Archive for the ‘war’ Category

Good news from the war front:

Posted: February 16, 2010 by datechguy in internet/free speech, war
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Looks like a big fish has been landed:

The Taliban’s top military commander was captured several days ago in Karachi, Pakistan, in a secret joint operation by Pakistani and American intelligence forces, according to American government officials.

The administration is allowed to take credit here and we should not hesitate to approve when they either do something right or get out of the way to let our agencies do it. The war is an American problem not a republican or democratic problem.

Then again when the first words out of the mouth of some is this:

Apparently Baradar has been in custody since last week and is being interrogated by both the Paks and us. (This is why the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group exists.) The ultimate point of fighting the Taliban is to compel them to give up fighting and accept some version of a post-Taliban order in Afghanistan. Torturing Baradar — which the Pakistanis have been known to do — is counterproductive to that effort. If we treat the guy respectfully, in a demonstrated way, it might spur a reconsideration of Taliban goals. I am not counting any chickens, but any hope of a game-changing possibility will be foreclosed upon if we or our allies torture Baradar. Let’s be smart — and true to Obama’s stated principles/executive order. If there was any doubt whatsoever, the Abdulmutallab case proved we don’t need to torture to get good intelligence. emphasis mine

What is he a baby seal? Shall we just make up signs that say “Save the Terrorists?” When the very first words out of some people’s mouths are this nonsense you wonder what world they live in.

Some people just shouldn’t be taken seriously.

And the prophesy is fulfilled

Posted: February 12, 2010 by datechguy in opinion/news, war
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January 30 2005 Instapundit:

Reader Peter Ingemi, meanwhile, offers a prediction:

I’m remembering the coy saying about the French resistance. “If everyone who claimed to be in the resistance really had been, there would have been nobody left to collaborate.”

I make the following prediction: In 20 or 25 years (it might not even take that long) all the people who where saying that the war was wrong and Iraq was wrong will talk about how America brought democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan and how they were a part of it due to their protests and desire for democracy and the end of tyranny. (of course they will not mention that the tyranny that they meant was us.) If the same people who write the current history books write them again be sure that this will happen.

Heh. Yeah, just like everybody pulled together during the Cold War.

And the prophesy is fulfilled

Oops Sorry wrong prophesy, lets try again:

Kind of hard to figure out which clip is a better example of Fiction isn’t it?

Meet the Press this week should be interesting.

Is it just me or is the Iranian anouncement an anti-climax?

Posted: February 11, 2010 by datechguy in opinion/news, war
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There are protests in the streets, police are clashing with protesters and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s “Nuclear state” statement is as far as I’m concerned hot air.

The Guardian is liveblogging protest from Iran but nothing that is happening today changes the same equations that were on the table yesterday the day before or last month.

If protest doesn’t stop the government either Israel or ourselves will have to, otherwise the equations of the middle east are changed forever.

And yes this stinks but stinks or no that is where we are.

A hidden truth

Posted: February 8, 2010 by datechguy in internet/free speech, war
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Hidden within the Clark Hoyt’s NYT public editor piece on if there is a conflict of interest in the Time’s middle east reporting since Ethan Bronner, the Jerusalem bureau chief of The Times, has a son in the Israeli military:

I asked David K. Shipler, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, what he would do. Shipler was The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief a generation ago and its chief diplomatic correspondent until he left the paper in 1988. He said foreign correspondents operate in far more nuanced circumstances than readers may realize. They may rely on translators and stringers with political ties or biases that have to be accounted for. They develop their own relationships that enrich their reporting, just as Bronner’s son’s military service could open a conduit for information that other reporters might not have. emphasis mine.

This is something that the MSM has not emphasized in the past, but blogs on the Right have. In the words of Ralph Peters at the time:

The dangerous nature of journalism in Iraq has created a new phenomenon, the all-powerful local stringer. Unwilling to stray too far from secure facilities and their bodyguards, reporters rely heavily on Iraqi assistance in gathering news. And Iraqi stringers, some of whom have their own political agendas, long ago figured out that Americans prefer bad news to good news. The Iraqi leg-men earn blood money for unbalanced, often-hysterical claims, while the Journalism 101 rule of seeking confirmation from a second source has been discarded in the pathetic race for headlines.

To enhance their own indispensability, Iraqi stringers exaggerate the danger to Western journalists (which is real enough, but need not paralyze a determined reporter). Dependence on the unverified reports of local hires has become the dirty secret of semi-celebrity journalism in Iraq as Western journalists succumb to a version of Stockholm Syndrome in which they convince themselves that their Iraqi sources and stringers are exceptions to every failing and foible in the Middle East. The mindset resembles the old colonialist conviction that, while other “boys” might lie and steal, our house-boy’s a faithful servant.

The result is that we’re being told what Iraqi stringers know they can sell and what distant editors crave, not what’s actually happening.

To hear the NYT finally (albeit accidentally) admit that there are biases involved in stringers is long overdue.

Oh and BTW. It is a conflict, but as long as it is disclosed to the reader then I don’t have a huge problem with it. If the reader knows the source for a potential bias they can adjust judge a piece accordingly. NOT disclosing the conflict would be a dishonorable breech of journalistic ethics and we all know how important that is to the NYT. HA!

Before he became Mr. Hyde Charles Johnson used to touch on the use and the biases of these stringers.

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