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Death for Musharraf plotters
Today's Headlines
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Page 4: Opinion
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-Short Attention Span Theater-
Master Sergeant Makes His Call
Last night I received a very disturbing phone call. It wasn't from my wife telling me that our two-year old son had knocked out a tooth or that our house had fallen out of escrow -- it was from an active duty Air Force Crew Chief telling me about his new Master Sergeant. Evidently, Master Sergeant Erskin, who was recently assigned to this C-5 Group out of Travis Air Force Base, decided to grill his company on the types of vehicles they drive. Erskin asked if anyone drove a vehicle with a V-8 engine -- everyone kept their mouths shut. He then asked if anyone drove a pickup truck or SUV, again, no responses. He finally asked if anyone utilized car pool opportunities or public transportation to get to base on a daily basis. One female air crew member responded affirmatively. The Master Sergeant congratulated her and told the rest of the assembly that they were supporting terrorism by driving "gas guzzling" vehicles and by not car pooling. Erskin finally began a miniature rant that the current war on terror has nothing to do with terror, but is rather all about keeping gas prices low in the U.S.

I have known the source of this for some time and consider him a very credible. He loves the Air Force and considers it a calling not a career. I remember from my days in the Coast Guard that the UCMJ has very serious language regarding bringing discredit to the service, etc. Does this fall in that crevasse? Is the Master Sergeant within his purview to make statements such as this? While in uniform?

Posted by Jibtrim -- not the random name below that I can't seem to change
Posted by: Omesing Ulomorong9978 || 08/27/2005 00:37 || Comments || Link || [6 views] Top|| File under:

#1  ...Having met more than my share of uniformed characters, I'm gonna say that MSgt Erskin is absolutely right in saying that high gas prices do fund terrorism, albeit in a roundabout way. That's a matter I know has shown up here more than once. And encouraging caropooling - hell yes.
As far as why we're fighting? Well, I dont agree with him, but as far as the article goes, there's nothing in there that says he's in violation of Article 88. On the other hand, were I his supervisor, I would definitely take him aside and remind him of its provisions.

Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski || 08/27/2005 10:18 Comments || Top||

#2  First of all, why is a Master Sergeant addressing a company? If I was that company's First Sergeant, I would have a thing or two to say to him(*). Second of all, why hesitation about putting your hand up? This does not sound like the enlisted I have known, who were always willing to put in their two cents. Sounds fishy.

(*) In the AF, unlike the Army, a "Master Sergeant" is an E-7. "Senior Master Sergeant" is an E-8. A "First Sergeant" can be an E-7 or E-8, but like in the Army, it is a separate assignment, not easily confused with the other.
Posted by: Anonymoose || 08/27/2005 10:47 Comments || Top||

#3  Not to sure about the Air Force but in the Army this would, or could, be seen as conduct unbecomming. If the soldiers were there in formation and he was spouting his beliefs on the war to his troops and his opinion differs from our official policy he is wrong. Now before I get all the 1st ammendment arguements, if they are in formation it is an oficial event. He is not entitled to force his troops to listen to his drivel. Off duty or informally he can say what he wants. He might slip by UCMJ but the judgmemt block on his NCOER should be a goose egg.
Posted by: 49 pan || 08/27/2005 22:50 Comments || Top||


Fifth Column
VDH : The Paranoid Style
VDH strikes back!
Iraq: Where socialists and anarchists join in with racialists and paleocons.

It is becoming nearly impossible to sort the extreme rhetoric of the antiwar Left from that of the fringe paleo-Right. Both see the Iraqi war through the same lenses: the American effort is bound to fail and is a deep reflection of American pathology.

An anguished Cindy Sheehan calls Bush "the world's biggest terrorist." And she goes on to blame Israel for the death of her son ("Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel").

Her antiwar venom could easily come right out of the mouth of a more calculating David Duke. Perhaps that's why he lauded her anti-Semitism: "Courageously she has gone to Texas near the ranch of President Bush and braved the elements and a hostile Jewish supremacist media."

