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Confederate Yankee

March 01, 2007

Standing on Their Own: The View From Amiriyat al Falluja

While much of the blogosphere today seems focused on John McCain's announcement that he's zzzzz... ah, um, running for President (and being a putz), or which side of the blogosphere is the most profane, and the "professional" media is glued to Anna Nicole Smith's burial plans, Reuters has produced a story about the war in Iraq that seems to be having a very difficult time finding the front page.

Iraqi security forces killed dozens of al Qaeda militants who attacked a village in western Anbar province on Wednesday, during fierce clashes that lasted much of the day, police officials said on Thursday.
Sunni tribal leaders are involved in an escalating power struggle with Sunni al Qaeda for control of Anbar, a vast desert province that is the heart of the Sunni Arab insurgency in Iraq.
Interior Ministry spokesman Abdul Karim Khalaf said foreign Arabs and Afghanis were among some 80 militants killed and 50 captured in the clashes in Amiriyat al Falluja, a village where local tribes had opposed al Qaeda.
A police official in the area, Ahmed al-Falluji, put the number of militants killed at 70, with three police killed.

If you read the entire article, you'll note something that should be of great interest to readers here in the United States: when al Qaeda attacked the village, residents of this Anbar province town turned not to the U.S. military to take back their homes, but Iraqi security forces, and it was these Iraqi security forces, with no U.S. military involvement at all, that crushed the al Qaeda attack.

Amiriyat al Falluja is only a small town in western Iraq, and it is by no measure the largest battle here in Anbar's past or future, but this battle still bears noting. Why? It is the embodiment of what both Democrats and Republicans should be hoping for in regards to the future of Iraq.

In this town, on this day, Iraqi soldiers and policemen fought a pitched battle against a sizable force of al Qaeda fighters, and prevailed without our guidance, and without our intervention. They won this battle convincingly, standing on their own. What's more, the local citizens trusted them to be able to do so.

This is perhaps an isolated incident in an isolated corner of the western Iraqi desert, but it is, after all, exactly what we've hoped for. Iraqi policemen and soldiers came through for their fellow Iraqi citizens, and carried the day. We've been waiting for such news for four long years.

It's a shame that few of us in this country seem destined to ever hear about it.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 02:03 PM | Comments (18) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

February 28, 2007

Palestinian Crowd Control

Liveleak.com provides the following disturbing but intriguing video of an alleged Hamas sniper dispersing a group of Fatah gunmen with one well-place shot.

Content warning for... well, you'll see at the 27-second mark.

Early in the clip, we see a group of gunmen, which the person who posted this video clip thinks belong to the Palestinian Fatah party, which, depending on your point of view and perhaps which branch of Fatah you are talking about, may be viewed as a legitimate part of the Palestinian government, or as a terrorist organization. You'll note that all or most of the gunmen are wearing what can loosely be defined as a uniform, of sorts: dark, short-sleeved shorts, long black pants, various kinds of military web gear, and AK-pattern rifles.

Based upon the way they are clustered, it seems evident that they have little or no military training. A burst from a machine gun or an RPG strike could easily decimate the tightly-bunched group of at least six gunmen, not to mention the none-too bright bystanders only feet behind them. If this is representative of how Palestinian civilians typically observe urban combat, the Israeli Defense Forces deserve the Nobel Peace Prize every year for not killing thousands of them when engaging legitimate Palestinian military targets.

At the 26-second mark, the lead gunman steps away from the cover of the wall and raises his rifle to fire. A split second later, he squeezes off a shot as his last mortal act before collapsing from a single shot to the central nervous system a split second later.

Several bystanders then rush in with several of the other gunmen to drag the man who has just be shot out of the line of fire, some with hands raised. the group of gunmen and their supporters then sage a rapid retreat with the body of their martyr. It wasn't pretty, but a single shot ended this particular skirmish before it actually began.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:36 PM | Comments (17) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Eric Boehlert's Creepy Obsession

I've only come across this story several days late, but has anyone noticed that Eric Boehlert of Media Matters is obsessed with Michelle Malkin?

It would appear to be an unhealthy obsession at best, but perhaps what irritates me about his posts the most is not his opinion of Malkin, to which he is certainly entitled, but the fact that Boehlert can't keep his facts straight, which seems to be a long-running problem.

He concludes his most recent attack by listing bullet points of what he considers "Malkin’s recent lowlights,” including the following:

In April 2005, Malkin was leading the charge (i.e. "raising troubling questions") in accusing a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer with the Associated Press of working in concert with Iraqi insurgents to stage the public assassination of a Baghdad election worker. (The photog was tipped off by terrorists, Malkin claimed.) The allegations were proven to completely fictitious.

Entirely ficticious, Mr. Boehlert?

