Target Centermass

Category: General

  • Schools Win Battle Over Campus Military Recruiting

    In a ruling destined to be appealed and hopefully overturned, a federal court has ruled the colleges can bar military recruiters without financial repercussions from the Department of Defense.

    A federal appeals court on Monday barred the Defense Department from withholding funds from colleges and universities that deny access to military recruiters.

    The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said a decade-old federal law which allows withholding the funds infringes on the free speech rights of schools that wish to limit on-campus recruiting in response to the military’s ban on homosexuals.

    Ruling in a lawsuit brought by a coalition of more than a dozen law schools, a three-judge panel said the government’s threat to withhold funding amounted to compelling the schools to take part in speech they didn’t agree with.

    “The Solomon Amendment requires law schools to express a message that is incompatible with their educational objectives,” the court wrote.

    By a 2-1 vote, the panel overturned an earlier decision by a federal judge that those challenging the law were unlikely to prevail at trial.

    The ruling affects all institutions of higher learning, but the case revolved around law schools because most had developed policies prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

    Monday’s ruling represented the first time a court has barred the government from enforcing the law.

    The Justice Department, which represented the government in the case, said it was reviewing its appeal options. “The United States continues to believe that the Solomon Amendment is constitutional,” the agency said in a statement.

    One judge on the panel wrote a stinging dissent, saying he was disturbed that law schools would ignore the consequences that a recruiting ban would have on the military’s ability to compete with law firms for young talent.

    “They obviously do not desire that our men and women in the armed services, all members of a closed society, obtain optimum justice in military courts with the best-trained lawyers and judges,” Judge Ruggero John Aldisert said.

    He said he disagreed with plaintiffs who argued that the schools were being asked to violate their own anti-discrimination policies by welcoming recruiters who won’t take openly gay men and women.

    The two-judge majority based its decision in part on an earlier Supreme Court ruling that the Boy Scouts of America could bar homosexuals from becoming scouts or troop leaders.

    The court reasoned that if the Boy Scouts could legally reject gays because it had a core belief that homosexuality is illegitimate behavior, then other institutions could impose an opposite type of restriction if it had a core value that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is wrong.

    Realize first that we’re talking about an all-volunteer military that discriminates on a variety of factors in its hiring policies. I don’t recall my tank being wheelchair-accessible. Because of the special role that the military plays, it has long been legally held that even some constitutional rights are surrendered or curtailed for its members.

    This ruling essentially seems to give a free hand to law schools and other institutions of higher education to ordain any aspect of the military that they feel is discriminatory and banish recruiters as they see fit. Well, without the ruling, they could already do this, but with the understanding that there could be financial repurcussions. The schools want to fight what they view as discrimination by the government with discrimination against the government, as long as it doesn’t hit the bottom line.

    The Boy Scout rationale seems flimsy, and I expect this to be a short-lived hit against recruiting. Hopefully, anyway, as I’m sure a large chunk of left-leaning, anti-military professors and administrators are currently busy right now drooling over telling the folks in uniform to stick it. This ruling is probably the equivalent of Pavlov’s bell for hippie holdovers in academia.

  • Iran Offers to Train Iraqi Police

    Iraq must find it refreshing to have such helpful neighbors.

    Iran offered to train Iraqi police and border guards two days before it was scheduled to host a meeting of security chiefs from Iraq’s neighboring states, the official news agency reported Sunday.

    It was unclear how Iraq would respond to the Iranian offer. The countries fought a war from 1980-88 that killed or wounded nearly one million people on both sides.

    “The Islamic Republic is ready to train Iraqi police and border guards and even equip them as well as help with the country’s reconstruction,” said Ali Asghar Ahmadi, Iran’s deputy Interior Minister for Security Affairs, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency.

    Ummm … I don’t think it’s a good idea to have a country helping train Iraq’s security when that country is blatantly working to undermine Iraqi security.

  • International Landmine Summit Opens

    Representatives of 143 countries opened a conference in Nairobi, Kenya today with calls for a “total ban of production, stockpiling and use of anti-personnel landmine to make the world mine-free.”

    In his opening remarks, Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki said “unless all the existing stocks are destroyed, and unless production of these lethal weapons is brought to an end, the threat posed by landmines will continue to be with us.”

    He urged governments to intensify conflict resolution efforts by resolving conflicts before they escalate into full-scale war.

