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Gore For Dean

Ron Fournier of The Associated Press is reporting that Al Gore intends to endorse Howard Dean for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Gore, who lost to President Bush in the disputed 2000 election, has agreed to endorse Dean in Harlem in New York City on Tuesday and then travel with the former Vermont governor to Iowa, sight of the Jan. 19 caucuses which kickoff the nominating process, said a Democratic source close to Gore.

You want to know what really bothers me about this news? The fact that the Associated Press doesn't know the difference between "sight" (something you see) and site (a location). What are they teaching in journalism school these days anyway?

posted by Jerry Bowles 8:50 PM

Reasons to Hate Shrub Bush, Part 612:
The Qala-i-Janghi Murders

The administration may blame the recent deaths of nine children on the fog of war, but the line between "collateral damage" and outright war crimes has been crossed in Afghanistan in at least two buried and nearly forgotten events.

After the negotiated fall of Kunduz, Taliban fighters who were Afghanistan citizens were released but hundreds of foreign-born Taliban—estimates vary between 400 and 800—were trucked on November 23-24, 2001 from Kunduz to the outskirts of Mazar-i-Sharif and then herded into the Qala-i-Janghi fortress, which was serving as the military headquarters of the notoriously brutal warlord General Rashid Dostum.

The decision to not release the foreign fighters came directly from Washington. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had told FoxNews on November 22: “It would be most unfortunate if the foreigners in Afghanistan — the Al Qaeda and the Chechens and others who have been there working with the Taliban — if those folks were set free and in any way allowed to go to another country and cause the same kind of terrorist acts.”

He was also quoted in The Times on November 20 as saying: “The United States is not inclined to negotiate surrenders, nor are we in a position, with relatively small numbers of forces on the ground, to accept prisoners. … Any idea that those people in that town who have been fighting so viciously and who refuse to surrender should end up in some sort of a negotiation which would allow them to leave the country and go off and destabilize other countries and engage in terrorist attacks on the United States is something that I would certainly do everything I could to prevent. They’re people who have done terrible things. … The idea of their getting out of the country and going off to make their mischief somewhere else is not a happy prospect. So my hope is that they will either be killed or taken prisoner.”

Most of the foreign Taliban were shocked at being detained because they had believed the Northern Alliance has agreed to their release as part of the surrender. During the night of November 24, a Taliban prisoner about to be searched detonated a hidden hand grenade, killing himself and a couple of Dostum’s soldiers. A handful of other POWs followed suit, blowing themselves up with hand grenades.

The next day, Northern Alliance forces began tying the hands of prisoners behind their backs. About 250 POWs had been tied up when CIA agent Johnny Spann and a second agent, identified only as “David,” who were “advisers” to Dostum, apparently decided to do the Rambo-thing and start interrogating some of them. (They are the cocky jerks seen on film playing mindgames with American Taliban John Walker Lindh.)

Clearly, these two guys were neither too bright nor too professional. Prisoners greatly outnumbered guards, the atmosphere was still extremely tense from the previous day’s incidents, and Spann and “David” were wandering around among them, lightly armed, with no American backup. Both were wearing Afghan robes, had grey beards and spoke Persian badly enough to be pegged as Americans. When one of them charged Spann, it touched off a revolt that quickly spread panic throughout the camp. Some press accounts say that Spann was able to kill four of the attackers before being overwhelmed and killed.

“David” hauled ass and called for American assistance. US and British special forces raced to the fort and began directing an all-out assault on the POWs inside, most of whom were not armed and not taking part in the rebellion and many of whom still had their hands bound. The assault soon escalated to massive air strikes. Over the next two days, nine or ten bombs were dropped directly on the compound.

As the carnage piled up, U.S. special forces and British SAS watched as Northern Alliance troops roamed the complex shooting at bodies to make sure there were no survivors, looting the bodies of the dead, stealing their rifles, boots, clothing and even gold fillings from their teeth. The special forces also instructed Northern Alliance troops to pour diesel fuel into a basement where terrified prisoners—none of whom were participating in the revolt, including John Walker Lindh—were hiding and set it on fire.

