Or so a Palestinian militant group claims (via Drudge):

A spokesman for gunmen in the Gaza Strip said they had fired a rocket tipped with a chemical warhead at Israel early on Thursday.
The Israeli army had no immediate comment on the claim by the spokesman from the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed wing of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement.
The group had recently claimed to possess about 20 biological warheads for the makeshift rockets commonly fired from Gaza at Israeli towns. This was the first time the group had claimed firing such a rocket.
"The al-Aqsa Brigades have fired one rocket with a chemical warhead" at southern Israel, Abu Qusai, a spokesman for the group, said in Gaza.
An Israeli military spokeswoman said the army had not detected that any such rocket was fired, nor was there any report of such a weapon hitting Israel.

Silly al-Reuters reporters. They weren't supposed to release that story until tomorrow.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:13 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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That crashing sound you hear is shatering of the liberal myth that Saddam Hussein's Iraq didn't have ties to the Taliban and al Qaeda. Of course it did, and the documented ties are getting stronger:

Newly declassified documents captured by U.S. forces indicate that Saddam Hussein's inner circle not only actively reached out to the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan and terror-based jihadists in the region, but also hosted discussions with a known Al Qaeda operative about creating jihad training "centers," possibly in Baghdad.

Hussein had been host to Abu Abbas, Abu Nidal, and Abdul Rahman Yasin, and so adding more terrorists to the Baghdad social scene would make perfect sense.

If nothing else, Saddam was consistent in his ties with the "movers and shakers" of Islamic terrorism.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 06:43 AM | Comments (37) | Add Comment
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Hi Eric! Hi James!

Once again, I see you've taken it upon yourselves to disclose national security secrets (I refuse to link to the article, thus putting advertising dollars in your pockets), and your good buddy Bill was more than happy to let it fly, even though the program you compromised:

• was legal
  
• had congressional oversight
  
• had built-in protections against abuse
  
• was effective at catching terrorists

Does that just about just about cover it? Maybe. Maybe not.

I tend to agree with quite a few others who think you have gone far too far, once again.

At first, I caught myself nodding my head when Patterico said:

I am biting down on my rage right now. I'll resist the temptation to say Ann Coulter was right about where Timothy McVeigh should have gone with his truck bomb. I'll say only this: it's becoming increasingly clear to me that the people at the New York Times are not just biased media folks whose antics can be laughed off. They are actually dangerous.

And they are dangerous, but I think Patrick is wrong to even imply a truck bomb should be used against the New York Times. Even when paraphrasing someone else as a dark form of humor, that is a horrible thought. Someone radicalized enough could get it into his head to try to build such a bomb, and were he successful in detonating it, many innocent people in nearby buildings could be killed or injured.

Besides, the editorial staff, hidden behind the impenetrable wall of Times Select, would walk away untouched.

Nor do I advocate the much more precise use of small arms, in case some of you were thinking that route. There should be a chilling of the New York Times staff to run stories such as these, but cooling staffers to room temperature isn't the way to do it. Monetary damage is all they seem to understand.

Can you file lawsuits as private citizens on behalf of national security against the Times?Can their sources be indicted for exposing classified information, and how do we bring about pressure to bear on the government to pursue such charges?

I'd like to see the terrorist protectionist NY Times broken as a business, and I'm open to suggestions.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:27 AM | Comments (30) | Add Comment
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The Democratic Underground is all over the Miami terror arrests, quickly discerning the real reason for the raid:

This raid sounds like b.s. and voter intimidation to me

This is more of J.E.B.'s campaign to keep black people in Florida from voting. Bet on it.

The Democratic Underground: Because sometimes, you feel like a nut.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:42 PM | Comments (28) | Add Comment
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ABC News has the details:

ABC News has learned that federal agents, including the FBI, are launching a series of raids tonight targeting a suspected terror cell based in Miami.

According to sources familiar with the investigation, the group allegedly planned to bomb the FBI building in Miami and the Sears Tower in Chicago.

The group has been under surveillance for some time and was infilitrated by a government informant who allegedly led them to believe he was an Islamic radical. The suspects are described as African Americans and at least one man of Caribbean descent.

I guess that NSA "domestic spying" program works pretty good, doesn't it? (Yes, I know it sounds like a classic infiltration operation, but still.) At least one was an illegal alien.

This operation is on-going, expect more details to follow.

As always, Allah is on top of it. It's almost like he has something to do with Islamic terrorism...

Update: moved D.U. quote to it's own thread.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 07:41 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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We've now had roughly 15 hours since Senator Rick Santorum and Rep. Pete Hoestra announced in a hastily-called news conference that a newly declassified portion of a report from the National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC) confirmed that approximately 500 chemical weapons have been recovered in Iraq since 2003.

Since that time, the major media outlets have greeted this story with a virtual news blackout, leaving this story to the blogosphere to analyze.

Predictably, reaction to this story seems to fall along party lines. Many conservative bloggers covering the story see this as an absolute vindication of the Bush Administration, and are ecstatic. Quite a few others are more cautious, hoping to see more in the way of details released from the still-classified NGIC report from which the summary was culled.

On the other side of the political spectrum, many liberal blogs seemed almost rudderless in the hours after the story broke, almost as if they were waiting for guidance from either the silent media or equally quiet top-flight liberal blogs. Since then, they have mostly seemed to fallen in line behind Dafna Linzer of the Washington Post, who is taking the position, "nothing to see here/this doesn't count."