You wouldn't find it in Boehlert's article—he does not have the integrity to link directly to the Malkin post in question—nor does he link to the April, 2006 article on Malkin's site that shows that the charges were far from "completely fictitious." As a matter of fact, it appears that the charges may have been quite accurate. What is Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Bilal Hussein doing now?

Cooling his heels in an Iraqi jail after being captured with al Qaeda leader Hamid Hamad Motib and another terrorist. Somehow, I doubt Boehlert will apologize for being wrong.

But this wasn't Boehlert's only questionable lowlight, as he concludes with this gem, near and dear to my own heart:

In January, Malkin experienced a particularly humiliating setback. For months, Malkin had been pushing a far-fetched media "scandal" by accusing the Associated Press of manufacturing a "phony" and "bogus" Iraqi police source who was reporting false stories about the daily carnage inside Baghdad. She claimed the phony AP source proved that all of the AP's Iraq reporting was suspect. (Malkin and company cling to the notion that the situation in Iraq is not as bad as biased journalists make it out to be.) In January, the Iraqi government confirmed the police source's existence, thereby ruining Malkin's press-hating conspiracy theory. (The Post remained silent when Malkin's Jamil Hussein allegation imploded.)

This may be a news flash to Boehlert, but as regular readers of Confederate Yankee know, there is no Jamil Hussein, there never has been, and despite what Boehlert and the Associated Press maintain, Iraqi General Abdul-Karim Khalaf says he never confirmed the existence of Jamil Hussein, and he has gone on the record to set the story straight.

Instead of the General confirming the existence of Jamil Hussein, Associated Press reporters confirmed to General Abdul-Karim that Jamil Hussein was a pseudonym; the name of the source the AP misrepresented as Jamil Hussein was actually Jamil Gulaim Innad XX-XXXXXXX [Name redacted for security reasons — Ed.], which AP reporters confirmed both during a conversation with General Abdul-Karim prior to Steven R. Hurst's deceptive January 4 article, and with a phone call to General Abdul-Karim after XX-XXXXXXX was interviewed by the Ministry of the Interior.

Eric Boehlert's obsession with Michelle Malkin is a bit creepy, but the fact he seems quite willing to lie—or is just an incompetent researcher—goes far beyond his obsessionwith Michelle Malkin, to whether or not we can trust him to be the least bit honest or accountable for the things that he writes.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 04:20 PM | Comments (21) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Iranians State "Right" To Pursue Kurdish Rebels Into Iraq

Ostensibly, this means they won't have any problem if we decide we need to return the favor:

Iran's forces may cross into Iraq in pursuit of Kurdish rebels if the government in Baghdad can't expel the militants from border areas, an Iranian commander said.
"I warn Iraq's Kurdish movements and anti-revolutionary armed insurgents who are linked with foreigners that Iraq's government must oust them from the region," Revolutionary Guards leader Yahya Rahim Safavi was cited as saying today by state-run Mehr News. "Otherwise the Revolutionary Guards, to protect the security of the country and Iranian people, will consider it as their right to chase and neutralize them beyond the borders."

I hope that U.S. State Department diplomats will take measures to make sure this is a reciprocal "right" that can be enjoyed by Coalition military forces as they meet with Iranian diplomats as part of an international meeting on Iraq, but somehow I doubt it.

Update: If I was a Kurdish rebel, and this is an example of the kind of pursuit the Iranians have in mind, I'm not sure that I'd be all that concerned.

The Iranians sure are lucky that the Kurds seem to be having a harder time finding EFPs than their neighbors further south.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 01:12 PM | Comments (15) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

BDS, EFPs, and the NY Times

One of the (often deserved) knocks against journalists is that many reporters are generalists, covering a wide range of breaking news stories, but lacking the specific knowledge one needs to write cogently or with any depth on a specific issue. That is especially true in smaller news organizations, where a general news reporter may have to cover a crash, a zoning board meeting, or an anti-hobo-kicking rally, depending on the news of the day.

At larger news organizations, however, reporters often fall into "silos," covering a certain beat, where they are expected to specialize on a specific kind of news story. This is why we have financial reporters, foreign affairs reporters and that guy who talks about "hog futures" (I tend to think that hog futures are almost all the same, usually involving their role as an entrée, unless they have an exceptionally literate spider nearby, but I digress).

A clear example of this kind of stellar, specialized reporting was published in the NY Times yesterday morning, U.S. Displays Bomb Parts Said to Be Made in Iran. After reading the article, I was left wondering if James Glantz and Richard A. Oppel, Jr., had transcended being mere reporters, as their insightful commentary was clearly approaching the level where they could soon be rubbing elbows with a frigid of Maureen Dowds or a pod of Oliver Willi.

Take a moment to bask in the glory of their perfectly honed lede:

— In a dusty field near the Baghdad airport on Monday, the American military laid out a display of hundreds of components for assembling deadly roadside bombs, its latest effort to embarrass the country it contends is supplying the material to armed Shiite groups here: Iran.

