Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
by John Cole| 91 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Without google, who are AC Wharton and John Peyton?
Answer: The mayors of Memphis and Jacksonville, respectively, both of whom govern cities with population sizes comparable to Alaska. I’m betting 99% of you have never heard of them.
So why are we going to spend the next few weeks listening to the lies of a grifter from up north who couldn’t even finish her term?
This post is in: War on Terror aka GSAVE®
Hopefully being tried and then sent to prison for the rest of their lives, where they can rot to death next to the unabomber and Eric Rudolph:
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and four others accused in the attacks will be put on criminal trial in New York, Attorney General Eric Holder is expected to announce later Friday.
The decision, described by people familiar with the matter, is part of wider announcement planned on how to bring to justice detainees held at the Guantanamo Bay prison. It’s the first set of decisions before a Monday deadline on how to deal with the more than 200 prisoners remaining at the facility, which President Barack Obama has ordered closed.
The wingnut freakout over this will be predictable and amusing, because as we all know, real patriots have no faith in our judicial system and law enforcement officers.
*** Update ***
Literally, as I wrote this post, I got a Red State Action Alert:
Today Barack Obama is going to announce that the terrorist mastermind of September 11th, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, will be sent to New York City for a criminal trial in a civilian court.
In that trial, the terrorist will get all the rights afforded an American citizen in a criminal trial, including the right to a fair trial, the right to a taxpayer funded attorney, the right to review all the evidence against him, potentially including classified intelligence matters, the right to exclude evidence against him including, potentially, any confession obtained through enhanced interrogation techniques, etc.
At best, this will be a show trial fit not for the American Republic, but a third world kleptocratic totalitarian regime. At worse, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will gain access to classified material he can then leak to other terrorists while New York yet again becomes a target for terrorists. We have already had occasions in this country where terrorists’ sympathetic lawyers have conveyed information, orders, and plans to other terrorists.
You can find more details here.
Call your Congressman and Senator right now. Tell them they should use every tool at their disposal to block this. The number to call is 202-224-3121.
Sincerely yours,
Erick Erickson
Editor, RedState.com
I love that his range of possible outcomes includes a “show trial” as the best possible outcome. Authoritarians simply have no faith in our Democracy whatsoever.
by John Cole| 54 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
by DougJ| 162 Comments
This post is in: Good News For Conservatives
In for a Broder, in for a Brooks. Am I alone in thinking that “prairie background” sounds like a euphemism? And why do so many profiles of Republican presidential candidates read like soft-core gay male pornography (not that there’s anything wrong with that)?
As you may or may not know, Thune is the junior senator from South Dakota, the man who beat Tom Daschle in an epic campaign five years ago. The first thing everybody knows about him is that he is tall (6 feet 4 inches), tanned (in a prairie, sun-chapped sort of way) and handsome (John McCain jokes that if he had Thune’s face he’d be president right now). If you wanted a Republican with the same general body type and athletic grace as Barack Obama, you’d pick Thune.
[….]He says his prairie background has given him a preference for small companies and local government.
by DougJ| 26 Comments
This post is in: Assholes, Good News For Conservatives
While House Democrats spent the week congratulating themselves for squeezing out the midnight passage of their version of health-care reform, neutral observers were reminding them: You’ve left the job half done.
I know some of you think that I spend too much time reading Broder. But “neutral observers”? This stuff is gold, readers, gold.
This post is in: Cooking, Food, Open Threads
Bad Horse’s Filly writes:
I’m off with family, getting ready for my youngest brother’s wedding. I’ll be the one in the pretty bridesmaid dress, my 3-year-old niece and I playing princess in our matching dresses while mom and dad get hitched. But I didn’t forget you guys. I thought a fish recipe would be nice since we haven’t had one in a while. This fish is courtesy of my friend Alton Gunn.
1) Pico De Gallo Fish
2) Rice
3) Tomato-Avocado Chutney
4) Fresh Pineapple w/Ice Cream
Click on the blue highlight for recipes and shopping list.
