July 31, 2006

Ultimate Gun Blogger


jd

If it ever makes it as a Weblog Awards category, John Donovan of Argghhh! wins, without a doubt.

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Were the Qana Bodies Staged?

These questions and others are beginning to mount as the discrepancies in Hezbollah's versions of events start to fall apart:


On the morning of July 30, according to the IDF, the air force came in three waves. In the first, between midnight and one in the morning, there was a strike at or near the building that eventually collapsed. There was a second strike at other targets far from the collapse building several hours later, and a third strike at around 7:30 in the morning. There too the nearest hit was some 460 meters away, according to the IDF. But first reports of a building collapse came only around 8 am.

Thus there was an unexplained 7 to 8 hour gap between the time of the helicopter strike and the building collapse. Brigadier General Amir Eshel, Head of the Air Force Headquarters, in a press briefing, told journalists that "the attack on the structure in the Qana village took place between midnight and one in the morning. The gap between the timing of the collapse of the building and the time of the strike on it is unclear."

Gen. Eshel appeared genuinely mystified by the gap in time. He "I'm saying this very carefully, because at this time I don't have a clue as to what the explanation could be for this gap," he added.

The army's only explanation was that somehow there was unexploded Hezbollah ordnance in the building that only detonated much later.
"It could be that inside the building, things that could eventually cause an explosion were being housed, things that we could not blow up in the attack, and maybe remained there, Brigadier General Eshel said.

Eshel reported that as recently as two days ago, military intelligence reported the building area had been used by the terrorists for storage or firing of weapons. It was a bad place to cram dozens of women and children.

There are other mysteries. The roof of the building was intact. Journalist Ben Wedeman of CNN noted that there was a larger crater next to the building, but observed that the building appeared not to have collapsed as a result of the Israeli strike.

Why would the civilians who had supposedly taken shelter in the basement of the building not leave after the post-midnight attack? They just went back to sleep and had the bad luck to wait for the building to collapse in the morning?

What we do know is that sometime after dawn a call went hour to journalists and rescue workers to come to the scene. And come they did.

While Hezbollah and its apologists have been claiming that civilians could not freely flee the scene due to Israeli destruction of bridges and roads, the journalists and rescue teams from nearby Tyre had no problem getting there.

Lebanese rescue teams did not start evacuating the building until the morning and only after the camera crews came. The absence of a real rescue effort was explained by saying that equipment was lacking. There were no scenes of live or injured people being extracted.

There was little blood, CNN's Wedeman noted: all the victims, he concluded, appeared to have died while as they were sleeping — sleeping, apparently, through thunderous Israeli air attacks. Rescue workers equipped with cameras were removing the bodies from the same opening in the collapsed structure. Journalists were not allowed near the collapsed building.

Rescue workers filmed as they went carried the victims on the stretchers, occasionally flipping up the blankets so that cameras could show the faces and bodies of the dead.

But Israelis steeled to scenes of carnage from Palestinian suicide bombings and Hezbollah rocket attack could not help but notice that these victims did not look like our victims. Their faces were ashen gray. Their limbs appeared to have stiffened, from rigor mortis. Neither were effects that would have resulted from an Israeli attack hours before. These were bodies that looked like they had been dead for days.

Viewers can judge for themselves. But the accumulating evidence suggests another explanation for what happened at Kana. The scenario would be a setup in which the time between the initial Israeli bombing near the building and morning reports of its collapse would have been used to "plant" bodies killed in previous fighting — reports in previous days indicated that nearby Tyre was used as a temporary morgue — place them in the basement, and then engineer a "controlled demolition" to fake another Israeli attack.

The well-documented use by Palestinians of this kind of faked footage — from the alleged shooting of Mohammed Dura in Gaza, scenes from Jenin of "dead" victims falling off gurneys and then climbing back on — have merited the creation of a new film genre called "Palliwood."

Assuredly, Hezbollah's supporters will accuse those questioning the Qana attacks as conspiracy theorists, so I simply advise that viewers view the evidence with their own eyes, and draw their own conclusions from there.

The photographic evidence below the fold includes images of the dead, and is not for the squeamish.
more...

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Qana Media Coverup?

The more I see about the timeline in Qana, the more I doubt the story being told to us by the world's media.

Katherine Shrader and Kathy Gannon of AP make the strike and its effect seem immediate:


A three-story house on the outskirts of Qana was leveled when a missile crashed into it at 1 a.m. Red Cross officials said 56 were killed and police said 34 children and 12 adult women were among the dead. It was worst single strike since Israel's campaign in Lebanon began on July 12 when Hezbollah militants crossed the border into Israel and abducted two soldiers.

