Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Any man's death may diminish me but I'm prepared to accept that there are cases which may be an exception to that rule.

I find a delicious irony in that yesterday two gravely ill patients finally died: Chris Hitchins and, officially, the U.S. "Operation Iraqi Freedom".

Hitchens never wavered from his love for the Third Gulf War, and, in retrospect, he might have done better to have gone to fight and sought a more merciful death there, stopping his ears before the inevitably dirty and sordid little finale to this ridiculous mess of hubris, treachery, lies, foolishness, and error made something tawdry and mocking of his ferocity in fighting the "war" from behind his keyboard.

I wonder (because I can't and won't ever know how ill he was at the end)...did the news of the official ignominious retreat from the Bush Salient contribute to ol' Hitch's willingness to depart this Vale?

Because if so he might well be included in the wretched toll this reverse-Machiavellian nonsense exacted from the West.

And as for OIF, well, that sucker was shot in the head eight years ago, when a clown-car full of rage-drunk idiots and cynical thieves tried to sneak into a foreign land and steal it on the cheap, justifying their theft with lies and evasions, muffing the thievery with ignorance and arrogance, and then taking years and years to accept that they couldn't change thousands of years of human history and hundreds of years of poverty, misgovernment, sectarian hatred, and Ottoman incompetence by their pure will alone. The entire mess was doomed from the start, it just took eight years for the fantasists in D.C. to recognize it was walking dead, and the only beneficiaries of its zombie progress since then have been the various outfits that have made millions looting the Occupation and the Malikist strain of Iraqi Shia who now stand to consolidate their kleptocracy with the help of the pals to the northeast.

It's not "over" for the ordinary Iraqi, mind you. The mess that Dubya and Dick created when they knocked over the Baathist toybox in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates won't be "over" for years, or decades. The social, economic, and political disaster that the idiots who truly believed that they "made their own reality" will haunt the poor bastards that live in that haunted land for generations.

What a congeries; Saddam, Dubya, Darth Cheney, Hitchins...can you imagine a more seedy and disparate group when they foregather in Hell twenty years from now?

Saddam peering at the others with his shifty, bluffing eyes hard in his dough-face, looking, as always, for the openings of fear or avarice that bullies always recognize, even after years of devilish torment still the Tikriti hardman.

Cheney snarling and defiant, knowing that he's still the smartest guy in the room, even in Eblis.

Dubya, still his patrician bobo, with that look of earnest and clueless vacancy still on his mug, at the same time gormless and venal - he can't understand why a Good Christian Man like him should be here with the Devil getting red-hot pokers shoved up his jacksie three times a day.

And Hitchins, drink in hand, fleering and mocking the other three idiots while, perhaps, just perhaps, recognizing the same hint of bully and grifter in himself; for all his faults he was a perceptive man. He may well have the worst of it; lacking the supreme egotism of the dictator, the dupe, and the schemer beside him he may just have a dark glimmering of the disaster they helped create between them and, worse, feel some sort of dim shame at the results.

Because all around them, the shades; the children ripped to pieces in a Ramadi street, the women buried in rubble of a Fallujah home, the trooper missing a leg that the landmine tore from his body, the widow dead of suicidal despair, the orphan raped and murdered by his captor, the hopeless, the fool, the martyr, the criminal, the lost, and the devoured.

And for what?

This fucking disaster is now just another day for most of the rest of the world, and I have little hope that it will be long remembered or regarded in my own country, either. Saddam and Hitch are beyond penalty, and neither Dubya nor Dick will ever pay the price they should. It's just done and dusted.

So all I can hope for is that somehow my vision might be accomplished; that in some future afterlife these dead men find a little of the misery and despair of the ghosts their evil created. That it penetrates the group around that table there in Hades, and that the sorry bastards enjoy a long, bitter draught of it before their tormentors herd them back to the Fires that they so deeply deserve.

Infamy II: Electric Boogaloo

Apropos of the last post, here's a nice article in Naval History Magazine about the problem that governments and militaries have, not just in assessing threat capabilities, but in assessing their own.

As Parshall and Wenger (2011) point out;

"In the case of the Pearl Harbor attack, the U.S. Navy had no real inkling of Japanese carrier warfare capabilities and therefore could not accurately assess likely operational targets. Not only that, but Japan’s carrier force—known as Kido Butai—was evolving so quickly on the eve of the Pacific war that almost no naval intelligence organ would have been able to track, internalize, and gauge those capabilities."

Even the Japanese Navy wasn't really able to understand their own strength.The article correctly notes that

"Indeed, the Japanese themselves did not seem to understand clearly the nature of the weapon they had created, or how best to wield it. Within six months of the opening of the war, poor strategy on the Imperial Japanese Navy’s part would end up committing Kido Butai’s component carrier divisions piecemeal, first at the Battle of Coral Sea and then at the Battle of Midway. During the latter, Kido Butai was decisively defeated—with four of its carriers sunk. Japan’s overwhelming early war numerical advantage was thus erased. Shortly thereafter, America’s superiority in production began asserting itself."

