That is what A.J. Strata, AllahPundit, Bill Roggio and others are thinking today in response to reports that Pakistani military forces killed 80 suspected al Qaeda militants with a strike led by Pakistani helicopter gunships using "precision weapons," Among the confirmed dead so far is radical cleric Maulana Liaqat, who led the al Qaeda-affiliated school.

Roggio suspects that the attack may not have been carried out by Pakistani forces, but instead an combined forces hunter/killer team currently named Task Force 145.

In previous incarnations, this team hunted and killed Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq as TF 626, hunted and coordinated the capture of Saddam Hussein as TF121, and hunted down and killing Saddam's son's Uday and Qusay as TF20.

Whatever the group is called, it is thought to be composed of the most elite American and British Special Forces units from all branches of service, including elements of Delta Force, SEAL Team Six, SAS and SFSG commandos, and US Army, USAF, and RAF special operations air units.

Brian Ross is stating that the attack came from Predator drones.

Zawahiri was targeted and almost killed in a Predator strike under similar circumstances back in January.

Update: The operation appears to be completely Pakistani in execution, as eyewitnesses identified three Pakistani helicopters as having fired upon the Taliban and al Qaeda affiliated madrassa. What is interesting is that the locals have displayed just 20 bodies of the 80 thought to have been killed, even though there is comparatively little rubble remaining to hide bodies according to the few pictures taken from the scene.

We know from previous attacks in the area that the Taliban and al Qaeda forces are quick to claim their bodies for the rubble of such strikes if at all possible, and so the discrepancy between the number claimed killed and those recovered may be an inadverdant indicator of how many militants were indeed killed.

Update: An al Qaeda leader that survived the strike confirmed that the madrassa was used to train militants.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 03:04 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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The American translator kidnapped last week has been identified, and it appears that he broke Army regulations by marrying an Iraqi civilian:

A U.S. Army translator missing after being kidnapped in Iraq had broken military rules to marry an Iraqi woman and was visiting her when he was abducted, according to people who claim to be relatives of the wife.

According to a report in Monday editions of The New York Times, the relatives said that the soldier, previously unidentified by the U.S. government, is Ahmed Qusai al-Taei, a 41-year-old Iraqi-American. The family did not know he was a soldier until after the kidnapping, the relatives said.

Taei married a 26-year-old college student, Israa Abdul-Satar, three months ago, the family said. They showed visitors photographs of the couple's wedding and honeymoon, the newspaper reported.

The relatives said members of the Shiite Mahdi Army militia came to the wife's home on Oct. 23 and dragged Taei into their car.

It should be pointed out that the situation al-Taei put himself in is one of the reasons why the military discourages soldiers from marrying into the local population, as it places both the soldier and the family at risk for reprisal attacks.

If al-Sadr's Mahdi Army is indeed behind the kidnapping, the situation has the potential for causing significant a significant political rift, as it may force a more aggressive targeting of the Shiite militia that has formed part of the base of support for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:23 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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And the Anonymous War continues:

Teenagers set a bus ablaze in Marseilles, France, seriously burning a female passenger and sending three others to the hospital for smoke inhalation.

The group reportedly forced the vehicle's doors opened and threw a flammable liquid into the bus before fleeing, the BBC said Sunday.

Authorities reported several recent bus attacks, coinciding with the one-year anniversary of riots in poor suburbs across France. The deaths of two teens in Paris sparked the riots.

In Paris, about 500 people marched in memory of the two teenage boys who died in 2005. The deaths of the two, both from immigrant families, and suggestions they were fleeing from police touched off weeks of suburban clashes, the BBC said.

During last year's riots, authorities said more than 10,000 cars were set on fire and 300 buildings were firebombed, the BBC said.

It's too bad no one can seem to get a description of the people carrying out these attacks. Apparently, France is being overrun by vague, featureless teenagers.

Oh, the horror...

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:25 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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1 How about "the ugly face of the failure of the French experiment with Socialism." Yes, they are primarily young muslim males, but I'm leaning toward the bulk of the blame being French government policy.

Posted by: Mark at October 29, 2006 10:42 AM (uUD7+)

2 Damn Druids - I knew it would come to this...

Posted by: Purple Avenger at October 29, 2006 11:05 AM (AuPsg)

3 And how about this wonderfully telling quote on how things are going in France: Two other public buses and 277 vehicles around the country were burned overnight, police said. "...Still the Interior Ministry described the night as "relative calm," noting that up to 100 cars are torched by youths in troubled neighborhoods on an average night..." Yeah, I sure want this country influencing world events. Losers...

Posted by: WB at October 29, 2006 11:05 AM (A9ieS)

4 How fortunate, then, that my home country, Finland, is very reluctant to take immigrants, and is quite keen to deport them, should they commit any serious crimes. I'd hate to see the French way of doing things (or rather, NOT doing things) in here. It seems that much of Europe is held hostage by these criminals, who are so eager to kill, burn, and then blame others for what they themselves have done.

Posted by: Anonymous for now at October 29, 2006 04:26 PM (RMHg5)

5 Anonymous Finn, the last time I was in Helsinki, the central train station was full of sullen Somali "youths".

Posted by: Anonymous too at October 29, 2006 05:56 PM (gq1+F)

6 Just another example of media manipulation. They do it all the time. Just check out my latest article at www.fromthepen.com/issue208.html to see another example. Regards buck

Posted by: bucktowndusty at October 29, 2006 06:53 PM (XDAh6)

7 This is really laughable because everyone on the planet with an IQ above room temperature realizes that "youths" in this context means Muslims. If whites rampaged against Muslims, does anyone doubt that the editors would find "youths" to be an inadequate discription of the perpetrators?

Posted by: Karl at October 29, 2006 10:33 PM (BHlA3)

8 "Anonymous too" - you probably saw most of our Somalis there. BTW, I'm missing your point. They didn't rob you, did they?

Posted by: Anonymous for now at October 30, 2006 12:46 PM (RMHg5)

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Baltimore Sun reporter David Wood makes that claim citing the Army's vice chief of staff, Gen. Richard Cody, in an oddly-titled article, "Warfare skills eroding as Army fights insurgents":

Pressed by the demands of fighting insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. Army has been unable to maintain proficiency in the kind of high-intensity mechanized warfare that toppled Saddam Hussein and would be needed again if the Army were called on to fight in Korea or in other future crises, senior officers acknowledge.

Soldiers once skilled at fighting in tanks and armored vehicles have spent three years carrying out street patrols, police duty and raids on suspected insurgent safe houses. Officers who were experienced at maneuvering dozens of tanks and coordinating high-speed maneuvers with artillery, attack helicopters and strike fighters now run human intelligence networks, negotiate with clan elders and oversee Iraqi police training and neighborhood trash pickup.

The Army's senior leaders say there is scant time to train troops in high-intensity skills and to practice large-scale mechanized maneuvers when combat brigades return home. With barely 12 months between deployments, there is hardly enough time to fix damaged gear and train new soldiers in counterinsurgency operations. Some units have the time to train but find their tanks are either still in Iraq or in repair depots.

The Army's vice chief of staff, Gen. Richard Cody, recently told reporters that there is growing concern that the Army's skills are eroding and that if the war in Iraq continues at current levels, the United States could eventually have "an army that can only fight a counterinsurgency." Cody is broadly responsible for manning, equipping and training the force.

While General Cody is a career military officer and I am but a humble civilian blogger, I beg to differ with his analysis. Put simply, it seems doubtful that large U.S. mechanized units will every again square off against comparable units in large scale, high-intensity maneuver warfare, if that is indeed the assertion he was trying to make.

