 |  |
 
October 2012
August 2012 July 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003 August 2003 July 2003 June 2003 May 2003 April 2003 March 2003 February 2003 January 2003
     |
 Greetings! You are reading an article from The Mudville Gazette. To reach the front page, with all the latest news and views, click the logo above or "main" below. Thanks for stopping by! May 25, 2005
21 TrackBacksA CUNY professor who called religious believers "moral retards" has gone on another Internet rant - calling himself a defiant "superman" and comparing religion to oppressive regimes. A firestorm erupted at Brooklyn College after the views of Timothy... Read More "Hold on, we'll be there in a minute," yelled Marine Sgt. Shawn Bryan, of Albuquerque, N.M., assigned to the 3rd Marine Battalion, from a platform on the dam as Marines scrambled into vehicles to try to locate the attackers. Read More "More people joined the Michael Jackson fan club. We've done picked all the low-lying Lynndie England fruit, and now we need warm bodies." - Bill Maher on the Army's low recruitment numbers for April. " Is this statement treason? According... Read More Is this a joke? In a radio interview with Hugh Hewitt, ABC News correspondent Terry Moran said: "There is, I agree with you, a deep anti-military bias in the media ..." Recall that this is the same moron who jumped all over Scott McClellan last ... Read More Still pumped from MRSA-infection debates during the recent election cycle, it took little time for the UK media to hype the news that a Royal Marine died from a rare MRSA strain last year during commando training. And in so doing, to apply the usual... Read More I arrived aboard USS CONOLLY (DD-979) in late September, 1983. Assigned as Engineer Officer, I felt it was my duty to quickly and properly qualify as Engineering Officer of the Watch (EOOW). My CO, CDR Harry Maxiner, had other plans. Reporting aboard... Read More Yahoo News reports: Amnesty Takes Aim at 'Gulag' in Guantanamo LONDON - Amnesty International branded the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay a human rights failure Wednesday, calling it "the gulag of our time" as it released a report that offers st... Read More The University of Wisconsin Stout and it's pitiful excuse for a Chancellor just stepped into the crosshairs. This sorry, ungrateful, pampered over-educated, under-learned prig has managed to stop the school from allowing ROTC Read More Sensible, sure. Soldiers are trained and meant to do soldier-type jobs, which, if I can infer anything from the bucket of plastic green army men I had when I was a kid, usually involve carrying a rifle around. Read More A policy paper discussing the conversion of the Aegis anti-aircraft system into an anti-missile system marked Baxter's entry into the world of military consulting, but it is some of his more revolutionary ideas that are promising to transform the Ame... Read More Well, well, well, it seems those good idea fairies that masquerade as our legislative branch finally got one right. The GOP-controlled House decided Wednesday to let the Pentagon continue deciding military jobs for women, as long as defense officials g... Read More Bubba sent it to me. So blame him. Want to dance like a white guy? Buy the video and start learning now. Call 1-800-555-HONK-E. Limited time offer.... Read More Elaine Donnelly Center for Military Readiness Today, the House of Representatives dropped a provision in the Defense spending bill that would have codified the military regulations which prohibit assigning women to units with a direct land combat miss... Read More Elaine Donnelly Center for Military Readiness Today, the House of Representatives dropped a provision in the Defense spending bill that would have codified the military regulations which prohibit assigning women to units with a direct land combat miss... Read More Red Six at Armor Geddon relates a story about using way too big a knife for the job at hand, and the results. Read More I had mentioned earlier that you could buy a Foxtrot-class submarine, slightly, uh, used, for about $250K. Looks like the Canadians might be able to undercut that deal: The Oberon-class submarines are presently docked on the Dartmouth, N.S., wate... Read More Monday, May 30 is Memorial Day. Americans have set this day aside each year to honor those who have given their lives for their country. Traditional observance of Memorial day has diminished over the years. Many Americans nowadays have forgotten the m... Read More Here's the example Meyer gives to demonstrate the colossal boondoggle Congress and President Bush have created for our intelligence service: Read More The story of young Lizzy Lulu could have been one of a girl with cystic fibrosis, dealing with the frustrations of that ugly disease Read More Still pumped from MRSA-infection debates during the recent election cycle, it took little time for the UK media to hype the news that a Royal Marine died from a rare MRSA strain last year during commando training. Read More 13 Comments |
November 26, 2010America@war [Greyhawk]
I think anyone who's ever pondered the "comment" option - once only available on blogs and bulletin boards, now ubiquitous on almost any web site - will appreciate this:
