT Notices ANA Murder Spree

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 10:50:00 GMT

The New York Times sees -- but knows not what it sees.

KABUL, Afghanistan — An Afghan soldier turned his gun on American military personnel while they were playing volleyball at a camp in southern Afghanistan, killing one and wounding three others before being fatally shot, the Afghan police said on Monday.

It was the third time in just over two weeks that a man wearing an Afghan Army uniform attacked NATO personnel.

And at least the 43rd such fatality in 26 months.

In the earlier cases, the Taliban claimed responsibility, although there was no immediate claim in this case that the Afghan soldier had Taliban sympathies.

Card-carrying Taliban or not, as a Muslim, the ANA soldier was subject to the call of jihad. Fact. I'm sorry about that, but I didn't write the Koran.

The attack took place on Sunday afternoon in Qalat, the capital of Zabul Province. The Afghan soldier approached the volleyball game and appeared to watch the soldiers play before opening fire with an M-16 assault rifle, said Ghulam Jilani Farahi, deputy police chief of Zabul Province. Another American soldier who heard the firing shot and killed the attacker, he said.

The coalition released a brief statement Sunday saying that a service member “was killed today in southern Afghanistan apparently by a member of the Afghan National Army.”

Not even "just the facts, ma'am." Just a terse, inadequate statement. Meanwhile, on the ISAF website, lead stories report on ANA sniper training and a joint Marine-ANA combat medic course. No joke.

Back to the Times account:

Afghan soldiers have repeatedly shot NATO counterparts in recent years, and there is concern among NATO and Afghan commanders that insurgents may be infiltrating the ranks of the Afghan security forces.

Meanwhile, back at the ISAF website, such infiltration -- sorry, reintegration -- is celebrated.

Mohammad Ashraf Nasiri, the governor of Zabul Province, had a slightly different account of Sunday’s shooting. He said only one American soldier was wounded, in addition to the one American who was killed.

Deputy Chief Farahi said the police were investigating what had caused the Afghan soldier, whom he identified as Shafiullah, to open fire at the camp.

He said Mr. Shafiullah, originally from a Pashtun-dominated region of eastern Afghanistan, was a religious man who spent a lot of his time in the mosque near the camp. He said the soldier and his family used to live in Quetta, Pakistan, which is where the leadership of the Taliban is believed to be, although Quetta also has hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees with no ties to the Taliban. Coalition authorities were now requesting that the Afghan commander of the local garrison hand over details about the soldier’s identity and his references, he said.

A lot of facts. No conclusions. Ever.

Operation Enduring and Unexamined Dementia, Cont'd (Corrected, 1/19/12)

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:16:00 GMT

US Army and Afghan Army play volleyball in southwestern Kandahar in 2011. On Sunday, a similar match in Zabul province turned deadly when an Afghan Army member shot and killed one American, wounding three.

---

It would be most helpful for at least one of the GOP candidates to think long and hard about what is going wrong with the Bush-Obama Afghanistan War and share his thoughts with his fellow citizens. A good place to start would be with examining -- noticing -- the serial murders of ISAF soldiers by Afghan Army members, particularly given the fact that the Bush-Obama strategy is to train the Afghan security forces (at exhorbitant US taxpayer cost) as the supporting pillar of our so-called Exit Strategy. As George W. Bush used to say about Iraq, as they stand up, we stand down. And that worked out so well.

In the last three months the murder count in five separate attacks by uniformed Afghan security forces inside the wire includes:

Three Australian Diggers killed and ten wounded; four non-specified NATO troops wounded; two members of France's elite 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment killed; and, most recently, one US soldier killed and three wounded--while playing volleyball.

Excluding the Australian losses, the remaining attacks occurred in the past three weeks.

Adding to my informal record, this grim toll (which doesn't inlude non-fatal injuries) now comes to 43 48 ISAF troops and security contractors killed by their Afghan counterparts in the past 26 months.

In April 2011 alone, the body count came to 11 Americans killed by their Afghan counterparts including the mass murder of nine at Kabul Airport (column here) by a long-serving Afghan Air Force officer. Even this sensational story failed to draw much in the way of media interest, even -- no, particularly -- on Fox News. Do we know the fate of the Afghan shooter in this case? Was he charged? Is he in prison? Is he drawing a US-taxpayer salary? We have no answers. We have no interest.

~~If anyone is tracking my addition, I now believe the total ANA murders of ISAF troops for April 2011 was 11, and not, as I previously thought, 15.~~ (NB, 1/19/12: I went back to the most solid numbers I have found and added on from that point forward to October 30, 2011. Since that date, two French and one American have been killed, totalling 48 Westerners killed by uniformed Afghans security forces.)

But clearly, an official Price-Waterhouse-style accounting of this scandal is required. If any Congressman sufficiently cared, for example, the Congressional Research Service or some Pentagon office would be tasked to track these casualties of hearts-and-minds COIN. But politicians don't care; neither do the media. ABC News, in fact, folds in the victims of the latest ANA murder of an American (at a volleyball game; I can't get over that) with all other NATO casualties for the month. It is as though such killings were the regular, non-extraordinary price of doing battle. Call it the normalization of madness. Or, better, call it dhimmitude. Late last year, an editorial in Marine Corps Times justified teaching Marines to observe Islamic religious practices as a matter of personal safety inside the wire. The message is: mustn't offend our Muslim alllies whom we are supporting in every way or they'll kill us -- classic submission.

But about the Western warriors who have been killed?

Silence.

Dhimmitude.

Tony Blankley (1949-2012), RIP

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 13:28:00 GMT

I am deeply saddened and shocked to learn that Tony Blankley has died. Tony, by virture of his quite remarkable career and background spanning Hollywood and Washington, California and the East Coast, the US and Great Britain, was himself a wealth of experience and treasured knowledge, very much of the "old school" despite his Baby Boom birth. A man of a debonair and ebullient patriotism, Tony, his sharp pen and steadying voice will be greatly missed.

On a personal note, I will add that as editorial page editor at the Washington Times between 2002 and his much-lamented departure in 2007, Tony was always extremely supportive of my work, both my weekly column -- then at the Wash Times and on Tony's arrival still in its earlier phase of jihad and dhimmitude exploration -- and my 2007 book The Death of Grown-Up, which he quite generously praised. I imagined him remaining at the Washington Times forever -- wishful thinking. It seemed to be a perfect platform for his talents, and a great support for the rest of us. On leaving the paper, however, he by no means left the arena, as this email he wrote me at the time attests:

September 20, 2007

Dear Diana,

Thanks for kind words. I am trying to have it all--we shall see. I will continue the column in the WT and syndicated by Creators. I'm also continuing on McLaughlin, my weekly NPR show and assorted other media. I'll
be doing some research on the failures of our governments communications to the nation and world duration WOT. And I'll be exec vp for global public affairs at Edelman International.

I hope I have the energy and ability to do all these things well. My theory is there is time enough to rest in the
grave. I hope we keep in contact. I'll still be around town. By the way, your book has genuinely added to our national conversation -- congrats.

Cheers,
Tony

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RIP.

Andrew C. McCarthy: Obama Dissolves Separation of Powers ... and Republicans "Tweak"

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 13:00:00 GMT

In an urgently important piece today at NRO today, my friend Andy McCarthy elucidates the complex: the crude power grab by Barack Obama that is underway, camouflaged and fuzzed up by abstruse procedure and eye-glazing acronyms. Skewering all that is wrong with the Grand Old Party -- all that is wrong with those entrusted with safeguarding the Republic against the encroachments of the Superstate -- McCarthy lays out how Barack Obama is entrenching and expanding dictatorial powers unopposed.

Hint: the Constitution goes in the shredder while Republicans "tweak."

Of course, as Andy reminds us as a matter of almost guilty comic relief, this no doubt thrills the likes of Thomas Friedman, whose longings for the "right" kind of dictatorial powers are a matter of public record. “I have fantasized…that, what if we could just be China for a day,” the New York Times star columnist gushed for his ponderous fellow travelers on Meet the Press. “I mean where we could actually, you know, authorize the right solutions.”

McCarthy provides the sorry context:

It was May 2010, not long after Obama and a Congress dominated by Democrats had rammed through Obamacare, the most sweeping government usurpation of private industry and individual liberty in American history. Soon they’d be adding Dodd-Frank’s paralyzing intrusion into the financial sector. Yet, despite the shock and awe of hope and change, here was the Progressive Poobah, grousing that “my democracy” was failing “to work with the same authority, focus and stick-to-itiveness” as a totalitarian Communist dictatorship. After all, unburdened by our remnants of free-market competition, by the gridlock and sausage-making of two-party politics, the Chicoms produce trade and budget surpluses, state-of-the-art airports, and enviro-friendly high-speed rail. All we can manage, “on everything from the economy to environment,” Friedman complained, are “suboptimal solutions” — apparently not to be confused with the optimal Chinese menu of forced abortions, religious repression, secret police, kangaroo courts, and air you could cut with a chopstick.

This is the richly celebrated oracle of liberal thought speaking. As Andy points out, Friedman must be tickled now, what with Obama "authorizing" solutions ~~right~~ left and left. And the conservative response? The real scandal, as usual, is on what passes for the right, where acquiesence and accomodation are the only rejoinders.

Excerpts:

In sum, Obama dissolved the separation of powers, the framers’ ingenious bulwark against any government branch’s seizure of supreme power — and thus the Constitution’s bulwark against tyranny. The president claims the power to appoint federal officers without the Senate’s constitutionally mandated advice and consent. He does so by claiming unilateral powers to dictate when the Senate is in session, a power the Constitution assigns to Congress, and to decree that an ongoing session is actually a recess. This sheer ukase, he says, triggers the part of the Constitution we’re keeping because he likes it — viz., the executive power to fill vacancies without any vetting by the people’s representatives.