My friend seydlitz likes to talk about how the lack of strategic vision in the 2011 U.S. has contributed decisively to our frittering away our blood and treasure pursuing impossibilities in Central Asia. But I think one of the important lessons of Pearl Harbor, as well-discussed in Parshall and Wenger (2011), is how extraordinarily difficult trying to understand even one's own military and geopolitical strengths and weaknesses is.

How much more so trying to integrate all that into an overall assessment of potential threat capabilities, friendly political and military capacity, national interests, and geopolitical variables.Especially in a domestic U.S. political climate of increasing polarization and magical thinking.

Not saying that this shouldn't happen, or can't happen. But just pointing out that all our historical examples show how extraordinarily difficult it is.

...but for Wales..?

It's early in the pre-dawn. Or late in the night, I'm not sure, but I'm up to go to work early. I checked the weather to see how fucking cold it is (it's fucking cold!) and made the mistake of checking in to a couple of blogs only to find this.

I'd seen this bill mentioned over at my pal Labry's place - she was spitting fire about it, good woman that she is - and it occurred to me that what I feel is just a sort of tired, sad, inevitability.

How many times in history have we watched this play out?

The frightful, desperate "enemy" that must be "defeated" at any, and ALL costs. The populace tittilated and terrified by tales of that enemy's desperate frightfulness. The group (or groups) that insist that "the old rules don't apply". The rush to "do something" that results in granting power upon power without a moment''s reflection of whether that power can ever be taken away.

I know I use this quote a lot, and, yes, I understand the irony of making that rigid old tartar Tom More into a petty saint of restraint and good government (the man who delighted in the aroma of crackling heretic, honestly...) but the words spoken here are NOT the words of Thomas More but of Robert Bolt, his playwright:

ROPER Then you set man's law above God's!

MORE No, far below; but let me draw your attention to a fact-I'm not God. The currents and eddies of right and wrong, which you find such plain sailing, I can't navigate. I'm no voyager. But in the thickets of the law, oh, there I'm a forester. I doubt if there's a man alive who could follow me there, thank God . . .

(He says this last to himself)

ALICE (Exasperated, pointing after RICH) While you talk, he's gone!

MORE And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law!

ROPER So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!

MORE Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

ROPER I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

MORE (Roused and excited) Oh? (Advances on ROPER) And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you-where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? (He leaves him) This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast-man's laws, not God's-and if you cut them down-and you're just the man to do it-d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? (Quietly) Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

And yet we are so fucking terrified of a bunch of raggedy ass Allah-pesterers that we won't give THEM the benefit of law for OUR safety's sake.

I'm so tired. Just tired.

And I haven't really even been all het up about this nonsensical "War on Terror" and the way it's got us hitting ourselves on the head, the way my pals Jim and Lisa have, say, over at Ranger Against War, ringing the changes of our eagerness to put down our legal trousers and hand the rod to our "leaders" and policemen and soldiers like a firebell in the night.

Or the way Greenwald has.

Or the way a hundred better writers, better bloggers, better citizens that I am have decried this silliness, this mouse blown up by shadows and smoke to the size of an elephant.

Because, really, I mean, people?

The fucking "War on Terror"? How stupid are we, collectively, to buy into this? We're supposed to be the adults here, the "We, the People" that those guys in the wigs supposedly put in charge to sort things out. We're supposed to remember things like that in wars, or lovemaking, capabilities count, not intentions. We're supposed to be able to see that these ridiculous villains are no more capable of actually "warring" on us any more than a sneak thief can "war" on your television set, or a Newberg high school freshman of making love to Angelina Jolie.

And that for all that he may masturbate frantically over her picture and describe the business as a "love affair" that it is not, and will never, be in HER best interests to describe it as such or act as if it were in fact.

And that a pack of reasonable adults should be able to sort this out about this idiotic "War" on some-forms-of-terror-perpitrated-by-some-groups-we-don't-like-but-not-others-that-we-sorta-do before their coffee get cold.

But we don't, we aren't, and we haven't.

And what the fuck more can I do?

I elected the goddam Democrat three years ago, worked for all my local sane guys, people like my Senator Merkeley, wrote letters to the paper, talked to anyone who would listen...

...and for what?

We're stuck right where we were about five years ago. A third of the U.S. public recognizes the insanity of this idiot's tale. But - and despite that more than three-quarters of the same public is more than ready to end the misadventures that the active pursuit of the "war" brought in train - the Third Gulf War and the God-Knows-How-Manyth-Afghan-War - the other third is still all about killin' us some ragheads.

And the final third is just too fucking stupid, lazy, poorly-informed...or something. To care.