The so-called faculty of writing is not so much a faculty of writing as it is a faculty of thinking. When a man says, "I have an idea but I can't express it"; that man hasn't an idea but merely a vague feeling. If a man has a feeling of that kind, and will sit down for a half an hour and persistently try to put into writing what he feels, the probabilities are at least 90 percent that he will either be able to record it, or else realize that he has no idea at all. In either case, he will do himself a benefit. That's wisdom from the past, captured for posterity at the US Naval Institute, shared via the web on the institute's 137th anniversary. From their about page:
"The Naval Institute has three core activities," among them, History and Preservation: The Naval Institute also has recently introduced Americans at War, a living history of Americans at war in their own words and from their own experiences. These 90-second vignettes convey powerful stories of inspiration, pride, and patriotism. Take a look at the collection, and you'll see it's not limited to accounts from those who served on ships at sea, members of the other branches are well-represented. I'm fortunate to have met USNI's Mary Ripley, she's responsible for the institute's oral history program (and she's the daughter of the late John Ripley, whose story is told here). She also deserves much credit for their blog. ("We're not the Navy nor any government agency. Blog and comment freely.") We met at a milblog conference - Mary knew (and I would come to realize) that milbloggers are the 21st-century version of exactly what the US Naval Institute is all about. Once that light bulb came on in my head, I mentioned a vague idea for a project to her - milblogs as the 21st century oral history that they are. "Put that in writing," she said (of course - see first paragraph above!) - and here's part of the result. Shortly after the first tent was pitched by the American military in Iraq a wire was connected to a computer therein, and the internet was available to a generation of Americans at war - many of whom had grown up online. From that point on, at any given moment, somewhere in Iraq a Soldier, Sailor, Airman or Marine was at a keyboard sharing the events of his or her day with the folks back home. While most would simply fire off an email, others took advantage of the (then) relatively new online blogging platforms to post their thoughts and experiences for the entire world to see. The milblog was born - and from that moment to this stories detailing everything from the most mundane aspects of camp life to intense combat action (often described within hours of the event) have been available on the web... And et cetera - but since you're reading this on a milblog, you probably knew that. And you know that milblogs aren't just blogs written by troops at war, that many friends, family members, and supporters likewise documented their story of America at war online in near-real time, as those stories developed. The diversity in membership of that group is broad, the one thing we all have in common is the impulse to make sense of the seemingly senseless, and communicate the tale - for each of us that impulse was strong enough to overcome whatever barriers prevent the vast majority of people from doing the same. Everyone at some point has some vague idea they believe should be shared - we were the people who, from some combination of internal and external urging, found and spent those many half hours persistently trying to write it down. But where will all that be in another 137 years? Or five or ten, for that matter. That's something I've asked myself since at least 2004 - when I wrote this:
Membership in the ghost battalion has grown in the years since, and an ever growing majority of those abandoned-but-still-standing sites are vanishing. Have you checked out Lt Smash's site lately? How about Sgt Hook's? If you're a long-time milblog reader you know the first widely-read milblog from Operation Iraq Freedom and the first widely-read milblog from Afghanistan are both gone from the web. If you're a relative newcomer to this world you may never even have heard of them - or the dozens upon dozens of others who carried forth the standard they set down. If you have a vague notion that something should be done about that, (a notion I've heard expressed more than once...) then you and I and the good folks at the US Naval Institute are in agreement. Preserving the history documented by the milbloggers is just one of the goals of the milblog project, the once-vague idea that we're now making real. And it's a big idea, if I say so myself - too big to explain in one simple blog post, so stand by for more. Likewise, it's too big a task to be accomplished by just one person. So if you're a milblogger (and exactly what is a milblogger? is a topic for much further discussion on its own) I'm asking for your help. All I'll really need is just a little bit (maybe just one or two of those half hours...) of your time, and your willingness to tell the tale. We've already made history, it's time to save it. (More to follow...) Posted 4:02 PM | Permalink |
Comments (0) |
|
The Mudville Gazette is the on-line voice of an American warrior and his wife who stands by him. They prefer to see peaceful change render force of arms unnecessary. Until that day they stand fast with those who struggle for freedom, strike for reason, and pray for a better tomorrow.