Mind you, a president is the only government official constitutionally required to swear that he will “preserve, protect and defend” that Constitution. We are talking here not just about Obama’s characteristically breathtaking arrogance. These are profound violations of his oath and of our fundamental law. But rest assured he will get away with them. For that, Republicans can thank themselves and their surrender to statism.

Obama is hot to move forward on two fronts. The first is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB is the monstrous Dodd-Frank’s crown jewel. Congress unconstitutionally delegated to it virtually unreviewable power to “dictate credit allocation in the U.S. economy,” as C. Boyden Gray put it. Not just bank lending — the law invests dictatorial power in a single CFPB director over thousands of American businesses. The CFPB is not just part of Obama’s design to splay the government’s tentacles throughout the private economy; it is also key to his reelection narrative: Leviathan, no longer shyly creeping but heroically swashbuckling through predatory capitalists to rescue the noble “99 percent.”

By law, however, the CFPB cannot operate until its director has been confirmed. Before the midterms, Senate Republicans lacked the votes necessary to stop the CFPB from being enacted, but they now have the numbers needed to block confirmations — or, in this instance, to extract concessions in exchange for confirmations. In our constitutional republic, this is what is known as politics. That is not a dirty word. Indeed, it is the very horse-trading that leftists and their media cheerleaders indignantly demand to be afforded even when they don’t have the numbers to force their opposition’s hand.

So Republicans have declined to confirm Obama’s nominee, Richard Cordray (Ohio’s former attorney general, beloved of the trial lawyers). But being Republicans, they are not, of course, demanding repeal of this despotic CFPB coup — just as they have no real desire to slash any of the bulging administrative behemoth. Yes, they talk about slashing it, but what they actually want is to control it. So their bold pitch is to make the CFPB marginally more accountable and, as night follows day, bigger: to subject it to Congress’s appropriations process (as if that will give the public a real say in how it operates); to have bank regulators check its likely excesses (playing into Obama’s narrative about protecting Wall Street at the expense of Main Street); and to expand its leadership to several board members rather than a single unelected technocrat (because creating more patronage slots has been so effective in reining in the EPA and the rest of the bureaucratic maze).

Because the GOP establishment is statist lite, they play into the president’s hands. Removing the Dodd-Frank deadweight from a crippled economy, killing an authoritarian bureaucracy in the cradle — that is the kind of campaign that would have stoked passion, highlighting a very different vision of a country breaking free of its regulatory chains. But no one is going to get whipped up over a few technical tweaks on the one-way road to bigger Big Government. Obama has a simple story to tell: “Obstructionist Republicans are trying to stop me from saving you.” By comparison, the Republican story — “We’re all for statist cures, just with a Washington-style nip here and tuck there” — makes your eyes glaze over.

...

The president’s second front is, as ever, Big Labor. He also used his supposed recess power to appoint three members to the National Labor Relations Board. This will ensure that the NLRB will not lack for the necessary quorum to do the bidding of union bosses who, in turn, keep the campaign cash and direct-action services churning for the Democratic party. Obama was even more audacious on the NLRB appointees than on Cordray: He submitted two of the three names to the Senate on December 15, right on the eve of the recess that wasn’t a recess. There is not even a fig leaf of GOP obstructionism to complain about — the Senate was given no realistic opportunity to do background checks or hold committee hearings, much less hold an informed confirmation vote.

Again, however, Republicans have not even attempted to sound the alarm for folding up the NLRB, even after its unelected bureaucrats outrageously presumed to begin telling private businesses, like Boeing, where they would and would not be permitted to operate. The GOP is not making the overarching case for getting Americans out from under the statist thumb; they are saying they would apply the same thumb more benignly — by slow-walking enough confirmations, they figure the 2012 election will mean vacancies filled by Republican-preferred bureaucrats.

That is to say, the GOP has already surrendered on the greater constitutional transgression: the transfer of power from the people to the administrative state. To take another example, remember the Independent Payment Advisory Board? Like CFPB birthed by Dodd-Frank, the IPAB is an unaccountable, authoritarian panel created by Obamacare. It will ration health care through price controls. As Stanley Kurtz recounted in National Review, when the democracy-dissing Orszag was still working for Obama, he crowed that the IPAB is “the largest yielding of sovereignty from the Congress since the creation of the Federal Reserve.” That is supposed to cheer us, since Congress has lower ratings than Keith Olbermann. But Orszag was wrong: Congress is not the sovereign; you are. It’s your control over your life that your representatives are yielding to cadres of “expert” technocrats at the IPAB, the CFPB, the NLRB, and the rest of the faceless bureaucracy that bends inevitably to the statists who create and sustain them — a bureaucracy that coerces our besieged private sector to shift trillions of dollars from the production of value to compliance costs.

Republicans have accommodated themselves to that gross distortion of constitutional governance. Realizing this, President Obama calculates that the GOP will have little difficulty swallowing this latest, lesser indignity: He no longer deigns to consult them on the staffing of a sprawling, suffocating bureaucracy over whose control they’ve already abdicated. He has taken their measure. He knows that, after a few days of huffing, puffing, and reading the editorial pages, they’ll shrug their shoulders and move on — mumbling some drivel about how they only control one-half of one-third of the government (that would be the one-half of one-third without whose approval the beast could not be funded). ...

Read it all here.

To Win, GOP Candidates Must Confront Wars and Bush

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:51:00 GMT

On Dec. 31, 2011, Iraq’s Nouri al-Maliki declared a national holiday to celebrate the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. Funny way to say “thank you” for all the blood and treasure, no?

Not that al-Maliki was saying thank you. He wasn’t even saying good riddance. He was saying, in effect, that it was all a dream. Or, in the Associated Press’ words: “The prime minister sought to credit Iraqis with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and made no mention of the role played by U.S. forces that invaded Iraq in March 2003.”

No mention, huh? I guess it was just a trillion-dollar mirage, a figment, a never-never fantasy best dropped from speeches, polite conversation, maybe history books. Then again, silence suits the American political classes fine. Amazingly, following the U.S. withdrawal, the questions, “What was that all about?” or, “What went wrong in Iraq?” or even, “Did something go wrong in Iraq?” (never mind, “What is going wrong in Afghanistan?”) don’t rise even to the level of conversation-enders. They don’t rise, period, not even among GOP presidential candidates, beyond the odd sound bite.

Famously, of course, Ron Paul calls for withdrawal of U.S. troops everywhere, a rollback of the international security force the U.S. military has become, certainly, since entering World War II. While Paul’s constitutional position is strong, his misunderstanding of Islam undermines his rationale for me; indeed, it transforms his policy into submission. The aftermath of withdrawal under a Paul presidency could be as dangerous as it would be under more Obama.

I support withdrawal from guaranteed-recidivist hellholes such as Iraq and Afghanistan as a means to shore up the wall against the spread of Shariah (Islamic law) in the West rather than, in effect, continuing to fight/accommodate Shariah culture in the Islamic world. This is a no-win struggle in which only a see-no-Shariah utopian could still engage. It is this Islam-blind engagement that is the simple but devastating flaw of the Bush-Obama counterinsurgencies (COIN). But it continues to get a national pass.

Indeed, most GOP candidates tend to promise more of the same Bush-Obama COIN. (Jon Huntsman is the other main GOP exception. He voices a come-home-America policy in Afghanistan based on non-feasibility, economics and war-weariness – all valid points – but without parsing COIN, which he sees as a success in Iraq.) The candidates speak in generalities, when they speak at all.

I think that’s because if Republicans were to discuss the past decade’s wars – what worked, what didn’t, whether the USA should fight for constitutions that enshrine Shariah (Iraq’s and Afghanistan’s) – they would have to discuss the president whose tenure was dominated by these wars. And the last thing they want to discuss is George W. Bush.

This is a grave political mistake. The fact is, President Obama has continued much of the Bush war agenda in both Iraq and Afghanistan – an agenda polls indicate most Americans don’t support. For much of Obama’s term, key war-making personnel were Bush holdovers, from Defense Secretary Bill Gates to Gen. David Petraeus. The war plan for “Obama’s war” in Afghanistan came off the Bush drawing board.

Even Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq was on Bush’s schedule. Opponents, including most GOP candidates, seem to forget that Obama agreed with them. After all, he pleaded with Iraq to allow some U.S. forces to remain.

How does this play out in Election 2012? Without a GOP strategy to confront the essentially non-conservative mistakes of the Bush presidency, I predict GOP defeat. Come November, having failed to repudiate George W. Bush’s bailouts and stimulus spending, Mr. GOP will be unable to make the clear case for free markets, let alone for repealing socialized medicine. Reverting to Republican “good manners,” he won’t argue against leaving a redistributionist and collectivist in the Oval Office, either (and forget about the phony birth certificate). He’ll probably think he has an ace in the hole – foreign policy, traditionally the Republican strong suit.

But, no. Failing to have distanced himself from key Bush policies, the GOP candidate has failed to distance himself from Obama’s, too. Then Obama shows his cards, the pieces de resistance: the hit on Osama bin Laden (operationally insignificant, but no matter); the killing of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi (never mind the USA actually supported al-Qaida allies to get it done); more drone-killed hilltop jihadis than Bush ever got. In a campaign endgame, such strokes could give Obama the empty but winning boost.

Sure, Iraq’s al-Maliki can clam up about everything, but we know better. Or do we?

Choice at the UN

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 17:23:00 GMT

Heard an interesting talk this week by Austin Ruse, who, heading up a Catholic NGO at the United Nations, is on a professional and vocational quest to prevent the UN, in its various documents and legal instruments, both non-binding and binding, from declaring abortion to be a human right. He pursues a similar track regarding "gender identity," another anti-traditionalist area seen as ripe for human-right-hood on the Wild-Eyed Left. Ruse has been successful to date -- if, by success, we mean continuing to stand in place on the edge of civilizational precipice. And we do.