But we know that the immediacy of the collapse given in this timeline to be a false construct. Many hours before this AP story was released, the IDF had already reported that the building did not collapse until 8 A.M.

Shrader and Gannon did not question the rather unique makeup of the families hardest hit in the attack (my bold):


Israel suspended air attacks on south Lebanon for 48 hours starting early Monday in the face of widespread outrage over an airstrike on a house that killed 56 Lebanese, almost all of them women and children.

[jump to page 2]

Red Cross officials said 56 were killed and police said 34 children and 12 adult women were among the dead.

[snip]

In Qana, workers pulled dirt-covered bodies of young boys and girls dressed in the shorts and T-shirts they had been sleeping in out of the mangled wreckage of the building. Bodies were carried in blankets.

Two extended families, the Shalhoubs and the Hashems, had gathered in the house for shelter from another night of Israeli bombardment in the border area when the strike brought the building down.

"I was so afraid. There was dirt and rocks and I couldn't see. Everything was black," said 13-year-old Noor Hashem, who survived, although her five siblings did not. She was pulled out of the ruins by her uncle, whose wife and five children also died.

34 children. 12 adult women. Not a single adult male officially listed among them. How strangely asexual these "civilian" families seem to be.

The men were elsewhere as under-reported elsewhere:


In Qana this morning, the Katyusha squads took their rocket launchers and rockets from inside the buildings, fired off the rockets at Israel and then rushed back inside.

It seems increasingly probable that the Shalhoub and Hashem men were likely members of Hezbollah, involved in launching the very rockets at Israel that called in the counter-battery fire that killed their families that were hiding deeper in the building.

It also seems possible that the deaths of the Shalhoub and Hashem women and children came not as a result of the initial Israeli air strike, but because of secondary explosions more than seven hours later, explosions that would seem to be consistent with ammunition and rockets "cooking off."

Based upon the evidence emerging, it seems more plausible than not that Hezbollah men were responsible for the deaths of Hezbollah women and children, and over-exploited that fact for media consumption.

Somehow, this more plausible scenario gets little play from Shrader and Gannon and the rest of the media.

It must be the CNN effect.

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July 30, 2006

Mel's Apocalyptic Statement


mel

"F*****g Jews... The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world."

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There Are No Civilians Here

At least 56 Lebanese, including 34 children, died in an Israeli air strike on a neighborhood that Hezbollah had been using to launch rockets. The errant air strike killed 56.

Some were innocents. None were civilians.

Since 1982, Hezbollah—"The Party of God"—has spread throughout the Lebanese Shiite culture. Inspired by Ayatollah Ruhollah Sayed Khomeini's Islamic Revolution in Iran, it is far more than just a terrorist group. Hezbollah sponsors social programs, runs hospitals, schools, and newspapers, and its political arm holds seats in the Lebanese Parliament and Cabinet. Hezbollah is involved in every facet of Shia life in Lebanon. A July 26 poll by the "Beirut Center for Research and Information" purports to show that 87% of Lebanese support Hezbollah's current war against Israel. For all intents and purposes Hezbollah is Shiite Lebanon, from cradle to grave.

This is Hezbollah.


LEBANON

So is this.


Hizbollah-boys

As is this.


hizbollah_rally

As is this.


Hzbollah

Hezbollah seeks to set up an Islamic government in Lebanon modeled after the one in Iran. Hezbollah officially supports the destruction of the state of Israel; the eradication of Jews from the Mediterranean. From birth, Hezbollah trains Lebanese Shiite to hate and desire to kill Israelis. It trains man, woman and child to do what they can to drive Israel into the sea and end the Jewish state. That is why Lebanese Shiites accept Hezbollah rockets, barracks, and weapons depots in their neighborhoods, and why those killed today will be celebrated as martyrs.

The 34 children who died in this Israeli strike were innocent in that they know no other way of life than to hate Jews. But they were not civilians.

Not in any way we'd recognize at all.

Update: The building collapsed almost eight hours after the Israeli air strike. The IDF thinks that Hezbollah explosives stored in the building may have detonated, causing the collapse.

Update 2: A.J. Strata has been following this story very closely. It seems Hezbollah was firing rockets from this neighborhood, and then running inside the building hit and others nearby for cover. They knew Israel would track the rockets back to their location and engage in counterbattery fire.

Hezbollah purposefully put children in a building in a combat zone and launched rockets from outside their location, knowing the Israeli response. Hezbollah targeted Lebanese children with Israeli missiles.

They served their purpose. They're martyrs, you see.

There are no civilians here.

Update 3: Staged.

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July 29, 2006

Turtle Eggs and Cannons


abbeyroad

"Abbey Road, Mexico." (l to r) Sean Quigley, John Donovan, Ward Brewer, and John Nowakowski, half of "Brewer's Bandits" on the DD-574/E-01 in Lazaro Cardenas. Mk4 20mm cannon in the foreground.
Photo filched from Rob Harshbarger.

