OK, look at my user profile for LiveJournal. What does it say my name is? Hmmm, Gary.
When you email me and I reply, my header includes my name, which would be? Yes, that’s right – Gary.
So why do so many people assume my name is Andy just because my username is Andysocial? If I didn’t know their names, I would not think that GardenGnome is named Garden, nor that LilSister73 is actually a girl named Lil, so what is wrong with people?
Thank you, I feel better now. Off to stare at a computer and pretend to care about testing and evaluations…
current_mood: annoyed
That cut on my hand was not fully healed after all. Or at least, that’s what the burning sensation from the phosphor must have meant last night when I was cleaning the tile. Still not as good a psychotic cleanser as the stuff we used professionally, but I don’t think there’s an industrial chemical supply house around here that will sell me sulfuric acid so my toilets will sparkle. 🙂
<rant>
Seriously folks, if you don’t know what you want, or you can’t be bothered to explain yourself clearly and completely, don’t get mad at me because I make a picture that you ask for, but not what you want.
This goes far beyond the poor girl who misspelled a four-letter word. About 70% of the userpic requests I get, even from folks who seem to be professional icon-requestors, make no sense.
If you want something specific, use specific language. If you say, “Make it cool” then you’ll get whatever the designer thinks is cool, not necessarily what you think is cool.
</rant>
current_mood: annoyed
Last week I made a triple-layer cheesecake, which consisted of butterscotch, dark chocolate, and white chocolate layers of cheesecake, covered with candy drizzles on top. Oh, and it had a chocolate crust.
Since I rarely make anything “normal” and we still had a package of cream cheese left, I bought more cream cheese and baked a classic New York style cheesecake tonight. We’ll see how it turns out after it cools. I’m sure the top will crack, even though I’ve loosened the sides…
I’m pretty sure this isn’t what she wanted, but it’s what she asked for…
Be very careful with typos when you’re requesting userpics, I’m taking them all literally now. 😉
current_mood: evil
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!
current_music:
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.”
current_music:
current_mood:
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…
current_music:
current_mood: exhausted
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
current_mood:
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
current_mood:
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!
current_mood:
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
current_mood:
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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current_mood:
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
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