June 14, 2005

Online Instructions: How to get into Iraq and Become a Terrorist

iraq_jihad_routes.jpg Jihadweb has published an online guide on how to become a terrorist in Iraq. The instructions (in Arabic) can be downloaded here by clicking the image to the right. I'm making it available since I have an odd feeling this site won't be up very much longer ;-) [UPDATE: DOWN LIKE A CLOWN CHARLIE BROWN]

After describing how to mentally and physically prepare for becoming a terrorist in Iraq (including the instructions that you should never turn down a suicide mission) the author goes on to give advice on how to get into Iraq. First, get in touch with your local Salaafist group. This would be any mosque with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood or other Islamist groups.

Next, get yourself into Syria. From SITE's translation include:

After providing guidelines through which a potential mujahideen should mentally prepare himself for battle, the author supplies information on how to reach Iraq and the mujahideen. He states that " Salafist jihadists are in most of the Arab countriesÂ…most of these have good relations with the mujahideen groups in Iraq and, through these groups, hundreds of thousands have reached the land of the two rivers." Meanwhile, the author urges readers to be cautious, warning that "Â…getting near some of them may lead to you getting persecuted. Try to get in touch with them in a very secret wayÂ…."


Once the potential mujahid is ready to enter Iraq, the author suggests entering into Iraq "Â…via the Syrian lands." He notes that while "There is a saying that the Syrian regime turns their face [away] from the mujahideen who take secret roads" Syrian authorities are nonetheless "Â…complicating things at the entry and exit front, so make your entry to Syria via Turkey, or for a good reason. Your parents should know the reason [by which you are professing to enter Syria]Â… and it is good if you have your passport with an entry via to Turkey, so you can pretend that youÂ’re in transit to Turkey." One a further note, he suggests that potential insurgents "wear jeans and eat donuts and use a walkman which has a tape of any singer" in order to appear westernized, and thus less of a threat. [full translation available by subscription at SITE]

Just to show you where these guys stand, and to avoid the frequent charge made against me that I don't really know the website in question is pro-terrorist, here is a screenshot of one of their many banners. Any questions?

jihadweb_screenshot_banner.jpg

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June 13, 2005

The Horrors of the Gulags

As I've said many times, the main problem with comparing Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo, Cuba, to the Soviet gulags is not so much that it drastically overstates what is happening to prisoners in the US War on Terror, but that it such comparisons minimize the utter horror of the Soviet gulags. My post on the subject is here.

The same minimization occurs when you compare [insert unliked political figure here] to Hitler or [insert perceived problem here] to the holocaust. Some crimes and criminals are so far beyond infamy that to compare any one or any thing to them does a grave injustice to their victims. Comparing Camp X-Ray to gulags is immoral and disgusting because it is an insult to the tens of millions of victims who died under the horrible opression that was the gulag system.

UPDATE: Let me also add that using such terminology is also immoral for consequentalist reasons. If you really believe that Bush = Hitler then, as a moral being, aren't you compelled by conscience to do something about that? Isn't it your moral obligation then to attempt to assasinate the President? If you answer no, then either a) you don't really believe Bush = Hitler or b) you are a moral idiot. But if you answer yes....You see where this is going?

For this reason I have, in the past, called on the government of the U.S. to bomb al Jazeera and have called Noam Chomsky a traitor. If you wish to make the case that the U.S. has some sort of equivelancy to the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany then you are also making the moral case for war against the United States. The reason the jihadis fight the U.S. is not that they simply hate us, but that they believe the lies told to them by al Jazeera and the Leftist Western press. That is, they believe they are engaged in a moral struggle. They are the freedom fighters, we are the Hitlers!

Again, words have consequences. The gulags were genocidal. If the U.S. is actually engaged in such a genocidal endeavor, then it would be the duty of all moral beings to resist--with force. Unless AI is willing to call for war against the U.S., I'd suggest they shut their pie holes.

I've known R.J. Rummel's work for some time in my professional capacity. His specialty is documenting state-sponsored genocide. Thanks to Dean Esmay for pointing out that Rummel is also a blogger. Here is an excerpt from his must read post on the subject of the gulags:

Overall, from 1917 to 1987, Gulag, including transit deaths, probably killed about 39,464,000 Soviet citizens and foreigners. Compare this 6,228.5 mile stack of corpses (assuming each corpse has a width of 10 inches), each a loving, self-conscious human being like you and I, to these totals:

Gulag = 39,464,000 murdered (democide/genocide);
All American executions 1864-1982 = 5,753 killed;
All the Americans killed in all its wars up to the Gulf War = 1,177,936 killed;
The killed in battle in World War I = 9,000,000;
Of World War II = 15,000,000;
All 20th Century international and domestic wars = 35,654,000 killed;
And all major wars 1740-1997 = 20,000,000 killed.

Now tell me again, Irene Khan and William Schulz of AI, that Guantánamo is like Gulag

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June 07, 2005

John 'Brilliant' Kerry vs. George 'Slacker' Bush

Thanks to Flea for sending me this link to this Boston Globe article that questions the assertions made by partisans on the Left that George Bush is so much duller a light than John Kerry. It turns out they are equally dull. In fact, John Kerry may be a notch duller than George W. Bush. An earlier IQ comparison had shown that George W. Bush was slightly higher on the scale than Kerry.

