Does it really make sense for a president who was recently a half-term junior senator from the state of Illinois, and who was before that a state senator, and who was before that a “community organizer” to pick a fight with a guy who has spent 30 years tracking towards a position as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States?
The ACLU is ostensibly a group of American lawyers who concern themselves with American civil liberties. Why then is a Canadian lawyer for the ACLU concerning himself with the appropriate number of American soldiers who ought to expose themselves to death or mutilation in the prosecution of stateless terrorists on foreign shores?
Jonathan (Mannes) said, for example, that one of the issues with Predators was that they removed the “natural barriers” that would otherwise have to be fought through in order to attack alleged terrorists. It made it (too) easy for the US to resort to violence… But it would be hard to come up with a more direct statement that the issue for the ACLU is not the usual (at least surface) concern of human rights groups with jus in bello and the conduct of armed operations, but instead a belief that the US needs to be restrained — through direct and personal exposure to death on the part of its soldiers — in order that it have the proper incentives not to over-resort to the use of force.
What the ACLU… seems really to be saying is that “we”… should not make it too easy for the United States to win its wars, if necessary by forcing its troops to fight their way through “natural barriers” and at the appropriate cost in American lives. Wow. Heck of a point of view, at least for an ostensibly American organization and its lawyers. Count me out.
Yeah, me too.
The ACLU, for all its obstreperousness, serves an important national function. But it when it allows itself to dabble, as it all too often does, in issues far outside the organization’s swim lane, they make a mockery of themselves.
Being too cool and refined to take sides is not always a sign of moral superiority… Suggesting, however sophisticated the language, that superior intellects understand that “we” need to have more American GIs killed, or at risked, in order to reach the efficient equilibrium of incentives and disincentives to violence is not a winning argument.
It takes a really smart lawyer to look this stupid.
It looks like Saddam Hussein was well on his way to striking a deal with Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan for the Big One before his army got rolled up in 1991:
At the time of the 1990 offer, Iraq was embarked in a crash program to develop nuclear weapons in the face of a threatened U.S.-led attack over its occupation of Kuwait. By that date, Iraqi scientists had acquired a limited amount of weapons-grade enriched uranium but lacked several key components, including a workable design for a small nuclear warhead.
Fears that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program helped propel the United States into a second war with Iraq in 2003, though a U.S. review later determined that Hussein was never able to mount a serious bid for the bomb after 1991.
Aid from the Pakistani scientist could have accelerated Iraq’s quest for a weapon if the Iraqi leader had not run out of time, writes Albright, a former U.N. inspector who now heads the nonprofit Institute for Science and International Security. One memo cited in the book promised to provide “all the vital components and materials” needed to make fissile material, and added that “two to three Pakistani scientists could be persuaded to resign and join the new assignment” in Iraq. Copies of the original Arabic documents — several with handwritten comments in the margins — were shown to The Washington Post.
Alternate histories are a kind of child’s game – anyone can get in – but in 2001, the regime of UN-imposed sanctions on Iraq were collapsing under the weight of a brutalized population even as the Ba’athist tyrant built for himself pleasure domes. “Smart sanctions” went nowhere, opposed in Paris and Berlin.
So I have to wonder, where would we be, if we were not here?
A petite, blond-haired, blue-eyed high school dropout who allegedly used the nickname JihadJane was identified Tuesday as an alleged terrorist intent on recruiting others to her cause, as federal prosecutors unsealed criminal charges that could send her to prison for life.
Colleen Renee LaRose, 46, has been quietly held in U.S. custody since October on suspicions that she provided material support to terrorists and traveled to Sweden to launch an attack, according to federal officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case is continuing to unfold.
LaRose, who lived in suburban Philadelphia, allegedly recruited men and women in the United States, Europe and South Asia to “wage violent jihad,” according to an indictment issued in Pennsylvania. She fueled her interests on the Internet over the past few years and used Web sites such as YouTube to post increasingly agitated messages, the court papers said…
She has been married at least twice and, over several years since the mid-1980s, had been arrested in South Texas for writing bad checks and driving while intoxicated, according to court records obtained by The Washington Post.