So...what the hell will it take to make the point to the ignorant third and the radical-conservative-wingnut third that Sun Tzu sussed out, like, two thousand years ago - that fighting long wars is NEVER good for the combatant...even if it "wins"? That war makes people and nations do incredibly stupid things to themselves because those things seem "right" at the time?

I have no idea.

But just thinking about makes me tired.

I guess I always thought that if my country was to go to hell it'd be in some dramatic fashion. We'd hand ourselves over to the devils of authority and oligarchy in the midst of some titanic struggle with the Great Foe; the Soviet Union bristling with nukes or the Chinese hordes of Asia. We'd go down in a monumental crash of great rhetoric and epic protests, with the last defenders of the old outmoded liberties herded into the cattle trucks for the journey to the Utah camps. I never pictured my countrymen lying about on our dead asses while we drift along in a state of perpetual "war" with a bunch of sorry ass Islamic fantasists...I mean, can you THINK of a stupider way to give away the gift?

Bolt again:

MORE I have one question to ask the witness. (RICH stops) That's a chain of office you are wearing. (Reluctantly RICH faces him) May I see it? (NORFOLK motions him to approach. MORE examines the medallion) The red dragon. (To CROMWELL) What's this?

CROMWELL Sir Richard is appointed Attorney-General for Wales.

MORE (Looking into RICH'S face, with pain and amusement) For Wales? Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. But for Wales..!

Central Asian Rocket Science

Of all the things that frustrate me about our current adventure in Afghanistan, perhaps the most frustrating is listening to the various D.C. talking heads bloviate about Pakistan.The latest was ADM Mullen, the outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who laid stick on the Pakistani ISI for supposedly assisting in the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. But this has been a constant theme for years. Chris Hitchens gives us a taste of the 180-proof version of this rhetoric, the pure, undiluted, GOP-stillhuse hootch in his latest Slate column, and, yes, I know it's fucking Slate.

Still.

Why does this bug me?

Because I'm a relatively unlettered hairy-knuckled sergeant, a spearcarrying nobody from the Northwest. My entire first-hand geopolitical and global political experience consists of having watched Egyptian border cops and Israeli reservists make fist-pumping gestures at each other across the wire at Taba.

And I fucking know that the Pakistanis care more about their military position with India than any-fucking-thing else in Southwest Asia.Including "terrorism" and the damn Taliban.

The whole POINT behind their coziness with many of the people we're shooting in the hustings of central Asia is that the Taliban regime was anti-Indian, and their remnants are, too. The Karzaites we've installed in Kabul are not, and so the Pakis REAL problem, their single most crucial concern is ensuring that they have a lever to pressure Kabul into having their back if they get into another scrap with India.

So the rule of thumb is; don't bet on Pakistan Facebook-friending your Afghan proxy if that proxy shows signs of "friending" India.

For conventional wisdom that one ranks right up there with "never get involved in a land war in Asia."

Oh.

Anyway, the frustrating thing is that the rhetoric coming out of D.C. hits the same note; why, why, WHY are you so naughty, Pakistan? What can we do/what must we do to make you stop hugging these nasty terrorists? Why don't you give us more geopolitical love?

Well, duh.The Durand Rule is If You Let Your Afghan Proxy Get Close To India Don't Expect Much Cooperation From Pakistan.

I can figure this out.

Why can't all these highly paid people in D.C.?

I don't know, but every time I run across it it's really frustrating.

The Captives of our Bow and Spear

You can take an Afghan to Hell with kindness,
but never to heaven by force
--Afghan proverb

Tribe wars with tribe. Every man's hand
is against the other and all are against the stranger
... the state of continual tumult has produced
a habit of mind which holds life cheap
and embarks on war with careless levity
--Winston Churchill
______________________

Chief advocates viewing the Battle of Little Bighorn as another fight in the progression of events which began in 1492. This perspective helps in
understanding the totality of the situation. Using that viewpoint, let us extend lessons from LBH into current scenarios in Afghanistan dealing with Counterinsurgency, unconventional/guerrilla war (UW/GW) and terrorism. This may seem a stretch, but saddle up . . .

The hostiles in both scenarios did not have a problem in the world until the outer world forcibly imposed progress upon them. The Afghans have much experience repulsing the outsiders, be they Greek, Persian, British, Russian, Paki, Indian, Chinese, American or even present-day Iranians.Minus external forces, the Native Americans and the Afghanis would do fine, thanks, without the education or whatever the interlopers wish to impose. Both nations (or more precisely, confederation of nations) would be happy to continue killing each other before it became necessary to reach out and kill The Other. The only thing better than killing each other would be to kill invaders.