    Jointly organized by the United Nations, International Campaign to Ban Landmines and Kenyan Coalition Against Landmines, the Nairobi Summit on a Mine-Free World, has brought together senior government officials of 143 countries across the world.

    The summit, to be held in Kenya’s capital Nairobi from Nov. 29 -Dec. 3, will see the first review conference of the milestone Ottawa Convention and the most significant event of the treaty since its signing in 1997, according to the organizers.

    During the conference, participants will review the progress of the efforts made in ridding the world of landmines, and produce a concrete action plan for the next five years.

    The President-Designate of the Nairobi Summit Wolfgang Petritsch also called at the opening ceremony for increased efforts and action to address the man-made humanitarian catastrophe posed by landmines.

    “The problem of anti-personnel mines is unique, as the solution to it is within our reach if we maintain the same intensity and even increase in coming years as we have in the past. My expectation is that the summit will propel us close to our dream of a world free of landmines,” Petritsch said.

    The Ottawa Convention, officially known as the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction, was signed in 1997 and entered into force in 1999.

    Africa is the world’s most mine-affected region and many saw it as fitting that the First Review Conference of the Ottawa Convention is being held in Africa.

    The U.S. is not attending the conference, nor is it a signatory to the Ottowa Convention. Forty-two other countries, including Russia and China, also chose to not sign the convention. The main sticking point for the U.S. is the Korean peninsula, where anti-personnel mines are a large part of defense plans against a North Korean invasion. It should be noted that the U.S. has stated that it shares “common cause with all those who seek to protect innocent civilians from indiscriminately used land mines.”

  • Colombian Rebels Told to Kill Bush

    Some bad people might want President Bush dead and, surprisingly enough, this time they aren’t Islamists.

    Colombia’s main rebel group asked followers to mount an assassination attempt against President Bush during his visit to Colombia last week, Defense Minister Jorge Uribe said. There was no evidence Saturday that rebels even tried to organize such an attack.

    Uribe told reporters late Friday that informants said the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC, told followers to attack Bush during his four-hour visit in the seaside city of Cartagena last Monday, where he met with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe.

    The defense minister, who is no relation to the president, said security forces were on full alert during the visit. About 15,000 Colombian troops and police, along with U.S. troops and Secret Service agents provided security. There was no indication Bush’s life was ever in danger.

    Uribe did not say where the informants had heard about the purported order to attack Bush.

    The Secret Service did not comment on security details, as is its policy.

    “We have full confidence in the fine work of the Secret Service and their work with security officials on the ground when the President travels,” White House spokesman Jim Morrell said Saturday.

    The FARC has declared U.S. troops in Colombia military targets. The troops are training local forces and providing logistics and planning assistance for military operations against the rebels.

    However, the rebels never publicly declared Bush a target during his first-ever visit as president to Colombia. Bush visited Colombia after attending a summit in Chile.

    Damn drug-trafficking Marxists.

  • U.S. Sends in Saddam’s Old Commandos

    Reuters is reporting that the U.S. has created a team of police commandos, comprised of former Iraqi army officers and special forces, and is employing them south of Baghdad.

    Twenty months after toppling Saddam Hussein, U.S. troops still battling his followers in the heartland of Iraq’s old arms industry are hitting back with a new weapon — ex-members of Saddam’s special forces.

    For five months, Iraqi police commandos calling themselves the Black Scorpions have been based with U.S. Marines in the region along the Euphrates south of Baghdad, which roadside bombs, ambushes and kidnaps have turned into a no-go areas and earned it the melodramatic description “triangle of death.”

    “All of them were previously officers in the Iraqi army or special forces,” the Scorpions’ commander, Colonel Salaam Trad, said at the Marines’ Kalsu base near Iskandariya on Saturday.

    “But Saddam was dirty and no good for Iraq.”

    The performance of this SWAT team, as the Americans call it, could be a critical test of how U.S. forces can hand over to Iraqis to meet their goal of withdrawing from a stable Iraq. U. S. officers in the area say they are increasingly optimistic.

    “The hardest fighters we have are the former special forces from Saddam’s days,” Colonel Ron Johnson, commander of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, told reporters.

    Praising their local knowledge and fighting skills, Johnson singled out one man who fought against him at Nassiriya, the hardest battle of last year’s brief war against Saddam’s army.