Anyway it just goes to show that speaking ability is not a very good measure of intelligence. It is said that James Madison was a horrible speaker with a squeaky little voice. I take it we all can agree that Madison stands only next to Jefferson in terms of pure political genius?

Yes, George W. Bush is a horrible, horrible speaker, but even if Daddy Bush got him into Yale it was still Shrimp-Chub-Bush who managed to get out of Yale and then go on to Harvard for an MBA. Me? I just went to the local community college for awhile, then on to a small state college, before moving on to a large private university known primarily for their football team and toga parties. And I think we can all agree that I'm no genius despite my excellent speaking abilities. Oh, wait. None of you have heard me speak. *sigh* That'll have to wait for The Jawa Report podcast.

UPDATE: Apparently I'm the last blogger on earth to here about this. That's only because my wards keep me in a hermeutically sealed room in an ongoing experiment to test Schroedinger's 'jawa in box' experiment. Does Rusty really exist in such a state? Quantum physics says both yes and no at the same time, but I'm not so sure.

Anyway, Ace gave me a chuckle with this one, "Shockingly enough, one of Kerry's highest grades (and yet still not all that good) was in... French."

Oh, and The Ankle Biting Pundits manage to use the word tergiversations in a sentence, "Of course, during the campaign, his staff went the extra mile to say that his frequent tergiversations were due to his superior intellect. We can all have a good laugh now."

On a more serious note, Aylward chimes in, "Evidently the erudite persona Kerry has worked tirelessly over the years to create wouldn't allow him to acknowledge his own failures. He paid a hefty price for his stubbornness - the Presidency."

Michelle Malkin has a much more complete roundup, as I'm desperately needed elsewhere and don't have the time right now to see where this thing is going.

It looks like all you guys are going to have to take down your 'Sign the SF-180 Form' banners.

Llamas make me yip, orgle, and laugh!

UPDATE: Holy shit, Kos says something that is both reasonable and remarkably intelligent for once!! (well, a single sentence, but I'll take it) "Why the hell didn't he release these documents earlier?"

UPDATE II: Whoa. Check out what John O'Neil from the Swifties says to Matt Margolis about Kerry's less than forthcoming release of his records.

We called for Kerry to execute a form which would permit anyone to examine his full and unexpulgated military records at the Navy Department and the National Personnel Records Center. Instead he executed a form permitting his hometown paper to obtain the records currently at the Navy Department. The Navy Department previously indicated its records did not include various materials. This is hardly what we called for. If he did execute a complete release of all records we could then answer questions such as (1)Did he ever receive orders to Cambodia or file any report of such a mission (whether at Christmas or otherwise); (2) What was his discharge status between 1970 and 1978 (when he received a discharge) and was it affected by his meetings in 1970 and 1971 with the North Vietnamese? (3)why did he receive much later citations for medals purportedly signed by Secretary Lehman who said he did not know of them; (4) Are there Hostile Fire and Personnel Injured by Hostile Fire Reports for Kerry's Dec. 1968 Purple Heart (when the officer in charge of the boat Admiral Schacte, the treating Surgeon Louis Letsos, and Kerry's Division Commander deny there was hostile fire causing a scratch) awarded three months later under unknown circumstances.
more...

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June 06, 2005

Koran Splashed With Urine (Video)

So it looks like a guard at Gitmo may have accidentally had some piss hit a Quran. Big deal. I get piss splashback on my shoes fortnightly, and isn't that far more offensive? Anyway Dan Riehl uncovers more Koran pissing abuse here and he has the video to prove the allegations this time. more...

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Photoessay: GI's Doing Good

Gaijin Biker has an excellent series of photos of the U.S. military doing some good. Just send your lefty friends there the next time they accuse the US of ill intentions in Iraq.

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Natalee Holloway

Red at Scared Monkeys is following the story closely. Updates will be posted here.

Me? I'm not so interested although this is clearly a tragic story. But there are millions of tragic stories that could be told on any given day. I can't help but wondering if this would be the lead story if Natalee wasn't a gorgeous blonde? I'm serious. In my book this is the lead story for a local TV station at best. There is no reason this ought to be the lead at CNN and Fox. More evidence of the vast gynocratic conspiracy and the Oprahization of the news.......

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June 03, 2005

Serbian Civilian Murders Broadcast on TV, Leads to Arrests

Amateur video taken of war crimes committed by Bosnian Serbs against civilians has been aired on Serb and Bosnian TV for the first time. I first saw this story at my yahoo mail account. I see Hysciene is also covering it here. I'm going to archive the story and the photos below since The AP has a tendency to take them down after a week or so.

more...

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Tiananmen Square Anniversary

Tiananmen Square - June 4th, 1989. Never forget.

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June 02, 2005

The Two Faces of Seymour Hirsh

I've always know Seymour Hirsh was an idiot, but I had no idea he was a moonbat to boot. In the pages of The New Yorker Hirsh appears to be a hard hitting left-of-center partisan. And he's had quite a lot of scoops in his day (My Lai), peppered with the occasional idiotic report (I'm thinking of his 'Forged uranium documents story'). However, when he gets away from editorial oversight of David Remnick, the other, less sane, side of Seymour Hirsh comes out. What's even more insane than the accusations, which literally come straight out of the pages of al Jazeera, are the fact that he attributes them to unnamed sources deep within the Pentagon.