Advances in imagery and signals intelligence makes it doubtful that an opposing Army could assemble a large mechanized force without U.S. commanders learning of its location, at which point other intelligence gathering assets would be able to determine the force make-up and develop precise targeting coordinates. At this point, Air Force, Navy, and Marine strike fighters and bombers, along with cruise missiles and long-range artillery assets such as the MLRS and ER-MLRS can repeatedly engage opposing force armor concentrations at a range of hundreds of miles. Once closer, any surviving units can be engaged with close air support by Army and Marine attack helicopters and conventional artillery assets, in addition to on-going attacks from Air Force and Navy strike fighters and bombers. By the time American armor closes to within their several-mile striking distance, the bulk of enemy forces will likely be destroyed, at which point the job for American armored forces will likely be identifying and destroying surviving remaining enemy armored forces that are significantly degraded and largely immobilized.

Likewise, if General Cody does not see large armor-versus armor conflicts on the horizon, the practical experience gained over the past three years in urban street fighting probably makes our soldiers better prepared for future conflicts. The kind of overwhelming short range fire-support and long range "sniping" against fixed position targets that Neil Prakash wrote about in his now-defunct milblog Armor Geddon seems to be the future of heavy armored units in heavily integrated combined arms warfare.

General Casey may indeed have a point if we once again face an opposing force that can deny us the air superiority needed to make a combined arms battlespace its most effective, but as our most pressing projected opponents—Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan, according to the article—do not have that capability, his concerns seem to me to be the complaints of the kind of stereotypical general wedded to past tactics, guilty of always fighting the past war.

Note: John Donovan tells me via email that he might address the Sun article in more detail later today at Castle Argghhh!

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Okay, I'll confess my ignorance and ask the question:

Has anyone else ever seen an African-Palestinian terrorist before?

There is the possibility that the gunman pictured is just a very dark-skinned Arab, or that the color balance was incorrect in this photo. Indeed, another photo of what appears to be the same individual at the same location does apparently show somewhat lighter skin. But with the population of Gaza being 99.4% Arab Palestinian and the remaining 0.6% being Jewish, the question is obvious:

Who is that masked man?

Do we now have photo evidence that Palestianians are importing terrorists from North African terrorist groups? And would that perhaps explain why the Associated Press photographer who shot this photo was kidnapped just hours after this picture was published?

Enquiring minds want to know.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 01:49 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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This child was weak—perhaps injured or dying—as this photo was taken in the Darfur region of Sudan in 2004. He may already be dead. One thing is certain; the future of millions of children throughout the Middle East just like him will be affected by you very soon.

As you read this, Darfar is a largely abandoned genocide. Supported by the Sudanese government, Arab janjaweed militias are exterminating Africans of the Fur, Zaghawa, and Massaleit ethnic groups. Estimates of the number of dead vary, and millions are thought to be displaced. We know that children and babies are among the targets of the janjaweed attacks, and that dismemberment is a not uncommon tactic. We also know that the violence in Darfur is projected to worsen throughout the rest of the year.

If current U.S. political trends hold, Iraq may become another Darfur, and Darfur well may be on its way to becoming another Rwanda.

As Victor David Hansen notes of unexpected outcomes today:

Where does all this lead? Not where most expect. The Left thinks that the “fiasco” in Iraq will bring a repudiation of George Bush, and lead to its return to power. Perhaps. But more likely it will bring a return of realpolitik to American foreign policy, in which no action abroad is allowable (so much for the liberals’ project of saving Darfur), and our diplomacy is predicated only on stability abroad. The idealism of trying to birth consensual government will be discredited; but with its demise also ends any attention to Arab moderates, who whined for years about our support for the House of Saud, Pakistani generals, Gulf autocrats, or our neglect of the mayhem wrought by Islamists in Afghanistan. We know now that when the United States tries to spend blood and treasure in Afghanistan and Iraq that it will be slandered as naïve or imperialistic.

Every major Democratic candidate in this fall’s congressional race—save one principled independent Democrat in Connecticut—is pushing for the United States to withdraw from Iraq. Some moderate Republicans are taking this tack as well. They claim that they want U.S. forces out of Iraq because our continued presence there only invites attacks against American soldiers, saps the national treasury, weakens our ability to respond to other threats such as Iran and North Korea, and weakens our image in the international community.

All of these points have some merit.

U.S. soldiers would be far safer if redeployed to Okinawa. There are no insurgents, no sectarian militias, and no roving bands of al Qaeda terrorists there.

The War in Iraq is indeed expensive, costing over 336 billion dollars and growing according to one anti-war web site.

Having such a large commitment of soldiers currently in, returning from, or preparing to go to Iraq certainly absorbs a significant portion of our current military strength, though it barely occupies our force projection from the Navy and Air Force to any extent.

And let us not forget that our international image is indeed tarnished, particularly among those nations of the world community run by strongmen, despots, and dictators that would see a weaker and more isolationist United States as a benefit for their own foreign policy desires.

But what no candidate in favor of withdrawal wants to address is what will happen to the Iraqi people if anti-war candidates do take control of Congress and attempt to live up to their campaign promises.

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) and other leading Democrats have already made their intentions abundantly clear:

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) will chair the powerful Ways and Means Committee if Democrats win control of the House next year, but his main goal in 2007 does not fall within his panelÂ’s jurisdiction.
"I canÂ’t stop this war, " a frustrated Rangel said in a recent interview, reiterating his vow to retire from Congress if Democrats fall short of a majority in the House.

But when pressed on how he could stop the war even if Democrats control the House during the last years of President BushÂ’s second term, Rangel paused before saying, "YouÂ’ve got to be able to pay for the war, donÂ’t you?"

Rangel’s views on funding the war are shared by many of his colleagues – especially within the 73-member Out of Iraq Caucus.

Some Democratic legislators want to halt funding for the war immediately, while others say they would allocate money for activities such as reconstruction, setting up international security forces, and the ultimate withdrawal of U.S. troops.

"Personally, I wouldnÂ’t spend another dime [on the war,] " said Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.).
Woolsey is among the Democrats in Congress who are hoping to control the power of the purse in 2007 to force an end to the war. Woolsey and some of her colleagues note that Congress helped force the end of Vietnam War by refusing to pay for it.

If Democrats take control of the House of Representatives, they will cut funding to the war effort. What they will not publicly admit is that the nearly immediate precipitous withdrawal that that would force will almost certainly destroy any hopes of Iraq being able to develop a representative form of government.

An impending, unimpeded civil war dwarfing the current level of sectarian violence will quite probably lead to genocide in Iraq, and yet, politicians in the House would not likely respond by reinserting U.S forces to help halt the violence. To do so would be to admit that they were wrong to force such an abrupt withdrawal.

Photo of an Iraqi family near the Iranian border courtesy of Michael Yon.

The price of such short-sighted political miscalculations will be paid for with the blood of Iraqi, men, women, and children. They do not want an even wider civil war, but lack any authority or capability to stop it on their own. No one can predict just how bad the violence would become, but anyone addressing the situation honestly must acknowledge that the number of those killed, injured and displaced will be far greater than the already unacceptable casualties thus far.

The Democratic PartyÂ’s intention is not genocide in Iraq, but if they come to power in Congress, that is almost assuredly what they will cause. Their much-discussed and on-going drive for isolationism is precursor to mass murder.

And yet, Iraqi civilians will not be the only victims of a Democratic Congress. A Democratic House that refuses to allow American forces the opportunity to attempt to stabilize a situation we created will have no political capital to intwt in interceding in other conflicts where we have even less direct interests.

