Outgoing IRS commissioner, Steven Miller, testified before a House committee on Friday.

1. IRS asked Iowa pro-life group about the ‘content of their prayers’ (read)

2. How America gains 600,000 new Christians each year — without evangelism (read)

3. Have 8 million millennials really given up on Christianity? (read)

4. Douglas Karpen, abortion clinic doctor at the second ‘house of horrors’ in Houston, Texas, accused of ‘twisting heads off fetus’ necks with his bare hands’ (read)

5. Judge tosses out most of abuse lawsuit against Sovereign Grace Ministries (read)

6. Illinois Senate approves bill to legalize medical marijuana (read)

7. Gallup Poll: Americans paying less attention than normal to Benghazi and IRS drama (read)

8. North Korea reportedly launches short-range missiles (read)

9. France’s Hollande signs homosexual marriage law (read)

10. Gunmen kill 9 people in Iraq; 8 people kidnapped (read)

That’s today’s top news stories. You can read about all of these stories and more at UrbanChristianNewsNetwork.com.

As you go throughout this day, keep this word in mind: Romans 11:33 says, “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!”

Turkey complains of unfair treatment over northern Iraq: report

Since the countries that report the highest number of IED attacks are the US and various Middle Eastern/Central Asian countries, I thought it would be useful here to reflect a bit on how the means to prevent IEDs all require watering down one or another element of what the US has valued as its practice of liberal democracy.  IED attacks will never succeed in bringing down US democracy, nor will they accomplish terrorists’ plans in the US (other than making the US population angrier across the board), but they frequently sabotage Middle Eastern attempts to implement broad-based democracy on a US model, and the responses taken by Middle Eastern governments to counter terrorism are often labeled “violation of freedoms” by people in the US who do not realize the choice between curtailed freedoms and further loss of life.  Looking at the limited means available to interrupt the production of IEDs, and their attendant costs in terms of freedom, may provide a more realistic assessment of options in both American and Middle Eastern governance.

So, how can IED attacks be prevented?

Option 1: Ignorance is bliss

If people don’t know how to make homemade bombs, they cannot make them to use in attacks.  Unfortunately, the cat is out of the bag, and I’ve heard that one can find bomb plans online (I haven’t looked).  So apart from bringing down the whole internet and reverting to 1995, which almost no one would support because of the widespread benefits which also come from internet access (including my ability to write this blog, for example), this is no longer an option.

Option 2: You don’t say!

Internet reading access is nearly unrestricted, but so is internet writing access, and now with free blogs and Facebook just about anyone can write anything and put it online.  One might try targeted cyber attacks to take down any webpage that posts recipes for homemade bombs.  Call it selective censorship.  Yes, it curtails freedom of speech, although some would be willing to pay a selective topic-specific loss in freedom of speech in order to gain more safety on the streets.

Unfortunately, it is not easy to define precisely what is or is not a recipe for an IED.  Pressure cookers, for example, were a main ingredient in the recent Boston Marathon bombs, but pressure cookers are also mentioned in home canning recipes posted online.  Given that those attempting to post bomb recipes would presumably not title them “How to Make an IED” or something equally obvious, there is a real danger of more subtle detection methods making Facebook never work again because of a continuous stream of false positives, and the majority of the US population would then go into withdrawal symptoms.  But there’s also the problem of false negatives: just as the alchemists of old came up with bizarre codes to encode their recipes which might allegedly turn lead into gold, so codes could be endlessly invented to attempt to circumvent the targeted cyber attacks.

And even if the internet could be ruled out as a means of transmitting the knowledge of how to make IEDs, that does not prevent person-to-person or over-the-phone sharing.

Option 3: It’s not what you know, it’s whom you know

If it is not possible to prevent transfer of the knowledge of how to make IEDs, perhaps it is possible to trace the social networks by which this knowledge transfer happens.  In this case, new social media websites actually help by making publicly visible the otherwise invisible threads of social connections.  If person A is a suspected terrorist, then all of person A’s “friends” might be suspected terrorists too!  Of course, as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s classmates have found out, it is possible to be a “friend” of someone accused of an attack without having the faintest idea.  This raises the problem of the lower and upper bounds of this kind of reasoning: the number of suspected terrorists for which a government knows the name (and social media usernames) might be very small relative to the number of people who might be getting information to plan IED attacks, while it might be very difficult to distinguish “terrorist social networks” from normal social networks on the basis of structure alone.

How to obtain better results?  Apart from putting a beacon on every search engine to inform them whenever anyone searches for “home made bomb recipes” (now admit it, how many of you found this post by just such a search?), it is very difficult, and there is great danger of racial profiling or religious profiling.  I was dismayed by the way news articles (for example, here) used reports that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had become “more religious” as synonymous with “more likely to be a terrorist.”  If a Protestant minister or an atheist blogger criticizes the US government, that is just the value of free speech in a functioning democracy, but if an imam criticizes the US government, many might take that to be a symptom of radical Islam!  Racial profiling and religious profiling will simply increase the bitterness and alienation of those in the targeted groups against the government, leading to increased violence.

