Target Centermass

Month: July 2005

  • Egypt, Beirut: Making London Look Safer

    More terror as bombers strike in Lebanon and wreak havoc in an Egyptian resort. Hey, can’t let the Islamists in England grab all the headlines.

    Beirut blast wounds 12 in busy street

    A bomb exploded near a popular street in Beirut on Friday, wounding 12 people, destroying cars and spraying shards of glass inside crowded restaurants hours after a brief visit by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

    The blast in a Christian neighbourhood of Beirut was the latest to hit Lebanon and came three days after a new government was formed, the first since Syrian forces withdrew in April.

    […]

    Prime Minister Fouad al-Siniora condemned the bombing as he visited the site near Rue Monot, an area known for its nightlife, saying it was “aimed at destabilising Lebanon and shaking the confidence in the new government.”

    Blasts in Egypt Kill at Least 49 at Sinai Resort

    At least 49 people were killed in a series of powerful explosions early Saturday in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheik, according to Egyptian state television and wire service reports.

    More than 100 people were wounded in the blasts, apparently caused by car bombs at hotels and a market that catered mostly to European and Arab tourists, the television said. Fire and smoke rose in Sharm el Sheik and nearby Naama Bay, which also has a strip of beach hotels.

    The Egyptian authorities said many of the wounded had severe injuries, and the death toll was expected to rise. Reuters, citing the police, put the death toll at 49.

    Saturday’s bombings appeared to be the deadliest terror attack in Egypt since a 1997 assault in Luxor, on the Nile River, that killed 58 tourists.

    The explosions rocked the resort area shortly after 1 a.m. Saturday and all took place within a few minutes of one another, witnesses said.

    “I heard two blasts and got up and ran out of the hotel,” Yasmine el-Bahey, an Egyptian spending the weekend at the Kahramana Hotel, said in a telephone interview. “Everybody was running outside. Glass was shattered and there was a big cloud of black. Everybody ran to the beach. Many of them were naked.”

    There was no immediate claim of responsibility, and it was not clear whether the bombs were in parked cars or detonated by suicide bombers.

    No immediate claim of responsibility? Well, let me go out on a limb and suspect radical Islamists terrorists. After all, it will be difficult to peg this one on Timothy McVeigh or Charlie Manson.

  • “This changes the face of London”

    Is it possible the 7/7 bombings didn’t get through to some Londoners? Is it really possible that yesterday’s attack was insufficient to make clear the actuality of the war? Apparently so, as there are still some who refuse to face it today, even after a dramatic chase and shooting on the Underground.

    Police Shooting Startles and Worries Londoners

    It was around 10 a.m. on a sunny, summery Friday when London crossed a once-unthinkable line in its unfolding war on terror.

    In a city where most police officers do not carry guns, the shock from the shooting death of a man in a subway car was palpable. It raised questions about police firearms practices, kindled uncertainty among Muslims and deepened the anxiety of a city that looks, these days, under siege.

    The police said they had trailed a man, described as South Asian in appearance, from a house in Stockwell that they had under surveillance. He was clad in bulky clothes on a warm summer day, witnesses said.

    He vaulted over a turnstile and dashed onto a train, with plainclothes police officers right behind him. The police said the man did not obey orders to stop, so the officers shouted at the passengers to get down and take cover.

    The man stumbled onto a train, and a passenger, Mark Whitby, told the BBC: “I looked at his face. He looked sort of left and right, but he basically looked like a cornered rabbit, a cornered fox. He looked absolutely petrified, and then he sort of tripped, but they were hotly pursuing him.”

    The officers “couldn’t have been any more than two or three feet behind him at this time,” Mr. Whitby said, “and he half tripped and was half pushed to the floor, and the policeman nearest to me had the black automatic pistol in his left hand.”

    The officer with the gun “held it down to the guy and unloaded five shots into him,” Mr. Whitby said.