As Hanson notes in his article linked above, no action abroad will be permissible if we withdraw from Iraq. There can be no intervention to stop the genocide in Darfur. There can be no intervention in any other "hot spots" that may develop around the world ,because a Democratic Congress that abandoned Iraq will have committed itself to a policy of non-intervention worldwide.

It is well within the realm of possibility that American voters will determine with their votes on November 7 whether or not we will see this mistake of inaction repeated in other nations in the Middle East and Africa in coming years.

The cost in blood and treasure of the current "Republican" war may yet pale in comparison to the human suffering imposed by a pending Democratic "peace."

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Breaking on al-Reuters:

A U.S. soldier was reported missing in Baghdad on Monday, the military said.

The soldier, part of a multi-national division in the Iraqi capital, went missing at about 7:30 p.m. local time, the U.S. military said in a statement.

"Coalition and Iraqi Security Forces immediately responded to attempt to locate the soldier, the search is ongoing," the statement said.

The limited information coming out thus far does not indicate the circumstances under which the soldier went missing. In June, two soldiers were captured, tortured and eventually beheaded after a larger force was drawn away and their isolated position was overrun.

It has not been confirmed that this soldier was indeed captured, but that is of course the fear.

More as this develops.

Update: Fox News television mentioned the story briefly. The soldier, a translator, was kidnapped. The kidnapping was reported by an Iraqi civilian who witnessed it..

As expected, the bottomfeeders at the Democratic Underground are already insisting that any impending torture is, of course, President Bush's fault for signing the Military Commissions Act nine days ago.

Never miss a chance, kids, no matter how petty.

Update: This may be something:

An employee at Baghdad's al-Furat TV, which was raided by American forces earlier Monday, said the U.S. forces conducting the search told him they were looking for an abducted American officer of Iraqi descent.

The employee said U.S. soldiers and Mouwafak al-Rubaie, the government's national security adviser who went to the station during the raid, told him the missing officer had left to join family members in Baghdad's Karadah district.

The officer's wife, also an Iraqi-American, was reportedly in the capital visiting family, according to the reports passed on by the al-Furat employee.

Having relatives in the combat zone means that this particular soldier had a great degree of potential exposure. I hope that whoever kidnapped the missing soldier did not use his family members or his spouse as bait leading to his capture.

Update: Snatched on the way to his family? that is what I take away from this line:

American troops who raided Baghdad's al-Furat TV on Monday said they were looking for an abducted American officer of Iraqi descent who had gone to join family members in Karradah.

This is starting to sound like this specific officer may have been targeted, bring about the possibility that whoever took him is looking for intelligence, not just a random soldier to torture for propaganda purposes ahead of the election.

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Pat Tillman, a former NFL safety with the Arizona Cardinals, quit the NFL in May of 2002 and joined the Army eight months after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. He enlisted along with his brother Kevin Tillman, who gave up his own chance to play professional baseball. Both brothers excelled in the Army and were assigned to the 75th Ranger Regiment, and saw duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pat Tillman was killed by "friendly fire" in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004.

I thank the Tillmans for their service in the American military. They both gave up potential fame and fortune to serve our country, something that is increasingly rare among celebrities of this age. They put America first, and their own dreams and ambitions second. I was touched by their personal sacrifice, and felt sorrow when I learned that Pat Tillman had given his life for his nation.

Kevin Tillman has since left the U.S. Military, and on October 19, published an article remembering his brother and condemning U.S foreign policy towards combating terrorism.

When you read his article you can feel the frustration and anger Kevin Tillman feels, no doubt due to his own experiences as a soldier and as someone who has experienced direct personal loss as result of the War on Terror. That does not excuse him, however, from using his position of what Maureen Dowd called "absolute moral authority" when applying it to Cindy Sheehan, to spread unsupported hyperbole, innuendo, and half-truths.

Tillman repeats common canards of the anti-war left, but his own military service does not make for him an unassailable shield, nor does restating them make these tired conventions any more true. Saddam Hussein's Iraq did, without any doubt at all, harbor terrorists. We know the most famous of them by name, including Abu Nidal, Abu Abbas, and Abdul Rahman Yasin. They all killed Americans, and they all lived as Saddam's guests. Yasin was the man who built the 1993 World Trade Center bomb laced with sodium cyanide, the first and so far only attempted chemical weapons attack on American civilians.

Only those on the anti-war left ever (purposefully) misstated that Iraq was involved with the terrorist attacks of September 11, and only the anti-war left ever stated that Saddam's Iraq received uranium from Niger. The Bush Adminstration did not hold those positions. An honest accounting would show that the United States invaded Iraq not because of any involvement with September 11, but because September 11 made us realize how much of a threat Saddam's Iraq could be. Saddam's Iraq were behind previous terror attacks against U. S. targets, and retained the know-how to reconstitute both biological and chemical weapons programs.

Tillman's diatribe is dramatized hyperbole, and some of his commentary is purposefully erroneous and obtuse.

His statement that the suspension of habeus corpus has even occurred is an outright falsehood; no foreign soldier in any war in this nationÂ’s history has ever had habeus corpus rights, and no American civilian is threatened by the Military Commissions Act, which applies only to "alien unlawful enemy combatants"... foreign terrorists.

And yet, Kevin Tillman does provide one unassailable truth in his diatribe, when he stated that, "Somehow a narrative is more important than reality."

His narrative—devoid of concrete facts, long on assertion, hyperbole, and emotional appeal—is just that kind of narrative.

Kevin Tillman purposefully misstates why we went to war in Iraq, even conflating the insurgency and the current sectarian violence as a reason for invasion, and he fundamentally misunderstands—or perhaps avoids—recognizing the essential fact that al Qaeda and terrorist-supporting states such as Syria and Iran have decided to make Iraq the central front in the War on Terror.

Like it or not, Iraq is where the terrorsits are, partially due to our actions, but also due to the emphasis terrorists and their supporters have poured into winning in Iraq.

This leftist anti-war narrative relies on the misguided belief that if we withdraw from Iraq, that somehow, terrorists would cease trying to attack and kill American civilians. That misguided position of disengagement should have died when we were attacked on September 11, 2001, long before we ever invaded Iraq or Afghanistan.

Islamic terrorists have stated time and again the intention to come after us, no matter what we do, and our past withdrawals have only served to embolden them.

It's too bad Kevin Tillman couldn't work that one over-arching and essential fact into his narrative.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:19 PM | Comments (14) | Add Comment
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Lovely:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Friday called Israel's leaders a "group of terrorists" and threatened any country that supports the Jewish state.

"You imposed a group of terrorists ... on the region," Ahmadinejad said, addressing the U.S. and its allies. "It is in your own interest to distance yourself from these criminals... This is an ultimatum. Don't complain tomorrow."

"Nations will take revenge," he told a crowd of thousands gathered at a pro-Palestinian rally in the capital Tehran.

Ahmadinejad said Israel no longer had any reason to exist and would soon disappear.

"This regime, thanks to God, has lost the reason for its existence," he said.

"Efforts to stabilize this fake (Israeli) regime, by the grace of God, have completely failed... You should believe that this regime is disappearing," he said.

What Ahmadinejad's thinly-veiled threat failed to mention is that his apocalyptic Hojjatieh sect quite likely has the intention of "helping" Israel out of existence once Iran has both nuclear warheads and the ability to deliver them.

The implicit threats of this particular exchange, which CNN provides coverage of in greater depth, are directed at Europe:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has warned Europe that it may pay a heavy price for its support of Israel.

