FrontPage Magazine

The Nation goes out and says yes there was a war crime committed in Haditha and yes the guilty party was George W. Bush.

Enough details have emerged from survivors and military personnel to conclude that in the town of Haditha last November, members of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment perpetrated a massacre. The killings may have been in retaliation for the death of a Marine lance corporal, but this was not the work of soldiers gone berserk. The targets (children from 3 to 14, an old man in a wheelchair, taxi passengers), the hours-long duration of killings, the number of Marines involved, the careful mop-up--all amount to willful, targeted brutality designed to send a message to Iraqis. As Representative John Murtha has pointed out, the patently false story floated afterward, blaming the killings on roadside bombs, and Marine payoffs to survivors imply a cover-up that may extend far up the chain of command. ...

What makes war crimes is criminal leadership. Whatever the responsibility of the unit commanders in Haditha, it is George W. Bush as Commander in Chief who has sent the clear message that human rights abuses and violations of international law are justified in the "war on terror."

Former Defense Undersecretary Jed Babbin, writing nearly simultaneously in Real Clear Politics, predicted that over the coming days "the left" would make every effort to set the agenda and would have near-total freedom to do it in.

We don't know what happened in Haditha, an insurgent stronghold in Anbar Province. Unverified press accounts allege that members of Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, First Marines, were hit by an improvised explosive device and one of them was killed. Others, according to these reports, went on an hours-long killing spree to revenge their comrade's death, leaving about twenty-four men, women and children dead. Navy and Marine Corps investigators are at work, and other reports indicate that at least three Marine officers, including the battalion and company commanders, have been relieved of duty. It's also reported that more than one enlisted man has been detained pending charges about to be brought. ...

It will be easy for the left to drive this story into a frothing political rage because they will have the field to themselves. If anyone in the military chain of command (including civilian leaders such as Secretary Rumsfeld) says anything about the case that could be interpreted as prejudging it or attempting to influence the outcome, the charges could be dismissed under the military law doctrine that prohibits "command influence."

None of it would matter if "the agenda" coincided with the facts which are presumably known, or sufficiently known, or known in a larger sense to the Nation. But the coverage of Katrina provides an interesting example of things that were "known" which were really not. Not that it matters now. One internal problem with the Nation's narrative, which will be invariant to any outcome of the investigation immediately jumps out. The assertion that it was all "willful, targeted brutality designed to send a message to Iraqis" is immediately contradicted by a recitation of how it was 'covered up' -- "the patently false story floated afterward, blaming the killings on roadside bombs, and Marine payoffs to survivors". Note to whoever is in charge of sending messages of terror to the Iraqis: terror is no good unless you publicize it; if you conceal your message with false stories, or blame roadside bombs and worst of all, if you pay money to survivors then you are missing the point. Any halfwit knows that the right way to sow terror is to leave corpses hanging from lampposts, skulls piled before the city gates or decapitate victims in a studio and distribute the video through Al Jazeera.

Sissy Willis raises the interesting question of how much rules of engagement have contributed to the context -- not to the justification -- but the context of any possible massacre that may have occurred. She cites a USA Today story to illustrate how restraint in combat is not always free.

Del Gaudio said he made a tough call after a roadside bomb killed four of his men in April. While securing the scene, he was shot at by a machine gun in a follow-up attack. When he aimed his weapon to return fire, he saw that the gunmen had a line of children standing in front of them and two men filming with video cameras. He held fire until the children moved out of the way but was shot in his hand, which was only inches from his face. "Restraint almost cost me my life," he said.

There are probably quite a few people in hospitals or six feet under the ground who were shot not in the hand as Del Gaudio luckily was but in the head; and for whom the actual price of restraint was their lives. But much more interesting is her link to a King 5 news interview with one of the survivors of the actual Haditha incident. Interesting because the roadside bomb which precipitated the incident may have ironically killed or incapacitated the very NCOs tasked with enforcing the payment of this restraint. (Emphasis mine in the excerpt below)

The incident began November 19 when the Humvee that North Bend, Wash. native Lance Cpl. James Crossan was riding in was blown up by a roadside bomb. He was seriously injured and one of his good buddies died. Lance Cpl. Miquel Terrazas, TJ, was killed by the blast.

"He was my point man and he was pretty much the guy that I went to if I needed anything," Crossan says now. Terrazas was so admired that Crossan tattooed his name on his leg as he recuperated from the broken back, shattered bones, and perforated eardrums he suffered in the blast.

Now some, including Crossan, believe the anger his colleagues felt over that attack may have driven them to kill innocent civilians. I know in my heart if I was there I possibly could've stopped what happened," Crossan said. But the military is now investigating whether other members of the close-knit unit expressed their grief in a more immediate and lethal manner.