Following are some ways LBH can be compared to the Phony War on Terror (PWOT):

[1] "Fighting Season" -- both the Indians and the Afghans could only fight when they could support themselves operationally. Where the Afghans gather support external to the group, the Indians had to follow the cycle of nature. Both groups were sidelined by deadly winter weather, but of course, they continued to train, plan, maintain equipment, etc.[2] Militarily, both the Afghan and Indian War campaigns had the same goals. The hostiles were given a Hobson's choice: Submit to government control or pick up the lance. There is no discernible middle ground.

[3] The Afghan fighters have a force structure similar to that of the Indians, one based upon tribal loyalties and realities. The groups are usually as strong as their leaders. Both groups possess limited ability and opportunity to isolate the battlefield, but both have the luxury and will to prepare the field before they willingly engage government forces. Both are fighting for their survival as discrete entities; neither care to subsumed into their own loosely confederated nation nor into a construction fashioned by the invaders.[4] Both must apply the concept of Mass and Economy of Force. The LBH demonstrated Mass as the prevailing principle, where most fights in Afghanistan demonstrate the principle of Economy of Force. The U.S. Army must gain and maintain contact with these adversaries, while it is the opposition's job to break contact until it is advantageous for them to turn and face the enemy. This was shown at LBH, Waygul and Wanat.

[5] Government forces used indigenous members to neutralize the indig. The government elevated the indig that they chose either to leadership positions or as judas goats.At LBH they were called Scouts and in Afghanistan they are called the Afghan National Army.[6] Intelligence is mitigated: In 1876 intel was negligible to nonexistent regarding the Indians' intentions. In Afghanistan there is so much intel that analysis is hampered. The reliability and validity in both cases is always in doubt.

[7] Concealment: In the Indian Wars, there was no place for the Indians; in Afghanistan, the hostiles hide in plain sight and there is no place for U.S. forces to hide.

In conclusion, the best hope of prevailing in the Afghan leg of the PWOT would be to use a tactic that worked with the Indians: Give them tax-free cigarettes, legal gambling casinos and tell them they are free and autonomous. Facts be damned.

---------

All I can add to what jim has written is that when tribal cultures war with outsiders there are only two outcomes; the outsider is pushed back out (or destroyed) or the tribesman is assimilated and destroyed (with this conquest there is no "or"; in order to make the tribesman into the image of his conqueror his culture and entire way of life must be destroyed, and that almost always involves massive butchery among the natives.).

Anything else lends itself to the continual low-grade warfare endemic to tribal and especially nomadic tribal societies. The skills of a pastoralist or a horse-nomad lent themselves entirely too well to warfare; the tribes will nearly always want to retain their freedom to raid when they want, to battle for mastery when they choose.

The British took 100 years to acquire India, from Clive's victory at Plassey to the crushing of the Bengal Revolt of 1857. They then spent the next 100 years trying to remake the Indian peoples into a Western-style nation. By and large they succeeded. But it took a century, billions of pounds, and hundreds of thousands of lives; both in lives taken and lives spent in the service of that immense colonial enterprise.If the United States is willing to pay that price, no one has yet informed the U.S. public.

The Revenge of Pussy Galore

As usual, the dog gets all the press whilst the cat does all the work. A helmet-cam video still as a SEAL team cat uses his superior cat-stealth technology to take out one of bin-Laden's bodyguards prior to the May 2 raid.I'd say it's time to lift the "Don't Ask, Don't Meow" ban on war cats, wouldn't you?(h/t, amazingly, to Slate!)

The Bourne Stupidity

I'm a middle-aged American guy; I was raised on "spy thrillers". And don't get me wrong - I enjoy the celluloid adventures of spies and counterspies as much as the next guy.Not to mention the stylings of the deliciously cerebral Franka Potente.

So it's just kind of irking when my country's spies don't seem to have watched those same flicks or have forgotten the plots. WTF, Felix Leiter?

Take the case of Raymond "Not Jason Bourne" Davis.

Remember this guy? The "diplomat" who shot his way out of the holdup in Lahore, Pakistan?Okay; first off - I have no idea what the hell happened in the streets of Lahore on January 27th. It seems very plausible to me that the guys Davis slotted were robbers, bazaar badmashes intent on at least holding him up and possibly murdering him.

But.

This discussion by a BBC reporter reports that

"investigations by the police, forensic labs and the local and international media suggest that the two men were driving away from Mr Davis when they were shot. That "no fingerprints had been uncovered on the triggers of the pistols found on the bodies of the two men. Furthermore he said that tests had shown that the bullets remained in the magazines of their guns, not the chambers."

Even more damning, far from the bad guys the U.S. has suggested,

"...the men have no criminal records as such. Both...were carrying licensed pistols (and) security sources in Lahore say that they were part-time or low-level operatives for the local intelligence services. Although reports are sketchy about what they were doing in relation to Mr Davis, security officials believe it could be the case of a surveillance operation gone horribly wrong."

Well, damn. So maybe it really was the case of a guy getting flaky at the wrong time and busting a cap on a couple of local snoops from the Lahore ISI Nose Patrol.