"You should believe that this regime (Israel) cannot last and has no more benefit to you. What benefit have you got in supporting this regime, except the hatred of the nations?" he said in nationally broadcast speech Friday.

"We have advised the Europeans that the Americans are far away, but you are the neighbors of the nations in this region," he said.

"We inform you that the nations are like an ocean that is welling up, and if a storm begins, the dimensions will not stay limited to Palestine, and you may get hurt."

I wonder how much longer the pint-sized Holocaust denier will continue to issue threats against the world community without any measurable response from those countries he has threatened to put in the crosshairs.

Time and again, Ahmadinejad says Iran only wants to continue its nuclear program for peaceful means, only to quickly reissue threats that most understand to be links to implied of attacks by MIRV-equipped ICBMs.

I won't be shocked to find that the world will only recognize the threat that Ahmadinejad's Hojjatieh sect brings to hundreds of thousand if not millions of lives as they attempt to bring forth the Hidden Imam. I suspect it will only be after Iran's missiles are launched, and by then it will be far too late.

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A developing story in Iraq is the seizure of the southern Iraqi city of Amarah today by roughly 800 militiamen of Muqtada al-Sadr's al-Mahdi Army in response to the kidnapping of the teenage brother of the local head of the a-Madhi Army. the kidnapping came on the heels of the assassination of the head of police intelligence in the area, who belonged to another Shiite militia, the Badr Brigade. The Associated Press is among many of the news organizations covering the story.

The takeover of Amarah is just the latest example of intra-sectarian fighting in Iraq that shows that the current U.S. strategy in Iraq is not working. As a recently-back-from-Iraq Phillip Carter noted yesterday:

During the last two years, the U.S. presence in Iraq has consolidated in massive superfortresses like Anaconda and shut down dozens of smaller bases and outposts across the country. This operational withdrawal was meant to make the U.S. presence more efficient and to reduce the risk of having small units deployed on small bases where they might be vulnerable to insurgent attack; it also forced the Iraqis to become more self-sufficient in securing their own cities. Unfortunately, this has come at a price. When a massive flare-up happens in places like Balad, Tikrit, or Kirkuk, all cities without a permanent U.S. presence, our military must respond from afar, its effectiveness and responsiveness limited by distance.

* * *

This violent weekend proves that America needs to radically change its course in Iraq, while some form of victory still lies within our grasp. First, the U.S. military must reverse its trend of consolidation and redeploy its forces into Iraq's cities. Efficiency and force protection cannot define our military footprint in Iraq; if those are our goals, we may as well bring our troops home today. Instead, we must assume risk by pushing U.S. forces out into small patrol bases in the middle of Iraq's cities where they are able to work closely with Iraqi leaders and own the streets. Counterinsurgency requires engagement. The most effective U.S. efforts thus far in Iraq have been those that followed this maxim, like the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Tal Afar, which established numerous bases within the city and attacked the insurgency from within with a mix of political, economic, and military action.

I hope that the current situation spurs military leaders in Iraq towards to solution that Carter rightly advocates, starting with a direct confrontation of the 800 al-Mahdi militiamen that have taken over Amarah.

Logistically, it isn't possible for just 800 unsupported militia fighters to establish and maintain the "total control"(as the media so breathlessly puts it) of a city as large as Amarah, which has an estimated population of 340,000 spread across the geographical boundaries formed by the fork of three rivers.

A more detailed satellite map from GlobalSecurity.org can be seen here.

Based upon map data alone, this would be an extremely difficult city for a much larger, better equipped and better trained conventional military force to hold, much less a militia. It seems that geography could be used to section off parts of the city, which could then be cleared of militiamen in the following manner.

Conventional military units could be used to set-up checkpoints in blockading positions around the roads leading into Amrah, while small special operations units from the Iraqi military and supported by U.S. intelligence and strike aircraft should be able to locate and observe concentrations of militiamen (untrained forces have a tendency to cluster) and inflict significant casualties with precision weapons. Militiamen patrolling the city in vehicles would seem to be prime targets for hit-and-run ambushes, which could be assembled on the fly with intelligence from overhead U.S. drone aircraft.

There is no need to engage these militia forces in a frontal assault with conventional forces that would lead to significant damage to the civilian infrastructure when precise intelligence, coordinated small arms and the use of smaller precision airborne munitions could achieve the same objectives.

If such a plan is able to be implemented, the militiamen would be forced to surrender, attempt to escape, or die as they move around the city. Once sufficiently weakened, conventional Iraqi Army and Police forces should be able to mop-up any remaining forces and reestablish control.

American and Iraqi military and police forces must rein in militias, reestablish localized bases across Iraq to better provide stability and quick response capabilities, and work to bring economic and political force to bear to make lasting changes on a local level.

I'm not sure if we need "more boots on the ground" to stabilize Iraq, but I am quite certain that we cannot improve the situation by isolating our forces in large bases and letting militias and sectarian gangs run free.

"All politics is local," said someone very wise. So are insurgencies, which cannot be defeated from the PX of a large megabase.

Update: Bill Roggio has related thoughts on dealing with Mahdi Army leader Muqtada al-Sadr.

Update: The Iraqi Army came in with two companies of soldiers from Basra, and have retaken the city. The threat of going up against a large conventional Army force was apparently enough for the militiamen.

As a side note, Wikipedia (where I got my population number from) claims Amarah's population as being 340,000 in 2002. Lexicorient.com places the city's population at 420,000 as of 2005. The AP article from today states that the population is 750,000.

I think we just found the missing people from the Lancet study.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:58 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Via Bryan at Hot Air, the politically-timed Johns Hopkins/Lancet study stating that more than 655,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the Iraq War has had its very suspect methodology thoroughly crushed:

After doing survey research in Iraq for nearly two years, I was surprised to read that a study by a group from Johns Hopkins University claims that 655,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the war. Don't get me wrong, there have been far too many deaths in Iraq by anyone's measure; some of them have been friends of mine. But the Johns Hopkins tally is wildly at odds with any numbers I have seen in that country. Survey results frequently have a margin of error of plus or minus 3% or 5%--not 1200%.

The group--associated with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health--employed cluster sampling for in-person interviews, which is the methodology that I and most researchers use in developing countries. Here, in the U.S., opinion surveys often use telephone polls, selecting individuals at random. But for a country lacking in telephone penetration, door-to-door interviews are required: Neighborhoods are selected at random, and then individuals are selected at random in "clusters" within each neighborhood for door-to-door interviews. Without cluster sampling, the expense and time associated with travel would make in-person interviewing virtually impossible.

However, the key to the validity of cluster sampling is to use enough cluster points. In their 2006 report, "Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional sample survey," the Johns Hopkins team says it used 47 cluster points for their sample of 1,849 interviews. This is astonishing: I wouldn't survey a junior high school, no less an entire country, using only 47 cluster points.

Neither would anyone else. For its 2004 survey of Iraq, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) used 2,200 cluster points of 10 interviews each for a total sample of 21,688. True, interviews are expensive and not everyone has the U.N.'s bank account. However, even for a similarly sized sample, that is an extraordinarily small number of cluster points. A 2005 survey conducted by ABC News, Time magazine, the BBC, NHK and Der Spiegel used 135 cluster points with a sample size of 1,711--almost three times that of the Johns Hopkins team for 93% of the sample size.

Since the beginning, Les Roberts, one of the primary authors of the study has mantained that the study is methodologically sound.

