I’ve decided to not deign to answer those who purposely mangle their mother tongue online. No longer will I respond to anyone who asks me, “wat dew u lyke 2 yews 4 dat?” or any other inane crap. Typos are one thing, unfamiliarity with a language is another; purposely misspelling things just to be “kewl” is stupid, moronic, idiotic, and several other synonyms.
So, all you “leet” folks out there – piss off. I’m not going to answer your questions, except perhaps to tell you that you are not speaking any language I recognize. Phbt!
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current_mood: giddy
The boy has been repeating the tagline from the latest Carl’s Jr commercial all through dinner.
Doan bodda mee, I’m eating!
current_mood: amused
Last Edit: 05 Aug 2005 @ 07:24 AM
Email • Permalink • Comments Off on TV on the brain
Gee, who would you believe – the US soldiers who admitted a mistake, or 34 men with cuts and bruises and a consistent story? We’re not always 100% good guys.
Fighters Recount Unanswered Pleas, Beatings — and an Apology on Their Release
By John Ward Anderson, Washington Post Foreign Service
HAUZIMATED, Afghanistan, March 25 — When U.S. tanks and helicopters surrounded a walled compound in this tiny desert outpost on March 17 and arrested more than 30 men suspected of belonging to the al Qaeda network, the Pentagon depicted the operation as a good example of how U.S. forces would finish rooting out terrorists from Afghanistan.
But last week, after four days of imprisonment, all of the suspects were released. U.S. officials had discovered that the compound was a security post manned not by al Qaeda or Taliban forces, but by fighters from the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance hired by the government of Kandahar to help control crime.
Eighteen of the men said in interviews that they quickly surrendered and tried to explain that they were U.S. allies as their small compound was surrounded by eight to 10 U.S. tanks and dozens of American soldiers at about 3 a.m. that day. But they said their explanations were either not understood or ignored and that they were tied up, punched, kicked and kneed by the soldiers and then held in cages at a U.S. military base for four days before being released with an apology.
The incident and others like it raise questions about the quality of U.S. intelligence gathering and analysis in Afghanistan. U.S. forces frequently have been accused of not recognizing when they are being fed bad information by local Afghan leaders who want to settle political, personal and tribal disputes by accusing their rivals of being members of the Taliban or al Qaeda.
The incident is reminiscent of a Jan. 24 U.S. military operation in the town of Uruzgan in which 21 villagers were killed and 27 were detained for two weeks before being released. The villagers complained that they had been severely beaten during their capture and detention by U.S. military forces who had misidentified them as al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.
The U.S. Central Command, which runs the war in Afghanistan, has refused to acknowledge error in the Uruzgan operation, saying its troops were fired on in what Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Feb. 21 called an “untidy” situation. But the CIA has made reparation payments to the families of those killed, according to reports from local authorities here.
Maj. Ignacio Perez, a spokesman at the U.S. military base at Kandahar airport, said the operation eight days ago in this tiny hamlet about 25 miles west of Kandahar is not under investigation. “These individuals were treated in a highly professional manner,” he said. “We treat all detainees humanely and consistent with the protections provided for under the Geneva Convention.”
Perez refused to provide specifics about how the men were detained, citing “operational security.” He said he did not know why the outpost had been targeted by U.S. forces as an enemy camp. No shots were fired during the incident, officials said.
In revealing the operation at a Pentagon briefing last week, Air Force Brig. Gen. John W. Rosa Jr., deputy director for current operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said there was “a set of indicators” pointing to possible enemy activities and “when those indicators line up, we’re going into those compounds.”
Several days later, when announcing that the men had been released, Rosa explained, “We had looked at that site some time ago. And what happened through intelligence — we saw more ammunition, more weapons in that area. We also saw folks that we didn’t necessarily recognize. More importantly, the Afghanis that were with our troops did not know who was in that compound.”
“We never processed them and they never became detainees,” Rosa added.
But many of the men interviewed showed what appeared to be official U.S. government identity cards stating: “This card is issued to prisoners of war in the custody of the United States Army.”
The compound here officially is a police post surrounded by a 10-foot wall about 100 yards off the Kandahar-Heart highway, in a community that exists principally to make emergency automotive repairs. Men stationed here said that if anybody wanted to know who they were and why they were there, all they had to do was ask.
“They should have sent someone here and taken our leader to their base and asked, ‘Who are you?’ and solved this through dialogue,” said Ahmed Younis, 22. “But they didn’t ask anything. They just took all of us to their base, beat us and insulted us, and then apologized.”
