Written on March 15th, 2010 by adminno shouts
The NY Times is outraged! In a front page expose, today’s edition features yet another secret operation exposed because, well, because they can, and because they, like so many lefties, hate the thought of Muslim extremists having their Constitutional Rights, as extended to the entire world, violated, along with being killed without a long, drawn out civilian trial. But, don’t question their patriotism: Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants
Under the cover of a benign government information-gathering program, a Defense Department official set up a network of private contractors in Afghanistan and Pakistan to help track and kill suspected militants, according to military officials and businessmen in Afghanistan and the United States.
The official, Michael D. Furlong, hired contractors from private security companies that employed former C.I.A. and Special Forces operatives. The contractors, in turn, gathered intelligence on the whereabouts of suspected militants and the location of insurgent camps, and the information was then sent to military units and intelligence officials for possible lethal action in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the officials said.
While it has been widely reported that the C.I.A. and the military are attacking operatives of Al Qaeda and others through unmanned, remote-controlled drone strikes, some American officials say they became troubled that Mr. Furlong seemed to be running an off-the-books spy operation. The officials say they are not sure who condoned and supervised his work.
Which officials? None are actually named. Besides, who, other than pusillanimous lefties, cares? It’s just fine with me that extremist Muslims, members of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and any other group, are tracked and whacked. Better them than us.
It is generally considered illegal for the military to hire contractors to act as covert spies. Officials said Mr. Furlong’s secret network might have been improperly financed by diverting money from a program designed to merely gather information about the region.
It’s also generally illegal to hijack planes and fly them into buildings. It’s generally illegal for terrorists to fight without wearing a uniform of any country. It’s generally illegal to saw a humans head off while alive. You don’t see the NY Times and other liberals complaining about those. In fact, they tend to back the people who do those things.
But, hey, good news: the NY Times has just put every person in Afghanistan and Pakistan in even more danger. Kudos, Fish Wrap! Way to start the work week, giving aid and comfort to the enemy!
Unfortunately
Officials say Mr. Furlong’s operation seems to have been shut down, and he is now is the subject of a criminal investigation by the Defense Department for a number of possible offenses, including contract fraud.
At one time in our country’s past, Furlong would have been a hero for taking the fight to the enemy.
Crossed at Pirate’s Cove
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Written on March 9th, 2010 by adminno shouts
I hate to defend Obama on this one, but, the ACLU has forgotten that KSM and the other 9/11 co-conspirators are NOT American citizens and have no right to a civilian trial. That said, it must give the Left and the ACLU fits that Obama has pretty much been Bush-lite when it comes to Gitmo, terrorists, rendition, as well as expanding the Afghanistan war (which he said he would do time after time on the campaign trail)
The possibility that President Obama could send the self-professed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks to a military tribunal has earned him the highest insult from the left — that he’s another George W. Bush.
A full-page ad in Sunday’s New York Times left no doubt as to how the American Civil Liberties Union feels about the possibility of the president reversing the decision to send Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his alleged co-conspirators to civilian court.
“What will it be Mr. President?” the ad asks in boldfaced type. “Change or more of the Same?”
Actually, that’s not fair to Bush, who knew what he was doing. Obama has no clue, and is just flailing away like a single-A ball player at bat against Nolan Ryan. (I’m going to be really disappointed if none of you know who he is.)
“Many of us are shocked and concerned that right now, President Obama is considering reversing his attorney general’s decision to try the 9/11 defendants in criminal court,” the advertisement continues. “Our criminal justice system has successfully handled over 300 terrorism cases compared to only 3 in the military commissions.”
Yes, it has. A good chunk of those were caught IN the United States, which should get them a civilian trial. Those caught outside? Nope. Enemy combatants.
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Written on February 13th, 2010 by adminno shouts
I came across an article on Salon entitled “How to leave a soldier” that has apparently been making ripples across the blogosphere. It absolutely infuriated me, and I knew I had to write about it.
Before I get into the article, though, let me explain some things in the interest of full disclosure. My significant other is a Marine. We live together in North Carolina while he’s stationed at Camp Lejeune. He’s an 0311 (infantry rifleman) who has been to Iraq twice and is deploying to Afghanistan this year. The first year of our relationship was long distance, with him in North Carolina and me in Florida. We’re together now, but the Corps separates us occasionally for training and such, and of course, for deployments. Never, ever would I do something so cowardly as to send him a Dear John letter while he was deployed.
But that’s exactly what this woman did. Meet Courtney Cook, an extraordinarily shallow and callous woman.
I can chart the entire history of my first marriage along the lines of U.S. military engagements. I fell in love with my ex-husband in no small part because he was a soldier. He was a Dartmouth senior on a ROTC scholarship, and his heroes were George Patton and Ulysses S. Grant. He could use words like “valor” and “courage” without irony. I liked the way he carried himself — taller it seemed, and with honor.