Here are the accusations from The New York Metro. I recommend reading the whole article::

*Videotape of young boys being raped at Abu Ghraib.
*Evidence that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi may be a “composite figure” and a propaganda creation of either Iraq’s Baathist insurgency or the U.S. government.
*The active involvement of Karl Rove and the president in “prisoner-interrogation issues.”
*The mysterious disappearance of $1 billion, in cash, in Iraq.
*A threat by the administration to a TV network to cut off access to briefings in retaliation for asking Laura Bush “a very tough question about abortion.”
*The Iraqi insurgency’s access to short-range FROG missiles that “can do grievous damage to American troops.”
*The murder, by an American platoon, of 36 Iraqi guards.
Hat tip: Evariste over at Discarded Lies.

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June 01, 2005

The Gulag Archipelego vs. Amnesty International's 'Gulags'

Work Will Make You Free
Sign over the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Labor in the USSR Is a Matter of Honor, Courage, and Heroism
Sign over the gulag camps gates.

[Right: A group of exiles prepares for mass deportation to Siberia]

Last week Amnesty International called the Guantanomo Bay, Cuba, detention facility (also knows as Camp X-Ray) where so-called 'enemy combatants' in the Global War on Terror are being held 'the gulag of our times.'

By invoking the term gulag, Amnesty International wishes to convey the notion that what is happening to the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay is somehow comparable to the Soviet labor camp prison system of the Stalinist era. By using the term gulag, Amnesty International wishes to convey images of political terrorism, repression, and harsh prison conditions.

Comparing Guantanomo to a gulag is a serious accusation.

This post explores three questions: What exactly is a gulag and how widespread was the gulag system? What were the Soviet gulags like? And how do the worst and yet unproven allegations of abuse at Guantanomo Bay compare to what happened in Soviet gulags?

None of these questions are fully answered here, but hopefully the reader will come away with a better understanding of the gulag system and the political motivations of Amnesty International in using the term.

Let's begin with the last question first.

What have the Guantanomo Bay prisoners alleged?

[Right: Gulag workers]


According to Amnesty International, there were about 520 prisoners altogether at Guantamo, of which 234 have been released or tranfered out. Many have claimed 'abuse' ranging from humiliating name-calling to guards punching the prisoners.

A videotape of alleged abuse is said to reveal:

the guards punching some detainees, tying one to a gurney for questioning and forcing a dozen to strip from the waist down [in front of female guards].
Al Jazeera calls this one of the 'worst cases' of abuse, presumably because it was allegedly done by a female FBI agent:
One document describes how an FBI special agent (SA) observed a female interrogator caress a shackled prisoner, whisper in his ear and then cause him to grimace in pain.

"SA [name deleted] asked what had happened to cause the detainee to grimace up in pain," the document said.

"The marine said [she] had grabbed the detainees thumbs and bent them backwards and indicated that she also grabbed his genitals."

The document showed that the marine also implied that her treatment of that detainee was less harsh than her treatment of others.

He said he had seen her cause other detainees to curl up into a foetal position on the floor and cry in pain.

An FBI memo cited by Al Jazeera reported the whopping number of:
26 agents at Guantanamo said they had observed some form of mistreatment, although not by FBI personnel.
Only 9 of these were deemed serious enough to investigate.

Cageprisoners.com, an openly pro-jihadist website cloaked in a civil-libertarian dressing, documents the alleged abuses of 6 Bahraini prisoners of Camp X-Ray in this PDF document. Most of the allegations are nothing more than common prison horror stories, much worse could be seen in any prison inspired movie, but some of them do include the allegations of abuse by interrogators (including death threats), mishandling of the Koran, and the story of a guard who overeacted to one of the prisoners for religious reasons.

There are no allegations of out and out murder nor are there allegations that prisoners have been starved to death.

If all the allegations were to prove correct we would have the story of several hundred victims of being at the wrong place (mostly foreigners in Afghanistan their for 'religious studies') at the wrong time (captured within Taliban lines or at al Qaeda camps), taken to a far-off prison with little recourse to due process, and who find that while their lives are in no danger, the conditions at their new home are abusive and less than ideal.

If all of the above is true then Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is a blemish on America's good name and a national shame which needs correcting.

I do not believe for a moment that the majority of the abuse stories at Camp X-Ray are true, especially in light of the recent revelation that al Qaeda trains its operatives to make abuse allegations. However, it is probable that some of the stories are true, even if the majority of those stories turn out to be the kind of routine behavior accepted at most US detention facilities. Abuse happens in prisons, and such abuse should be rooted out. But if you cannot accept any level of abuse at a prison then you cannot accept any penal system.

So then how do the abuses at Camp X-Ray compare to the Soviet gulags? Are such comparisons fair?

What is a gulag?