This odd symbiosis began right after 9/11. Then the lunatic Left mused about the "pure chaos" of the falling "two huge buck teeth" twin towers, lamented that they were more full of Democrats than Republicans, and saw the strike as righteous payback from third-world victims.

The mirror-imaging fundamentalists and censors in turn saw the attack as an angry God's retribution either for an array of our mortal sins or America's tilting toward Israel.

In Iraq, the Left thinks we are unfairly destroying others; the ultra-Right that we are being destroyed ourselves. The former alleges that we are bullying in our global influence, the latter that we are collapsing from our decadence.

But both, in their exasperation at George Bush's insistence on seeing Iraq emerge from the Hussein nightmare years with some sort of constitutional government, have embraced the paranoid style of personal invective.

They employ half-truths and spin conspiracy theories to argue that the war was unjust, impossible to win, and hatched through the result of a brainwashing of a devious few neocons.

I'll consider four diverse attacks (by a socialist, anarchist, racialist, and paleocon) on my support for the removal of Saddam Hussein, and the effort to prompt constitutional government in his place, that are emblematic of this bizarre new Left/Right nexus, shared pessimism, and paranoid methods.

I. The Cabal

In the current issue of The American Prospect, Harold Meyerson — hitherto known as the polemicist who compared President Bush to the secessionist, pro-slavery Jefferson Davis (e.g., "The American president — though not of the United States — whom George W. Bush most nearly resembles is the Confederacy's Jefferson Davis"), Sen. Zell Miller to Joseph McCarthy, and the voting of the California white middle class to a "riot" — charges that a number of pundits are responsible for what he sees as a catastrophe in Iraq, specifically Tom Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol, and myself. (

The chief complaint of Meyerson's is his belief that Iraq has ruined almost everything:

"As anti-war sentiment began to mount, Hanson dismissed it. 'We are told,' he wrote contemptuously in February 2002, 'an attack against Iraq will supposedly inflame the Muslim world. Toppling Saddam Hussein will cause irreparable rifts with Europeans and our moderate allies, and turn world opinion against America.' What to Hanson was nonsense looks like pretty fair prophecy today."

Hardly. After a surge of anti-Americanism, continental Europeans, from the Dutch to the French, are now certainly more involved in the war against terror than they were in February 2002, as are the British.

Anti-Americanism in the Arab world was at an all time high well before Iraq. In early 2002, 72 percent of the Kuwaitis, whom we saved in 1991, expressed a dislike for the United States. Two thirds in the Arab world insisted that Osama bin Laden had nothing to do with September 11.

I thought that the radical Islamic world was "inflamed" on September 11, when Palestinians danced in the streets on the news, Saddam Hussein praised the murderers, and mothers starting naming their children "Osama."

Yet Osama bin Laden's popularity is less now than it was then as well; there is no more Hussein dynasty; and Mr. Abbas is asking for American help. We have never been as close to moderate allies as we are now — whether we define such friends as India (where over 70 percent express admiration for America) or Japan. Elections in France, Holland, and soon in Germany do not bode well for anti-American, EU leftists.

Yes, the long corrupt and murderous Middle East is aflame. But that is precisely because after Iraq, the Syrians have left Lebanon, the Egyptians are convulsed over novel elections, democratic Iraqis and Afghans are killing terrorists, a no longer secure al Qaeda is fragmented after losing Afghanistan, we are pressuring Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Libya to reform, and after 25 years of somnolence the United States is finally fighting back against Islamic fascism. By Meyerson's logic, 1942 was far more disastrous than 1939, when the sway of prewar autocracies was unquestioned and we were at peace.

How odd that Meyerson, a vice chairman of a national socialist organization, has become a harsh critic of American support for democratic reform in the Middle East.

But then we remember that the prime directive of the hard Left is to be against anything that Bush is for — even if it means praising the hyper-capitalist, commodities speculator George Soros, whose machinations once nearly ruined the Bank of England along with its small depositors. In Meyerson's gushing praise: "[Soros] made his money the old-fashioned way, on Wall Street."