Uh, not quite:

Curious about the kind of people who would have the chutzpah to claim to a national audience that this kind of research was methodologically sound, I contacted Johns Hopkins University and was referred to Les Roberts, one of the primary authors of the study. Dr. Roberts defended his 47 cluster points, saying that this was standard. I'm not sure whose standards these are.

Appendix A of the Johns Hopkins survey, for example, cites several other studies of mortality in war zones, and uses the citations to validate the group's use of cluster sampling. One study is by the International Rescue Committee in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which used 750 cluster points. Harvard's School of Public Health, in a 1992 survey of Iraq, used 271 cluster points. Another study in Kosovo cites the use of 50 cluster points, but this was for a population of just 1.6 million, compared to Iraq's 27 million.

When I pointed out these numbers to Dr. Roberts, he said that the appendices were written by a student and should be ignored. Which led me to wonder what other sections of the survey should be ignored.

With so few cluster points, it is highly unlikely the Johns Hopkins survey is representative of the population in Iraq. However, there is a definitive method of establishing if it is. Recording the gender, age, education and other demographic characteristics of the respondents allows a researcher to compare his survey results to a known demographic instrument, such as a census.

Dr. Roberts said that his team's surveyors did not ask demographic questions. I was so surprised to hear this that I emailed him later in the day to ask a second time if his team asked demographic questions and compared the results to the 1997 Iraqi census. Dr. Roberts replied that he had not even looked at the Iraqi census.

And so, while the gender and the age of the deceased were recorded in the 2006 Johns Hopkins study, nobody, according to Dr. Roberts, recorded demographic information for the living survey respondents. This would be the first survey I have looked at in my 15 years of looking that did not ask demographic questions of its respondents. But don't take my word for it--try using Google to find a survey that does not ask demographic questions.

Reviews of the Johns Hopkins/Lancet study casts strong doubts upon the credibility of the methodology used. When compared to other studies, IÂ’d venture to say that the Johns Hopkins study is worthless and irreproducible, perhaps purposefully so. The timing of the report, once again issued in the weeks preceding a national election, casts strong doubts upon the intentions, credibility, and integrity of the researchers.

Then again, their campaign contributions and affiliations should have tipped you to their biases long ago.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:07 AM | Comments (20) | Add Comment
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Captain Poofy is starting to sound like a great proponent of regime change, primarily his own:

Blaming the United States for instigating U.N. Security Council sanctions against it, North Korea on Tuesday called the resolution approved over the weekend a "declaration of war."

North Korea's Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency that the country wants "peace but is not afraid of war."

The North "vehemently denounces the resolution, a product of the U.S. hostile policy toward (the North) and totally refutes it," the statement said, according to a report from The Associated Press.

North Korea's statement followed U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice calling the U.N. resolution a "clear message" that Pyongyang must "make a new set of calculations" about its nuclear endeavors.

"North Korea cannot endanger the world and then expect other nations to conduct business as usual in arms or missile parts," Rice told reporters on Monday. "It cannot destabilize the international system and then expect to exploit elaborate financial networks built for peaceful commerce."

As some have mentioned previously, the nuclear gambit is North Korea's last straw. They have nothing else with which to threaten the world. Their nuclear threats fall short with missiles that won't fly and nuclear weapons that won't detonate, and their massive conventional army is decades obsolete. All the have left is their arms business, and the U.N. blockade is taking that away.

At the current rate of escalation, I would not be all that surprised to find North Korea may very well be considering a disasterous invasion of South Korea if a pending second nuke test fails. They had so little to begin with, that they have almost nothing else to lose.

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Lynne Stewart, the radical liberal lawyer convicted of providing material support for terrorism, faces being sentenced for up to 30 years today. Her defense team's strategy?

She and her allies are pinning their hopes for leniency on a strategy that argues she became so emotionally involved in the sheik's case that she acted irrationally — a strategy that is underpinned by a sealed letter to the court from a psychiatrist.

A psychiatric report submitted to the federal judge in Manhattan who will decide the sentence, John Koeltl, claims that several emotional events in Stewart's life suggest her actions were motivated by "human factors of her client and his situation" and not by politics, according to portions of the psychiatric report.

The psychiatrist, Steven Teich, points to 11 emotional events that he claims prompted her to want to take action on Abdel Rahman's behalf, Stewart's attorneys say. Among the events that make Dr.Teich's list are her experiences seeing Abdel Rahman incarcerated and the 1995 suicide of a drug defendant named Dominick Maldonado, whom Stewart had once represented.

"Ms. Stewart's commitment to the protection of her client, the Sheik, in prison was magnified by emotions from her perceived failure to protect her former client Mr. Maldonado, which had, consequently, resulted in his death by suicide," Mr. Teich wrote.

While the evaluation by Dr. Teich is filed under seal, Stewart's attorneys quote portions of it at length in public legal papers.

Stewart's behavior was "emotionally based and sometimes impulsive" and her mental state while representing Abdel Rahman "immobilized her critical ability to evaluate the potential consequences of her actions," according to the psychiatric report.

In other words, they are claiming that Stewart became a traitor to her country because she let her perceived failures and emotions get the better of her, not because she was inherently or willfully disloyal.

Somehow, that defense sounds familiar... where have I heard it before?

This "emotionally-based and sometimes impulsive" behavior did not start in 2000 or in September 11, 2001, in October of 2001, or March of 2003. It is instead a inherent structural flaw in a group of people going back decades.

Once upon a time liberals were classic liberals, pulling for individual rights, equal opportunity, freedom, and peace. I didn't agree with the methods they espoused towards realizing their ideals, but I could at least respect their ideals, if not their plans for implementation.

Somewhere, however, liberals began to lose their liberalism and thirst for universal freedoms. As Dr. Sanity noted, they traded their ideals for ideology, and have now reached a point where:

...every issue supported by the Left, and almost all of the behavior exhibited by the Left is completely antithetical to classical liberal philosophies. There is no longer a commitment to personal liberty or to freedom. The Left is far too busy to promote freedom for the common man or woman, because their time is taken up advocating freedom for tyrants who oppress the common man; terrorists who kill the common man; and religious fanatics who subjugate the common woman.

The intellectuals who once promoted the IDEA of freedom, now are ensnared in an IDEOLOGY that depends for its very existence on the silencing of speech; the suppression of ideas; and the persecution of those who dare to refute its tenets.

Patriotism and love of one’s country is mocked by those who once fought to bring the American Dream to all American citizens; and who once championed those who were prevented from sharing in that Dream. Slowly and inexorably those idealists who once shouted, “we shall overcome,” morphed into a toxic culture promoting a never-ending victimhood that cannot possibly be overcome. Love of American ideals and values was transformed into the most perverse and vile anti-Americanism –where all things originating or “tainted” as American are uniquely bad; and where America became the source of all evil in the world.

This is the worldview that seems to have ensnared Lynne Stewart, and forms the basis for her defense as she is about to be sentenced for aiding and abetting terrorism. "I didn't mean to become a traitor," seems to be her cry, "my emotions made me do it." It seems beyond her that emotions led her to support those who would take away everything that she professed to support in a lifetime of liberal activism.

Liberals are not liberal anymore, and have not been for decades.

Many no longer even choose to identify themselves as such, perhaps subconsciously acknowledging that as they brand themselves as "progressives," without even realizing what they are progressing towards; Statism, the destruction of free speech, the crushing of dissent, the willful abandonment of a platform that once declared all should have equal rights to life liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Their new platform is something else entirely.

Progressives donÂ’t want peace; they just don't support our going to war.

