The Curmudgeon Letters - Volume 4 Number 33

C. A. ("Al") Irvine……airvine@mail.com

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Quote of the Day
"This is bullshit"—Robert Novak, just before walking of the set of a CNN news program. James Carville, referring to Novak, had just said "He’s got to show these right wingers that he’s got a backbone, you know." The interviewer, Ed Henry said that he was just about ask Novak, as he had told him he would, about his role in the outing of Valerie Plame. I don't think that that had anything to do with Novak's exit, do you?
Wonder of wonders! CNN has "asked Mr. Novak to take some time off."<
Ideot of the Day
Today the award goes to George W. Bush. He has over and over again shown his antipathy towards science. He denies global warming and by doing so threatens the survivability of the human species. As Governor of Texas, he supported teaching both Creationsism (the world is only 6,000 years old and God made it in 6 days) and Darwinian evolution. So, now we shouldn't be surprised by his endorsement of "Intelligent Design." Intelligent Design is purported to be an alternative 'scientific' theory about the origin of the universe and the creation of life. It argues that everything, especially life on earth is so complicated that it couldn't possibly have just happened—it had to be designed by some intelligent being.

In the first place, just because we can't understand how it could have just happened, is no evidence at all that it didn't happen that way. This whole intelligent design thing is just an hopeless attempt to find a way, that scientists can't refute, to say that God created the world. The argument is exactly like saying, the operation of the stock market is so complicated that no one can really understand how it works therefore God made it!
Military Intelligence, the Prototypical Oxymoron
Brig. Gen. C. Donald Alston, chief spokesman for the American command in Iraq has concluded that: "This is not an expanding insurgency." He based that on his observation that: "the tempo of suicide attacks has decreased." I personally can't imagine that even a real decline in suicide attacks would convince me that the insurgency was not expanding—and a decrease in the "tempo" of suicide attacks must be even less convincing. And how did Alston arrive at the conclusion that the "tempo" had decreased? Not because the number of suicide car bombings had decreased, but because the "percentage of car bombings involving suicide bombers" has fallen over the past few months! I wonder if he has considered the possibility that the insurgents have found effective ways to carry out car bombings without requiring that someone commit suicide?

Alston has gone on to apply his amazing reasoning skills to argue that "the tempo of suicide attacks has decreased" because the "flow of foreign fighters was ebbing." Part of this logic is that the military has decided that a good measure of the number of foreign insurgents is the fraction of car bombings that are carried out by non-Iraqis. I can't imagine why that would be a good measure, particularly when we remember that the Brookings Institute (Iraq Index — a PDF file) estimates that only 5% of the insurgents are "foreign terrorists" and noted that the estimated number of insurgents is now the highest that it has ever been! I guess that all of this muddled thinking trumped the fact that, as the NY Times reported, "At least 24 marines have been killed in the last week in fighting along the Euphrates, one of the bloodiest periods for American forces in months."
This Is Not The Country That I Thought I Grew Up In!
ABC News Online has reported that it has obtained emails from two former members of the Guantanamo prosecution team complaining about the unfairness of the 'legal' process at Gitmo. The emails were addressed to their "supervisors in the Office of Military Commissions in March of last year."

"Capt Carr says that the prosecutors have been told by the chief prosecutor that the panel sitting in judgment on the cases would be handpicked to ensure convictions.". [emphasis mine]

'You have repeatedly said to the office that the military panel will be handpicked and will not acquit these detainees and that we only needed to worry about building a record for the review panel,' he said."

Men have been held in Gitmo for three years without representation, charges or trials! These kangaroo courts are being held in your name! Are you proud of your country?

And there's more. Abu Bakker Qassim, 36, and A'del Abdu Al-Hakim, 31 were captured in Pakistan and sold to the Americans at $5,000 per head.

"'In March of this year -- which is to say, three years after the United States took Qassim and al-Hakim into custody -- a U.S. Combatant Status Review Tribunal concluded that the two men were not enemy combatants but merely had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. … [my emphasis again]

Although Qassim and al-Hakim were cleared in March, the United States didn't bother to share that fact with anyone outside Guantánamo. And having been denied contact with their lawyers or their family members, the men had no way to spread the word themselves. So for four more months, they sat in Guantánamo, cleared but not freed.

The men were finally allowed to meet with the lawyers in late July, and they were able then to reveal the news that they had been cleared. The government confirmed that fact for the lawyers last week. So are the men free now? No. Their lawyers asked a federal judge in Washington to order their release yesterday, but the government is resisting. The U.S. says it can't send the men back to China because it fears they'll be persecuted there, and it hasn't found any other country that is willing to take them. Why not release them into the civilian population at Guantánamo until something better can be arranged? Can't do that, either, the government says. 'They have been detained in here with some very bad people, under some very bad influences,' Guantánamo spokesman and Army Maj. Jeff Weir tells the Globe. 'We can't just release them into a hotel amongst the civilians on the base ... We understand the point of what the lawyers are saying, but it's an impossibility.'"

Tim Grieve, Salon.com, August 2, 2005.

Another example of military intelligence! It implies that when a person is wrongfully convicted of a serious crime and sent to prison to live with hardened criminals for say 3 years, even if later completely exonerated he or she should never be freed! Why? Because the effects of their imprisonment among hardened criminals would make them dangerous!