<$BlogRSDUrl$>

Jun 25, 2005

HELP! SCROLL DOWN IF THIS IS ALL YOU SEE! 

Okay, I posted the last post, didn't change the template at all, and now this!
If you're using Firefox, the rest of the blog has been pushed down below the sidebar stuff. If you're using IE, you just scrolled way down here to read this. WTF?
Like I said, I changed NOTHING in the template, and as far as I can tell, nothing is out of place. Any ideas folks? (besides it just being Blogsnot?)
|

So much to do and so little time 

Yes, I'm back.
Yes, I've been home for a week.
Yes, I haven't blogged or even attempted to.
Yes, my computer having a Win98-based meltdown has had something to do with that.

But I can tell you this: workups are over.

THANK.
CHRIST.

Deploying will be a joy compared to that last time out on the grey flotation device. What a red-ass.

Anyway, like the post's title says, I've got a ton to do in the next few weeks... most of it goofing off on leave... hehehehe. Like tomorrow: beloved Weef and I go to her first big league baseball game. If you're a Padres (or Mariners!) fan and the game's on TV, look hard at the stands down the third base line. You might just see Mike the Marine. 'Course you'll have to guess which of the many short-haired Marine-types at the ballpark is me...

Be prepared in the next few weeks for another military movie review. I just know I want to do one... haven't decided which yet. As a matter of fact, any suggestions? Put 'em in the comments. Short movie review of the last two flicks I saw:

Mr. & Mrs. Smith - funny as hell. Take your spouse. Between Brad and Angelina, there's eye candy for everybody.
Batman Begins - The BEST Batman yet. Hands down. And the new Batmobile is UN.BE.FREAKING.LEAVABLE. Gotta get me one of those.
|

Jun 8, 2005

And on that note... 

Gone again for another short trip on the big grey floatie. May get a post up from there this time. We'll see.

Courtesy of Mad Mikey (who I haven't been checking in on nearly enough lately):
What Pulp Fiction Character Are You?

What Pulp Fiction Character Are You?
Tired of being underappreciated and manipulated by powerful "others," you fight back. Though possessing a cold, violent outside, you have a soft, scentimental inside. You love your partner, you cherish family heirlooms, and you want nothing more than to be geniunely happy -- but you don't mind having to kill a couple of nimrods who happen to clutter your path.


Damn... that's pretty good.
|

Jun 3, 2005

They call him "the Hammer" 

But if they don't, they should.

Charles Krauthammer lays the smack down in today's Washington Post. The WaPost requires website registration which is easily defeated by a quick trip to bugmenot.com, but just in case they yank the article after a few days (as some news sites do) I'm going to repost the whole thing. It's just too damn good.

Gitmo Grovel: Enough Already
The self-flagellation over reports of abuse at Guantanamo Bay has turned into a full-scale panic. There are calls for the United States, with all this worldwide publicity, to simply shut the place down.

A terrible idea. One does not run and hide simply because allegations have been made. If the charges are unverified, as they overwhelmingly are in this case, then they need to be challenged. The United States ought to say what it has and has not done, and not simply surrender to rumor.

Moreover, shutting down Guantanamo will solve nothing. We will capture more terrorists, and we will have to interrogate them, if not at Guantanamo then somewhere else. There will then be reports from that somewhere else that will precisely mirror the charges coming out of Guantanamo. What will we do then? Keep shutting down one detention center after another?

The self-flagellation has gone far enough. We know that al Qaeda operatives are trained to charge torture when they are in detention, and specifically to charge abuse of the Koran to inflame fellow prisoners on the inside and potential sympathizers on the outside.

In March the Navy inspector general reported that, out of about 24,000 interrogations at Guantanamo, there were seven confirmed cases of abuse, "all of which were relatively minor." In the eyes of history, compared to any other camp in any other war, this is an astonishingly small number. Two of the documented offenses involved "female interrogators who, on their own initiative, touched and spoke to detainees in a sexually suggestive manner." Not exactly the gulag.

The most inflammatory allegations have been not about people but about mishandling the Koran. What do we know here? The Pentagon reports (Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, May 26) -- all these breathless "scoops" come from the U.S. government's own investigations of itself -- that of 13 allegations of Koran abuse, five were substantiated, of which two were most likely accidental.

Let's understand what mishandling means. Under the rules the Pentagon later instituted at Guantanamo, proper handling of the Koran means using two hands and wearing gloves when touching it. Which means that if any guard held the Koran with one hand or had neglected to put on gloves, this would be considered mishandling.

On the scale of human crimes, where, say, 10 is the killing of 2,973 innocent people in one day and 0 is jaywalking, this ranks as perhaps a 0.01.

Moreover, what were the Korans doing there in the first place? The very possibility of mishandling Korans arose because we gave them to each prisoner. What kind of crazy tolerance is this? Is there any other country that would give a prisoner precisely the religious text that that prisoner and those affiliated with him invoke to justify the slaughter of innocents? If the prisoners had to have reading material, I would have given them the book "Portraits 9/11/01" -- vignettes of the lives of those massacred on Sept. 11.

Why this abjectness on our part? On the very day the braying mob in Pakistan demonstrated over the false Koran report in Newsweek, a suicide bomber blew up an Islamic shrine in Islamabad, destroying not just innocent men, women and children, but undoubtedly many Korans as well. Not a word of condemnation. No demonstrations.

Even greater hypocrisy is to be found here at home. Civil libertarians, who have been dogged in making sure that FBI-collected Guantanamo allegations are released to the world, seem exquisitely sensitive to mistreatment of the Koran. A rather selective scrupulousness. When an American puts a crucifix in a jar of urine and places it in a museum, civil libertarians rise immediately to defend it as free speech. And when someone makes a painting of the Virgin Mary, smears it with elephant dung and adorns it with porn, not only is that free speech, it is art -- deserving of taxpayer funding and an ACLU brief supporting the Brooklyn Museum when the mayor freezes its taxpayer subsidy.

Does the Koran deserve special respect? Of course it does. As do the Bibles destroyed by the religious police in Saudi Arabia and the Torahs blown up in various synagogues from Tunisia to Turkey.

Should the United States apologize? If there were mishandlings of the Koran, we should say so and express regret. And that should be in the context of our remarkably humane and tolerant treatment of the Guantanamo prisoners, and in the context of a global war on terrorism (for example, the campaign in Afghanistan) conducted with a discrimination and a concern for civilian safety rarely seen in the annals of warfare.

Then we should get over it, stop whimpering and start defending ourselves.

OOH. RAH.
|

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?

Weblog Commenting by HaloScan.com