John Donovan of Argghhh! and the rest of Ward Brewer's crew are getting a lot of work done on the John Rodgers/Cúitlahuac as they continue to prep the destroyer to take the long trip from Mexico's west coast to Mobile Bay. The Mexican Navy is taking great care of them... perhaps too good of care of them. I'm jealous.

Read the latest posts at Argghhh! here and here to find out why.

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Another "Deranged" Muslim Attacks

Another violent attack carried out because of religion, and once more, it isn't carried out by Methodists.


Six women were shot - one fatally - this afternoon at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle by a man who told a witness he was upset about "what was going on in Israel."

Police spokesman Rich Pruitt said there was one shooter, who was apprehended without incident outside the Jewish Federation building at the corner of Third Avenue and Virginia Street.

"We believe it's a lone individual acting out his antagonism," said David Gomez, who heads the FBI's counterterrorism efforts in Seattle.

Authorities did not release many details, but the FBI said the alleged shooter was between 30 and 40 and agents were investigating the incident as a hate crime. When asked at a news conference if that meant the alleged shooter was Muslim, Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske said: "You could infer that."

Steve at Hog on Ice captures my frustration with this and other attacks from Muslims on civilian targets nearly perfectly:


Congratulations, Brave Muslim Warriors
Seattle is Safe From Pregnant Jewish Women

When will the political left figure out the difference between Israel and the Muslims? Notice I don't say "Muslim extremists." That's because the "extremists" have the moral and financial support of Muslims everywhere, and because the Islam we call "moderate" is more intolerant than the Klan.

The left excoriates Israel constantly for its "brutality," complaining that Israel kills civilians. Yes, Israel kills civilians. So does every country that engages in military action. Like all civilized (i.e. "non-Muslim") nations, and to a greater degree than most, Israel strives to avoid civilian casualties, but they still happen. As a result of Muslim provocation, of course. No one bothers to point that out.

Muslims, on the other hand, target civilians deliberately. The USUAL goal of armed Muslims is to kill civilians. Partly because they're barbarians, and partly because they generally lack the guts to take on soldiers.

Israel attacks a missile battery. The Muslims shell a suburb. Israel destroys an ammunition dump. The Muslims shoot up a playground. This is the way it has always worked. Yet the poltical left squeals in outrage when a Muslim civilian dies, and they accept dead Jewish civilians as though being a Jew justifies murder.

The left wets itself when anyone dares suggest that Muslim immigrants and resident aliens need special scrutiny, or that they might turn out to be disloyal. But the left isn't around to pick up the pieces when British Muslims or American Muslims who have never been oppressed in their lives blow up a subway train or kill random citizens with a sniper rifle. Actually, they ARE around. To tell us we brought it on ourselves.

Steve (read the whole thing, it's an impressive rant) goes on to advocate the conquering of Muslim countries and forcing them into submission, which I do not advocate.

Yet.

Ask me again after the next 9/11-scale terrorist attack on this nation.

Until then, these pinprick attacks by "unstable" Muslims make me view the rest of their co-religionists with deep suspicion and mistrust

They've earned every bit of it.

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July 28, 2006

Inside the Sandbox

A soldier/son's wise perspective on Iraq at Blue Crab Boulevard.

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Cindy Lied, SAGEBRUSH DIED!

Hot Air has a breaking story that Cindy Sheehan arranged a strawman purchase of five acres of land in Crawford, TX, on a concocted sob-story that the real buyer was a Hurricane Katrina victim trying to start over.

sheehan2

Oops. I bet that little detail wasn't supposed to slip out.

On the bright side, she couldn't loose any more credibility...

Update: Cindy's new themepark, Stalkerland.

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Frog-Marching Tice?

This press release by the so-called "National Security Whistleblowers Coalition" is sure to get the progressive netroots in a tizzy (via Stop the ACLU):


On Wednesday, July 26, Russell Tice, former National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence analyst and a member of National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC), was approached outside his home by two FBI agents who served him with a subpoena to testify in front of a federal grand jury. NSWBC has obtained a copy of the subpoena issued for Mr. Tice's testimony and is releasing it to the public for the first time. The subpoena directs Mr. Tice to appear before the jury on August 2, 2006 at 1:00 p.m. in the Eastern District of Virginia. Mr. Tice “will be asked to testify and answer questions concerning possible violations of federal criminal law." [To view the subpoena click here].