So they fell in love, got pregnant, and then got married. Her then-husband was activated due to Operation Desert Shield. Long story short, she ended up not having a clue what she was getting into and wanted to leave her husband because she couldn’t handle the separation.
Now, I know firsthand how difficult a relationship in the military is. I don’t begrudge someone who acknowledges that they can’t handle it. It takes a special kind of person to be able to endure this lifestyle. Camp Lejeune is full of women who make it through with grace, dignity, and class — and women who just couldn’t do it. There’s no shame in admitting that you just can’t handle it. A lot of people, especially 18-year-olds who don’t come from a military background, just don’t fully realize what they’re getting into when they marry someone who is active-duty military. I don’t personally believe it means they should take the easy way out and leave, but I don’t think it makes them a bad person, either.
Now, on to Ms. Cook’s essay. We’re going to take this bit by bit, because the entire article is long and doesn’t need to be excerpted. So with that, away we go…
It helped that the other lieutenants in the Armor Officer Basic Course spent a lot of time with us in our married officer’s quarters. They were great, smart, handsome guys — the Channing Tatums and Jake Gyllenhaals of their day — as committed to winning their squadron intramural football league as they were to the complexities of tank gunnery and platoon leadership. Since they’d left their sweethearts at home, my unborn baby and I were the local version of what they were fighting for. Soon I too was caught up in the romance that comes with men who go off to war, seduced by the heady mix of youth, strength, risk and passion that makes loving a soldier so beautifully intense. It’s the same brew that fuels the drumbeat sexuality in contemporary war movies like “Jarhead” and “Atonement,” last December’s “Brothers,” and, one would presume, the upcoming “Dear John.” It’s a glory we can’t get enough of — until it’s gone.
Here we start to get a hint of just how shallow this woman truly is. Perhaps its just me, but when you’re comparing soldiers and military life to actors and movies, something is wrong. Sure, Jake Gyllenhaal and Channing Tatum have played soldiers on the big screen. It doesn’t make them anything remotely similar to actual soldiers. Nor is military life anything like “Atonement”, “Jarhead”, or “Brothers”. Most people, even civilians, would understand that (wouldn’t you think?). It seemed to me to be the first hint of just how shallow this woman is — and that she was going to doom her marriage with romantic, unrealistic expectations.
Desert Storm ended just 11 days after the birth of our son, but within weeks John and I were facing a wrenching tragedy. My husband’s brother, a U.S. Navy pilot, was killed in a training accident leaving behind my new sister-in-law, and their daughter and baby son. My husband had to drop out of training to be at his own brother’s funeral. I spent most of the memorial service watching my dead brother-in-law’s children play in the nursery. I was still learning how to breast-feed.
Here we get our first hint of another recurring theme throughout the essay. Everything is all about me, me, me.
We decided enough was enough. John would go on reserve status. We would put each other through grad school and get jobs in the private sector. For a while it worked. We were a couple again. We cooked and ate dinner together, took our kids trick-or-treating at Halloween. At night we sat close and watched movies. When our son decided to whistle “Oh My Darlin’” for the school talent show, John was there.
Then came 9/11. My husband, like so many others, saw the attacks as a call to action.
I guess apparently he should have just ignored the worst attack ever on American soil, that killed almost 3,000 innocent people. It makes you wonder: she says that valour and courage are important to her, but the very moment when her husband showed those traits she was angered by it.
I took a job at an independent bookstore and started spending time with the young, funny, book-reading guys I met there. When John came back things were awkward. I couldn’t stop myself from being angry, couldn’t help feeling abandoned.
Could her feelings of anger and abandonment possibly be exacerbated by the fact that she spent his deployment hanging around “young, funny, book-reading guys”. What is her implication here, that her husband is old, boring, and dumb? And while I can’t speak for her ex-husband, I can say without a doubt that the vast majority of Marines I know would be furious if they came home to find out their wife had been spending their deployment with other men, regardless of whether or not she was actually cheating. It looks bad and causes jealousy and suspicion. The soldier or Marine starts worrying that their wife was being kept warm by Jody while they were gone.
Meanwhile I was just 30 years old, working with teenage students, surfing all of their exuberant, sexy, rowdy energy. I was teaching the great literary love stories in class, and coaching Ultimate Frisbee in the exhilarating spring air. On weekends my book-reading friends from the bookstore stopped by. We made dinners together, spent evenings talking and laughing. I liked it that we had so many things to talk about. I liked it that they were near.
My husband was a world away from me. After 12 years of distance it felt as though he always would be. I was worn out with waiting. So I left him.
Just that simple. She was tired of waiting, and so she just left. And how did she leave? She sent him a Dear John letter, and then made him send a letter to their children explaining, that she then gave to them, rather than at least having the guts to tell her children herself that she was leaving Daddy.
