The 500 tons of Iranian rockets, grenades, ammunition and mortar shells that Israel intercepted on the MV Francop was destined for Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon, a fact that Iran's friends in the Obama White House will not doubt seek to downplay if not outright ignore. That means that a media largely compliant to the Administration's wishes will fail to pick up on the alarm sounded by Israel, which noted the weapons they intercepted had first been shipped into an unsuspecting third country, unloaded, transferred, and shipped out again without anyone in that nation knowing.

The weapons were not segregated or controlled, were not properly stored or packed, and highly explosive.

And it could happen any any port at any nation on earth.

"When you deal with those containers without any precautions at all, they can explode almost anywhere. And any one of your ships could carry one of those containers one day, and any one of your ports could deal with those explosives."

This isn't a secret.

So why isn't anything being done about it?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:18 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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My appearance with Bill Whittle of EjectEjectEject and AfterBurner fame on PJTV, talking about Iran arming terrorist groups, based upon this article from yesterday at Pajamas Media and this one here.

Thanks for having me on, Bill!

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 07:29 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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107mm rockets of recent Iranian manufacture are among the 500 tons of ordnance recovered by the Israeli Navy, and the rockets they recovered precisely matched those captured outside of U.S FOB Hammer in July of 2007.

And in case you are wondering, yes, those same rockets are still being used, and are still killing American soldiers today.

An American logistics contractor known to readers of this blog as "Big Country" says via email that those same rockets are still being used against American bases:

...between the hours of 2000 and 2200 (8pm to 10pm) drop, yep you guessed it, 107mm rockets on us. Some days they don't drop at all, which is even worse. The waiting ya know? The largest number was 6 in short order, and the lowest was a single one. Guess it depends on how confident they are about getting caught. One of them KIA'd a guy on the pad across from me a few weeks backÂ… 4 WIA, 1 KIA. (That one made FOXnews and CNN) I'm getting my intel firsthand on this, (it's pretty common knowledge on post) and the Army is fully aware of the whole thing, but whether or not it helps, I dunno... wheels within wheels as they say. I hope they put the zap these jokers soon.

Will President Obama man-up and stop Iran from supplying weapons being used against our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and against our allies and national interests? Or will he continue to pretend these weapons are not being used against Americans, so he can play at gutless diplomacy?

Somehow, I think we all know the answer.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 03:16 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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For once, an anti-gun organization's spurious claims may have saved lives.

My latest article is up at Pajamas Media.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:37 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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My latest article is up at Pajamas Media.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 02:06 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Lots of acclaim, and undeserved kudos that became an embarrassment.

I was just ahead of my time...

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:30 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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And please, don't blame me for the title.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:21 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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Frankly, it sounds like crap science geared towards a predetermined political verdict.

I think both the Bush Administration and the Obama Administration would consider a show trial that results in across-the-board convictions to be in their best diplomatic interests in dealing with the Iraqi government, who have rather foolishly (IMHO) decided to push the issue as a matter of national pride.

It takes only a layman's understanding of ballistics and metallurgy to see the obvious questions that the FBI laboratory seems to have failed to adequately answer.

I'm not giving Blackwater blanket immunity for their actions in Iraq by any stretch of the imagination, but there are certainly enough questions about the quality of the investigation and the forensic research thus far released, the forensic evidence being withheld under the rubric of religious customs, the chain of evidence, and prosecutorial political influence to cast serious doubt on whether there can be a fair trail for the accused.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 07:14 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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The solution to the expanding drug cartel violence in Mexico isn't for our anti-gun President and Attorney General to pass even more restrictive gun laws in the United States, but instead change Mexican laws to increase the flow of guns into the right hands in Mexico, paralleling the success of the Sawa or "Awakening" movement in Iraq that drove a similarly violent Sunni insurgency out of al-Anbar.

Read my latest, A Call to Arms in Mexico, at Pajamas Media.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 07:24 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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My latest at Pajamas Media.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 06:09 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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My latest is up at Pajamas Media.

(link fixed)

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 07:33 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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And why do they keep freedom-hating urban Democrats?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:29 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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When your standards are this low to start with, the lying comes easy.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 05:09 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Let me type this  s l o w l y  so that certain people who don't seem to be able to read with any level of detail can follow along.

The Pajamas Media advertising network—responsible for those ads you generally ignore see in the sidebar over there to your right—is going the way of the digital dodo on March 31. Pajamas Media, the portal site that features news and opinion, is not closing. The blogfather, Glenn Reynolds, will still be found at http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/

Only the advertising network, which never made any money, is going away. Pajamas Media and PJTV.com live on, and are in an apparent expansion phase.

The network going down to hurt some good bloggers who depended upon the network as their primary sources of income. They have my sympathy and sincere prayers. As someone who worked in web development contracting for many years, I know the fears of suddenly becoming jobless with a family to support as well or better than many, and the stress that can cause.