But this comes at some immeasurable toll. Islam opposes abortion; therefore, as Ruse explained, among his sturdiest allies are representatives from many Islamic countries -- probably the whole OIC shebang, I would think. But, as he noted, these same Islamic countries persecute Christians (not to mention Jews and other non-Muslims). This means, as he said, that the anti-abortion coalition at the UN cannnot also be a religious freedom coalition as well.

There is a horror to this that is palpable. In Ruse's case, for example, the Catholic teachings he holds dear and, not incidentally, inculcate opposition to abortion, are anathema under the sharia (Islamic law) that directs the lives of the good Muslims of his anti-abortion coalition. Indeed, should a Muslim individual renounce Islam for Catholicism (or any other faith, or no faith), his "apostasy" from Islam is punishable by death under sharia. (We saw this play out to the 11th hour again last year in US-supported Afghanistan where only international pressure saved the life of a death-penalty-convicted "apostate.")

Is this just another instance of politics making strange bedfellows? I'm afraid not-- not in this era of expansionist, flexing Islam. Notice it is not the Christian tradition, the one that upholds freedom of conscience, that proves to be stronger in this particular contest of wills in the international arena. That is, it is not the Islamic countries who put aside their "prejudices" against other religions to join a religious liberty caucus in their desire to preserve fetal life; it is the pluralistic non-Muslims who put aside their allegiance to religious (and other) liberty to make common cause with religious totalitarians to oppose abortion.

Lesser of two evils? Or better to fail at preventing the UN from declaring abortion a human right? I think it would be best to ignore and pull out of the UN altogether, which doesn't answer the question. I don't know how religious doctrine weighs the lives of death-penalty-convicted apostates vs. the unborn; but it seems that the coalition Ruse describes is not without risk for welcoming proponents of sharia into the most respected circles of Western moral and religious tradition.

From the Vault 5: Looking Back on Iraq

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 20:23:00 GMT

This journal entry is less than a year old, but I think it documents the scant essence of what is considered arguable about Iraq to this day: logistics and tactics -- anything but the doomsday flaw, the false, ideological premise that the US can build nations in the umma (Islamic world).

From February 16, 2011:

Haven't read Rumsfeld's book, but I did read a rebuttal by Dan Senor and Roman Martinez in the Wash Post this week in which they argue over what went wrong in Iraq. Rummy says it was poor planning in a too-long CPA-led aftermath; they say it was Rummy's failure to send enough troops. They further contend that Rumsfeld supported the CPA's policy at the time, citing internal docs to prove it.

But this whole argument seems completely beside the point, whizzing right by anything meaningful or significant about the disastrous policy the Bush administration executed in Iraq. I refer to the cocoon of ignorance about Islam that our government and military were (and are) operating from in attempting to nation-build our way out of the umma, first in Iraq and now Afghanistan.

But there's something else to note in the Senor-Martinez piece. The rebuttal crescendos here:

Rumsfeld now argues that a speedy handover to a sovereign Iraqi government would have prevented the (largely Sunni) insurgency from taking hold.

But a sovereign Iraqi government established in the spring or summer of 2003 would have empowered the Shiite leaders of the Iraqi opposition movement in exile before the war (most notably, Ahmed Chalabi and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Republic of Iraq). Chalabi has said that such a government would have invited the radical and violent cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to become a member. These figures unflinchingly advocated policies such as aggressive de-Baathification and the use of sectarian Shiite militia groups that antagonized Sunnis after Hussein's fall.

Um, but isn't that roughly what happened anyway? Chalabi is out (and good riddance) but the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, now known as Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, is a major player in the government, while Prime Minister Maliki is himself a Shiite alumnus of the Iraqi opposition movement in Iranian and Syrian exile as a former leader of the Dawa Party. As for the Iranian-homing Moqtada al Sadr, his political party is a lynchpin of the current governmen, with 8 of 29 cabinet positions.

But Senor and Martinez seems to have missed these headlines.

A government led by these figures would have deeply alienated Sunnis, who harbored fears about the Shiite exile leadership, its ties to neighboring Iran and its desire for payback after decades of dictatorship.

Would have?

It likely would have made the Sunni insurgency worse.

Not exactly a radical difference in outcome. They continue:

Without basic security for ordinary Iraqis, it was extraordinarily difficult to achieve lasting progress in Iraq --

Is "lasting progress" what we achieved?

-- especially with respect to a political transition that required negotiation and compromise among competing factions. Establishing public safety was what we failed to do during Rumsfeld's tenure. Only after he resigned and President Bush deployed more troops and a traditional counterinsurgency approach did things begin to turn around.

Sorry. "Things" didn't "turn around." "Things" paused. With more cops on the beat -- "the surge" -- crime (sectarian violence) went down. Paying bad guys on the US-taxpayer-funded protection money ("Sunni Awakening" is so much more poetic) helped. The egghead theory, however -- the "traditional counterinsurgency approach," the rubbish of winning hearts and minds -- was a complete and abysmal failure.

So why have taken COIN on the road to Afghanistan? Because there has been no reckoning, no interest even in such a reckoning by any of our elected representatives, on the performance of COIN doctrine over the last decade. No one wants to ask what went wrong in Iraq. And so it will go wrong all over again in Afghanistan.

What, No "Auld Lang Syne"?

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 13:35:00 GMT

In case you missed it, Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki decided New Year's Eve wasn't sufficiently festive without also declaring December 31 a national holiday in Iraq to celebrate the withdrawal of American troops as a "new dawn" for Iraq -- the American effort to cobble together a functioning nation in Iraq, presumably, being the old night. According to the story:

Thе prime minister sought tο credit Iraqis wіth thе overthrow οf Saddam Hussein аnԁ mаԁе nο mention οf thе role played bу U.S. forces thаt invaded іn March οf 2003.

Goodbye, 2011

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 13:13:00 GMT

Taking stock at year's end, I chose to throw a spotlight onto the "unsolved mystery of 2011" -- what really happened in Smolensk, Russia in April 2010, when the sitting government of Poland and a central swath of its intelligentsia was lost in a stunning plane crash. The 2011 Russian crash investigation report prompts more questions than the it answers, beginning with: Why hasn't Russia returned the Polish plane's black boxes to Poland? Why doesn't the international community, so-called, want to find out? Has the West, once again, become complicit in another Big Lie to come out of Moscow?

Looking past all too obvious top 10 story lists, it's well worth noting Andrew McCarthy's timely jeremiad -- "The surrender is complete now..."-- in a piece today at NRO where he picks up on a recent report in The Hindu claiming that Yusef al-Qaradawi, smoothie sheikh of jihad, is mediating secret talks between the US and the Taliban. I do hope they're serving tea. It would make a nice bookend, if not homage to the surrender process's beginnings in "teatime for terrorists," as noted in a column of mine on the first "secret" talks between the US and jihadists in Iraq going back to July 5, 2005.

Over at PJM, Patrick Poole has done yeoman work with his "Not Top 10 List" of national security fiascos to help us all articulate why we are sputtering into our champage glasses on hearing Obama National Security Advisor John Brennan tells us "President Obama has been, I think, very singularly focused on doing everything possible to keep the American people safe,"

Note especially Patrick's point #6 (in chronological order): "Obama backs overthrow of Gaddafi, installs al-Qaeda-friendly, Shariah-compliant regime in Libya (March-present)."

This, I submit, is the story of the year, if not the decade. Ten years after 9/11, the United States of America switched sides, and no one, not the American people as represented by Congress, not even the GOP presidential contenders, noticed. Talk about a catastrophic crash.

This week's column:

Tis the season for media list-mania, and (true confession) I always am mildly surprised upon viewing Top 10 story lists to find that I've forgotten some humdingers. Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011?

In fact, given a tally of my own columns, jihad is the top story of 2011, just as it has been since at least 2001. Not that the media see it that way, of course; they see the spread of Islam's law and call it "diversity" in the West or "Arab Spring" in the Middle East. They are blind to its implications, they apologize for its depredations and, in general, they commit professional malfeasance by misrepresenting the facts. Then again, at least they cover it.

The same isn't true for the following story, which I submit is the great unsolved mystery of 2011. What really happened in the forest at Smolensk, Russia, when a Polish aircraft carrying Poland's national leadership crashed in April 2010, killing all 96 people on board, including Poland's president and first lady?

The answers Russia presented in its 2011 crash report are wholly unsatisfactory. Indeed, the Moscow-controlled crash investigation seems to have been designed to suppress or tamper with evidence to exonerate Russia of all responsibility for an accident, or any guilt for a crime. Like a tired rerun of an old horror movie, the Russian pattern of investigation into the 2010 Smolensk crash is the Russian pattern of investigation into the 1940 Katyn Forest massacre.

It's hard to overstate the significance of that fateful flight by those Polish leaders, now deceased. They lost their lives trying to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Katyn, the mass murder of 22,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia killed by Stalin in 1940 to make way for a pro-Soviet, communist Poland. After Nazi German troops discovered their graves in 1943, Stalin denied responsibility for this crime against humanity. Roosevelt and Churchill let him, thus joining in a Big Lie; Stalin's successors lied about it until Boris Yeltsin came along in 1995. The 2010 anniversary was to be a public, ceremonial Russian admission of guilt. That those who cared so much about Katyn were killed -- and quite possibly assassinated -- nearby is one of history's darkest ironies.

The Russians assert that Polish pilot error, supposedly induced by pressure to land from the Polish president himself, caused the crash. Poles, particularly those associated with the late president's conservative Law and Justice party, see something far more sinister. In this worst-case scenario, Russian air controllers incorrectly informed Polish pilots they were on the proper glide path when that wasn't true. On purpose? If so, the world has witnessed mass assassination of a government. And done nothing.

I don't claim to judge the evidence. But it's clear an impartial investigation is warranted, due to a Moscow-run investigative process marked by irregularities. These include the red flag that Russia has refused to return the black boxes of the Polish plane to Poland. Other irregularities, as summarized in a November 2011 Polish document known as the Smolensk Status Report, include the fact that crash evidence was crudely destroyed (including by bulldozers), tampered with and lied about. (Russian investigators claimed no radar video recording existed, for example, but then cited it in the crash report.) The document notes that some Russian pathological reports on victims included descriptions of organs that had been surgically removed before the crash.