They push to surrender in Iraq and Afghanistan—or as the style it, "redeploy"—because they claim that the cost of American lives is too high. The are ashamed to address what occurred when they were able to convince us to withdraw from Somalia and Vietnam. They perhaps saved tens of thousands of American soldier's lives by forcing politically-motivated withdrawals, but at what cost?

Millions died in Southeast Asia as a result of a successful anti-war movement in the United States forcing us to retreat, and the Murtha-led retreat from Somalia inspired Osama bin Laden to the African embassy bombings, the attack on the USS Cole, and eventually 9/11/01.

Progressives still claim to support individual freedoms and feminism and equality, but shamefully propose to abandon two fledgling nations struggling to find democracy to Islamists that subjugate people for being of a different ethnic group, or religion, or race, or gender.

How is this surrender to oppression in any way in confluence with the classical concept of liberalism? Put bluntly, it is not.

Liberalism, or at least those who today claim to be liberal and progressive, has become the refuge of back-biting isolationists that long ago gave up any pretense of finding freedom and equality concepts worth fighting for in favor of a morally bankrupt ideology blindly seeking power and relevance at any cost. Once more, those that claim to be liberals urge us to turn our backs on the ideals that made American great.

Justice. Honor. Freedom. Equality.

These noble concepts are snorted at with derision by an American Left today that in no way shares the ideals of those who came before. No one truly interested in human rights and justice and equality could abandon Iraq to insurgent Islamists and elements of al Qaeda advocating sharia law, nor abandoning Afghanistan to a brutal Taliban that subjugates women and murders homosexuals and others who deemed unworthy under brutal and primitive Sharia law. These "liberals" would condemn more than 50 million people to oppression because the price we've paid thus far is too much for their tender sensibilities.

Lynne Stewart braces for sentencing today as one liberal that long ago abandoned her stated principles in favor of an ideology most un-American. Thousands more just like her view her impending incarceration as a travesty of justice, without understanding that it is instead their beliefs that run counter to every ideal this nation holds dear. Ironically, they think they are the voices of freedom and reason.

Freedom is not earned by submission. Cowardice does not buy liberty. Retreat does not win equality.

Somehow, so called liberals lost sight of those basic facts long ago.

Update: I said "cowardice does not buy liberty"... but convicted felon and liberal moneyman George Soros came damn close. Soros funded a significant portion of Stewart's legal defense.

Stewart was sentenced today to to a whopping 28 months in prison. Her paralegal Ahmed Sattar got 24 years for conspiracy to kidnap and kill those in a foreign country.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:17 AM | Comments (18) | Add Comment
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1 Justice. Honor. Freedom. Equality. These noble concepts are snorted at with derision by an American Left today that in no way shares the ideals of those who came before. Abu Ghraib. Waterboarding. Stress positions. Keep preaching to us about the moral superiority of the American Right...

Posted by: Phoenician in a time of Romans at October 16, 2006 04:32 PM (iYlrE)

2 Phoenician, Waterboarding vs Beheading... you can argue about the wrongs of individuals all you want but in the end you have to choose sides. I think it is a great testament to this nation that our citizens will not stand for relatively minor(considering the historical and international record on torture) mistakes by our side. at the same time, it is mind boggling how people can some how come to the conclusion that these occurrances not only make us equally evil as our enemy, but worthy of losing the war at the cost of millions of innocents here and abroad. Wars do not end without a victor; regardless of our indiscretions, to deny that we must win this war is at best naive and stupid, at worst it is treasonous and fascistic.

Posted by: K-Det at October 16, 2006 07:08 PM (aaP7C)

3 Still trying to pin the slaughter in Cambodia on America's withdrawl from Vietnam? Hard to square with the fact that the Vietnemese are the ones who put a stop to the "killing fields."

Posted by: monkyboy at October 16, 2006 07:45 PM (unUeA)

4 Pleeeeaaaassee tell me that wasn't a reference to "waterboards" and "stress positions" as some sort of heinous atrocity. You can do better than that. being waterboarded sucks, but it's probably got long term effects similar to being tickle-tortured for an hour. when i was at SERE school, some of the guys in the class wanted to see what being water boarded was like, so they resisted past all reason and the instructors obliged them. to a man, and we're talking about marine officers and a SEAL, they said that after being water boarded they told the instructors anything they wanted to hear because it freaked them out. were they sitting in the fetal position in class? no. having had it done on them, they recognized how effective it was because it's such a powerful tool. is there a risk of death? no. you just think you're going to drown, but you wont. are the terrorists probably pissed off and crying torture because they completely freaked out and spilled the beans? wouldn't surprise me. Open question: Have any journalists volunteered to be water boarded to see what it's like? It might sound ridiculous but..why not? Anyway, this woman is claiming to be a slave to her emotional impulses, and her occasional whackjob sessions make her a threat to those around her. She ought to be treated as such, and be placed in a mental institution so that she doesn't accidentally get emotionally involved with terrorists and whatnot. It's for her own safety.

Posted by: paully at October 16, 2006 09:00 PM (yJuX3)

5 Waterboarding vs Beheading... A difference in degree, rather than kind. you can argue about the wrongs of individuals all you want but in the end you have to choose sides. Very good - I choose the side of civilization rather than barbarity. Your country has degenerated to resemble the thing it claims to struggle against. I take pride in being able to state that my country does not torture people. Any thinking American would be deeply humiliated by the fact that they cannot say the same. Justice. Honor. Freedom. Equality - remember?

Posted by: Phoenician in a time of Romans at October 16, 2006 10:57 PM (iYlrE)

6 Freedom is not earned by submission It was for the Confederacy...or at least for the Confederacy's former slaves.

Posted by: Hed at October 16, 2006 11:53 PM (ZS4Cu)

7 Freedom is not earned by submission. Cowardice does not buy liberty. Does this mean that you believe those Iraqis attempting to kill the American invaders occupying their country are right to do so?

Posted by: Phoenician in a time of Romans at October 17, 2006 12:03 AM (iYlrE)

8 Put your hand on the phone-ah, dial the number, see that your free to be carrying on-ah, when your gone-ah...

Posted by: Pinko Punko at October 17, 2006 12:46 AM (6F6lT)

9 What country are you from? Pamphletpropagandastan? Those little snipings are pretty tired. Why not bring in your experiences from your utopic country, which you mentioned is free of any oppression, and throw around some original ideas?

Posted by: paully at October 17, 2006 01:00 AM (yJuX3)

10 Paully: Phoenician wanders into blogs spewing all over the place until it finally pisses off the blog owner and gets banned, in which case it finds a new one. Looks like Confederate Yankee's the next lucky host.

Posted by: Patrick Chester at October 17, 2006 03:21 AM (MKaa5)

11 PiatoR is one of Goldstein's old trolls from PW, it just took me a while to recognize the handle. He's gone. Not that it matters, but he is from New Zealand, a country rich in hobbits and hairy fruits.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at October 17, 2006 06:31 AM (BTdrY)

12 Go Braveheart Bob! Ban everyone who disagrees with you. Way to show that Kiwi who's boss of this little house of cards!

Posted by: Lint at October 17, 2006 08:07 AM (lf6+g)

13 you cant spell "banality" without "ban".

Posted by: paully at October 17, 2006 08:29 AM (gLHFl)

14 Hard to square with the fact that the Vietnemese are the ones who put a stop to the "killing fields." I would suggest you read Chandlers's Brother Number One

Posted by: Purple Avenger at October 17, 2006 10:06 AM (k5pDn)

15 Well, paully, it may have something to do with the fact that we prosecuted Japanese soldiers for waterboarding. War crime in 1945, but really effective interrogation technique now? As a graduate of a SERE course myself, I am constantly amused by the comparison if its use on highly trained troops in a known training environment, with its use on civilian prisoners under our control who have no recourse. Followed only by the first class cognitive dissonance that you don't have to prove a single one is guilty before you use a war crime to extract information. The irrational rationalization being, I suppose, its not really that big a deal, so if they're innocent, no harm done. It takes a special kind of crazy to fit that in your head, and then advocate having it written into your "law".