But, whatever, you've seen the movie and you all know what happens now, right? Our hero disappears into the crowd, makes his way to the "safehouse" where he changes his appearance and his identity cards and then slips out of the country one step ahead of the dictator's secret police (or his own agency, whichever is cooler...). Every spy has seen this part and knows what to do now.Or not.

Seems that the guy gave himself up on the spot, and was thrown into the local carcel.

Now this is the part where the CIA activates its cunning plan, sends its mole into the Lahore cop shop while the suave State Department spokesmodel spins a seamless web of denials and diversions that baffles the locals, enemies, and reporters alike. Our boy is whisked out of the country as if he had never existed, right?

Or not.

Of course this gentleman was not a "legal" CIA officer, accredited as a U.S. diplomat; he was another damn contractor, more of what appears to be the "secret" side of the war in central Asia which is about as secret as Lady GaGa's underwear. Instead of a cunning plan the U.S. government began by loudly beating the stupid drum by demanding his release AS a diplomat, despite the fact that it seems that both the State Department and the Pakistanis knew from the get-go that he was not.What's worse, the U.S. has insisted in doubling-down on this lie from almost immediately after he was arrested until just this past week after everyone from The Lahore News and Advertiser to the Onion published the truth. Finally, after several British news outlets stated the truth, the U.S. 'fessed up.

Well, damn.

So now what?

I doubt whether this guy is going to rot in a Pakistani jail; he'll get some public spankings to placate the Paki mobs and then quietly slip out of the country.But in the meantime, again, the U.S. ends up looking both foolish and deceptive, reinforcing the Dubya image of the idiot cowboy, shooting up the surroundings and bagging nothing but a couple of cottontails and the local schoolmar'm. And looking incompetent; the bumbling spy is a classic staple of movie comedy from Buster Keaton to Peter Sellers.

Don't get me wrong; I'd prefer that my country not be sneaking around other people's countries unless there was a hell of a good reason for it. But I'm realist enough to understand that all sorts of spying happens for all sorts of reasons, and many of those reasons are too secret for me to know. So I know my country is going to spy all sorts of places for all sorts of reasons, good and bad.But is it too much to ask that if we're gonna sneak around the globe making real-life spy films my country tries to spy more like Jason Bourne and James Bond than Phil Moskowitz and Inspector Clouseau?

The Feast of Stephen

I returned from a jolly week of drilling on a barge up the Columbia Gorge to note that it is Christmas Eve. And one of the things that has always been especially poignant for soldiers is holidays far from home. And that, in turn, made me think about my bride and our little Peeper and Missy warm and snuggly in their beds, inside our little house strung with lights and full of presents and cards and the other impedimentia of the Season, and contrast that with the last time I was far away from home on a Christmas Eve.

Ft. Kobbe, Panama, December 24, 1986

It was a practice in Headquarters Company, 2nd Battalion (Airborne) (Light) 187th Infantry Regiment for the unmarried sergeants to volunteer to take holiday duty for the wedded guys. So that's why I found myself standing on the landing outside the dayroom of the HHC barracks Christmas Eve day dressed tastefully in holiday-green tropical fatigues and a santa-red beret being violently abused by a Panamanian taxi driver.

It seems that one of our American heroes had, in an excess of Christmas cheer, commandeered the driver's services to motor all around Panama Viejo attempting to find a shapely little elf who would supply a Christmas stocking that he could fill.

Not surprisingly, given his slobberingly drunk condition, the only attentions he could find came from ladies who expected to receive green, folding presents in return, which struck our young hero as more than a little Grinchy.

This seeker of the true Spirit of Christmas imbibed some Chistmas spirits and then resolved to return to his only REAL family, his buddies at HHC 2/187, only to find on arrival that one of Santa's little ho-ho-hoes had lifted his wallet during his importunations. Or he had left it on the bar. Or whatever.

The upshot was, anyway, that he now had nothing to give the infuriated driver whose worn taxi now reeked of cheap perfume and drunken G.I. Worse yet, he turned out to be nimble as a monkey - even drunk - and had shinnied up the mango tree in front of the barracks and was hiding in the branches lobbing the occasional overripe fruit at both the driver and the taxi windshield.

The street in front of the barrack reeked of mango juice and the combined noise of a furious taxi driver and an intoxicated arboreal G.I. This, in turn, drew a small crowd of pre-Christmas revelers, who took turns abusing both parties and shying additional fruit at the taxi when the driver wasn't watching.

I managed to pay off the driver, scatter the crowd and talk the monkey-boy out of the tree just as one of my other single friends came sauntering down from his post as battalion staff duty NCO.

"I see life in the slums is still exotic and vigorous, even on Christmas Eve" he sneered.

SGT Chief: "Little you know about it, lolling about up there at Battalion as you do. It's like a freakin' Jerry Springer show down here, you know. Oh, and a Merry Christmas to you, too, jackass."