A glaring discrepancy concerns the cockpit voice recording (CVR). To prove the pilots were under third-party pressure to land, the Russians reported that a Polish crew member twice says "he will go crazy" if the plane doesn't land. Both the Polish Investigation Committee and the Polish Prosecutor's Office publicly contended that no such statement was made and that the Russians altered the CVR to create the statement.

In 1952, Congress investigated the Katyn Forest massacre and proved Soviet guilt; in 2010 and 2011, there were calls in Congress for an independent investigation into the Smolensk crash. Such an investigation is urgently required in 2012, and not only to solve the mystery of a vexing crash. We must find out whether the West has once again been party to a Big Lie out of Moscow.

A New "Silent Night" Descends on Austria

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 10:32:00 GMT

This week's syndicated column:

Ah, to be in Vienna at Yuletide. Streets sparkle with the lights of the Christkindlmarkts, the traditional markets that spring up for the season. Skaters circle the rink outside the picturesque Rathaus (City Hall). Merrymakers warm their hands on cups of gluhwein (mulled wine). What could possibly be missing?

Freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech no longer exists in Austria, as definitively proven by the Vienna high court. This week, a judge upheld the conviction against Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff on the following charge: "denigration of religious beliefs of a legally recognized religion." In simplest terms, this means that Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff speaks the truth about Islam, and in Austria, as in other nations across the Western world currently transitioning to sharia (Islamic law), speaking the truth about Islam is not tolerated, and, more and more, is against the law.

What did my friend Elisabeth say that the Vienna high court ruled verboten? Elisabeth was convicted in February 2011 of "denigration" of Islam because in the course of a seminar she was teaching on Islam she stated that "Muhammad had a thing for little girls."

This statement is demonstrably true. According to an authoritative Islamic text (hadith), Muhammad married his wife Aisha when she was six years old. According to the same hadith, Muhammad engaged in sexual intercourse with his "wife" when she was nine. This, at the very least, constitutes "a thing" for little girls. It also constitutes child rape under Western law and Judeo-Christian-derived morality. In all too many Islamic societies where Mohammed's example is emulated, such child rape in "wedlock" is not a crime; indeed, it is permissible under sharia.

In fact, the court didn't contest this. In both Elisabeth's initial trial and her recent appeal, the factual basis of her statement didn't come under judicial attack. Elisabeth is right, and the court knows it. What the Vienna court has twice defined now as being outside the law of Austria is the negative opinion her remark conveyed regarding Muhammad's record of deviance from Western traditions forbidding sexual intercourse with children. (Brava, Elisabeth.) It is wrong, according to the Austrian court, to look down on sex with children if the alleged perp, centuries ago, was the Islamic prophet.

As Henrik Rader Clausen put it, live-blogging the proceedings for the blog Gates of Vienna, Elisabeth, in the court's eyes, expressed "an excess of opinion that can not be tolerated. It is a ridiculing that cannot be justified." Cannot be tolerated, cannot be justified by whom, by what? The answer is by Islamic law. It is literally against Islamic law to criticize or expose Islam or its prophet (Muhammad) in any adverse way. This prohibition against freedom of conscience is now part of Austrian law as well. That the verdict upheld against Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff actually imperils the most innocent and vulnerable among us -- little girls whose molestation the courts have implicitly excused as a religious rite -- only underscores the depravity of the Vienna high court.

Where, exactly, does this leave all of the rest of us in that community of nations whose calendars, despite the press of Islamization, still culminate in Christmas? I offer in response a clarifying quotation that pegs our existential whereabouts exactly. It comes from Afshin Ellian, a Dutch columnist, law professor, and professor of citizenship, social cohesion and multiculturalism at the Leiden University, who in 1983 fled Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic Revolution in Iran.

In early 2010, Ellian, commenting on the trial of Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders for allegedly anti-Islamic statements, had this to say:

"If you cannot say that Islam is a backward religion and that Muhammad is a criminal, then you are living in an Islamic country, my friend, because there you also cannot say such things. I may say Christ was a fag and Mary was a whore, but apparently I should stay off of Muhammad."

Merry Christmas.

From the Vault 4: Looking Back on Iraq

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 23:47:00 GMT

L. Paul Bremer visits the Women's Center in Karbala, February 2004

---

Another entry in the Iraq "journal" -- a column from February 2004, reposted below.

The set-up: It's nearly one year after the US invasion, and nearly eight years before US troops finally withdraw from Iraq. We are at a turning point only we don't know it. In fact, the charade is becoming untenable even before the props are all in place. Looking back, naive US hopes for "equal rights" in Islamic Iraq promoted around a "women's center" in Karbala (described below) are emblematic of the policy failures to come. Almost symbolically, the following month in March 2004, the center's leading proponent, Fern Holland, a 34-year-old CPA employee, would be shot and killed by men in Iraqi police uniforms.

More directly pertinent to US policy, the US-backed Iraqi Governing Council (remember them?) had just voted in December 2003 to remove family law from secular jurisdiction and place it under sharia (Islamic law), relegating American projects such as "women's centers" to the land of delusion. It is tragically interesting to note the efforts of L. Paul Bremer (remember him?) to grapple with the emergence of sharia into deliberations on the Iraqi consitution. Once it became clear that the constitution would enshrine sharia because the culture enshrined sharia, the American project was doomed. This fundamental flaw of "nation-building" is something that our leaders should have figured out at some point, due to some exertion along a learning curve. But no. Instead, they simply ignored the whole Islamic context of life in the umma, and still do.

This ignorance and blindness and denial mar US policy in the Islamic world to this day. Looking back, it is clear that such blindness -- let's call it naivete at this relatively early point in the war -- is what permitted Charles Krauthammer, as noted below, to lay out a design for American victory through "seizing territory and leaving something behind" -- democracy. Full disclosure: At this point in the past, I still buy the policy based on a rejection of sharia (when pigs fly...).

Krauthammer's words are worth noting because they describe the main goal the US set for itself in Iraq: "Establishing civilized, decent, non-belligerent, pro-Western polities in Afghanistan and Iraq ... would, like the flipping of Germany and Japan, change the strategic balance in the fight against Arab-Islamic radicalism."

We failed to achieve this goal and won't admit it -- or, more important, why. In fact, the totally absurd American (infidel) project to remake (Islamic) Iraq and Afghanistan as allies in the war on "terror" (jihad) has been conveniently forgotten altogether.

2.23.04

"Staring down sharia law"

Another big story has come out of Iraq with little media fanfare -- and this is one with colossal implications.

Recently, L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. official in Iraq, toured a new women's center in Karbala. (The center occupies a former Ba'athist Party headquarters -- nice touch.) There, citing a 2003 United Nations report that pegged the poverty and non-productivity of the Arab-Muslim world to the repression of half its workforce -- women -- under Islamic sharia law, Bremer touted the equal rights and full participation of women in the new Iraq.

This topic was apt, particularly since the U.S.-backed Iraqi Governing Council voted in late December to withdraw Iraqi family law matters from their secular jurisdiction and place them under an undefined Islamic sharia law. Such a legal maneuver could subject women to underage marriages, polygamous marriages, on-the-spot divorces ("I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you," is all a husband has to say in certain sharia proceedings), unfair inheritance laws and other terrible inequities.

Bremer has not approved the Islamization of Iraqi family law. (Nor, as Paul Marshall reported at National Review Online, has Bremer intervened in the Islamization of Iraq's universities, nor the peremptory removal of a female deputy minister for whom hardliners refused to work.) Against such a political backdrop, Bremer discussed the current draft of the interim Iraqi constitution, which is due Feb. 28. The draft designates Islam the state religion of Iraq, Bremer said, and "a source of inspiration for the law" -- not the only source of inspiration for that law.

What would happen, Bremer was asked, if Iraqi leaders write an interim constitution inspired exclusively by Islamic law? "Our position is clear," Bremer replied in an unforgivably underreported answer picked up by the Associated Press. "It can't be law until I sign it." This statement strongly suggests Bremer would veto an Islamic charter -- which, of course, he should for the sake of liberty and justice for all Iraqis. Equal rights before the law do not exist under Islamic law. One citizen, one vote does not exist under Islamic law. Freedom of worship does not exist under Islamic law. Minorities -- that is, non-Muslims -- enjoy rights and protections at the pleasure of the Muslim community that are ever-subject to the capriciousness of a rights-canceling fatwa. Indeed, Islamic law is not the basis of a religion, as the Judeo-Christian world understands religion, but is rather the basis of a controlling ideology that is nothing short of totalitarian.

Sharia's adherents, of course, would disagree. In a January article about the Governing Council's family law decision, every judge and lawyer the Los Angeles Times interviewed in Baghdad insisted on the superiority of sharia law to civil law.

"Sharia is from God, the law is man-made, and sharia is better because what comes from Allah is fixed," said Kadhim Jubori, 55, who has practiced family law for 33 years in Baghdad. ("I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you" is fixed?) Fixed or not, U.S. efforts to tend democracy's roots in Iraq would wither under any sharia-based constitution.

This would bode ill, but not just for Iraq. The fact is, as columnist Charles Krauthammer said recently in a magisterial address to the American Enterprise Institute, "You win by taking territory -- and leaving something behind." We won Iraq by taking territory -- and now must leave the basis for democracy behind. Not sharia.

Such a policy -- Krauthammer calls it "democratic globalism" -- combines realism with an idealistic commitment to human freedom, tempered, he cautioned, by "strategic necessity." That means that the United States commits blood and treasure only in "places central to the larger war against the existential enemy, the enemy that poses a global mortal threat to freedom."