Residents of the community said they, too, could have told the U.S. forces that the people in the compound were not enemies, but they were too afraid to leave their homes when tanks and soldiers rumbled into town.
After their post was surrounded, one of the men from the compound opened the front gate with a light and invited the unexpected guests inside, but he was told to go back in and not to come out again, the men here said. Finally, about 30 U.S. soldiers entered and ordered the men to surrender their weapons. They said they turned over 24 AK-47 assault rifles, pistols and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
“They told us that ‘We have information you belong to al Qaeda or the Taliban,’ that ‘this is [Taliban leader] Mullah [Mohammad] Omar’s house, and you are going to attack us and turn the people against us,’ ” said Faida Mohammed, a commander at the outpost who was sporting a black eye he said he received that night. “We laughed and said, ‘We’re from the government.’ But we didn’t move or say anything against them.”
The men said their feet were bound, their hands tied behind their backs and black hoods placed over their heads while U.S. soldiers punched and kicked them. Many of the 18 men who gathered to describe what happened showed a variety of cuts and bruises they said they had received during the beatings. In all, they said, 34 men at the outpost were taken into custody; U.S. officials put the number at 31.
They were driven to the U.S. base about 40 miles away, and once there, at about 7 a.m., they were ordered to lie on their stomachs on a patch of rocky ground for the next seven hours. “Whenever we moved, they hit us,” Faida Mohammed said.
For the next four days, the men said they were held in a large, walled detention area at the base that had about 15 cages, each about 32 feet long and 15 feet wide, made with wooden posts surrounded by metal fencing and topped by weatherproof material. Each cage held 10 to 18 people, they said.
The men were divided among three of the cages, sharing the space with Pakistani, Iranian, Chechen, Bangladeshi, Palestinian and other Arab prisoners, they said. Each man was given two blankets and a space on the wooden floor on which to sleep. There were two buckets for the latrine, but otherwise they were ordered to sit on the floor all the time, not look up and not talk to anyone, the men said.
They were fed regularly, and after the first day, they were not mistreated, the men said. Each underwent about an hour of personal interrogation during the first two days, which consisted principally of questions about their family background and their political and military allegiances. They said they were not threatened or hit during the questioning. They said that after two days, it appeared that their true identities had been discovered, and they were mostly ignored for the last two days.
“Finally, they believed us, and they said, ‘It was a misunderstanding — someone gave us bad information,’ ” Faida Mohammed said. “They said, ‘We apologize,’ and they flew us back here in five helicopters, accompanied by the top leader of the air base himself.”
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Quite probably the most physical exertion I’ve put forth in more than a year. This garden better have actual growing stuff when we’re done. Ouch, my shoulder…
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By Blake Morrison, USA Today
In the months after Sept. 11, airport screeners confiscated record numbers of nail clippers and scissors. But nearly half the time, they failed to stop the guns, knives or simulated explosives carried past checkpoints by undercover investigators with the Transportation Department’s inspector general.
In fact, even as the Federal Aviation Administration evacuated terminals and pulled passengers from more than 600 planes because of security breaches, a confidential memo obtained by USA TODAY shows investigators noticed no discernable improvements by screeners in the period from November through early February, when the tests were conducted.
At screening checkpoints, the memo reads, “only the opaque object (such as a film bag) were routinely caught.” Guns passed through in 30% of tests, knives went unnoticed 70% of the time, and screeners failed to detect simulated explosives in 60% of tests.
Perhaps just as troubling, investigators “were successful in boarding 58 aircraft” at 17 of the 32 airports tested. “In 158 tests,” the memo says, “we got access to either the aircraft (58) or the tarmac (18) 48 percent of our tries.”
The Feb. 19 memo, sent from the inspector general’s office to top transportation officials, including Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, illustrates that major security problems remained in the months after Sept. 11.
Indeed, security might even have gotten worse after the terrorist attacks. Failure rates in the memo are higher than those in FAA tests cited during congressional testimony last year. For example, according to the General Accounting Office, “in 1987, screeners missed 20%” of weapons in FAA tests. Because knives were banned after Sept. 11, investigators hadn’t included them in previous tests.
Days after the inspector general’s tests ended, the new Transportation Security Administration took control of airport security from the FAA. But screeners remain employed by private security companies, overseen by TSA officials.