So what do we really have, and what do we really know?

We know for a fact that under Saddam Hussein, Iraqi began cultivating the development of chemical weapons in 1971. An article from the United Nations News Centre tells us further (h/t Flopping Aces:

Iraq first started exploring chemical weapons in 1971, and reviews developments through the establishment of a “large-scale chemical weapons programme” in 1981. The capacity expanded from there to the point that “according to Iraq, the use of chemical weapons achieved its major purpose and made a significant impact on the outcome of the Iran-Iraq war.”

According to declarations made by Iraq, in the period from 1981 to 1991 the chemical weapon programme produced approximately 3,850 tons of the chemical warfare agents mustard, tabun, sarin and VX, the report states.

Of the total of some 3,850 tons of chemical warfare agents produced, approximately 3,300 tons of agents were weaponized in different types of aerial bombs, artillery munitions and missile warheads.

In the period from 1981 to 1991, Iraq weaponized some 130,000 chemical munitions in total. Of these, over 101,000 munitions were used in combat, according to Iraq, in the period from 1981 to 1988.

Iraq declared that some 28,500 chemical munitions remained unused as of January 1991; about 5,500 filled munitions were destroyed by coalition forces during the war in 1991, while another 500 filled munitions were declared destroyed unilaterally by Iraq. “These last two figures were partially verified by United Nations inspectors,” the report states.

The bulk of the destruction of some 22,000 filled munitions occurred under the supervision of the UN inspectors in accordance with Security Council resolution 687 (1991) – the "ceasefire resolution" which ended the war – in the period from 1991 to 1994. During the collection of chemical weapons for destruction after the 1991 war, Iraq stated that it was not able to locate some 500 chemical munitions.

Iraq claimed it had 28,500 chemical weapons in 1991, and about 5,500 were destroyed in the 1991 Gulf War bringing the total to 23,000. Iraq then claims to have destroyed 500 munitions on their own and 22,000 weapons were destroyed under the supervision of U.N. weapons inspectors. This leaves us with roughly 500 chemical weapons that Iraq was unable to locate.

Are these same 500 chemical weapons that Iraq was unable to account for the same 500 chemical weapons that Santorum and Hoekstra revealed that U.S. forces have captured, and the same 500 that Dafna Linzer claims were buried in the desert near the Iran-Iraq border during their 1980-88 war?

If it can be verified that these are the missing 500 munitions from Saddam's declaration to the United Nations, then the accounting of Saddam's known weapons of mass destruction should be very close to complete. There should be no more significant caches of chemical weapons found in Iraq. It took 15 years and a war, but his chemical weapons have apparently all been accounted for and no significant quantities of thes munitions seem to have fallen into the hands of the various terrorist groups that Saddam cultivated in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East.

This news in and of itself would seem to be a significant victory.

But this is not how this story has been presented by Rick Santorum and Pete Hoekstra. They make the presentation that the 500 weapons found by U.S forces since the invasion of Iraq by Coalition forces justify the WMD rationale, one of several reasons and by far the one most publicized used to justify this conflict.

I wish that this did justify that rationale, but it does not.

Our rationale was based on the thought that Saddam was continuing to develop and experiment with weapons of mass destruction, and that he continued to have the capability to build chemical and biological weapons. Saddam, indeed, led the world to believe that he still had this capability, and it wasn't until after the war that we discovered that he may have been bluffing all along. We have found no more modern (post 1991) chemical weapons in Iraq. We have found no smoking gun showing concrete proof of more recent development, and it is quite possible we never may.

It does, however, seem to close the book on the WMDs known to have existed in Iraq as of January 1991, as declared by the government of Saddam Hussein. The 500 munitions Saddam's Army could not locate seem to have been recovered by the U.S military. While small quantities of these weapons may still turn up, no significant caches should remain to be discovered.

That fact alone, that we recovered these approximately 500 "lost" munitions, is reason enough to celebrate, but it neither proves nor disproves the existence of a post-1991 weapons program.

If any significant future caches are found, however, then the game will indeed be afoot, and both the media and doubters in the blogosphere will be out of valid excuses.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:30 AM | Comments (14) | Add Comment
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To put it mildly, this bears discussion:

The United States has found 500 chemical weapons in Iraq since 2003, and more weapons of mass destruction are likely to be uncovered, two Republican lawmakers said Wednesday.

"We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons," Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., said in a quickly called press conference late Wednesday afternoon.

Reading from a declassified portion of a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center, a Defense Department intelligence unit, Santorum said: "Since 2003, coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent. Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq's pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist."

Or at least, one might think this would bear discussion, whether Santorum and Hoekstra are right or wrong.

If correct, their claims of found chemical weapons—mustard gas or sarin, filled or unfilled, degraded or in perfect condition—would seemingly vindicate the Bush Administration and bury a key canard of leftist opposition to the war, that soldiers and civilians have "died for a lie."

Likewise, it would be worth it for the media/anti-war/Democratic Party camps to begin questioning the story, on the chance that Santorum and Hoekstra have buried themselves with inaccurate information.

Everyone should be talking about thisÂ… so why aren't they?

While Fox News runs a story about the Santorum/Hoestra release, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Boston Globe have taken the code of omertà as of midnight, though the Washington Post, to its slim credit, squeaked out a page A10 mention essentially claiming that these WMDs didn't count, even though they provide exactly zero support for their claims.