    “If I could have an Iraqi security force guy who’s honest, reliable and dependable, it’s worth five Marines,” he added.

    Captain Tad Douglas, who leads almost daily raids with the Scorpions, said he believed it was a unique experiment that made use of the Iraqis’ feel for their home province of Babylon.

    “Ninety-five percent of our intelligence is from the SWAT,” he said. “They can put a guy in a cafe in the way we never could … They have a good finger on the pulse.”

    U.S. officers are reluctant to discuss how big the SWAT team is and Trad and Douglas brush off questions on what they may or not have done to each other in last year’s war.

    “It doesn’t matter to me what they did. They’re staunchly anti-insurgent,” said Douglas, who dismissed suggestions their training under Saddam might have made them too violent.

    “We just had to polish them up a bit,” he said. This week, Johnson has stepped up raids against insurgents in an operation code-named Plymouth Rock, hoping to keep pressure on Sunni rebels after their rout at Falluja to the northwest.

    Of Johnson’s 5,000-strong force in the region, which was once the heart of Saddam’s arms industry and base of the Medina armored division of the elite Republican Guard, more than 2,000 are Marines, 850 British soldiers and the rest Iraqi.

    At the camp 30 miles south of Baghdad, the Scorpions are very visible, wearing the khaki jumpsuits of Marine special forces and black mustaches traditional in the Iraqi military.

    Occupying powers have a long and patchy history of creating local units and Iraqi forces in other regions have had mixed success. This month, thousands of police in the northern city of Mosul fled or changed sides when Sunni insurgents took charge.

    Johnson acknowledges the loyalties of some Iraqis in his force may be divided but says they “want to be on the winning side” and is confident that U.S.-led troops can end what he sees as limited and decentralized violence by at most a few thousand disgruntled Saddam supporters and local bandits.

    Iraqi police here have stuck to their posts despite killings of comrades in bomb attacks and murders of off-duty officers: ” They don’t cut and run, despite their losses,” Johnson said.

    Clearly exasperated by the “triangle of death” tag, he said: “I’m getting more optimistic every day.”

    As for Colonel Salaam, a small, wiry man of 32, he shrugs off insurgent threats to himself and his family and says what he wants is: “Freedom, a new Iraq, peace.”

    This move is no great surprise. It is an easily-made mistake to lump in professional soldiers with the evil regimes that control them. Look at the officers of the Wehrmacht and their entangled relationship with the Nazis as an example.

    Much more could’ve and probably should’ve been done sooner with the Iraqi army, had it not been dispersed and disbanded. Granted, many would have to have been filtered out, but this story shows there were certainly some professional gems lost that could currently have already been serving for the betterment of their country.

  • Allawi, Shias: No Delay on Iraq Vote

    Despite yesterday’s petition for delay, Iraqi officials are insisting that the January 30 balloting for the 275-member National Assembly should proceed.

    Iraq’s main Shia parties insisted today that elections should go ahead on January 30 as planned, rejecting mounting calls from Sunni and secular politicians to postpone the polls because of guerrilla violence.

    The dispute threatens to widen sectarian divisions in a country already racked by lawlessness and widespread unrest. A statement by 42 Shia and Turkmen parties, including the influential Dawa Party and Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), said a postponement would be illegal.

    Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, said if the election was postponed, “this would mean that the terrorists have been able to achieve one of their main objectives”.

    The Shia statement followed a petition yesterday by 17 Sunni and secular groups for a delay of up to six months to ensure the broadest possible participation in the elections.

    The parties that backed the petition drawn up after a meeting yesterday at the house of elder statesman Adnan Pachachi included the Iraqi National Accord of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and the two main Kurdish parties.

    Allawi’s spokesman said today the Prime Minister took very seriously his obligation to hold elections by the end of January, as mandated by Iraq’s interim constitution and a UN Security Council resolution. But the statement left open the possibility of a postponement.

    “The Prime Minister is aware of the statement made by some parties yesterday, calling for a delay in holding elections,” spokesman Thaer al-Naqib said. The statement said Allawi believed “the key to a building real and lasting democracy and stability in Iraq is ensuring all Iraqi citizens can vote”. It added that “he does not believe that a delay will necessarily make such broad participation any easier to achieve”.

    I agree with Abdul Aziz al-Hakim’s statement that a delay would appear a victory for the terrorists.