In response to the subpoena, Mr. Tice issued the following statement: “This latest action by the government is designed only for one purpose: to ensure that people who witness criminal action being committed by the government are intimidated into remaining silent.” He continued: “To this date I have pursued all the appropriate channels to report unlawful and unconstitutional acts conducted [by the government] while I served as an intelligence officer with the NSA and DIA. It was with my oath as a US intelligence officer to protect and preserve the U.S. Constitution weighing heavy on my mind that I reported acts that I know to be unlawful and unconstitutional. The freedom of the American people cannot be protected when our constitutional liberties are ignored and our nation has decayed into a police state.”

Uh, yeah.

Are we to believe that the purpose of the NSWC is to protect those that illegally leak classified information to the media? I'm only asking, because that is what not only what Russell Tice did, but publicly admitted to doing.

The NSWC is calling this a "witch hunt," but when someone commits a crime, and acknowledges doing so publicly, what responsible authority can decide not to investigate the charges? This is akin to an arsonist standing outside of a burning abandoned, shouting "I DID IT!" and then expressing incredulity when he is taken down to the local precinct for questioning.

To cry foul when the government takes your admission seriously is perhaps even more deranged than stalking a fellow employee and acting surprised when you get disciplined for it.

Perhaps Tice is the only person that may be facing a subpoena at this time, but I strongly suspect that the NSWC is making so much noise because they are concerned that others in their merry little band of leakers might also wind up in front of a federal grand jury.

It appears Tice and his ilk are willing to be patriots only up until the point that they might have to deal with the legal consequences of their actions.

Chickensquawks.

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What You Need To Know

The editors of Pajamas Media are providing by far the most comprehensive news and opinion round-up on the on-going war in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah, featuring frequently-updated news breaks from the world's media outlets, along with opinion and blog reporting.

N.Z. Bear is providing the eyes-on-the-ground, first-hand reporting from civilian bloggers in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Israel, in addition to round-up of bloggers around the world covering the conflict.

No news organization in the world is providing as comprehensive reporting as these two sites.

Period.

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"Thank you from the bottom of my heart"

Listen to a gripping call to Pat Dollard from Susan, and Army wife and mother, on Pundit Review.

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July 27, 2006

Hezbollah's White Phosphorus Lies

It was only a matter of time before Hezbollah and their gullible dupes in the media began applying the Terrorist Propaganda Cook Book to the present war in Lebanon, accusing Israel forces of using chemical and other "illegal weapons" against civilians.

The Sydney Morning Herald was all too willing to print these suspiciously vague allegations:


Killed by Israeli air raids, the Lebanese dead are charred in a way local doctors, who have lived through years of civil war and Israeli occupation, say they have not seen before.

Bachir Cham, a Belgian-Lebanese doctor at the Southern Medical Centre in Sidon, received eight bodies after an Israeli air raid on nearby Rmeili which he said exhibited such wounds.

He has taken 24 samples from the bodies to test what killed them. He believes it is a chemical.
Cham said the bodies of some victims were "black as shoes, so they are definitely using chemical weapons. They are all black but their hair and skin is intact so they are not really burnt. It is something else."
"If you burnt someone with petrol their hair would burn and their skin would burn down to the bone. The Israelis are 100 per cent using chemical weapons."

Lebanese President Emile Lahoud has repeatedly accused Israel of using phosphorus bombs in its offensive.

Human Rights Watch, which has accused the Israeli army of using cluster bombs in populated areas of southern Lebanon, said it had not verified claims that Israel had used phosphorus.

"We are investigating but we haven't confirmed anything yet. We have seen phosphorus used before and we have seen it in the artillery stocks of the Israeli army in the north," said Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch.

"Phosphorus shells do have a legitimate use in illuminating the battlefield at night. The offensive use of phosphorus would be a violation of international conventions."

If these charges seem to be familiar, it is because they are an echo of the exact same kind of charges popularized in a fraudulent documentary called Fallujah, the Hidden Massacre, from Italian Rai News24, an offshoot of communist-dominated channel Rai 3, directed by Sigfrido Ranucci.

I thoroughly debunked the half-truths and lies of this film back in November in a series of posts:

Rai's White Phosphorus Fraud

The Lies of Fallujah, The Hidden Massacre, Part 1

The Lies of Fallujah, The Hidden Massacre, Part 2

The Lies of Fallujah, The Hidden Massacre, Part 3

The well-documented and irrefutable lies in Ranucci's film begin in the opening credits and do not stop until the final credits are over.

Hezbollah seeks to use these same dark libels without a shred of any evidence supporting their allegations, other than claims made by Lebanese doctors and government officials. Let's look at the claims made by the Lebanese doctor in the Sydney Morning Herald article again:


Bachir Cham, a Belgian-Lebanese doctor at the Southern Medical Centre in Sidon, received eight bodies after an Israeli air raid on nearby Rmeili which he said exhibited such wounds.