With the exception of Fox News, the WMD story and the underlying newly declassified six paragraph summary (PDF) seems to be the subject of a major news blackout.

Is this silence the sound of fear?

7:00 AM Update: According to a Google News search for WMDs, all the news organizations cited above still refuse to discuss this news.

Shocking.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:32 AM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
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Via the News & Observer:

The man accused of driving a rented SUV onto the UNC campus in March and striking nine people told a judge he plans to plead guilty to the charges against him.
Mohammed Taheri-Azar entered the courtroom this morning to ask that he be allowed to represent himself. A judge had ordered the public defender's office to work with him while it was determined whether he was competent.

But after being told he would have to submit to a psychiatric evaluation in order to do that, the 23-year-old said he would rather keep his court-appointed lawyer.

Taheri-Azar told Superior Court Judge Carl Fox he had met a few times with the psychiatrist and psychologist and "they don't appear to be very good psychologists and psychiatrists in my oinion[sic]."

Taheri-Azar has said in letters and in a 911 call that he wanted to kill people to avenge Muslim deaths around the world when he drove a rented SUV through The Pit, the main gathering spot on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus, March 3.

Do you think UNC-Chapel Hill will finally admit this was a homegrown Islamic terrorist attack?

Me neither.

Update: I've been told that it isn't unusual for Carolina graduates to refuse psychological evaluations, so perhaps we shouldn't read too much into that part of the story.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:26 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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When I came across this comment by Markos "Kos" Moulitsas via LGF, I was momentarily speechless:

There's a reason the Geneva Conventions exist. We've lost the moral high ground. What a fucking waste of a war.

Note I said, "momentarily."

You would think that Kos, as an Army veteran and a graduate of the Boston University School of Law, might have the inkling that what he states above is incorrect.

After all, the Geneva Convention was written to protect soldiers, militiamen, and civilians, not terrorists. As a matter of specific fact, groups such as terrorists seem specifically exempted from Geneva's protections [my bold]:

• Articles 1 and 2 cover which parties are bound by GCIII
• Article 2 specifies when the parties are bound by GCIII
  • That any armed conflict between two or more "High Contracting Parties" is covered by GCIII;
  • That it applies to occupations of a "High Contracting Party";
  • That the relationship between the "High Contracting Parties" and a non-signatory, the party will remain bound until the non-signatory no longer acts under the strictures of the convention. "...Although one of the Powers in conflict may not be a party to the present Convention, the Powers who are parties thereto shall remain bound by it in their mutual relations. They shall furthermore be bound by the Convention in relation to the said Power, if the latter accepts and applies the provisions thereof."
• Article 3 covers internal armed conflict (not of an international character) and it provides similar protections for combatants as those described in the rest of this document for a prisoner of war. That Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including POWs; shall in all circumstances be treated humanely. It also lays out some basic rules for the treatment of all people combatants and non-combatants alike. Article 3 also states that parties to the internal conflict should endeavour to bring into force, by means of special agreements, all or part of the other provisions of GCIII.
• Article 4 covers all conflicts not covered by Article 3 which are all conflicts of an international character. It defines prisoners of war to include:
  • 4.1.1 Members of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict and members of militias of such armed forces
  • 4.1.2 Members of other militias and members of other volunteer corps, including those of organized resistance movements, provided that they fulfill all of the following conditions:
    • that of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;
    • that of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance (there are limited exceptions to this among countries who observe the 1977 Protocol I);
    • that of carrying arms openly;
    • that of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.
  • 4.1.3 Members of regular armed forces who profess allegiance to a government or an authority not recognized by the Detaining Power.
  • 4.1.4 Civilians who have non-combat support roles with the military and who carry a vaild identity card issued by the military they support.
  • 4.1.5 Merchant marine and the crews of civil aircraft of the Parties to the conflict, who do not benefit by more favourable treatment under any other provisions of international law.
  • 4.1.6 Inhabitants of a non-occupied territory, who on the approach of the enemy spontaneously take up arms to resist the invading forces, without having had time to form themselves into regular armed units, provided they carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs of war.
  • 4.3 makes explicit that Article 33 takes precedence for the treatment of medical personnel of the enemy and chaplains of the enemy.
    

At no point in the section above are terrorists granted protection by the Geneva Convention. Article 4.1.2 stipulates that groups to be granted Geneva rights as "militias or other volunteer corps" must fulfill "all of the following conditions."

• that of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;
• that of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance (there are limited exceptions to this among countries who observe the 1977 Protocol I);
• that of carrying arms openly;
• that of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.

Islamic terrorists, under the guise of al Qaeda or the insurgent Mujahedeen Shura Council, have never, at any point in the war, fulfilled these required four conditions, and very rarely meet even one. By definition, they are therefore exempted from Geneva's protections, and can be—quite legally—shot on sight.

As Jonah Goldberg notes:

We've all seen countless WWII movies about how soldiers out of uniform can be shot as spies under the Geneva Convention. Well, all of al Qaeda's soldiers are spies. And they most emphatically do not provide their prisoners with ping-pong tables and dormitories. They cut off their heads and put the pictures on the Internet and TV. The same goes for Osama's allies and fellow travelers in Iraq.

The liberal punditocracy seems to think it's an obvious fact that the Geneva Convention should apply to the war on terrorism, even though the plain text of the Geneva Convention applies as much to the war on terror as it does to the battle between the Federation and the Klingon Empire.