  • Dad’s Drinking Crackdown Backfires

    Oh, I just love these sweet Thanksgiving-with-the-family type stories.

    A father’s attempt to teach his daughter a lesson about drinking backfired when the teen led officers to a stash of drugs and weapons inside their New Jersey home, US police said.

    Kevin Winston, 46, called police in the early hours after his 16-year-old daughter came home drunk and unruly.

    When police arrived, however, the girl allegedly told them she feared for her safety because her father stored drugs and weapons in the home.

    The girl led officers to a crawl space above the ceiling where they found four semi-automatic guns and more than 600 vials of cocaine, a spokesman said.

    Mr Winston was charged with numerous weapons and drug charges. His five daughters were placed in the custody of a relative.

    “He called us on her and ended up getting locked up himself,” said Newark Police Director Anthony Ambrose.

    If one is in possession of illegal weapons and drugs, I think a generally good rule of thumb is don’t ever call the cops, even when one’s little brat is three sheets to the wind. Ah, Turkey Day, Jersey-style.

  • Ukraine: Viktor’s Victory Beginning to Vanish

    The controversy around the Ukrainian presidential election continues to swirl, as Ukraine’s parliament is now calling for a do-over.

    Ukraine’s Parliament passed a non-binding resolution Saturday to annul the results of this week’s presidential election, CNN reported.

    The lawmakers also voted to dissolve the nation’s Central Election Commission that declared the winner of the election, which has been widely condemned by international observers as being rigged.

    That commission ruled Viktor Yanukovych, the government’s hand-picked, pro-Moscow successor, had won the election.

    Parliament’s Saturday resolution said the results did not reflect the will of the Ukrainian voters and should be made invalid. It also said new elections are needed.

    It is not presently clear which governmental entity has the authority to void the election, the Parliament, President Leonid Kuchma, or the nation’s high court, which has stayed Yanukovych’s inauguration pending the outcome of an investigation.

    This is beginning to make the Bush-Gore 2000 results look as cut and dried as they really were.

  • Big 12 Championship Set

    Oklahoma vs. Colorado, as Missouri has just taken out Iowa State 17-14 in overtime.

    The Cyclones fell just short of becoming the seventh team to reach the championship. To date, three teams from each division have reached the championship, with Nebraska, Colorado and Kansas State from the north and Texas, Texas A&M and Oklahoma from the south. All six have won at least one title, with Oklahoma and Nebraska winning twice. The Sooners will go to Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City next Saturday with the opportunity to win their third Big 12 championship in five seasons.

  • Iraq Sunnis Want Election Delayed

    Despite the election being set for January 30, some in Iraq are now petitioning for a delay.

    Several political groups in Iraq are calling for the postponement of national elections, scheduled for January 30. The parties, mostly Sunni Muslim, Kurdish and secular groups, cited security concerns as their reason for calling for the delay.

    Saying that the interim government cannot guarantee the safety of voters at polling stations, the groups are calling for the postponement of Iraq’s elections by up to six months.

    A petition was signed Friday in Baghdad at the home of influential Sunni Muslim elder statesman Adnan Pachachi. Three interim government ministers attended the meeting.

    The petition is the latest effort waged mostly by Iraq’s minority Sunni population to delay the elections, fearing that violence in Sunni Muslim areas, such as Fallujah, Baquba, Samarra, Tikrit and areas around Baghdad, would prevent Sunni Muslims from voting in January. Several Sunni groups have threatened to boycott the elections, if they are held in January.

    Numerous Sunni clerics associations have repeatedly called for the elections to be postponed. However, most of Iraq’s majority Shiite Muslim population want to move forward with the elections, following decades of oppression under Saddam Hussein, who is a Sunni Muslim.

    A senior official with Iraq’s Interior Ministry said holding the elections in January as planned would be a blow to insurgents in Iraq, who are attempting to prevent the elections from being held. The official said postponing the elections would only fuel the insurgency.

    So now the threatened Sunni boycott is based on the expected security situation in January? Previously, it was to be based upon our going into Fallujah. We’ve done that and they’re still only threatening. The Sunnis want the election delayed because it will further entrench their minority status. The terrorists want the elections delayed indefinitely because it will bring the government to the people.

    These elections need to go forward as soon as possible, and, right now, January seems possible.