All along, I've been under the delusion that we were fighting Sunni insurgents, al Qaeda terrorists, and Shia militias in an attempt to bring some sort of stability to the 26 million people of Iraq. What was I thinking? As the razor-sharp team of Glantz and Oppel astutely noted, our military goal—of which this is just the "latest effort"—is the embarrassment of Iran. How did I miss that? Well, that is why they are the professionals, and I'm just a blogger.

It takes a sharp dedicated mind to cover the war for the NY Times. Listen to how these crack experts can turn even the most technical matter into speech even us common folk can understand:

The cache included what Maj. Marty Weber, a master explosives ordnance technician, said was C-4 explosive, a white substance, in clear plastic bags with red labels that he said contained serial numbers and other information that clearly marked it as Iranian.

See? C4 is a "white substance" with "red labels" in a "clear plastic bag." That I can grasp. It has, as we say, meat on it.

Why, if someone had tried to tell us that C4 was a durable, moldable RDX-based high explosive, it would have been far too complex to comprehend. I guess we're just lucky our soldiers didn't find any triacetone triperoxide.

But sometimes, even such experts as Glantz and Oppel can find the more technical aspects of their job, well, confusing:

But while the find gave experts much more information on the makings of the E.F.P.’s, which the American military has repeatedly argued must originate in Iran, the cache also included items that appeared to cloud the issue.
Among the confusing elements were cardboard boxes of the gray plastic PVC tubes used to make the canisters. The boxes appeared to contain shipments of tubes directly from factories in the Middle East, none of them in Iran. One box said in English that the tubes inside had been made in the United Arab Emirates and another said, in Arabic, “plastic made in Haditha,” a restive Sunni town on the Euphrates River in Iraq.
The box marked U.A.E. provided a phone number for the manufacturer there. A call to that number late Monday encountered only an answering machine that said, “Leave your number and we will call you back.”

Quite confusing, indeed.

These tubes made of the very rare element PVC. The fact that none of these tubes was made in Iran "cloud[s] the issue," for Glantz and Oppel in much the same way that Toyota's manufactured in Tennessee are still "Japanese cars."

The thing is, these commonly-found components didn't really seem to cloud the issue at all. At least, it didn't cloud the issue for the guys who created a series of PowerPoint presentations for a security services company in Iraq that just happened to fall into my lap.

The tubes, be they plastic or metal, made in Tehran, Haditha, or Boise, don't really matter. Any tube of the right size can be used to make an EFP, as even I can figure out. What matters are the explosive charge and the copper liners that form into slugs when the EFP detonates.

Why, one might even think that Glantz and Oppel were the ones purposefully trying to cloud the issue, but I guess that even professionals can get confused, so I'll see what little I can do to help.

This is a captured EFP.

It doesn't have a "made in Iran" stamp on it, so I can see how two of the Times best could get confused.

It isn't shiny, and it isn't pretty, but then, it doesn't have to be. What matters is that the copper disk liner on the front is manufactured to precise tolerances to form a slug when the explosive blast wave hits it. These aren't very easy to make without the right manufacturing equipment, and the kind of manufacturing equipment used to make them can often be determined from tool marks left on the copper disks. These marks are like fingerprints if not quite as precise, and can often determine where an EFP came from, especially if the EFP is captured intact before firing.

That is essentially what Maj. Jeremy Siegrist attempted to tell Glantz and Oppel, but they still seemed confused and captivated by the tubes. They even apparently misplace Siegrist's quote to make it appear he is talking about the PVC tubes in this cache, as opposed to the machined copper disks to which he seems to be rather obviously referring. Journalism? It's hard.

Items in the cache included the concave copper dishes called liners that cap the canisters and roll into deadly armor-piercing slugs when the explosive detonates. There were also various kinds of electronics, presumably for arming and triggering the devices, the PVC tubes, and two types of rockets and mortar shells that Major Weber said had markings and construction that identified them as being Iranian in origin.
The PVC tubes, of several different sizes, appeared to be fittings of the kind of used to splice two stretches of PVC tube together in routine applications.
“It’s worth pursuing that it’s machine-made and you can track the country of origin,” said Maj. Jeremy Siegrist of the First Cavalry Division. “And it’s manufactured for a specific purpose.”

The terrorists that use them have found that when EFPs are shiny and pretty, soldiers tend not to drive in front of them, and so they started camouflaging them by burying them in dirt mounds, or other roadside debris, or in fake rocks, like this one.

This particular fake rock EFP is quite nasty, as many of the newer EFPs are. This is a bank of 5 EFPs hidden in one fake rock, aimed at slightly different angles to create a wider spread of fire across a larger area.

