One Hand Clapping

Military running out of ammo
Kim du Toit has a typically, uh, pithy synopsis of the armed forces' shortage of small-arms ammunition, especially the 5.56mm rifle cartridge used in the standard- issue M16 series rifle.

One of the things the Army seems to have to learn every war - and then seems to forget - is the astounding number of bullets that get fired in combat. In the Civil War a Union general computed that it took his troops 30,000 fired shots to drop one Confederate. And that was before the machine gun came along.

After Operation Just Cause, the invasion of Panama, in 1989, the operation's ground forces commander, Lt. Gen. Carl Stiner, said that the firefights in Panama were much more intense than in Vietnam. Stiner said that the reason was that automatic weapons were much more numerous now. "Machine guns are everywhere," he said. (Stiner had spent several tours in Vietnam as an infantryman and Special Forces officer. He later earned his fourth star and commanded US Special Operations Command.)

The Army today uses a light machine gun called the SAW - Squad Automatic Weapon. It uses the same ammo as the M16 rifle, a good idea for interoperability and simplifying the supply chain. But soldiers love the SAW and would much rather use it, with its 1,000 meter effective range and far heavier weight of fire, than the shorter-ranged rifle. This has been the case with all rifles versus MGs for almost a century. In fact, typical engagement ranges with the infantry rifle are practically unchanged since World War I: 20-30 meters. Even US Marines, who pride themselves on long-range rifle fire, rarely fired at targets more than 100 meters distant.

So combat ops today are eating ammo wholesale, and the military's sole ammo plant in Independence, Missouri, can produce only 1,200,000 rounds per year, far under the Army's new estimated requirement of three to five times as much for the next several years.

Which makes me wonder what on earth the Army expected to do if the really big balloon dropped, say in central Europe or the Korean peninsula. The European battlefield against the Soviets envisioned General War, when the military would be entirely committed to combat operations, all the Reserves and Guard units mobilized and deployed, and intensive, round-the-clock combat taking place for weeks on end.

That sort of combat would have sucked the ammo-reserve well dry in short order. Could civilian manufacturers of such popular hunting and target loads such as Winchester, Remington and Browning have been redirected for military ammo in a short enough time to make a difference? I don't know.

In World War II, the Olin Corp. (which makes Winchester-brand ammo) built and operated the then-largest ammo plant in America in St. Louis, Mo.

Total production of .30 and .50 caliber rifle and machine gun ammunition at the St. Louis Ordnance Plant during the war, 6,738,009,746 loaded rounds, exceeded the output of all of the nation's small arms ammunition plants in World War I. In addition, the Western Cartridge Company plant at East Alton produced 4,022,621,734 loaded rounds of ammunition, and the Winchester plant in New Haven another 4,499,493,774 rounds. Thus a total of 15,260,125,254 rounds of ammunition were produced by the various Olin companies during World War II. [link

Note that each of the three plants mentioned manufactured far more than a billion rounds per year during the war.

To solve the present shortage, the Army will contract with civilian manufaturers to make up the difference.

by Donald Sensing, 5/27/2004 01:06:00 PM. Permalink |

Bloggers are mentally ill
At least, that's the impression one is left with after reading the NYT's hatchet job about bloggers, "For Some, the Blogging Never Stops."

The whole piece is about bloggers who are so obsessed with blogging that it dominates their lives to the exclusion of everything else. Such as the lead profile of a couple on an anniversary getaway:

... Early on the morning of their anniversary, Ms. Matthews heard her husband get up and go into the bathroom. He stayed there for a long time.

"I didn't hear any water running, so I wondered what was going on," Ms. Matthews said. When she knocked on the door, she found him seated with his laptop balanced on his knees, typing into his Web log ... .

Later we learn that he has missed deadlines for his paying job - writing articles - in order to write posts for his non-paying blog. Overall, the piece strongly implies that not only are bloggers "slight teched in the head," as we used to say down South, but that blogging is simply futile anyway: "... never have so many people written so much to be read by so few. By Jupiter Research's estimate, only 4 percent of online users read blogs."

I will be the first to admit that blogging has a certain allure that many other activities don't have. As bloggers go, I think I am pretty senior. I've been blogging without a break, except for vacations, since March 2002. Many blogs predate mine (and mine has been through three evolutions so far) but overall, One Hand Clapping is a graybeard of the blog world. (I remember when an Instalanche yielded about 1,500 hits rather that the several thousand it yields today.)

What seems objectionable about the Times piece to me is that it has no balance, it does not show there is a highly productive side of blogging, both financially and in information dissemniation. There is a brief quote from Jeff Jarvis, who is sort of the media's go-to guy for blogging matters, but no sense of proportion. There is only the drumbeat, from beginning to end, that bloggers are out of touch with the real world and are slightly, well, off.

There is also a profile piece in today's Times of Brian Stelter, an 18-year-old college student who blogs solely about cable news.

BTW, searching the NYT's site for "blog" yields only 11 articles. "Blogging" yields three, all duplicates of the other search. As others have said, the m=oldline media just don't understand this medium, and it shows in what limited coverage they give it. (hat tip: Bill Hobbs)

by Donald Sensing, 5/27/2004 01:05:00 PM. Permalink |

Break
Still on vacation, of sorts, anyway, so posting will be light and irregular for the nonce.

by Donald Sensing, 5/26/2004 04:43:00 PM. Permalink |

Stuff I found looking for something else
I forget what I Googled for, but in the results, this page turned up that purports to be an objective look at more than 300 diet plans and products. And so it seems to be. Maybe you will find it useful.

by Donald Sensing, 5/26/2004 01:45:00 PM. Permalink |

The other media bias
Story about "lifestyle changes" due to gas prices reveals media coverage slanted toward monied class

With all the attention we've been focusing recently about media bias toward the left side of American politics, perhaps some attention should be paid to another bias: coverage biased toward the middle and upper economic classes.

In today's Tenessean (Nashville) the front-page feature article is entitled, "Gas prices driving change in lifestyles," wherein we read this nugget in the fourth graf:

"It's really thrown our budget off," said Troy Farmer, who began looking at hybrid cars last week to get better gas mileage than his 1992 Ford Thunderbird. "We can't buy as much extra food. We can't go as many places. I'm buying more Kroger brands, going to Wal-Mart more. We don't rent as many movies on the weekend."

Another unfortunate person drastically affected:

Christina Brown, 18, of Lebanon has cut back on her social calendar and is relying on carpooling to hang out with friends.

Oh, the horror! Please, somebody take up a collection so the poor woman can get her social life back on track.

The whole article is nothing but lazy journalism, a puff piece for the middle class to read and moan about how bad it has it. Poor Troy Farmer can't rent as many DVDs as he used to - aren't you about to cry? Can't you feel his pain? Aren't high gas prices the awfulest thing you've ever heard about?

What about the people of the lower economic classes, who are hit much higher for higher prices of any consumer commodity than everyone else? Troy Farmer can cut down on Blockbuster to pay for his gas, but what about the cabbie who has nothing much to cut down on to pay for his higher fuel costs?

In a post about what journalism really is in February 2003, I quoted Matt Welch, who wrote that America's newspapers are catering almost exclusively to the well-to-do in search of advertising dollars, skewing their news coverage in order to achieve reader demographics that attract high-dollar advertisers. As the result,

"Daily newspapers have effectively dropped [coverage of] the bottom quintile or perhaps a third of the population," wrote communications professor Robert McChesney of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in a chapter of the 2002 book Into the Buzzsaw .

I note that McChesney is pretty left-leaning himself, and casts an eye of deep suspicion on the media from a socialism-influenced perspective (at least, I conclude from reading stuff on his own web site). Even so, this November 2000 article rings true to me:

It is the class bias that is the biggest obstacle. In the 1940s, most medium- and large-circulation daily newspapers had fulltime labor-beat reporters, sometimes several of them. The coverage was not necessarily favorable to the labor movement, but it existed. Today there are less than ten fulltime labor reporters in the media; coverage of working-class economic issues has all but ceased to exist in the news. Conversely, mainstream news and "business news" have effectively morphed over the past two decades as the news is increasingly pitched to the richest one-half or one-third of the population. The affairs of Wall Street, the pursuit of profitable investments, and the joys of capitalism are now presented as the interests of the general population. Journalists rely on business or "free market"-loving, business-oriented think tanks as sources when covering economics stories. ...

In recent years, this increased focus by the commercial news media on the more affluent part of the population has reinforced and extended the class bias in the selection and tenor of material. Stories of great importance to tens of millions of Americans will fall through the cracks because those are not the "right" Americans, according to the standards of the corporate news media.

The story in today's Tennessean does seem to bear this claim out. Now, I know that "one robin doth not a springtime make," so I don't want to over-generalize using only one newspaper story. But McChesney's point is valid. Journalism has become an elitist career (curious, since it does not qualify as a real profession), populated by college-degree holders. Bernard Goldberg, Emmy-award winner who retired from CBS with 30 years experience, documented his book Bias, A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News , how the newsrooms of CBS (like other newsrooms across America) are staffed by people whose world views and prejudices are almost all alike.

But not just political views. Because members of the lower economic strata rarely become reporters, that bottom fifth to a third of the population Professor McChesney mentioned is ignored in the reportage - unless there is a shooting or drug bust.

The bottom third, you see, doesn't have a "lifestyle." That's for you and me to have, and to read about.

by Donald Sensing, 5/26/2004 11:38:00 AM. Permalink |

Ramada blogging
Okay, we're out of town and staying in a Ramada Inn, where I discover that broadband access is available in all the room for no extra charge. Problem is, I don't have a laptop. Ah, but there is an always-on PC in the lobby; just sit down and type. So while the teenagers are going back to bed after breakfast and the daughter is swimming, I am knocking off a post or two.

Bush's Speech:

I didn't see the president's speech last night because I am on vacation, dadgummit. But from what I have seen and read this morning, it was pretty much a "stay the course" speech rather than a revelation of anything new. Bush has said we wants more international involvement in the transfer of sovereignty before, as well as UN legitimization of the new Iraqi government. No one could ever have realistically expected that the US would start to withdraw troops anytime soon.

My fault-finding with the speech - again, only having read about it - is that is was too mechanistic oriented: it dealt with nuts and bolts rather than forward visions. We still have not had the White House explain to us why we invaded Iraq beyond the WMD threat Iraq was said to pose and long list of UN resolutions it broke.

All well and good, but right now we're like the proverbial dog who finally caught the car: now that we have it, what are we going to do with it? As I wrote several months ago, the real benefits of taking down Saddam relate to the outyears (also here).

Now, it may well be that what I outlined as the strategic rationale for the invasion - the reformation and democratization of Arab societies themselves - is not what the administration ever thought. That's fine, but I sure would like to know what their long-term strategy is. Not the details, of course, but at least a philosophy of overcoming the terrorist threat that has a longer timeline than this summer. And I don't hear Bush and company doing that.

**********************

Vanderleun posts more problems with UN troops - in Iraq the corruption was oil for food. In the Congo it is sex for food.

Also, he makes a good case that liberal media bias - which the media trade journal Editor and Publisher exposes (and E&P is a liberal publication) - is the result of a sort of "social Darwinism," rather than simple party affiliation.

by Donald Sensing, 5/25/2004 08:01:00 AM. Permalink |

See you Wednesday!
I'm taking a couple of days off from everything. Had an exhausting weekend - Saturday was younger son's Eagle Court of Honor and yesterday was eldest son's high school graduation. We're whipped and going to relax until midweek.

Thanks for reading!

by Donald Sensing, 5/24/2004 06:51:00 AM. Permalink |

Ascension Sunday
Today is an elephant in the living room of North American Christianity

Acts 1:1-11
1 In the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning 2 until the day when he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen.
3 After his suffering he presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God. 4 While staying with them, he ordered them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father. "This," he said, "is what you have heard from me; 5 for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now."
6 So when they had come together, they asked him, "Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?"
7 He replied, "It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. 8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."
9 When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. 10 While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them.
11 They said, "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven."

You have probably heard the expression, "an elephant in the living room." The source of this saying apparently was a substance-abuse counselor, who said that families in which there is a drug user are living with an elephant in the living room: It moves around, takes up an enormous amount of space, makes loud noises, bumps into them, knocks things over, smells bad - yet the family members are usually in denial and pretend it isn't there.

The story of Jesus' ascension is sort of an elephant in the living room of North American Christianity. Clergy of mainline churches like the UMC know what dominates this story but we usually pretend it isn't there. In previous years on Ascension Sunday, I ignored the elephant, too, but today I'm coming clean. What dominates this story is Jesus' bodily ascension into Heaven.

A miracle, in other words. That's the elephant.

The 21st-century Western mind pretends the miracle isn't there. We search for the moral of the story or its implied meaning for our day and ignore the miracle. Lay people are taught, by implication, to do that in our secular school systems and colleges. Clergy are taught to do that in mainline seminaries and divinity schools. Every mention of biblical miracles in my classes at Vanderbilt Divinity School was to show how the event itself wasn't really important and wasn't the real point of the story, anyway. Don't dwell on the miracle - with the unspoken implication being that the miracle didn't really happen or that the event was really an ordinary event that occurred in unordinary circumstances and was mistaken for a miracle. Besides, the people who wrote the Bible were educated for their day, but not for ours, and did not enjoy the benefit of the scientific method as a way of understanding reality.

I certainly do not attack science and some of you may even remember that I have defended science and the scientific method against religious fundamentalism and have exposed the holes in what is inaccurately called "scientific" creationism.

But we have to face the elephant in the living room of 21st-century, North American Christian faith, the fact that the entire Christian religion inescapably rests on miracles. And whatever other points the Ascension stories may have for us in our day, the central part of the story is that Jesus ascended bodily into Heaven.

In defense of modern scholarship, though, I readily agree that in miracle stories, including those of Jesus' healing, the miracle is not the only point of the stories, and sometimes not even the main point. For example, Jesus healed the servant of a Roman centurion whose faith in Jesus was so profound that Jesus exclaimed, "I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith" (Matt 8:10). That's the real kicker of the story, not the healing, which takes place entirely offstage. An officer of the oppressive, occupying Roman army, not a Jew, has the greatest faith.

But there are three miraculous events of Jesus' life in which the miracle is so central to defining who Jesus was - and who he is today - that explaining them away somehow cuts the heart from our faith.
The first is Jesus' miraculous Incarnation as the unique Son of God. I do not refer to the virgin birth. I mean that, as Paul wrote, "In Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form," (Col 2:9), which cannot be said about any other person past or present. That Jesus was fully God and fully human is an essential miracle of his very existence that cannot be intellectualized away without surrendering the essence of who Christ is, what he means and what he does.

Second is that Jesus was dead, buried, and on the third day rose from the dead. The resurrection is the hinge of Christianity, the thing about which everything else rotates. Everything about our faith depends on it. Once its affirmation is abandoned, Christian faith becomes pointless, another fact that Paul recognized. He wrote the Corinthians that if there is no resurrection, "'Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die" (I Cor. 15.32).

The third miracle is the Ascension.

The Reverend Robert Hansel described most classical art of the Ascension.

We see Jesus dressed in gauzy, flowing robes and he appears to be floating weightlessly on a couple of insubstantial-looking white clouds. The clouds are being lifted up by some smiling, chubby cherubs. It seems like some kind of pre-technology elevator or a circus levitation act. Even though we understand that what we're seeing is artistic and poetic, we just have to smile at the apparent silliness of the whole thing. Jesus lifting off like a rocket? Peter Pan with pixie dust? Come on! Isn't this whole idea of Ascension dated and embarrassing - something we'd be better off simply leaving out of contemporary Christian theology?

The modern mind replies, "Yes."

Yes, we all know that people do not fly unassisted through the air and that precious few of us have seen angels, although we can all imagine circumstances that would be greatly improved if one showed up now and then. And we know that wherever Heaven is, it isn't directly over our heads, as hundreds of spaceships have proven.

And having affirmed all that, we are left with the cold, hard fact that Jesus isn't here any more, and neither is his body.

The suffering, death, resurrection, appearances and ascension of Jesus Christ form a single narrative. In religious terms, they use poetic imagery and mythical literary language to describe the central events of the most important person in all history. Religious language is used best for religious experience. But there is also a very practical matter addressed, an important one for a faith that claims to be grounded in real events of actual history, as our faith claims. That is, What happened to Jesus' body?

Matthew records that this question was of foremost concern to Jesus' opponents after he was buried and the tomb turned up empty. Disbelieving that Jesus was raised from the dead, the question of what happened to Jesus' body was both obvious and urgent.

The story of Christ's ascension leaves us with much the same question, too. Namely, if Jesus didn't ascend into heaven, where is his grave? For he is no longer walking around, continuing his ministry. A crucial historical fact of Christianity is that Jesus' body is missing. Peter preached to the people of Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost, "Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses. ... I may say to you confidently of our ancestor David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day." Jesus' tomb is still here, too, but unlike David's tomb, there's no body there. So for people who dismiss the Ascension story from a scientific-technical point of view as I once did, I have to ask:

Accepting for the sake of argument that Christ was raised from the tomb but denying that Christ ascended into heaven, then what happened to his body? In a religion with two thousand years of building innumerable monuments to even the most obscure saint or martyr, where is the church or reliquary or plain granite obelisk claiming to stand on Jesus' final resting place?

