Secret Service agents might get fired over party crashers

…so reports the Washington Post:

Secret Service chief Mark Sullivan told a Congressional committee Thursday morning that the agents who admitted Tareq and Michaele Salahi through a White House checkpoint at last week’s state dinner have been placed on administrative leave and could lose their jobs.

I’m sorry, but, could lose their jobs? Could? Really? Crikey. What does it take to get fired from that gig? Ugh. I don’t want to know. We’re lucky that the Salahis are essentially harmless wannabe fameballs. Shoot. Any club bouncer or Fashion Week list minder would have kept those two clowns out.

Even this guy would do a better job (I know…the bouncer scene out of “Knocked Up” would’ve been better, but NBC won’t share…).

Afghanistan: UK v. US — who is tougher?

Hot on the heals of President Obama announcing his plans for Afghanistan (major troop commitments for at least 18 months, but a stern warning to the Karzai governmnet there there will be no more blank checks, etc.) a couple of headlines in today’s Evening Standard caught my eye.

The first was:

We’ll hit the Taliban until their eyeballs bleed, says UK general

Well, that’s pretty tough talk.

Now compare the language of General Stanley McChrystal (which only ran in the print edition of the paper):

Now we will seriously degrade the enemy, says McChrystal

Don’t get me wrong. Degrading is pretty badass. Hardcore, maybe in some circles. It just lacks the….ooomph eyeballs and bleeding, no?

Brit anti-terror tactics as paranoid as American ones

While Google Earth continues to document everything  — excluding including  Dick Cheney’s home (but only after it became Joe Biden’s crib) — with their creepy Street View vans, British police are hassling people taking pictures of tourist sites.

The Evening Standard reports that police questioned Jeff Overs, BBC photog taking shots of the sunset over St. Paul’s Cathedral last week as part of their anti-terrorism measures. There were tourists all around him, taking pictures of the same thing. The story goes:

The incident took place on Wednesday – a day before police announced a dramatic fall in the use of anti-terror stop and search powers. This followed an outcry over the number of members of ethnic minorities being searched.

American readers may recall the case of Ian Spiers, the photography student who was questioned an intimidated by agents from the Department of Homeland Security for taking pictures of the Ballard Locks in Seattle in 2004. Even as tourists happily snapped pictures all around him, Spiers, who (unlike Overs) has darker skin, was targeted.

My friend and former colleague Robert Jamieson wrote of the incident:

In May he was taking photos for his Shoreline Community College class at the Ballard locks, where waves of tourists flock to take pictures and where no signs prohibit shutterbugging.

Ian says he suddenly found himself surrounded by more than a half-dozen guys wearing black. He says they glowered, brusquely asked what he was doing and demanded his identification.

He tried to explain he was a photo student who had done nothing wrong and shouldn’t have to show his ID. One of the men, Ian says, erupted: “See this badge! This is a federal badge! I’m with homeland security!” (…)

Before leaving, Ian said the agent made a request: “You ought to let me take your picture.”

The photo student felt devastated. “The real threat to America,” he said when we spoke, “is what I’m experiencing now.”

I’m wondering if they’ve ever caught any terrorist on either side of the pond by walking around and hassling people taking pictures of tourist attractions (read: The very things a city often advertises or promotes as the sort of asset that attracts tourists and photographers).

The Swiss aren’t down with the Minarets…and Muslims?

It seems that minarets are such a major menace to the good people of Switzerland that they had to take a vote on whether to ban them. And…they voted to ban them. The Times reports:

Swiss voters defied their Government and churches today and approved a ban on building minarets — reflecting an alarming hostility to a rising Muslim minority.

Fifty-seven per cent of voters in a referendum supported the direct democracy initiative, which ensured international embarrassment for Switzerland and a backlash in the Muslim world, upon which the country depends for exports.

A big majority of the 27 cantons supported the right-wing inspired move, with opposition strongest in the German-speaking part of the country, according to initial results. In Geneva, home to United Nations agencies, the voters rejected the initiative by nearly 60 per cent. Turnout was 53 per cent, a relatively low figure by the standards of Swiss democracy. Opponents of the measure saw this as a reflection of apathy among many voters who would not have approved of the ban.

Whoa…okay, so the, the anti-minaret vote went through. Is that really a big deal? Don’t  the Swiss have a righ to regulate their architecture? Is this really an anti-Muslim move? I mean, can’t they favor steeples over minarets if they want to? Well, you tell me. Here’s a poster promoting the ban:

Hmmm....is this initiative really about minarets?