I am married to a lithe, blue-eyed Marxist whose dissertation was on U.S. imperialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a man who participated in war protests in Santa Cruz, Calif., during the winter I lived at Fort Knox.
Tells you just about all you need to know, doesn’t it? She went from a man who proudly defended his country and answered the call of freedom, to a Marxist who protested war.
But these passages above were just the tip of the iceberg. I now present to you the two worst parts of this entire essay.
Yet I didn’t escape what it feels like to love a soldier.
Last July my son, the baby that was born to television coverage of Operation Desert Storm, said goodbye to his high school friends, shaved his head and enrolled in the United States Naval Academy. I am deeply proud of him, but it was my ex-husband who stood with my son on Induction Day. I could not bear to be there, could not watch the child of my body step away from the safe, civilian world I’d tried to so desperately to create for myself and him.
Yes, Heaven forbid she support her son because he had the audacity to join the military. It really tells you all you need to know, doesn’t it? She leaves her husband and the father of her children via a Dear John letter and then refused to support her son, both because of the military. Yet she gets off on the image of our soldiers. She gets off on Jake Gyllenhaal in “Jarhead”. She wants the uniform, but isn’t interested in the honor and the courage it takes to earn the right to wear it.
Finally, here is the worst passage. Interestingly, they’re also the opening paragraphs.
You’d be surprised how easy it is to leave a soldier on deployment. You can do it with a letter. (He can’t argue with you. He doesn’t have a phone.) If you lay the groundwork early, saying to the soldier before he leaves, “This will be the end of us, we might as well admit it,” it’s that much easier. The letter won’t even come as a shock.
And if you have children with that soldier? You can handle all that with a letter, too. He’ll write it — because he cares about the kids, because he wants to work with you to do what’s best for them even though you’re leaving him — and you’ll give it to them. Here again, you will avoid a nasty confrontation. Who will they cry to? You? You’re just the teary-eyed bearer of the letter. Him? The one who’s sweating it out in the desert?
There will be no moving truck, no boxes, no house torn asunder. The soldier is peeing in a bucket as you pack. He doesn’t care who gets the couch.
It isn’t enough for her to be this callous, shallow, superficial, and selfish. She’s recommending other women do the same thing, too. One of the worst parts about this is that she feels like it was a good thing to tell him while he’s away at war that she’s leaving him. She presumably doesn’t care about the effect this has on soldiers while they’re deployed. They’re over there fighting for their lives, and she thinks it’s a smart move to saddle them with this while they’re in the middle of that? You’ve got to be a pretty damn low person to not care about the extra stress you’re putting on someone that’s fighting a war and risking their life, all because you don’t want to deal with telling them face-to-face that your marriage is over. Soldiers fighting a war don’t need the added stress of knowing that the person who they think is waiting for them has abandoned them. She abandoned him for a Marxist, and then abandoned her son when he didn’t conform to the life she wanted. Her husband sounded consistent in his morals and values throughout the duration of their marriage. She, on the other hand, seemed to grow to hate the military to the point where she couldn’t even support her own son because he decided to join.
It’s sad, because there are many people out there who hold the same contempt for the military in their hearts. These men and women put their lives on the line, and yet they unfortunately are treated so low by so many. And only on a liberal website like Salon would this be featured.
This article is despicable because it’s really a how-to manual of how to ruin a soldier’s life, not just how to leave him. But for someone so self-absorbed, what does it really matter if she leaves a soldier’s heart shattered in her selfish, cowardly wake?
Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary, or follow her on Twitter!
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Written on February 11th, 2010 by adminno shouts
-By Warner Todd Huston
If it’s anti-west, anti-British, Anti-American, Anti-Israeli… well, be sure that Amnesty International supports it. Here’s another bit of proof for that bromide with AmNasty International’s suspension of human rights specialist Gita Sahgal. Why was Sahgal removed from her AI position? Because she criticized AI for supporting Moazzam Begg, Britain’s biggest supporter of al Qaeda, the Taliban and religious oppression against women.
Interesting to see the clash of political correctness here, isn’t it? They’ve booted a female, minority civil rights worker from her position because she came out against an Islamofascist that AI is in love with.
I am sure this had the PC heads at AI roiling in a tizzy. Their dilemma was do they support, a). the female, minority, civil rights worker, or b). the aggrieved Islamofascist that was once held at Guantanamo. What a dilemma for the politically correct, eh?
Tellingly, Amnesty International chose to support the fanatic Muslim that supports al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Here’s what occurred: Last January Gita Sahgal, who was head of the “Gender Unit” at Amnesty International, became alarmed that AI was aligning itself with Moazzam Begg. At that time she sent a letter to her employers at AI saying in part, “To be appearing on platforms with Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban, whom we treat as a human rights defender, is a gross error of judgment.”