BN SDNCO: "Yeah, well, lucky for us that the first Christmas happened in Bethehem, not Fort Kobbe, eh?"

SGT Chief: "Why's that?"

BN SDNCO: "'Cause where the hell'd you find three wise men and a virgin around here..?"

It was an old joke but I was still chuckling as I ran back up the stairs to the dayroom to share warm Coke with the three guys watching football.

This year, as they have for the past nine years now, American soldiers are preparing for a holiday in faraway places much less entertaining and far more hazardous than my Panamanian Christmas Eve two and a half decades ago. I'm sure that they share many of the same feelings I did then: loneliness, regret, some pride in a hard job well done in demanding circumstances, but mixed with others I didn't; fear of death or wounding, anger and grief at lost friends, hope that their own homecoming will be soon and safe.

As do I.

So Merry Christmas, Joyous Kwanzaa, Happy Hanukkah...however you say it, however you celebrate it, all you young - and not so young - men and women in the hard places far from home; I hope you will all be home soon to enjoy this time with your families.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night...

Spy vs. Spy: Beaver State Fathead Edition

So it turns out that I now know a total of something like a dozen people who were in Pioneer Square in downtown Portland when this fucking idiot thought he was committing an act of guerilla violence.

The following couple of days my Facebook page was littered with posts to the effect of "OMG! I was there! Thank you, FBI!" and appended with comments praising God and the solder (or FBI agent) whom we adore.

Perhaps it was because I hadn't the slightest interest is watching the lights go on a big fir tree so I was at home playing Jenga. Or perhaps its because I'm a nasty, cynical SOB by nature. But you'll excuse me if I beg off the universal congratulations to my government for catching the next Khalid Sheik Mohammad.

Because from what I understand;

1. This idiot did everything but wander around Corvallis wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Osama and the legend "I'm With Stupid".

2. Ignoring the First Rule of Internet Hookups ("The chance that the hot sixteen-year-old soliciting for no-holds-barred wild monkey sex over the Internet is actually either a vice cop trolling for morons or a 42-year-old pervert looking to get you to post pictures of your pecker approaches unity the longer you keep searching the Net for loli-porn") the idiot splattered the Web with his jihadi spam until the FBI was unable to continue to ignore him.

3. The feds then:
a. contacted Mohamud in a June 2010 e-mail under the guise of being a jihadi.
b. met with the guy multiple times, where he pushed them to help him with his nefarious plans. Supposedly the agents "cautioned Mohamud several times about the seriousness of his plan, noting that there would be many people, including children, at the event"
c. pretended to help him with logistics, including "assembling" the bomb and testing a smaller version somewhere in backass Lincoln County, Oregon.
d. appeared in a video with him to record his "mission statement".
e. picked up Mohamud to travel to Portland to finalize details of the attack.
f. set him in the seat of his bomb-van with several fake drums of pretend explosives in the back (which the idiot failed to check, proving that he was a no-go at the first performance test of walking-while-breathing, "You need to be smarter than your equipment") which he dropped off near the tree-lighting spot
g. let him make the detonating phone call - twice - and then busted him.

So excuse me if I'm not celebrating the takedown of the greatest criminal mastermind since Professor Moriarty. This moron Mohamud sounds like he might have spent the next five years in his bedroom playing the jihadi version of "Call of Duty" and eating cheetos if the FBI hadn't pretty much handed him the color-by-numbers handbook for would-be jihadi truck bombers. This wasn't fucking Tim McVeigh. This wasn't even your basic Palestinian pay-for-kaboom suicide bomber. This was a fucking idiot who didn't have the basic common sense to check the equipment his suddenly confiding new "friends" procured, engineered, assembled, transported, and emplaced for him.

Don't get me wrong. I'm glad this guy didn't kill anyone. I'm GLAD he is a fucking idiot.

But I'm reading the skittish Facebook responses from the people who were in the square that evening, and wondering what will happen the next time someone proposes some sort of additional security theatre, or profiling the Somali immigrant community, or loosening the entrapment laws, or some other sort of exchange of liberty for "security".

And, of course, demands that all response to the nose-led idiot be based on panic fear and reflexive condemnation rather than skepticism and the Rule of Law.

Or, even better, turns into lynch mob counter-terror and attacks on American muslims because...well...because, y'know, they're terrists!

Because if the study of history and politics has taught me anything, it has taught me that there is no practical limit to the damage to a society that the society can do to itself when prodded by a single idiot.