From the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office's Gulag study which investigates and seeks the return of the bodies of US soldiers held in the Soviet gulags:

The word “gulag” became a familiar term in the West with the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s epic novel, The Gulag Archipelag, in 1973. A Russian acronym for Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerey (Main Administration of Camps), “Gulag,” is often used to mean any oppressive penal system.
The problem with calling any penal system which is 'oppressive' a gulag is that it minimizes the enormity of the crimes committed in the Soviet gulag system. Still, the term is lightly thrown around among polemicists wishing to make a point.

It is important to recognize three distinguishing characteristics of the gulags that seperate them from other prison systems.

[Right: Graves of victims at Kolyma gulag]


First, the gulags were a form of political terrorism. These massive prisons were used to weed out those that were even remotely suspected of having all but the most enthusiastic of feelings toward the Soviet system. Solzhenitsyn, for instance, found himself in a Siberian gulag for making the mistake of making a joke about Stalin in a letter.

Can a single prison holding less than 500 people be considered a widespread tool of political terrorism?

Second, the gulags were a source of slave labor. It is not a coincidence that the massive increase in the number of prisoners in the gulags is timed precisely with the announcement of Stalin's first Five Year Plan. Although most of our knowledge of the gulag system comes from the intellectual class that survived them, such as the memories of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelego, most of the victims were simple peasants. The gulags were not prisons in the Western sense of the word. The gulags were massive industrial complexes of forced labor.

No prisoner at Guantanomo or at any other detention facility for war prisoners has alleged forced labor.

Third, while the purpose of the gulags was not necessarily to torture or kill prisoners, the gulags were a place where humiliation, torture, and genocide scale mass deaths occured. Unlike survivors of the holocaust, though, who have found voice in the state of Israel, in US based interest-groups, or who have captured the fascination of Hollywood, the story of the gulags remains largely unheard of for the vast majority of the American public. While we understand that the gulags were bad places in the Soviet Union, the horrors of the gulag do not seem to resonate with us in the same way.

Very few cases of death are alleged to have occured in any US war related detention facility, none at Guantanamo.

Just how widespread was the gulag phenomenon?

Only the crimes of the Holocaust can measure up to the sheer evil of the gulags of the Soviet empire.

Anne Applebaum in Capitalism Magazine:

As a result, between 1929, when they first became a mass phenomenon, and 1953, the year of Stalin's death, some 18 million people passed through them. In addition, a further 6 or 7 million people were deported, not to camps but to exile villages. In total, that means the number of people with some experience of imprisonment in Stalin's Soviet Union could have run as high as 25 million, about 15 percent of the population.
The Hoover Institute, which in 1999 began to publish their findings from newly opened original documents from the Lenin-Kruschev era, notes:
-Ten percent of the entire population of the Soviet Union lived in the camps.
-The Gulag administration was the largest single employer in all of Europe.
-The average life expectancy of a camp prisoner was one winter.
-At least twenty million people perished in the labor camps during StalinÂ’s rule.
-The camps dehumanized life and instituted a reign of terror throughout Soviet society.
A single gulag complex, Kolyma, killed 3 million people.
In total, between 1937 and 1953, as estimated by Robert Conquest, Kolyma consumed almost 3 million lives, mainly natives of the Soviet Union.
But foreigners were also victim. For instance, at the Chukhots camp?
No Polish prisoners at all returned of 3000 sent to Chukhots camps
The gulags, then, were a system of terror. When speaking of a single gulag, a person may be tempted to conjure up the image of German POW camp, perhaps Stalig 13 out of a 1960s WWII movie. Perhaps this is why European and American Leftists like to compare Camp X-Ray to the gulags. Such an image, though, would be far from the truth.

To understand the sheer enormity of a single gulag one would have to envision medium sized cities made up entirely of the victims of forced relocation campaigns surrounded by a series of smaller cities made up entirely of slave laborers. Some of the gulags were so massive in geographic scale that they are hard to imagine. For instance, the deadly Kolyma gulag was really a series of forced labor camps in and around the massive gold mine and not a single prison. Think the size of US states, and not just Rhode Island and Deleware--think Kansas.

The gulags were so enormous that they pervert the Russian economy to this day. Whenever the centralized government was forced to make the decision to invest in labor or capital, labor was chosen because it was nearly free and had certain advantageous political effects. To this day, hundreds of thousands of Russian citizens live in communities founded by gulag slave-labor in arctic regions which have no business being there. Many of these arctic residents are the children of gulag survivors and exiles forced to the area.

[Right: Gulag slave laborers dig the Balamor canal]whiteseacanal1.jpg
Thousands of forced labor projects left millions dead. Here is just one example from the building of the Belamor Canal:

Over 100,000 prisoners equipped with pick-axes, wheelbarrows and hatchets - dug a 227-kilometre long canal linking the Baltic and the White Sea in 20 months between 1931 and 1933. Tens of thousands died in the process.
Guantanamo Bay's Camp X-Ray at its height had just over 500 prisoners. If Amnesty International is to be believed, then the maximum figure of total prisoners ever held by the US led Global War on Terror is around 70,000. But these figures include thousands that have been already released and thousands held by friendly governments. Further, the vast majority of those who were once detained were found on a field of battle either in Iraq or in Afghanistan.

Even if one were to compare the combined US War on Terror prisons to the gulag system one would be left with a drop of abuse next to a pool of horrors and mass murders. Such a comparison is unwarrented and immoraly minimizes the horrors of the gulags.