(It is always worth reminding people that the terror tactics presently used by jihadis were adopted by them in imitation of secularist and right-wing Western terrorists of a previous generation.  These secularist and right-wing Western terrorists have continued to the present in figures such as Anders Behring Breivik.)

And even if social network analysis has yielded some folks who probably know how to make IEDs and know people who might want to use them, how should the government act on this information?  Should it arrest them?  On what charge?  Should it have secret police follow them around?  Wouldn’t that just make them angrier?  Should it simply tap their phones and wait for them to say something incriminating?  It is unclear how such information might be used to reduce the change of attacks rather than to increase it.

Option 4: Why do you want that pressure cooker?

A separate option would be to try to restrict the materials used in the construction of IEDs, keeping a national registry of anyone who buys pressure cookers, nails, or fertilizer.  Then if people are buying a whole lot of pressure cookers, they could be flagged for further investigation.  But given that a large proportion of the population uses nails or pressure cookers at one time or another, I doubt this approach would yield meaningful data.

Option 5: Checkpoint Charlie

The cheapest solution in many Middle Eastern countries is to install checkpoints with metal detectors.  There are two theories of this: one is to create a “safe zone” within which it is guaranteed that no one has IEDs (at least in theory), and the other is as a deterrent to try to prevent traveling bombs and catch some people in possession.  The former theory is the more difficult to implement, but is the theory of airline security.  The latter goal, more modest, may open the door for people to circumvent the checkpoints.  While these checkpoints are relatively standard in the Middle East, I doubt the US population would tolerate this curtailment of freedom of movement, even if it would create a lot of jobs.  In practice it would also give outlet to all of people’s prejudices and result in racial and religious profiling.

Option 6: Big Brother is Watching (Some of) You

I was struck how in the search for Boston Marathon bombing suspects the FBI quickly released photos taken by surveillance cameras.  This enlisted the public aid in a way that previous manhunts had not, and raised the possibility of increased permanent surveillance cameras being used to track people whom the government suspects of possible terrorist intent.  Of course, even if the whole country were blanketed in security cameras, it would be impossible to follow everyone all the time across them.  The camera-watching personnel could not in principle comprise such a large portion of the population to make that feasible.  And so inevitably, while Big Brother may be watching, it will only be watching some.  While those some may be identified through just means, they may also be identified as “persons of interest” through unjust means such as racial profiling.

There is also the danger of misconstrual: the pictures of the Tsarnaev brothers released by the FBI before they knew their names caused fear and consternation among people who physically resembled them.  Nor did the photos released by the FBI show any wrong-doing; and what if the photo released had been of someone who had not done anything wrong, but who had done something which might have looked perhaps like something wrong from the camera angle?  How confident are the people watching surveillance cameras in their understanding of the events depicted?

Option 7: Peer Pressure

Of course, the cheapest and most old-fashioned method is to ask people to report suspicious behavior to authorities.  Even this is not perfect, however, even apart from its undue burden on introverts and eccentric personalities.  People may report “suspicious behavior” of people they know and do not like (as in “witch hunts”), and people may not report known violent behavior if they suspect it will reflect negatively on them, for instance by making them a suspect of a crime or by alienating them from their current community.  When a minority identifies itself as alienated from its government, as Sunnis do in Iraq now, it is unlikely to be forthcoming with aid to the government.  All too often, this leads the government to view the group as a whole as terrorists or potential terrorists, breeding further resentment between the government and the targeted minority.

Conclusions

IEDs are indeed destructive, but often not in the way desired by terrorists.  While an attack may generate media attention, its ability to subvert democracy depends upon the public response to the violence.  If, as is often the case in the Middle East, the public views the attack in sectarian terms and blames everyone of a certain hated group (which group it is will depend on who was targeted), then democracy is among the first casualties.  In the US this is less common for public outcry to turn sectarian (although public suspicion of Muslims often approaches sectarianism), and such blasts tend to provoke public anger against the person(s) or group identified as responsible and a desire to thwart whatever might be identified as their goal.

But how can IED attacks be prevented?  Interrupting the transfer of knowledge over the internet involves censorship or restricting free access to information, while using social media and increased surveillance cameras or checkpoints almost universally leads to acting out prejudice and profiling.  The availability of IEDs for attacks, while they will not bring western democracy to an end, may require curtailing some of the freedoms we have enjoyed in the West.

Safety comes at a price.  In some cases, that price is worth it, and in some cases it isn’t.  But we do not know unless that price is made clear to us.  And if we decide the price is worth it, we must make sure that both the cost and the benefit are apportioned fairly, to avoid the “tyranny of the majority over the minority.”  Such democratic tyranny would only increase the bitterness and suspicion of minority groups, and result in greater violence.