Fifty years ago, that described Germany and Japan, vortexes of fascism. Both nations, Krauthammer noted, "were turned, by nation-building, into bulwarks against the next great threat to freedom, Soviet communism." Today, he continued, the new global threat to freedom is "the new existential enemy, the Arab-Islamic totalitarianism that has threatened us in both its secular and religious forms for the quarter-century since the Khomeini revolution of 1979." He continued: "Establishing civilized, decent, non-belligerent, pro-Western polities in Afghanistan and Iraq ... would, like the flipping of Germany and Japan, change the strategic balance in the fight against Arab-Islamic radicalism."

Krauthammer admits we may fail even as he insists we must try. Certainly, the first thing to do is for Bremer -- and the American people -- to be prepared to veto a sharia-based constitution in Iraq.

From the Vault 3: Looking Back on Iraq

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 23:33:00 GMT

The retrospective continues.

Trouble from the start.

4.23.03

"How democratic will Iraqi democracy be?"

After roughly 100 Iraqi exiles, sheiks and clerics gathered in a fortified and air-conditioned tent in Iraq this week to begin piecing together their country's future, U.S. Central Command headquarters released a 13-point summary of the meeting that included the outcome of the historic first vote in Saddam-free Iraq. The Iraqi proto-body voted to meet again in 10 days, and also voted on a string of high-minded resolutions.

Point one said "Iraq must be a democracy"; point three said "the rule of law must be paramount"; and point four stated that the country "must be built on respect for diversity including the role of women." No word as yet on how "respect" for "diversity including the role of women" translates into legal or political rights; maybe that comes at the next meeting.

Meanwhile, there's something positive to be said about the plainspoken certitude with which some of these democratic building blocks are being laid out, at least on paper. But such energy is lacking in another key point on the list. Point six is downright phlegmatic which it comes to noting, merely, that, "the meeting discussed the role of religion in state and society."

It did, did it? Well, what did "the meeting" say? Nothing that could be distilled into a declarative point of consensus. Which shouldn't be surprising. The most intractable problem facing democratic reform in Iraq (or anywhere else in the Muslim world) is how to reconcile that founding principle of democracy -- the separation of church and state -- with Islamic law, which is predicated on the inseparable union of religious and political power.

"Those who would like to separate religion from the state are simply dreaming," a conference participant told The New York Times, echoing a line that resounds with much of Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority. At least one Iraqi Shiite cleric at the big-tent planning session, Sheik Ayad Jamal al-Din, however, disagreed. "Dictators may not speak in the name of religion," he said, calling for a "system of government that separates belief from politics." (Let's hope such a "system" is an improvement on a dictatorship that is secular.) Sheik al-Din's is a rare voice of dissent.

More typical is the comment of another Shiite imam to Agence France Presse: "Our objective is to set up an Islamic state, because this is the supreme ambition of all Arab and Muslim countries. All Muslim countries would like to see their governments applying sharia (Islamic law)."

This doesn't bode well for democracy, fledgling or otherwise. As Islamic scholar Ibn Warraq explains in his book Why I am Not a Muslim (Prometheus, 1995), Islamic law "tries to legislate every aspect of an individual's life. The individual is not at liberty to think or decide for himself; he has but to accept God's rulings as infallibly interpreted by the doctors of law," or clerics. Another problem is that Islamic law limits, or even "denies the rights of women and non-Muslim religious minorities." Which, of course, is no way to run a democracy.

We have already begun to see elements of sharia re-introduced into post-Taliban Afghanistan, where, as Freedom House's Nina Shea has warned, a "theological iron curtain" is dropping across the country even as the United States pours in hundreds of millions of political and economic reconstruction dollars. Will that happen in Iraq? It's too soon to tell, of course; but not too soon to make ourselves acutely aware of the possibility.

Nor is it too soon to develop a really good nose for similar developments elsewhere. Citing an article in the Israeli newspaper Makor Rishon, Cybercast News Service reports that the new Palestinian constitution -- the creation of which is considered a prerequisite for reforming the Palestinian Authority -- defines not a democratic republic, but an Islamic state. Not a good sign. And this week in France, La Republique found itself taking an unexpected step closer to European-style sharia with the surprising electoral success of the Union of Islamic Organizations, an Islamist group that preaches Islamic law for France, a place where 5 to 10 million Muslims call home. Having won a big chunk of seats on the new Islamic council created by the government to foster "an official (read: moderate) Islam for France," the decidedly un-moderate group has earned its place at the government table.

This prompted surprisingly tough talk from France's Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy: "It is precisely because we recognize the right of Islam to sit at the table of the republic that we will not accept any deviation.

Any prayer leader whose views run contrary to the values of the republic will be expelled." And there was more: "Islamic law will not apply anywhere," he said, "because it is not the law of the French republic."

Not yet, anyway. But who knows what can happen in a democracy?

From the Vault 2: Looking Back on Bush and Islam

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 23:00:00 GMT

This second piece in my "from the vault" retrospective dates all the way back to 2002. It stands as a reminder of how assiduously George W. Bush played Islamic booster-in-chief after 9/11 -- a role that did great damage in confusing and stifling national debate. Meanwhile, though, in 2002 I'm still holding out at least some faint hope for Islamic reform, which I later came to realize would be nice and everything but was no strategy for Uncle Sam to hang everything on. This column also marks what may be the first appearance of one of this blog's all-time faves, Abu "Has George Bush Ever Actually Read the Koran?" Qatada. NB: Khaled Abou El Fadl, referred to below as an "outspoken liberal Muslim," has since been unmasked as a stealth jihadist. Oh well.

11.26.02

"Something to contemplate this Ramadan"

Part of me wanted to let Ramadan, Islam's month-long holiday of contemplative fasting and Thanksgiving, slide. Sure, there has been a mini-surge in published musings by American Muslims on the cruel and unusual punishment of airport security, but, some things, as they say, never change.

More intriguing is a scheduled flurry of administration-sponsored Ramadan dinners. Even this inspires only minor head scratching over the specifically Islamic whirl of events to be hosted by the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department -- unmatched, of course, by any consciously Christian, Jewish or even Druid soirees. No point wondering what makes Islam so special. I haven't understood the Bush push to console and placate Muslims over 9/11 since 9/12. This round of Ramadan outreach looks like more of the same.

Yet, maybe things are a little different now. The president's rhetoric on Islam hasn't changed much since his "Islam is peace" line of last year, and his "Islam is a peace-loving faith" line of this month, but in the repetition over the long haul, some almost-Orwellian echoes may be heard.

"Islam is a faith that brings comfort to people," Mr. Bush said last month, one day before the world shook from a blast in Bali set by Islamic jihadists (one of whom was nabbed when his motorcycle was spotted outside a local mosque). October was also a month, the New Republic reports, in which American law professor Khaled Abou El Fadl, an outspoken liberal Muslim who's received death threats since 9/11 and required 24-hour security to attend a debate in Qatar where he contested the morality of suicide bombing. None of which is to say, of course, that Islam doesn't bring comfort to people, but maybe that's not all it brings.

"It's a faith based upon love, not hate," Mr. Bush said in September, a month in which a Palestinian Muslim suicide bomber took the lives of 19 Jewish Israelis on a bus in a by-now common act of premeditated mass murder sanctioned -- indeed, encouraged -- by some of Islam's most senior religious authorities.

"Islam is a peaceful religion, a religion that respects others," Mr. Bush said last week as headlines told us a man in Iran and a woman in Nigeria stood condemned to death under sharia (Islamic) law, he for "apostasy" (renouncing his faith), she for the capital crime of adultery. While our president surely doesn't see himself as defender of the faith, his inexplicable tendency toward the slogans of boosterism have caused him to gloss over crucial pieces of the big picture. Which hasn't gone unnoticed, by the way, in the deeper reaches of the Islamic world. As reported by the Washington Post last year, Abu Qatada, a British-based imam with links to Al Qaeda, put it this way: "I am astonished by President Bush when he claims there is nothing in the Quran that justifies jihad violence in the name of Islam. ... Is he some kind of Islamic scholar? Has he ever actually read the Quran?"

Thanks to, among other things, the separation of church and state, it's not in the president's job description to be an Islamic scholar; but neither is it incumbent upon him to take up the pom-pom for old Islam. This seems particularly clear now that Mr. Bush has decided to weigh in on the blunt critiques of Islam offered by several conservative Christian leaders who have voiced their reactions (negative) to the violence at the core of Islam's unreconstructed traditions of jihad. Islam is violent, said one. Islam is evil, said another; and besides, said another, Mohammed was a pedophile.

Historic truths or baseless slanders? If the president has his way, we'll never know. Such remarks "do not reflect the sentiments of my government or the sentiments of most Americans," Mr. Bush noted pointedly last week. "Ours is a country based upon tolerance ... and we welcome people of all faiths in America. And we're not going to let the war on terror or terrorists cause us to change our values."

But what if terrorists believe in terror -- for the sake of Islam? Not only does a willful official blindness to the militant Islamic-ness of the terrorist foe undermine our war effort, a point columnist Daniel Pipes has most recently made, it is also a detriment to any peace that follows. Just think: If the President of the United States -- the Great Satan's great Satan -- believes, as this one has variously and repetitively stated, that unreformed Islam is already the ultimate in peace, comfort, charity, compassion, honesty, inspiration, love, mercy and justice, then you have to wonder what on earth would possess Islam's liberals to undertake the arduous and even dangerous work of forcing the religion out of the Middle Ages and into the 21st century.

Something to contemplate this Ramadan season.

Old Soldiers Don't Fade Away ...

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 14:58:00 GMT

From the WSJ:

German engineering giant Siemens AG is adding heft to its campaign to win more business with the U.S. government by appointing former U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal to a supervisory role.

The company is expected to announce Monday that the retired four-star general will chair a board overseeing a newly created unit aimed at securing more and bigger contracts with the federal government.

What's the old line: Old soliders don't fade away; they just become ... lobbyists?