What were the Soviet gulags like?

While the prisoners at Guantanamo complain of periodic guard abuse, Koran flushings, and no judicial review by US civilian courts, the victims of the gulag were busy dying by the millions.

But what also needs to be remembered is that the gulags were not just a place for men, but for entire families.

Susanna Pechuro retells the horrors of the gulags:

The most horrible thing I saw in a camp was how children were taken away from their mothers. Because it's something you can't live with. And there are some things I don't let myself remember, because if I do I get insomnia for several weeks remembering those screaming mothers after their children have been taken away from them, [screaming] because they will never know where these children are being taken, to what orphanages. I've never seen anything more horrible than that, even though I also saw people beaten up. But nothing more horrible than the separation of children and mothers. And this can never and should never be forgiven. No matter what communists say now, the social structure which made it possible will never be pardoned.
Melana Zyla Vickers relates the following story from Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History. It is reminiscent of the Holocaust:
...millions of children were either imprisoned with their mothers, or were born in the Gulag. Babies were taken from their mothers to be watched in batches of dozens by rough-mannered nurses. The nurses "took off their nightclothes and washed them in ice-cold water. The babies didn't even dare cry. They made little sniffing noises like old men and let out low hoots. This awful hooting noise would come from the cots for days at a time," wrote political dissident Hava Volovich. Of her own baby, Volovich wrote: "Little Eleanora, who was now fifteen months old, soon realized that her pleas for 'home' were in vain. She stopped reaching out for me when I visited her; she would turn away in silence. On the last day of her life, when I picked her up (they allowed me to breast-feed her) she stared wide-eyed somewhere off into the distance, then started to beat her weak little fists on my face. . . . Then she pointed down at her bed. In the evening, when I came back with my bundle of firewood, . . . I found her lying naked in the morgue among the corpses of the adult prisoners."
This story of the gulags reminds us of the periodic mass murders that took place. From Applebaum agian:
During the winter of 1937-38, "no hot food was given to the prisoners at all; the daily ration consisted of 400 grams of half-dried bread. [In March 1938], a new group of NKVD officers arrived from Moscow. The officers formed a 'special commission' and called out the prisoners in groups of forty. They were told they were going off on a transport. Each was given a piece of bread. The prisoners in the tent heard them being marched away --- and then [heard] the sounds of shooting."
Karol M.Nawalicki remembers the horrors of the Kolyma gulag:
"-It was easier to get accustomed to seeing the dead or dying, than to the scenes of stripping the dead bodies, sometimes even before they had died. The inmates did this themselves in order to have more clothes. There was no place for the majesty of death in the gulags of Kolyma. I could not get used to naked bodies being dragged by their legs to a special store, some considerable distance from the barracks. The mortuary was emptied depending on the season of the year."
Avraham Shifrin, the son of a gulag victim and gulag survivor himself, recounts his experience:
Until 1956, Shifrin and his fellow prisoners worked ten-hour days, seven days a week. Thereafter the work load was reduced to six days. Prisoners who attempted to escape, and were shot and killed some distance from the camp, were left to rot (though their index fingers were severed for purposes of fingerprint identification). The bodies of those shot close to camp were placed near the gate to terrorize and deter other inmates who might be contemplating escape....

Shifrin also recalled a grisly incident involving a prisoner who cut off his hand with an ax and asked a fellow inmate to place the severed appendage inside lumber that had been loaded for shipment. When Shifrin asked the amputee why he had done this, he replied that the lumber would go to other countries, where the hand might help people understand the conditions under which the lumber was cut.

Hopelessness, desperation, and fatigue from the exhausting work schedule led to many instances of self-mutilation. Some prisoners induced infections by pulling thread through the plaque between their teeth, then running the thread through a few inches of flesh with a needle. Serious infection would develop within minutes and justify their transport to a hospital for a "rest."


Krakowiecki on the mine workers at the Kolyma gulag:
From there, from the gold mine, came a procession of human phantoms. These people were driven hard to work, like animals, through the entire (summer) season. The animals would have revolted or died. The man endures more than they do. The men exploited through the season changed into skeletons. One cannot understand how these people are still alive? Only skin and bones, without exaggeration. These past people, physically completely destroyed, are not needed in the gold mine anymore, because their productivity is nil; therefore the half dead men are directed to the task of maintaining the roads."

Conclusions

Making any sort of comparison, even as a rhetorical device, between Camp X-Ray and the Soviet gulag system is problematic at best and grossly immoral at worst.

For Amnesty International to stoop to the low of making such a comparison reveals their ignorance of history and their political bias against the United States. While the US, like all nation-states, is not perfect, her flaws do not begin to compare to the oppression of Communist states in general and of the gulags in particular.

Shame on you Amnesty International, I will never take your accusations seriously again.

Resources:

Perhaps the most complete account of the gulag system is Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, but the enormity of the work makes it difficult reading. An easy afternoon read, and a better piece of literature, is Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich which recounts the humanity of a single victim on a single day under the oppression of the gulag system.

Another account of gulag stories see Applebaum's Gulag: A History, which is really a narrative history and very readable.

For a great e-bibliography, see The Soros Foundation funded Gulag link site.