    The gunshots reverberated much further than the grimy confines of Stockwell station, in a hardscrabble neighborhood of south London. It was the first such shooting in memory. Between 1997 and September 2004, the police opened fire on 20 occasions, killing 7 people and wounding 11, according to the Metropolitan Police. The statistics do not specify where the shootings took place.

    Although most London police officers are unarmed, since 9/11 Londoners have grown used to seeing special armed units, who have been given antiterrorism training.

    Police rules require officers to give warning if they intend to open fire and to “ensure that their responses are proportionate and appropriate in the circumstances and consistent with the legitimate objective to be achieved.” Officers are supposed to aim for immobilizing body-shots, but television reports said Friday that shoot-to-kill shots had been authorized to prevent suicide bombings.

    Even as Londoners absorbed the news of the shooting, a debate unfolded whether it was justified.

    Justified? Check the circumstances, check the attire, check the weather. Then ask the Israelis if they have any experience with unusual attire and things going kaboom. Justified? Oh hell yes. Unfortunate? Yes, as well. I’d much rather have this piece of trash in custody spilling his guts than in the Tube spilling his blood. Still, I’ll settle for the blood.

    The article from this point on consists mainly of a back and forth as Londoners chimed in on the developments. I’d like to highlight a few and leave the rest of the article for y’all to peruse. I’ll then turn to a few other pieces of news.
    (more…)

  • Comments Glitch Fixed

    There was a lingering little hiccup related to last weekend’s WordPress upgrade that was resolved today. Commenters are once again able to enter their names and websites whenever they choose to throw in their two cents.

    For those considerings WordPress, the support forums are an excellent resource.

  • Media and Morale in Iraq

    The same news piece, a survey on morale among U.S. Army troops stationed in Iraq. The same data. So many different ways to look at it.

    First, let’s look at the unnecessarily negative headline.

    Army: GI morale low in Iraq

    Why do I say unnecessarily negative? The piece, by far the shortest of the three that I will examine, has a negative headline followed by a brief, mostly positive story of improvement. Also, I just pick up some negative vibes of consensus without a frame of reference from the header. It’s hard to put a finger on the problem, but the assertion of “majority” in the following story comes off as less dismaying.

    Majority of Soldiers Say Iraq Morale Low

    A majority of U.S. soldiers in Iraq say morale is low, according to an Army report that finds psychological stress is weighing particularly heavily on National Guard and Reserve troops.

    […]

    The report said 54 percent of soldiers rated their units’ morale as low or very low. The comparable figure in a year-earlier Army survey was 72 percent. Although respondents said “combat stressors” like mortar attacks were higher in the most recent survey, “noncombat stressors” like uncertain tour lengths were much lower, the report said.

    The headline is accurate, as the following paragraph I quoted shows. How lengthy was my omission before the story actually reached the supporting figures? I had to jump eleven paragraphs in a sixteen-paragraph story. I would put forth that the slim majority of those who felt their unit morale was low was quite tucked away. More about the unit morale issue in a bit, but I’d like to say that this version of the reporting does not exactly waste the intervening paragraphs.

    National Guard and Reserve soldiers who serve in transportation and support units suffered more than others from depression, anxiety and other indications of acute psychological stress, the report said. These soldiers have often been targets of the insurgents’ lethal ambushes and roadside bombs, although the report said they had significantly fewer actual combat experiences than soldiers assigned to combat units.

    The report recommended that the Army reconsider whether National Guard and Reserve support troops are getting adequate training in combat skills. Even though they do less fighting than combat troops, they might be better suited to cope with wartime stress if they had more confidence in their combat skills, it said.

    Only 55 percent of National Guard support soldiers said they have “real confidence” in their unit’s ability to perform its mission, compared with 63 percent of active-duty Army support soldiers. And only 28 percent of the Guard troops rated their level of training as high, compared with 50 percent of their active-duty counterparts.

    While confidence in training could be a reasonable difference in attitudes between reserve and guard troops, I would put forth another difference as contributing to disparities between support and combat personnel — a sense of control. I would be interested to see the numbers comparing those who drive or ride along, fearing the likes of an IED, and those who actually go forth with the intent to confront the enemy.