I also plead guilty to Meyerson's other two charges: Abu Ghraib really was blown way out of proportion and was not simply, as Ted Kennedy slurred, a continuation under new management of Saddam's gulag where tens of thousands perished.

And, yes, Iraq can craft a constitutional government as it is now doing, and that will make the Middle East both a more humane place and less a risk to the security of the United States. The only flickers of hope right now in the Middle East for an end to the old autocracy and fanaticism are in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Egypt — and all such movement is due solely to the United States' removal of the Taliban and Saddam and pressure on Mubarak.

Aflame? Perhaps, but at least there is hope where there was none before.


II. The Anarchist Howl

But if Meyerson's skewers facts and twists progress into abject failure, take the example of someone using the name Gary Brecher of Encore magazine. In an article called "Victor Hanson: Portrait of an American Traitor, " Brecher became incensed about a suggestion that neither the formal education nor the autodidacticism of the Hollywood elite granted them any privileged wisdom about American foreign policy:

"That column got me so furious I daydreamed about driving down Highway 99 to Hanson's farm and setting all his orchards and vineyards on fire. I kept thinking of what the Spartans said when one of their neighbors threatened them: "Your cicadas will chirp from the ground," meaning, "We'll burn your f...ing olive orchards if you mouth off again."(*


To understand the mindset of the anarchist, consider his similar fury right after 9/11.

"The best war is when you can hate both sides, and that's how it was with the WTC. I cheered those jets...Until those planes hit the WTC nobody dreamed you could knock down an American corporation building. Nobody ever thought one would come down. And when they did, damn! It was like the noche triste, when Aztecs made the Conquistadors bleed for the first time and said, "Hey these aren't magic six-legged metal monsters, they're just a bunch of victims like us."

"Hate both sides" in fact, is not quite accurate, since in reality more often the invective is reserved only for the United States — as when he cheers for the terrorists on 9/11, not for us. But then compare the recent antiwar hysteria that equates Abu Ghraib with Saddam's death jails, Guantanamo with the Gulag and Nazi death camps, and the terrorist killers in Iraq with Minutemen.



III. It's About White People?

Then there is the racialist Right, whose tactic is to turn to the old neoconservative slander and prattle on about betrayal of the foundations of the white American republic at war with a darker other.

In their view, trying to foster democracy in the Islamic world, rather than dealing with the same oil Realpolik, is, well, connected with (yes, you guessed it) a general betrayal of the American race, and equivalent to some sort of love of perpetual war.

So one F. Roger Devlin writes in something called The Occidental Quarterly. In his article, "The Case of Victor Davis Hanson: Farmer, Scholar, Warmonger," he argues that we are wasting our time trying to promote democracy in Iraq, and that, more importantly, I never understood the role of race, both ancient and modern:

"If the valleys of Dark Age Greece had been inhabited by the present citizens of Equatorial Guinea, whose average IQ is said to be 59, the result would not have been the classical city-state, self-rule under law, tragedy, philosophy, and the Parthenon. Hanson, unfortunately, has milked the "antiracial" aspect of his own thesis for a great deal more than it is worth. He never misses an opportunity to reiterate that Western Civilization is a matter of "culture, not race" — as if informed racialists were unaware of anything besides biology... And whatever Hanson may think, race is no exception to the rule that one ought to know something about a subject before endeavoring to instruct others. Sadly, Hanson knows less about racial differences than I do about raisin production."

In Devlin's world, race is the key to everything. Only those who don't understand racial superiority would attempt such a fool's errand at promoting democracy abroad.


IV. America as bin Laden?

In an online magazine called LewRockwell.com (article titles in the online magazine range from "Heil, Abe" to "I Hate Rudy Giuliani"), one Gene Callahan takes off from where Devlin ended.

Once again one is derided as a lover of war for suggesting that the United States, when it goes to war against fascists, should defeat them, insist on their unconditional surrender, and stay on to promote democratic reconstruction.