“We still have the same people doing the same jobs they did before Sept. 11,” says Reynold Hoover, an expert on counterterrorism who conducts screening seminars.
Hoover cautions that screeners are only part of the problem. Tests of aircraft security and access were equally unsettling, he says.
“The ability to access aircraft in what is supposed to be the most secure area of the airport, that is pretty frightening,” Hoover says. “The fact that they’re able to get in shows that there’s still a weakness in the control measures.”
FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown says security agents “took aggressive enforcement action” during the test period. Among the actions: evacuating 40 terminals and deplaning 636 flights between Oct. 30-Feb. 16.
“Before Sept. 11, the FAA recognized significant improvements were needed in screener training, and we developed regulations to require better training and to give us more direct control over screening companies,” Brown says.
Other current and former FAA officials say the agency often ignored results of its own testing, failed to take corrective action, and after Sept. 11, did not dispatch its elite undercover team to test security.
A senior TSA spokesman says the new agency plans an aggressive approach to security ? both in training screeners and imbuing a new philosophy of vigilance.
“We have significantly enhanced what people are looking for and what procedures they go through to look for things,” the spokesman says. “Secondly, the training has been readjusted to meet the requirements and needs post-Sept. 11.”
In the next four weeks, 1,200 new supervisory screeners begin a 45-hour training program, then report to airports for two weeks of on-the-job training. “These are fresh people,” the spokesman says.
Whether the new approach or new workers will make airports safer quickly remains unclear.
Hoover calls the TSA’s screener training program “an ambitious plan,” but he says he expects dramatic improvements by November, when screeners become federal workers.
“Hopefully, you’re going to be able to raise their skill level,” he says.
current_music: Live – Flow
current_mood: amused
The Washington Times today reports on the latest moves from the Office of Homeland Defense. The government wishes all federally-funded web sites to scrub all their information regarding weapons of mass destruction and clear it off their public sites. Of course, the information has already been saved by many people and automatic archiving systems such as Google and the internet Wayback Machine, but that’s irrelevant.
Much as the internet has been blamed for giving Timothy McVeigh information on how to blow up a building, here it gets stricter scrutiny than a public library once again. Hey, guys? Ever heard of the Anarchist’s Cookbook?
current_music: Incubus – Blood on the Ground
current_mood: incredulous
Every year, the Chinese government puts out a report on U.S. human rights violations. It always makes entertaining reading. With the right spin, any country can sound like Nazi Germany…
current_music: Bif Naked – Leader
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In case you were curious who the U.S. government doesn’t like, check out this list, which includes the “Real IRA” and some Isreli terrorist group, also. Bizarre.
current_music: A Perfect Circle – Brena
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Gotta love this nonsense. I never understood the weasel approach that Clinton took on the gays in the military issue. If he wanted to make it legal for gays to serve in the military, he could have just said so. This “don’t ask don’t tell” crap had no chance of working.
San Antonio Express-News
March 19, 2002
‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Policy Still Contentious
By Sig Christenson, Express-News Military Writer
Capt. Monica Hill was days away from reporting to Andrews AFB in Maryland when she was told her partner of 14 years had terminal brain cancer.
Hill asked for a delay in reporting to Andrews, more than 1,000 miles away.
But months after the Air Force canceled her orders, it moved to kick Hill, a physician, out of the service under the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy ? intended, ironically, to protect gays in the armed forces.
“Captain Hill’s case illustrates the absurdity of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ ? the inhumanity,” said C. Dixon Osburn, executive director of Servicemembers Legal Defense Network. “Here is a woman who had dreamed her entire life of becoming a medical officer in the Air Force, and in the wake of losing her lifelong partner of 14 years, the Air Force’s response is to kick her out.”
SLDN, an advocate of gays, lesbians and bisexuals in the armed forces, points to Hill’s experience as typical of life in a “homophobic” military that actively discriminates against people on the basis of their sexual orientation. The Pentagon, in turn, counters that it is doing its best to implement rules that will protect gays, lesbians and bisexuals now in uniform.
Depending on who’s talking, statistics from the 2001 fiscal year either prove SLDN’s point or buttress the Pentagon’s view that “don’t ask, don’t tell” is working.
The policy allows gays, lesbians and bisexuals to serve as long as they don’t reveal their sexual orientation ? as Hill did ? and as long as they don’t engage in homosexual acts. Commanders are forbidden from asking troops about their sexual orientation.
Last year, 1,250 men and women were kicked out under the policy, devised by President Clinton and enacted into law in 1993. The discharges for the 2001 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, set a new high for the policy and were the most since 1987.