As stated earlier, and mentioned above by Maj. Siegrist, these copper disks have a very specific purpose behind their design; the blast wave created when the explosive charge goes off will turn a properly shaped copper disk into a explosively-formed penetrator like the one below, moving at up to 2,000 meters/second.

These penetrators do very nasty things, as you might imagine, but you'll have to go elsewhere to see the results. Unlike CNN, I'm not interested in promoting the results of a terrorist attack. I will however, show you what an EFP looks like even after it has hit its target.

As you can see, a properly manufactured EFP still holds together rather well even after hitting an armored vehicle and injuring or killing those inside.

Improperly manufactured EFPs, presumably, don't work as well. If not shaped properly, they will, instead of forming a dart-like penetrator, will be thrust forward as some sort of misshapen ~~blog~~ blob with far less penetrative power that could go wildly off target, or simply shatter on detonation in far less lethal shrapnel.

I hope this little bit of information eases the confused clouds surrounding and created by Glantz and Oppel, and yet somehow, I doubt it. They're covering the war to embarrass Iran, not the one we are actually fighting.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:46 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Editing the Offensive

I must confess that I simply don't get it (well, except for the puppet show, which is predictable to a tedious degree).

So what if Arianna Huffington felt compelled to close her comments, and then started deleting (but not fast enough) hate-filled invective left by liberal commenters? I have to do that every time certain liberal sites link to mine.

It kind of comes with the clientele.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 07:35 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

February 27, 2007

Taliban Claims Attempt on Cheney

File this one under wishful thinking:

A Taliban suicide bomber killed up to 12 people at the main U.S. military base in Afghanistan on Tuesday in an attack the rebels said was aimed at Dick Cheney, but the visiting U.S. vice president was not hurt.
An American and South Korea soldier were killed, as well as a U.S. government contractor whose nationality was unknown, NATO and Korean officials said. NATO said 27 people were wounded.
A Reuters photographer at the scene at Bagram Airbase, 60 km (40 miles) north of Kabul, saw eight bodies in addition to NATO's tally of four dead, putting the toll at 12.
"We wanted to target ... Cheney," Taliban spokesman Mullah Hayat Khan told Reuters by phone from an undisclosed location.

An terrorism expert cited on WPTF radio stated that there was possibly a leak from Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) revealing Cheney's trip to Bagram, which followed on the heels of the Vice President's trip to Pakistan, in which Cheney asked Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to crack down on al Qaeda and Taliban elements operating out of the tribal regions of Pakistan along the Afghan border.

It almost goes without saying that the suicide bombing attempt, while bloody, was a futile effort. Bagram is a huge airbase, and Cheney was far from the edge of the base where the attack occurred, and under multiple layers of security. Almost any other kind of attack—mortars or rockets come to mind—would have still likely failed, but still would have had a far greater chance of success than the truck bomb on the edge of the perimeter. Instead of getting anywhere near the Vice President, the suicide bomber instead killed several soldiers and the rest of the victims appear to be civilian truckers and workers waiting to have their vehicles searched before entering the base.

It will be very interesting to see how Musharraf reacts to this apparent leak from within his nation's security service.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:06 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

February 26, 2007

Pat Dollard: Living With Snipers

Pat Dollard's letting me run an unedited version of Living with Snipers from his "Young Americans" Iraq War documentary series as a semi-exclusive (avialable in full only here on CY and patdollard.com). Content warning for language. Thanks to Pat's web guy Chad Coleman for setting up the embed code.

Update: Hot Air has a more polished, abbreviated and cleaner (language-wise) version of this clip for those of you who may be sucking your employer's bandwidth.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 05:50 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

The Scandal that Refuses to Die: AP PR Director Alleges Iraqi General Lied About Jamil Hussein

The Jamil still-not-Hussein story is getting interesting again, with the AP's Director of Media Relations & Public Affairs, Linda Wagner, sending me an email early Saturday morning strongly implying that Iraqi Interior Ministry Spokesman Brigadier General Abdul-Karim Khalaf lied when he stated that he never confirmed the identity of the AP's two-year source as Jamil Hussein in an exclusive to Pajamas Media last week.

Wagner stated:

Mr. Owens,
AP knows that police officer Jamil Gholaim Hussein was its source. We did wish to obtain from Brigadier General Khalaf confirmation that Hussein is on the Iraqi police force, after Khalaf had earlier denied that fact. Khalaf provided that information on January 4.
An AP reporter attended the Iraqi Interior Ministry briefing on January 4. After the briefing, the AP reporter spoke to Khalaf who confirmed for the record what he had told that same reporter on the phone unofficially the night before:
* that Jamil Hussein's name could not be found in their initial search of their Iraqi police employee records.
* that subsequent searches of those records turned up Jamil Gholaim Hussein, which is the name AP reported in late November 2006.
Khalaf has since told the same thing to another AP reporter.
Linda Wagner
Director of Media Relations & Public Affairs
The Associated Press

I'd be very interested to see how BG Khalaf "provided that information" on January 4, if he in fact did so. He maintains, of course, that the story is quite the opposite, that the AP reporters he spoke with confirmed their source as someone with a different name (Jamil Gulaim Innad XX XXXXXXX [Name redacted for security reasons — Ed.]), on two occasions.