In the past, Callahan (who predicted that after our October strike against the Taliban in Afghanistan there would be "thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of deaths this winter due to massive famine") has questioned the need for fighting both the Confederacy and Hitler, and now turns his anger in "Hanson Agonistes" to my conclusion that dropping the bomb on Hiroshima probably saved millions of lives.

"Among pundits currently urging Americans to embrace an eternal state of war, I find Victor Davis Hanson one of the most disturbing. .. His recent column defending the atomic bombing of Hiroshima reveals the Mr. Hyde lurking within our Dr. Jekyll. "

Callahan ignores the fact that the bomb ended, not perpetuated "eternal" war, abruptly saving millions of casualties on both sides. Only unconditional surrender discredited the militarists and thus allowed democracy to emerge — and with it more than a half century of Japanese prosperity, security, and liberal government. And in the security of the present he forgets that the allies much earlier had tried a negotiated, rather than unconditional surrender and subsequent occupation of the enemy homeland in 1918 — and got Hitler and another war later as thanks.

"Hanson would claim that the US had to demand unconditional surrender in order to prevent the possibility that a revived Japan might undertake aggression again in the future. (One wonders how near he believes that future must be — can one wipe every member of an enemy nation to ensure safety from it forever?) But realistic worries on that front can be worked out in peace negotiations."

He slurs the United States military of WWII by suggesting the logic of forcing Japan to surrender leads to "wipe (sic) every member of an enemy nation". In this world of moral equivalence, rightwing dictatorships are usually always bereaved victims of leftwing American imperialism. So Callahan continues on his screed that we should have negotiated with the militarists of imperial Japan:

"That does not mean both sides in the discussion have the same voice. Japan was willing to discuss its terms of surrender, and was not demanding that of the US."

Tell all that to the Chinese in Nanking or those who fought on Okinawa. In such a world of relativism it makes no difference who starts wars, much less whether they are fought by fascists or democracies. Indeed, to Callahan, the United States in World War II operated on the same premises that bin Laden does now:

"Note that this sort of thinking is exactly how Osama bin Laden justifies striking civilian targets in the US, Britain, or Spain. We must grant that the conduct of modern warfare blurs the line between combatants and non-combatants — on which side of it are the workers in a bomb factory? But as blurry as we might make it, an infant in Hiroshima or a new immigrant delivering a sandwich to the World Trade Center are obviously non-combatants."

Ponder that: Dropping a bomb on the headquarters of the Japanese 2nd Army to force a military cabal to surrender during a war they started that was taking 250,000 Asian lives a month is the same as blowing up an office building full of civilians at a time of peace.

Such a strange, strange world we live in now of David Duke praising Cindy Sheehan's scapegoating Israel.

George Bush who risked his presidency to free millions of Iraqis is to be the moral equivalent of Jefferson Davis — but perhaps is just as hated by the unhinged Right because he is not enough like their beloved Jefferson Davis.

Forcing imperial Japan to surrender is the same as terrorists blowing up the World Trade Center.

And stopping the genocide of Saddam and promoting constitutional government are warmongering.

And all this nonsense transpires in the midst of a war in which the only way we can lose is to turn on each other and give up.


*****
*I should preface my remarks that every fact that Meyerson adduces is incorrect. Take the following:

"Soon after 9-11, the San Joaquin Valley classics professor began writing regularly for The National Review, demanding we go into Iraq, imparting martial lessons from Greece and Rome to an America abruptly at war. In short order, Hanson became a fellow at Palo Alto's Hoover Institute (sic), a dinner companion of Bush and Dick Cheney, and the most unswerving defender of administration policies."

I wrote regularly for the National Review Online, not National Review. I never "demanded" that we go into Iraq, but urged that we do so after considering both the pros and cons of that difficult choice. The Hoover Institution is not "Palo Alto's" but affiliated with Stanford University, whose administration must approve senior fellow appointments in a lengthy process that is not done "in short order." I have never on any occasion been "a dinner companion of Bush." Nor have I been an "unswerving defender of administration policies" but criticized many of its stances from immigration and farm subsidies to deficit spending and current policy toward Saudi Arabia.