SLDN said the Army had the most expulsions, with 616 soldiers booted last year. Lt. Elaine Kanellas, though, said the 480,000-strong Army likely would have the most discharges because it’s the largest service branch.
At Lackland AFB, where 328 “don’t ask, don’t tell” discharges in the 1998 fiscal year sparked dramatic changes, 23 airmen were ordered out in 2001 for being gay ? a five-year low.
“We believe we are very successfully following the (Department of Defense) guidelines,” said Dave Smith, a spokesman for the Air Education and Training Command, which oversees Lackland and 12 other bases.
“Don’t ask, don’t tell” discharges have been rising throughout the military in recent years. In all, 1,212 members of the armed services were discharged under the policy in 2000, a 17 percent increase over 1999.
That year, 1,046 troops were discharged by the services, SLDN stated in “Conduct Unbecoming,” its annual report on “don’t ask, don’t tell” discharges.
A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Jim Cassella, said discharges have leveled off.
He also disputed SLDN’s claim that defense officials haven’t implemented a 13-point anti-harassment plan issued in 2001 by former Defense Secretary William Cohen. The plan was drafted after the Pentagon inspector general documented anti-gay harassment in the services.
Cassella conceded that even one harassment case is too many, but said the report outlined “a series of incidents that, as egregious as they may be in individual cases,” aren’t representative of the military.
SLDN’s 52-page report, released last Thursday, paints a darker picture. It logged 1,075 cases of “anti-gay harassment” in 2001, up from 871 only the year before.
Former Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon and Air Force Secretary F. Whitten Peters don’t know what to make of the numbers.
“Since nobody really knows what proportion of people serving in the military are gay, it’s hard to know whether that’s a large number of people leaving or a small number,” Peters said of last year’s 1,250 discharges.
He went on to say that while clusters of troops have left the military because of sexual harassment, others have simply claimed to be gay so they could get out of their service commitment.
That apparently occurred when Lackland’s discharge rate shot up, Bacon said, noting that commanders shied away from disputing recruits who wanted out.
The number of recruits kicked out of boot camp tumbled after Lackland developed a new policy that gave them time to reconsider.
current_music: Powerman 5000 – Tonight the Stars Revolt!
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Well, I now understand why the web app I mentioned previously sucks ass – it uses Microsoft’s .Net framework. This sure doesn’t bode well for their future endeavors. I can’t even load the main application today.
current_music: Cake – Short Skirt – Long Jacket
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Who but the Soviets would have created a class of power generators based on the waste heat from radioactive decay?
This story details the contraptions, which are abandoned throughout the former Soviet Union, many of them misplaced or stolen.
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Just nuked my slowly-accrued MP3 directory at work and copied some new tunes into it. Now, instead of 30+ hours of music, I’m down to a mere 16 hours. Of course, I only went through about half of my MP3 CDs to grab tunes and didn’t snag all the ones I wanted, just so I’d have to listen to some of the lesser-played albums I’ve gotten in the past 2 years.
current_music: Colin James – Just Came Back
current_mood: happy
As I mentioned last week, the Camp Xray Store is open for business. If you know someone who’s stuck down in Cuba playing prison guard, they may appreciate a commemorative shirt or trivet. Can’t get enough trivets.
And, when the next set of orders is complete, I’ll get my first-ever commission check from Cafepress. Woohoo!
current_music: Prince – The Future
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There are good months and bad months. This is a good one.
- I’m still married to a wonderful sexy woman who puts up with me with minimal complaint.
- The boy is still as cute as ever, and proving to a smart little boy.
- I’ve made record time on writing reports and such, despite two of the reviewers sucking up half of my alloted time just sitting on the documents.
- The IRS check showed up at the same time as my bonus from work, which was just in time to help with the closing costs on the house.
- As a friend needs some financial assistance to help with hospital costs, the VA finally comes through with the money they’ve owed me since October, which makes it easy to give away 2 grand without screwing up my own family.
- Same day I drop the check in the mail to pay my Amex corporate card, I get the settlement from the company for that trip.
- I’ve been told I may go to Hawaii on a business trip in August. Better than Omaha in February, you betcha!
That about sums it up. Go me!
current_music: Prince – Kiss
current_mood: happy
Short piece about the recent Microsoft Vs. Lindows case. Lindows is being sued by MS to get them to stop using a name which could be “confused” with Windows. Is anyone so slow they would confuse Lindows and Windows?