Don’t get me wrong. Love the look of the poster, that whole Shepard Fairey meets Communist-era aesthetic. But the fact that the minarets look like missiles and the woman illustrated looks like a sinster, evil spy (it’s all in the eyes) kind of says it all. Alan Fisher reports for Al-Jazeera that there are around 160 mosques in Switzerland and that “Very few have applied to have a minaret.” Fisher writes:

“It’s a symbol against integration,” I’m told by Ulrich Schuler, a Swiss MP and one of the leaders of the anti-minaret campaign.
“It starts with minarets, then the power grows and soon they will want the introduction of Sharia law”.

Well, at least Ulrich is honest about his paranoia. Anyway. To lighten the mood (and, actually, to offer some fine commentary of their own), here’s a classic skit from “The Kids in the Hall.” Enjoy.

Another major blunder: We almost had Bin Laden

…as in, our forces knew where he was in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains (or so says a Senate report release today) but then failed to move in on him. Why? Oh, maybe there was a good “Law & Order” rerun on that night. Or maybe we were totally gonna go, but then got sucked into a game of Halo and, well, there went the night.Right? Wrong. The blame for this epic mistake lands squarely on the shoulders of the higher ups.

The report, entitled, “Tora Bora Revisited: How We Failed to Get Bin Laden and Why It Matters Today” (alternate title: “How We Managed to Screw the Pooch Yet Again in the Middle East and Why They Still Might be Kinda Miffed At Us About It.”) lays it out nicely for us. It’s a pretty sweet read (and by sweet, I mean cringe-inducing), and at 49 pages, a quick one too.

If you’re wondering exactly what the hell happened and who was responsible, here’s an abbreviated blow-by-blow (released just as President Obama is to share his plans for troops in Afghanistan):

By early December 2001, Bin Laden’s world had shrunk to a complex of caves and tunnels carved into a mountainous section of eastern Afghanistan known as Tora Bora.

Note: At this point, US troops were bombing the bejeezus out of the region. So Bin Laden was essentially cornered.

Bin Laden expected to die. His last will and testament, written on December 14, reflected his fatalism. ‘‘Allah commended to us that when death approaches any of us that we make a bequest to parents and next of kin and to Muslims as a whole,’’ he wrote, according to a copy of the will that surfaced later and is regarded as authentic. ‘‘Allah bears witness that the love of jihad and death in the cause of Allah has dominated my life and the verses of the sword permeated every cell in my heart, ‘and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together.’How many times did I wake up to find myself reciting this holy verse!’’ He instructed his wives not to remarry and apologized to his children for devoting himself to jihad.

Got it? The guy knows his jig is up.

But the Al Qaeda leader would live to fight another day. Fewer than 100 American commandos were on the scene with their Afghan allies and calls for reinforcements to launch an assault were rejected.(…) Instead, the U.S. command chose to rely on airstrikes and untrained Afghan militias to attack bin Laden and on Pakistan’s loosely organized Frontier Corps to seal his escape routes.

Also ixnayed were requests for troops to block paths running through the mountain to Pakistan. And that worked out really welll for Bin Laden, who retains his top spot on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list:

On or around December 16, two days after writing his will, bin Laden and an entourage of bodyguards walked unmolested out of Tora Bora and disappeared into Pakistan’s unregulated tribal area. Most analysts say he is still there today.

Still in the wind....

What the…?!?! Who would make such a moronic decision?

The decision not to deploy American forces to go after bin Laden or block his escape was made by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his top commander, Gen. Tommy Franks, the architects of the unconventional Afghan battle plan known as Operation Enduring Freedom.

Oh. Right. Those two. But why?

Rumsfeld said at the time that he was concerned that too many U.S. troops in Afghanistan would create an anti-American backlash and fuel a widespread insurgency. Reversing the recent American military orthodoxy known as the Powell doctrine, the Afghan model emphasized minimizing the U.S. presence by relying on small, highly mobile teams of special operations troops and CIA paramilitary operatives working with the Afghan opposition. Even when his own commanders and senior intelligence officials in Afghanistan and Washington argued for dispatching more U.S. troops, Franks refused to deviate from the plan.

Oh, come on. First off, the report tells us that there were already enough troops there to successfully carry out what needed to be done — get Bin Laden. Furthermore, I’m wondering what happened to this fear of an “anti-American backlash” by the time the decision to attack Iraq (for no legitimate reason whatsoever) rolled around? What obscured their clear vision of things?

 

Israel offers to halt settlement contstruction!

But only for 10 months!

And only in the West Bank!

Won’t that be enough to get the peace talks going? Well sure! But…

Wait.

Huh. What about east Jerusalem?