** How strange that about the time that Mr. Brecher's article appeared, someone in fact did try to torch our vineyard, but managed only to scorch about 20 vines near the road before the nearby Mid-Valley Fire Department arrived to put out the fire.
Posted by: anonymous5089 || 08/27/2005 10:27 || Comments || Link || [2 views] Top|| File under:


Home Front: Politix
The Old, The Young, and The Media
From the strange people of the F.R.A. comes a sort of synopsis of the next Fonda movie featuring Cindy Sheehan.
I guess with the Michael Jackson trial over with, the Aruba case slowing down, and John Kerry and Howard Dean slipping slowly into the disinterest of the public, the next candidate for heavy media coverage is Cindy Sheehan.

Many on the left are thanking there lucky stars for this one. A woman who just happened to fall right into the laps of the left, saying exactly what they are to afraid to let slip out. They hate war and think that everything Bush does is evil.

Yes once again someone else is doing their bidding abroad so they can spend more time making life miserable on the hill with the Roberts confirmation.

But...I'm just curious...Because I like to ask silly questions....And she is my most favorite person in the world...

How's Jane Fonda taking this? Is she upset that Cindy Sheehan is taking the anti-war movement steam engine? Is there potential for a catfight?

Picture this: The fry smelling tour bus of Fonda stops in the middle of a desert road, a few meters in front the Sheehan bus stops. Out they come long hair and styles reminiscent of the 60s, then like a scene from the "Good, The Bad, and The Ugly" they start throwing soy eco-safe products at eachother hoping, just hoping the other will give up or hop on the others band wagon.

But little to their knowledge (yeah right) the media is watching with skycams and what not. As people become injured (o.k. just pretend injured) and fall to the waste side, Cindy and Fonda emerge center stage. Both look around horrified at what has been done.

"We're no better than the people we're trying to stop." Says Fonda teary.

"We have become the same monsters, let's show America that we can stop this senseless violence together!" whimpers Sheehan as they take eachothers hands and raise them triumphantly in the sky.

"TOGETHER!" everyone shouts as they all sing anti-war songs long into the night near a bonfire.

END SCENE

In the meantime the media finds other news, and moves on with their lives. Sheehan and Fonda remain a topic of blogsites and small dosages of t.v. coverage. But gradually the world sees the senselessness of these people, and notice how much more civilized things seem to be in Iraq. They find the courage to disagree with countries that think America and Britain are wrong, and find it refreshing to see the Iraqi people free. And thanks to rogue media outlets, they see how good change (democratic or otherwise) is in that part of the world.

And fallen soldiers are remembered, thanked, and honored by others continuing to fight for freedom and against terror.

But that's just my take...
Posted by: Chomoger Thiling4897 || 08/27/2005 00:00 || Comments || Link || [2 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Do we ever leave the children in charge of national security.. ever....?

pssst Libs, try a new playbook. The old one is tired and predictable. I mean the Manifesto has been around since the 1800s. It didn't work for Stalin or Pol Pot. Look forward, not to the past.
Posted by: macofromoc || 08/27/2005 1:56 Comments || Top||

#2  When I saw the picture my first thought was "OH NO! VOLDEMORT IMPERIUSED DUMBLEDORE!"
Posted by: Korora || 08/27/2005 8:32 Comments || Top||


Home Front: WoT
Enormous Likelihood of Mistaken Identity of Atta by Able Danger
From The Los Angeles Times, an opinion piece by Terry McDermott, a staff writer and the author of Perfect Soldiers: The Hijackers -- Who They Were and Why They Did It
.... I know nothing about Able Danger other than what I've read, so I can't speak with authority on what the program uncovered about Atta, or when. But, having spent the better part of the last four years investigating Atta's life, I can speak to what is otherwise known about him and his whereabouts.