If Jesus is not here, and he is not ascended, what happened to him? And more importantly, what will happen to us?

For Christ's resurrection to be decisive, it had to be permanent. After all, Lazarus was also raised by God's power, through Jesus. Note that we call ourselves "Christians," not "Lazarites." Lazarus' resurrection was a temporary reprieve from the grave and therefore of no value to our salvation.

The Ascension of Christ is a critical element of Jesus's story, and therefore of our salvation. But we are a scientifically minded, technically trained people, and unlike the uneducated, superstitious masses of earlier centuries, we know better than to believe in fairy tales like the Ascension story. At least, that's how I used to think, including for quite a while after I became committed to Christ. But I think now that we cannot gut the story of Jesus of its miraculous content, leaving holes in the narrative, and expect something sensible to remain. If Jesus didn't heal the sick in inexplicable ways, then what did he do? Just preach? There have been countless thousands of extraordinary preachers since Jesus' day. Quick, name two, not including Billy Graham ... or Donald Sensing. So preaching itself gets no monuments dedicated to you.

Thomas Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment and the age of Rationalism, a deist rather than a traditional Christian. He took scissors to the New Testament, cutting out the verses that mentioned miracles. What was left was perhaps morally inspiring, but not much more. As you may recall me saying before, any religion founded only on Jesus' teachings would be simply an admirable form of Judaism. That's no bad thing, but that is not what brings us here each Sunday. The disciples knew this, even said so explicitly. Paul wrote the Corinthians that if Christ is not raised than we are still in our
sins and have no hope.

I quote the Reverend Hansel again:

Whatever we may think of the poetic imagery, the Ascension tells us finally and completely who Jesus really is. The picture of Jesus returning to God the Father enables us to let go of previous and incomplete pictures of Jesus. Certainly Jesus is the baby in the manger at Bethlehem, but that's not who he is now. Yes, he is the great teacher of the Sermon on the Mount, but we know much more than just a record of his words. We know that he hung and died on the cross, but that's not where he is today. We believe that he rose victorious from the empty tomb, but he's not just hanging around like some sort of wandering ghost.

Ascension adds a final and critical photograph to the album of who Christ is and what he does. He is ascended - once more with the Father, enthroned forever as the ruler and judge of all human history. This is the final picture and a very important one indeed because it puts all the other pictures in perspective.

There is a lot more to the Ascension story than the Ascension itself, but without the Ascension itself, there isn't much else about the story that matters.

by Donald Sensing, 5/23/2004 07:44:00 AM. Permalink |

Do you complain about coach seating?
Try flying 19 hours like these guys. I have done it more than once. It ain't fun.

by Donald Sensing, 5/22/2004 09:46:00 PM. Permalink |

Makes you want to yell at the radio
When Jeff Jarvis, a generally gentle man, gets so angry listening to his car's radio that he spittles all over the windshield yelling at the moron holding forth on the air, then you know things have gotten really bad.

by Donald Sensing, 5/22/2004 09:40:00 PM. Permalink |

The sarin-gas shell, revisited
Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter says the nerve-gas shell exploded against US troops was most likely a leftover test shell, but I doubt it

Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, former US Marine officer and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter argues that the artillery shell, filled with sarin nerve gas, that was used as an IED against US troops was "high likely" a dud round fired long ago in a test program (link ). His main points and my reply are:

Modern artillery shells have a high dud rate, usually 10 percent or higher..

This is an incredibly great exaggeration. As a career US Army artillery officer ( retired 1995) I have observed thousands of artillery rounds impacting. The sarin shell is question is described by the CPA and Ritter as being of 155mm in caliber. The standard 155mm US model M107 high-explosive round, used since 1959, has a vanishingly small dud rate, in the tenths of a percent and probably lower.

The US has not ever used chemical artillery rounds in battle but did develop and test them extensively. The detonation mechanism of these rounds was simple and extremely reliable. (None remain in service stockpile.)

Submunition, or "bomblet" rounds have a much higher dud rate, but for the bomblets, not the carrying projectile or its activation. The bomblets often fail to explode if, after ejection from the projectile, they hit the ground or target at an oblique angle. The dud rate varies according to the type of bomblet and ground or target conditions (snow on the ground, for example, increases the dud rate). Unexploded bomblets are a real concern among relief agencies in former combat areas and military commanders who move into places such rounds were used.

Saddam's regime declared to the UN that it test fired 150 sarin-filled shells, meaning that with a 10 percent dud rate, 15 of these shells are lying on the test range, "waiting to be picked up by any unsuspecting insurgent looking for raw material from which to construct an IED."

Again, a dud rate that high is simply a Ritter invention, but his thesis depends on it. Iraqi military technicians were by no means incompetent, especially having had training by Canadian artillery genius Gerald Bull. Furthermore, Iraqi 155mm artillery was very advanced, being also of Canadian design, based on the highly regarded GC-45 gun.

I would estimate that of 150 fired shells, even prototype ones, the dud rate should realistically approach zero. The detonation mechanism is just too simple and of decades-proven reliability to be more.

Ritter says that the shell's fragments can be examined to determine whether it had been fired, and the US government should announce the results of this test.

This contention is true, but not quite to the extent Ritter seems to think. I, along with every other new artillery lieutenant, was taught the basics of shell-fragment analysis. For a shell used as a roadside bomb, there is only one type of fragment that can reveal whether it has been fired. That is a fragment from the rotating band.

Artillery cannons are rifled, so as the shell travels down the tube it rotates. The shell has a rotating band, a ring of relatively soft metal such as brass, that grips the grooves of the tube's rifling to impart the spin. No other part of the shell contacts the cannon barrel's interior, and hence no other part of the shell would reveal whether it has been fired.

Ritter says that the sarin shells declared by the former regime were "base-bleed" shells. A BB shell is one in which the base (trailing end) of the shell is mildly concave, in which sits a gas emitter like a rocket motor. The gas emitter imparts no thrust. The gas simply fills the vacuum caused by aerodynamic effects as the projectile travels. Because the vacuum causes drag, removing the vacuum with the base-bleed method can greatly increase the shell's range.

A base-bleed projectile in flight

Ritter is correct that if the gas emitter was recovered, it would show whether the shell was fired. A discharged emitter would strongly indicate the shell had been fired. But it is also necessary to note that the proper function of the fuze and detonation mechanism has nothing to do with the gas emitter. Even if the gas emitter failed to ignite upon firing, the fuzing would still function.

Here is a qualifier, though. Chemical rounds are used with either countdown-timer fuzes or radar-activated fuzes (called variable-time fuzes, the radar being inside the fuze). In either case the point is to detonate the round above the ground to aid in dispersal of the chemical contents. Ground detonation tends to drive the chemical solution into the soil, where it is ineffective.

Time or VT fuzes have a backup mechanism that explodes the shell on the ground if the air-burst fails to occur. After all, some sort of detonation is better than none at all. It is possible (how likely I don't know) that the Iraqis used air-burst fuzes with no impact backup. I think this is very unlikely, but it is possible. If so, than it is more possible than otherwise that the round, if fired, was a dud as Ritter postulates.

Ritter wrote,

Given what's known about sarin shells, the US could be expected to offer a careful recital of the data with news of the shell. But facts that should have accompanied the story - the type of shell, its condition, whether it had been fired previously, and the age and viability of the sarin and precursor chemicals - were absent. And that's opened the door to irresponsible speculation that the shell was part of a live WMD stockpile.

I don't think the speculation Ritter refers to is irresponsible. But I agree that a lot more about the shell and its legacy would be helpful. The jury is still out. I also note that the US government has been pretty mum about it. I don't really fault them for it - the tests Ritter outlines have surely been done - but I would like to know. (The question is begged, though, whether I have a need to know, and I must admit I don't, and neither does Ritter.)

BTW, I know that Ritter's reputation is pretty much down the tank for many reasons, not least of which is that he was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by an Iraqi agent for his support of Saddam's regime, was honored by the rubberstamp Iraqi parliament and was investigated here in the US for matters relating to child sexual offenses. But those things don't seem relevant to the technical questions at hand.

Aht tip: Joe Carter

by Donald Sensing, 5/22/2004 01:32:00 PM. Permalink |

Dueling biases
The media are biased. So am I. But which bias shall we choose and why?

One of the memes of the blogosphere since Nick Berg's brutal beheading on May 11 has been the enormous tilt of the traditional news media away from Berg's murder in favor of piling up ink and broadcast minutes about the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal by American soldiers.

I summarized this phenomenon a week ago, and many other writers have, too, including some traditional media outlets.

The web is biased, too.

As of the date-time of this posting, a Google search for the exact phrase, "Abu Ghraib" yields "about 527,000" results.

A Google search for the exact phrase, "Nick Berg" yields "about 777,000" results.

Google searches non-media sources on the the web as well as media sources. So the searches show that Berg has received more coverage on the WWW than the prison scandal to the tune of a quarter-million more pages.

Does this mean that the web is biased toward the Berg story by 250,000 entries? I'm not trying to sound like Reuters, but could it be that "one man's bias is another man's fairness"?

Commentary overkill

In the Cold War, it was said that we had so many nukes pointed at Moscow that all most of them would do would be to "make the rubble bounce." And with the prison and Berg stories, instead of talking about what happened, we are talking about how we are talking about what happened.

There just isn't any "new news" coming from either case. All we are doing is recycling the same pictures and analysis over and over. Not even the courts-martials for prison offenders qualifies for the amount of "news" coverage Abu Ghraib still gets: there just isn't that much to report. And nothing new has happened in the Berg story except the Iraqi authorities captured four suspects, let two go and still hold the other two. (Wonder what their treatment is like?)

Hence, what is going on now is dueling biases. Have the mainline media shoved Berg down the memory hole while they relentlessly hammer the prison abuse story? Unquestionably.

Are web commentati, including me, pretty much off the Abu Ghraib story and still pounding the keyboards about Berg's murder and what it portends? Absolutely.

Both sides proceed from pre-existing biases. But are all biases equally objectionable or comparable? I don't think so. Discriminating among choices with moral import and deciding which to choose is the fundamental problem of ethics.

Ethics and commentary

There are a fair number of ethical matrices that can be used to approach the question. Aristotelian ethics would ask about the objective sought, whether it is just and excellent. Kantian ethicists might try to determine what is the rule to be followed. Utilitarian ethics leads one to ask what course would most likely result in the greatest good for the greatest number.

All these approaches have their merits and their deficiencies. I tend to approach tough ethical issues using the method of H. Richard Niebuhr. The first question in his ethics system is not, "What to do?" but, "What is really going on?" In other words, what is the setting of the ethical dilemma as best as can be known and described?

I believe it is impossible to discuss the present issue apart from the fact that large numbers of violent Islamic extremists have declared total war upon the United States. There are potentially millions of human lives at stake, and not just American lives. Should the Islamofascists detonate a nuclear weapon inside an American city, as they have said they want to do, there is no way to say in advance that the American government certainly would not respond in kind against a city inside the Axis of Evil.

And that leads us bump into the goal of Niebuhr's ethics: the promotion of human flourishing. This is not really the same as Utilitarianism's goal of the greatest good for the greatest number, a system which founders for the lack of a utilitarian calculus. HRN said that ethics is the problem of determing the "fitting response" to a situation. A fitting response is that which advances human flourishing (in HRN-speak, "advances the potentiality of beings.") Hence, HRN's ethics are consequentialist to some degree.

As ethics should be, for while consequences of a chosen course are rarely wholly determinative of what the course should be, they can hardly ever be disregarded (as Kant wanted to do, holding that only the rule mattered).

Consequences matter

It can hardly be argued that human flourishing is better to be achieved by Islamists. The Taliban, for instance, beat and even shot women who went outside their homes without company of theiur husbands or a close male relative. They flogged or hanged men whose beards were too short. In Saudi Arabia last year, a girls' school caught fire one night and the decency police (yes, they have them in Saudi Arabia) refused to unlock the exits because the girls were not properly veiled. At least 15 girls died. And surely human flourishing will not be brought about by the routine practice of beheading enemies, as Islamists have been doing for a very long time.

I quite agree to the other side of the argument, that human flourishing will not be brought about by the kinds of tortures that were done to Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. But there are two crucial, indeed central, differences, to which the news media are almost entirely oblivious and the blogosphere is not:

The abuses were anomalous, not normative.

We are doing something about it.

In the world view of our enemies, the brutality and cruelty they commit are not exceptional, but routine. In fact, such acts are held to be a positive good, admired by Allah (who is not the God of Jesus) and commanded by him. The men who commit them are heroes, not villains.

The potential of human flourishing in this war's outcomes and the selection of biases:

There are only four basic outcomes of this war:

1. Over time, the United States engenders deep-rooted reformist impulses in the Islamic lands, leading their societies away from the self- and other-destructive patterns they now exhibit. It is almost certainly too much to ask that the societies become principally democratic as we conceive democracy (at least not for a very long time), but we can (and must) work to help them remit radical Islamofascism from their cultures so that terrorism does not threaten.

2. The Islamofascists achieve their goals of Islamicization of the entire Middle East (at the minimum), the ejection of all non-Muslims from Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Persian Gulf, the destruction of Israel, and the deaths of countless numbers of Americans.

3. Absent achieving the goals stated just above, al Qaeda successfully unleashes a mass-destructive, mass-casualty attack against the United States and total war erupts between the US and several Islamic countries.

4. None of the above happen, so the conflict sputters along for decades more with no real changes: we send our troops into combat intermittently, suffer non-catastrophic attacks intermittently, and neither side possesses all of the will, the means and the opportunity to achieve decisive victory. The war becomes the Forever War.

Perhaps you can think of another, different outcome, but I think these pretty much cover them.

So the question for us commentati, whether based on the web or in traditional media, is simply: which of these outcomes is best? Which will be most favorable to human flourishing?

As for me, I choose the first, and have no qualms admitting I am heavily biased in favor thereof. And that bias certainly shapes my blogging!

The basic issue for news media :

For the news media, I ask you: which outcome do you want? It is not possible to pretend neutrality here, for the power of the media to frame the public's debate is too great to claim you are merely being "fair and balanced." There literally is no neutral ground here, no "God's eye view" of events, and hence no possibility of not taking sides. One way or another, what you print or broadcast, what stories you cover and how you cover them, what attention you pay to what issues and how you describe them - all these things mean that you will support one outcome over another. Which will you choose? How will you support it? These are the most important questions of your vocation today. But you are not facing them at all.

Roger Simon is right: this war is war at its most basic: "It's about civilization versus a death cult. Make a choice!"

Now.

by Donald Sensing, 5/21/2004 06:00:00 PM. Permalink |

Marine moms
Nashville Tennessean columnist Tim Chavez profiles local mothers of US Marines serving overseas and writes a real winner of a column.

The Marine moms had had it up to here with news media coverage:

Their opinion hasn't been formed by news media coverage, Bob Woodward's latest book, the loudest talking head on television or a presidential candidate. These local moms get their perspective from the telephone and from pictures sent home or over the Internet. They've quit watching and reading the news. They say the coverage doesn't provide the full story.

Endless days of big headlines and lead stories on prisoner abuse make one believe Iraq is just one big holding pen instead of a place where people can now protest openly and hold religious observances once banned. If any one of the 200,000 members of our armed forces is doing something right in Iraq, the average viewer and reader would be hard pressed to find out. Yet if there is even speculation of something wrong, it leads the newscasts and makes the front page.

Which is what bloggers have been saying for a long time.

While the rest of us have seen the picture of the Army reservist holding the Iraqi prisoner on a leash a thousand times, these mothers talk about all the pictures showing Marines holding children, laughing with children and even an old man kissing the hand of a Marine.

''My son calls at 3 or 4 in the morning, and he once told me, 'I don't care who you vote for, but vote for someone who is going to let us finish the job,''' says Nancy Hayden of Nashville about her son, Justin. He is a Marine private. ...

These moms will surprise you if you depend on the media for your opinions. Of the 15 mothers in attendance Saturday, not one criticized President Bush. Laurie Undis, whose son Lance Cpl. Mark Underdahl is ready for deployment, said: ''I didn't vote for George Bush. I've never voted Republican before. But John Kerry scares me. George Bush has the leadership.''

Don't tell these mothers that war protests are designed to save their sons lives.

''When they call, we tell them we're doing fine, that we're strong, that we're doing great and that we're thrilled to hear from them and that America is behind them 100% and we're praying for them,'' said Martha Morris of Franklin. ''The reason for that is if they are brave enough to go over there for us and to fight for us, then by God they will not spend one second worrying about whether their mothers are strong enough to handle what they're doing.

''We'll talk about that when they get home.''

Some calls are harder than others. Trish Autery of LaVergne was talking on the phone with her son, Lance Cpl. Ryan Autery, when she heard an explosion. Ryan told his mom he had to go. Autery says she was hysterical for 10 minutes. Then her son called back and said it was a mortar attack. But he was fine.

Make no mistake. These mothers love their sons dearly and would prefer them safe at home. But the greatest love a parent can have for a child is in supporting him or her in pursuit of happiness and a meaningful life. So these Marine moms are always searching for ways to cope.