By hiding among civilians, torturing and beheading captives, and acting like, well, terrorists, these people have, by their own actions, exempted themselves from Geneva's protections.

Kos states and apparently believes "we have lost the moral high ground" to the kind of barbarians who torture, mutilate, and kill their captives. This is the same Kos that said of American contractors killed, mutilate, burned and then hung from a bridge in Fallujah, "screw them."

It seems to me that Markos Moulitsas is the last person to be lecturing others about ground clearly so far above his reach.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:11 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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At least one part of Congressman John Murtha's Haditha story has now been conclusively debunked.

Murtha had maintained that the incident that culminated in the deaths of up to 24 Iraqi civilians at the hands of Marines after a fatal convoy ambush had been covered up:

Mr Murtha, himself a former Marine, charged that US military authorities had paid compensation to the families of the victims, indicating they had assumed responsibility for the deaths. "They paid people $1,500 to $2,500. This doesn't happen unless it comes at the highest authority," Mr Murtha told CNN.

Asked if he meant victims' compensation, Mr Murtha said: "Yes. And that doesn't happen ... if it's an explosive device."

Mr Murtha repeated his accusation that the Marines had sought to cover up the killings."This is what worries me. We're fighting a war about America's ideals and democracy's ideas and something like this happens, they try to cover it up," he said. "It is as bad as Abu Ghraib, if not worse."

An independent Army General who investigated the charges of a cover-up has completed his report, and concludes otherwise:

The general charged with investigating whether Marines tried to cover up the killing of 24 civilians in Haditha has completed his report, finding that Marine officers failed to ask the right questions, an official close to the investigation said Friday.

Nothing in the report points to a "knowing cover-up" of the facts by the officers supervising the Marines involved in the November incident, the official said. Rather, he said, officers from the company level through the staff of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force in Baghdad failed to demand "a thorough explanation" of what happened in Haditha.

I imagine many netroots liberals reading this account published in the L.A. Times will immediately dismiss the report as a whitewash, saying that though an Army General investigated a Marine incident, it is still a military cover-up.

But never fear. They still support the troops.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:30 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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Some have more meaning than others.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:12 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Will all the liberals out there equivalating how Americans treat captured terrorists with how terrorists treat those unlucky souls they capture, please take the time to remind me when that last time was American soldiers did anything like this:

The bodies of two U.S. soldiers found in Iraq Monday night were mutilated and booby-trapped, military sources said Tuesday.

Pfc. Kristian Menchaca and Pfc. Thomas L. Tucker went missing after a Friday attack on a traffic control checkpoint in Yusufiya, 12 miles (20 km) south of Baghdad.

The sources said the two men had suffered severe trauma.

The bodies also had been desecrated, and a visual identification was impossible -- part of the reason DNA testing was being conducted to verify their identities, the sources said.

A tip from Iraqi civilians led officials to the bodies, military sources told CNN. The discovery was made about 7:30 p.m. Monday.

Not only were the bodies booby-trapped, but homemade bombs also lined the road leading to the victims, an apparent effort to complicate recovery efforts and target recovery teams, the sources said.
It took troops 12 hours to clear the area of roadside bombs. One of the bombs exploded, but there were no injuries.

The terrorists captured two of our men, and what steps did they take?

The did not take them to a tropical island where captives are so well fed that almost all gain weight. Nor were they forced to put womens underwear on their heads, and they did not have fake blood thrown at them, or pull other fraternity/reality TV-grade tricks.

But I don't here liberals complaining about the actions of the terrorists, and how uncomfortable it must be for those captured by terrorists to be mauled with a power drill, or scorched with acetylene torches, or castrated, or beheaded, or hung, dangling from meat hooks while still alive, or raped with found objects.

No, the left can bear to shed no real, heart-felt words of sympathy, and they drop crocodile tears as they quickly use this occasion to bash both the Adminstration and the troops.

If we treat terrorists like anything other than privileged dinner guests it is torture by their sophomoric definition, and it's the President's fault. If terrorists, in turn, perform unspeakable acts of barbarity on our soldiers, it's still the President's fault.

Nothing is ever the fault of the terrorists, and the United States is never, ever in the right.

Do I question their patriotism?

No.

Where they stand is abundantly clear.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 03:11 PM | Comments (25) | Add Comment
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Pat Dollard, former Hollywood agent turned Iraq War documentary filmmaker needs your help:

I gave it all up, my life and my income, to serve my country in the War in Terror, with the one weapon a 42 year old civilian like me could use: a camera. I'm bleeding my life savings dry, and we all need your help with finishing funds for the project. I may soon have to go back to Ramadi to cover a potential large operation in the city ala Fallujah. It's a risk, as usual, that I'm willing to take. Any donation you can make towards "Young Americans" will be greatly appreciated, and more importantly, will have a huge impact on America
by helping to balance out the non-stop BS liberal message we are all drowning in. All contributors, if requested, will be named in the end title sequence with a shared Associate Producer credit. Please rally around the project, the Marines, and America.

At my request Pat set up a Paypal account (via the link above), which will allow you to help contribute to the completion of this project. Please consider doing so. Every dollar helps Pat get one step closer to finishing a real reality series that will show America the war in Iraq as fought by the Marines that the mainstream media would never dare show you.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:55 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Sadly, I think this is what we expected:

A high-ranking official with the Iraqi Defense Ministry told CNN on Tuesday that the bodies of two missing U.S. soldiers were found Saturday south of Baghdad.
No more details were immediately available.