    Another point: did you notice that the majority of those saying unit morale was low was comprised of both the “low” and “very low” groupings, but the reporting of reservist support focused only on the “real confidence” sector. I would surmise that their was also a “confidence” option; how do those two groups collectively compare with the full-time troopers in a similar position? Is the discrepancy severe, or are we watching degrees of confidence being spun in a different manner than morale?

    Now, on to a third piece.

    Morale of soldiers in Iraq improving, Army survey finds

    Holy crap, a positive and accurate headline. See, how tough was that?

    Morale among U.S. soldiers in Iraq has improved since the start of the war in 2003, and the soldiers’ suicide rate dropped by more than half last year, according to an Army mental-health survey released yesterday.

    The Army’s second Mental Health Advisory Team report paints an improving picture of how soldiers are handling their tours and how medical personnel are dealing with mental-health problems. The team surveyed more than 2,000 soldiers from August to October and concluded that aggressive efforts to improve mental-health care and to make soldiers aware of the stresses of combat have succeeded.

    A majority of soldiers fighting in Iraq, however, reported that morale is still a problem, with 54 percent saying their unit morale is “low” or “very low,” and 9 percent reporting “high” or “very high” morale.

    During the first survey in late summer 2003, 72 percent of soldiers reported low morale.

    Balanced and accurate.

    This story also includes a little morsel left out of the other two representaions.

    The survey also reported that when soldiers were asked about their own morale — as distinct from their unit’s morale — there was improvement from 2003 to 2004: 52 percent described their morale as low or very low in the first survey, and that dropped to 36 percent in 2004.

    Based on this detail, all three of these stories could have said morale was high. Two chose to go negative. Hmmm…

    To sum up, two points and a question.

    First, individual morale is up, and apparently significantly so.

    Second, the individual’s confidence in the unit is improved but still negative. Why the dichotomy? I would submit the difference can be attributed to the nature of soldiering. The soldier has five basic jobs: performing his mission in a competent and professional manner, bitching, whining, grumbling and gossipping. It’s the human reaction to a situation where an individual’s control over his activities is greatly impaired and his outlets for tension are limited. The soldier’s own bitching and moaning are white noise to him, nothing more than a release. The result is an individual, confident in his own abilities, who is inundated with the same grumbling from those around him. But hey, I’m not a shrink; that’s just a common-sense way at viewing the difference, in my view. To back this up a bit and possibly support my idea, I would like to see the raw numbers on unit confidence, including both the confident and really confident categories.

    Now, to that important question, I know we did morale and psychological surveys among our troops during World War II, but did we publish them before the world while still engaged? Did we give the enemy (both foreign and domestic) the ability to spin and impair our efforts?

  • London. Again.

    (c) FreeFoto.com

    Second verse same as the first. Only less so.

    Two weeks to the day after the July 7 London bombings, attackers tried — and failed — to set off explosive devices at three Tube stations and on a double-decker bus.

    Police said evidence left behind in Thursday’s attempted bombings has given them what may be a “significant breakthrough” in their investigation.

    Metropolitan Police Commissioner Ian Blair told reporters the intention of the terrorists “must have been to kill” and that some of the devices failed to explode.

    There are reports of one person wounded, although ambulance services said they did not transport anyone from the scenes.

    There’s is no official word at this time that the latest terror attack was the work of Moslem radicals, but let’s safely say they do have a pretty good track record in these matters. There’s an old saying that has been modified to more adequately match reality: the race isn’t always to the swiftest nor the fight to the strongest … but that’s the way to bet. The terrorists aren’t always radical Islamists, but putting your money down on the red crescent would seem to have a generally solid rate of return.

    Maybe we should all just sit down and have a nice little powwow on the matter. Just yesterday, Prime Minister Tony Blair pondered on a conference to ponder on how best to deal with Islamic extremism. British Moslem leaders countered with a call for an investigation into the motivation of the terrorists. Great, throw in a few rounds of kumbayahs and we might be on to something.