Clemons recently was getting into her car at Wal-Mart when a Marine in dress blues got out of his vehicle. Seeing him, she did an about face and ran his way. Later, she felt bad. He was African American, and she is white. And she felt the Marine must have thought she was intending something ill toward him. But she simply asked: ''My son is in Iraq, but I can't hug him. So can I hug you?''

He said, ''Yes.''

What these mothers have to say about the war in Iraq is more than mere opinion. They are invested — in every phone call and every slamming car door that could be the casualty officer paying that fateful visit. Don't question them. Thank them. Then listen and learn the rest of the story.

God bless all the mothers of our men and women serving in the armed forces.

by Donald Sensing, 5/21/2004 08:53:00 AM. Permalink |

Deal at Six Flags
In case anyone is interested, you can buy discounted tickets online at Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom at what seemed to me to be a pretty deep discount of $11 off ($25.99 vice $36.99). And you can get a next-day ticket at the park for $5.

SFKK is already one of the least expensive around. Dollywood, near Gatlinburg, Tenn., charges $42.40 regular admission with no online discount. The only discount it presently offers is $5 off with specially marked Coke cans.

There are other ways to get discounted tickets, of course. The military's Morale, Welfare and Recreation agencies sells discounted tickets, too. But the SFKK online deal seemed pretty good to me. If not, I don't want to know.

by Donald Sensing, 5/21/2004 08:44:00 AM. Permalink |

Ambushed!
If you ever wondered what it was like to be in a fuel convoy in Iraq and get ambushed on the journey, then read this first-person account by Army Pfc. Jarob Walsh. It will curl your hair and leave you wondering, "Where do we get such men?" HT: Right Side Redux.

by Donald Sensing, 5/20/2004 09:30:00 PM. Permalink |

Saudis kill four terrorists in gun battle
One Saudi policeman was also killed in the gunfight "during a raid on a militant hideout in Khudaira, a southern district of Buraidah." Link.

by Donald Sensing, 5/20/2004 06:48:00 PM. Permalink |

Report: German army in Afghanistan told, Take no prisoners!
Incredible as it may seem, German military lawyers

... have advised German elite soldiers in Afghanistan not to take prisoners to avoid having to turn them over to US forces, Der Spiegel magazine reported.

There are millions of people in eastern and western Europe who remember all too grimly what it means for "elite" German army units to be told not to take prisoners.

The lawyers' concern was that the prisoners might wind up in American hands, where they would be abused. Alas, the new directive says that German soldiers are to release prisoners rather than turn them over to Americans.

"Well, Mullah Omar, we hope stay with the German army has been pleasant and comfortable. Please give our regards to Osama."

The thing is, I would be willing to bet my air fare to this year's Oktoberfest that the German units themselves think this order is idiotic. (More info.)

by Donald Sensing, 5/20/2004 06:33:00 PM. Permalink |

The secret life of Kirk and Spock
And where is Star Fleet headquartered? San Fran-flippin'-cisco! Coincidence? Yeah sure, and so is Kirk's lavender shirt! I mean, really! (Caution, profanity at linked site, but it's funny and thought-provoking.)

by Donald Sensing, 5/20/2004 04:16:00 PM. Permalink |

Linkagery
Some stuff I wanted to write about but know I'll never get around to, so just the links thereto:

The Saddam-9/11 Link Confirmed - by Laurie Mylroie, who advised Bill Clinton on Iraq.

"Why are the architects of Kosovo so down on Gulf War II?" by Matt Welch.

A former Marine NCO says that officers ordered him and other Marines to

"Throw candies in the school courtyard, and open fire on children rushing to snatch them. Crush them."

He's a liar.

by Donald Sensing, 5/20/2004 01:37:00 PM. Permalink |

There will always be an England
Okay, the men who did this amazing feat were really Scots (I think, maybe Welsh?), not English, but still, it's a jaw-dropper for those of us who know what it entailed.

by Donald Sensing, 5/20/2004 01:28:00 PM. Permalink |

My prophecy comes true
I wrote in the last graf of this post,

I am convinced that if a Baathist dead-ender showed up one day in front of CPA headquarters, driving a truck containing a one kiloton, use-ready atomic weapon, and announced he was defecting and making a gift of the nuke to the coalition, that the Left would argue, somehow, that it doesn't fit the definition of WMD that Bush (and Clinton and Kerry, btw) claimed Saddam had.

Well, I was right.

by Donald Sensing, 5/20/2004 01:20:00 PM. Permalink |

Your move, Kofi
At the end of his bleat which starts by talking about home roasting coffee, James Lileks moves on to weightier matters and remarks about Seymour Hersh's latest piece about Iraq, which focuses exclusively on Abu Ghraib:

Anything on the Berg slaughter? Alas, no. That was a one-off, it seems, an aberration. Move along, nothing to see. Hersh’s article ends: "'We’re giving the world a ready-made excuse to ignore the Geneva Convention. Rumsfeld has lowered the bar.'" Ah. Hereafter the terrorists will be emboldened to saw people’s heads off with dull blades. I’m not going to get into any of that, except to say: 1. the UN Food-for-Oil scandal continues apace. And 2. The first sentence has been handed down in the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal. A downgrade, a bad-conduct discharge, a year in the pokey.

Questions: is the Oil-for-Food scandal characteristic of the UN, or not? Is the Abu Ghraib scandal characteristic of the US Armed Forces, or not?

Which body acted swiftly to investigate? Which body opened itself to public hearings and condemnations? Which body put the bad guy in the dock, held a trial, and pronounced sentence? Says AP:

Within hours of Sivits’ court-martial, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the senior U.S. commander in Iraq, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington that abuse of prisoners in Iraq will be investigated thoroughly up the chain of command, "and that includes me." ...

Kofi? Your move.

Yeah, Kofi will move, all right, about as fast as the Sphinx, and about as forthcoming.

by Donald Sensing, 5/20/2004 01:13:00 PM. Permalink |

James Lileks, coffee man?
Brian Jones emailed to tell me that James Lileks evidently doesn't read One Hand Clapping (and why not?) Because he posted today,

Had a guest for lunch today: Mike J. Nelson, bearing a small jar of home-roasted coffee. I know what you’re thinking: he roasts his own coffee? Apparently. I had no idea such a thing was possible, but the world is full of such surprises. No doubt there’s a thriving industry to support this hobby.

Well, James, all you have to do is read this essay of mine, which will tell you all about it.

I think I’ll start roasting my own and selling it here.

Two tips: ignore all the coffee from South America and go straight either to African coffee or, better yet, southwest Pacific coffee. I refer to the absolute best I have roasted, Papua New Guinea, and Sumatra Mandheling (also spelled Manhelding). In fact, Mandheling blended 50-50 with Tanzania Peaberry is outstanding.

Roasting and selling it on your site? Believe me, if it was economically feasible I'd be doing it already.

Home roasting machines only roast a few ounces at a time and except for only a couple of machines, none are "start and forget." You must closely monitor the roasting process the entire time. The two machines I know of that will roast pretty much automatically are also slow roasters and therefore you can't roast much coffee per day.

I don't know of any roasters that are in between home and commercial capacity. Commercial-capacity roasters cost thousands of dollars and require extensive duct work for venting and electrical capacity.

Since the whole point of home roasting is freshness, you'd also be hieing off to the FedEx station every day to send out that day's roast. All this means that you'd have to charge a very large amount per pound to make the effort worth your time - but since fresh-roasted coffee is already available online from commercial roasters, why would someone buy from you (or me) and not them?

Nope, there is only one reason to roast your own coffee: It's the best coffee you will ever have!

Update: A little Googling of -coffee blog- reveals a number of sites dedicated to the subject, including a new blog dealing just with fair-trade coffee issues. But CoffeeBlog isn't about coffee at all.

Here is Don's coffee consumption by kilogram and origin, Mar 2002 - May 2004. Sorry, it's another Don.

by Donald Sensing, 5/20/2004 01:05:00 PM. Permalink |

Government licensing of pastors?
As i have mentioned a couple of times before, I serve as a volunteer chaplain for the Williamson County (Tenn.) Sheriff's Department. This is a ministry to the deputies and through the department to the county's residents, not to the county jail, which the WCSD runs.

Hence, I was a little dismayed to learn that beginning next month, the department's policies for pastor visitation with inmates will require pastors to complete the department's certification program. Only two certifying sessions per year, apparently will be held, both in May.

Only pastors with a photo identification badge issued through the identification program will be allowed to visit inmates.

I do not know yet just what it is that is being certified. I suspect, but do not know, that the certification deals with rule for inmate contact, off-limits areas, jail procedures and the like.

I have no objection to such training . . . but I wonder whether all visitors must complete such certification, or only pastors. On the face of it, this new policy seems ripe for legal challenge on the basis of especially burdening clergy. We'll see.

by Donald Sensing, 5/20/2004 10:44:00 AM. Permalink |

Reminder
For reasons I posted here, blogging will be irregular for the next several days. Sorry, but thanks for reading!

by Donald Sensing, 5/20/2004 09:15:00 AM. Permalink |

High gasoline prices
AlphaPatriot has some comments run through the sharpener before posting.

by Donald Sensing, 5/18/2004 09:20:00 PM. Permalink |

Linkagery

If you use a digital camera - and what blogger doesn't? - then "digital camera care tips" is for you!

Not a link, but an email from reader Tom Mortenson:

Dan Abrams of “The Abram’s Report” on MSNBC tonight called the internet “The Sewer of History” for it’s dissemination of the Berg beheading video! So much for the Elite Media’s view of free speech! Is this fear of downsizing because the “Instapundit” and other blogs have more viewers than MSNBC?

Yeah, probably. Their "intruder alert" is sounding full klaxon now.

Lexington Green, a self-described "Jacksonian American" writing for the "libertarian-oriented" blog, Chicago Boyz, surveys the work of the Massachussetts Supreme Judicial Court and concludes,

... by calling a homosexual union marriage, and making it a Constitutional right, the Massachusetts Supreme Court, and soon many like-minded courts around the country, are more or less intentionally making Christianity illegal. Repeat: Christianity is being made illegal. The teaching that homosexuality is a sin is embedded in Christianity. It is in the Pauline letters. There is no getting around it. I have heard the counter-arguments, and they don't cut any ice. The Christian teaching against homosexuality is organic, it was part and parcel of the attack on the pagan society of the Roman Empire and it is fundamental to the Christian conception of marriage and sexuality. So, again, if gay marriage is a Constitutional right, then anyone preaching the moral teaching of Christianity is committing a hate crime or otherwise attacking the exercise of a Constitutional right. I object to this as a Christian, obviously.

He has some other grim predictions, too.

Update: David at Submandave explains some reservations, too, and some situational problems.

The heavily-left-wing National Council of Churches (earlier post here) was saved from severe financial difficulty by a $7.4 million donation. According to the NCC's general secretary (what a fitting title), the Rev. Dr. Bob Edgar,

... the donor was eager to support the NCC's political lobbying rather than any Christian evangelism or discipleship work among its churches.

Which says a lot, I think. Another high point of this speech was when,

... Edgar mentioned the need to follow the Christian virtue of loving your enemies, “even when your enemies are people like Jerry Falwell and Franklin Graham.”

I cannot find a text of the speech itself online, even at the NCC's site. But the site linked (the IRD) summarizes the address, which was made to delegates of the UMC's general conference on April 29.

Michael Totten, no member of the VRWC, slices the latest immorality from The Nation.

by Donald Sensing, 5/18/2004 09:17:00 PM. Permalink |

More about the sarin shell

Controversy is afoot about the age of the sarin-filled shell that terrorists exploded this week in Iraq. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmit is cited by the LA Times as saying that the shell was "left over from the 1980s, when Baghdad secretly produced hundreds of tons of poison gas." Problem is, says Blaster's Blog, the transcript of the press conference concerned reveals no such remark by Kimmitt. What Kimmitt said was, "It was a weapon that we believe was stocked from the ex-regime time."

Blaster also points out,

According to this source, Iran did use chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq War. However, they are not suspected of production of G-nerve agent (sarin or tabun) until 1993, and not suspected of binary chemical capability until 1995.

So this is definitely not an Iranian dud. It has to be a post Iran-Iraq War, post Desert Storm product.

Vanderleun dissects an NYT headline and story about the shell (it's getting so easy to do it is almost no fun anymore.) He also correctly identifies the issue in determining the age of the shell: it's not when the shell casing was made that matters, but when the sarin was made. Surprise, the NYT didn't get it.

Christopher Hitchens:

So a Sarin-infected device is exploded in Iraq, and across the border in Jordan the authorities say that nerve and gas weapons have been discovered for use against them by the followers of Zarqawi, who was in Baghdad well before the invasion. Where, one idly inquires, did these toys come from? No, it couldn't be. …

I am convinced that if a Baathist dead-ender showed up one day in front of CPA headquarters, driving a truck containing a one kiloton, use-ready atomic weapon, and announced he was defecting and making a gift of the nuke to the coalition, that the Left would argue, somehow, that it doesn't fit the definition of WMD that Bush (and Clinton and Kerry, btw) claimed Saddam had.

by Donald Sensing, 5/18/2004 09:05:00 PM. Permalink |

Brits put private rocket into space
Why on earth we let the Brits beat us to putting the first privately-owned rocket into space is beyond me. But they did, and good on 'em, too!

by Donald Sensing, 5/18/2004 05:57:00 PM. Permalink |

Headlines
Some grabs from Jay Leno's regular Monday feature, "Headlines."

The Golden Door Down Under...

They tax everything now!

"What on your mind?"
"Nuthin'."

Ole Ernie hitting the sauce again...

by Donald Sensing, 5/18/2004 05:46:00 PM. Permalink |

A short note to readers
I am very grateful for the literally thousands of new readers my site seems to have garnered over the last several days. I appreciate your patronage!

So I feel somewhat awkward in announcing that blogging here will be fairly irregular for the rest of May. This is graduation week for my eldest and my second son's Eagle Scout court of honor is this Saturday. We have family coming in from out of town and that necessarily and justly will claim much of my time.

Beginning next week I intend to take a colossal amount of time off from everything, and my second son will also be competing in the state high school track and field tournament in Memphis next week. (He qualified in the discus throw.)

I'll probably be back online later tonight, but am booked for the next few hours. Grace to you!

by Donald Sensing, 5/18/2004 04:37:00 PM. Permalink |

Alabama isn't all of America, but . . .
A survey there defines John Kerry's political challenge:

A new statewide poll indicates that a majority of Alabamians are unhappy with the direction of the country, but that they don't blame President Bush and would not replace him with John Kerry if the election were held today.

If this mindset holds in kuch larger swaths of the country, and I think it does, it explains why Kerry seems not to be getting traction.

by Donald Sensing, 5/17/2004 10:47:00 PM. Permalink |

Heh!
Glenn Reynolds writes,

I was raised Methodist; now I'm Presbyterian. Why the shift? I guess it was predestined. . . .

Which reminds me of the old joke about the three ministers at an ecumenical conference. The Baptist minsister walks down a flight of stairs to the conference room and trips over a wrinkle in the rug. He tumbles down the stairs and lands in a heap at the bottom.

In pain and distress, he raises his hands heavenward and cries out, "Oh God, you are just even in discipline! What sin have I committed that you have judged me thus?"

The Methodist minister tumbles down at the same place. At the bottom picks himself up, kneels with hands clasped and prays, "O Lord, tribulation hath befallen me, but with thy Spirit to guide me I shall perservere to glory!"

Then comes the Presbyterian, who falls like the others. He stands, brushes his clothes off and says, "Well Lord, I'm glad that's checked off the list for today."

by Donald Sensing, 5/17/2004 10:32:00 PM. Permalink |

Same-sex "marriage"
I use quotes around "marriage" because I have already explained at some length why same-sex partnerships cannot truly be marriages.

Justin Katz of Rhode Island has bloged a lot more than I have about this issue, and today, when Massachussetts legalizes same-sex "marriage," he has posted an essay he wrote for his state's legislature on this issue. "Rhode Island has two competing bills in the legislature, one defining marriage as it is already defined, and the other defining homosexuals into it."

You can read the essay here.

by Donald Sensing, 5/17/2004 03:06:00 PM. Permalink |

Guitars for soldiers
Chief Wiggles linked to a story about a Louisiana maker of custom guitars who is sending them to Iraq.

CA Guitars is putting the final touches on six carbon composite acoustic guitars, which will soon be shipped to recreation rooms at U.S. bases throughout Iraq. Each guitar, worth $1,200 to $1,800, comes with an accessories package worth about $200. The package, donated by Glenwood Guitars and Music in Glenwood, Iowa, includes an electronic tuner, a leather strap, picks, a string winder, extra sets of strings, a polish cloth and a Lee Oskar harmonica.

The guitars for the troops program is part of the famed Operation Give. The web site has a link button to donate online or you can give by check or mail:

Operation Give
15915 Yukon Lane
Rockville, MD 20855

Thisw is one of the earliest and best programs that enables individual Americans to reach out to the Iraqi people.

by Donald Sensing, 5/17/2004 01:22:00 PM. Permalink |

Why women will never be infantry
This photo and its accompanying text says it all. It was written by a paratrooper of the US Army's 173d Airborne Brigade who jumped with the brigade into northern Iraq. Fascinating story!