"Two bodies have been found," Maj. William Wilhoite, spokesman for Multi-National Forces-Iraq, told CNN.

"We haven't made any confirmation if they're the two U.S. soldiers we're looking for."
He said he did not know whether the bodies showed signs of torture. "I haven't heard anything through our official channels," he said.

"Obviously, before we made any announcement, if it was our soldiers, we'd have to make notification to the families," Wilhoite said.

Pfc. Kristian Menchaca, 23, of Houston, Texas, and Pfc. Thomas L. Tucker, 25, of Madras, Oregon, went missing Friday after an attack on a traffic checkpoint near the town of Yusufiya, 12 miles (20 km) south of Baghdad.

The Washington Post reports that the two men had been tortured:

Two U.S. soldiers missing since an attack on a checkpoint last week have been found dead near a power plant in Yusifiyah, south of Baghdad, according to an Iraqi defense official.

Maj. Gen. Abdul Aziz Muhammed-Jassim, head of operations at the Iraqi Ministry of Defense, said the soldiers had been "barbarically" killed and that there were traces of torture on their bodies.

As I predicted yesterday, the media quickly found their anti-war, anti-Bush soundbite:

The news is going to be heartbreaking for my family," Menchaca's uncle, Ken MacKenzie, told NBC's "Today" show.

He said the United States should have paid a ransom for the two soldiers from money seized from Saddam Hussein.

"I think the U.S. was too slow to react to this," MacKenzie said. "Because the U.S. did not have a plan in place, my nephew has paid with his life."

MacKenzie is entitled to grieve, but he cannot blame this on anyone other than the terrorists. Today Show host Matt Lauer even called him on it.

Once his nephew surrendered he was a dead man, and there was nothing, no "plan" or bribe that would have changed this outcome.

The terrorists of the Mujahedeen Shura Council probably think they have scored a victory, and indeed, in the short-term, they have. They can claim that after three years of war, they finally captured and killed a grand total of three U.S. soldiers. Accounts of the capture and killing of U.S. soldiers will receive a great amount of press worldwide. Arab media will likely present the deaths as a thinly veiled triumph, and the western media will use it as an opportunity to once again call for disengagement, as will many Democrats.

But these killings will not be received favorably by the U.S. military in Iraq, which will likely step up operations to hunt down and destroy terror and insurgent cells operating in this part of Iraq. Though official orders will not be given, perhaps U.S. forces will not be so inclined to take prisoners after this incident. Insurgents and their al Qaeda allies set the tone of giving U.S. forces no quarter when they took prisoners.

They made a huge mistake.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:16 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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Despite the shrill cries to the contrary, the Iraqi War is part of the War on Terror, as occasional C.Y. poster Ray Robinson shows with further analysis of newly-translated documents linking Saddam with the Taliban (bold in original):

I am the one who started with this issue, the relation between Taliban and Iraq, and it is our idea. The brothers in Afghanistan are facing the pressure of America, and are struggling against America and aim to have some connections between Afghanistan and Iraq, and it is a good start to establish the relations with Iraq and Libya and our association has taken this responsibility upon her. I already met with Mr. the Vice-President and the previous head of the directorate, may God rest his soul (translator's note: apparently the head of the directorate passed away) and both proposed that Hekmatyar and the Taliban should get to an agreement. I spoke with the Taliban about this issue and they started meeting with delegations from the Islamic Party, and I met Mullah Omar and his reply was positive.

As a party, our stand is that there should be an agreement between the Taliban and the rest of the opposition, Shah Ahmad Massoud and Rabbani. And Mullah Omar said that we are looking towards this and that (not clear) and (not clear) and Ahmad Al Kilani and Jalal Al Din Hakkani do not oppose us. Therefore, Hekmatyar is on the positive way but we are in a war situation and that needs a lot of trust, and there are hurdles to this because he fought us and killed us and he has problems with the opposition in the North and with us. After repeated contacts we will reach an agreement, but in the form of steps. Concerning the relations with Iraq, he said that they are our brothers and Muslims and are facing pressures from America, like us and like Sudan and Libya. And he (Mullah Omar) desires to get closer relations with Iraq and that Iraq may help us in reducing our problems. Now we are facing America and Russia. He requested the possibility of Iraq intervening to build a friendship with Russia since Russia is no more the number one enemy. And we request Iraq's help from a brotherly point of view. They are ready for this matter and they prefer that the relation between Iraq and Taliban be an independent relation from Hekmatyar's relation with the Taliban. We want practical steps concerning this issue and especially the relationship with the Taliban and (not clear, but could be Iraq).

Robinson then supplies analysis of the translation, including this description of the meeting:

So it seems possible the IIS Chief died just prior to this meeting and the Maulana is meeting with the new IIS chief. The new IIS chief would have been Tahir Jalil Habbush al Tikriti, who according to the Multi-National Forces' Iraq Web site as of January, 2006 is still listed as “at large.” Of course, if he has not been captured, it is reasonable to assume he has not been interrogated.

Tahir Jalil Habbush al Tikriti came to public attention in December, 2003 when the Telegraph UK reported Terrorist Behind September 11th Strike was Trained by Saddam.