A decapitated unit of enraged teenagers is context and not an excuse because if those Marines lost control than nothing: not grief, not anger, not the possibility their leaders were out of action will absolve them from a breach of discipline. Because that is what ignoring the rules of engagement consists of. Disobedience. Combat units follow rules not because they are recruited from angels or packed with ethical training; not because they overflow with kindness or knightly virtue. They follow the rules because even when bleeding, hurt, frightened, angry and grieving beyond the experience of any normal person, they are expected to obey orders. It's often forgotten that Leonidas and his 300 Spartans are remembered not so much for their bravery, though they were that, but for their obedience.

O xein', angellein Lakedaimoniois hoti têde
keimetha tois keinon rhémasi peithomenoi

Go, stranger, and tell the Spartans
That we lie here in obedience to their laws

Those laws are the work of both those who order men into combat and those who expect them to follow rules of engagement; and prevail at both whatever the cost. Those rules are supposed to embody the values of a nation balanced against the need of the Soldier or Marine to survive. And if the Marines fail at either they must pay and pay still. Captain del Gaudio points out in his USA Today interview that what Jed Babbin calls "the story" will also take its toll:

RAMADI, Iraq — Allegations that Marines killed civilians in the western Iraqi town of Hadithah last year could undo efforts to win the cooperation of locals in the volatile Anbar province, some Marines say. "All it does is make our jobs harder out here," said Capt. Andrew Del Gaudio, commander of Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment. "Every Iraqi will assume Marines will act like that. It's a perception that in this part of the world is hard to overcome."

Restraint isn't free; and men will pay for both observing and ignoring it. The Nation wrote that "what makes war crimes is criminal leadership", though I wonder whether they appreciated the irony. "That we lie here in obedience to their laws." Thursday, June 1, 2006

http://fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com

Oh, that's something to look forward to, given the people who have been associated with this project, especially Qaradawi and the slick and sly Mahdi Bray.

The Houston Chronicle reports on border security - with Canada:

Only one terrorist has been caught crossing the U.S. border with explosives and a detailed plot to harm Americans. He came through Canada. [snip]
The United States has only 1,000 agents to patrol the 4,000-mile northern border, compared with 10,000 agents monitoring less than half the distance along the Mexican border, U.S. officials say.

This is a subject I touched on last November when a number of elected officials in the Republican Party made inaccurate and/or unsubstantiated claims about al-Qaeda operatives having crossed our Southern border ( see here, here, and here).

Obviously, the flow of illegal immigrants across the Southern border is massive and represents a serious problem for the United States as well as a potential threat to national security. But the greater threat to U.S. national security is the unsecured border with Canada.

There are a number of reasons for this. First, the border with Canada, as noted above, is much longer and less well manned than the one with Mexico.

Another reason is the mentality of the United States government toward the Northern border. Awhile back I asked a good friend of mine who manages the North American operations for a Fortune 100 transportation company how easy it would be for al-Qaeda to put a nuke in the back of an eighteen-wheeler, hire a Mexican to drive it across the Southern border, park it in downtown Los Angeles and walk away. He said it would be much harder than I thought, and his explanation surprised me.

Our approach to the Southern border for the last four decades has been based on a strategy of interdiction: stopping the flow of drugs and immigrants. We've become quite good at it (despite being overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of the task) and the various bureaucracies that have bloomed as part of the effort now provide a level of redundancy that most people don't realize. For example, we have a number of different agencies working on the Southern border (though probably not with the level of coordination we'd like) performing their own regulatory and/or security-related functions: Customs, DOT, ATF, DEA, and others, as well as Border Patrol.

Conversely, our approach to the border with Canada for decades has primarily revolved around commerce and making it easier for goods (and people) to flow back and forth across the border. Again, we've gotten pretty good at the job of streamlining the process. Most of this has been done in the context of working with large, reputable companies who have their own security protocols and safeguards, but the larger point is that we've had a vastly different mentality, and taken a much different strategic approach with our border with Canada over the years.