It doesn’t matter to me whether or not 9/11 was an “inside job”. Nor does it matter to me whether or not the moon landing was fake, or whether Stanley Kubric was the one who filmed it. I don’t care whether or not Jay Z, Rhianna or even Obama are members of Satanic cults. I don’t even really care whether or not reptilian aliens from the other side of the galaxy have been secretly running all human civilisations for the past 130,000 years.

But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter if powerful people are secretly doing things which lead to the deaths of civilians that they then lie about. Killing civilians is not acceptable by most people’s standards of morality, and what’s more it goes against the Geneva convention, as does torture and the mistreatment or prisoners of war. If a government which has signed the Geneva convention does these things, the officials responsible are War Criminals.

Not lizards, or satanists or members of whatever New World Order you think is going on, but War Criminals. War Criminals who don’t want to be brought to justice, and would rather hide their tracks. If possible, they would rather be remembered as heroes, not criminals, or failing that not remembered at all.

If the West is at war against Islamist Terrorism, that’s one thing. Of course, “terrorist” is a slightly meaningless label given that most of the West’s enemies would call it’s leaders terrorists as well.  Whenever someone uses violence to achieve their political goals, then their opponents will probably call them a terrorist. It’s a subjective definition.

So let’s just stick with the term “War Criminal”, because that’s a lot more clear-cut. If a rebel group attacks a nation state, even killing military personnel in the process, they are not necessarily war criminals. In fact they may be completely dedicated to achieving a lasting peace and a democratic system of government, only resorting to violence because their enemies are so despotic and brutal that they are ensuring perpetual conflict.

However, anyone, whether they are a Nation-State, a rebel group or a mercenary squad, who kills civilians, tortures people or mistreats/kills prisoners of war, is a War Criminal, whatever their ideology, nationality or size.

The leaders of the West (broadly speaking, the NATO powers) are War Criminals. The mistreatment of prisoners of war at Guantanamo Bay is well known, and this is only one site at which prisoners of the “war against Terror” are tortured. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq due to Western bombs and bullets are also well known. Again Iraq is only the most famous recent example: Western bombs killed plenty of civilians in Libya, Mali, Afghanistan and Pakistan too, to name just a few examples. 

Also War Criminals are the leaders of Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, Boko Haram, Al Nusra and any other Islamist militant group that targets civilians, torture’s people or kills or mistreats prisoners of war. So in this “War of Terror” both “sides” are War Criminals. Both can be called terrorists too, if you like that term. But it is of course more complicated than that, because there are not just two sides. There are too many “Islamist groups” in the world for anyone to be able to count them all, and they are not all united in common cause, with common leadership or even with a common ideology.

The West gets around this complexity by simply referring to them all as if they were the same, much as they used to refer all leftists and serious labour organisers around the world “Communists”, and for much the same reason. So that they can kill them, and their citizens will not object to it because the majority of those citizens have been convinced that “Communists”, or “Islamists” are a deadly threat.

But this lumping of all Islamic militants in the same category plays another function as well, which is to disguise the fact that the West is only really at war with some of these groups, and is in fact funding or operationally supporting others. This is the point at which some people will say i’m a conspiracy theorist, so i guess i’d better name drop some respected journalists and academics who have collected a wealth of empirical evidence for these claims: Michel Chossudovsky and Jeremy Scahill are good places to start.

I am going to focus on the bigger picture of the basic theory. Lets start with three basic assumptions: 1. Imperialism is a lot easier if the imperialist nations don’t have to fight all their own wars but can instead get the people who have already been conquered to fight them instead. 2. Imperialism is also a lot easier is the people who are being conquered are too busy fighting ethnic wars against one another instead of uniting against their colonisers. 3. Imperialism is even easier if the colonised people don’t even see themselves as such but instead are deluded into thinking they are citizens of independent sovereign nations.

Today we have a world divided between three major imperialist powers (Russia, China and the West) with a few countries led by governments who at least try to maintain a degree of independence (e.g. Iran, Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela). Most of the world’s supposedly independent sovereign nations are actually Western proxy governments, since the West is the most militarily superior imperialist power.

Instead of ruling these countries’ peoples directly as colonial subjects, the West installs pseudo-democratic governments. These governments hold elections, but if the population elects a candidate the West doesn’t like, they will either be assassinated by agents working for the west, or their entire government will be overthrown by rebels armed by the West.

Two important books documenting this overall pattern are “War is a Racket” by Major General Smedley Butler and “Confessions of an Economic Hitman” by John Perkins, both of whom were actually heavily involved in this process and who later choose to expose it through their writings.

If the colonised people happen to vote for pro-Western candidates in their fake elections then they stand a chance of being able to live in peace. If not, and if they organised armed rebellion against whatever government the West imposes on them by force, they will most likely be drawn into a civil war that takes on ethnic dimensions.  