From the Vault: Looking Back on Iraq

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 14:25:00 GMT

Writing a weekly column is much like keeping a journal. It preserves thoughts and events of the day that would otherwise slip or blur in memory. Now that US forces have withdrawn from Iraq, I decided to look back on some of my many weekly entries on the topic to see if any of them might be of use in taking stock of what happened -- and what didn't happen.

Here, from the vault, is a column published almost exactly 5 years ago to the day on something that had just been newly announced in Washington: the "surge."

12.23.06: "The pitfalls of `victory' in Iraq"

Sure, let's go ahead and say this new "troop surge" being bandied about Washington comes off, and tens of thousands of additional American troops pacify enough of Iraq to pull off what President Bush this week called the Iraqi dream -- "a stable government that can defend, govern and sustain itself."

OK. So then what? It's not hard to imagine that the United States would take the first opportunity to wish that dream-come-true government well in defending, governing and sustaining itself, and then high-tail it back home.

But that's no strategy. That's an escape hatch. What happens after that?

Looking back on, lo, our many costly years of liberation and occupation in Iraq, what would it turn out that we had actually won? In other words, what, in this best-case scenario, is "victory" supposed to look like?

This is an important question. But it's one that is never, ever asked, let alone discussed. For reasons I can't altogether explain, tunnel vision on Iraq has led to a kind of dead-end thinking on Iraq. Amid what amounts to a group failure of imagination on the part of our Big Brass and Deep Thinkers, no one takes into account, or even seems curious about what exactly "victory" in Iraq might mean, or, more important, might gain for the United States of America and friends.

To the president, victory must seem self-evident, which is why he will say things like, "Success in Iraq will be success." Taking the opposite tack, the new secretary of defense explains also that "failure would be a calamity." But neither of them -- and no one else, either -- offers much more in the way of hard detail. "Success" may well be the stabilized Iraqi government the president waxes pre-nostalgic about, and "failure" may well be the absence of that "success," but none of this talk counts for enlightening debate.

What I want to know is what happens if this much-discussed American troop surge actually manages to secure Iraq, which then emerges as a natural ally of Iran and perhaps Syria? Will we salute U.S. efforts that brought into the (Islamic) world another Shi'ite dominated, pro-Hezbollah, anti-American, anti-Israel sharia state with lots of oil? To me, such "success" sounds more like the "failure" that is usually described, roughly, as the loss of American face or the transformation of Iraq into a terrorist haven. In the aftermath of any "victory" in Iraq that benefits Iran more than the United States, our face wouldn't look so hot with all that egg on it, and the world would surely have a new terrorist haven.

So maybe "more troops" to shore up the Iraqi government doesn't give us a bona fide win in the so-called war on terror -- which is, of course, what this intervention in Iraq was supposed to achieve in the first place. That's not a failure of our great military; it's a failure of our best intentions. The next question is, what can we salvage from battle for the United States?

The only way we can even try to answer this question is to take a longer, wider view that takes in more than just the map of Iraq, which remains, after all, the arbitrary creation of Anglo-French diplomats carving up conquered landmasses after World War I. We need to refocus this 21st century war effort of ours around the specific needs of the United States as it fights against what we persist in calling "terror," but which really comes down to the expansion of Islam and Islamic power -- via terrorism, both gangland (Al Qaeda) and state (Iran), oil, massive demographic movement, and the resulting introduction of sharia (Islamic law) -- into the West. If we were to acknowledge this over-arching mission and recognize its urgency, "stabilizing" Iraq -- which now means spending American blood and treasure to try to quell millennia-old Sunni-Shiite barbarism -- might not figure prominently in the fight.

Stopping Iran and its allies in mass murder from becoming a genocidal nuclear outlaw and world-class menace; stopping the liberty-sapping spread of sharia into the heretofore non-Muslim world; stopping U.S. aid to countries that foment jihad against us; stopping our addict-like dependence on Islamic oil: These are the urgent missions of our day. They are grand objectives on whose success the future of the West turns. I'm increasingly dubious we can make the same case for "success" in Iraq.

Please Sign 1Lt. Michael Behenna's Petition for Clemency

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 14:54:00 GMT

A November update from Scott and Vicki Behenna (which I missed it when it arrived in my inbox last month):

To the thousands of supporters of 1Lt Michael Behenna,

It has been awhile since we sent out an update. Michael's lawyers have filed the petition to the Court of Appeals of the Armed Forces (CAAF). The CAAF is the highest court for the military justice system and is similar to the Supreme Court as they do not have to take your appeal. There were four issues on Michael's case presented to the CAAF and we would expect to hear within 30-60 days whether the CAAF will hear his case. If the CAAF does not choose to hear any of the issues, then Michael’s appeals are done. So you can see the importance of this appeal. We desperately need your prayers so that Michael’s conviction will be seen by the CAAF for what it is – an abomination of the military justice system. The CAAF judges are civilians, so it is our hope that they will look at Michael's case much differently than how the military judges have thus far.

Michael has his next Clemency Hearing the first week of January 2012. Although the Clemency Board disappointed us last year in not granting any Clemency (despite Michael being a model prisoner for the past two years), we know we will get to present Michael’s situation before a new panel. In addition, we are hopeful that with the US military leaving Iraq at the end of December, that the atmosphere of appeasement towards the Iraqi government may be different. If you want to help with Michael's Clemency you can draft a letter to the Clemency Board. A sample clemency letter is included below, but we ask that you PLEASE change up the language and add some additional thoughts, so the letters don't all look the same.

Also, we would like to get Michael's petition (currently 28,400) to over 35,000 signatures before our meeting with the Clemency Board. We would really appreciate it if you could blast out this request to everyone you can. You can sign the petition here.

Michael is handling his prison life remarkably well and is not caught up in the negative mindsets and daily doldrums of incarceration. His sights remain firmly on the day he will be released and finally returns home to his family. He very much appreciates all the support that you have given him and looks forward to being able to thank each of you for all your efforts on his behalf. Thanksgiving is just a couple of weeks away and despite our struggles to free Michael from this injustice we have much to be thankful for. As the holidays near and Michael spends his 1000th day behind bars please keep him in your prayers and consider sending him a card or letter at:

Michael Behenna #87503

1300 N. Warehouse Road

Ft. Leavenworth, KS 66027-2304

Lastly, a Special Forces soldier who Michael befriended in Leavenworth named Kelly Stewart has a new book about Stewart's politicized military trial (the author talked about Michael's case in the forward). I won't ruin the story for you, but suffice it to say that it is the most tragic, unjust conviction I have ever encountered. The book is called Three Days in August and can be purchased at the following link: http://threedaysinaugust.com/ Please pray that Kelly will receive a new trial so that he can clear his name once and for all.

Yours in the fight for justice,

Scott & Vicki Behenna

http://www.defendmichael.com

SAMPLE CLEMENCY LETTER

Deputy Assistant Secretary Mitrano

c/o Army Clemency and Parole Board

1901 South Bell Street

Arlington, VA 22202

Re: Clemency for 1LT Michael Behenna

Dear Ms. Mitrano,

I have followed the case of 1LT Michael Behenna since hearing about his conviction for killing an al-Qaida operative. I have read many news accounts about his conviction, the email written by the government forensic expert Dr. Herbert MacDonell, and the outstanding background of this young man, including his Officer’s Evaluation. I request, on his behalf, that you grant him clemency and immediately release him. His immediate release would give him the same opportunity that our military is affording enemy combatants who are being released in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Please consider the “fog” this young man was operating under after having survived an attack on his platoon which took the lives of two of his soldiers just three weeks before, and the questionable decision to require 1LT Behenna to return the terrorist home. I have many questions about his conviction, especially hearing that critical evidence was withheld from his defense counsel and the jury. Give this young man the benefit of the doubt and release him so that he can begin to pick up the pieces of his life.

Sincerely,

The Rich Fantasy World of the Iraq War Hawks

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 19:37:00 GMT

This week's column:

I wish I could find the perfect label for the depths of denial and the heights of delusion manifested in Frederick and Kimberly Kagan's latest declarations on Iraq, published this week in The Washington Post as "opinion."

"Fantasy," is more like it. The premise of these two military advisers closely associated with the "surge" strategy in Iraq is that Western-style nation-building there failed not because the policy was an exercise in hothouse academic utopianism (leftist cant) that withered in the real-world conditions of the Islamic Republic of Iraq, but because the exercise didn't go on long enough.

Even as our troops withdraw after eight fruitless years, the husband-wife team still sees "American core interests" in Iraq, including "ensuring that Iraq contributes to the security of the Middle East, rather than undermining it through state collapse, civil war or the establishment of a sectarian dictatorship."

Is that all? Ensuring that Iraq doesn't collapse, enter civil war or establish a sectarian dictatorship requires an indefinite occupation on a colossal scale (why?) or the total transformation of Iraqi Man (read: Muslim Man), which is the Frankensteinian basis of "winning hearts and minds," the cornerstone of counterinsurgency theory (COIN).

In another epoch, armies of Christian missionaries might have been the force of choice to rework Islamic culture to such an end; then again, Western nations haven't fared so well in such endeavors. (Remember the Crusades.) COIN-inspired nation-building is the contemporary, secular alternative. Its adherents burn with a blind zeal that admits no cultural difference between the West and Islam, that sees most arrogantly a universal appeal in their own Judeo-Christian-derived values.

The only stumbling block between COIN values and Islamic acceptance, as COIN elites see it, is PR. The sales pitch. Take off those protective, ballistic glasses, soldier. Eat parasite-ridden goat and wreck your digestive system maybe forever, grunt. Smile. Get to know the people. Walk those roads (bang) and see that those wells and bridges are built, those mosques mended, those tribal conflicts settled, and don't call in fire support when a "kinetic" incident occurs or the "population" will think you don't trust them. And whatever you do, don't forget the payola.

But remaking human beings, "re-educating" people to conform to ideological goals, doesn't ever work out well, whether the policy is enacted through bribery by nation-builders with guns bearing gifts, or?through force by commissars destroying civilization with gulags.