Details of Atta's visit to the Iraqi capital in the summer of 2001, just weeks before he launched the most devastating terrorist attack in U.S. history, are contained in a top secret memo written to Saddam Hussein, the then Iraqi president, by Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, the former head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.

The handwritten memo, a copy of which has been obtained exclusively by the Telegraph, is dated July 1, 2001 and provides a short resume of a three-day "work programme" Atta had undertaken at Abu Nidal's base in Baghdad.

In the memo, Habbush reports that Atta "displayed extraordinary effort" and demonstrated his ability to lead the team that would be "responsible for attacking the targets that we have agreed to destroy".

Atta, of course, led the 9/11 attacks.

Saddam to al Tikriti to Atta. A strong link from Iraq to 9/11. Add this to evidence that Saddam gave money and housing to Abdul Rahman Yasin, the 1993 World Trade Center bomb builder, and I'd say that you're looking at evidence that Saddam was linked to attacks on the World Trade Center not once, but twice.

"Illegal war?"

I think not.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 06:29 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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Almost a month ago I ripped into ex-Marine John Murtha for unequivocally stating that a unit of Marines had "killed innocent civilians in cold blood" after an IED blast killed a fellow Marine in Haditha, Iraq.

I stated:

First off, it is unconscionable for any legislator to accuse U.S. military personnel of multiple counts of premeditated murder before an investigation into these charges is complete. Prosecutions must proceed at their own logical pace as evidence in the case dictates. Premature accusations by a public figure in such a case imposes an artificial timeline, endangering the accuracy and thoroughness of an investigation.

At the same time, such heated rhetoric as charges of murder of "innocent civilians in cold blood" is prejudicial against the defendants, poisoning public opinion against them. This would be an explosive charge in a civilian court, but to make such charges against members of the U.S. Military when they are engaged in military operations in that country is absolutely fissionable.

An attorney for one of the Haditha Marines apparently agrees, and states that if his client is charged, he will call Murtha as a witness:

A criminal defense attorney for a Marine under investigation in the Haditha killings says he will call a senior Democratic congressman as a trial witness, if his client is charged, to find out who told the lawmaker that U.S. troops are guilty of cold-blooded murder.

Attorney Neal A. Puckett told The Washington Times that Gen. Michael Hagee, the Marine commandant, briefed Rep. John P. Murtha, Pennsylvania Democrat, on the Nov. 19 killings of 24 Iraqis in the town north of Baghdad. Mr. Murtha later told reporters that the Marines were guilty of killing the civilians in "cold blood." Mr. Murtha said he based his statement on Marine commanders, whom he did not identify.
Mr. Puckett said such public comments from a congressman via senior Marines amount to "unlawful command influence." He said potential Marine jurors could be biased by the knowledge that their commandant, the Corps' top officer, thinks the Haditha Marines are guilty.

"Unlawful command influence." Let that sink in. According to United States vs. Gore, No. 03-6003, 60 MJ 178 (and summarized here), unlawful command influence:

• is recognized as the mortal enemy of military justice;
• tends to deprive service members of their constitutional rights;
• if directed against prospective defense witnesses, it transgresses the accused's right to have access to favorable evidence.

John Murtha took the extraordinary step of accusing Marines of a war crime before the investigation was complete, and perhaps has compromised justice in this process entirely. Someone should ask Murtha if his political grandstanding was worth becoming the "mortal enemy of military justice" and jeopardizing the constitutional rights of these Marines. Someone should, but they aren't likely to get an answer. According the author of the Times article, Murtha's spokesman did not return a call seeking comment.

Apparently too late, ex-Marine John Murtha has finally learned to shut up.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:32 PM | Comments (15) | Add Comment
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While we were all looking at Karl Rove, President Bush decided to make an unannounced visit to Baghdad, no doubt as a show of support for the newly completed Iraqi government and a tough-talking Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's plans to increase security in Baghdad and throughout Iraq.

From Fox News:

President Bush made a surprise visit to Iraq on Tuesday to meet newly named Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and discuss the next steps in the troubled, three-year-old war.

It was a dramatic move by Bush, traveling to violence-rattled Baghdad less than a week after the death of terror chief Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in a bombing attack. The president was expected to be in Baghdad a little more than five hours.

You can say what you will about his successes and failures as a President, but George W. Bush certainly has courage. Not many Presidents—actually none that I know of, but I hardly claim empiracal knowledge—have made it a practice to visit our soldiers and our allies in an active war zone, and I can't recall a time when the technological capability for the enemy to strike against a President during a visit been greater.

This article (and others, to be sure) tells a reeling al Qaeda where Bush is and when he will be leaving the airport, and the flight paths in and out of the airport are anything but secret. Frankly, I fear the possibility of an attempt to use MANPADS against Air Force One as it leaves Baghdad International. We know that insurgents have Russian-designed SA-16 man-portable surface to air missiles, and if DEBKAfilecan be believed, as many as a thousand Iranian-built SA-7s. I do not know how much of a threat to Air Force One small man-portable missiles would be, but a volley of these missiles fired simultaneously as the President's plane was ascending could be problematic to say the least.

Those worries aside, the reasoning behind Bush's visit is sound. He is there to give a morale boost for an American military accused of murdering innocent civilians, and to show support for the Iraqi government that seems serious about cracking down on both insurgent and sectarian violence. His very presence all but assures success on both of these goals.

More as this story develops...