Their revolutionary army will be infiltrated by Western agents who will do all they can do split the organisation into rival warring factions on ethnic lines, or the West will simply form a new “rebel” group to fight against them from the outside. Western propaganda, and the propaganda of the Western proxies on the ground, will constantly emphasise the ethnic dimensions of the conflict.

This could be done for example by forming a rival rebel group comprised of members of only one ethnic group to attack the genuine revolutionaries. This would be likely to inflame passions all across the country and perhaps lead to the spontaneous formation of other rebel armies representing only one ethnic group. Then the war will appear to outsiders and even to the citizens of the country to be an ethnic war rather than one between an imperialist country and it’s subjects.

Sometimes Russia, China, Iran or some other anti-western power will also be funding one of the other rebel armies, or perhaps the government the rebels are fighting itself. This is what’s going on in Syria: Russia is supporting the Assad regime, Iran are supporting Hezbollah, and Saudi Arabia and Qatar are supporting various other rebel groups. It must be pretty annoying (to say the least!) to be a genuine Syrian revolutionary and having to work with all these imperialists!

The interesting this is that the NATO powers do not directly fund the rebels, instead they fund Saudi Arabia and Qatar and let them fund rebels, though CIA, M16 and other western secret service agencies are almost certainly playing more direct roles than the Western governments are publicly letting on. Nonetheless, it is an example of the kind of long twisted hierarchies of power in modern Imperialism. 

The interesting by-product of this complexity is that the West finds itself actually funding groups who share the kind of Islamist ideology that the West declared war against after 9/11. Some of the Syrian rebels, like Al Nusra are openly in allegiance with “Al Qaeda”, as the West itself admits and complains about. But they don’t tell Saudi Arabia or Qatar to stop funding them.

“Al Qaeda” itself is not the most coherent of organisations, but rather many different organisations pursuing different objectives in different parts of the world with different leadership structures. This is how it is possible for some Al Qaeda groups to be working with the West, as in Syria, and some working against the West, as in most places. 

The point is, all of this should be enough to show that the West do not really care about fighting Al Qaeda or Islamist militancy per se. They will support or fight against these groups depending on other factors, as to whether or not it seems to suit their short term geopolitical interests.

So what are these interests? Well, the financial system or the western world (by which we mean all it’s quasi colonies in Africa, Latin America, Asia and Australasia as well as simply the imperial heartlands of Europe and North America) is still dominated by the US dollar. The value of the US dollar, and thus the integrity of the whole system, is based on it’s link to energy supplies, especially Oil and Gas. If Oil and Gas are sold in dollars at a good price, then the West is happy. If not, it’s not. 

This is why we always hear about war or tense diplomatic relations concerning the West in countries where there are Oil and Gas reserves under the ground: (e.g. Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Mali, DRC, Venezuela), or where Oil or Gas pipelines would have to be built (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Colombia). 

For the rest of the Western colonies in the world the explanation is slightly simpler. There’s no point going to all that trouble ensuring the ratio of value between US Dollars to Oil is OK if no workers are being exploited to turn natural resources into commodities for those dollars to be spent on. So the West makes sure that the countries with the raw materials are run by regimes who’ll sell them to the West cheaply, and the countries with the workers will be run by regimes who’ll keep wages down by violently repressing trades-unions and other social movements of the poor.

The companies making money off of the cheap labour power and raw materials, are of course all based in the West and their owners go to the same parties as Western military and political leaders, since they are members of the same social class- the ruling class. 

So there you go. It’s not all an Evil conspiracy. It’s just plain, good old-fashioned Imperialist War crimes being covered up behind a smokescreen of democracy for the benefit of capitalists.

Gunmen broke into the home of the administrator for the Rashid area, south of Baghdad, killing one of his guards, an interior ministry official said.

They then moved to the nearby house of Captain Adnan al-Obaidi, a police officer in an anti-terrorism unit, and killed him, his wife and their two children, the official said.

A medical official confirmed the toll.

Gunmen also shot dead the imam of a Sunni mosque near the main southern port city of Basra, police and a Sunni endowment official said.

Near Ramadi, west of Baghdad, security forces attempted to arrest Mohammed Khamis Abu Risha, who is wanted in connection with the killing of five soldiers, sparking clashes with armed tribesmen in which two of them were killed, a police captain said.

Mohammed Khamis, the nephew of power tribal sheikh Ahmed Abu Risha, who is a key supporter of Sunni anti-government protesters in Anbar province and also led the uprising against Al-Qaeda in the province from 2007, confirmed that two members of his tribe were killed.

Hundreds of gunmen then gathered in the area of the Anbar Operations Command headquarters near Ramadi, the captain said.

In another incident in the Ramadi area, gunmen ambushed a patrol and kidnapped 10 security force personnel, a police lieutenant colonel said.

The area is one of the main centers of the Sunni protest movement in Iraq, which began almost five months ago.

Demonstrators from Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority accuse authorities of marginalizing and targeting their community, including through wrongful detentions and accusations of involvement in terrorism.