We descended from 20,000 feet to an altitude of 600 in less than 12 minutes. If you have never experienced this sensation, imagine being pulled down by twelve people as you try to maintain your balance. All of us were weighted down so heavily with weapons, ammo, food, squad equipment, etc..I weigh 160lbs soaking wet. After I was weighed with all of my gear, I topped the scales at over 320lbs. This was light compared to my boys who were jumping in mortar gear and the machine gunners. ...

[after landing on the drop zone --] The mud was so deep in places, it was coming up to our waists. It didnt help that we were all carrying rucks that were the weight of small children. It was so dark that we had to stop often in order to make sure we were good to go. After a nice one hour stroll thru the mud, we finally linked up with our boys.

He later reported that it was 36 days before he got to take a shower.

by Donald Sensing, 5/17/2004 12:18:00 PM. Permalink |

Iraq terrorists use military chemical weapon
Reuters is reporting that terrorists used an artillery chemical round as a roadside bomb that exploded a few days ago. The shell contained sarin nerve agent. US military forces in Iraq also reported that mustard agents have also been found, according to other new reports.

The question remains whether the terrorists knew the shell was a chemical shell. Speaking as a former artilleryman, I know that all shells are marked to indicate what kind of shell they are. The United States paints each type a shell a different color in addition to stenciling in words on the side what kind of shell it is. All other armies use similar systems.

No casualties were reported in the explosion. According to Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, interview on cable news,

the shell was a 155mm shell, a medium-size artillery shell and a very common caliber used around the world. It was a "binary" round, meaning that the chemical contents are inert until the shell is fired. The shock of firing (the g-force setback due to acceleration) ruptures a thin membrane between two compartments in the shell, resulting in the contents of the two compartments mixing in flight. This mixture is the lethal chemical.

The date the round was manufactured has not been determined.

The IED maker probably didn't know the round was a chemical round.

Chemical weapons are, of course, one of the tryptich of WMDs - weapons of mass destruction. So the question of whether Iraq really did possess WMDs seems pretty settled now, doesn't it?

Update: Andrew Olmsted has more insights.

by Donald Sensing, 5/17/2004 11:59:00 AM. Permalink |

Did the State Dept. screw up the war's aftermath?
Tom Donelson, author of Economics 101 and Other Thoughts and Empire of Liberty, says there is good reason that if the Iraq War's aftermath seems quagmirish, the blame really rests at Colin Powell's feet, not Donald Rumsfeld's.

While Rumsfeld feet is being held to the fire, I will defend the embattled Secretary of Defense. Quite frankly, Rumsfeld has been blamed far too much and others such as Secretary of State Colin Powell far too little.

From Barbara Lerner on Rumsfeld strategy post Iraq War- “ Rumsfeld's plan was to train and equip — and then transport to Iraq — some 10,000 Shia and Sunni freedom fighters led by Shia exile leader Ahmed Chalabi and his cohorts in the INC, the multi-ethnic anti-Saddam coalition he created. There, they would have joined with thousands of experienced Kurdish freedom fighters, ably led, politically and militarily, by Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani. Working with our special forces, this trio would have sprung into action at the start of the war, striking from the north, helping to drive Baathist thugs from power, and joining Coalition forces in the liberation of Baghdad. That would have put a proud, victorious, multi-ethnic Iraqi face on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and it would have given enormous prestige to three stubbornly independent and unashamedly pro-American Iraqi freedom fighters: Chalabi, Talabani, and Barzani.”

This plan was shelved by those within the State department, who failed to give Chalabi much help and in some quarters, declaring war on the one Iraqi- who was our biggest supporter. Instead of an Iraqi liberation army of 10,000 plus, we ended up with an army of hundreds. Thus weakening the power base of the incoming Iraqi government.

Tom's site can be a little tough to navigate - his posts are not individually permalinked. This is from a four-part series that began May 6, so page down until you find it. The excerpt is from Part 2 of May 11.

by Donald Sensing, 5/15/2004 05:21:00 PM. Permalink |

No further comment
Relevant to my earlier posts (here and here) about, uh, "incomplete" media coverage of Iraq, Chris Muir, author of Day by Day, kindly emailed me his cartoon from yesterday. Thanks, Chris!

Update: Fred Barnes just said on Fox News, "The media can't tell you what to think, but it can tell you what to think about." Hence, in what stories the media choose to cover, to what extent and in what way shapes the debate. Barnes concluded that the media stayed focused on Abu Ghraib to the exclusion of Nick Berg because the abuse scandal fit readily into the media's existing template on Iraq and Berg's murder did not. And really, you do know what that template is: I refer you once again the the Telegraph article excerpted by Glenn Reynolds. Consider this, too.

by Donald Sensing, 5/15/2004 03:41:00 PM. Permalink |

United Methodist bishops resolve on Iraq
Not much depth evident

The United Methodist Council of Bishops passed a resolution (that speaks only for the council) which states in part that it deplores,

... the cycle of violence in which the United States is engaged has created a context for the denigration of human dignity ...

News flash 1: all war denigrates human dignity. News flash 2: This is not a "cycle of violence." It is warfare, which is quite another thing.

The implication seems to be that if only the United States would stop killing terrorists, they would stop killing us. This war, so the council implies, is really just a tit-for-tat exercise with no rationale. Peace will bloom automatically if we simply step outside the so-called "cycle of violence."

This is literally kindergarten-level thinking. "Just stop it!" is how parents and teachers deal with little kids because their disputes are inconsequential, done for inconsequential reasons. It really doesn't matter whether Billy or Bobby had the ball first, so demanding that they stop slapping one another over it is reasonable.

But is that where the thinking level of UMC's Council of Bishops is stuck, at kindergarten? Do they really mean to imply - and imply they certainly do - that we are fighting this war over inconsequential reasons, and therefore we should just stop it?

I note as well that the bishops' statement also credits only the United States as engaging in the cycle of violence; only the United States has created a "context for the denigration of human dignity." The statement makes no mention of al Qaeda terrorists or Baathist insurgents. The men who use women and children as human shields in Fallujah (Baathists) or saw off the heads of bound captives (al Qaeda) get a pass when it comes to the denigration of human dignity. Only America, it seems, shedding its blood to bring democracy, freedom and human rights - including women's rights - to Iraq, only America is guilty.

Need further evidence? Here is what the resolution actually resolved in favor of:

Therefore, The Council of Bishops of The United Methodist Church:

1. Laments the continued warfare by the United States and coalition forces.

Again, note that there is no lament about continued warfare by al Qaeda or Baathist dead-enders. I would have thought that with Jordan recently announcing it had broken a terrorist plot that would have killed tens of thousands of Jordanian civilians, the Council of Bishops might have been minimally aware that their so-called cycle of violence has more than an American foot on the pedal. But no. Only America's warmaking is lamented. Islamofascists get to kill and rape and behead and destroy, unlamented.

Continuing:

2. Prays for military personnel and their families who have sacrificed as a result of this war and for a swift end to the destruction and violence raging in Iraq.

No problem here. This is a good thing for which I thank the council.

3. Asks the United States government to request that the United Nations become involved in the transition process to a new Iraqi government.

4. Requests the United Nations to establish a legitimate transitional government of Iraq to maintain the peace and safeguard sustainable development efforts.

The UN part I have already posted about. But let's decode the rest; it won't take long:

"legitimate transitional government" = "any transitional government untainted by American influence."

"maintain the peace" = "don't fight back against al Qaeda and Baathists"

"safeguard sustainable development efforts" = "impose central economic planning along a socialist model." (So much for a truly free Iraq if that comes about. There is no political freedom if there is no economic freedom.)

Continuing:

5. Calls for the rebuilding of Iraq and other nations in the Middle East through a multinational development plan that honors the participation of the peoples of the region and gives them hope for the future.

What "other nations in the Middle East" need rebuilding? Why are "other nations" included here? Oh, right - Palestine, which is not a nation at all but would have been years ago if Yasir Arafat hadn't turned it down.

"multinational development plan" = UN administration again.

"honors the participation of the peoples of the region" - Forget that "honors" is an inexact word that has no utility in formulating policy. I assume the council means that contracts should be let to companies based in the Middle East, and Middle Eastern workers should be hired. I don't have a problem with that provided that they actually can do the work, on time and to standard. But the track record of such companies is not impressive. Furthermore, the owners of such companies are either the national governments or non-government men with family connections to government leaders. In neither case will the workers benefit. Both government and business in the Arab lands operate as despotisms for the enrichment and benefit of their rulers or owners. Just consider the bin Laden family in Saudi Arabia. The workers get squat and are often imported from southern Asia countries anyway. In Saudi Arabia the workers, especially women, are in fact often put into chattel slavery. If the Council of Bishops did not know this, then it should have done more homework before resolving anything. If it did know this, why did it ignore it?

Native-owned corporations also have a track record of financing the bad guys. Why we would want to do that I can't imagine.

6. Invites United Methodists throughout the world to pray for a new era of peace and to advocate for public policies that promote justice, life, and reconciliation among adversaries.

Sounds good, but before there can be peace justice must be established. That means that terrorism must be vanquished as the precondition to everything else. For the time being, there is no other way to do that except through military means.

As a United Methodist, I do promote "public policies that promote justice, life, and reconciliation among adversaries" for the people of Iraq. And every one of those policies begins with defeating terrorism. Unless that is done, no amount of advocacy and sweet-sounding words will do any good.

Update: I should point out that my own bishop, William Morris, has a son who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom as a member of the 101st Airborne Division. Bishop Morris is one of the sound members of the council. There are others.

Also, see this piece by Alan Wisdom at the Institute on Religion and Democracy that slices and dices both the National Council of Churches letter and the Council of Bishops' resolution.

by Donald Sensing, 5/14/2004 03:30:00 PM. Permalink |

Wearing underwear on their heads
Reader Tom Nally emails,

If forcing an Iraqi detainee to wear underwear on his head would have lead to information about the whereabouts of Nick Berg prior to Berg's murder, would that have been justified?

Of course. I posted earlier in objection to torture of prisoners, and this is not torture.

Update: Phil Carter explains how torture is actually counterproductive.

by Donald Sensing, 5/14/2004 01:31:00 PM. Permalink |

The new pornographers
What do "CBS, NBC, ABC, 60 Minutes, the New Yorker, The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, Time and all their ilk right down to the last man and woman that makes up their ranks" have in common?

They "have become nothing better than pornographers," says Vanderleun.

They’ve tried it. They like it. There will be more. “This just in: more prison porn from Iraq.”

Pretty soon, we can count on a splash page coming up when we log to newyorktimes.com offering : “FREE! HOT! 1,000 pictures of naked Iraqi prisoners and full-streaming video for only $2.99 for the first three days. Click here if you are really, really, really over 18.”

As Gary Snyder has observed: “Once a bear gets hooked on garbage, there’s no cure.”

Read the whole thing.

by Donald Sensing, 5/14/2004 11:08:00 AM. Permalink |

Nick Berg - down the memory hole
The good people of West Chester, Penn., Nick Berg's hometown, can't be fooled, saying that,

... his beheading by Islamists in Iraq has been underplayed by journalists, who are devoting more attention to the Iraqi prisoner-abuse scandal. ...

"I'm troubled by how the media and our politicians are focused on the [Abu Ghraib] prison," he said. "I don't think Mr. Berg and the four contractors executed in Fallujah [last month] are receiving a proper focus."

Not coincidentally, May 12 was a record setter across the blogosphere for readership. Blogs covering political and military affairs received their highest traffic counts since the Iraq campaign.

Only on April 8, 2003 has my site received more traffic than it did Wednesday. That was the day US Marines pulled down Saddam's statue in Firdos Square, Baghdad. I still-captured some shots of TV coverage and posted them. Best of the Web Today linked to the post; I recall that my blog got about 30,000 unique hits as the result.

Wednesday, I got more than 11,000 page views and more than 9,000 unique hits, almost thrice as many hits as usual.

So to all new readers, welcome, and thank you for reading!

Glenn Reynolds posted that he got 200,000 views Wednesday. Little Green Footballs reported more than 50,000 visitors before the day was near done.

Unquestionably the reason was the story and video of Nick Berg being beheaded. LGF said that more than half its hits came from search pages with a variation of search terms including the name and "beheading," "video" and so forth. Lycos search engine reported that its top 10 search requests for the day all had "Nick Berg" in them.

For the first few hours Wednesday easily 95 percent of my referrals were from msn.com searches for the Berg murder. Andrew Sullivan reported,

Every political blog site has just seen an exponential jump in traffic - far more than anything that occurred during the Abu Ghraib unfolding. My traffic went through the roof yesterday, and, according to Alexa, so did everyone else's.

Other bloggers are already covering this phenom, so I won't try, except to note that for breaking news, the internet is fast becoming the medium of choice for information consumers. And within the internet, blogs are becoming the medium of choice for one and only one reason: we don't compete with each other as news media outlets and sites do.

Blogs do not do original reporting except very rarely and never (yet) for breaking news of national interest. For original reporting you have to turn to mainline media. And I am sure their sites got buried Wednesday, too. So why are blogs becoming sources of choice?

Because FoxNews.com won't link to CNN which won't link to the WaPo which won't link to MSNBC which won't link to the NYT, etc. Mainline news media remain vertical. But blogs are horizontal. Not only will we link to all those sites, we link to one another. In fact, we have to link that way because otherwise blogs vanish from internet consciousness.

Another thing that led people to blogs Wednesday (and still does) is that for mainline news media, the Nick Berg atrocity practically disappeared down the memory hole almost as fast as it appeared. As Jeff Jarvis wrote on his blog,

We can look at the traffic on stories about an evil enemy killing one of our innocents versus stories about -- to go to Page One of the NY Times today: stories about our "abuse" and even a story blaming us for the murder of our innocent. ...

The people have their own newspaper now. And you're looking at it [the blog].

Blogs are synergistic aggregators. No one blog is near as comprehensive as any mainline media site (even mine, haha). But because bloggers are dedicated linkers, as a group we become extremely comprehensive in scope. And nowhere does this shine through as when the mainline media try to quash a story, as they pretty much tried to do with the Berg story.

by Donald Sensing, 5/14/2004 06:38:00 AM. Permalink |

Humor break
With the news being so grim here are some lousy jokes.

Why was the calendar so sad? Because its days were numbered.

A lot of money is tainted. 'Taint yours, 'taint mine.

A boiled egg in the morning is hard to beat.

The short fortuneteller who escaped from prison was a small medium at large.

When you've seen one shopping center you've seen a mall.

If you jump off a Paris bridge it proves you're in Seine.

When my wife saw her first gray hair she thought she'd dye.

Bakers trade bread recipes on a knead to know basis.

Santa's helpers are subordinate clauses.

Acupuncture is a jab well done.

by Donald Sensing, 5/13/2004 09:47:00 PM. Permalink |

Beheading enemies has long Islam history
So reports LGF, citing this article.

Such gruesome acts are in fact sanctioned by core Islamic sacred texts, and classical Muslim jurisprudence. Empty claims that jihad decapitations are somehow “alien to true Islam,” however well-intentioned, undermine serious efforts to reform and desacralize Islamic doctrine. This process will only begin with frank discussion, both between non-Muslims and Muslims, and within the Muslim community.

I remind once again that Islam is not a "religion pf peace," it is a religion of submission, which is what "islam" means.

Update: Amir Taheri writes at some length about the brutal history of beheading in Islam.

One [present-day] Algerian specialist in slitting throats and cutting off heads was known as Momo le Nain (Muhammad the Midget). He was a 20-plus-year-old butcher's apprentice recruited by the GIA [the Islamic Armed Group, i.e., terrorists - DS] for the purpose of cutting off people's heads. In 1996 in Ben-Talha, a suburb of the capital Algiers, Momo cut off a record 86 heads in one night, including the heads of more than a dozen children.

In recognition of his exemplary act of piety, the GIA sent him to Mecca for pilgrimage. Last time we checked, Momo was still at large somewhere in Algeria.

Four years ago, Iran was shocked by the murder of the well-known dissident leader Dariush Foruhar and his wife Parvaneh. The couple, in their 70s, had their heads chopped off and displayed on their mantelpiece. The regime blamed "rogue elements" within its Ministry for Intelligence and Security. But no one was punished.

Cutting heads is frequently practiced against clerics from non-Islamic faiths or even rival Islamic sects. At least four Christian priests and nine Sunni Muslim muftis have been murdered in that way in Iran since 2001.

As he says, we can almost certainly expect more of the same to come.

by Donald Sensing, 5/13/2004 08:28:00 PM. Permalink |

Churches vote to condemn Iraqis to deadly terror
To paraphrase what Will Rogers said about the Democratic party, I am not a member of any organized religion, I'm a United Methodist. And the UMC is a member of the National Council of Churches. And the NCC is a refuge for transnational progressivists, not to mention political neo-Marxists.

Therefore, it is utterly unsurprising that the NCC has determined

... that US policy in Iraq has become so destructive [that] the United Nations should take over.