AI replied by suspending her and launching an “internal investigation.” This prompted Sahgal to release a public statement.
“Amnesty International has sanitised the history and politics of ex-Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg, and completely failed to recognise the nature of his organisation Cageprisoners.”
“The issue is a fundamental one about the importance of the human rights movement maintaining an objective distance from groups and ideas that are committed to systematic discrimination and fundamentally undermine the universality of human rights. I have raised this issue because of my firm belief in human rights for all.”
So, who is this Begg character? He runs an organization called Cageprisoners and has been an outspoken supporter of the Taliban and al Qaeda.
Originally from Birmingham, Mr Begg went to a training camp in Afghanistan in 1993 and then moved there with his family in 2001.
In his memoirs, he said the Taliban were “better than anything Afghanistan has had in 20 years.”
He was picked up by the CIA in 2002 after fleeing to Pakistan. The U.S. claimed he was a member of al-Qaeda who had helped recruit others and fund training camps.
Since his release, he has been a vocal campaigner for the rights of detainees and has been involved with Amnesty for several years.
Begg’s group has come to the aid of Islamic hate preacher al Al-Awlaki (linked to Major Hassan’s act of terror in Texas in late 2009) as well as 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the group has also given support to Abu Hamza, and Abu Qatada.
Sahgal says that Cageprisoners “‘actively promotes Islamic Right ideas and individuals.” Obviously she is right.
Yet she is the one that got canned by Amnesty International. AI claims they don’t support terrorists, but this action makes this claim very, very hard to believe.
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Written on January 31st, 2010 by adminno shouts
A wise politician knows when they’re reaching too far. They know when it’s time to draw the line. In Obama’s presidency, that wisdom is completely non-existent. Show him a problem, and he’ll get the government involved. It doesn’t matter how much is on his plate or how annoyed Americans are about the expansion of government already, he just doesn’t know how to say no. The president likes to constantly remind everyone just how much he’s juggling — two wars, a skyrocketing deficit, record high unemployment, health care, cap and trade, amnesty — but he wants to add government regulation of college football to that list. Yep, that’s right. The White House is investigating the BCS system so that Obama can force a playoff system onto college football.
The Obama administration is considering several steps that would review the legality of the controversial Bowl Championship Series, the Justice Department said in a letter Friday to a senator who had asked for an antitrust review.
In the letter to Sen. Orrin Hatch, obtained by The Associated Press, Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich wrote that the Justice Department is reviewing Hatch’s request and other materials to determine whether to open an investigation into whether the BCS violates antitrust laws.
… Several lawmakers and many critics want the BCS to switch to a playoff system, rather than the ratings system it uses to determine the teams that play in the championship game.
“The administration shares your belief that the current lack of a college football national championship playoff with respect to the highest division of college football … raises important questions affecting millions of fans, colleges and universities, players and other interested parties,” Weich wrote.
Weich made note of the fact that President Barack Obama, before he was sworn in, had stated his preference for a playoff system. In 2008, Obama said he was going to “to throw my weight around a little bit” to nudge college football toward a playoff system, a point that Hatch stressed when he urged Obama last fall to ask the department to investigate the BCS.
This largely stems from a temper tantrum thrown by Orrin Hatch last year because his team — the University of Utah — didn’t make it to a championship game. And hey, I want a playoff system as much as every other college football fan out there. The BCS system stinks. But what gives the government the right to force it on us? Start interfering with college football and you’re going to start seeing a lot of very angry people. And Americans are fed up already. The government under Democrats has become some kind of monster, trying to slide its tentacles into every facet of our lives. If there’s anything that they think needs to be remedied, the government will be there to take it over. Failing automakers? They’ll bail them out and fire the CEOs for good measure. Some Americans don’t have health care? Well, they’ll nationalize the entire health care system. Economy’s not doing too well and unemployment numbers are rising? They’ll spend massive amounts of money causing the economy to get even worse. And one whiny senator doesn’t like that his team didn’t get to play in a championship game? The government can regulate college football, too.
There comes a point when one needs to simply stop. Many Americans want a playoff system in college football, granted, but they won’t take too kindly to the government deciding how college football is played. Some things the government just needs to leave alone, and this is one of them. Obama has enough to be worrying about as it is, and whether college football championships are determined by a playoff system or the BCS is not exactly a priority. Maybe Obama should be focusing on, I don’t know, our struggling economy? The war in Afghanistan? The fact that a terrorist came very close to murdering hundreds of people on Christmas day? What he’s going to do with the jihadis at Gitmo? He clearly is in over his head already, and now he’s trying to take on college football as well. And I think this is one issue he (and Orrin Hatch) needs to leave alone. As he constantly reminds us, he’s got enough on his plate as it is.
Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary, or follow her on Twitter!
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