Atta's academic, immigration, credit, transit and telephone records provide a fairly complete account from the time he left his native Egypt in autumn 1992 to his death. This includes the period during which Able Danger is said to have identified him as a terrorist in the United States. The story those records, and corroborating interviews, tell is that Atta was not in the United States and made almost no contact with the U.S. until June 2000. .... In May [2000], he applied for a visa from the U.S. Embassy in Berlin. Six weeks later he landed in Newark, N.J.

It is hard to see how computers could have named Atta as a member of an American cell before he got here. .... He was listed on airline flight manifests as Mohamed el-Amir, not Atta. His full name was Mohamed Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta. El-Amir is how Atta was known to friends at school, to the banks that issued his credit cards and to the immigration service in Germany. It's the name on his high school and college diplomas.

Even if Able Danger somehow produced a name, "Mohamed Atta," that might not mean much. Variations of "Mohamed" are overwhelmingly the most common name in the Muslim world. It is James, John and Robert combined. Atta isn't Smith or Jones, but it isn't Einstein either. There are plenty of Mohamed Attas — and plenty of Mohamed el-Amirs too. The likelihood of mistaken identity is enormous.

But there is another possibility. Over the last four years I have interviewed dozens of people who swore they saw Atta somewhere he wasn't. This includes an assortment of waiters, students, flight instructors, taxi drivers and, more dramatically, two women who each claim to have been married to Atta, this despite the fact that they were never in the same city at the same time he was. .... I think people subsequently, subconsciously placed that face where it made sense to them. There is no reason that a congressman or even two career military men searching for solutions are any less susceptible to seeing what they need to see, where they want to see it.

Whatever the resolution of the Able Danger imbroglio, there were plenty of missed opportunities on the road to 9/11. German law enforcement knew in mid-1999 that Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, another Sept. 11 hijacker, were acquaintances of an Al Qaeda recruiter. This information was passed on to the CIA. The name of a third hijacker, Ziad Jarrah, was given to U.S. intelligence agencies in early 2000 when he was interrogated at length as he passed through customs in the United Arab Emirates en route from Afghanistan to Germany. He told Emiratis he was going to the United States to become a pilot. The Emiratis say they passed this information to the Americans. More famously, the CIA tracked two known Al Qaeda operatives through eight CIA stations from the Middle East to Malaysia, then somehow didn't notice as they walked onto a jetway and a plane bound for Los Angeles. ....
Posted by: Mike Sylwester || 08/27/2005 00:00 || Comments || Link || [1 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Relevant quote: "I know nothing about Able Danger other than what I've read, so I can't speak with authority on what the program uncovered about Atta, or when." But then he continues...

3 arguments here:

1) I studied him and didn't find evidence he was in the US. Therefore any i.d. of him is wrong.

2) Mistake of name. Atta wasn't the name he used regularly, or something like that. Those fools probably got the name wrong.

3) Individuals have a propensity to make up the past in accordence with what they know of the present. "There is no reason that a congressman or even two career military men searching for solutions are any less susceptible to seeing what they need to see, where they want to see it." Stupid, stupid Congressmen and Military officers!

In summary, the writer's arguments hinge around how he is better at his job and staying free of mistakes and prejudices than those professional individuals trained to do their job, and who have been doing it for years, and have access to the most sensitive information. How pompous and self important.

Allow me to retort:

Third Source Backs Able Danger Claims

Relevant quote:

""I am absolutely positive that he [Atta] was on our chart among other pictures and ties that we were doing mainly based upon [terror] cells in New York City," Smith said.

Smith said data was gathered from a variety of sources, including about 30 or 40 individuals. He said they all had strong Middle Eastern connections and were paid for their information. Smith said Able Danger's photo of Atta was obtained from overseas."