I hardly know where to begin. How about a cursory look at the UN's record?

Since 1999, when UN peacekeepers entered Bosnia,

... the number of institutions where women and girls are being [sexually] exploited has mushroomed from 18 to 200 in 2003, according to the report. Girls as young as 11 have been lured under false pretenses from places like Moldova, the Ukraine and Bulgaria to work in the sex trade. [link]

More sex troubles in Eritrea, where the government accuses the UN of "destabilizing the region" and a "string of offences ... including housing criminals, paedophilia, making pornography and even using the national currency as toilet paper." [link]

In Sierra Leone, site of the largest mission in the world (16,000 troops under UN command), women are so frequently raped by UN "peacekeepers" that Human Rights Watch issued a special report.

"What is particularly shocking and appalling is that those people who ought to be there protecting the local population have actually become perpetrators," said Steve Crawshaw, the London director of Human Rights Watch. "It's also very disappointing that there seems to be a deep reluctance to investigate and prosecute these very serious crimes. To turn away from a problem like that is a terrible dereliction of duty."[link]

What confidence would the Iraqi people have in a UN administration when the UN was a principal agent in keeping Saddam in power since 1991? Saddam bribed scores of people, not all of them UN officials, to keep UN-overwatched money coming to him in the "oil fotr food" program. Men he bribed included Benon Sevan, "the U.N. official directly responsible for the oil-for-food program."

On April 17,

... two American women and an American man were slain in Kosovo, and eleven people were injured when they came under armed attack by a Palestinian from Jordan. The killer was a member of the same body in which they served: the United Nations police force in the territory. [link]

The same site also reports that the media in Kosovo operate "under heavy UN censorship," which would doubtless thrill the Iraqis.

Freed Iraq's foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, told the UN last December,

"The United Nations as an organization failed to help rescue the Iraqi people from a murderous tyranny that lasted over 35 years, and today we are unearthing thousands of victims in horrifying testament to that failure."

He declared, "The U.N. must not fail the Iraqi people again."[link]

There is no compelling reason to believe that the UN's prospects in Iraq are any better than its dismal track record.

There are two key things to remember: (1) the United Nations has no troops of its own. Any UN peacekeeping operation (PKO) is manned by soldiers and logistics donated by member states. (2) The UN has no money of its own. It is funded by contributions paid by member states.

What this means in practice is that a fairly small number of countries provide almost all the money and almost all the decently-trained troops. Outside Europe and the Anglosphere, very few nations can field a force that is both numerically significant and suitably trained and equipped for PKO and stability operations. As the record sadly shows, a large number of such troops come from countries where the military is an oppressor class, not a protector.

"Blue helmet" soldiers answer to no authority but their own national command. The UN has no prosecutorial authority for troops it supposedly commands. When UN troops commit misconduct or crimes, all the UN command can do is request their national command send them home.

But should the UN be wholly cut out? Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jose Ramos-Horta says no.

Now is the time for Washington to show leadership by ensuring that the U.N. plays the central role in building a new Iraq. As an East Timorese, I am well aware of the international body's limits, having seen first hand its impotence in the face of Indonesia's invasion of my country in 1975. The U.N. is the sum of our qualities and weaknesses, our selfish national interests and personal vanities. For all its shortcomings, it is the only international organization we all feel part of; it should be cherished rather than further weakened. While the U.S. will continue to play a critical role in ensuring security in Iraq, a U.N.-led peacekeeping force would enable many Arab and Muslim nations to join in and help isolate the extremists.

I think this is seriously misguided because Mr. Ramos-Horta seems to think that "many Arab and Muslim nations" are committed to Iraq's development into a secular, democratic nation. That is exactly what they do not want. A UN operation consisting of substantial Arab forces would be Iraq's death knell.

As Desi Arnaz might say, "Kofi, you have some 'splainin' to do," starting with making a truly convincing case why the UN's performance will be different in Iraq than most of the rest of the world. Should we demand performance guarantees? Absolutely.

Update: Glenn Reynolds links to a Telegraph article about how the UN mission for Sudan relief is a disaster in itself.

"What is going on here is very dark," said one western aid worker at a non-UN agency.

"Money seems to have disappeared. Who knows whether it has been stolen or whether it has just disappeared in the UN machine. The inefficiency is astounding."

Astounding, yes. Surprising, no.

Update: Eric Rasmusen at Indiana University has documented severe misconduct by non-US, Western troops under UN command, and it ain't pretty.

Update: Fouad Ajami points out another curse the UN would bring to Iraq: the curse of a return to pan-Arabism. Ajami says, speaking of the UN's chief representative to the poltical reconstruction of Iraq, Algerian Lakhdar Brahimi,

Mr. Brahimi owes us no loyalty. His prescription of a "technocratic government" for Iraq--which the Bush administration embraced only to retreat from, by latest accounts--is a cunning assault on the independent political life of Iraq. The Algerian seeks to return Iraq to the pan-Arab councils of power. His entire policy seeks nothing less than a rout of the gains which the Kurds and the Shiites have secured after the fall of the Tikriti-Baathist edifice. The Shiites have seen through his scheme. A history of disinheritance has given them the knowledge they need to recognize those who bear them ill will. American power may not be obligated--and should not be--to deliver the Shiites a new dominion in Iraq. But we can't once more consign them to the mercy of their enemies in the Arab world. At any rate, it is too late in the hour for such a policy, for the genie is out of the bottle and the Shiites will fight back. Gone are their old timidity and quietism. Their rejection of Mr. Brahimi's diplomacy is now laid out for everyone to see.

What those calling for the UN to take over the whole operation do not seem to grasp is that the UN does not share their agenda. By and large (but not completely) the American pro-UN advocates really have no vision for Iraq much different than that explained by the Bush administration. They just don't want Bush to be the one who brings it about.

But they need to understand that the UN plan for Iraq is pretty much restoration of the status quo ante bellum, without Saddam or his terror regime, but also without the true freedom the Iraqi peoples deserve so richly. What the UN apparatus certainly does not want is an Iraq whose people are both economically and politically free.

by Donald Sensing, 5/13/2004 08:20:00 PM. Permalink |

There is no but, part 2
Ah, moral relativism. How I long for easy copouts from difficult issues! I posted a week or so ago about how the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison could not be excused. You know, the "yes, but . . ." construction: "Yes, the abuse and humiliation and battery of the Iraqi detainees was awful . . . but look how badly Saddam treated people in prison. Look what the Iraqis did to those four contractors on March 31, etc etc, etc.

"Yes but" is rearing its ugly head again, this time more despicably in relation to Nick Berg's brutal beheading by al Qaeda terrorists. Now the Boston Globe wallows in profoundly ignorant relativism:

Those quick to assert that the treatment of Berg was far worse than the US treatment of its prisoners miss an essential point.

The United States is now part of a cycle of violence in Iraq that is leading in the wrong direction. The murder and mutilation of four American contract workers in Fallujah were infuriating. Logic might say an attack on Fallujah to root out the wrongdoers was justified. But when that attack kills scores of innocents along with some insurgents, it may generate more hostility and deepen the cycle of violence.

"Yes, the sawing off of Berg's head from his body was awful . . . but look what are doing in Fallujah!"

Has the Globe no sense of decency? Has the Globe no sense of shame? Has the Globe no intelligence at all? Uh, well, I guess not.

And to think that the media get annoyed - offended, even! - when they are accused of media bias!

by Donald Sensing, 5/13/2004 04:09:00 PM. Permalink |

A buggy day
I'm battling some kind of bug I picked up somewhere, so blogging will likely be light for the nonce.

(I always get a kick out of writing, "for the nonce." It sounds so Shakespearean.)

by Donald Sensing, 5/13/2004 04:07:00 PM. Permalink |

Questions for evolutionists
Fred Reed is, as someone recently wrote, "an acquired taste." Here he questions the "Lockstep Thinking On Evolution" with a series of questions. Here are two, a little truncated:

(5) If intelligence promotes survival, why did it appear so late? If it doesn’t promote survival, why did it appear at all?

(6) People have a wretched sense of smell and mediocre hearing. Why?

Answers, anyone?

by Donald Sensing, 5/12/2004 09:46:00 PM. Permalink |

Kerry's picks for defense secretary
Rumsfeld fails to make the short list. Or the long one.

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry named Senators John McCain, John Warner and Carl Levin as potential nominees for secretary of defense in his administration should he be elected this fall. He also said he might tap Bill Clinton's SecDef (after Les Aspin served), William Perry.

Responding to "concerns that a change in Pentagon leadership could hurt the war effort" and that Rumsfeld should stay on even if Kerry wins, Kerry told interviewer Don Imus,

If America has reached a point where only one person has the ability in our great democracy to manage the Pentagon and to continue or to put in place a better policy even, we're in deeper trouble than you think. I don't accept that. I just don't accept that. I think that's an excuse. The fact is that we need a change in policy.

The expectation that Kerry will retain any Bush appointee in office, including Clinton CIA-chief holdover George Tenet, is just looney. That being said, Kerry's point is well said that no one in the Pentagon, including Rumsfeld, is somehow indispensable.

As Charles de Gaulle said, "Cemeteries are full of indispensable men."

by Donald Sensing, 5/12/2004 01:34:00 PM. Permalink |

US strikes Karbala mosque
US Army forces in Karbala took the Mukhaiyam Mosque there under fire early today (link).

The strike on the Mukhaiyam Mosque brought hundreds of American soldiers to within a third of a mile of two of the holiest sites in Shiite Islam, the shrines of the martyrs Hussein and Abbas. A building behind the mosque was fired on, detonating a huge weapons cache, and soldiers stormed the mosque, chasing insurgents out into a hotel and alley.

Fighting continues as American soldiers tighten the ring around Muqtada al-Sadr.

by Donald Sensing, 5/12/2004 08:07:00 AM. Permalink |

Retribution
I was an artillery second lieutenant in 1978, serving in the 2d US Infantry Division in South Korea. My battalion was in the field one spring day; my battery was moving to a new firing position along a river that wound through the countryside. I don't recall the name of the river. The terrain there was rugged but striking to see - a long, flat valley on our side of the river, on the other steep, tall hills.

We emplaced our howitzers a few hundred meters from the base of a very steep escarpment that reached at least 150 feet into the air. It was a tower, almost, and the river curved sharply around its base. I took some pictures, but Lord knows where they are now.

There was a South Korean unit exercising not far away. By the bye, their sergeant-major walked over to us; he happened to approach me first. He was in his fifties, I guessed, with many years service. He looked to be one tough dude.

He spoke broken English, fortunately, since I didn't speak any Korean. Through gestures and words, he related how during the Korean War he had seen a fight here from across the river. The Chinese had trapped a company of US Marines at the foot of the escarpment. The Marines, entirely cut off, fought until their ammunition was gone. Then they shattered their weapons and waited to be taken captive.

The Chinese swarmed in and yanked the Marines into a single file. They bound their hands behind them. They stripped them of their outer clothing and boots and at bayonet point marched them to the peak of the escarpment. One at a time, they threw the Marines onto the riverbank more than 150 feet below.

"More than one hundred Marines," said the sergeant major. "War very rough." He grimaced. "Marines kill many Chinese after that day. None made prisoner. All killed."

During World War II's Battle of the Bulge, an American patrol came upon a small church that was badly damaged. A corpse of an American soldier was hanging by the neck from a beam across one of the windows. Because of the bitterly cold temperatures, the body was preserved - including bruises and swelling of the face and neck.

The patrol quickly concluded the dead man had been captured by the Germans, beaten while being interrogated, then hanged. The patrol brought him down and covered the body near the church as best they could so it could be retrieved later.

They they went forth in a killing mood. As one of the soldiers later related, the next time a German patrol came to the church, they found three dead German soldiers, hanged by the neck from the same window.

After that day, the Germans murdered no more prisoners in that sector. Neither did the Americans.

I wonder what is going through the minds of American Marines and soldiers in Iraq now. War is bitter, bloody business. The longer it goes on, the more inhibitions are shed. Acts once shunned as cruelty become almost passé. It was Stephen Ambrose, I think, who related that near the end of the second world war a platoon of GIs came upon about 30 German soldiers hiding in a ravine several feet deep. The Germans threw up their hands. The Americans gunned them all down.

An American medic related that in North Africa, the German and American medics would often assist each other in treating all the wounded after a firefight, without regard to nationality. By the time the war moved into France, he said, the medics would shoot at each other.

"War is cruelty and you cannot refine it," said Union Gen. William T. Sherman. He was, I think, the first American general to systemize war. His march from Tennessee through Georgia to Savannah was the deliberate, planned, quality-controlled destruction of almost everything he found in a path sixty miles wide. Sherman's army left Atlanta a burned husk, occupied Savannah and then turned north into South Carolina, where he left Columbia a charred ruin.

D. W. Brogan, commenting on America's entry into WW2, said,

For Americans war is almost all of the time a nuisance, and military skill is a luxury like Mah-Jongg. But when the issue is brought home to them, war becomes as important, for the necessary period, as business or sport. And it is hard to decide which is likely to be the more ominous for the Axis - an American decision that this is sport, or that it is business.

At the industrial, macro level of war, this is quite correct. But if the combat is not soon ended, the terrorists (or so-called "militants" or "insurgents") will learn something else: they have made the war personal. When that happens, the American experience of war shows that our troops will shed the veneer of restraint like a snake's skin. And for every American head Zarqawi severs, he will soon find three of his own men's heads.

by Donald Sensing, 5/12/2004 07:40:00 AM. Permalink |

William T. Sherman to Iraqi terrorists
What would Sherman say to them? Perhaps this.

by Donald Sensing, 5/11/2004 09:36:00 PM. Permalink |

We heard about the sadists, but not this man
A Marine Corps release about Capt. Brian R. Chontosh, who earned the Navy Cross (second only to the Medal of Honor) by responding to an ambush thus:

He had his driver move the vehicle through a breach along his flank, where he was immediately taken under fire from an entrenched machine gun. Without hesitation, Chontosh ordered the driver to advance directly at the enemy position enabling his .50 caliber machine gunner to silence the enemy.

He then directed his driver into the enemy trench, where he exited his vehicle and began to clear the trench with an M16A2 service rifle and 9 millimeter pistol. His ammunition depleted, Chontosh, with complete disregard for his safety, twice picked up discarded enemy rifles and continued his ferocious attack.

When a Marine following him found an enemy rocket propelled grenade launcher, Chontosh used it to destroy yet another group of enemy soldiers.

When his audacious attack ended, he had cleared over 200 meters of the enemy trench, killing more than 20 enemy soldiers and wounding several others.

Vanderleun asks,

But you heard nothing about it, did you? You heard, instead, about the sadists until you couldn’t stand to hear any more and then you heard more. You heard about the man from an ancient war who did or did not toss medals away until you couldn’t care about it less and then you heard more. ...

Courage, though, real physical courage that requires a man to put the lives of his comrades above his own life, is beyond the shrunken moral scope of those who’ve spent the last week grinding out every last drop of rancid, phony outrage out of the Iraq Prison centerfolds they been displaying. Outrage and shock may have been permissible and even correct at the outset of the incident, but now doesn’t it seem as if there’s an element of perverse enjoyment creeping into the whole thing?

No, we will hear almost exclusively about the rare and not-terribly-brutal excesses of American troops, but we won't hear about Capt. Chontosh except by accident, and there will be no national-media coverage of these soldiers, either, or these. Or these.

by Donald Sensing, 5/11/2004 09:09:00 PM. Permalink |

Al Gore's TV problem
As you may have heard, Al Gore has bought a cable TV channel and intends to become the Rupert Murdoch (okay, maybe not Murdoch) of people in the 18-34 year-old demographic.

But SFGate's Tim Brandon has some pointed advice for Al, starting with the caution that getting elected is easier than doing TV.

With reporting on your goals for cable content sketchy and dreamy at best, it has also been said you're looking for people 18-to-34, which is a nice little concession that you might not get the twentysomethings but could rally at the 11th hour and snag the early thirtysomethings, who are, perhaps but not proof-positive, a little wiser, a little more curious about the world. If this is true, then, just to add to the thing about the 18-to-34 demographic, there's this: Great. Welcome aboard. Everybody wants the 18-to-34 demographic. Write that down -- everybody.

A funny piece but packed with warnings for Al or anyone else who thinks that commercially-viable TV is not too tough to do. Hat tip: AlphPatriot.

by Donald Sensing, 5/11/2004 09:01:00 PM. Permalink |

Take George Bush for a boat ride?
Air America hostess says President Bush should be shot

In the classic mobster movies of The GodFather series, the day comes when Michael Corleone, the new godfather of the Corleone crime family, decides to eliminate his enemies and settle old scores.

One of the men marked for death is his own brother, Freddie (usually, "Fredo"), who had stupidly made a deal with another family that had led to an unsuccessful hit on Michael. "I didn't know it was going to be a hit!" he had protested to Michael - successfully, he thought.

But on the fatal day, he goes fishing with one of Michael's trusted capos. They putter to the middle of the lake where the capo shoots Fredo dead.