After the fighting was over, only 86 prisoners had survived. Press reports said Northern Alliance forces executed all Taliban prisoners who managed to escape from the fort.

When the dead Taliban’s “arsenal,” was tallied, the prisoners had only 30 guns, two anti-tank weapons and two grenade launchers. An Associated Press photographer said he saw the bodies of up to 50 Taliban whose hands had been bound, laid out in a field inside the fortress. Don Rumsfeld's Geneva Convention-flaunting take-no-prisoners message had clearly made it down the chain of command.

Next: The Cargo Container Murders

posted by Jerry Bowles 2:04 PM

Spendthrift Conservatism

President George W. Bush is presiding over the biggest growth in U.S. government spending since 1990, as a Republican-led Congress provides money for programs ranging from the fight against terrorism to a dried plant exhibit at the New York Botanical Garden.

Federal spending rose 7.3 percent to $2.2 trillion in fiscal 2003 and 7.9 percent the year before, the most since George H. W. Bush was in the White House. Congress will vote this week on a $328 billion bill to fund such projects as an $18 billion loan guarantee for an Alaska gas terminal that may benefit ConocoPhillips Co. and Exxon Mobil Corp. Bloomberg, December 8, 2003

posted by Jerry Bowles 12:14 PM

The Clark Conundrum... uptown demographics

In Arizona, retired General Wesley K. Clark is running a TV ad positioning himself as everyone’s candidate. But the net result is that his campaign is attracting mainly heavily white, upper income voters, the Los Angeles Times reports. The limousine liberal tag is an indication that Clark’s pro-DNC/Clintonite handlers are painting him into a corner as a top of-the-food-chain candidate. Hardly the way to win in the nation’s most ethnically diverse primary state.

posted by Groom 1:57 AM

Ashcroft is Soft on Terror

As any good rightwinger will tell you, America is a lot safer today than it was two years ago thanks to the hardnosed, lock ‘em up and throw away the key, enforcement job that John Ashcroft and his merry band of prosecutors at the Justice Department have been doing. Right?

Well, wrong actually. An analysis of case-by-case Justice Department data obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a non-partisan data gathering, research and data-distribution organization associated with Syracuse University, released this morning, shows that while Federal investigators are recommending far more terrorism-related prosecutions than before 9/ll, the outcomes—as measured by the length of sentences—are ridiculously small.

How small? Of the 6,400 individuals the government concluded had committed terrorist acts or should be charged with some crime because doing so might "prevent or disrupt potential or actual terrorist threats" since 9/11, only five have so far been sentenced to 20 years or more in prison. For those categorized as “international terrorists” the median sentence--half got more, half got less --was 14 days.

The TRAC report goes on to note:

Putting the anti-terrorism matters to one side, the government's case-by-case records show that in the post-9/11 period there were three and a half times more suspects convicted for what the government said were terrorist acts than in the pre-9/11 period. Despite this jump -- the number of convictions went from 96 to 341 -- the government's enforcement effort has not resulted in putting more terrorists behind bars for significant periods of time. Curiously, in fact, the number of defendants sentenced to five or more years in prison actually declined. There were 24 such sentences in cases initiated in the two years before the attacks, 16 in the two years after.

A similar decline was found even when the data analysis focused only on individuals that the government had classified as international terrorists. For this special group, in the two years before the attack, a grand total of six persons were sentenced to five or more years. In the two years after, only three received such sentences.

In other words, Ashcroft and the lads have been pumping the numbers to make it look like they’re really on top of the terrorism thing by prosecuting a lot of bullshit cases that cost the taxpayers millions of dollars on charges so petty that the so-called “international terrorists” involve walk in two weeks or less.

posted by Jerry Bowles 12:16 AM