While the government has made some concessions, such as freeing prisoners and raising the salaries of Sunni anti-Al-Qaeda fighters, underlying issues have not been addressed.

(Source / 18.05.2013)

A security official said the blast in Baqouba hit worshippers emerging from Friday prayers.

A health official confirmed the death toll.

All spoke anonymously as they were not authorized to talk to reporters.

My response was, “Do you think we like making those kinds of pictures? See the full post @ http://www.cainimages.com/v7/i-dont-like-pictures-of-people-crying/

This story is several months old but someone just linked it to my Facebook page. A happy ending to a lot of suffering, loss, uncertainty and personal trauma.  

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/4715418/ali-abbas-wedding-iraq.html

The big day for Ali and childhood sweetheart Ankam

Ali lost 16 members his family, including both his parents, and both his arms and suffered third degree burns to 70% of his body when a missile slammed into his house on the outskirts of Baghdad when he was twelve.

I first saw him in a decrepit hospital in the Sader City slum of northern Baghdad after a neighbour rescued

from his burning home.

When I first entered the room I could not even tell if he was alive, and I did not think he was going to live for long.

The doctors told us he would not survive without proper treatment and, with most of his skin burnt, he was highly susceptible to infections in the unsanitary conditions of the hospital he was in.

There had been several attempts to extricate him from there after his plight made world headlines but there were all sorts of complications and efforts to relocate him had failed.

By chance, I was able to arrange for Kuwaiti authorities to accept him, paving the way for American forces to get involved and Peter convinced them to remove and transport him to Kuwait.

The story and details about securing his release from the hospital and removing from there is a long and harrowing one.

Suffice it to say it took several days of coordinating between the hospital, the US military, Kuwaiti health authorities and a local Shi’ite cleric with political ambitions who took the situation to heart and complicated things as much as he could.

We found ourselves driving from the relative security of the Palestine Hotel in central Baghdad (within the ‘secure’ zone held by US forces) to the Sader City, a grim, rough and dangerous suburb north of the city. We had to go back and forth at all hours, through numerous checkpoints manned my militias and local vigilantes and with the constant sound of sporadic gun battles and burning building all around us.   Baghdad at the time was still a full blown warzone.

This happened juts days after we were released from captivity by Iraq’s secret police. More on this here and in Peter’s book. We were all practically in shock and suffering the onset of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Something that lived inside Peter John and myself to varying degrees and manifestations for years to come.

It is covered in more detail in two books: Long Drive Through A Short War by Peter Wilson and The Ali Abbas Story by Jane Warren.  

I met Ali again years later in London and he looked so well and grown. It was another person altogether from the charred limbless and dying child I’d first seen in Baghdad.

The morning after he was airlifted, Peter and I had to make the 14 hour drive south from Baghdad to Kuwait because we’d promised Ali’s family to call back and tell them he was safe. We’d also had to promise the sheikh to report Ali’s safe arrival. 

The harrowing drive, the Iraq venture and capture are stories, as they say, for another time.

‘The recipient of the largest government services contract in U.S. history has told military officials it will take another 13 years and half a billion dollars to finish off its work stemming from the Iraq war.

This assessment from KBR Inc., which won the $38 billion deal from the U.S. Army way back in 2001, is at the heart of a legal battle between the two sides.

KBR was responsible for aiding virtually all American military support operations as part of the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (pdf) (LOGCAP) III in Iraq.

With the conflict over and the pullout of combat units, the Pentagon sought to alter the terms of payment for the remainder of the contract. U.S. Defense Department officials want to pay KBR a fixed amount for what’s left to do (which could save it hundreds of millions of dollars), while the company wants to be reimbursed for its efforts, which has been the case since the deal was arranged last decade.

The Army’s move to implement the change prompted KBR to sue in court, where its lawyers argued that the remaining duties will cost $500 million and take 13 years to complete.’

FULL ARTICLE @ ALL GOV

In 1954, RSAF Enfield and BSA began production of the 7.62x51mm NATO caliber L1A1 Self-Loading Rifle for the British military to replace their long-serving stocks of Short Magazine Lee Enfield Rifles, a design that had lasted the Brits for nearly 70 years. The L1A1 was a version of the Belgian FN FAL rifle, set up in semi-auto and using SAE or ‘inch-pattern’ templates rather than metric. It proved a hard serving rifle and saw use in the Suez, Malaysia, Aden, Northern Ireland and the Falklands as well as being adopted by close allies Canada, Australia, and New Zealand among others. However by the late 1970s, the L1A1 was a bit long in the tooth, and well, a bit long overall (45-inchs) as well. With most of NATO at the time already using smaller, 5.56mm-chambered rifles such as the M16, FAMAS, and HK33, the UK decided to get on the smaller caliber/smaller weapon bandwagon.
Read the rest in my column at GUNS.com