So, a lifetime loser chooses religiously motivated, violent extremism.
Between the two of them, China and India are raising a cohort of some hundred million men who will never know the civilizing, rooting influence of marriage:
Asia is “missing” about 96 million women — the vast majority in China and India — who died from discriminatory health care and neglect or who were never born at all, the UN estimated on Monday.
Female infanticide and sex-selective abortion have caused a severe gender imbalance in Asia, and the problem is worsening despite rapid economic growth in the region, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report said.
“The old mindset with its preference for male children has now combined with modern medical technology” that makes it easier to predict and abort unborn girls, said Anuradha Rajivan, the report’s lead author.
“It is not just female infanticide but sex-selective abortion of unborn girls that cause so-called ‘missing’ females,” she said, contrasting the issue with recent improvements in female life expectancy and education.
The UNDP report found that East Asia had the world’s highest male-female sex ratio at birth, with 119 boys born for every 100 girls.
This far exceeded the global world average of 107 boys for every 100 girls.
“Females cannot take survival for granted,” it said.
No, nor may many of those men, if history is any judge.
I’m fiercely protective of mine. And hold a very low view of sex offenders. And, if anything, a lower view of those who enable their depredations, intentionally or otherwise.
So it’s with an admitted bias that I wonder about this week’s news that the remains of young Amber Dubois were found, just six days after a paroled child rapist John Gardner was arrested for the rape and murder of 17-year old Chelsea King. Both girls went missing in east county.
Amber had been missing for a year, the trail – never warm – had grown cold. And then last week, Gardner was arrested for Chelsea’s murder and then suddenly Amber is found.
It smacks of a plea deal to me, the kind of thing offered by a prosecutor to a predator in exchange for taking the death penalty off the table. In order to “bring closure”, maybe.
Which, fine. If that’s the way it’s got to be. Just place him in gen pop.
In 2004, a guy I’d served with at TOPGUN dropped an LGB that killed four Canadian soldiers. I never posted on that subject.
In 2010, a guy I went to school with is in a whole lot of hot water in the national press. I don’t plan to post on that either.
Sometimes, the passions of the moment cause us to demonize people who don’t perfectly comport to our own preferences. We tend to lose sight of the real person inside, the melange of of genetic, environmental and experiental complexity that defies simple reduction.
We do it anyway, about people we don’t know personally.
A man who stole a plane from Montgomery Field in San Diego, then flew the single-engine aircraft to Palm Springs and on to Los Angeles International Airport, pleaded guilty Monday to a felony charge of using an airplane without the owner’s permission.Skye Turner, 23, will be referred to a Behavioral Health Court program, said defense attorney Jill Kovaly.
About seven or eight months ago my good friend Scott Kesterson who was and still is in Afghanistan told me “things are changing here, they are going back to a Vietnam way of patrolling”. I was not sure what he was talking about or implying so I asked him. He told me that the troops were getting out of he vehicles and walking every where they go. Vehicles were limited to the roads for the most part and the enemy had them channeled and could focus the IEDs and EFPs on the roads. Soldiers were finding (along with GEN McChrystal’s direction) that if they went dismounted they were safer because the enemy could not IED wide open space.
In order to have freedom of movement and to increase the chance of survival, soldiers were going “cross-country” by dismounted patrols. Since that time I have read reports and stories where entire platoons and sometimes companies never even see vehicles. They spend their whole year walking everywhere. Not to mention that this is the most effective way to engage the local populace and truly exercise COIN. You cannot get to know the local people by speeding through the bazaars behind 3″ of glass and armor. So by going dismounted the troops are accomplishing several things both tactically, and for force-protection.
Of course I am speaking mostly of US Forces as local Afghan forces like to ride.
Of course they do.
Update: That whole “Embedded Training Team” concept?
"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." -- John Paul Jones
"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Caesar and Cleopatra"
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friedrich Nietzsche
"A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate."--Edmund Burke
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"Blogito Ergo Sum" -- Neptunus Lex
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