Parenthetically, I spent some time studying in Russia during the mid-1990s. For about a year I studied the Soviet system. To this day the Russian people have still not come to terms with the horrors of Communism. Even survivors of the gulags prefer to blame them on Stalin, rather than the Marxist-Leninist system which Stalin was inspired by.

Roger L. Simon comes to a conclusion similar to my own here. Malkin also has a nice reaction to the Gitmo flack here along with blog reaction and Babalu Blog reminds us that the very real gulags of Cuba still operate to this day. Austin Bay fisks Amnesty here. John Henke does a good job discussing the accusation here and how the US is rightly investigating them. Villanous Company puts it into perspective here.

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds is kind enough to link me and he has a good post of his own here. You might also want to check out the 'fatwas' issued below.

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Hey Look, Fox News has joined the liberals!

I'm not a history buff. I don't know all the specifics about the two World Wars because that's just not the type of information that sticks with me. However, I do know when someone is using misinformation to attempt to prove a point, and in one of its latest opinion pieces, Jim Powell at Fox News seems to be doing just that.

The piece is titled "U.S. Has Long History of Waging Wrong Wars" and seems to assume that every war fought since the Civil war has been the wrong one. He backs up his theory with statements such as this:

In 1917, Wilson persuaded Congress to declare war against Germany, so that the U.S. could make the world "safe for democracy." By entering World War I on the side of France and Great Britain, Wilson enabled them to win a decisive victory and impose vindictive surrender terms on Germany. This move triggered a bitter nationalist reaction, generating political support for Hitler.

Anyone who has studied societies and/or economics knows exactly how Hitler came to power. He played himself up as a moderate to rise up through the ranks to the highest position he could attain. And the whole time he did it, he gave the people exactly what they were asking for. He built industry and created jobs, and he instilled national pride in the German population. The author of the piece above makes it sound as though the Germans were mad at everyone else and simply elected Hitler specifically to start the next World War. That, by itself is complete lunacy. He then goes on to talk about other nations as well.

Even though the United States defeated Hitler in World War II, within five years more people lived under totalitarian regimes than before the war, as communists came to power in Eastern Europe and China. Millions ended up exchanging a Nazi tyranny for a communist tyranny.

And how exactly is that the cause of the US fighting WWII? Is it just because we didn't go in and set up democracies in all the countries that were ravaged by the war? Or should we have created US colonies out of them? I'm sure the rest of the world wouldn't have minded. Heck, they already see us as nation builders and we haven't even done anything of the sort.

Of course one could also take away from that statement that we shouldn't have fought Hitler in the first place. Especially given the title of the piece. And if that is the suggestion he is making, then he REALLY needs to go back to school. Not college, but middle school. Because that's where I learned what kind of man Hitler was. Certainly not the type you wanted to leave in charge in Europe. And make no mistake, without our help, Hitler would have been in charge of all of Europe.

Confident about America's overwhelming firepower, President Lyndon Johnson escalated the Vietnam War during the 1960s. But the North Vietnamese adopted guerrilla tactics to elude most of the bombs, and American soldiers were at a disadvantage in strange jungles. More than 58,000 Americans were killed. The quagmire forced Johnson to give up the idea of seeking re-election in 1968.

If Johnson had been so confident of our superior firepower, he would have allowed our soldiers to use it. If you really think that our soldiers lost simply because of guerrilla tactics and strange jungles, then you must have gotten your education at Berkeley.

The author then proceeds to wrap up with this gem.

If, in the name of fighting terrorism and reforming the world, the U.S. embarks on a policy of perpetual war, its ability to fight as effectively as possible when it really counts will be undermined. Already, the armed forces have had difficulty conducting operations in both Afghanistan and Iraq. There's much concern about enlistment rates for a volunteer army because of the Pentagon's "stop loss" orders forcing tens of thousands of soldiers to remain on active duty perhaps a year longer than they had bargained for.

In addition, the U.S. invasion of nuke-free Iraq and its restraint with nuke-armed North Korea send a signal that other nations should secretly accelerate efforts to acquire nuclear weapons since they deter U.S. intervention. U.S. actions encourage the nuclear proliferation it is intended to prevent.

First off, I don't see us having a policy of perpetual war. Nor do I see what gives the author that idea unless it's just another fancy way of saying "Bush doesn't have an exit stragegy". I think that particular dog has been beaten enough.

Secondly, who said anything about Iraq having nuclear weapons? We thought they might have the fuel, but we never said they had nuclear weapons. Nor was that the reason for an invasion there. I'm not going to go into they whole "why Bush invaded Iraq" argument again, but comparing it to North Korea is comparing apples and oranges. What works with one won't necessarily work with the other. And when we can confirm that a country does have nuclear missles, don't you think a little more caution in dealing with them might be called for?

I have to assume, in allowing this article to run, that Fox is trying to uphold their "fair and balanced" mantra, but it would certainly be nice if they could get someone to get their facts straight before running off making accusations about how the US doesn't ever fight the right war. I'm guessing that there are millions of liberated people, not just in Iraq, but all across Europe who would say that we did fight the right wars.