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:04 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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I've long thought that the mental acuity of the average leftist was highly retarded by a wall of anti-Bush agi-prop (hence the tagline, "liberalism is a persistent vegetative state"), but even still, I was blown away by the blatant paranoia, open delusions, and thinly-veiled hatred of American soldiers manifested on liberal blog Talk Left, regarding the killing of terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Starting on Saturday and continuing again Sunday, Talk Left posters began working themselves into a lather over a claim made by an anonymous Iraqi to the Associated Press that U.S. soldiers beat al-Zarqawi to death after his safehouse was hit by two 500-pound bombs.

The claim:

The Iraqi, identified only as Mohammed, said he lives near the house where al-Zarqawi was killed. He said residents put a bearded man in an ambulance before U.S. forces arrived.

"When the Americans arrived they took him out of the ambulance, they beat him on his stomach and wrapped his head with his dishdasha, then they stomped on his stomach and his chest until he died and blood came out of his nose," Mohammed said, without saying how he knew the man was dead.

A dishdasha is a traditional Arab robe.

A similar account in The Washington Post identified the man as Ahmed Mohammed.
No other witnesses have come forward to corroborate the account. U.S. officials have only said al-Zarqawi mumbled and tried to roll off a stretcher before dying.

Now, by even applying basic reasoning skills to Mohamed's claim, one would have to ask how "Mohammed" could see blood flow out of al-Zarqawi's nose with his robe wrapped around his head, but that was easily bypassed by this top liberal blog, which was quick to label al-Zarqawi's killing an act of terrorism by the American military:

Killing Zarqawi and three women in the house with him was not an act of war. It was an act of retaliatory terrorism. By our government. And I don't want it to be in my name.

So according to Jeralyn Merritt, founder of Talk Left, killing a major terrorist is itself an act of terrorism.

The comment left me speechless over the weekend; I could not find a way to adequately explain the moral vacuousness and depraved indifference to reality needed to make such an incredibly stupid comment, and mean it.

But several of Jeralyn's regulars were ready to go beyond her labeling of American soldiers as terrorists, and seemed to float the theory that al-Zarqawi never even really existed at all:

The whole story is so unbelievable to begin with that the AP story only adds to the confusion.

al-Zarqawi has been a psy/ops character made for the American audience since Powell pointed to him as proof aq[sic] was in Iraq.

Why would the last chapter, his death, be any less fictional. With the US military controlling the narrative, anything is possible.

Some where willing to grant the possibility that he existed, but weren't convinced he was a terrorist :

The whole thing is bull. Whatever killed the man, it was not a 500-pound bomb. We know that's a lie, because the building was vaporized and the guy supposedly inside came out looking like he had been slapped by a high-school freshman. Then he died, with hardly a mark on him. Sure would like to see the autopsy report.

It seems that a lot of people are willing to take the word of people who have been wrong about EVERYTHING SO FAR that he was a terrorist, and that his role was important.

That was Saturday.

Sunday's post was even more discombobulated, with Merritt and her supporters apparently convinced that a delay in releasing the autopsy until DNA confirmation was complete as evidence of some sort of a cover-up, with the "discovery" of a second (predictably) anonymous source all the proof they required that al-Zarqawi's death was the result of a brutal beating of an injured man by American soldiers.

It's just heart-warming isn't it? Jeralyn and her followers find it far easier to believe that American soldiers are mindless thugs that would beat a wounded man on a stretcher to death, that believe he actually died as a result of two 500-lb. precision-guided bombs.

Of course, that depends on the silly assumption of those of us outside the "reality-based community" have that al-Zarqawi actually existed. Talk Lefter's don't seem convinced.

From Jade:

All the national and international media reported for the last two years that Zarqawi had one leg. They even told when and how he lost it. The quote often was "how hard is it to find a one legged man in Iraq".

Then we see a video of a two legged Zarqawi and a corpse of a two legged Zarqawi, how did that miracle of science happen?

From Aaron, the "more than one al-Zarqawi" theory:

While the DNA and the fingerprints may prove that this is indeed the terrorist we've come to know as Zarqawi, there does seem to be a lot of conflicting accounts, there may actually be a number of people using this moniker.

[snip]

The more you look at this nice neat little package which has been provided for us since day one, with the Jordanian government immediately stepping forward, and everyone revealing their intelligence sources, that's the moment you know to open your eyes wide, and listen very carefully. Far from being a coordinated attack it looks more and more like they just got lucky even with the help of Al Qaeda, and were able to call in a couple of planes which were on routine patrol. Beware of nice neat little packages when examining such counterintelligence scenarios.

And last but not least, Furillo:

I don't believe a word of what Gen. Casey Said.

Zarqawi never existed. At least the terrorist one.

It's all propoganda. Since when does a sullen Gen. Casey have to confirm what some already know is to use to press to brainwash and bombard us with dogma and story telling.

You see folks? al-Zarqawi never existed. Nick Berg sawed off his own head. That half-hour propaganda video so beloved by CNN's Jamie McIntyre was likely filmed on the same set as the faked Apollo moon landings. It all fitsÂ… at least when you're having fits.

Sadly, Jeralyn Merritt and her posters are not that atypical of the average "netroots progressive" that feel that our present U.S. government is the single greatest source of evil on this planet, and that terrorists such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Osama bin Laden are just props created by President Bush "to further the neocon agenda."

Can you imagine the looks they would have received in World War II?