He has taken 24 samples from the bodies to test what killed them. He believes it is a chemical.

Cham said the bodies of some victims were "black as shoes, so they are definitely using chemical weapons. They are all black but their hair and skin is intact so they are not really burnt. It is something else."

Almost these exact same descriptions are used to describe many of the bodies shown in Fallujah, the Hidden Massacre. Chris Milroy, professor of forensic pathology at the University of Sheffield (England), had this to say about those bodies:


He reported that "nothing indicates to me that the bodies have been burnt". They had turned black and lost their skin "through decomposition. "

The simple fact of the matter is that the war in Lebanon has been going on for 16 days, and those people killed more than a few days ago would quickly begin to decompose in the summer heat. Conditions vary from place to place, but it is quite possible and perhaps even probably that those killed by primary blast efects from bombs or artillery fire and left in the streets would be black through decomposition, not the affects of some sort of "mystery weapon."

The classification of injuries caused by an explosive blast fall into four classifications:

  • primary
  • secondary
  • tertiary
  • quaternary

A thorough description of these kinds of injuries is available here.

Primary blast injuries—those caused by the pressure wave of a conventional military explosives, typically affecting soft tissues within the body but leaving little or no visible wound on the body—are highly consistent with the bodies described by the Lebanese doctor, providing that as ABC alluded to, bodies are often unrecovered for days.

This is the exact same kind of injury that killed Jordanian terrorist mastermind Abu Musab al Zarqawi. Had he not been recovered immediately—say, a major conflict was erupting around his body and it could not easily be recovered for days or even weeks—there is a quite distinct chance that if the environmental condition in his area were favorable, then his body would have been recovered, "all black but... hair and skin... intact," precisely as Dr Cham saw in Lebanon.

Now, let us look again at the specific white phosphorus comments made in this SMH article:


Lebanese President Emile Lahoud has repeatedly accused Israel of using phosphorus bombs in its offensive.

Human Rights Watch, which has accused the Israeli army of using cluster bombs in populated areas of southern Lebanon, said it had not verified claims that Israel had used phosphorus.

"We are investigating but we haven't confirmed anything yet. We have seen phosphorus used before and we have seen it in the artillery stocks of the Israeli army in the north," said Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch.

"Phosphorus shells do have a legitimate use in illuminating the battlefield at night. The offensive use of phosphorus would be a violation of international conventions."

White phosphorus munitions, despite the way they are described in this article, are not illegal, are not banned by any international treaty, and have perfectly legitimate military uses.

They are primarily used for smoke screens, but because of their incendiary nature, they are also useful against flammable targets. Hezbollah's rockets—more than 2,000 of which have been fired into Israel with up to an estimated 8,000 more remaining in Lebanon—are highly flammable, and a viable target for WP munitions.

White phosphorus shells are also useful as a psychological weapon against entrenched position. The U.S. forces in Fallujah used a combination of white phosphorus and proximity-fused high explosive shells to clear terrorist positions, as described here:


In a tactical trick called a "shake 'n bake," American mortars or howitzers would drop several white phosphorus shells as close as possible to an entrenched enemy position. The white phosphorus-saturated felt wedges would then deploy and fall to the ground, where some could potentially burn terrorists hiding in trenches and spider holes, but it would almost certainly obscure their vision, no matter what kind of cover they were under.

The terrorists, knowing that American forces preferred to use the dense smoke of white phosphorus to screen attacks, would panic, fearing they were about to be overrun. As the evacuated their entrenched ambush positions, high explosive shells were the fired to kill the insurgents flushed out in the open.

White phosphorus munitions are a normal part of the inventory for NATO forces, among others, and there is nothing illegal in their use. Some have complained that white phosphorus weapons are illegally being used against civilians. Would it be more palatable of these civilians were killed with other munitions?

The simple fact of the matter is that Hezbollah, by purposefully integrating their positions into civilian neighborhoods, place the lives of Lebanon's civilians in danger. Lebanese Shiites that support Hezbollah and allow Hezbollah to build bunkers, storehouses, and sniper nests in their homes should not be surprised or appalled when the Israeli military targets that position.

The arguments are recycled, the evidence contrived; there is no credible evidence that chemical or white phosphorus weapons are being used to target Lebanese civilians, and it is telling that the media are all too willing to be led down this same path of lies again.

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Bringing the Rogers Home-Day 1

Ward Brewer and his team from Beauchamp Tower Corporation (Operation Enduring Service web site, blog) have arrived in Mexico City on the first leg of their trip to bring home the DD-574 John Rogers/E-01 Cuitlahuac (photos from NavSource Online), the longest-serving of the World War II-era Fletcher-class destroyers.


dd574


AA Action view from CVA-8 Hornet 14 May 1945 of kamikaze exploding over John Rogers (John Chiquoine via NavSource Online)

They will push on today to Lázaro Cárdenas, a Mexican port city in the state of Michoacán, where the John Rogers is currently berthed.