If the Associated Press has documentation proving their allegation, then things could get very interesting for the Interior Ministry spokesman, but at this point, Wagner has refused to answer whether or not they have anything to support their contention, or if they are simply going on the word of their reporters, which are apparently the same reporters that have been completely unable to substantiate the claim that 24 people died in the Hurriyah mosque attacks with any physical evidence over the past three months.

The burden of proof rests fully on the Associated Press to prove that "Hussein" exists, and so far, they have fallen woefully short.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 02:50 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Alleged Sunni Rape Victim an Apparent Mormon

As relayed by a source in Iraq, Al-Iraqiya television at 9:00 PM had breaking news about the investigation of the rape alleged by Sabrine al-Janabi, the woman that brought rape charges against Iraqi policemen one week ago today. According to the account relayed this morning, it seems like her name is false and that she has more than one husband, to boot:

The channel carries a report by its correspondent Thamir
al-Shammari on the alleged rape of an Iraqi woman called Sabrine
al-Janabi. The report says: "The investigation committee that was
formed to look into the case revealed initial facts about the real
name of Sabrin al-Janabi, which is Zaynab al-Shammari, who is married
to more than one man according to official papers. She also has a
daughter, according to the Interior Ministry undersecretary, who
chairs the investigation committee." The undersecretary is shown
saying that it has been proved that Zaynab was married to two men at
the same time, which is a violation of the law and Islamic law.

This case just keeps getting stranger.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 06:37 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

February 23, 2007

More on that Iranian Fauxtography

As you might recall, Charles Johnson caught the Iranian Fars News Agency in a crude attempt to PhotoShop "evidence" showing the United States was supplying insurgents in Iran with munitions. With my background in things that go bang, I noticed and commented on the fact that ammunition in the manipulated picture was nothing less than old Winchester USA civilian-grade practice ammunition.

Several readers chimed in to date the ammunition packaging to 10-20 years old, and several sent in photos to prove it.

One of those readers, Don Jordan, went so far as to contact Olin Corporation, Winchester's parent company, to get the official word from the company itself, and they provided the following response:

Mr. Jordan,
Thank you for visiting Olin's website. Your inquiry was forwarded to me
for response.
The ammunition boxes appearing in the picture are similar to commercial packaging we began using about 20 years ago and subsequently discontinued using approximately 15 years ago. I also feel it important to note that Winchester is a proud supporter of our military forces and complies with all U.S. Departments of State, Commerce and Treasury regulations with regard to the sale of our products. Although we believe this photo has been altered, we do take this allegation seriously and can assure the public that Winchester has not, does not and will not supply any product to Iran or any other country or person that does not meet the approval of the U.S. Government.
I hope this information is helpful, and I thank you for contacting us.
Ann Pipkin
Olin Corporation

Vintage ammunition and a poorly 'Shopped picture.

The boys at Far News just aren't very clever.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 02:34 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Can I See Some ID?

"Yeah, I just saw that guy toss a grenade into an orphange, but since I can't see his al Qaeda ID card from here, Harry Reid said I have to let him go."

Determined to challenge President Bush, Senate Democrats are drafting legislation to limit the mission of U.S. troops in Iraq, effectively revoking the broad authority Congress granted in 2002, officials said Thursday.
While these officials said the precise wording of the measure remains unsettled, one draft would restrict American troops in Iraq to combating al-Qaida, training Iraqi army and police forces, maintaining Iraq's territorial integrity, and otherwise proceeding with the withdrawal of combat forces.
The officials, Democratic aides and others familiar with private discussions, spoke only on condition of anonymity, saying rank-and-file senators had not yet been briefed on the effort. They added, though, that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada is expected to present the proposal to fellow Democrats early next week for their consideration.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:46 AM | Comments (19) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Controversial Iraqi Rape Claim May Be "Red-On-Red"

I first heard of the allegations that a Sunni woman was raped by three Iraqi police officers they way many bloggers did, on an Iraqi blog called Baghdad Burning, where a blogger using the pseudonym "Riverbend" reported watching a 20-year-old woman by the name of Sabrine Al-Janabi reporting her alleged ordeal on al Jazeera television:

As I write this, Oprah is on Channel 4 (one of the MBC channels we get on Nilesat), showing Americans how to get out of debt. Her guest speaker is telling a studio full of American women who seem to have over-shopped that they could probably do with fewer designer products. As they talk about increasing incomes and fortunes, Sabrine Al-Janabi, a young Iraqi woman, is on Al Jazeera telling how Iraqi security forces abducted her from her home and raped her. You can only see her eyes, her voice is hoarse and it keeps breaking as she speaks. In the end she tells the reporter that she can’t talk about it anymore and she covers her eyes with shame.