• 1792  New York Stock Exchange is founded when 24 brokers sign agreement under a buttonwood tree on Wall Street in New York
• 1827  At 18 years of age, future 17th President Andrew Johnson marries 16-year-old Eliza McCardle
• 1863  Union troops win Battle of Big Black River forcing Confederates into besieged Vicksburg, Mississippi
• 1943  Flight crew of the Memphis Belle becomes the first B-17 Flying Fortress crew to complete 25 missions over Europe
• 1954  Supreme Court rules in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation in public educational facilities is unconstitutional
• 1970  Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl begins sailing a papyrus boat across the Atlantic; proves ancient Africans could have made the trip
• 1974  500 LAPD officers lay siege to hideout of Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA); gun battle and fire leaves 6 terrorists dead; kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst is not found
• 1987  Iraqi Mirage F1 fighter launches 2 Exocet anti-ship missiles at frigate USS Stark killing 37 and wounding 21 during Iran-Iraq War
• 1996  President Clinton signs new “Megan’s Law” requiring states to notify communities when sex offenders move into their area

Roll up, roll up! Some of our workmen were concerned the Iranians might see this as mobilisation and send air strikes

It’s a fine thing to relax in the shade on a hot sunny day, and not such a fine thing when a rainy squall dumps forty kilos of wet canvas on your head. It should have been obvious to all that acquiring three hundred square metres of sun shades for the site would make the weather hate us, but some of us here are on a steep learning curve. Of course, such an acreage of canvas can pack a hefty punch; my time at sea has taught me that one of our trench shades would be sufficient to get a two-to-three hundred tonne ship underway against a moderate swell, but sadly, among his many other practical deficiencies, the director is no seaman.

Indeed, it was only yesterday I had a close call with the trench C shade. I wasn’t giving the situation my full attention, as I was on the phone to the co-director about how dangerous I thought the shades might be in wind, when out of the corner of my eye I saw the shade pole falling towards my head. I took a rapid step backwards as it fell in front of me, and then an even hastier one forwards to avoid the iron stake being propelled across the trench at the height of my vital organs by the corner of the sail. I would like to point out that such occurrences were not anticipated in the forty two page risk assessment (which included the possibility of nuclear war with Iran) http://oldstuffinhotplaces.wordpress.com/2013/03/13/disaster-plan/.

Oven [209] looking like a beetroot salad

It is Thursday night, the only night where we can sleep late in the morning so I must away to the fridge and our new stock of alcohol, obtained at great length from the only beer shop (locked garage) in Halabja (which, understandably, has perhaps had enough of poisons). It looked for a while that we’d have to get through the weekend sober. We were down to half a bottle of Iraqi made ‘Sir Henry’s London Dry Gin’ (cost: £2.50 per litre), which I have tested for nerve agents to be on the safe side.

Sir Henry’s gin: unconventional warfare

Combining fun and technology with knowledge while playing bingo where instead of numbers or letters there will be sentences containing human rights texts, dates of world days, like world humanitarian day…to raise awareness. The objective is to get people to donate, play, have fun and learn about Human Rights. The game can be programmed as a computer game and can be played on i-pads and phones. It also can be a charity bingo event where the money will be used to buy supplies for poor children.

A military judge, Army Col. David Conn, found Sgt. John Russell guilty of premeditated murder on Monday and imposed the sentence Thursday morning. The only other possible penalty for Russell would have been life in prison with the possibility of release.

Russell will be transferred within the next several days to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, Army spokesman Lt. Col. Gary Dangerfield said late Thursday.

The 14-year veteran from Sherman, Texas, had previously pleaded guilty to unpremeditated murder in exchange for prosecutors taking the death penalty off the table. Under the agreement, prosecutors were allowed to try to prove to an Army judge at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state that the killings were premeditated. A streamlined court martial ended Saturday.

The shooting was one of the worst instances of soldier-on-soldier violence in the Iraq war and raised questions about the mental health problems for soldiers caused by repeated tours of duty.

Killed in the 2009 shooting in Baghdad were Navy Cmdr. Charles Springle, of Wilmington, N.C., and four Army service members: Pfc. Michael Edward Yates Jr., of Federalsburg, Md.; Dr. Matthew Houseal, of Amarillo, Texas; Sgt. Christian E. Bueno-Galdos, of Paterson, N.J.; and Spc. Jacob D. Barton, of Lenox, Mo.

Russell’s lawyers argued that he was deluded by depression and despair at the time. An Army mental health board found that Russell suffered from severe depression with psychotic features and post-combat stress.

Russell had long sought help with sleep troubles and was stammering and crying for help in the days before the shooting. His commanders were so alarmed that they disarmed him and sent him for repeated visits to mental health clinics, said attorney James Culp.

However, prosecutors argued that Russell was trying to paint himself as mentally ill in an attempt to win early retirement — just as he was facing a sexual harassment complaint that could derail his career and his benefits.

The day before the killings, psychiatrist Michael Jones told him that a mental disability retirement would require “some kind of suicidal psychotic crisis,” Maj. Daniel Mazzone said during closing arguments, according to the Los Angeles Times.