Posted by: Officious Pedant at October 17, 2006 12:13 PM (688sS)

16 I want the three minutes of my life back that I spent reading this. So "liberal" is o.k., but the liberals have forgotten what that means? Yes CY, it is the left that is pushing to destroy free speech and squelch dissent. Damn man, what color is the sky in your world?

Posted by: T.S. Garp at October 17, 2006 03:55 PM (pSZ41)

17 You guys do realize that the Republicans wanted a US withdrawal from Somalia, right? Statement of Republican Policy on U.S. Armed Forces in Somalia, Adopted April 1, 1993

Posted by: AJB at October 18, 2006 07:36 AM (C8fuN)

18 ...every issue supported by the Left, and almost all of the behavior exhibited by the Left is completely antithetical to classical liberal philosophies. There is no longer a commitment to personal liberty or to freedom. Hm. I support Habeas Corpus. Apparently this makes me a fascist? Bye bye, Republicans. It has been unpleasant dealing with you.

Posted by: brooksfoe at October 18, 2006 10:27 AM (OVjfO)

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If some of the stories told to Sgt. Heather Cerveny by guards at Guantanamo Bay are true, I hope the offenders are appropriately punished, but parts of CervenyÂ’s affidavit are simply sad:

During my conversations with these people, one Sailor who called himself Bo (rank and last name unknown) told the group stories involving detainees. Bo was 19 years old and had been working at Guantanamo Bay for almost one year. He was about 5”10” and 180 pounds. He was Caucasian, with blond hair and blue eyes. Bo told the other guards and me about him beating different detainees being help in the prison. One such story Bo told involved him taking a detainee by the head and hitting the detainee’s head into the cell door. Bo said that his actions wee known to others. I asked him if he had been charged with an offense for beating and abusing this detainee. He told me nothing happened to him. He received neither nonjudicial punishment or court-martial. And he never even received formal counseling. He was eventually moved to the maintenance section but this did not occur until some time after the incident where he slammed the detainee’s head into the cell door.

Detainee abuse is a bad thing, but Sgt. HeatherÂ’s apparent incredulity that Bo didnÂ’t even get counseling makes me either want to laugh or cryÂ… I havenÂ’t decided which yet.

It is worth noting that this and all the other admissions came as a lonely, undoubtedly horny sailors were trying to impress a girl in a bar. Pardon me if I hold out hope that his apparent attempt to be “bar tough” is just one more lie to join the hundreds of millions told in a fruitless attempt to impress women.

What Sgt. Heather also seems to consider abuse outside of several claims of hitting detainees, however, is well, questionable.

I recall speaking with a guard named Steven. Steven was a Caucasian male, about 5”8”, 170 pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes. He stated that he used to work in Camp 5 but he now works in Camp 6. He works on one of the “blocks” as a guard. He told me that even when a detainee is being good, they will take his personal items away. He said that they do this to anger the detainees so that they can punish them when they object or complain. I asked Steven why he treats detainees this way. He said it is because he hates the detainees and that they are bad people. And he stated that he doesn’t like having to take care of them or be nice to them. Steven also added that his “only job was to keep the detainees alive.” I understood this to mean that as long as the detainees were kept alive, he didn’t care what happened to them.

I bet Sgt. Heather is probably a very nice person, kind to old people and animals, and is probably just the girl youÂ’d like to take home to meet dear old Mom and Dad, but would someone please explain to her what holy Hell these people are in prison for?

They are Islamic terrorists who want nothing more than to see Americans dead. These same inmates have a long record of flinging various bodily liquids at guards, assaulting them with homemade weapons, and generally not being nice people. God forbid that Steven doesnÂ’t like them and occasionally confiscates the personal effects from an inmate that once forced him to remove a uniform covered in , urine, feces, spit, or semen, or who once tried to cut him with a shiv.

And God forbid, sheÂ’s upset that they might not be getting their mail in a timely manner:

I asked Shawn why it often takes 6 months of so for them to get their mail. Shawn replied that there is often a delay because the mailroom personnel have to look through everything and get it translated prior to the mail being forwarded to detainees. I then asked why it would possibly still take six months if the mail matter was printed in English. Shawn said there wouldnÂ’t really be a reason and it was not uncommon for them to withhold the mail of detainees until they, the mailroom clerks, decided to forward the mail.

Prisoner abuse—hitting and punching them without prevarication or just cause—is patently wrong. But Sgt. Heather seems to be under the delusion that Marines and sailors have a duty to be nice and go out of their way to provide prompt, courteous, and friendly service to terrorists, as if Guantanamo Bay was a resort. Someone needs to write this little Marine paralegal a reality check.

Of course, Brian Ross sees this as a major scandal. I guess Foleygate must not be having the desired effect.

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Thank you, Asymmetrical Information commenter Yancey Ward:

If there have been 650,000 excess deaths, and my understanding is that violence is the predominate cause of this excess, then I wonder about the ratio of wounded to dead. From my reading of history, in war there is about a 3 to 1 or greater ratio of wounded to dead in combat. If we take the study seriously, then we should also have well over 1.5 million wounded. Has anyone checked this out?

According to the Lancet’s disputed study, 601,027 people—al Qaeda terrorists, insurgents, Iraqi soldiers, police, and true civilians—have been killed violently ("the most common cause being gunfire," says the summary) since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

We also know that for every combat-related death, there are usually a far greater number of casualties. As Donald Sensing notes in a 2004 post to his blog, the United States sustained a ratio of wounded to killed of 2.3:1 in World War II, 3.28:1 in Vietnam, and 9.5:1 in the current Iraq war (a more current Newsday article from last week puts that figure at roughly 8:1).

The numbers look the way they do largely because of the advances made in medical and defensive technologies since the World War II and Vietnam era. U.S. soldiers that sustain wounds today will often survive what would have been killing wounds of 40 to 60 years ago, and they often won't sustain wounds where they might have in prior wars because of advances in vehicle and personnel armor.

Iraqi civilians do not wear body armor and as a rule neither do most insurgents or al Qaeda terrorists (though there are exceptions to that rule as well). Many Iraqi police and Army units do have body armor, as well as some lightly armored vehicles. While it is a simple SWAG, it would probably not be unreasonable to suspect that medical technologies available to the average Iraqi are probably not any worse than what our soldiers faced in World War Two, and may be better and approaching or exceeding Vietnam-era levels in some urban areas.

It is far from valid science (I, at least, admit it), but one might assume that a wounded to killed ratios of all Iraqis probably fits within the 2.3:1 and 3.28:1 figures of these prior wars, and a slightly higher number afforded by modern medical methods used in Iraqi civilian hospitals.

If we can therefore make that assumption (and I'm not entirely sure that we can, but I'm going to in an endeavor to prove a point) that the Lancet accurately states that 601,027 Iraqis have been killed violently since 2003, then there would logically be a minimum of 1,382,363-1,971,369 Iraqis wounded by violence (using the WWII and Vietnam ratios). If the ratio of wounded surviving is better than that, then there should be in excess of 2 million wounded Iraqis in addition to those killed by violence, or a grand total of 1,983,390-2,572,396 Iraqi civilians that have either killed or wounded since 2003.