It is worth noting that discussing rape is taboo in Arab cultures, where the "honor killings" of rape victims is an accepted practice, and that for a woman to come out to the broadcast news the day after such an attack and describe it in detail, anywhere in the world on camera, is highly atypical, to say the least.

Throw in the fact that al Jazeera got an exclusive on this--they've been expelled from Iraq for biased reporting-- and note that some of the language used by Al-Janabi were "antithetical to Iraqi national unity" as one expert put it, that the Association of Muslim Scholars (an al Qaeda-aligned group whose leader Harith Dhari fled Iraq on charges of inciting terrorism in December) was right there to denounce the alleged rape, and that leading Sunni politicians immediately used this alleged attack to start questioning the Baghdad security plan just as the "surge" was cracking down hardest on Sunni terrorist groups, and you've got plausible reason to question the timing and delivery of the story.

This is not to say that rapes have not occurred in Iraq at the hands of security forces, as they almost certainly have--the alleged rape of a 50-year-old woman in Tal Afar by four soldiers, stopped by a fifth at gunpoint seems quite plausible--but the choreography of the events surrounding Al-Janabi's account bear further scrutiny, especially in light of the fact it is being used by Sunni politicans and insurgent groups as a rallying point to try to thwart the Baghdad security plan, that at the moment, is hitting them the hardest.

Presently, it appears the politicians and the terrorists are trying to use issue to break the security plan on sectarian lines, alleging that the Shia-run police are attacking Sunni women.

There is just one problem with that theory: according to Yassen Mageed of the Iraqi Prime Minister’s office, and reported on Al Iraqiya TV Wednesday; all three officers that Al-Janabi alleged raped her are Sunni.

I'm presently in the process of trying to get Mageed's statement verified, and hoping the get the names, ranks and confirmation of the sect of these three officers through my contacts in the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior. The MOI is currently conducting an investigation of Al-Janabi's rape allegations, and once the investigation is complete, I'm told they plan to go on the record with their findings.

Surprisingly enough, the allegation by Yassen Mageed on Al Iraqiya TV that the three accused officers are Sunni does not appear to have been picked up by the world press.

As the allegation that this is a Sunni-on-Sunni crime would certainly dampen the rhetoric of Sunnis attempting to use this incident to force an end to the "surge," I find it quite interesting that the world media has completely failed to pick up this story.

Update: An account on Fox News now reports that two of the three policement accused are Sunni:

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has exonerated the three policemen accused in the alleged Baghdad rape following an investigation that lasted less than a day. He accused Sunni politicians of fabricating the allegation to undermine support for the security forces during the ongoing Baghdad crackdown. Some Shiite lawmakers said the three included two Sunni Arabs.

They're slow, but better late than never. I do wonder, however, why this development isn't getting more attention.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:18 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

February 22, 2007

USO After Death

By request from one of our men "over there."

Funny how some things haven't changed in all these years.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 06:37 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

When the Deceptive and Uninformed Attack

The liberal blog The Carpetbagger Report has a post up this morning entitled They don’t even have the right rifles, in which the author laments over National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers being re-deployed without enough time between deployments and without the right equipment.

The post is based upon this article in today's New York Times.

Now, it is perhaps deceptive enough that the blog dowdified the quote it chose to feature from the Times article to leave out certain critical information that David S. Cloud felt was important enough to dedicate the second paragraph of the article to—namely that a final decision had not been made to re-deploy these soldiers—but the blog then focused the rest of its post on lamenting that the soldiers don't have the "right" rifles.

Unlike the Carpetbagger Report treatment of the Times article, I'll provide you with their full rifle-related original commentary:

As if that weren’t bad enough, there’s the equipment problem weighing heavily on the military. Maj. Gen. Harry M. Wyatt III, commander of the Oklahoma National Guard, told the NYT that one-third of his soldiers lacked the M-4 rifles preferred by active-duty soldiers and that there were also shortfalls in night vision goggles and other equipment. Capt. Christopher Heathscott, a spokesman for the Arkansas National Guard, said the state’s 39th Brigade Combat Team was 600 rifles short for its 3,500 soldiers and also lacked its full arsenal of mortars and howitzers.
Think about that — National Guard troops are training for another quick deployment, but some of these soldiers don’t even have the right rifles yet. Body armor and Humvee protection is one thing, but Guard troops don’t have the rifles they want?
It’s unfortunately part of a trend.