The blogging community is very lucky to have an exclusive on the repatriation of the Rogers, with milblogger John Donovan reporting in on Argghh!, and his first post form Mexico is already online.

Read it here.

I'll hope to have some additional commentary posted here on Confederate Yankee, and my brother phin will be chiming in as well, which isn't necessarily a good thing. He promised to reveal "deep, dark secrets" about me to Ward and John in exchange for the recipe for the Avocado Ranch dressing they use to lace the fish tacos he got addicted to on his business trips to the southwest.

Whatever the charge, I maintain my innocence, and will remind my dear brother that that particular street runs both ways.

Update: John has another post here, and the first pic.

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The Illustrated Greenwald

Glenn Greenwald's fans will continue to deny his fraudulent nature as he wanders the golf courses of Florida looking for the real killers bed & breakfasts of Brazil looking for the "real puppeteers."

That said, Patterico's thoroughly damning Annotated WuzzaDem makes it very unlikely that ardent Greenwald supporters Ryan, Wilson, Ellison, Thomas Ellers, and Rick Ellensburg (who all disappeared when Greenwald was accused of sock puppetry, and who have not resurfaced since) will ever be heard from again.

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July 26, 2006

"You're a Dead Man"

Those were the words uttered to George at Seixon this morning on his cell phone, from a person he believes to be none other than disgraced lefty journalist Jason Leopold.

This was after Larry Johnson's alleged threats against George and his family yesterday.

Several weeks ago, Glenn Greenwald—the official one, not one of his many assumed names we've since learned of—made the following statement in the comments to the post A Proud Member of the Toddler-Threatening Community:


There are random anonymous commenters who make repugnant comments all the time on blog. LGF linked to a post I wrote yesterday and I had people coming to my blog telling me to do the world a favor and end my life with an honor suicide just as my Muslim terrorist allies would do.

There is a big difference between comments of this sort coming from people who have influence and are known opinion leaders (like David Horowitz, Michelle Malkin, StopTheACLU, etc.) and some random individual who starts commenting on a blog. Trying to build up her importance in order to make her somehow representative of the "Left" is rather misleading.

So tell me now Mr Greenwald: does Jason Leopold constitute "a known opinion maker," as a "regular contributor" to CNBC and National Public Radio? Is he "representative of the 'Left'" as a writer for Alternet, CounterPunch, Common Dreams, Raw Story, and Truthout?

What of Larry Johnson, who gave the weekly radio address on July 23, 2005 for the Democratic Party, and wrote a July, 2001 NY Times editorial claiming a declining terrorist threat, and has appeared on many of the major news channels? I think he qualifies as well.

Larisa Alexandrovna, the managing editor of progressive news site Raw Story seems to be the most likely person to have given Seixon's name to Leopold, and she is certainly regarded as a representative of the "Left."

This is Glenn Greenwald's chance to go after three "known opinion makers" that most reasonable people would agree have likely conspired to go far over the line. this would seem to present Greenwald with the fight he seems to be clamoring for in the excerpted comment cited above.

What course of battle, then, does Greenwald choose today?

Why, attacking the exact same "random anonymous commenters" at LGF that he seemed to think were unimportant less than a month ago.

Perhaps with Wilson, Ryan, Ellison and Thomas also using that same computer, Glenn simply couldn't get online long enough to post a condemnation about the kind of people he personally states he thought were worthwhile condemning.

He'll get to it tomorrow, I'm sure.

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"Everybody Gets Blown Up"

Patt Dollard has a new trailer posted for Young Americans. It's something over six minutes long, interviewing the survivor's of an IED attack on what appears to be a LAV-25.

As always, Dollard doesn't pull punches or attempt to script what the Marines say, so the language is raw, and perhaps not safe for work. In addition, there is some mild gore, with blood shown on the LAV-25 after the IED attack.

Pat is also collecting donations for an injured Marine Lance Corporal Benjamin Hardgrove:


Well, the very first night we got back to California from Iraq, Hardgrove was hit by a car and has suffered extensive injuries including severe brain damage. He is 20 years old. His mother is a fighter who has done everything she can to secure the best medical treatment possible. Half of all donations to Young Americans Media this week will go to Hardgrove's medical fund, and I am beginning to work with his mother, Jaime, to have another fund set up exclusively for him by week's end.

If you're able to help out, the PayPal link is at the bottom of Dollard's main page.