No doubt the Kagans would disagree with my premise. They see no gulf so existential between the West and the Islamic world. In their eyes, it's an easy-peasy fix when it comes to Iraq, requiring just two conditions. "First," they write, "Iraq must be able to control, police and defend its territory, airspace and waters. Second, Iraq must preserve and solidify the multiethnic and cross-sectarian political accommodation that was established in 2008 and 2009 but that has been eroding since the formation of the current government."

Again, is that all? Not only are these beyond Iraqi competence and scope, they aren't American interests. They are Iraqi interests, if Iraqis care. They are also international interests that global interventionists arbitrarily obsess about, whether in Iraq, Libya or any other hot spot du jour. It is not in America's interest whether Iraq preserves and solidifies multiethnic and cross-sectarian blah blah blah. It is, however, in the interest of the unreconstructed Iraq Hawks, the COINdinistas, and their political allies because these are the theoretical justifications for their failed missions. In many ways, Obama's reluctant troop withdrawal, which, last time I looked, fulfilled George W. Bush's agreement with Iraq, is the best thing that has happened to them. It keeps the fantasy of "if only" alive.

"Neither condition is likely to be met in the coming years," the Kagans write. Thanks to Obama, they hereby absolve themselves of any and all responsibility for the impossibility of these conditions -- the conditions of COIN nation-building -- ever being met. They are free. Or so they seem to think.

But maybe there's a chance to take another whack at things. Noting violations of international agreements by Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the Kagans write: "Responsible nations should insist that Iraq demonstrate its commitment to those obligations. The president should tell Maliki in no uncertain terms that Washington will hold him to account in the international arena if Iraq does not."

Excuse me, isn't that where we came in?

The View from the Tower

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 13:28:00 GMT

If I were a psychiatrist I could find the perfect label for the depths of denial or the heights of delusion that manifest themselves in Frederick and Kimberly Kagan's latest declarations on Iraq published in the Washington Post as "opinion." "Fantasy" is a more like it. Their premise is that the American nation-building exercise in Iraq failed not because nation-building is pure academic utopianism (leftist cant) that withers in real-world conditions (Islam), but because the exercise didn't go on long enough.

They pre-emptively score Prez Obama for the happy talk that's the predictable outcome of his meeting today with Iraq's Maliki. Fair enough. The image of Iraq he is sure to present, they write, "is a mirage." But if we're talking about disconnection from reality, the Kagans have once again pulled their own plug.

They write:

Even after the last U.S. soldier departs, America’s core interests in Iraq include:

●Ensuring that Iraq contributes to the security of the Middle East, rather than undermining it through state collapse, civil war or the establishment of a sectarian dictatorship;

●Ensuring that terrorist groups affiliated with al-Qaeda or backed by Iran cannot establish sanctuaries;

●Promoting an Iraq that abides by its international responsibilities;

●Containing Iranian influences that are harmful to U.S. interests in Iraq and the region; and

●Signaling U.S. commitment to the region at a pivotal moment in history.

Is that all? Just to take the first bullet point, "ensuring" Iraq doesn't collapse, descend into civil war, or establish a sectarian dictatorship requires either an indefinite occupation on a colossal, non-supportable scale (why?), or the total transformation of Iraqi Man -- or Afghan Man (read: Muslim Man) -- which is the Frankensteinian basis of winning hearts and minds a la COIN. In another epoch, armies of Christian missionaries might have been the force of choice to rework Islamic culture to such an end; then again, Western nations haven't fared so well in such endeavors (remember the Crusades). COIN-spearheaded nation-buidling is the postmodern-day, secular alternative. Its adherents burn with a blind zeal that admits of no cultural difference between the West and Islam, that sees most arrogantly in their own Judeo-Christian-derived values a universal appeal. The only stumbling block between COIN values and Islamic acceptance, as COIN elites see it, is PR. The sales pitch. Take off those ballistic glasses, soldier. Eat parasite-ridden goat and wreck your digestive system maybe forever, grunt. Get to know the people. Walk those roads (bang) and build that "vital infrastructure," and don't call in fire support, or the "population" will think you don't trust them, and don't forget the payola.

This is not like taming a feral dog with a bone -- and that can be a dicey proposition. Remaking human beings, "re-educating" people to conform to ideological goals, doesn't work, whether the policy is enacted by nation-builders with guns bearing gifts, or comissars destroying civlization with gulags.

Back to the Kagans:

Securing these and other U.S. interests requires two basic conditions: First, Iraq must be able to control, police and defend its territory, airspace and waters. Second, Iraq must preserve and solidify the multi-ethnic and cross-sectarian political accommodation that was established in 2008 and 2009 but that has been eroding since the formation of the current government.

Not only are these beyond Iraqi competence and scope, they aren't American interests. They are Iraqi interests, if Iraqis care. They are also international interests which global interventionists arbitrarily obsess about, whether they exist in Iraq, Libya or any other hotspot de jour. It is not in America's interest whether Iraq preserves and solidifies ethnic or cross-sectarian blah blah. It is, however, in the interest of the Unreconstructed Iraq Hawks, the COINdinistas and their political allies because these are the theoretical justifications for their failed missions. In many ways, Obama's reluctant troop withdrawal, which, last time I looked, fulfilled George W. Bush's agreement with Iraq, is the best thing that has happened to them. It keeps the fantasy of "if only" alive.

"Neither condition is likely to be met in the coming years," the Kagans write. Thanks to Obama, they hereby absolve themselves of any and all responsibility for the failure of these conditions -- the conditions of COIN nation-building -- ever being met. They are free. Or so they seem to think.

They continue:

Despite enthusiastic rhetoric from Maliki and Defense Secretay Leon Panetta, Iraq is not able to defend its territory or airspace. ...

Hey, we tried. In fact, didn't Gen. Petraeus make his reputation in Iraq in part as the great trainer of Iraqi troops?

Iraqi security forces are unable to maintain their capabilities and equipment, much less meet new challenges. The only remaining U.S. training missions are for Iraqi police, and there are no agreements for training or supporting the military beyond year’s end. “How they deal with that gap” in defense capabilities, Helmick noted, “is really up to them.” ...

About time, I'd say. But the Kagans think it's up to us to continue training the obviously, patently, backwardly untrainable. And that's not all: Maliki, they take pains to explain, is actually a tinpot strongman! Maliki, they write, "is unwinding the multi-ethnic, cross-sectarian Iraqi political settlement." And it was so great before. Let freedom rain.

Despite the withdrawal of U.S. forces, Washington has leverage to affect Iraqi behavior. Iraq is a signatory to numerous treaties and a member of international organizations obliging it to respect human rights, ensure due process of law, and refrain from arbitrary or political detentions. Responsible nations should insist that Iraq demonstrate its commitment to those obligations. The president should tell Maliki in no uncertain terms that Washington will hold him to account in the international arena if Iraq does not.

Isn't that where we came in?

All bilateral military relations and security cooperation were governed by the expiring strategic agreement and must be established under new agreements. There is much that Washington could offer, including guaranteeing the security of Iraq’s land, sea and airspace until Iraq is able to defend itself and establishing a program of collective military training, exercises and exchanges to improve the quality of Iraqi forces....

Desperation.

An independent, stable and responsible Iraqi state is critical to U.S. interests in the Middle East.

No, an independent, stable and responsible domestic energy policy is critical to U.S. interests in the Middle East.

A substantive policy toward that end can result from a combined insistence that Iraq adhere to international laws and norms, pressure on Iraqi leaders to deepen the political settlements under such stress, and the positive incentives of genuine military cooperation.

The objective would not be to oust Maliki but to do what the 2008 Strategic Framework Agreement specified: “support and strengthen Iraq’s democracy and its democratic institutions as defined and established in the Iraqi Constitution, and in so doing, enhance Iraq’s capability to protect these institutions against all internal and external threats.”

We did that. It didn't work.

Such a policy would reflect U.S. values and could help ensure free, fair and inclusive elections in 2013, so the Iraqi people preserve the representative government to which so many in the Middle East aspire.

Everything looks beautiful in the view from the tower.

What's "Vital Infrastructure"?

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 02:43:00 GMT

Sapper Elijah Bond, 24, was born in Havant, Hampshire and grew up in St Austell, Cornwall. He joined the Corps of Royal Engineers in August 2008. He died from wounds sustained from an IED in Afghanistan on Thursday.

From the BBC report:

He had a vibrant personality and in quieter moments was an excellent chess player, a Ministry of Defence spokesman said. ...

"It was whilst on an engineer reconnaissance patrol helping to plan vital infrastructure for the local population that he paid the ultimate price."

RIP.

Too Many Government Secrets!

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 13:04:00 GMT

This week's syndicated column:

Last month, I noted that Democratic Sens. Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Jim Webb of Virginia had written to national archivist David S. Ferriero on Nov. 7, asking him to open the records of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, which Ferriero has summarily sealed for 20 years. Guess what? Webb's office tells me it still hasn't received a reply. Where's Wikileaks when you need it?

It's been about a year since the furor crescendoed over Wikileaks (see here, here, here, for example). Actually, "furor" is too mild a term. This was baying for blood. (Charles Krauthammer and Mike Huckabee talked about "execution," while Sarah Palin practically called in a drone strike herself.) Then and now, I consider the revelations of lying, incompetence and betrayal of foundational principle, as revealed by the Wikileaks organization's massive dumps of classified documents, to be a public service.

We heard an awful lot about "blood" being on Wikileaks' hands, but it all seemed to come down to egg on officials' faces. The fact is, a government of the people, by the people and for the people – whose officials, as information security experts Elizabeth Goitein and William Leonard recently wrote in the New York Times, "made 77 million decisions to classify information" in 2010 alone – should have the shutters yanked off so the sun can shine in.