The area in question (from palestinemonitor.org)

Glad you asked…(from The Guardian):

Netanyahu’s offer does not include east Jerusalem, which Israel captured in 1967 and is now home to more than 200,000 Jewish settlers. It also does not include what are thought to be around 3,000 homes where work has already begun or where permits for work have been issued, and nor does it include any public buildings such as schools or synagogues.

And yet, the Palestinians dare dismiss Netanyahu’s grand gesture. The nerve. There’s just no pleasing some people, I guess.

China executes two over tainted milk

And this…it just seems so obviously screwy. The BBC reports:

More than 300,000 other infants were made ill from milk powder contaminated with melamine, an industrial chemical.

Zhang Yujun and Geng Jinping were the only people to have been executed, court officials said.

Nineteen other people were sentenced to prison terms for their roles in the scandal.

Zhang Yujun was convicted of endangering public safety by dangerous means, for selling more than 770 tonnes of the tainted milk powder from July 2007 to August 2008, the official Xinhua news agency said.

Geng Jinping, who managed a milk production centre, was convicted of supplying milk containing melamine to the now-bankrupt Sanlu Group.

Okay… not that anyone should be executed, but doesn’t it seem odd that whatever the hell happens, China seems to just hold one or two people responsible? They always seem to find a fall guy or two — never too many — and then move on, as if justice has been served, as if people way higher up the chain aren’t profiting from things like the tainted/fake drugs they export, for which China executed one guy in 2007.

Problem solved, right? Wrong-o. The Guardian reported at the start of 2009:

Counterfeiting gangs based in China are producing sophisticated copies of the world’s bestselling pharmaceuticals. In 2008 an estimated 8m of these potentially deadly pills found their way to NHS patients. The health of millions of people is at risk (…)

So vast is the scale of the threat from fake medicines that public confidence in the NHS could be “completely undermined”, according to legal experts. Health officials also warn that the health of millions of Britons is potentially at risk.

The toy executive they were going to place all the blame for the tainted toys on took the pre-emptive step of hanging himself last in 2007, and yup, they’re still recalling tainted toys all over the world.

So, what are the chances that the tainted milk issue is over, and that they two guys who were killed were the ones who were really the brains behind the operation?

Lead up to Iraq war: Even more lies (shocking!)

I’m not sure why anyone needed to wait years for some report to come out to realize that the lead up to the Iraq liberation occupation was built on nothing but lies, but, well, here it is (from The Telegraph) — it turns out that like the Bush administration, Tony Blair’s fibbed and fibbed and then fibbed some more:

Tony Blair, the former prime minister, misled MPs and the public throughout 2002 when he claimed that Britain’s objective was “disarmament, not regime change” and that there had been no planning for military action. In fact, British military planning for a full invasion and regime change began in February 2002.

Of course, like Team Bush/Cheney, Blair’s was totally unprepared for the hell that would break loose once Iraq was, in fact, invaded:

Operations were so under-resourced that some troops went into action with only five bullets each. Others had to deploy to war on civilian airlines, taking their equipment as hand luggage. Some troops had weapons confiscated by airport security.

Commanders reported that the Army’s main radio system “tended to drop out at around noon each day because of the heat”. One described the supply chain as “absolutely appalling”, saying: “I know for a fact that there was one container full of skis in the desert.” (…)

The plans “contained no detail once Baghdad had fallen”, causing a “notable loss of momentum” which was exploited by insurgents. Field commanders raged at Whitehall’s “appalling” and “horrifying” lack of support for reconstruction, with one top officer saying that the Government “missed a golden opportunity” to win Iraqi support. Another commander said: “It was not unlike 1750s colonialism where the military had to do everything ourselves.”

How could Iraq ever have truly diplomatic relations with U.K. and the U.S.? How can this ever be forgiven?

Obama right about Americans and guns

Remember when during the election, Senator Obama said that during hard times, Americans get bitter and cling to guns because they start to fear or hate people who are different than them?

Of course, all the gun nuts and Republicans freaked out, and it was even reported that the “bitter flap” might cost him crucial votes.

Fast forward to just over a year after the election and what do you get? Why, the following headline:

The story reads:

All over America demand for firearms and ammunition is rising amid concerns that rising unemployment, which passed 10 per cent this month, will lead inexorably to higher rates of crime. Fears of terrorism have also helped to lift demand, as have concerns among gun owners that the Obama Administration may introduce restrictions on gun ownership and impose additional taxes.

So, broke, bitter, scared Americans are clinging to guns as times get tougher. Of course, gun sales have been spiking since Obama’s election, but it’s nice to see that there’s more driving the fear and paranoia than just his presence in the White House.

And now, Herman Van Rompuy

is EU President. Yeesh.