Update: More about Hardgrove here.

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House of Cards

I've long held, as you see above, that "liberalism is a persistent vegetative state," but at no point could I ever have predicted that it was as inbred and corrupt as the story unfolding around Sexion, an American blogger living Norway, seems to indicate.

The entire sordid situation is too bizarre for me to accurately replicate, so I'll send you to Matthew Sheffield's explanation of events as they are currently understood.

Read it.

Seriously.

Because if you don't, the rest of this post won't make any sense.


Apparently, disgraced journalistic fraud and technorati-addicted freak Jason Leopold (hi Jason, yes I see you, go stalk someone else), several of Leopold's sockpuppet identities, ex-CIA Joe Wilson defender (man what a bad time for that) and former media darling Larry Johnson, and Larisa Alexandrovna of Raw Story (the liberal "Drudge Report") are all involved in a bizarre web of... well, I'm not exactly sure. But it involves fake sock puppet identities, attempts to discredit a Daily Kos diarist and Seixon, allegations of a conspiracy theory, and what appear to be threats against Seixon and his family by Johnson.

Read this post by Ace, and follow the whole bizarre thing at Seixon's blog.

Jason Leopold, a disgraced journalist with a history of admitted mental illness and drug addiction, allegedly created (and seems to presently create) false identities and false emails to attempt to discredit critics on the Internet. His former colleague at Raw Story, Larisa Alexandrovna, jumps in supporting these attempts to discredit at least one of these critics. A former CIA and State Department Counter-terrorism official, Larry Johnson, loyal to all things Joe Wilson, is apparently threatening bloggers and their families across international borders.

"crosspatch" offers a plausible explanation for these attacks in the comments of Sexion's latest post:


What it seems to be is that their whole community is based on faith. For example, that Bush "stole" the elections in 2000 and 2004 is a fundamental principle in their world. Now they have no actual proof of this and this is all based on a plausible scenario. When you begin to expose people like Jason as liars or catch them making thigs up or spreading falsehoods, it risks bringing down their entire community they have so carefully built and nurtured. In other words, what you are doing is speaking heresey. You must be attacked and run off so that you don't "poison the minds" of other believers. But unlike the rank and file "believers" people like Larry are in the college of cardinals on their religion. They have a great deal to lose. People like Johnson, Wilson, Dean, Kos, et al have much to lose if people don't believe their scenarios anymore. If people stop believing that Rove controls the world and that Rumsfeld is dictating Israeli military strategy, then their entire little empire is lost and they are no longer celebrities as their own status is reduced.

[snip]

You are being treated this way because you are a threat to Larry's status and all the "plausible scenarios" that have been trotted out to support the community that shares those beliefs. Fact is their enemy when it is at odds with their beliefs.

An interesting hypothesis.

Not surprisingly, this same comment would describe the motive for Glenn Greenwald's alleged sock puppetry and his reputed recent, after-the-fact "evidence tampering."

What do these liberal luminaries—Jason Leopold, Glenn Greenwald, Larry Johnson, Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame—and the rest of the "reality-based" machine have to lose if their house of cards falls apart?

Quite a lot, from several angles.

Financially, Greenwald, Wilson, and Plame all have current or future books whose success obviously hinges on the credibility of author.

Larry Johnson has quite the media career going for himself, with many appearances in major international media, but if his credibility is damaged or he is shown to be unstable(which seems to be a developing story), his media spotlight would quickly dim, and his value to BERG Associates would certainly diminish.

Likewise, (writer) Leopold's Truthout and (editor) Alexandrovna's Raw Story, leftists news sites with already questionable credibility, have much to loose if their writers and editors are caught as frauds, or show that they can be easily duped.

Of course, the much larger picture, which "crosspatch" correctly identified, is that if these and other central figures in the "reality-based" community are exposed as charlatans and dupes, then an entire series of allegations that form the potential base of growth for the progressive moment falls apart.

This is going to be fun to watch.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:10 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 760 words, total size 6 kb.

July 25, 2006

The Longest Trip Home

Long-time readers of this site know that one of my pet interests is Operation Enduring Service, an effort of not-for-profit Beauchamp Tower Corporation to make the best practical use of retired U.S naval vessels currently facing the cutting torches of scrapyards.

Most of my focus has been on one aspect of OES, the creation of a disaster response fleet I long ago dubbed the "Salvation Navy." Negotiations for that part of the program are currently being worked out at the highest levels of state and federal government, but another part of the program hasn't received as much attention, and that is the restoration of World War II-era warships, beginning with the DD-574 John Rogers, the last of the serving Fletcher-class destroyers.