I wonder what would have happened to people of this ilk during World War II as they tried to tell other Americans of a conspiracy cooked up by FDR to make his friends in the military-industrial complex filthy rich by creating a pawn called Benito Mussolini. Mussolini of course didn't really exist, since they never did find conclusive enough proof that the body recovered after he was reported killed was really a fascist dictator at all.

Back then, they'd be off to a rubber-padded room for electroshock treatments. Today, they run for office as Democrats.

Merritt and her fellow partisans ask us to believe their current insanity is a self-evident truth. Even the release of the autopsy showing al-Zarqawi was killed by the blast overpressure of the bombs will not be enough to convince them.

Based upon their easy dismissal of al-Zarqawi as a fictional character, one can only assume that from their enlightened perspective, Osama bin Laden is but a figment of our imagination as well.

Silly, silly us.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:09 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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Allow me to crow a bit this morning, as I'm extremely proud of and happy for Ray Robinson, who comments occasionally here at Confederate Yankee and helped me out immensely with his technical expertise in a series of posts debunking the "white phosphorus is a chemical weapon" myth of last November.

Ray went on to establish his own blog in March, and now has a new column at FoxNews.com, called "The Saddam Dossier."

What does Fox News plan to accomplish with this series?

Was Saddam Hussein a security threat to the United States? Did the Iraqi dictator have connections to Al Qaeda or other terrorist ties? What happened to the weapons of mass destruction everyone believed were in his possession? Did Saddam move them? Did they ever exist?

All of those questions have been dogging President George W. Bush and his administration since the start of the Iraq war. Politicians and respected U.S. military and intelligence officials have weighed in publicly on both sides of the debate, but until recently the general public has had little of the information necessary to make a fully informed decision on its own.

But that is changing.

The U.S. government seized thousands of classified Iraqi government papers when Saddam's regime was toppled, and Washington recently released a trove of these documents on the Pentagon's Foreign Military Studies Office Web site.

The documents, many in Arabic and with no accompanying translation, provide multiple insights into events inside pre-war Iraq. The dossier, however, is huge and disorganized. Digging out its secrets is a laborious task — one that the U.S. government decided to leave to others.

[snip]

With a small cadre of independent translators to support his efforts, Robison will now translate and analyze scores of the unexplored trove of documents from Saddam's regime in a FOXNews.com exclusive series: The Saddam Dossier.

In addition to translation, Robison will provide analysis based upon his work for the Iraq Survey Group and his military operations research experience. On occasion, he or a translator will remark in the translation itself for clarity, but will maintain the integrity of the document. All of their work will be linked online to the original Arabic texts, stored on the Foreign Military Studies Office Web site. Robison's analysis, however, is based on his own opinions.

"It is my belief," Robison says, "that those who just want to know the truth will find new and shocking information in these documents and may even change their beliefs about the reasons for the war."

The first installment of "The Saddam Dossier," Terror Links to Saddam's Inner Circle is online, and examines documents that connect Saddam's Iraq with the Taliban.

The much vaunted liberal cry of "Bush Lied, People Died" has never been so threatened.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:38 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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CNN, today:

Thousands of pounds of armor added to military Humvees, intended to protect U.S. troops, have made the vehicles more likely to roll over, killing and injuring soldiers in Iraq, a newspaper reported.

"I believe the up-armoring has caused more deaths than it has saved," said Scott Badenoch, a former Delphi Corp. vehicle dynamics expert told the Dayton Daily News for Sunday editions.

Since the start of the war, Congress and the Army have spent tens of millions of dollars on armor for the Humvee fleet in Iraq, the newspaper reported Sunday.

That armor -- much of it installed on the M1114 Humvee built at the Armor Holdings Inc. plant north of Cincinnati, Ohio -- has shielded soldiers from harm.

But serious accidents involving the M1114 have increased as the war has progressed, and the accidents were much more likely to be rollovers than those of other Humvee models, the newspaper reported.

USA Today, March 2005:

The Army is baffled by a recent spate of vehicle accidents in Iraq — many of them rollovers involving armored Humvees — that have claimed more than a dozen lives this year.

One key concern: Soldiers lack the skills to handle the heavier Humvees and are losing control as they speed through ambush areas before insurgents detonate roadside bombs.

"An individual feels that if he goes faster he can avoid that threat," says Lt. Col. Michael Tarutani, an Army official tracking the accidents. "But now he's exceeded, first, maybe his capabilities, and then maybe the speed for those conditions."

In the past four full months, the numbers of serious vehicle accidents and fatalities in Iraq have more than doubled from the previous four months, records provided by the Army show. In the first 10 weeks of this year, 14 soldiers were killed in accidents involving Humvees or trucks. All but one died in rollovers. If that rate continues, the number of soldiers killed in such accidents this year would be almost double the 39 soldiers killed in 2004. Detailed records involving Marines were not available.

Perhaps recycling a year-old article is "news" for CNN, but their story is well-known to anyone who has been following this war... or any other.

Just as with the human body armor that some have been pushing, there is a significant trade-off, because added armor decreases mobility and flexibility. More armor does not always mean more survivability, as the heavier armor slows soldiers down and puts them in the enemy's kill zone longer. Firepower almost always ends up defeating a slowed, moderately-armored enemy.

It's a formula that has held for hundreds of years, at least since the Battle of Crécy in 1346.

I'm glad CNN is finally catching up.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 06:17 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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