Thanks to RCP, we learn that,

Yesterday on her Air America radio show, Randi Rhodes said that's exactly what should be done to President Bush. Rhodes commented that Bush was like Fredo Corleone and that either Poppy or Jeb should take W. out for a fishing trip and blow him away.

After imitating the sound of gun going off Rhodes said, "Works for me." Nice.

You can hear the clip here.

Air America = hate radio.

by Donald Sensing, 5/11/2004 08:31:00 PM. Permalink |

Condoleeza Rice and the Jubilee
Gordon Gee, the chancellor of my M.Div. alma mater, Vanderbilt University, will present National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice with a "distinguished public service" medal and the Chancellor's Medal when she appears there this month to address the graduating class the day before commencement. But, predictably, some of the faculty are protesting, including Gee's wife, who is an associate professor of public policy at Vandy.

A group of Vanderbilt University students and employees will tell Chancellor Gordon Gee today that the university's decision to honor national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, an architect of the Bush administration's decision to go to war with Iraq, is "inappropriate and incomprehensible." ...

"We stand ashamed and angry that our good will is being abused by the honoring of Dr. Rice," group members wrote in letters some of them plan to deliver to Gordon Gee at his office today. "We feel compelled to state: Not in our name!"

But Gee isn't backing down, perhaps because, as Bill Hobbs observes, "less than two percent of the Vanderbilt community signed the petition."

Imagine - the Left protesting a liberal university honoring a black woman. Who'd a-thunk it? I guess the Jubilee has finally arrived.

by Donald Sensing, 5/11/2004 05:09:00 PM. Permalink |

Meanwhile, back in the Middle Ages
By now the word has gotten around that in response to the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib by US soldiers, terrorists in Iraq affiliated with al Qaeda captured and beheaded American civilian Nick Berg, 26., whose body was found near a Baghdad highway Saturday. The terrorists videotaped his murder, and the tape was posted on an Arab web site .Reports AP,

The video showed five men wearing headscarves and black ski masks, standing over a bound man in an orange jumpsuit who identified himself as an American from Philadelphia.

After reading a statement, the men were seen pulling the man to his side and cutting off his head with a large knife. They then held the head out before the camera.

This story broke the same day that the US Army's Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on the abuse scandal. Taguba was the Army's command investigator of the abuse whose report, coupled with the now-infamous photos, lit the scandal's fuze. In response to news coverage of Taguba's appearance, a commenter at Mudville Gazette observed,

It doesn't matter. They're chopping off the heads of U.S. contractors in Iraq in response to sexual humiliation. This story is almost over. If they kill that U.S. soldier that they're holding hostage in response to the abuse at Abu Ghraib ... this story will disappear. ...

The enemy may be aware of our penchant for self-immolation when we make a mistake, but they can't keep from acting like savages nonetheless. It's difficult to engender sympathy as a weak, defenseless victim in the West if you go around behaving as if it's the Middle Ages.

Bluntly put, but probably correct. A section of the videotape is linked to on this page. Berg's killing is of course murder, a war crime under international law (in fact, his killers are unlawful combatants).

by Donald Sensing, 5/11/2004 04:38:00 PM. Permalink |

"the new erotic-worship genre"
Douglas LeBlanc writes about an emerging worship style:

Writing in the May edition of Touchstone magazine, senior editor S.M. Hutchens sees all sorts of dangers in contemporary church services that emphasize performers and egocentric lyrics. Hutchens begins his essay, "Please Me, O Lord," by describing what he witnessed during his return to an evangelical congregation:
On a recent visit to a fairly typical Evangelical church, we were treated to one of its regular features. A handsome young woman, attractively dressed, stood before the congregation with an eight-inch microphone, the head of which she held gently to her lips while she writhed and cooed a song in which she, with closed eyes and beckoning gestures, begged Jesus, as she worked her way toward its climax, to come fill her emptiness. The crowd liked it.
Kenneth Tanner, a friend of this blog commenting on the post "When bad music happens to a good God," made a similar critique when he cited Marie Barnett's "Breathe" as "perfectly awful" and "a classic of the new erotic-worship genre."

OTOH, Jonathan David observes there is a trend too toward a return to Orthodox worship styles, which quotes surveyor of American religious life, George Barna,

"What we know about Americans is that we view ourselves first and foremost as consumers," said Barna. "Even when we walk in the doors of our churches what we tend to do is to wonder how can I get a good transaction out of this experience. ... So, what we know from our research is that Americans have made worship something that primarily that we do for ourselves. When is it successful? When we feel good."

Concludes David,

This is a big reason why I am now Orthodox. After 30 plus years of trendy music and me driven worship, I was litterally sick to [spiritual] death of worshiping myself every Sunday. When I worship now, it's not a matter of what will I like, but what is pleasing to God and what will heal my soul. Seriously, if I had not found Orthodoxy, I would have had to give up on Christianity altogether.

In case you are wondering, the music at my church (not meaning the hymns, but the anthems and offertories) tends toward late medievalism and Renaissance style. The tonal qualities and harmonies are often simply breathtaking. Sometimes, though, we enjoy American folk music, mostly from the late 18th and middle 19th centuries. Our Easter anthem, for example, was "Now Has Christ Risen from the Dead," by America's first eminent hymnist, William Billings, 1746-1800. (hat tip: Brutally Honest blog)

by Donald Sensing, 5/10/2004 09:51:00 PM. Permalink |

High morale in the new Iraqi Army
That according to Iraqi blogger Mohammed, who relates a conversation he had with a male relative. The unnamed relative had been a draftee in Saddam's army, where graft and corruption were rampant and soldiers were treated as chattel. But now,

The most important thing is that this army has no retards or illiterate in it like the old one. Now education is an essential requirement when applying to serve in the new army and anyone who hasn’t finished high school at least has no place there. In fact most of the volunteers are college and technical institutes graduates.

Everything is new, no more worn out dirty uniforms that only God knows how many people used before you, and they never minded about the size. This time they took our sizes and handed each one of us a new elegant uniform that’s worthy of an officer! It was a common scene, you know, that soldiers wander near their halls in their underwear after training hours. Some of them did that because they didn’t have much to wear when they wash their uniforms, but the majority did it out of custom. Now this is unacceptable, and everyone received a nice comfortable suit to wear after the training hours. ...

My relative’s face was glowing as he continued, "you can’t imagine how much valued we are and how much our religion and traditions are respected. When we pass by a mosque, the officer in charge shouts “no talk” until we pass the mosque by a considerable distance, and when one of the officers enters our hall, if he sees that one of us is praying he remains silent and order us to keep quite until our comrade finishes his prayer.

For the first time in my life, I feel I’m somebody. I’m not a trash as Saddam and his gang tried to make me believe” as he finished his last words his voice went faint as if he was chocking. I felt his pain and tried to change the course of our talk, “how much do you get paid” I asked, “Oh, pretty much, more than enough, thank God” “and what about your meals” I added and he said with a smile, “Oh you won’t believe it. Everything that we couldn’t get in our own homes before and that we only saw when the officers in the old army made a feast to honor a guest! I mean we have everything; meat is essential in every meal, vegetables, fruits apples and bananas. It’s still unbelievable to many of us!” ...

A frown crossed his face as he said "I remember when they used to train us at the most hot hours of the day for hours without allowing us to rest for a while under a shade or drink any water, and when we get almost killed by thirst, we would be forced to drink from the dirty contaminated ditch water. Now we don’t even drink tap water! Each one of us gets more than enough an amount of that healthy bottled water everyday”

To some people this may mean little if anything, but my relative looked at it as something huge, and indeed, before the war, drinking bottled water was really a luxury that a very small percentage of Iraqis could afford. In my house we used to boil the tap water and cool it before drinking it, because we knew it was not safe and we couldn’t afford buying bottled water everyday.

"I feel I’m somebody now. I’m respected and get all what most people get. Do you believe that they threw one of the Iraqi officers out of the army because he used us to do him personal services, like carrying his bags, and when we complained about his behavior, they told him “ Do you see any of us, American officers use our soldiers? You can go home. You still have the mentality of the old regime and you can’t fit in this new army!” imagine that! They listen to our complains, we the soldiers, and bring us justice even if it involved the higher ranked officers. This had never happened in the old army."

Read the whole thing.

by Donald Sensing, 5/10/2004 04:31:00 PM. Permalink |

Karl Marx explains the Bible
I posted last year about the neo-Marxist politicization of the Western Church in the context of the then-ongoing Iraq War.

... the oldline American Protestant churches are dominated by people who are primarily political, not primarily theological in their world view. ... Having predetermined their political identity, they pile on religious language to back it up.

The neo-Marxist politicization of Western Christian theology is not total, but it's very deep. These are men and women who have allowed themselves to be propagandized by postmodern dialectics and see no redeeming virtues in Western civilization, especially America. They have no theology, not really, they have only left-wing political philosophy (and not even a well-done philosophy) that they have dressed up in God talk and called theology.

I also have written that a primary feature of modern Bible scholarship is to liberate Bible students from the Bible rather than immerse them in it (in the endnote to this ).

... the rise to pre-eminence in academia of post-liberal Christian theology and Bible scholarship has intentionally sought to free society from the Bible rather than help lead it to follow it. Massive numbers of papers and books have been written since the mid-twentieth century attempting to show that the Jewish and Christian Scriptures are patriarchal, oppressive documents that tell less the story of humanity's struggle with its relationship with the divine, than they are the record of proto-Marxist class and gender struggles of power, exploitation and domination. ...

Comes now no less a figure than the highly respected UMC Rev. Will Willimon, professor at Duke University Divinity School and dean of the university's chapel. Willimon preached back in 1997,

[I was] Talking to a student who was taking a course on the writing of the Christian apologist and literary critic, C.S. Lewis, I asked, “What have you learned in your course?”

“I have learned that Lewis really was rather sexist…and racist in some of his stereotypes.”

That sort of profound “critical reading” happens here all the time.

The Bible has not been exempt from such critical scrutiny. Feminist scholar, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza writes that “a feminist critical hermeneutics of suspicion places a warning label on all biblical texts: Caution! Could be dangerous to your health and survival” (quoted by Richard Hays, “Salvation by Trust: Reading the Bible Faithfully,” p. 218).

The job of the biblical critic is to unmask the patriarchy behind biblical texts, to show the ways in which the Bible promotes oppression. If you have heard many of my sermons, you know that I am often beneficiary of this “hermeneutics [interpretation] of suspicion.” It is important to read the Bible intelligently, critically, aware that this is treasure in a very earthen vessel, subject to most of the limits of any humanly constructed literature.

However, if the Bible, that source of Christian thought and identity is dismissed as oppressive, where then are we to go for guidance? Or, as our Professor Richard Hays has asked, “If the Bible is dangerous, on what ground do we stand in conducting a critique of scripture that will render it less harmful?”

As the critics have noted, everyone stands somewhere whenever there is interpretation. If we won’t stand with the church in reading the Bible as scripture, as at least potentially the life-giving Word of God, then where will we stand? For feminist critics like Schussler Fiorenza the place to begin to understand the Bible is from “women’s own experience and vision of liberation.” Women’s experience, as she defines it with the help of Marxism , is treated as revelatory. The Bible is carefully scrutinized, but not “women’s experience” [boldface added - DS]

Trouble is, it is easier to see the Bible’s cultural conditioning, the self-deceit, and limits to see our own. Rather than be so suspicious of scripture, a greater intellectual feat would be to be to apply the hermeneutic of suspicion to ourselves. When someone enmeshed in a consumptive, consumerist, culture of radical egotism and individualism tells us first to honor our contemporary standards of judgment before we listen to the Bible, we are right to be, well, suspicious. Why should we bow the tradition of Marx more than we honor Matthew? Why should the viewpoint of Kant, or Descartes demand our submission more than the Saints?

It is of the nature of modernity to tell ourselves that we stand at the summit of human development. Therefore we stand in sovereign judgment on everyone who got here before us. Our arrogance is a hard habit to get over. Therefore, we gather you here, every Sunday, open up the ancient book, bend our lives toward it, and try to listen to the Saints half as much as we listen to ourselves.

Read the whole thing.

by Donald Sensing, 5/10/2004 03:51:00 PM. Permalink |

Why I don't consult "psychics"
Here's one named Lydia Anderson who predicted at the beginning of this year:

The U.S. economy by the end of 2004 will be relatively the same compared to the end of 2003.

Now, I don't know what she means by "relatively the same" except that she's hedging her bets. It's either the same, or very close, or its different.

At any rate, the US economy isn't the same as it was just five months ago. It's much better .

Friday's employment report confirms the economic expansion is accelerating. Creation of 288,000 payroll jobs in April almost doubled the consensus forecast of 150,000.

Coming on top of the 337,000 new jobs created in March (revised up from 308,000), the economy has now created 625,000 jobs in just two months. This is a very impressive performance after months of disappointments.

Not only that, but,

Initial claims for unemployment insurance have dropped steadily and are now the lowest level since October 2000. The insured jobless rate has fallen to 2.3 percent, the lowest since the end of the recession in November 2001.

The Institute for Supply Management, an industry group, has seen its manufacturing employment index jump to the highest level in 15 years, signaling growth in manufacturing employment of 50,000 per month. With goods-producing employment having risen 124,000 in just the last two months, this forecast looks very good.
The ISM's index of capacity utilization is up to 85.6 percent — well above the Federal Reserve's figure of 74.6 percent. If the ISM index is more accurate, which it may be, we should soon see a burst of corporate investment as businesses scramble to add new capacity.
The Congressional Budget Office reports profits rising so fast corporate income tax revenues are 45 percent above this time last year. It also reports higher payroll tax revenues consistent with expanding employment. Overall, the economic picture has brightened so much CBO now sees $30 billion to $40 billion more in federal revenue than earlier anticipated.

Yes, things can turn south by the end of the year. A mass-casualty attack inside the US would do the trick, for example. So while she may turn out to be correct that the economic state in December 2004 will be pretty close to that of December 2003, I don't think it's unfair to ask why a psychic missed foretelling the very strong economic recovery going on now.

Here's another of Lydia's "predictions."

The situation in Iraq will slightly worsen compared to the level of violence that occurred in 2003.

Slightly? Nuff said. Make up your own mind whether she's a deliberate or self-deluded fraud.

I'm reminded of the old story of the traveling carnival's "Madam Natasha, Sees All, Tells All." One day the weather bad and not many people came to the carnival. Natasha complained to a nearby barker, "If I'd known business would be so bad today I wouldn't have opened."

When Lydia wins the famous James Randi Paranormal Challenge, I'll take her site as something other than novelty entertainment.

by Donald Sensing, 5/10/2004 03:22:00 PM. Permalink |

Internet update
Still experiencing mostly no service. Comcast is sending a tech tomorrow afternoon, they know the problem is on their end.

BTW, if you have emailed me in the last three days or so, the odds a very high I have not seen it. Please do not resend; it's waiting in queue for me on the server.

by Donald Sensing, 5/08/2004 08:12:00 PM. Permalink |

There is no "but"
Jeff Jarvis quotes David Weinberger:

I am willing to admit that there are circumstances in which torture is permissible, just as I think sometimes we have to kill people. And I'm willing to admit that what we apparently put the Abu Ghraib prisoners through wasn't nearly as bad as the torture that's routine in many other countries.

Is the right willing to admit that: Torture should only be used in the direst of circumstances? Torture should never be a cause for the exulting shown in the photos? The people responsible for allowing the wholesale torture at Abu Ghraib need to be punished severely, quickly and publicly not only for the sake of justice but to try to limit some of the damage the practice has done to our war on terror?

Can we get even to that common ground? Can we as a nation say that we abhor torture, except in the rarest of cases? That we do not believe in the institutionalizing of torture? That we will fight it around the world? That we believe in the rule of law and that no one is above the law? That we believe in treating even our enemies with dignity? That we support the established international conventions for treating prisoners? That we are sorry about what went on at Abu Ghraib

Sorry, I am not willing to admit there are circumstances where torture is admissible. And yes, I am familiar with the arguments, including, for example, Alan Dershowitz's.

But the cite brings to mind liberal writer Ron Rosenbaum's two-year-old piece, "Goodbye, All That: How Left Idiocies Drove Me to Flee:"

Over and over, one heard variations on the theme of, "Gee, it’s terrible about all those people who died in the towers and all"—that had already become the pro forma disclaimer/preface for America-bashing—"but maybe it’s a wake-up call for us to recognize how bad we are, Why They Hate Us."

Yes, the 9/11 attacks were terrible and all . . . but .... look at how badly the United States has treated the Third World, etc. etc. etc.

And I hear an echo of this "but" in some of the conservative commentary about Abu Ghraib: "Yes, the abuse and humiliation and battery of the Iraqi detainees was awful . . . but look how badly Saddam treated people in prison. Look what the Iraqis did to those four contractors on March 31, etc etc, etc.

There is no "but." Period. As Secretary Rumsfeld and his accompanying high defense officials and officers have made abundantly clear, the acts were crimes and must be understood as such.

There is no but. There is no but. There is no but. Clear?

by Donald Sensing, 5/08/2004 03:24:00 PM. Permalink |

Library blogging
My cable internet service is down again today. I am in the public library doing some research. But I call your attention to an historically relevant post by Geitner Simmons. It seems that during WW2, the USA captured so many Germans that to conserve manpower for deployment, the Army turned inner administration of our POW camps over to the German prisoners themselves.