Anyway, the judge said that there are serious questions about whether MS should have ever been granted a trademark on the GENERIC word Windows in the first place. Not like MS uses generic words for trademarked things elsewhere, like Word or Project… You’d think they could have seen this coming. Nobody is allowed to trademark the word “computer” why should MS be allowed to trademark “Windows”? Wouldn’t the obvious assumption then be that Anderson Windows has to pay MS a fee for use of the trademark on their glass products? heh
current_music: Prince – 18 & Over
current_mood: amused
A followup to an earlier entry.
After more experimentation, I have determined that all three major browsers (MSIE, Opera and Navigator) handle the <acronym> tag in a reasonable way. It’s amazing, but true – standards compliance is a good thing.
The only reason I’d not seen it before is because the only place I use the Acronym tag is at work, and we use ancient browsers there. But, NN6 shows the tags as a dotted underline, making it obvious what acronyms have meanings linked to them. The other two browsers handle the Acronym tag like they do the ID tag. In IE, it shows up as a tooltip, in Opera, it shows up in the status bar. But, without the underlining, how would a reader know which acronyms are linked? HTML 4.0 recommends commenting the first instance of each acronym, so you’d have to pay attention while reading. I kind of like Netscape’s approach best, except the underlines show up when you print.
I know, I’m a geek.
current_music: Prince – Peach
current_mood: entertained
The Bush administration plans to ask Congress next week to remove all restrictions on U.S. military aid to Colombia, including those that limit assistance to counter-narcotics efforts, impose human rights standards on the Colombian military and cap the number of U.S. military personnel in the country, administration and congressional sources said.
The plan, which also seeks to ward off restrictions on any future aid, is included in legislation that the administration expects to submit to Congress asking for additional funds for global and domestic anti-terrorism efforts this year.
The White House put aside a similar Colombia proposal barely two weeks ago on grounds that Congress might not support a significant broadening of the U.S. military mission there to assist the government of President Andres Pastrana in its fight against leftist guerrillas. The Pentagon, backed by some officials in other departments, had proposed including Colombia in the global war on terrorism.
So, under the guise of fighting terrorism, let’s re-instate the foreign policies of the Cold War. Remember them? We didn’t care how evil the dictator was, nor how bad he beat his own people, so long as he wasn’t Communist. Now, we’re going to let Colombia off the hook for human rights because they’re not terrorists? Geez.
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I downloaded and installed Netscape 6.2.1 at work this morning. I can still use NS4.7 if I want to feel in pain, and IE-crippled edition is still around too. Now I can see my LiveJournal pages as they were intended, DIV tags and all. Woohoo!
Meanwhile, as I was checking some HTML pages I was editing at work, I noticed a cool feature of NS6 – acronym highlighting. As part of my efforts to improve “accessibility” to the web pages I make, I follow many of the Section 508 requirements and recommendations. One is to break out acronyms with the <acronym> tag. Cool feature, and screen readers can be set to voice them for people. However, they are invisible to the normal browser. Except NS6. Hover over an underlined acronym and BAM! A popup tooltip shows what that acronym means. Combine that with the support for alternate stylesheets, and NS6 is shaping up to be a pretty damned good browser, now that they’ve killed the showstopping bugs in version 6.0.
I think I’ll stick with Opera at home, though – I have grown accustomed to the MDI interface.
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current_mood: geeky
As I’ve mentioned in the past, my organization has both Netscape 4.7 and MSIE 5.5 loaded. Netscape 4.7 is a horribly old piece of technology, and I notice a large number of folks upstairs who have installed Netscape 6.2 as well, just to have a browser that doesn’t suck at CSS and such. The MSIE browser has had every piece of vulnerable technology turned off, which means it’s a braindead piece of software that can’t render the simplest Javascript correctly.
So, what do we have in our inboxes today, but a message that we all must go to a particular intranet site, which must be accessed with Internet Explorer. This site is a “web app,” one of those things any geek has heard of but few have actually seen in use. You would think, since DISA has mandated that Netscape 4.7 is the standard browser, the web app would work in Netscape. Go figure.
I actually attempted to go to the site with Netscape and ran into authentication problems. Wonder if it would work with NS 6.2…
This is not the point behind web applications. The idea is that any web app should be accessible with any browser of reasonable vintage. NS4.7 is not so old that it should be completely nonoperational with this spanking new application.
Ah, progress..
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