rich ruminations

Naw… he’d rather meet with leaders of countries which sponsor terrorists.

What a great story…

Anti-war lawyer keys a Marine’s car just before the Marine was to deploy to Iraq. He got caught. Here’s the background.

And justice was sweet - read thru to the end of the article, and the first few comments…

I just love a happy ending!

Via Instapundit.

Via OPFOR.

Strategypage has a brief write-up about status of military recruitment efforts:

In the last six months, the U.S. Army is seeing 15 percent more soldiers re-enlist than expected. This continues a trend that began in 2001. Every year since then, the rate at which existing soldiers have re-enlisted has increased. This despite the fact that 69 percent of the troops killed in Iraq have been from the army. New recruits continue to exceed join up at higher rates as well.

Further, morale levels are quite high:

The army makes a big thing, internally, about the number of troops re-enlisting, especially within combat units that are in Iraq or Afghanistan. Pictures of mass re-enlistments are published in military media, but the civilian media has generally ignored this phenomena. Also ignored, except by some local media interviewing locals who are in the army, is the positive attitude of the troops, especially those in combat units. The large number of re-enlistments occur because the troops believe they are making a difference, and winning. This is especially true for soldiers who have come back to Iraq on a second tour, and noted the improvements since the first tour.

One of our neighbors has been serving in Iraq the past several months, and is currently home for a short leave (he returns in a few days). I spoke with him last week about morale levels, and he provides confirmation that indeed, the troops have consistently high morale. “We’re very well taken care of,” is what he says. “We know we’re there for the right reasons, and we’re doing noble work.”

Yet the Democrats seem intent on snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

My neighbor says the biggest frustration the troops have is the discouraging and defeatist message being presented by the media. “We watch CNN reports about Iraq, and what they are reporting is just not an accurate story about what is going on. Often, there will be a reporter in Baghdad talking about an operation underway up in our area, hundreds of miles away. The reporter hasn’t been here, and clearly is clueless about the facts of the operation.”

Michael Yon’s Frontline Forum is now available. I’ve followed Michael Yon’s dispatches from Iraq, he’s provided detailed information and insight into the daily heroism of our troops.

The new Frontline Forum should be quite interesting.

The Frontline Forum is an alternative channel for compelling stories from those now wearing boots and carrying rifles and not comments or those endlessly forwarded unattributed “true” stories that always seem airbrushed. This is a place for those deployed in harm’s way to tell real stories about the ground situation.

Our goal is for frontline information to break through and be heard. We hope that over time, a more comprehensive and accurate picture of what is happening on the ground can emerge.

This virtual organization primarily is run by a volunteer group of retired military personnel. They will read every story, with the bar set high for accuracy and our radar on full alert for embellishment and operational security. Over 100 volunteers have stepped forward, from all branches of the military, from grunts to generals, veterans from the Korean War forward. They are joined by more than a dozen professional editors, reporters, and published authors, and a team of subject matter experts on topics as diverse as explosives, oil industry technology, law enforcement, computer programming, satellite communications and meteorology.

Not every submission will be published and authors of those submissions will be notified when we decline. Stories selected for publication we will perhaps polish a bit, edit for length and content, and then post ASAP or as the situation in the field allows.

The first story has been posted, and it is a good one.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about emerging evidence about Saddam Hussein’s links to terror training camps.

New information about the impact of these links is discussed in an article by Thomas Joscelyn.

THE REVELATION that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq trained thousands of Islamic terrorists has important ramifications for European counterterrorism efforts. According to officials, one of the groups trained in Iraq prior to the war was al Qaeda’s Algerian affiliate, the Algerian Salafist Group for Call and Combat (”GSPC”). The GSPC and its predecessor, the Armed Islamic Group (”GIA”), are well-known to European counterterrorism officials: Within the last several months, in fact, the GSPC has been at the center of several substantive terrorist plots.

Just last week, Spain arrested 20 suspected terrorists who are alleged to have been recruiting and funding suicide bombers to send to Iraq. The New York Times covered the arrests, noting that according to a statement from the Spanish Interior Ministry the group included 15 Moroccans, 3 Spaniards, a Turk, and an Algerian. The suspects were “detained in Madrid and Barcelona, and in the Basque region, and had ties to two Islamic militant organizations . . . the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat [GSPC], based in Algeria, and the Moroccan Islamic Combat Group.”

Read the whole thing.

Bruce Thornton’s essay, Reflection on 1862, is a thought-provoking and well-written article.

Unfortunately, historical perspective seems to be lacking in much of the critical coverage of the war on terror; rather, we seem to be fed a lot of hysterical perspective. Thornton shows that was also true for Lincoln and the US Civil War.

History comforts us with these reminders that the behaviors that so annoy both the supporters and the critics of the current conflict are typical of a society at war, especially a democracy in which the military is subjected to control and audit by civilian power. Thus it has always been, ever since the Athenian people executed eight victorious admirals for failing to collect the dead after the sea-battle at Arginusae in 406 BC. So what we are going through now is what we should expect, particularly in a mid-term election year (as was 1862), when the party out of power is eager for victory, and the party in power is eager for reelection. But history also reveals something novel about our own predicament –– the unrealistic expectations of a therapeutic culture that refuses to accept the tragic limitations of human action and that prizes psychic and material comfort over everything else.

I was not previously aware of the viciousness of the attacks leveled on Lincoln:

And this complaining was attended by cruel personal attacks that make the puerile Bush-bashing by Howard Dean and moveon.org seem complimentary in contrast. One of the favorite insults for Lincoln was “the original gorilla,” an allusion to speculations at the time about the Darwinian missing link. Lincoln’s striking ugliness was a constant source of amusement for his political enemies and even his political kin. The New York Times’ Paris correspondent suggested an embargo on portraits of the president in order to preserve European support for the Union: Lincoln looked like “a man condemned to the gallows,” and some French shopkeepers were selling his portrait as that of a notorious guillotined serial killer. Keep such pictures at home, the reporter advised, for “such a face is enough to ruin the best of causes.”