    Prime Minister Tony Blair said Wednesday he is considering calling an international conference on how to eliminate Islamic extremism following last week’s terror bombings in London, while Britain’s Muslim leaders demanded a judicial inquiry into what motivated the four “homegrown” suicide bombers.

    Want to understand them? Want their motivation? Well, I have it — they want and feel they deserve domination of the whole freakin’ world. Ace also has it and spells it out quite clearly [emphasis in original].

    The Islamofascists do not need fresh provocations for their mass murders. They have 1400 years of greivances they want payback for.

    And, by the way, the ideology is expansionist, imperialist, and colonialist– they want to control all territory they once held, and they want to controll all territory which Muslims have, through immigration, “colonized.” They believe it against the demands of Allah for any Muslim to subjugate himself to any authority except a strict Islamic one.

    Do you really think they just want Israel and Iraq?

    What about the disputed areas of Kashmir? What about Muslim-heavy areas of the Balkans? What about East Timor? What about non-Muslim parts of Lebanon? What about Africa?

    What about the scores of smoldering little civil wars going on all over the world, the majority of which involve Muslims fighting non-Muslims?

    Why does the left insist on believing that actual diagnosable psychopaths — and I am NOT using that term hyperbolically; Islamofascists are true psychopathic murderers — are somehow “reasonable” and if we just give them a little they’ll be satisfied with that?

    Does a shark stop eating after its third fish?

    You can appease to your heart’s content, ladies. But they want Spain back too.

    So please write out a list of all the territory of the world you are willing to cede to viciously medieval thugocratic rule in the interests of buying “peace” from people who have told you, out of their own mouths and with no equivocation, they simply want to eradicate you and there’s nothing you can give them that will change their minds.

    Their worldview must be reshaped or eliminated. It’s as simple as that, and the civilization we cherish and hope to pass on to our progeny hangs in the balance.

  • A Bit of Advice, Fellow Bloggers

    Back up your work.

    I had hoped to write up something tonight on this piece about the growing Chinese threat. While gathering my anticipated links, including internal ones, I managed to jack up and delete an old post. Luckily, I was able to delve through my pre-upgrade backup and salvage it but, to understate the matter, restoring a single post from a backup of a previous version sucked the life out of my night.

    Luckily, as I don’t expect China to conquer Taiwan overnight, I can return to my anticipated blogging tomorrow. I just won’t be very timely. Then again, when am I very timely?

    Oh yeah, since I’ve given up on this wasted night, go read Ace’s poetic ode to Scotty.

    And thanks again, Mr. Doohan, for all I didn’t know about you.

  • Farewell, James Montgomery Doohan


    Chief Engineer Montgomery “Scotty” Scott
    3 March 1920 – 20 July 2005

    Mr. Doohan lived a long life, far longer than your typical Federation redshirt. I grew up watching him on Star Trek, but I did not realize until today the amazing story of the man. Canadian artillery officer, storming the beach on D-Day, wounded in action including four shots in the leg, a lost finger and a nearly fatal shot stopped by a cigarette case, air force pilot, and arguably the best damned engineer to ever serve on a starship.

    IMDB.com has some interesting tidbits in its bio.

    The only two episodes of “Star Trek” (1966) in which one can see that his middle finger is missing are “The Trouble with Tribbles” and “Cats Paw”. Also in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984), when Scotty is handing McCoy the parts from the Trans-Warp Drive, as well as in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989) when Scotty is holding a plastic bag dinner given to him by Uhura.

    According to the Director’s Edition DVD of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), the Klingon language first introduced in that movie and later featured in many later Trek movies and TV episodes was initially devised by Doohan. His original sounds were later expanded upon and refined by others, ultimately resulting in Shakespeare plays and The Bible being translated into Klingon years later. Ironically, his character, Scotty, complains of difficulty reading Klingon at the start of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986).