Though the Germans ran their camps efficiently, just as in their own country their main instrument of discipline was terror. Through intimidation, threats, beatings and sometimes murder they controlled the inner workings of the prison camps. Incidents occurred at more than 200 camps across the country.

One of the more notorious cases involved a Corporal Kunze, who was accused of passing military secrets to the Americans and was beaten to death. Five Afrika Korps sergeants were convicted of that crime and executed by American authorities. At least five politically motivated murders are documented, and it is suspected that a number of "accidental" deaths may actually have been murders. Fake and coerced hangings made to look like suicides were another method.

The record of American custody of foreign POWs is mixed, though pretty far weighted toward humane treatment. Beginning a few decades after the war many German POW associations actually would return to America and hold reunions here. In the 80s I spent some time at Fort Sill, Okla. where I read the Dallas Sunday paper. One Sunday there was a long article about a reunion just ended. A former POW was quoted as saying that his captivity was a lot more comfortable than being a member of the Afrika Korps - better food and more of it, lighter work. He advised future enemies of the US to surrender as quickly as possible.

by Donald Sensing, 5/08/2004 03:12:00 PM. Permalink |

Enforced absence
My cable internet service has been AWOL all afternoon. A couple of quick items:

- Some readers have sent me some really good email today. I've scanned it all but won't have time to read it thoroughly very soon. I really wish I had the time to reply to each one, but sorry, the volume is such that I just can't.

- I am about to leave for one of my periodic ride-alongs with the sheriff's department (I am a voluntreer chaplain). I'm taking my digital camera and if anything exciting happens maybe I'll get some pictures to post.

- I thought Rummy did very well today before the Congressional committees. Note that he emphasized what I posted on three days ago, the problem of command influence on prosecutions. I never was a military lawyer, but I'd say that the command-influence line has been full crossed, more than once, and that successful prosecutions will now be extremely dificult, if indeed they are even possible any more.

by Donald Sensing, 5/07/2004 06:53:00 PM. Permalink |

James Joyner is sorry - really, really sorry
And he has a lot to apologize for.

by Donald Sensing, 5/07/2004 01:03:00 PM. Permalink |

Calls for Secdefs' heads
Comparing Les Aspin's scandal with Donald Rumsfeld's

Note the plural, "Secdefs." As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld prepares to be the main course today before both armed services committees of the Congress, it might be worth reviewing the events that led to the resignation of Bill Clinton's first secretary of defense, Les Aspin. Aspin took over as SecDef in January 1993 and resigned on Dec. 15 the same year with an agreement to serve until Jan. 20. He died in office on Jan. 3. (I left the Pentagon in May 1993 and so had only about five months under Aspin in the building.)

Aspin had served many years on the House Armed Services Committee, including a long tenure as its chairman, by the time Clinton ran for the White House. Because of Clinton's obvious shortcomings in personal credentials in defense matters, Aspin served as his campaign advisor on military affairs.

Aspin was a controversial figure for many members of both parties. He had supported Bush 41 in the Gulf War and had supported President Reagan's covert programs to arms and support the contra guerillas who fought the Marxist government of Nicaragua in the 1980s. Many fellow Dems were less than thrilled with these and other ways he supported the two successive Republican administrations. But Republican members were often upset with Aspin's positions opposing the Strategic Defense Initiative, favoring a smaller Navy, cutting American troops strength overseas and reducing the defense budget.

Les Aspin was a consummate politician, a skill that served him well in the Congress but which was much less useful as the executive head of the defense department.

Aspin was badly handicapped almost from the day he took office as SecDef. Immediately he had to manage the bungled way the new president had tried to open military service to homosexuals, an issue the White House had so ineptly attempted that even very powerful Dem members of the Congress (i.e., Sen. Sam Nunn) fought it.

Aspin was eventually successful in resolving the issue, although no side at the time was fully satisfied. His resolution became known as the "don't ask, don't tell" policy and remains in effect today. But an awful lot of his time, attention and energy was consumed on this issue that would have served the country better elsewhere.

Barely a month into his term, Aspin was hospitalized with heart disease. Further hospitalization followed for implanting a pacemaker. Although he returned to full schedule fairly quickly, doubts about his health remained for the rest of his term.

To his credit, Aspin took a hard line on North Korea. The Clinton administration had announced a gradual drawdown of US troop strength from South Korea when the North demanded that the US and the South cancel joint training exercises as a precondition of further negotiations on its nuclear program. Aspin rejected this demand flatly and announced that American troops would remain in full strength in the South.

Almost everything Aspin had to cope with - his health, regional conflicts such as Haiti, the defense budget, gays in the military, women in the military, and other issues - embroiled him in political turmoil, even firestorms. But it was America's misadventure in Somalia that caused a hard squeeze on him.

The United States had been providing humanitarian relief to lawless Somalia since August 1992. In December of that year, the lame-duck President Bush ordered American naval and land forces to enter the country as part of an international Unified Task Force (UNITAF).

"Mission creep" was endemic for the American command there. Eventually the National Command Authority decided that no progress would be made in Somalia until the tribal warlords were subdued, especially Mohammed Farah Aideed. American forces in Mogadishu were sniped at the their base camps came under frequent mortar attack. Troops were killed and wounded with no apparent progress being made.

In September 1993, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staf, Gen. Colin Powell, asked Aspin for approval to send Abrams tanks and other armored combat vehicles to Somalia. Aspin refused the request for reasons that are not clear to this day.

The next month American Rangers and soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division became embroiled in the now infamous battle detailed in Mark Bowden's bestseller, Black Hawk Down. In an attempt to capture Aideed and other key Somali figures, 18 American soldiers were killed, dozens wounded, one helicopter pilot captured, three choppers lost and American dead dragged through the streets of the city.

When word reached (or was leaked to) Congress that the American combat commanders on the ground had been compelled to beg a Pakistani unit to send an armored column to rescue the Rangers, the stuff hit the fan. Twenty-five Republican members of Congress called for Aspin's resignation or dismissal from office (although none threatened impeachment, as the habitually overwrought Rep. Charlie Rangel has done regarding Rumsfeld). The mantra quickly became that Aspin's rejection of Powell's request for armor had led to the unnecessary deaths of American soldiers.

(What was lost in the rhetoric was that even if Aspin has signed Powell's request immediately, the tanks would not have reached Somalia before the deadly battle. Furthermore, Aspin insisted that Powell had requested the tanks not to protect American soldiers, but to ensure the security of delivery of relief and aid convoys and distribution points.)

In less than two months, Aspin tendered his resignation. It begs to be noticed that at no time did President Clinton defend Aspin very strongly; in fact, the White House quickly distanced itself from the "no armor" decision, leaving Aspin twisting in the wind. Called to testify before a Congressional committee about the Somalia battle and defense policy there, Aspin appeared weak and not fully informed.

Observers have generally assumed that Clinton told Aspin to resign, but this assumption lacks actual evidence. Aspin merely said he was stepping down for "personal reasons." Clinton never indicated that he had fired Aspin.

But neither did Clinton ever defend Aspin. In my opinion, Aspin resigned for a mixture of reasons, a chief one being that his health remained poor. But I am convinced that his president's early abandonment of him once the heat got turned up was a key reason as well. With Clinton letting him get pummeled by the media and the Congress, Aspin probably concluded that his effectiveness would be permanently degraded.

Were the calls for Aspin's resignation justified?

There are key differences between Aspin's situation vis-a-vis Somalia and Rumsfeld's regarding the Abu Ghraib scandal:

Americans died and suffered in the Mogadishu battle, no Americans were even injured in the Abu Ghraib scandal. However, some number of Iraqi men were physically abused and reports says that some died in US custody.

By the time of the Mogadishu battle, the Somalia expedition had Aspin's direct involvement and decision-making wrought throughout. Although the tanks Powell had asked for would not have arrived in time to take part in the infamous battle, the fact that the SecDef reserved such decisions to himself shows how micromanaged from Washington the Somalia expedition was. This level of close control was Aspin's personal policy.

That the calls by Republican members for Aspin's resignation were politically motivated, at least in large measure, can hardly be doubted. Yet in retrospect, the calls were also motivated almost as much by the fact that Aspin's record since the preceding January hardly inspired confidence in his leadership and management capabilities. The call for his head was at least as much a vote of no confidence for his future executive ability as it was punishment for the loss of American lives in Mogadishu.

There was no presidential election imminent and the mid-term Congressional elections were a year away.

Be that as it may, the harshness of the rhetoric against Aspin was only a little less severe than that against Rumsfeld. I do not say that Aspin's head should have been called for, although his approximate year as SecDef was not marked by many virtues. The Somalia expedition was mostly misbegotten from the beginning, and the bungling of it throughout 1993 can and should be laid as much on the White House and the NSC as the defense department. Aspin wound up being a fall guy for an administration that throughout its span had no clear idea of what to do in Somalia any more.

That may well be the perception developing about the Bush administration, Donald Rumsfeld and Iraq. If Aspin's personal management of armor in Somalia can be faulted (was it really SecDef personal business?), so can Rumsfeld's mismanagement of vital military decisions regarding Iraq, starting with his blunt, public dismissal of former Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki's analysis that occupation of the country would require at least twice as many troops as Rumsfeld wanted to use.

I sense increasing frustration by Congress members, including Republicans, with the progress or its apparent lack being made in Iraq. There is a broad consensus among many important political figures that Iraq will not be ready for transfer of sovereignty come June 30 and that the military forces are reacting to events rather than shaping them.

It doesn't help Rumsfeld's situation that he has been a polarizing figure nearly from the beginning of his term. While Aspin came to be viewed as one who micromanaged as compensation for weak executive skills, resulting in wrong decisions, Rumsfeld has a reputation of micromanaging from strong executive skills. But many of Rumsfeld's decision are not obviously good ones, either.

If President Bush stands by his man, Rumsfeld will survive, but battered. The real issue, though, is twofold. First, the Democratic members are using the scandal to weaken Bush for the fall election. But second, the domestic side of this scandal should serve as a warning shot across the White House's bow that the ship of state is increasingly seen as rudderless in significant respects.

by Donald Sensing, 5/07/2004 11:40:00 AM. Permalink |

Rumsfeld apologizes

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is now testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee. One of the first things he did in his prepared statement was apologize to the Iraqi victims and accept personal responsibility for failing to inform the president.

While he spoke, some men and women stood and started yelling "What about" several other issues of Rumsfeld's involvement, such as, "What about the illegal war?" They were escorted from the room by Capitol Police.

Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also is testifying.

by Donald Sensing, 5/07/2004 11:11:00 AM. Permalink |

Bumper sticker wisdom?

I think this bumper sticker makes a point to ponder. Larger image here.

by Donald Sensing, 5/07/2004 07:05:00 AM. Permalink |

Abu Ghraib - what's the fuss?
Belmont Club describes how a potentially sanguine future could make us look back at the Abu Ghraib scandal and wonder why we thought it was a big deal.

He discusses briefly the air campaigns against Germany and Japan in WW2; hence I invite you to read my pre-Iraq War essay, "Precision Weapons, Abject Defeat, and Reshaping Societies," which examines Allied bombing policy in more detail.

by Donald Sensing, 5/07/2004 07:03:00 AM. Permalink |

Quote to close the evening
"History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid." Dwight D. Eisenhower

by Donald Sensing, 5/06/2004 10:08:00 PM. Permalink |

Fisking Friedman
In response to the breathless, panicky piece by Thomas Friedman in today's NYT, Allah is in the House posted a devastating, thorough response. A short excerpt of an RTWT post:

It's not Friedman's Arab toadying that's so galling, though. Anyone who's read him over the past few years has long since gotten used to that. What's galling is his suggestion that a sufficiently humiliating apology for what happened at Abu Ghraib might actually have an effect on world opinion--as though anti-Americanism were something keyed to specific events rather than to broad differences in ideology. Friedman would have us believe there are teeming multitudes out there who want to like us, are trying to like us, but just can't get a leg over because we keep doing awful things to break their hearts. Luckily, they're so open-minded and forgiving that we might be able to win them back if we put the Friedman plan into action ...

It is already time for the US government (not just the executive branch) to move on to other, far more pressing business. The criminal probes and inspector-general investigations must continue, but the front-page, top-of-the-hour billing the story keeps getting is now harming rather than helping our efforts. And so is the vicious speech coming from Capitol Hill.

Donald Rumsfeld will appear before before the Senate Armed Services Committee May 7. I expect blood will flow on both sides. Rummy will not be a punching bag for committee members, and the Dem members will be relentless.

Update: Jeff Jarvis pretty much agrees.

No, it's time instead for everyone -- Bush, Kerry, Iraqi leaders, European leaders, the U.N., Arab leaders -- to get priorities straight and remember that our priorities are alligned. If we let the stupidity of some guys in an Iraqi prison derail the cause of democracy and stability in Iraq over the niceties of friendship and apologies, then we're all a bunch of hopeless fools.

Indeed.

by Donald Sensing, 5/06/2004 09:49:00 PM. Permalink |

Rumsfeld's head on a platter
Long-time readers of this blog know that I have no membership card of the Donald Rumsfeld fan club.

But the calls for his head are both idiotic and deceptive. Idiotic because to hold the SecDef personally responsible for the actions of a handful of junior and mid-level enlisted soldiers, and even the command incompetence of a single brigadier general make me question the mental competence of those who say he should resign, be fired (Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, et. al.) or impeached (Charlie Rangel, who never runs out of stupid ideas, announced from the House floor today that he is preparing articles of impeachment).

Deceptive because Rummy is taking the fire, but Bush is the target. A more purely partisan, crass, politically-motivated campaign I have ever seen. And yes, I include the Ken Starr investigation.

The Dems' hot rhetoric will backfire, I think. Look for Kerrey's numbers to drop.

by Donald Sensing, 5/06/2004 05:53:00 PM. Permalink |

Army's scandal deepens
A military police captain who served at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison

... is under investigation following charges he secretly photographed naked female American soldiers, officials said on Wednesday.

Capt. Leo Merck, 32, a member of the California National Guard who commanded the 124-strong 870th Military Police Company, is under U.S. Army investigation and has been relieved of duty, they said.

The Army's reputation is taking major hits these days.

by Donald Sensing, 5/06/2004 05:40:00 PM. Permalink |

UMC clarifies offenses chargeable under church law
Sexual ethics reinforced

The only body of the United Methodist Church that can set denominational policy, including church law, is the General Conference. It meets every four years and is now is session in Pittsburgh.

By a razor-thin vote of 455-445, the GC's delegates voted today,

... to clarify language [of church doctrine] and give bishops, pastors and diaconal ministers a list of offenses that could result in a trial.

Offenses that will be chargeable, according to the new paragraph, are: a) immorality, including, but not limited to, not being celibate in singleness or not being faithful in a heterosexual marriage; b) practices declared by the United Methodist Church to be incompatible with Christian teachings, including, but not limited to, being a self-avowed practicing homosexual, or conducting ceremonies that celebrate homosexual unions, or performing same-sex wedding ceremonies.

This was not really a change in the denomination's doctrine - nothing was made contrary to doctrine that was not already so - but it does mean that the thin majority of delegates decided to make sure that clerics and bishops have no misunderstanding of church law on matters sexual. The vote was the direct result of the March church trial of the Rev. Karen Dammann.

In a matter related to the homosexuality debate, New Testament scholar Robert Gagnon, a Presbyterian, spoke to about a fourth of the delegates May 3 on what the Bible says about sexual relationships.

Citing the Book of Genesis, Gagnon said marriage is not simply about romance or raising a family, but about reuniting two parts of a sexual whole in a way that same-sex unions cannot achieve.

Homosexuality is "sexual narcissism," Gagnon said, because homosexuals are attracted to what they are, not to the other.

"That's what the Scripture finds wrong, and no amount of longevity [of relationships] can change that," Gagnon said.

Michael Williams also addresses this issue, pointing out that the GC voted 579 to 376 not to redefine the denominations' statement on homosexuality. For the past three or four Conferences, pro-gay advocates have attempted to pass a resolution stating that the UMC "is of two minds" or "is not in agreement" on the issue of homosexuality. These resolutions have failed by ever-wider margins each time. It failed again this year, too. Citing a news article:

A proposal for more moderate language, recognizing "that Christians disagree on the compatibility of homosexual practice with Christian teaching," failed to advance.

Note the slant of the reportage - the declaration that this position is "moderate," meaning by implication that the UMC's existing doctrine, that homosexual practice is "incompatible with Christian teaching," is extreme.

Michel correctly identifies the flaw in the so-called progressives argument, exemplified by the Rev. Rev. Margaret Mallory,

... who chaired the Church and Society subcommittee that voted to move more inclusive language forward last week, called the issue "a thorn in the collective side of the church."

She said the committee recommended the inclusive language to move the church out of "irreconcilable corners and to a place of dialogue."

Michael observes, accurately,

There's no point in dialogue, because the positions are irreconcilable. Acceding that discussion on the matter would serve any purpose whatsoever would be a total defeat for the side standing on the teachings of the Bible, because it would be an acknowledgement that human discussion has something to contribute to God's revelation. Once that line is crossed, there's no reason to stick to Biblical teachings on anything anyone disagrees with.