Posted by: Drew at 07:41 AM | Comments (22) | Add Comment
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May 31, 2005

Patriots at the NY Times Blow CIA Cover

You really need to read this. As I have been saying all along, journalists put their code of journalistic ethics above love of country. I recently heard an interview with Kevin Sites on NPR in which he discussed how he knew releasing the video of a Marine killing an unarmed and wounded insurgent would lead to more American deaths but that his journalistic code of ethics forced him to do so. No value or principle could ever trump journalistic ethics.

Posted by: Rusty at 05:36 PM | Comments (78) | Add Comment
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Al Qaeda Handbook: "Claim the Americans are torturing you."

Well, this certainly explains a lot. Chad Evans is all over this one and you definitely need to read his take, but I just have to put this up. Washington Times:

An al Qaeda handbook preaches to operatives to level charges of torture once captured, a training regime that administration officials say explains some of the charges of abuse at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp....

In a raid on an al Qaeda cell in Manchester, British authorities seized al Qaeda's most extensive manual for how to wage war.

A directive lists one mission as "spreading rumors and writing statements that instigate people against the enemy."

If captured, the manual states, "At the beginning of the trial ... the brothers must insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them by state security before the judge. Complain of mistreatment while in prison."

The handbook instructs commanders to make sure operatives, or "brothers," understand what to say if captured.

"Prior to executing an operation, the commander should instruct his soldiers on what to say if they are captured," the document says. "He should explain that more than once in order to ensure that they have assimilated it. They should, in turn, explain it back to the commander."

Very interesting indeed. This goes along way in explaining a lot of allegations. Especially from the likes of al Qaeda linked terror suspect Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, who you will recall accused the US of torturing him.

Posted by: Rusty at 04:55 PM | Comments (34) | Add Comment
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Deep Throat

The other day at Jawapalooza in D.C. this chick comes over to the table and starts talking to us.

After a few minutes she asks what we're doing there and so I say, "I'm deep throat." For some odd reason she found the Watergate reference offensive. I don't get it.

Deep Throat revealed:

A former FBI official claims he was “Deep Throat,” the long-anonymous source who leaked secrets about President Nixon’s Watergate coverup to The Washington Post, his family said Tuesday.

W. Mark Felt, 91, was second-in-command at the FBI in the early 1970s. His identity was revealed Tuesday by Vanity Fair magazine, and family members said they believe his account is true.

more...

Posted by: Rusty at 02:28 PM | Comments (27) | Add Comment
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Colonel is an honorary title

Pop quiz, cowboy. A Sunni terrorist blows up a Shia mosque. How do you respond? Burn down the nearest Kentucky Fried Chicken! Duh.

Come on, that was easy. Because nothing says let's protest terrorism better than destroying the Colonel's secret recipe which makes you crave some original recipe fortnightly.....

The Australian:

Six employees of a KFC restaurant were killed yesterday after the building was torched by a mob angry over a deadly suicide attack at a Shi'ite mosque in Karachi.

Four of the victims at the restaurant were burned to death, while the two others froze after taking refuge in a refrigeration unit.

The restaurant was targeted after three militants, a policeman and a worshipper were killed in a shootout and a suicide bombing during evening prayers at the Madinat-ul-Ilm mosque in Gulshan, a busy neighbourhood in Pakistan's violence-prone largest city.

Man, the Religion of Irony never ceases to amaze.

Hat tip: Bill Dauterieve, Shamalama, and Tim at Opinion Bug who have more.

Posted by: Rusty at 11:47 AM | Comments (16) | Add Comment
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Will Rusty Shackleford be the last infidel without a fatwa?

More and more I begin to think that the very fabric of the Universe is held together by a perverse sense of humor. Here I am constantly going out of my way to mock all that Muslims deem holy, make the most offensive and broad sweeping categorizations, and intentionally say things that would make even Salmon Rushdie blush, and besides the occasional death threat I get no response.

In contrast Jane Novak of Armies of Liberation never makes such broad and inflammatory statements about Islam, goes out of her way not to offend, and refrains from Koran in toilet type humor gets called by the Yemen Times a "docile pupil of a monkey monk.”

There is no justice in the universe!

Posted by: Rusty at 11:00 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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May 27, 2005

George Galloway's Lies, the Oil For Food Scandal, and the Ideology of the Left

Well, that would be the headline if there was justice in this world. Unfortunately, there isn't. Friend of The Jawa Report Clinton W. Taylor has this article in The American Spectator:

On May 17, the Right Honorable George Galloway, MP, gave a blustery and animated performance in front of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Pundits conceded he ran rhetorical circles around the plodding, staid Senators who couldn't quite catch him out on his relationship to the Oil-for-Food Scandal. But the Senate tortoises may yet have the last laugh. Mr. Galloway seems to have told a big, fat whopper under oath, and a tech-savvy blogger has dug up some proof.

During the hearing (which, though not released by the Senate, has been transcribed here), Senator Norm Coleman pressed Mr. Galloway about his links to Saddam crony, Oil-for-Food beneficiary, and super-rich businessman Fawaz Zureikat, who was a major donor to Mr. Galloway's Mariam Appeal charity. Did Galloway know Zureikat was trading oil for Saddam? Mr. Galloway responded that:

Not only did I know that, but I told everyone about it. I emblazoned it in our literature, on our Web site, precisely so that people like you could not later credibly question my bona fides in that regard. So I did better than that. I never asked him if he was trading in oil. I knew he was a big trader with Iraq, and I told everybody about it.
On his website? Well, the Mariam Appeal site (www.Mariamappeal.com) is long gone, the domain name snapped up by Internet squatters, so we'll just have to take Mr. Galloway's word for it, right?