But I'm equally confident that those bloggers who were drawing enough traffic to draw significant income from their advertising, like Ace and Jeff and Rusty, have the kind of unique voices and talent that may fair well on their own or other blog advertising networks. They, like the cheesy song says, will survive.

And while we get along on almost nothing, I think John Cole over at Ballon Juice strikes just the right tone.

So I donÂ’t have to keep answering this repeatedly in the comments, yes, I will no longer be with the PJ Media network starting 1 April. They are apparently moving on/the business model didn't work/whatever. Life goes on.

I understand there is an inordinate amount of bad feelings and some hostility being chucked around, and I want no part in it. Roger Simon and the others at PJ always kept their word to me. From where I sit, PJ Media was an ad portal that provided advertising content for this site, and that was about it. I never understood claims at the beginning of this several years ago that somehow I was "losing my independence" or the rest of the nonsense for signing up with them. As I have stated repeatedly, maybe others had different experiences, but the company was great to me. They always kept their word, their staff was top-notch and great to work with (and I really hope they find jobs quickly/keep their jobs), and Roger Simon was a great person to do business with the past couple years. I signed a contract through the end of March, PJ Media and I are both honoring it, and they are moving on to something different. This sort of thing happens hundreds of thousands of times every day all over the world, and is really rather unremarkable.

Life goes on, indeed.

As you might guess, the dissolution of the Pajamas advertising network will not disrupt things greatly here at CY. I'll still write feature stories for Pajamas Media published at the still very active (And judging by the growing comments sections, more active) pajamasmedia.com portal, and I'm already in discussion with another exciting potential partner who may be rolling some advertising and writing opportunities my way.

We encounter, we adapt, and overcome.

So let's move forward, shall we?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 04:25 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
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My post at Pajamas Media this morning is drawing a lot of heat for labeling President Bush's commutation of former Border Patrol agents Ramos and Compean his "final mistake."

I can certainly see the other side of the equation, as I personally prefer a walled, wired, and if necessary mined border with Mexico, but this case isn't as hard—for me at least—as some people would like to make it.

Cops that shoot fleeing suspects in the back, leave the wounded suspect to fend for himself, and then attempt to cover-up the incident deserve considerable jail time, and sentences of 11 and 12 years don't seem excessive in that context from where I sit.

Do I wish their aim had been a little better? Certainly. I despise drug dealers as well. But the suspect's profession doesn't mitigate the decisions made by these two former officers, and in my opinion, they didn't deserve their commutations (and certainly do not deserve the pardons some were lobbying for).

Update: The Dallas Morning News had a similar reaction to the commutation:

...this newspaper does not agree with Bush's decision to commute the sentences of former border agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, who, respectively, were serving 11- and 12-year federal prison terms for shooting a Mexican drug dealer. This was a despicable crime: The two officers had no idea the unarmed man was trafficking in drugs when they shot him in the back side as he ran for the border near El Paso. They then took extraordinary steps to cover up the shooting with a false report.

Their actions are an affront to Border Patrol agents who perform a difficult and thankless job, and the pair's sentences were upheld last year by a federal appeals court.

ItÂ’s regrettable that Bush shortened their jail time but significant that he found middle ground and didnÂ’t grant them pardons. Their convictions will remain on the record.

Perhaps the commutation will end the undeserved celebrity status that had erupted around these two former agents. Anti-immigration organizations have used them as poster boys to perpetuate a myth that they were in prison for doing their jobs while drug smugglers were allowed to go free.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Ramos and Compean committed felonies and were rightly brought to justice. Perhaps now the Obama administration can have a comprehensive immigration discussion without this distraction clouding the conversation.

Perhaps appropriately enough, they've been greeted with a similar response by their readers, who claim that they must favor the rights of drug dealers over that of police officers.

If that was the case, I'd agree as well.

But Compean and Ramos did not know the suspect was a drug dealer at the time. They followed a suspicious vehicle on a chase, then immediately engaged in a foot pursuit of the driver without having a chance to know why his was running. Should we really write our laws to allow law enforcement officers to do whatever they want, allowing themselves to justify it after the fact?

Ramos and Compean shot at a guy who could have stolen copper, had a warrant for failing to appear in court for a parking ticket... they simply didn't know. If you've ever watched COPS, you know that stupid people run for the police for all sorts of idiotic reasons, and officers are almost never justified at shooting at a fleeing suspect 14 times (Compean) or Ramos (once).

That the suspect in the case was later determined to be an illegal, and a drug smuggler with hundreds of pounds of drugs, cannot justify what they did before they had that knowledge.

I strongly suspect the vast majority of support for these officers would have never existed if the officers had fired upon a fleeing middle-aged white guy poaching wild game.