Well, I part company with Michael on one point here, in that I say that human discussion can contribute to God's revelation, at least to understanding it. But, again citing a news article:

At the end of the morning plenary, scores of United Methodists, most wearing the rainbow-colored collars acknowledging support of a more liberal church, shared communion. When they were done, a communion cup was shattered as sign of a broken church.

But the question is begged - who broke it? Not those who voted to affirm and maintain biblical teaching. Furthermore, for any group of UM pastors to hold a private communion is starkly in violation of Wesleyan tradition, in which the sacrament is open to all. That more than anything convinces me that ideology and power, not a theology of grace, is at the heart of the dissident movement.

Delegate "Faith Geer ... said later. 'It seems so simple to agree to disagree. That's all the petitions asked for, and we couldn't accept it,' she said." Again, Michael hits the nail on the head:

[The delegates] have agreed to disagree ... The majority just hasn't agreed to agree that the opposition has a theologically valid position.

What we never - never - see is the advocacy side taking their persistent defeats to change church doctrine as signals that perhaps their position is wrong. They never are willing to admit the possibility that their theology and exegesis of Scripture might be in error. God save our Church.

by Donald Sensing, 5/06/2004 05:05:00 PM. Permalink |

Hyundai autos tied with Honda in quality
The JD Power and Associates rankings of Initial Quality Survey, released April 28, show that Korea's Hyundai Motors and Honda are tied for second, trailing Toyota, which dominates the survey. BMW falls behind Hyundai and Honda. These are "corporate" rankings, with "nameplate" rankings being different.

The IQS measures problems per 100 (PP100) vehicles encountered during the first three months of ownership.

IQS measures a broad range of quality problems, heavily weighted toward defects and malfunctions, quality of workmanship, drivability, human factors in engineering (i.e. ease of use) and safety-related problems. Among these categories, the area that accounts for the greatest product improvement since 1998 are defects and malfunctions, down from 61 PP100 to 40 PP100. Further, those that are related to safety show a 44 percent improvement—from 25 PP100 down to only 14.

The 2004 Initial Quality Study is based on responses from more than 51,000 purchasers and lessees of new 2004 model-year cars and trucks, who were surveyed after 90 days of ownership. This industry benchmark study for new-vehicle initial quality is now in its 18th year.

The survey continues to show that car industry quality overall is improving each year, good news for consumers. Lexus is the leading "nameplate" in initial quality, "despite a 14 percent decline in initial quality" overall. The Lexus SC 430, however, "is the best-performing model in the IQS history, scoring just 44 PP100." The industry average is 119.

by Donald Sensing, 5/05/2004 10:23:00 PM. Permalink |

Chosen to be stranded
Which 10 bloggers would you pick to be stranded with?

You find the most interesting things going through referral logs. Such as Ace at The Pryhills, who says the "latest meme making it's way around the blogsphere" is answering this question:

Which ten bloggers would YOU choose to be with if you were deserted on an island?

And he says he would pick me because he thinks the group would need a spiritual leader.

Now, is it really an honor to be picked to be stranded on a deserted island? I'm still processing that . . .

But I take it in the spirit it is given, and say thanks for the compliment.

But, which 10 bloggers would I pick? In no particular order, they are:

1. If you're stranded, it's either laugh or cry. I pick laugh. So Scott Ott gets a nod.

2. Belmont Club has to come along because I think he/they and I would have fascinating conversations.

3. Ditto for Joe Katzman, whose Jewish faith I much respect and who respects my Christian faith in return.

4. Kim DuToit would have to join us because if there are any stobor on the island, he would have the right arsenal to deal with them. (Extra credit to anyone who knows what a stobor is and whence the name.)

5. Geitner Simmons would add some class and dignity to what would otherwise be a mere vulgar group.

6. Mark D. Roberts would be our resident practical theologian.

7. Bill Hobbs could blog our adventures over the satellite-phone connection with old-school, unbiased journalistic accuracy. For that matter, so could Geitner - hey, we'd have a morning and an afternoon "paper."

And of course, if we had a satphone, we wouldn't be stranded for long.

8. Sgt. Mom would be a great choice for female companionship - of the purely platonic kind, this being a family blog.

9. So would Virginia Postrel.

10. Last but certainly not least we'd have to have Steven Den Beste because with his engineering knowledge we'd have more labor-saving and comfort devices than Gilligan's Island.

Speaking of deserted islands, did you hear the one about the man stranded alone for six years who was finally rescued? You didn't? Good!

He was in good health and showed his rescuers how he had lived for the six years. He had diverted a stream and built a reservoir with bamboo plumbing into his hut to have running water. His hut hardly deserved the name - it had four large rooms furnished with palm wood and items retrieved from the man's shipwreck.

Outside there were two other smaller huts. Both had crosses atop the doorway.

"What are those?" asked a rescuer.

"This is my church," the man answered, gesturing to the nearest hut.

"What about that other hut? It looks the same," said a rescuer.

"That was the church I attended the first three years here, but I didn't like how things were done there, so I transferred my membership elsewhere."

by Donald Sensing, 5/05/2004 10:04:00 PM. Permalink |

Well, this was bound to happen
Here.

by Donald Sensing, 5/05/2004 08:20:00 PM. Permalink |

I vas chust following oooorrrrderrrrrs
As I write this a civilian lawyer for one of the soldiers accused of Abu Ghraib abuse is telling Sean Hannity on "Hannity and Colmes" that his client (unnamed) believed the orders he received to abuse the Iraqis were lawful orders.

Hannity told him pretty pointblank that such a defense will lose. And he's right. And it should lose.

by Donald Sensing, 5/05/2004 08:11:00 PM. Permalink |

The Karpinski two step
Her CYA tour is in full swing

I mentioned in yesterday's post about the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal that the former commanding general of the US Army-run prisons in Iraq, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, has blamed the abuse on military intelligence. She has been making the rounds to the evening news-talk shows hammering home this point. She has taken her civilian lawyer with her. She also told Fox News last night that she had not been relieved of her command, but had rotated home and is now simply on leave.

This is nothing but the Karpinski CYA tour. Her claims that she didn't authorize the abuse and didn't know about it may be true, but they are also irrelevant. The military police soldiers accused were under her command. That they may have been under an MI or CIA functionary's temporary supervision does not get Karpinski off the hook. She was the commanding general , and that makes her responsible, end of story.

If there had been only one or a very few, isolated instances of abuse, she could credibly claim innocence. All commanders have soldiers who violate law or policy once in awhile. But the abuses were persistent, repetitive and enduring from October to December of last year.

That's one darn long time for a commanding general not to know what is going on in her command. She should have known and if she truly didn't that was reason to fire her right there.

All American soldiers are taught literally from basic training that they must obey lawfulo orde3rs, even at the risk of losing their lives, but must not obey unlawful orders, no matter who gives them. That's a huge task of legal-moral discrimination we place on our troops from private on up. But we do place that burden on them and expect them to manage it. Commanders at all levels are expected periodically to retrain their soldiers on standards of conduct, ethics and the laws of warfare.

There is no way that the accused can credibly claim they didn't know the abuse was illegal, even if some intelligence weenie told them it was a standard interrogation technique or some other such crapola.

Nor does the fact that the abuse was initiated by non-MP people get Karpinski off the hook. The prisoners were under her command just as much as the MP guards were. The physical space in which the abuse took place was under her command. She had the authority, indeed the obligation, to maintain proper standards of treatment of the prisoners no matter who was dealing with them day to day for interrogation.

"A commander is responsible for everything his/her soldiers do or fail to do." You learn that from day one.

I find the Karpinski CYA tour professionally reprehensible. She is an American general officer and should have higher standards than that.

by Donald Sensing, 5/05/2004 05:47:00 PM. Permalink |

The evils of alcohol
This video clip explains it all.

by Donald Sensing, 5/05/2004 01:50:00 PM. Permalink |

Baptists to abandon public schools?
That's what a resolution offered to Southern Baptist Convention's annual meeting next month will call on the denomination's 12 million members to do.

Introduced by a well-known leader of the SBC and a Baptist attorney, the resolution asks "all officers and members of the Southern Baptist Convention and the churches associated with it to remove their children from the government schools and see to it that they receive a thoroughly Christian education, for the glory of God, the good of Christ's church, and the strength of their own commitment to Jesus."

Pharisaism has never vanished.

Update: Bill Hobbs, otoh, fully supports the proposal. BTW, Bill and I live in the same town of Franklin, Tenn. I am not so sure whether Baptists here will heed this call in large numbers when this sort of thing happens in our public schools.

by Donald Sensing, 5/04/2004 09:38:00 PM. Permalink |

I have the right to kill if I want to
An observation about the "March for Women’s Lives" last week in Washington, D.C.

"I think abortion is killing a life. [But] the person who is pregnant should decide whether to do it or not." ...

Ms. Flores’s attitude is deeply troubling, especially when you realize how widespread it is. Over and over again, people at the march made similar comments—the kind of comments that make your hair stand on end. The political debate is changing among activists on the ground. They’re now willing to admit that abortion is killing. But they’re arguing that their right to do what they want, without restraint, justifies that killing.

What we are seeing, of course, is the logical consequences of the desire for personal autonomy in an era of moral relativism. People can say with a perfectly straight face and without a twinge of conscience, "Yeah, it is wrong. It is murder. But nobody is going to tell me I can’t do it."

Chilling.

by Donald Sensing, 5/04/2004 09:14:00 PM. Permalink |

Ted Rall nominated for Editorial Cartoonist of the Year
Cartoonist Ted Rall, who spat on Pat Tillman's grave with this cartoon, has actually been nominated by the National Cartoonists Society for editorial cartoonist of the year. The other nominees are Mike Luckovich and Tom Toles. The winner will be announced at the NCS gala May 28-30 in Kansas City.

Here is Lukovich's most recent cartoon. And here is May 2's cartoon from Toles.

Let's see: Lukovich, Rall and Toles. Notice a certain thread here?

HT: Geitner Simmons.

by Donald Sensing, 5/04/2004 08:49:00 PM. Permalink |

Prison abuse prosecutors have tough row to hoe
Publicity so far is defense counsel's dream

Although at least four of the American custodians at Abu Ghraib prison are civilian contract employees, not subject to military law, others are military members who are subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, UCMJ. For readers who don't know how the military justice system operate, a short primer is in order before explaining why trial prosecution will be very difficult for the government to accomplish successfully. The issue in a nutshell:

Six suspects - Staff Sergeant Ivan L. Frederick II, known as Chip, who was the senior enlisted man; Specialist Charles A. Graner; Sergeant Javal Davis; Specialist Megan Ambuhl; Specialist Sabrina Harman; and Private Jeremy Sivits - are now facing prosecution in Iraq, on charges that include conspiracy, dereliction of duty, cruelty toward prisoners, maltreatment, assault, and indecent acts.

The details?

Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.

I need not spend time explaining that these acts are crimes against American law and violations of the Geneva Conventions.

Military members are sent to court martial by their commander. There are three levels of court martial: summary court, special court and general court. An excellent, concise explanation is here. General courts may try and adjudge the most serious offenses.

There is little doubt that the offenses enumerated will be tried by a general court martial, even though a special court empowered to sentence the defendant to a bad-conduct discharge would almost certainly suffice.

Be that as it may, ISTM there are two serious hurdles for prosecution of the putative defendants:

1. Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, formerly commanding general of the Army's eight prisons in Iraq, has claimed that the mistreatment of the Iraqi prisoners was ordered by military intelligence personnel in order to get the prisoners to respond to MI interrogators.

She says she was not a conduit for the order and did not know about it at the time. Sgt. Frederick's private defense attorney, Gary Myers, was one a of the defense counsels for the My Lai Massacre trials in the early 1970s. Myers says,

... that his client’s defense will be that he was carrying out the orders of his superiors and, in particular, the directions of military intelligence. He said, “Do you really think a group of kids from rural Virginia decided to do this on their own? Decided that the best way to embarrass Arabs and make them talk was to have them walk around nude?”

In letters and e-mails to family members, Frederick repeatedly noted that the military-intelligence teams, which included C.I.A. officers and linguists and interrogation specialists from private defense contractors, were the dominant force inside Abu Ghraib. In a letter written in January, he said:

I questioned some of the things that I saw . . . such things as leaving inmates in their cell with no clothes or in female underpants, handcuffing them to the door of their cell—and the answer I got was, “This is how military intelligence (MI) wants it done.” . . . . MI has also instructed us to place a prisoner in an isolation cell with little or no clothes, no toilet or running water, no ventilation or window, for as much as three days.

The military-intelligence officers have “encouraged and told us, ‘Great job,’ they were now getting positive results and information,” Frederick wrote. “CID has been present when the military working dogs were used to intimidate prisoners at MI’s request.” At one point, Frederick told his family, he pulled aside his superior officer, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Phillabaum, the commander of the 320th M.P. Battalion, and asked about the mistreatment of prisoners. “His reply was ‘Don’t worry about it.’”

Conceivably, the involvement of intelligence personnel and procedures, however criminal, could risk having to expose classified information to public, indeed world, scrutiny. It is much more difficult to prosecute trials when classified evidence is involved.

2. More problematic, however, is the serious matter of "command influence." This potential problem is not found in civil justice, so it bears some explanation.

Commanders order court martials. A general court martial is called that because a general officer in command orders it convened. There are three types of lawyers involved. The trial judge and defense counsels are military lawyers whose chain of command does not include the general convening the court. The general can neither punish nor reward either officer; they don't work for him. He has no input to their fitness reports.

The trial counsel's (prosecuting lawyer) chain of command goes to the general concerned. The trial counsel prosecutes the case on the general's behalf. Importantly, the members of the panel (jury) are detailed from officers under the general's command. (Noncommissioned officers may also serve on the panel.) That is where the problem of command influence is found.

Command influence is when anyone in the panel members' chain of command says something that might be interpreted by the panel as an attempt to sway them toward rendering a biased verdict. It amounts to jury tampering, except that command influence can be entirely accidental. Case in point: the 3d US Armored Division in Germany the early 1980s, just before I was assigned there. In an excellent article discussing the prosecutorial problems of the infamous Tailhook scandal (including command influence), we read,

In the mid-1980s, the two-star general in command of the Army's 3rd Armored Division in Germany complained to subordinates about what he saw as a paradox: Commanders would recommend that a soldier be court-martialed for an offense and then testify on behalf of the accused soldier. The general's comments roiled his division's justice system. Convictions were overturned, sentences were reduced, and cases had to be retried.

In fact, the general's whole point was a good one, that his lower-level commanders sent soldiers to court martial too quickly. Too many otherwise good troops were facing federal convictions for offenses that could be handled non-judicially. But no matter. Many convictions were overturned, even though they had been rendered up to two years before the commanding general made the comment near the end of his command tenure. This problem was so serious there that just before I assumed command of an artillery battery, I had to attend a class on what command influence was and how not to do it.

The Abu Ghraib cases are drowning in command influence.

President Bush said Friday that he was disgusted.

"I share a deep disgust that those prisoners were treated the way they were treated," Bush said. "Their treatment does not reflect the nature of the American people. That's not the way we do things in America."

"I didn't like it one bit," Bush added ...

Let it be noted that the president is in the chain of command of every possible military panel member. It gets worse. CNN reports today,

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said [that] "The president wanted to make sure that appropriate action was being taken against those responsible for these shameful, appalling acts," McClellan said.

Which is tantamount to a presidential order that a guilty verdict be returned.

Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, famous for his daily press briefing in Baghdad, said of the personnel accused,

"Nobody gave them the order to break the law," he said. "Nobody gave them the order to violate their integrity."

Kimmitt said his response to the allegations at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad is the same as every other soldier in Iraq: "just absolute disgust."

Kimmitt is not in the soldiers' chain of command, but he is an official spokesman for the CPA and that's close enough for the charge of command influence to stick. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld also got in the act; a radio report I heard this morning had him echoing what is not the party line: that those responsible will be punished.

I am not exactly predicting a judicial finding of unlawful command influence by the military judge, which will completely stop the trials. But I will be very surprised if such a ruling does not occur. Whether the prosecution can overcome it remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, similar charges of such mistreatment in British-run facilities have emerged, and the Brits have kept their head about them :

Meanwhile, British Armed Forces Minister Adam Ingram told the House of Commons on Tuesday that the government was taking reports of abuse by British soldiers seriously, but would not rush the investigation, according to The Associated Press.

The Daily Mirror newspaper has published a number of photographs that apparently showed British troops abusing prisoners, including one of a person in fatigues urinating on a hooded man.

"Many of these investigations require detailed work to be undertaken in difficult and often dangerous circumstances. They cannot, and should not, be rushed," the AP quoted Ingram as saying. "If British soldiers are found to have acted unlawfully, then appropriate action will be taken."

Which is the way we should have responded, too. But the bandwagon mentality among both the media and the military's uniformed and civilian leaders took over. Justice is not being done and maybe now can't be done.

by Donald Sensing, 5/04/2004 02:42:00 PM. Permalink |

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