 
 
 Furthermore, I will occasionally use satire or parody herein. The bottom line: it's my house. I like having visitors to my house. I hope you are entertained. I fight for your right to free speech, and am thrilled when you exercise said rights here. Comments and e-mails are welcome, but all such communication is to be assumed to be 1)the original work of any who initiate said communication and 2)the property of the Mudville Gazette, with free use granted thereto for publication in electronic or written form. If you do NOT wish to have your message posted, write "CONFIDENTIAL" in the subject line of your email. Original content copyright © 2003 - 2011 by Greyhawk. Fair, not-for-profit use of said material by others is encouraged, as long as acknowledgement and credit is given, to include the url of the original source post. Other arrangements can be made as needed. Contact: greyhawk at mudvillegazette dot com  Tending Distant Far from hearth and home, watching What tales we'll tell When things grim Some distant sunset, vision fading Saluting fallen friends whose names - Greyhawk, Baghdad, December 2004 |
Turns out Newsweek was right. I wonder if the right-wingers who were calling for Newsweek's scalp will now acknowledge the truth, or whether they will do what right-wingers do best and simply sweep it under the rug.
Actually, I don't wonder at all. Bad news is a terrorist plot. Will the right wing accuse the FBI of being a terrorist organization for reporting the truth?
This just in from Reuters:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An FBI agent wrote in a 2002 document made public on Wednesday that a detainee held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had accused American jailers there of flushing the Koran down a toilet.
The release of the declassified document came the week after the Bush administration denounced as wrong a May 9 Newsweek article that stated U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo had flushed a Koran down a toilet to try to make detainees talk.
The magazine retracted the article, which had triggered protests in Afghanistan in which 16 people died.
The newly released document, dated Aug. 1, 2002, contained a summary of statements made days earlier by a detainee, whose name was redacted, in two interviews with an FBI special agent, whose name also was withheld, at the Guantanamo prison for foreign terrorism suspects.
The American Civil Liberties Union released the memo and a series of other FBI documents it obtained from the government under court order through the Freedom of Information Act.
"Personally, he has nothing against the United States. The guards in the detention facility do not treat him well. Their behavior is bad. About five months ago, the guards beat the detainees. They flushed a Koran in the toilet," the FBI agent wrote.
"The guards dance around when the detainees are trying to pray. The guards still do these things," the FBI agent wrote.
ThePentagon stated last week it had received "no credible and specific allegations" that U.S. personnel at Guantanamo had put a Koran in the toilet.
The documents indicated that detainees were making allegations that they had been abused and that the Muslim holy book had been mishandled as early as April 2002, about three months after the first detainees arrived at Guantanamo.
In other documents, FBI agents stated that Guantanamo detainees also accused U.S. personnel of kicking the Koran and throwing it to the floor, and described beatings by guards. But one document cited a detainee who accused a guard of dropping a Koran, prompting an "uprising" by prisoners, when it was the prisoner himself who dropped it.
The Pentagon had no immediate comment on the documents.
The United States currently holds about 520 detainees at Guantanamo, a high-security prison it opened in January 2002 for non-U.S. citizens caught in the U.S. war on terrorism.
Former detainees and a lawyer for current prisoners previously have stated that U.S. personnel at Guantanamo had placed the Koran in a toilet, but the Pentagon last week said it did not view those allegations as credible.