    […]

    During his early stage work, he demonstrated a remarkable gift for foreign accents. He tried several During his audition for “Star Trek” (1966), and Gene Roddenberry was immediately taken by his Scottish brogue. Roddenberry cast him as the (previously-unnamed) ship’s engineer character, and they improvised the name Montgomery Scott (‘Scott’ for the accent, and ‘Montgomery’ for Doohan’s middle name).

    John has an excellent tribute to Mr. Doohan over at Argghhh!, including appropriate music.

    Meanwhile, Ace of Ace of Spades HQ fame waxes poetic in honor of Mr. Scott, as only Ace can.

  • Survey: 25K Civilians Killed in Iraq War

    A recent study has set a new guidepost for anti-war arguments — the death of 25,000 innocent Iraqis.

    Nearly 25,000 civilians have been killed since the start of the Iraq war, according to a group that tracks the civilian death toll from the conflict.

    The Iraq Body Count — a London-based group comprising academics and human rights and anti-war activists — said on Tuesday that 24,865 civilians had died between March 20, 2003 and March 19, 2005 [Jeez, London-based? I’d have waited a wee bit longer if I were them].

    The group said 42,500 injuries were recorded as well.

    Actually, as cold as it may sound, those figures don’t sound unreasonable, given an entire country being militarily defeated and then subjected to two-plus years of ongoing terrorist activity, the burden of which has been cowardly projected upon the civilian populace by our enemies. Compare these numbers to the approximately 43,000 killed in the London Blitz by one side. Oh yeah, throw on over 139,000 Brits wounded for a twisted topping and the cruel but unfortunate numbers may come into perspective.

    The report also said that “U.S.-led forces were sole killers of 37 percent of civilian victims” and that “anti-occupation forces were sole killers of 9 percent of civilian victims.” It added that “criminals killed 36 percent of all civilians.”

    I’ll buy the 25K, but I’ll need to see a bit more substantiation for this distribution of blame. They seem a little light on the “anti-occupation” category, given the wealth of recent terrorist bloodbaths. As a little side note, please realize that “anti-occupation” is the latest buzzword from al Jazeera, where even the terrorists comprising Hezbollah are glorified as anti-occupation fighters.

    Still, this 25K figure is far more reasonable than the previous 100,000 that has been so flaunted by the leftists, defeatists and pacifists.

  • Toughest Domino Falls

    General William Westmoreland has passed away. This article was selected for both its perfect headline, which I’ve happily utilized, and its content.

    Retired US army General William Childs Westmoreland, who commanded American and Australian troops in the Vietnam war, has died at age 91.

    Westmoreland died yesterday of natural causes at Bishop Gadsden retirement home in Charleston, where he had lived with his wife for several years, his son James Ripley Westmoreland said.

    The jut-jawed officer maintained to the end that the US was not defeated by communist forces in South-East Asia.

    “It’s more accurate to say our country did not fulfill its commitment to South Vietnam,” he once said. “By virtue of Vietnam, the US held the line for 10 years and stopped the dominoes from falling.”

    He would later say he did not know how history would deal with him.

    “Few people have a field command as long as I did,” he said. “They put me over there and they forgot about me. But I was there seven days a week, working 14 to 16 hours a day.

    “I have no apologies, no regrets. I gave my very best efforts,” he said. “I’ve been hung in effigy. I’ve been spat upon. You just have to let those things bounce off.”

    Thank you for your service, Gen. Westmoreland. You never let the bastards get you too down.

  • I Was a Cylon

    “Obedient, robot-like killers.”

    For nine years, that was me, at least one weekend a month and two weeks a year. That is, after all, the description of American soldiers, according to a delightful piece of email sent to Blackfive.

    Whew! Glad I escaped that. Hell, brainwashed little ol’ me thought I was doing a service for the likes of the gent who wrote that. I’m sure that, in his own little peculiar way, the email author really meant, “Hey, y’all, thanks for the sacrifices[, baby-killers]. I really appreciate it[, you murderous slaves].”