Update 11/28 p.m.: Greenwald has more, including the vexing details that the FBI 1) may not have actual evidence that the moron chose his moron path and was not entrapped in some form, 2) paid him as part of smoothing his path to Pioneer Square, and that 3) "Here we find one of the great mysteries in American political culture: that the U.S. Government dispatches its military all over the world -- invading, occupying, and bombing multiple Muslim countries -- torturing them, imprisoning them without charges, shooting them up at checkpoints, sending remote-controlled drones to explode their homes, imposing sanctions that starve hundreds of thousands of children to death -- and Americans are then baffled when some Muslims -- an amazingly small percentage -- harbor anger and vengeance at them and want to return the violence. And here we also find the greatest myth in American political discourse: that engaging in all of that military aggression somehow constitutes Staying Safe and combating Terrorism -- rather than doing more than any single other cause to provoke, sustain and fuel Terrorism."

The Man Who Wasn't There; a Cautionary Tale

As I was walking up the stairI met a man who wasn't therehe wasn't there again todayI wish, I wish he'd stay away“It’s not him,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul intimately involved in the discussions. “And we gave him a lot of money.”
Now it is not good for the Christian's health to hustle the Aryan
brown,
For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles and he weareth the
Christian down;
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of
the late deceased,And the epitaph drear: "A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East."

Nacht und Nebel

I have up to this point refrained from posting anything much regarding the "secret sacred wars" that the Bush, and now, the Obama Administrations have been conducting as part of their "Global War on Terror".

Partly because I don't really see what more needs to be said; lots of people in the blogosphere as well as conventional media have hammered away on this pernicious combination of secrecy, executive power, and "war" that go a long way to realizing Judge Jeffries' and the Court of Star Chamber ideal of guilt and execution without the bother and tedium of trial.

And partly, frankly, because of the very secrecy of the damn thing. At least with the conventional wars we're fighting in central Asia and elsewhere We the People have some vague notion of the purpose (at least the stated purpose), means, methods, approximate progress, and costs. With this stuff...who the hell knows? Which is obviously the point, since we can't get upset about the foolish waste of time, money, and human lives of some nonsensical secret program if we don't know enough about it to know whether it IS a waste of time, money, and lives.

But the Obama "Justice" Department's latest step is just too ridiculous to pass.

"The Obama administration urged a federal judge early Saturday to dismiss a lawsuit over its targeting of a U.S. citizen for killing overseas, saying that the case would reveal state secrets."

So what the Obama DoJ is saying, in effect, is:

1. We get to decide if you are a "threat" without showing you or anyone else the evidence and your U.S. citizenship is no defense, i.e. you have no due process of law with regard to the charge.
2. We get to decide what to do about that, up to and including assassinating you. Again, we need not show any evidence of why you need to die, so you have no recourse there, either.
3. And if you or your proxies have the temerity to challenge us in court, we will simply refuse to meet you there, citing State Secrets.

Three strikes, you''re out.Or dead, as the case may be.

This is insane.

The Constitution expressly forbids the U.S. government to take life or liberty "without due process of law" and this is supposed to be a government of laws, not of men.

Why, why, WHY are we not rioting in the streets about this?

If this is not tyranny, what is it then?

Acta est fabula?

Other than the usual fulminations of the tinfoil-hat Right, I note that this year's annual beatification of the Dead of 9/11 seems to have been relatively low-key.

Have we finally begun to see beyond the events of 2001? Does this mean that we can finally put it in the Forgotten Days file along with Pearl Harbor Day, VJ-Day and Arbor Day?Or is this just an off-year for Islamic Terra drumbeating?

Or could it be because I was on the woods west of Chehalis - Twin Peaks country, folks - and was off the net and missed the ritual parading of the bloody shirt?

Lemme know what you think.

Bite Me

The latest pearls of military wisdom from Our Man in Bananastan:

"One aide as saying McChrystal seized control of the war "by never taking his eye off the real enemy: The wimps in the White House."

"One aide called White House National Security Adviser Jim Jones, a retired four star general, a "clown" who was "stuck in 1985."

"On Holbrooke, an aide is quoted saying: "The Boss says he's like a wounded animal. Holbrooke keeps hearing rumors that he's going to be fired, so that makes him dangerous." McChrystal is also described as exasperated on receiving an e-mail from Holbrooke. "Oh, not another e-mail from Holbrooke. I don’t even want to open it."

Obama agreed to dispatch an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan only after months of study that many in the military found frustrating. And the White House's troop commitment was coupled with a pledge to begin bringing them home in July 2011, in what counterinsurgency strategists advising McChrystal regarded as an arbitrary deadline.

McChrystal's team disapproves of the Obama administration, with the exception of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who backed McCrystal's request for additional troops in Afghanistan.

A member of McChrystal's team making jokes about Biden, who was seen as critical of the general's efforts to escalate the conflict and who had favored a more limited counter-terrorism approach. "Biden?" the aide was quoted as saying. "Did you say: Bite me?" Biden initially opposed McChrystal's proposal for additional forces last year. He favored a narrower focus on hunting terrorists."