The final, and perhaps most important reason the border with Canada is a greater national security threat to the United States than the border with Mexico is the mentality of the Canadian government toward Islamic radicals and al-Qaeda-type operatives over the years. Ahmed Ressam (aka The Millennium Bomber), the Algerian-born al-Qaeda operative caught crossing the U.S.-Canadian border in December 1999, is but one example. In his book Disinformation, Richard Miniter quotes author and National Post columnist Stewart Bell who has written extensively about Canadian connections to terrorist attacks, including the 1993 attacks on the World Trade Center, the 2002 Bali bombing, and the 2003 bombings in Riyadh. Bell writes:

The list of specific government failures is extensive, from an immigration system seemingly incapable of deporting even known terrorists, to laws that have proven ineffective at shutting down charities and ethnic associations fronting for terror. But it all stems from a political leadership unwilling to take a stand and secure Canadians and their allies from the violent whims of the world's assorted radicals, fundamentalists, and extremists.
Time and again, politicians have been tested, and they have failed. They have dined with terrorist fronts, lobbied on behalf of captured terrorists, and given extremists access to the decision-making process. Canada's official terrorism policy - in effect, denying that there is a problem - is merely a public relations strategy intended to manage Washington in order to prevent the Americans from imposing border security measures that would slow North-South trade.

As much as we'd like to hope this trend has been reversed by the election of Stephen Harper's conservative government in Canada, there are signs the new boss might very well be the same as the old:

Canada will not embark on an untested identity card system to meet U.S. border concerns, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said yesterday. [snip]
He said he is hopeful that the Americans will come to see that the passport requirement will not enhance security significantly but will have significantly hurt trade and tourism.

Clearly, we have to find a balance between economic and security interests with both Canada and Mexico. But as far as the threat of terrorism goes, I continue to be more concerned about our exposure from the North. Thursday, June 1, 2006

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/blog

A DAY IN KABUL

By Bill Roggio

Kabul, Afghanistan: The city of Kabul remains quiet as evidence emerges that U.S. Army troops fired on demonstrators while leaving the scene of Monday's accident. According to General Amanullah Gozar, Kabul's chief of highway police who was present at the accident, the U.S. convoy started to leave the accident site after the Afghan mob turned violent. Soldiers in one or more lead vehicles fired warning shots into the air, but a soldier in the trailing vehicle apparently fired into the crowd after hearing gunshots from the crowd. General Gozar confirmed the traffic accident was indeed unintentional, and the U.S. troops immediately began to administer medical assistance to those injured. President Hamid Karzai was critical of the soldier's use of weapons, and the Afghan Parliament called for punishment of the American soldiers.

The latest news did not incite further protests or violence. Traffic was heavy on the streets today, and shops and street vendors remained in business. The evening air was filled with sounds of music emanating from several parties. The residents of Kabul left the evening festivities early to beat the 10:00pm nightime curfew, which has been extended indefinitely. The government has asked religious leaders to moderate the tone of the Friday sermons. There are indications demonstration may be held on Friday, and police, military and security companies are preparing for the possibility.

With the specter of Monday's accident and subsequent riots hanging over the city, an International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) vehicle struck an Afghan child in Kabul. The child was quickly rushed to the hospital. There have been no repercussions from the ISAF accident.

It should be understood that Kabul possesses four traffic lights, which are infrequently turned on. Describing Afghani drivers as aggressive is an understatement. Driving in the city is chaotic experience; the traffic in New York or Boston look like tame by comparison. It is in this environment, coupled with the threat and fear of suicide bombers, that Coalition forces and security contractors operate. Military units will very likely change the rules for convoys, but authority exists to check the driving habits of the security companies.

In southeastern Afghanistan, the police continue to be the main target of the Taliban, as their training and equipment is lacking compared to that of the Afghan Army and Coalition forces. On Tuesday, a police station was overrun by Taliban forces in the town of Chora in Uruzgan province. Ten policemen have been reported killed and forty are thought to have been captured. The Afghan government has acknowledged the Taliban has gained control of the town and is planning an operation to retake it. Taliban forces also attacked a police convoy in Zabul, killing a senior police official, and two provincial leaders.

The assaults on the Afghan police has not stopped the Afghan people from cooperating with the Afghan government and Coalition forces. Afghans in Kandahar province confronted insurgents staging rockets at Kandahar Airfield, and notified the police. Coalition forces also discovered a large weapons cache in the province. In Paktika province, an Afghan turned in two insurgents accessing their weapons cache to the police. Also in Paktika, two bomb-makers were arrested by soldiers of the 2nd Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment. Thursday, June 1, 2006

A BRIEF MOMENT OF UNITY ON IRAN

UN: RESCUE PALESTINIANS FROM THEMSELVES

SECOND COAT?

HADITHA

THE TRUTH BEHIND THE NUMBERS

TINFOIL HATS ON PARADE

FEAR OF JIHAD KEEPS BOSTON MOSQUE IN LIMBO

"THE OPERATIVE CONCEPT IS JIHAD, NOT TERROR"

JIHAD TERROR SUSPECT A 'PEACEFUL PERSON'

NORTH EXPOSURE: WHY THE BORDER WITH CANADA IS MORE OF A NATIONAL SECURITY THREAT

A DAY IN KABUL

By Bill Roggio

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