Unfortunately, we just get more shutters. For example, the Obama administration just sealed the court records on the murder of federal agent Brian Terry, whose killers, Mexican drug smugglers, used weapons from a failed federal program to smuggle arms into Mexico. As Judicial Watch noted: "No one will know the reason for the confiscation of public court records in this case because the judge's decision to seal it was also sealed."

That's about as secret as it gets. What Wikileaks was dealing with was classified information the 4.2 million Americans with security clearances already could read.

Yes, you read that number right, but I'll write it again to make sure it sticks. In its first public count ever, the intelligence community reported to Congress in September that 4.2 million Americans have security clearances, with nearly 1.2 million of those being "Top Secret." Suddenly, the charges against Bradley Manning, the Army private who allegedly leaked tens of thousands of classified documents and whose pretrial hearings begin next week, fall into a new and quite sprawling context.

Manning faces life in prison for charges related to divulging national secrets. But literally millions of Americans have access to the same "secrets" Manning is alleged to have downloaded from a government server known as SIPRNet and passed to Wikileaks for publication on the Internet. And his civilian defense attorney, David E. Coombs, is arguing that the news those documents contained was not harmful to national security.

Maybe most of the documents shouldn't have been classified in the first place. Maybe most of the information they contained shouldn't have been denied to Us the People by our elected leaders.

Coombs also claims that the government is denying his client access to exculpatory evidence proving the leaks did no national harm, evidence to which Manning is entitled by law in order to mount his defense. So far, the government is – you guessed it – keeping that evidence a secret.

In a request filed in court last month (released in partly redacted form), Coombs asked for copies of several internal reviews of the Wikileaks material that he said were conducted by the White House, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department. All of them, Coombs claims, conclude the leaks weren't harmful to the nation because they conveyed dated information, low-level opinions or previously disclosed information. Quoting a published report, Coombs continued: "A congressional official briefed on the reviews stated that the administration felt compelled to say publicly that the revelations had seriously damaged American interests in order to bolster legal efforts to shut down the Wikileaks website and bring charges against the leakers."

More lies? More hypocrisy? The government must release its reviews so we can begin to find out.

Come to think of it, lies and hypocrisy, along with incompetence, were the major revelations of Wikileaks – which tells us the real dangers to U.S. national security are our own foreign-policy makers who shield themselves from public scrutiny with too much secrecy. And no one should go to jail for life for telling us that.

US General Invites Libyan "Officers" to US War Colleges

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 16:53:00 GMT

Question: When the Libyan "military" comes to US staff colleges -- a real possibility-- do they get to bring their flags of al Qaeda with them?

This is a joke, right? I'm dreaming, aren't I? Either give me a pitchfork, or wake me up when it's over.

From USA Today:

The United States is in discussions with Libya over ways to help rebuild the country's military, which the U.S. military considers essential to unify the country and bring rival militias under national control.

We're looking for ways in which we can be helpful," said Gen. Carter Ham, commander of U.S. Africa Command. "They have to find some way to form a national army.'

Who cares if Libya isn't a "nation," but a motley patchwork formerly run by a personality-cultish dictator?

In an interview with USA TODAY in Washington, Ham said the discussions had not reached the level of agreeing to specific cooperation. If the two countries do establish a relationship, it would not be the scale of U.S. efforts to rebuild the militaries of Iraq and Afghanistan.

That's how it always starts.

We'd like, for example, to begin having Libyan officers come to U.S. staff colleges," he said, adding that the United States could also sell Libya equipment and offer training.

How do we screen out the ones who killed Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan???

Estimates of the size of the Libyan army under dictator Moammar Gadhafi ranged from 50,000 to 130,000 soldiers. He used it to crack down on political rivals and sometimes to assist other dictators in the region, such as Uganda's Idi Amin.

Libya's military mostly disintegrated over the course of the revolt that began with protests in February. Some units defected to the rebel side, some fought alongside foreign mercenaries and indiscriminately bombed cities, and others broke under pressure from rebel forces and NATO airstrikes.

Sounds like great material for US training -- which has worked SO WELL in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Libya had an impressive arsenal for a small country, according to a report of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, with more than 4,000 tanks and other armored vehicles and 400 combat aircraft. Even so, combat-readiness on the equipment was "exceptionally low" and even its best combat units suffered from severe training and leadership problems, political favoritism and erratic training, the report said.

The new Libyan government is interested in maritime security, because of its long coastline, Ham said. That is also an area of defense in which the U.S. military can assist, he said.

Hey, why not a space program while we're at it? Libya has a lot of air above, too.

Ham said Libya's new leaders recognize the new military must be "inclusive" and not exclude professional officers from Gadhafi's military as long as they did not participate in atrocities.

In Iraq, efforts to exclude from the military even midlevel officials in Saddam Hussein's ruling Baath Party deepened divisions.

Michael Rubin, a former adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, said military training would be a good way to prevent the militias roaming the country from disrupting the country.

Maybe midnight basketball, too.

A well-run and professional army and navy automatically gains legitimacy at the expense of militias, casting the latter as gangs rather than protective forces, he said.

I repeat: military training has worked SO WELL in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Rubin said U.S. involvement would also create personal relationships with Libyan officers that would provide intelligence benefits and help prevent militant infiltration of the Libyan military by helping it institute background checks. The U.S. military has learned from its experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, where militias competed with national forces for the hearts of young fighters, that "the sooner we start the easier it will be," Rubin said.

If that's what the U.S. military learned from Iraq and Afghanistan, it has learned nothing.

The Pentagon has also expressed concern about weapons and ammunition that may fall into the hands of rogue elements inside or outside the country. Gadhafi is believed to have stocked 20,000 portable surface-to-air missiles.

Ham said that some of the mercenaries who fought for Gadhafi might have brought weapons with them when they fled the country. There is "no hard evidence of that but my instinct tells me that's a pretty likely outcome," Ham said.

Unerring Ham.

Tough Job But a Lot of Laughs

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 14:20:00 GMT

"We are working closely with the Afghan government to wean the Afghan economy off international assistance and lay the foundation for sustainable, private-sector-led growth."

-- Thomas Nides, Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources and cheerleader for "the New Silk Road."

Harmonic Convergence: Against US

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 13:34:00 GMT

The new three musketeers?

From Pakistan's The Nation: "OIC, Russia and China Put Weight Behind Pakistan"

Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), China and Russia rallied behind Pakistan expressed “deep shock” over Nato airstrikes that left 24 Pakistani soldiers dead and called for an investigation into the incident.

“China is deeply shocked at the incident and expresses strong concerns and deep condolences to the victims in Pakistan,” foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei told a regular news briefing. “China believes that Pakistan’s independent sovereignty and territory should be respected and that this incident should be earnestly investigated and handled in a serious manner.”

While conveying its heartfelt condolences to the bereaved families and the government of Pakistan, OIC Secretary General Professor Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu said the attacks are indeed serious violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty and are totally unacceptable, an OIC statement said on its website. Ihsanoglu assured Pakistan of the continued solidarity of the OIC and expressed his expectation for the prevention of any recurrence of such incidents. The Secretary General then urged Nato to avoid any action that could further complicate the already dire security situation in the region, the statement said. Russia also called for a ‘meticulous’ investigation into a Nato raid in Pakistan that killed 24 soldiers, calling strikes that violate state sovereignty unacceptable.

“Leaders of Nato in Afghanistan should carry out a meticulous investigation into this incident,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told his Pakistani counterpart Hina Rabbani Khar in a telephone call. “Violations of state sovereignty, including in the cases of planning and carrying out anti-terrorist operations, are unacceptable,” he said, according to a statement from his office.

Afghanistan: "Unfortunately, the Expectations of the People Have Not Been Met"

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 12:19:00 GMT

Dunno why I never thought of it before, but Hillary Clinton, with her diplomatic background in cattle futures, Whitewater and shaking down donors to her husband's library-foundation in exchange for political favors, is perfectly attuned to the needs and desires of corrupto-stans and baksheeshlands....Uh-oh.

---

"Afghans Say Assistance Will Be Needed for Years," the NYT reports from the Bonn conference on Afghanistan. As in $10 billion per year until 2024, says Karzai. But there's a problem: Most of the money goes down the drain and/or into McMansions -- Mo-Mansions? --in Dubai for corrupto-klepto-baksheesho-crats.

Speaker after speaker — including Mr. Karzai — described corruption and poor governance as obstacles to the country’s development, factors that have caused reluctance among many countries about sending aid, especially given the economic crises in Europe and the United States.

“Billions of dollars have been spent in Afghanistan,” Sayed Rahim Sattar, the head of the Afghan N.G.O.’s. Coordination Bureau, told Mrs. Clinton during a roundtable discussion with members of civic groups, “but unfortunately, the expectations of the people have not been met.”

Sputtering, exhaling your soup. all of it would be lost on Sayed.

Meanwhile, a new catch-22 emerges.

From VOA's report, "Bonn Conference Offers Few Details Past 2014":

Dozens of nations, including the United States, and organizations met on Monday to come up with a road map of support beyond the withdrawal of U.S. and other international forces from Afghanistan in 2014.

They pledged to stand by Afghanistan in the 10 years after the withdrawal of foreign troops in exchange for good governance. However, none offered any specifics.

So, let's review. Afghanistan is incapabale of "good governance" but wants Western (US) life support to keep pumping at a strenuous rate of almost one billion $$ per month. The US is incapable of cutting off the Afghan life support -- it hurts so good -- but wants to see the Afghans modulate themselves into a state of "good governance."

Prediction: The money pumps on and "good governance" remains a fiscal year away, forever. Or, until we throw the bums -- the Congress and White House that calls this exercise in madness "foreign policy" -- OUT.

On Secure Freedom Radio with Frank Gaffney

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 18:24:00 GMT

Had a chance to speak with Frank Gaffney on Secure Freedom Radio yesterday about Afghanistan, what they're calling the New Silk Road, what I'm calling "the new Afghan man," COIN, three cups and more.

Audio here.