That's it. I'm now officially sick of my Army's general officer corps. From Ray "The Desert Ox" Odiernio, Abizaid, Sanchez, Slick Dave Petraeus, and now this idiot McChrystal - and remember, though none of these quotes come from the Man Who Wears The Stars these are his dogrobbers, selected for their enthusiastic syncophancy and utterly craven lickspittality...if they had an independent thought somewhere in their bullet heads they would be out leading a presence patrol in West Buttfuckistan - I swear, I can't find one of these douchenozzles I'd consider capable of leading four privates to a latrine.The quality of American general officers has never, in my opinion, been truly high. The officer selection process has always seemed to follow the old Japanese adage "The nail that sticks up will be hammered down". And we've had eight years of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld ideal of the big-R Republican general, committed not to the safety of the small-r republic but the geopolitical fantasies of the red-meat wing of the Grand Old Party.

And here is the result.

I have no doubt that Holbrooke is a paranoid dick and Biden an interfering old nanny goat. But;

1. Our entire system is built around civilian control of the military. No doubt that George Washington and Ulysses Grant thought that their civilian masters were dicks and nannies, too. But they got it, and kept their fucking mouths shut.

2. And this entire clusterfuck in central Asia is all about civilian political objectives. Killing raggedy-assed Afghan hillmen is utterly meaningless, and if McChrystal doesn't get this - and these quotes suggest that he and his dogrobbers don't - then he's not just a problem but THE problem and needs to go, like, yesterday.

3. And the final word on this comes from my old First Sergeant Holmes, uttered when he caught me mouthing off about the political situation in Panama, circa 1986."Who da fuck elected you, sergeant?" he snarled.

"Nobody, First Sergeant." I replied.

"You gots a whole bunch of politicians folks in CONUS done elected they ass and they job to tell yo ass what the fuck you gotta do. It you job to shut yo piehole and get the fuckin' job done they tells you to do. You gots a problem with that, you can tell yo momma. But you shut the fuck up around the troops, and around the civilians. Are we Airborne?"

"Airborne, First Sergeant!"

It seems that if we're going to keep him around we need to recall First Sergeant Holmes from his well-deserved retirement to adminster some Old Army wall-to-wall counseling to the good general and his aides.

The sooner the better.

(cross-posted to MilPub)

Dumping on the intel

Scott Horton on the Gitmo task force report. I noted this because an old associate of ours is mentioned:

"The Obama Administration came to Washington promising to clean up the Bush-era detentions policy and make it conform to the clear requirements of law. Then it seems to have decided that the law wasn’t so convenient and that simply providing for unbridled executive authority à la Bush-Cheney wasn’t such a bad idea after all. In terms of Washington power politics, that decision seems to have taken the form of letting Robert Gates make the call on all these issues. The two figures in the Administration who took the most credible stance for implementing the Obama campaign-era promises on detentions policy -- Greg Craig and Phil Carter -- resigned within a few weeks of one another, offering no believable reasons for departing. Then press reports began to appear about secret prisons, operated by JSOC and DIA and applying rules different from those applied in the "normal" DOD prisons, including plenty of torture-lite techniques under Appendix M of the Army Field Manual"

I am hardly sentimental about most of the people we have swept up in these illegal rattissages. They are unlikely to have loved us before they were imprisoned and, probably, tortured, and they are even less likely to let us alone now.But this isn't about them. This is about us, and who we are, and who we want to be. We started by warring on nations that did not attack us. We proceeded from there to violate the spirit of our national charter, which explicitly forbids bills of attainder, imprisonment without cause, and torture. We have now arrived at a place where the Chief Bobo - the mere "executive" who is supposed to do nothing more than enforce the will of the People in Congress has issued orders to murder U.S. citizens.

And the nation's response? Either approval or unconcern.

We had this discussion so many times over at the old Intel Dump. Five, six, seven years have passed, and...what? The people who worried more about our national character, about the rule of law, about the fact that whilst our enemies have no capability to destroy us we can do just that without so much as a pistol shot fired are gone, and those who see no issue with donning the morals and methods of the secret prison and the legalized assassination are still in charge.

At the old Dump even those of us who felt that there WAS a good fight to fight in central Asia pretty much agreed that the whole "why do they hate us"? question was a no-brainer. They hate us when we lie about our means and methods, they hate us when we callously violate the principles we vaunt, they hate us when we murder and kidnap and imprison without evidence or trial. All the intel we have from the places we're fighting in confirm these things. They don't hate us for our "freedoms". They don't hate us for who we are. They hate us for what we do, and this is one of the most hateful.So have good intel but we prefer to dump all over it like incontinent poodles. We know better and yet we do it anyway. We have better ways and we choose to do the worse. We have the means and methods to be smarter and yet we deliberately choose to be fools. It's worse than a crime; it's a mistake, a huge, inescapable political and foreign policy mistake, and in it we are digging our own political graves, and the People seem to see nothing but a bed of flowers.

WASF.

(h/t to Glenn Greenwald)