"Unfortunately, one thing we've learned over the last couple of years is that detainee statements about their treatment at Guantanamo and other detention centers sometimes have turned out to be more credible than U.S. government statements," said ACLU lawyer Jameel Jaffer.
Jaffer said the latest documents show the U.S. government had heard detainees complain as early as 2002 about desecration of the Koran at Guantanamo Bay, including at least one mentioning it had been placed in a toilet.
In another document, written in April 2003, an FBI agent related a detainee's account of an incident involving a female U.S. interrogator.
"While the guards held him, she removed her blouse, embraced the detainee from behind and put her hand on his genitals. The interrogator was on her menstrual period and she wiped blood from her body on his face and head," the memo stated.
A similar incident was described in a recent book written by a former Guantanamo interrogator.
The U.S. military launched an inquiry after the Newsweek article was published into whether Guantanamo personnel placed the Koran in a toilet, but the review was limited to searching through official day-to-day log entries.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan last week said Newsweek "got the facts wrong." Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman last week called the article "demonstrably false."
Hello Willysnout, I see you are taking a break from spreading your lies over at Protest Warrior to do the same here.
One question that no one has as of yet been able to explain
How does one flush a 464 page book down the toilet? Especially given the military's love affair with low flow toilets?
So willysnout, I guess I'll see you over at Protest Warrior when you find some more lies to talk about?
Look on page 3878 of the FBI files released as the result of the ACLU's Freedom of Information Act filing. It says: "The guards flushed a Koran in the toilet."
http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/052505/3836_3889.pdf
So, Caelestis, I'm afraid it is you who is lying. Unfortunately, the telling of lies has become the specialty of the American far right-wing, following the lead of the Pentagon, which lied about the circumstances of Pat Tillman's death, about the Jessica Lynch situation, about not having been informed about Koran desecration and about a wide variety of other issues.
The truth. It will set you free. Give it a try, why don't you?
Willysnout, I have accepted the truth, I'm not the one trying to denigrate our brave men and women in uniform.
If you "have accepted the truth," then you wouldn't lie about what I've posted.
I should also note that, like most of the right-wingers in this country, the denizens of "ProtestWarrior" approve of the desecration of the Koran by a 90% margin. They heavily approve of torturing Muslim captives; of "sexual humiliation"; of a "holy war" between Christianity and Islam; and that no detainee can ever be believed unless an American soldier is willing to testify that he saw that detainee being abused.
Not that the chest-thumping right wingers of this country will ever do it, but I'd suggest going to the ACLU's website and looking at the documents they obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. These documents weren't written by the ACLU, they were written by government personnel as they took testimony from detainees in a various places around the world.
The documents tell of torture in the name of Christianity; of sexual abuse, including rape, of male detainees by both men and women of the U.S. armed forces; of a lack of medical attention; of routine beatings and other forms of physical abuse; of systematic cultural and religious degradation.
A few of the incidents resulted in reprimands to the people who did it, but there has been no investigation of the reality that all of these tactics have been standard operating procedure. It's not much of a way to win hearts and minds in the Muslim world, and it's a dramatic departure from U.S. policy in other wars, most particularly World War II.
If the U.S. is to have any hope of winning Bush's "war on terror," it will need the Muslim world's help, or at least its tolerance. I don't think that flushing the Koran "in" the toilet, and sexually abusing their prisoners, and torturing them in the name of Jesus Christ, advances either those goals or our values.
That's a hard message to read, but it's true, and if we don't face the truth then we're lost.
RE: Women in Combat
Whatever your position on the immediate issue, everyone needs to understand the underlying trap involved in it.
Under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, Congress is the designated authority on the composition of the armed forces of the United States. Per its authority, under the implementation of that power, by Title X U.S.C. Congress, part of which reads -
TITLE 10--ARMED FORCES
Subtitle A--General Military Law
PART I--ORGANIZATION AND GENERAL MILITARY POWERS
CHAPTER 13--THE MILITIA
Sec. 311. Militia: composition and classes
(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.
(b) The classes of the militia are--
(1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and (2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.