But when Russell saw Jones again the next day, the psychiatrist said he had no intention of giving him “a golden ticket” out of the Army.

When Russell returned about an hour later, prosecutors say, he was looking for Jones, but wound up killing two patients, a bystander and two other mental health workers, including Navy Cmdr. Springle, who had also briefly treated Russell in the days before the shootings. Jones escaped injury by jumping out a window.

(Copyright 2013 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

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One of the consequences of American exceptionalism is that the U.S. government considers itself exempt from legal and moral standards accepted by other nations in the world. There is a long list of such self-exemptions: the refusal to sign the Kyoto Treaty regulating the pollution of the environment, the refusal to strengthen the convention on biological weapons. The United States has failed to join the hundred-plus nations that have agreed to ban land mines, in spite of the appalling statistics about amputations performed on children mutilated by those mines. It refuses to ban the use of napalm and cluster bombs. It insists that it must not be subject, as are other countries, to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.

What is the answer to the insistence on American exceptionalism? Those of us in the United States and in the world who do not accept it must declare forcibly that the ethical norms concerning peace and human rights should be observed. It should be understood that the children of Iraq, of China, and of Africa, children everywhere in the world, have the same right to life as American children.

These are fundamental moral principles. If our government doesn’t uphold them, the citizenry must. At certain times in recent history, imperial powers—the British in India and East Africa, the Belgians in the Congo, the French in Algeria, the Dutch and French in Southeast Asia, the Portuguese in Angola—have reluctantly surrendered their possessions and swallowed their pride when they were forced to by massive resistance.

An excerpt from: The Power and the Glory: Myths of American exceptionalism            By Howard Zinn

Abandoned Security Camp in Basra, Iraq

I am a proud veteran of the US Army. I joined for reasons all my own. I joined because I knew that at some point in my life I would have to ask for someone to take me seriously. I would’ve had to proven myself worthy of respect to merely ask someone else to consider giving it to me even for one instance. Little did I know that I would end up getting less of what I ever expected by choosing to give my life for the members of the society in which I live.

I may not be speaking for all soldiers and members of the armed forces but I will be bold to say that what I say is true most of the time. And ‘soldier’ in this context means anyone in the armed service. A Soldier is proud. They walk tall knowing that they’ve conquered demons most people can’t imagine. Even in basic training they’ve braved horrible living conditions, live fire training exercises and the complete destruction and rebuilding of their characters. Some get to see much more gruesome things early on. In my airborne school class a girl died when her parachute didn’t open properly. Talk about a humbling experience! All I can say is the sound of taps is quite possibly the hardest thing for me to bear. Even as I write this, I could easily get choked up thinking not only about those who have perished but their families and loved ones that have been left behind. Even on a less dramatic scale, the entire experience of becoming a soldier has permanent effects on one’s life.

Being in the midst of the general military population it was easy to see that for some people, it in itself was a social program. Some people join because they have no other viable option in life. Those people pissed me off when I was in. Overweight and lazy people were the worst. Here I was working my ass off trying to make a paycheck and not get in trouble while GI Fat-ass could always be late, never meet standards and not even deploy and receive the same privilege as I did without even trying. I would constantly wonder how I could be as useless as others and still go home every night feeling proud of myself. Funny thing is, that’s what it’s like on the outside as well. Here’s where it starts to piss me off.

The ‘broke-dicks’ and ‘shit-bags’ in the military, as useless as they are to a fellow soldier, have more credibility and demand for respect than any person who dares put down the value of a soldier or the military. They even deserve more respect than the ignorant, self-absorbed youth that think they are above public service at any level. I go to school with a ton of kids who would have no balls to even consider serving their country. It’s not even about war. Even National Guard duties do more humanitarian and relief missions than anything now that the Iraq war is done. How can I criticize these people? Well, for one I stood up and joined. I joined when I knew I would go to war and could quite possibly come back in a body bag. I was also one of those kids who thought I was above having to do military service when I was out of high school. I was going to do better things with my life. That is, until life bitch slapped me and brought me to my knees. I see myself in these kids that I’m surrounded by.  I gave up my pride for a faith that giving selfless service would change everything about my life. It did.

You remember the Budweiser commercial where everyone in the airport stopped and stood up for the returning soldiers? Well, funny thing is before that commercial aired I actually witnessed it happen in real life. I was standing in the Atlanta Airport fresh out of Basic Training headed to Fort Leonard Wood with my brand new Class A uniform on. One ribbon and a few accoutrements made me feel prouder than I ever thought possible. As I was waiting in line to get some Chinese food in the main concourse, an eruption of applause started. On the upper level mezzanine a group of uniformed soldiers came walking in. Fresh out of combat. Desert Tan BDUs visibly worn from months in harsh living conditions. No shit, the entire concourse full of people stopped what they were doing, stood up and cheered as they walked by. Words can’t describe it. And I wouldn’t dare expect an anti military puke to have any concept of what that feeling is like. After a few deployments and countless traveling I eventually became the one who would get the applause as me and my fellow soldiers would walk in. Seems that nowadays people are getting bored with it and it’s less dramatic now.