The Politico reported today that military officials have given lawmakers “a long list of equipment and reconstruction needs totaling nearly $36 billion, denied earlier by the administration in its $481 billion defense appropriations request for the new fiscal year.”
The Army and Marine Corps say they need more than 5,000 armored vehicles, another $153 million for systems that defend against the deadly improvised explosive devices in Iraq and $13 million in language translation systems.
In an annual exercise initiated by the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, the military service chiefs were asked to forward spending priorities for the new 2008 fiscal year that either Pentagon budget planners or White House budget officials struck from the services’ original requests. Lawmakers use the list to gauge where military commanders see shortfalls and to justify additions to the appropriations. […]
The Army’s $10.3 billion list includes $2.2 billion for 2,500 special vehicles to better protect troops against roadside bomb attacks.

Murtha’s “readiness strategy” is premised on the argument that troops with inadequate training and equipment shouldn’t be sent to Iraq. With this in mind, expect today’s reports to play a big role in the congressional debate. I can’t wait to hear to hear war supporters argue that National Guard troops who currently don’t even have the right rifles should be deployed anyway.

Now that we've heard the complaint about having the "right" rifles, let's take a look at exactly what we're discussing.

This is the M4 carbine:

The most common variant is chambered to shoot 5.56X45mm NATO ammunition out of a 14.5" barrel, has a 14.5" sight radius, and has a multi-position collapsible stock. It weighs in at 5.9 lbs (empty). Bullets leave the barrel at 2,900 ft/sec and generate 1645 joules of energy at the muzzle (Data from Colt Weapons Systems).

The M4 is the weapon many soldiers prefer for its compactness, lower weight, and adaptability.

This is the M16 rifle:

The most common variant is chambered to shoot 5.56X45mm NATO ammunition out of a 20" barrel, has a 19.75" sight radius, and has a fixed stock. It weighs in at 7.5 lbs (empty). Bullets leave the barrel at 3,100 ft/sec and generate 1765 joules of energy at the muzzle (Data from Colt Weapons Systems).

This combat-proven basic configuration and its updates have been the primary combat rifle for the American military for four decades.

Now, the Carpetbagger Report has somehow determined, using some leap of illogic, that the "preferred" M4 is the "right rifle," though how they came to that conclusion is never explained.

The operating mechanisms, rate of fire (700-950 rounds per minute) and ammunition of these two weapons are nearly identical; the primary difference between the two weapons is the barrel of the M4 is 5.5" (27.5%) shorter than that of the M16.

The shorter barrel length and overall shorter weapon length of the M4 (also due to the multi-position collapsible stock) of the M4 makes the weapon extremely popular ("preferred") by many of our soldiers, as does it's lighter weight. But many does not mean all, and it does not mean right, and that shorter weapon has some serious drawbacks, among them, a serious lack of "stopping power."

Without getting to bogged down in the technical aspects, the M16 and M4 issued to our military use the standard 5.56x45 NATO round; the 5.56 being a militarized, higher pressure/higher velocity version of the .223 Remington cartridge. The .223 Remington is , as Wikipedia correctly notes, a slightly enlarged and higher velocity version of the .222 Remington.

What is the primary avocation of the .222 and .223 Remington rounds?

Shooting creatures like these guys:

As you may well imagine, a cartridge developed from a family of cartridges designed to shoot small, lightly-armored woodland creatures has developed a reputation as having problems stopping much larger and occasionally armored humans. That problem is compounded in shorter-barrelled weapons such as the M4:

There has been much criticism of the poor performance of the round, especially the first-round kill rate when using firearms that don't achieve the velocity to cause fragmentation. Typically, this only becomes an issue at longer ranges (over 100 meters) but this problem is compounded in shorter-barreled weapons. The 14.5-inch barrel of the U.S. military's M4 Carbine can be particularly prone to this problem. At short ranges, the round is extremely effective, and its tendency to fragment reduces the risk to bystanders when used at close range. However, if the round is moving too slowly to reliably fragment on impact, the wound size and potential to incapacitate a target is greatly reduced.

I've spoken with several soldiers stationed at Fort Bragg shortly after they returned from deployments to Iraq, and the lack of stopping power of the M4 was a significant complaint. On soldier I spoke with had just completed a tour in Ramadi, and mentioned that he had shot one insurgent in the chest three times as he advanced, and it took a fourth shot to the head to finally end the threat. He was armed with an M4, and despised the weapon’s poor stopping power.

Also armed with the M4 were the soldiers of the "Deuce Four" Stryker Brigade Michael Yon wrote about in Gates of Fire, where:

Prosser shot the man at least four times with his M4 rifle. But the American M4 rifles are weak - after Prosser landed three nearly point blank shots in the man's abdomen, splattering a testicle with a fourth, the man just staggered back, regrouped and tried to shoot Prosser.

Prosser then engaged the man in heated hand-to-hand combat before finally prevailing over a man he'd already shot four times. The terrorist, 50% less fertile than before, was captured, and survived his wounds.