(Enjoy your princess dress, BHF!)
This post is in: Foreign Affairs
Soonergrunt posted this late last week, and I’m just sorry it didn’t get front-paged sooner:
I don’t have all the answers. I have said before that I have very little faith in anybody who speaks about Afghanistan as if they know exactly what to do, or they have a single, un-nuanced answer.
Again, I write now strictly from my own experiences in the eastern and northeastern parts of the country, as well as some stuff that I have picked up in open source news. I was there last in 2006-2007 when things were really starting to heat up.
When I arrived in Afghanistan, there hadn’t been any activity in the Kabul region for over a year. By the time I had left, every base in the Kabul area had been directly attacked at least once. I was a member of an Embedded Training Team. I, and one other ETT (we were supposed to be in teams of four, but there weren’t enough of us) were embedded directly into an Afghan National Army Infantry company in the 201st Corps in the eastern and northeastern part of the country. This was my third combat deployment, my first in Afghanistan.
In my experience, as well as recent reporting from sources such as NPR, there is no fundamental difference between the Afghan Taliban, Pakistani Taliban, and Al Quaeda.
As most of you know, the Taliban was financed and managed for years by ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service. The ISI saw the Taliban as a way to control Afghanistan, keeping it out of the Indian orbit, as well as a place for Pakistani militias to train and get combat experience before going to fight in Kashmir. Al Quaeda was also deeply involved in this aspect of the taliban. I fought against all three groups, sometimes all at once. There were almost always Pakistanis mixed in with Afghan Talib and other AGM (Anti Government Militia).
When I first got there, it was routine for the Taliban to winter over in a place called the Korengal. Some of you may remember Richard Engle’s series on NBC last year following a US Army unit in the Korengal.
I helped build the road into the place and I helped build the Korengal Outpost, Camp Restreppo, and some of the other places you saw in that series. The Taliban would go there because the terrain was unpassable in the winter and they could hole up there and wait for spring. They did this until we built the Korengal Outpost, the KOP, or as the 10th Mountain guys called it, the Purple Heart Factory. I also worked in a place called the Tagab Valley, just east of Kabul and Bagram.
As an ETT, I spent a large amount of time going into villages and meeting with village elders and headmen. I did more and better counter-insurgency sitting on my ass drinking chai than I did actually shooting, and I shot an ass-load of ammunition. I went into villages on market day and bought stuff I didn’t need as an excuse to talk to the locals, and I had my trusted interpreter and a couple of ANA I trusted do the same. This is the way you win a counterinsurgency war. One village at a time. It’s fucking hard. The shortest, most glib way to describe it is to say that we want to show the people that we offer a better life than the other guys do.
What I know from that time, and this has only been reinforced by my study of the region and current events there since, is that we cannot simply leave these people to their fate. I’ve seen what the Taliban do to people who defy them. God knows that ISAF/US forces have made mistakes, and there have been western troops who have abused prisoners. We’re not perfect, and we’re not angels. But we don’t gut-shoot children to make a point, and we don’t burn teachers to death in front of their students. As I said earlier, I’ve been places in eastern Afghanistan where the capitol of Kabul was as foreign as Washington, D.C. Most of the Afghans I met couldn’t care less who was the president of Afghanistan. It has no bearing on their lives. The level of governance that actually affects people’s lives is at the district and provincial level. That’s where things get done. This is the main reason that the country was most successfully ran as a feudal state from the 1930s to the 1970s before the communist coup.
In the short term, we need to keep building up the Afghan National Army. When I was there, the unit to which I was attached was considered one of the better companies in the entire brigade, which was considered the best brigade in the corps. They and their parent Kandak (Battalion) could barely keep themselves supplied in the field. Logistics were at their bare minimum, and the we frequently used money from our petty cash fund to buy firewood good supplies for the ANA. When I left, they were a lot better, but still not what I would’ve considered reliable or capable. Their unit level tactics were vastly improved over the “everybody run towards the gunfire” level when I got there, but still left a lot to be desired.