The CIA World Factbook estimates the population of Iraq at 26,783,383 as of July.

Does the Lancet really want to stand behind a study that seems to suggest almost a tenth of Iraq's population has been killed or wounded in the past 3 years, and the world somehow overlooked it?

Funny think, statistics.

Update: In a post titled, Reality checks: some responses to the latest Lancet estimates, the staff of IraqBodyCount.org accuses the Lancet of over-inflating the civilian body count in Iraq.

Interestingly enough, IBC asked where the wounded are, how the media could have overlooked such carnage, how the Iraqi government could have participated in such a cover-up, and where the death certificates are.

If those questions sound familiar, it's because you've been reading this blog.

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The controversial and disputed Johns Hopkins study published (free reg required) in the Lancet today claims an additional 654,965 deaths as the result of the Iraq War since 2003, 610,000 of those deaths as a result of violence. It also claims they were able to verify that 92% of those 629 claimed killed in their survey had valid death certificates.

Using the research of the John Hopkins study, the Iraqi Ministry of Health should be able to therefore produce roughly 602,568 total death certificates (654,965 x 92%), and 561,200 (610,000 x 92%) of these death certificates should by attributed to violent deaths, if they do in fact collect such information nationally.

If they have far, far less death certificates on file, then the Lancet study will have invalidated itself using it's own methodology, would it not?

I'll also be very interested to find out whether or not Gilbert Burnham of John Hopkins or the editors of the Lancet made any attempt to check their figures against any available compilations of the number of death certificates issued in Iraq as a check on their research. Iraqi morgues regularly and independently released their own figures until September, when the Iraqi government took over that responsibility, which was after the data in the study was compiled by June of 2006.

Other Estimates
Not surprisingly the study figures--far beyond every other survey done by orders of magnitude--are widely discounted by most, and run contrary to every previous attempt to estimate casualties.

Iraq Body Count, a well-respected site that tracks the number of casualties in Iraq based upon media reports, lists the maximum number of casualties to date at 48,693.

The Brookings Institute reports (PDF) their estimate, based upon IBC and United Nations Cumulative data until August 31, 2006, to be a slightly higher figure of 62,000 civilian deaths due to violence. Michael E. O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution said of the Lancet numbers:

"I do not believe the new numbers. I think they're way off," he said.

A June 25, 2006 Los Angeles Times report comes up with another set of figures:

The Times attempted to reach a comprehensive figure by obtaining statistics from the Baghdad morgue and the Health Ministry and checking those numbers against a sampling of local health departments for possible undercounts.

The Health Ministry gathers numbers from hospitals in the capital and the outlying provinces. If a victim of violence dies at a hospital or arrives dead, medical officials issue a death certificate. Relatives claim the body directly from the hospital and arrange for a speedy burial in keeping with Muslim beliefs.

If the morgue receives a body — usually those deemed suspicious deaths — officials there issue the death certificate.

Health Ministry officials said that because death certificates are issued and counted separately, the two data sets are not overlapping.

The Baghdad morgue received 30,204 bodies from 2003 through mid-2006, while the Health Ministry said it had documented 18,933 deaths from "military clashes" and "terrorist attacks" from April 5, 2004, to June 1, 2006. Together, the toll reaches 49,137.

Obviously, the Johns Hopkins study figures published in today’s Lancet are far higher than any previous estimates. It will be quite interesting to see if these figures—already dismissed by every world leader and military leader commenting on it so far—can indeed be defended.

As Bryan notes at Hot Air:

The Lancet study would have us believe that 2.5% of Iraq has been killed by the war in the past three years. It would have us believe that more Iraqis have died as a result of a mid-sized insurgency than Americans died in World War II. Or the Civil War. Or Germans, who died in World War II, fighting against the combined might of the USSR, the British Empire and the United States, at a time when Germany was reduced to conscripting young boys and old men to resist those armies as they approached Berlin.

This study, in other words, is nonsense on stilts.

Of course it is, but it will be most entertaining if we can debunk them using their own informaiton against them.

Update: A word on public health methodology from a medical professional at Jane Galt:

And sorry, but the defense that it's as soundly designed as can be expected for these kinds of public health surveys is a weak one. Retrospective, interview-based studies like this are poor designs. It may be the standard way of gathering data in the public health field, but that doesn't make it the best methodology, and it certainly doesn't make its statistics sound. For too long the field of public health has relied on these types of shotty shoddy numbers to influence public policy, whether it's the number of people who die from second hand smoke or the number who die from eating the wrong kinds of cooking oils.

The same blog post notes that Lancet-published studies of the past have been throughly debunked for shoddy research.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:25 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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I hope this is just an accident:

The aircraft struck the 20th floor of a building on East 72nd Street, said Fire Department spokeswoman Emily Rahimi. Witnesses said the crash caused a loud noise, and burning and falling debris was seen. Flames were seen shooting out of the windows.

"There's huge pieces of debris falling," said one witness who refused to give her full name. "There's so much falling now, I've got to get away."

The article goes on to say that this is a 50 story building, meaning that 30 stories of the building is above the site of the strike, which would likely make it difficult for people to escape through the elevators. The relatively low strike and small size of the plane might make a rooftop helicopter evacuation plausible, but I just don't have enough details to know.

It is too early to know how bad the fire may be or what the proximate cause was at this point. More as this develops...

Update From Allah's description, it does indeed sound like an accident and it appears that the NYFD will bring this under control, if they haven't already.

Update: NY Yankee's pitcher Cory Lidle and an instructor pilot were killed in the crash.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 02:33 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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How do I know?

'cause Michael Yon told me so.

This of course, means my "Divine Strake" guestimate of earlier this week was correct.

Yeah, even a blind hog can find an acorn every once in a while...

Update: Mary Katharine Ham and Allahpundit have more.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 03:52 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Can someone please tell me when the firing of an ICBM armed with a nuclear warhead was not universally recognized as an act of war?

North Korea stepped up its threats aimed at Washington, saying it could fire a nuclear[sic] nuclear-tipped missile unless the United States acts to resolve its standoff with Pyongyang, the Yonhap news agency reported Tuesday from Beijing.

Even if Pyongyang is confirmed to have nuclear weapons, experts say it's unlikely the North has a bomb design small and light enough to be mounted atop a missile. Their long-range missile capability also remains in question, after a test rocket in July apparently fizzled out shortly after takeoff.

"We hope the situation will be resolved before an unfortunate incident of us firing a nuclear missile comes," Yonhap quoted an unidentified North Korean official as saying. "That depends on how the U.S. will act."

The official said the nuclear test was "an expression of our intention to face the United States across the negotiating table," reported Yonhap, which didn't say how or where it contacted the official, or why no name was given.

More after I have a chance to think about what this means...

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 06:23 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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And Bill Gertz agrees with that initial speculation, just 24 short hours later:

U.S. intelligence agencies say, based on preliminary indications, that North Korea did not produce its first nuclear blast yesterday.

U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that seismic readings show that the conventional high explosives used to create a chain reaction in a plutonium-based device went off, but that the blast's readings were shy of a typical nuclear detonation.

"We're still evaluating the data, and as more data comes in, we hope to develop a clearer picture," said one official familiar with intelligence reports.

"There was a seismic event that registered about 4 on the Richter scale, but it still isn't clear if it was a nuclear test. You can get that kind of seismic reading from high explosives."

It still remains, of course, to see if this assessment is correct. It could have been a faulty nuke, after all.

As ever, the sleepless Allah is on the case.

Update: Related thoughts at AoC.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:31 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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