Not quite. There's this nifty thing called the Internet Archive Wayback Machine (here), which takes "snapshots" of websites over time. It works a little like Google's vast searchable cache, sending out an automated "webcrawler" that remembers the HTML code of the sites it encounters. Brand-new blogger George Gooding at Seixon.com used it to find the snapshots of the old Mariam Appeal site and verify whether Zureikat's identity was, in fact, emblazoned thereon. [READ THE REST]

One guess on whether or not Gallaway was lying or not? Trust me, you'll want to read the rest of the article here.

As for George Gooding, he's keeping on top of this. Check his site for updates.

Both Gooding and Taylor make an excellent point: that Galloway was lying. But let me point out the obvious problem in the logic which many of their readers may conclude from their posts--which seems to be the same logic the rest of the right is using in impeaching the character of Galloway and his ilk who benefited from the Hussein regime's kickbacks. If I follow the Right's logic, it goes something like this:

1) Saddam Hussein used lucrative oil contracts to transfer money to various Western officials and UN bureaucrats.
2) The intent of the Baathist dictator's regime was to influence these Western politicians and UN bureaucrats.
3) These Western politicians used their influence to oppose the UN sanctions on Iraq and the later US led war because of these kickbacks.

The problem with this logic is that it attributes the causal factors all wrong. That is, the normal right-wing theory seems to be that Western politicians, such as Galloway, supported ending the UN sanctions because of the kickbacks. It is the standard if you want to know why something happens then follow the money explanation of politics.

While such a hypothesis may sometimes be true, it cannot always be true, otherwise it leaves the realm of theory and becomes a non-falsifiable truism.

Look, people like George Galloway don't need their votes bought by the likes of Saddam Hussein. If you think he supported Husseing because of the money you just don't get it. With or without Hussein's money he would have opposed the UN sanctions and the later US led invasion. It's not the money, it's the ideology.

The ideology of the left divides the world into two groups: the powerful and the weak. It is the forgotten legacy of Marx that he rejected notions of good and evil in favor of a morality of power.

The left is unable to make any other moral distinction. Therefore Iraq is good because it is weak and the US/UK are bad because they are strong. Further, any position taken by any powerful country is seen as bad when such position pits weak countries against the strong.

The left around the world hates America because of her strength. America is bad, mmmmkay, because it is strong.

It is the same reason Galloway and his ilk support the Palestinians over Israel, Hugo Chavez over the democratic opposition, and lavish Fidel Castro with loving adoration.

Castro, Chavez, and Saddam Hussein don't need to buy Galloway's support. Galloway and the rest of the left have already pledged it.

The UN oil-for-food scandal does not represent graft with the intention of buying Western influence. The UN oil-for-food scandal represents money given as a reward to the already faithful.

Support did not follow the money. The money was a reward for support.

In our rush to judgement let us not forget that while blood is thicker than money, to the true ideologue, hate for America is thicker than anything else.

Posted by: Rusty at 01:49 PM | Comments (21) | Add Comment
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Scary beyond all reason? Yeah, that would be it.

Hey end-of-the-world alarmists, I have just the story to make the pamphlets about the end of the world come raining down. (I mean that affectionately.) Michael Chertoff, the new Director of Homeland Security, is pushing Britain to use the same ID technology as the US is planning to implement in their national ID cards (see here for my previous post on that). This would allow British and US screeners to access each others' databases to check for terrorists (always the surface goal, right?). In other words, not only will the state AND the Feds have access to our private information, but now our friends across the pond will too.

From The Independent:

The United States wants Britain's proposed identity cards to have the same microchip and technology as the ones used on American documents.

The aim of getting the same microchip is to ensure compatability in screening terrorist suspects. But it will also mean that information contained in the British cards can be accessed across the Atlantic.

more...

Posted by: Suzanne at 12:39 PM | Comments (20) | Add Comment
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May 25, 2005

Trying to Start a Riot (updated)

Somebody issue a fatwa. Fast.*

I ran out of toilet paper this morning so I used what was available next to the can: A copy of the Koran. more...

Posted by: Rusty at 02:11 PM | Comments (66) | Add Comment
Post contains 324 words, total size 2 kb.

May 12, 2005

Watson: CAIR's "Islamophobia and Anti-Americanism" Conference

Let's put the matter of Islamophobia into the right perspective and borrow some comments from DC Watson. American's don't fear Islam; "those who concocted the fake description "Islamophobia" should stop flattering themselves."" The term "Islamophobia" has no basis and supposedly refers to a “fear of Islam.” In reality it's a phony, made up word that conveys no factual truth. "It is as imaginary as the jabberwock and the unicorn."

Islamists have in fact instilled in Americans only disqust, so they should forget about thinking that they have caused us to fear them.

DC Watson takes aim and scores a direct hit yet again(via Dhimmi Watch):

more...

Posted by: Richard@hyscience at 05:48 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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