DD-574 John Rogers served in the Pacific theater of World War II, serving in raids and amphibious landings in places with names like Tarawa, Wake Island, Bougainville, Kwajalein Atoll, and Guam, where Rogers fired more than 3,600 shells to knock out Japanense defenses. Rogers also served of Iwo Jima and the invasion of Okinawa, and in July of 1945, participated in what was the deepest naval penetration of the war. Destroyer Division 25's anti-shipping sweep that came within 1½ miles of the Japanese shoreline. John Rogers steamed into Toyko Bay in September of 1945, having fought in almost every major offensive campaign of the Pacific theater.

John Rogers was decommissioned after the war like many destroyers, and was transferred to Mexico in 1968. The destroyer was renamed the E-01 Cuitlahuac in honor of the Aztec emperor. On July 16, 2002, more than 60 years after being launched, the longest-serving Fletcher was retired by the Mexican Navy.

But that was not to be the end of the story.

On December 7, 2005, 65 years to the day that the Japanese launched an attack on Pearl Harbor plunging America into World War II, CEO Ward Brewer of Beauchamp Tower Corporation signed a transfer agreement to return the ship to American hands.

Tomorrow, Ward Brewer's team from BTC, milblogger John Donovan of Argghhh!, and documentary film crew will fly to Mexico to tow John Rogers from the Mexican Pacific coast to the shipyard in Mobile, Alabama where the last serving Fletcher-class destroyer will be restored for future genrations.

In the coming days, follow the story of the Rogers repatriation at Argghhh!, starting with John's first post, A Series of Fortuitous Events. I'll also have commentary here at Confederate Yankee.

It has been 63 years since the DD-574 was launched on the Texas Gulf Coast, but the John Rogers is finally beginning the longest trip home.

Update: The Operation Enduring Service Weblog is back up and running at a new address: http://www.btconline.us/mt.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:08 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 457 words, total size 3 kb.

Odd Man In

I haven't been paying too much attention to the Joe Liebermann/Ned Lamont Democratic primary battle in Connecticut, other than to read blog commentary from the progressive "Nedheads" and smirk, but this post has me thinking it could get a lot more interesting:


The most interesting question about the possibility that Connecticut Democrats could deny Joseph Lieberman renomination is whether that would help or hurt the senator's political prospects. Or, for that matter, the Democratic Party's.

That's because even if Lieberman loses the Aug. 8 Democratic primary - and the newest polling data says that is a real possibility - he would be a huge favorite for re-election as an independent come November.
And if that is the case, it would not be hard to write a scenario in which the real loser from a Lieberman defeat to anti-war candidate Ned Lamont might be the Democratic Party itself

That would especially be the case if Lieberman's good friend Sen. John McCain of Arizona becomes the 2008 Republican presidential nominee and picks Joe as his running mate.

There are a couple of good nuggets to mull over in just those few paragraphs.

First, what would a Lamont primary victory really mean?

It would be a huge victory for the Kossaks and their ilk, beating an incumbent with a progressive political newcomer (who is leading 51%-47%, barely within the margin of error, in the latest Quinnipiac University poll). But that moral victory aside, would the primary election cement a win for Lamont in "blue" Connecticut?

Probably not.

Primary voters in Connecticut, (or so I've read here and there) tend to be far more liberal than their fellow Nutmeg State voters, which seems be be true when you consider the state's electoral map in the 2004 Presidential elections. True, John Kerry trounced Bush in Connecticut 55% to 44%, but the county-by-county map shows a state that while Democratic in makeup, was hardly a progressive monolith. The state itself is solidly Democrat, but there doesn't seem to be an overarching affinity among Connecticut voters for the rabid netroots politics favored by Lamont's most vocal supporters. It is quite possible—perhaps even probable—that Lamont could win the primary battle, but lose the war for the Senate seat in a state that is Democratic, but moderately so.

And how Paul Brown think that this battle in Connecticut may affect '08?


If Lieberman were to win as an independent it would give him great influence, not just in the Senate, but as the face of a new politics that transcends party labels.

Although he has pledged to caucus with the Democrats if elected as an independent, he would be a bigger player than even today as the party's former vice presidential candidate.

And he would be an awfully attractive running mate for McCain, not to mention other potential Republican
White House hopefuls.

A fusion ticket with a Republican Presidential candidate (please not McCain) and Lieberman as a Vice Presidential candidate would be even more competitive than the Cheney/Perazzi ticket I've secretly been holding out hope for. Cheney/Lieberman, anyone?

Quite frankly, the Lamont primary challenge is tough to view as anything other than a liability for the overall Democratic Party's long-term chances, even if the Frothing Few think that a Lamont primary victory would be a long-term triumph for the netroots.

Look for the wailing and knashing of teeth to continue.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:03 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
Post contains 567 words, total size 4 kb.

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