If I get motivated enough I could write about the military experience for more than anyone of my readers would care to sit through. Here’s the climax of what prompted me to write this today.

As a veteran, I can say that we get the shaft from all angles. No one really gives a shit about our ‘service.’ Ok sure, there’s people out there that really do ‘support the troops’ with more than a stupid magnet on their car but those people are few and far between. What makes me more angry is the divide between benefits that a US Veteran gets and the benefits that ‘others’ get from our government. The ‘others’ that I talk about can be classified as the illegals, the welfare leaches, the criminals…

I’ve been to combat twice. I’ve seen one too many memorials and funerals. I’ve heard taps one too many times. I’ve stood in a rifle squad to give salute to a fallen soldier, standing as still and as proud as possible while watching one too many tears fall from the faces of those left behind. This is nothing however compared to the true suffering some of our veterans have endured. Watching your buddy gets his head blown off while he stands a foot away from you. Seeing your arms and legs ripped off by an IED. Choosing between killing an infant and risking a suicide bombing. Contemplating suicide because no one is there for you when you return home. Drinking yourself into a coma day after day. Spouses cheating on you with no remorse. Your kids not knowing who you are because you’ve been gone too long. I don’t speak of my personal incidents too much but from the handful of things that I’ve experienced and the effect it’s had on me, I can’t fathom what it must be like for those less fortunate than me.

I have no concept of understanding how anyone could demand and actually receive more respect and consideration than a Veteran. Even the shit-bags that can’t pass a PT test demand hundredfold what some people on welfare get. I said ‘some’ people… The ones who use their food stamp card to buy booze and cigarettes (usually by trading cash for benefits). The ones who try to use their food stamp card at Starbucks. (I wanted to come across the counter and choke them out when they did that). The ones who roll up to the food bank dressed in Fubu driving some brand new escalade. We’ve all seen it. It’s disgusting. ‘Oh, you keep popping out kids? No problem, let the taxpayers take care of them. Procreate away!’ I overhear conversation at school from kids who think the world owes them something. They think they are the shit. All I can do is sit and shake my head hoping that one day they will be humbled before they take the rest of us down with them. Funny thing, it’s not just the kids I hear these things from.

I will never cut in front of someone or demand precedence because of my veteran status. I will however be more open to exclaiming how little respect certain people deserve when they have done nothing in their life to deserve it. And just because someone has made a lot of money does nothing for their worth. What they decide to do with their money can redeem them to a point. It’s also not only about military service. It’s about giving back to our society. Being selfless for once. The world does not revolve around one person or one god. We are all in this together and though war is ultimately pointless, it is a fact of the life in which are living in. For the sake of veterans who are truly worse off than the typical soldier, we as a society owe them not because they were a part of the war machine, but because they were ready to lay their life down for a greater good that seems no one knows how to attain.

I was going to attach a few pictures of some memorials but it just didn’t seem right. As I was flipping through them I found it hard to maintain composure. And in realizing the difficulty in the simple task of remembrance from a veteran point of view, I don’t think some people deserve to share in the suffering of loss when they piss on the ground in which a veteran walks.

MAsjid Syiah di bomb oleh golongan sunni yg kekampungan dan otak kampung

Atas keras kepala PM Iraq al maliki menyebabkan rakyat tidak berdosa keturunan syiah menerima akibatnya. Dua puluh enam orang terbunuh di Iraq selepas rentetan serangan dan letupan seluruh negara.

Semalam. Sekurang-kurangnya 12 orang telah terbunuh dalam serangan ke atas tempat ibadat Syiah, atau husseiniyah, di utara Iraq bandar Kirkuk, pegawai berkata.

Chad Hill, Ancient citadel in Kirkuk, Iraq

Seorang pegawai kanan polis berkata, seorang pengebom berani mati cuba memasuki al-Zahraa husseiniyah pada hari Khamis, tetapi telah dihalang oleh polis daripada berbuat demikian, dan meletupkan tali pinggang bahan letupan rigged berhampiran pintu masuk sebaliknya.

Letupan juga mencedera 40 orang, kata pegawai.

Saudara-mara mangsa dari keganasan pada hari sebelumnya telah datang ke husseiniyah untuk menerima takziah. Pengeboman telah membunuh 10 orang dan mencederakan 17 di bandar pada hari Rabu.

Terdahulu pada hari Khamis, beberapa siri letupan bom di negara ini membunuh sekurang-kurangnya 14 orang dan mencederakan lebih 30 yang lain.

Rumah iabadat tidak boleh di rosakkan apatahlagi membunuh org di dalamnya, atas apa jua sebab, nabi saw amat melarang

http://goingforj29.blogspot.com/2012/10/senjata-pertahanan-negara-islam.html

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