Please tell me where I'm wrong.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:44 AM | Comments (26) | Add Comment
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Pajamas Media published a pair of articles today about Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher (a.k.a. "Joe the Plumber" going to Israel for ten days to talk to Israelis and provide commentary for PJTV. I wrote the pro-Joe article three days ago; Jazz Shaw wrote the anti-Joe article since then.

In my post, I don't think I made any unreasonable demands of the man whom admirers like to refer to as "JTP."

IÂ’m not expecting Pyle's humanizing folksiness, nor Yon's gritty incisiveness, nor Crane's vivid imagery from Wurzelbacher. I don't know if he can craft a coherent sentence or conduct an revealing interview. And perhaps he'll be an absolute disaster as a journalist, even as he's created a PR explosion for PJTV.

But there is an obvious fear among so many members of the media so defensively and preemptively dismissive of "Joe the Plumber" trying his hand at reporting. Deep inside, they must wonder if an Ohio plumber could really be much worse than the so-called professionals we already have. There lies the fear that underlies those mocking Wurzelbacher in the media. It is a bruise to their egos when they realize that almost anyone can do what they do.

Since writing that post, Joe hasn't dazzled the world as a reporting prodigy, and has most recently been mocked today for telling a group of reporters that the media should be banned from reporting the conflict he was sent to report on:

"I think media should be abolished from, you know, reporting," Wurzelbacher said. "You know, war is hell. And if you're gonna sit there and say, 'well, look at this atrocity,' well you don't know the whole story behind it half the time, so I think the media should have no business in it."

The media, of course, lapped up Wurzelbacher's comment with great glee and held it up as if it were their vindication. I'm not sure it was, as there are good reasons to ban journalists from war zones on occasion.

While an outright ban on media coverage is generally considered undemocratic and is certainly unpopular in a culture told we should have access to almost any thing at any time, the simple fact of the matter is that irresponsible and often ignorant just-in-time journalism endangers combatants and civilians, and far too often reports completely false information as undisputed fact.

This conflict is no different.

Certain heavily-biased Middle eastern and European journalists have castigated Israel for using illegal incendiaries against civilians. It turns out those "illegal incendiaries" are quite legal 155mm M825A1 shells used to create smoke screens.

An aid organization temporarily stopped shipments of food and medical supplies into Gaza based upon definitive claims reported by the media that an Israeli tank targeted and shot at one of their trucks with a tank shell, killing the driver. Days later, after many came to accept this as fact, it was revealed that tank fire was not involved in the death of the driver, and that Hamas sharpshooters armed with rifles may have killed him.

Two news organizations—CNN and Channel 4—uncritically reported the claims of a Palestinian cameraman who stated his brother and cousin were killed by an IDF drone that fired a missile at them as the played on a rooftop. That no known missiles could cause the cartoonishly minimal damage shown on the rooftop, and that critics in the medical field quickly denouced the CPR performed on the boy in the hospital by a known propagandist dcotor as poorly pantomimed fakery, is buried by both networks, who defend the footage created by a cameraman who was later determined to have ties to Hamas.

France 2 is the latest to fake journalism, airing footage they claimed was from Israeli attacks, when the carnage aired actually come from a blast caused by Palestinian militants in 2005.

Another news organization can't tell the difference between dropping flares and dropping bombs. One pathic professional that reports from the region can't tell the difference between airplanes and helicopters.

So perhaps Joe the Plumber may turn out to be not much more than a media stunt. If so, he may still be more of a success if simply for causing less damage than our so-called professionals.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 06:37 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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I've got post at Pajamas Media highlighting Reuters using deceptive captions to suggest that photos capturing the deployment of defensive flares (uses to thwart heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles) are weapons being fired on targets in Gaza.

This is an Israeli helicopter deploying a weapon (a Hellfire, most likely), as is this. No one with any competence could ever confuse a bomb, missile, or rocket with a flare.

Associated Press photographer Ariel Schalit can ever photograph and properly label both missiles and flares in the same picture.

Reuters, masters of fauxtography, don't even try.

It doesn't serve their interests of cashing in on anti-Israeli propaganda by selling biased and inflammatory photos to an always-enraged Islamist-friendly media in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:34 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Competence.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 07:41 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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I'd love to see Obama ask the state of Hawaii to produce his long-form birth certificate. While there is no procedural mechanism in place as some have noted before, that is merely a matter of process, not a legal hurdle.

Anyway, I took a stab at debunking the common "Proofer" claims in an article at Pajamas Media.

Do you think it sufficiently makes the case to the rational people who have been misled by the half-truths of the proofers? And is there anything that can ever be done to convince those conspiracy theorists that they are wrong?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 07:48 AM | Comments (15) | Add Comment
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...for their sacrifices and service.

And if you'd like to give thanks to a milbogger deployed far away from home in a combat zone, you can do so here.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:23 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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