Read the whole thing.

Michael Ledeen writes in National Review Online that Osama bin Laden died in mid-December and was buried in Iran.

This will be great news if it can be confirmed.

Bravery. Sacrifice. Courage.

American heroes in 2005.

Representative John Murtha has become the darling of the press and the Democratic Party for his continued criticism of the Iraq war and claims that our troops should be pulled out. Some have complimented him for “speaking truth to power” (see Speak Truth to Power, John Kerry’s Online Office, MyDD, and News Hounds).

Representative Murtha found himself on the listening end of things at a town hall meeting in Arlington, Va., earlier this week, when Sgt. Mark Seavey confronted both Murtha and Representative Jim Moran. The Mudville Gazette has transcribed the exchange:

“Yes sir my name is Mark Seavey and I just want to thank you for coming up here. Until about a month ago I was Sgt Mark Seavey infantry squad leader, I returned from Afghanistan. My question to you, (applause)
“Like yourself I dropped out of college two years ago to volunteer to go to Afghanistan, and I went and I came back. If I didn’t have a herniated disk now I would volunteer to go to Iraq in a second with my troops, three of which have already volunteered to go to Iraq. I keep hearing you say how you talk to the troops and the troops are demoralized, and I really resent that characterization. (applause) The morale of the troops that I talk to is phenomenal, which is why my troops are volunteering to go back, despite the hardships they had to endure in Afghanistan.

“And Congressman Moran, 200 of your constituents just returned from Afghanistan. We never got a letter from you; we never got a visit from you. You didn’t come to our homecoming. The only thing we got from any of our elected officials was one letter from the governor of this state thanking us for our service in Iraq, when we were in Afghanistan. That’s reprehensible. I don’t know who you two are talking to but the morale of the troops is very high.”

Moran - who is one of the few congressmen supporting Charlie Rangel’s call to restore the draft - responded quickly: “That wasn’t in the form of a question, it was in the form of a statement. But, uhh… let’s go over here.” And he took the next question.

I encourage everyone to see the video of the exchange (the town meeting was broadcast on C-SPAN) courtesy of Michele Malkin.

By the way, Sgt. Seavey wasn’t the only one to confront Murtha at the meeting.

I’m unable to find any MSM coverage of the town meeting or the comments. I tried this query on Google news: http://news.google.com/news?client=safari&rls=en&q=murtha%20town%20hall%20meeting%20virginia&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wn. If you are able to find something please let me know in the comments area for this post.

The news I discussed below on the latest evidence of Saddam’s terrorist training camps provides an opportunity to ask if the leading critics of the Administration’s Iraq policy have been lying:

“I never believed in the link between Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and Islamist terrorism,” former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright flatly declared in an October 21, 2003 essay published in Australia’s Melbourne Herald Sun.

“Iraq was not a breeding ground for terrorism. Our invasion has made it one,” Senator Ted Kennedy said October 16, 2003. “We were told Iraq was attracting terrorists from Al Qaeda. It was not.”

In August 2003, former vice president Albert Gore reassuringly stated: “The evidence now shows clearly that Saddam did not want to work with Osama bin Laden at all.”

Even those who would be President of the United States cast doubts. “Iraq was not a terrorist haven before the invasion,” Democratic candidate John Kerry told Philadelphia voters September 24. At the September 30, 2004 presidential debate, Kerry asserted, “Iraq was not even close to the center of the War on Terror before the president invaded it.”

Quotes are courtesy of Saddam Hussein’s Philanthropy of Terror, which has details and links for each of these quotes, and quite a bit more information about Saddam’s links to terror.

Will Kerry issue an apology? Will the New York Times, Washington Post, CBS News, or other mainstream media cover this story, and ask Albright, Kennedy, Gore, and Kerry why they lied?

I won’t hold my breath.

Stephen Hayes writes in the Weekly Standard on new information being gleaned from documents of Saddam Hussein’s regime seized in Iraq over the past few years.

THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials.

The secret training took place primarily at three camps–in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak–and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria’s GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000. Intelligence officials believe that some of these terrorists returned to Iraq and are responsible for attacks against Americans and Iraqis. According to three officials with knowledge of the intelligence on Iraqi training camps, White House and National Security Council officials were briefed on these findings in May 2005; senior Defense Department officials subsequently received the same briefing.

The photographs and documents on Iraqi training camps come from a collection of some 2 million “exploitable items” captured in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan. They include handwritten notes, typed documents, audiotapes, videotapes, compact discs, floppy discs, and computer hard drives. Taken together, this collection could give U.S. intelligence officials and policymakers an inside look at the activities of the former Iraqi regime in the months and years before the Iraq War.

The discovery of the information on jihadist training camps in Iraq would seem to have two major consequences: It exposes the flawed assumptions of the experts and U.S. intelligence officials who told us for years that a secularist like Saddam Hussein would never work with Islamic radicals, any more than such jihadists would work with an infidel like the Iraqi dictator. It also reminds us that valuable information remains buried in the mountain of documents recovered in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past four years.

This information clearly proves a solid link between Saddam Hussein’s regime and al Qaeda.

Only 50,000 documents have been translated so far… there are over 2 million in total from both Iraq and Afghanistan. These documents may be released to the public in the near future.

It’s an interesting article, read the whole thing.

The Power Line blog is one of my favorites. Today John Hinderaker responds to an editorial in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The editorial recycles the MSM trope about the horrors of the Patriot Act, and John’s rebuttal is wonderful.

Read the whole thing: Power Line: Getting Specific About the Patriot Act