That is the basis of the 'draft'. The draft is the selective activation of the unorganized Federal Militia. Now if the government was to reinstitute the draft with a formal or informal policy of women declared as equal participants in the combat role as men, a judicial challenge will be there to contest the historical discrimination of only drafting males. The government will be hard pressed to justify why men are disproportionately subject to this government authority and act. A reasonable case may be there to declare this portion of the law unconstitutional as is. Be careful for what you wish for, you may get it.
''If this is how liberals support the
troops, then could they please f*cking STOP already? Don't tell those of us in
the military you "support the troops", and then spend 110% of your time and print space breaking your necks to paint us all as bloodthirsty criminals because of the acts of a few – all as a thinly-disguised way to grind a political axe with a President with which 90% of the media has a deeply personal beef. It isn't fooling anybody – especially "the troops". We're perfectly aware
that, to the media, we are expendable pawns in a political chess game, and we resent the hell out the very real damage they do to us every single day.''
- An American serviceman serving
overseas emails Arthur Chrenkoff
-*-
US Army Major Mark Bieger and
the wilfull work of the enemy our troops face daily in
Iraq.
Above post was for free Willy.
If inappropriate, my apologies.
I was a kid who believed Walter Cronkite during the Vietnam war. Today's ''kids'' are very fortunate to have access to the internet.
Thank you for your service, Greyhawk and Mrs. Greyhawk.
A web site whose time has come (LGF)
I can't speak for others but I can certainly say that I don't regard "all" American troops as "bloodthirsty criminals." If I really believed something like that, then I wouldn't be sending packages to people over there with best wishes for success and safe return.
I think the U.S. military has been misused by sending them to Iraq to begin with, and that its honor has been stained by the civilian-imposed policy of torture, perversion and cultural degradation. The perpetrators at the low levels have moral responsibility for what they've done, but I hold the senior leadership primarily accountable for these things.
In World War II, the Japanese were vicious, bloodthirsty and depraved as a matter of policy. They tortured civilians and POWs in the most gruesome ways. American policy toward Japanese POWs was not to torture them in return, or to "sexuallly humiliate" them, or to degrade their culture. For one thing, it didn't work. For another, we were Americans and Americans were better than that.
http://mysite.verizon.net/vze6kt7j/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/aamitcsm.pdf
This country has changed since then, and not for the better I'm afraid.
Michelle Malkin on the latest inflammatory accusations, with facts - and class:
GUANTANAMO BAY: THE REST OF THE STORY
Corrected link to article.
Well there is at least some progress on the rightwingnut front. Michelle Malkin has acknowledged that some of the detainees' complaints might be justified. The Pentagon, on the other hand, trotted out a spokesliar to say that it had received NO credible reports of desecration of the Koran.
Ms. Malkin is happy to selectively quote from documents obtained by the hated ACLU, and I'd say that also represents progress because at least now we can put to rest the usual accusation from the rightwingnut fringe that the documents can be dismissed because of who obtained them.
I challenge people to do what Michelle Malkin did, i.e., read the documents that the ALCU has obtained. Read ALL of them. No fair-minded observer can conclude that torture, "sexual humiliation" and cultural degradation were "isolated incidents" as Bush has protrayed them to be, and no one can conclude anything other than that the Pentagon simply LIED when its spokesman claimed that there had been no credible reports of desecration of the Koran.
As for the torture policy itself, that's been documented by Seymour Hersh, the foremost investigative reporter in America. The crazies of the right wing can play their denial games to their heart's content, but the truth is the truth and truth shall set you free.
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/040524fa_fact
A final thought: Many right-wingers will immediately cite terrorist horrors to justify the American policy and its implementation. My answer is to ask: Who determines American values? Are we to let terrorists turn us into the animals they claim we are?
Torture, "sexual humiliation" and cultural degradation are wrong. It doesn't matter if we are fighting people who commit horrible crimes themselves. Those things are still wrong. Not only that, but they don't even work. They not only stain the honor of our military and blacken this country's reputation, but they degrade our security by threatening to turn mainstream Muslim opinion against us.
The truth, people. Look it in the face, because if you avoid the truth you lose wars.