I don't know what bothers me more; the fact that the comission ignored this, or that fact that some people continue in precisely the same mindset which got us to this situation: I know the answer I'm looking for, so I'll only see the evidence I want. The writer of this piece did it, and you're doing it right now, Mike.
Posted by: Mark E. || 08/27/2005 8:41 Comments || Top||

#2  Jayson Blair is alive and well...
Posted by: Snease Pheath5636 || 08/27/2005 10:01 Comments || Top||

#3  MS must have ben transferred from the defence of Kofi to discrediting of Able Danger. Nothing indicates more to me that this story has legs. Is this a promotion for Mikey? Let's hope things work out better than they did on Annan watch.
Posted by: Mrs. Davis || 08/27/2005 10:56 Comments || Top||

#4  Abel Danger tied Atta to Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheikh of 1993 WTC bombing fame. Here's two degrees of separation from Rahman to Atta:
1. Rahman closely, closely associated with El Sayyid Nosair, the man who murdered Meir Kahane in 1990.
2. El Sayyid Nosair had a hit list which included the judge and DAs responsible for the deportation of Mohammad Atta.

The problem is that THIS Atta was not the 911 Atta. This Mohammad Atta was the one who attacked a bus in Israel.

The chance for mistaken identity is real. More data please.
Posted by: Marlowe || 08/27/2005 11:05 Comments || Top||

#5  had his photo.... On the chart.... Before sept 11th.

Whether mistaken or not, they knew there was "A" Mohammed Atta, if not "the" Mohammed Atta running around.
Posted by: Mark E. || 08/27/2005 11:22 Comments || Top||

#6  But the liklihood of mistaken identity is enormous! I'll bet we're talking billions and billions of percents.
Posted by: Mrs. Davis || 08/27/2005 11:35 Comments || Top||

#7  Somebody else who doesn't understand data mining. See my and others earlier posts on the topic.

Businesses spend very large amounts of money on data mining precisely because it produces surprising and accurate results that can not be produced in other ways and specifically cannot be produced by a roomful of the best analysts.

Otherwise Mark is correct. The man's argument is 'I don't understand how Able Danger could have identified Atta, therefore it didn't.'
Posted by: phil_b || 08/27/2005 14:55 Comments || Top||

#8  And there are plenty of Mark Johnstons and Anne Smiths. The data mining crowd have ways of handling multiple people with the same name. The fact there are 2 mohamed Attas who were terrorists is irrelevant.
Posted by: phil_b || 08/27/2005 15:09 Comments || Top||

#9  I have been fearful that the right, I include myself in that movement or political spectrum, has jumped the shark on Operation Able Danger.

However, as more persons come forward, this is one instance where I am so happy to be wrong. Seems that O.A.D. is the real deal!
Posted by: The Angry Fliegerabwehrkanonen || 08/27/2005 17:10 Comments || Top||


Iraq-Jordan
Quantitative military aspects of the Iraq war
I know we aren't supposed to quote other blogs, but this is very interesting and from a source I doubt many Rantburgers go to, and I don't know how to paste graphics (click on link), so here goes:

Much as I hate to sound like an unclean economic vampire, I suspect this chart is the most important measure of how the war is going.
Posted by: Mrs. Davis || 08/27/2005 11:40 || Comments || Link || [3 views] Top|| File under:



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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.

Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.

Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has dominated Mexico for six years.
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Two weeks of WOT
Sat 2005-08-27
  Death for Musharraf plotters
Fri 2005-08-26
  1,000 German cops hunting terror suspects
Thu 2005-08-25
  UK to boot Captain Hook, al-Faqih
Wed 2005-08-24
  Binny reported injured
Tue 2005-08-23
  Bangla cops quizzing 8/17 bomb suspects
Mon 2005-08-22
  Iraq holding 281 foreign insurgent suspects
Sun 2005-08-21
  Brits foil gas attack on Commons
Sat 2005-08-20
  Motassadeq guilty (again)
Fri 2005-08-19
  New Jordan AQ Branch Launches Rocket Attack
Thu 2005-08-18
  Al-Oufi dead again
Wed 2005-08-17
  100 Bombs explode across Bangladesh
Tue 2005-08-16
  Italy to expel 700 terr suspects
Mon 2005-08-15
  Israel begins Gaza pullout
Sun 2005-08-14
  Hamas not to disarm after Gaza pullout
Sat 2005-08-13
  U.S. troops begin Afghan offensive


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