The simple fact of the matter is that the M4 may be "preferred" by some troops, but because of its record of dubious stopping power, it is not the favorite of all, leading to some soldiers preferring the M16, while others prefer modernized variations of the Vietnam-era M14 battle rifle. Because of the M4's anemic stopping power, there has been rushed special operations development of more powerful cartridges for elite forces, including the 6.8 SPC, 6.5 Grendal, and the .50 Beowulf, to pick up where the 5.56 M4 falls short.

Clearly, there is a huge gap between "preferred" and "right," and millions of dollars have been poured into the development of weapons and cartridges precisely because many in the military community feel that the M4 is not the "right" rifle as the Carpetbagger Report argues from a position of ignorance.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 02:08 PM | Comments (28) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

The Duke Lacrosse Player The Media Won't Focus On

Mary Katharine Ham posts a touching tribute to Army Ranger Jimmy Regan... the ultimate Duke lacrosse player, killed by a roadside bomb on February 9 in northern Iraq his fourth combat tour.

Regan's mourning father notes:

"What is written in the papers and what is being politicized out there by our candidates is undermining our service," said James Regan, a senior vice president at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, a Manhattan financial services investment bank.
"These gentlemen that are out there are mission-focused," he said of the troops. "They're trying to do the best job they possibly can. There have been mistakes made, why even list them? ... You cannot put men in the field of battle and then change your mind and go out as a whip-dog. Let the men do their job."

I'm fairly certain that last line was directed at Okinawa Jack, Blinky Pelosi, and the rest of the Democrats that are desperately trying to think of ways to lose the war in Iraq.

Make sure you read the whole thing.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:25 AM | Comments (12) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

February 21, 2007

Chicago Cousins Plotted Iraqi Terror Attacks

And then there were five:

Two cousins were arrested here Wednesday on charges of conspiring to commit terrorist acts against American military personnel in Iraq, as well as others abroad, in an Islamic holy war against the United States and its allies.
The defendants, Zubair A. Ahmed, 27, and Khaleel Ahmed, 26, were taken into custody at their Chicago homes after a federal grand jury in Cleveland returned a fresh indictment in a pending terrorism case in which three Ohio men are already awaiting trial in Toledo.
The new indictment accuses the two Chicago men of plotting with the Ohioans “to kill or maim persons in locations outside of the United States,” including members of the armed forces serving in Iraq.

I'm going out on a limb and guessing they didn't vote Bush/Cheney in '04.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:35 PM | Comments (23) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Experts Warn British Drawdown Could Lead to Violence

I thought folks like John Murtha and Nancy Pelosi were telling us that a withdrawal from Iraq would result in a peaceful nation of lollipops and bunnies.

Obviously, I misunderstood:

Britain's planned reduction in its force in southern Iraq could empower Iran and lead to more bloodshed between rival Shiite Muslim groups, analysts warned Wednesday.
The area around Basra is less violent than Baghdad, and sectarian killings are rare, in part because it is overwhelmingly Shiite. But the government's authority there is rivaled by armed groups that are "thoroughly intertwined with criminal enterprises," according to a report from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
"In the coming year, the drawdown of British forces in the deep south will likely be accompanied by an upsurge of factional violence as the long-delayed fight for local supremacy begins in earnest," said the report, written by Iraq security specialists Michael Knights and Ed Williams.

Of course, these guys are just Iraq security specialists, so they probably don't know near as much as Okinawa Jack and Blinky.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:22 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Raceless Female Raped by Raceless Male at a Party Hosted By a Raceless Fraternity in the Same City Where Rich White Boys Raped A Poor Black Stripper

I'd provide more details, but the News & Observer still can't seem to find any.

Update: It's even more ironic when you consider the N&O headline: "Warrant reveals details in rape case."

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:14 PM | Comments (21) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Another One Down

Undercover Israeli soldiers disguised as Palestinians ambushed and killed Mahmoud Abu Obeid today, a leader of either the Islamic Jihad if you want to listen to U.S news media, or a leader of the Al-Quds Brigades if you'd rather trust Palestine Today.

The second account provides the details:

Eyewitness reports said that an undercover Israeli army unit entered the city using a civilian car with Palestinian license plates. Troops shot Abu Obeid at close range in the city center in the early hours of Wednesday morning.
Witnesses added that after the troops shot Abu Obeid from the car, one of the unit members walked out of the car and shot Abu Obeid a few more times to confirm his death. During Abu Obeid's funeral, the Islamic Jihad said it would have revenge on his assassins. Israeli army sources claimed that Abu Obeid was planning what they described as a large-scale bombing in Tel Aviv.

Paul Campos could not be reached for comment, as he is currently drowning in his own embarrassment.

"Beclowning" must really hurt.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 01:43 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

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