Great article by Jeff Wilkinson in The State on the impact of Fort Jackson, Shaw and McEntire on our economy. Ike McLeese has done a tremendous job leading the effort locally, as has Comptroller General Richard Eckstrom on the State level. The Rhoads Group has done an outstanding job for us making sure the Pentagon has all the information about the strengths of Fort Jackson. The BRAC decision in 2005 was a big win economically for the Midlands and South Carolina.
The piece does make an important point, and I know Ike McLeese has done yeoman’s work over the past decade keeping the military engaged in the Midlands.
President Obama will deploy an additional 1,200 National Guard troops to the southern border and request $500 million in extra money for border security, according to an administration official. The decision comes as the White House is seeking Republican support for broad immigration reform this year.
The official said the new resources would provide “immediate enhancement” to the border even as the Obama administration continues to “work with Congress to fix our broken immigration system through comprehensive reform, which would provide lasting and dedicated resources by which to secure our borders and make our communities safer.”
The 1,200 troops will join about 340 already working in the border region, the official said. They would provide support to law enforcement efforts against drug trafficking by increasing monitoring of border crossings and performing intelligence analysis.
My dad and I are staying this weekend at the Navy Lodge at Bethesda Naval Hospital. You’re going to say that I have no right to be there, and you’re perfectly right; I’m very sensible of the fact. But my Dad, a retired captain and Vietnam combat veteran (river patrol boats) has every right to be there, and I’m his driver, so I’m staying with him.
Dad and I came up for his sister’s 90th birthday party, which is this afternoon. I mention that just because it really seems to bug bud whenever I, as an unemployed guy, take what he regards as a “vacation.” I’m just along to drive my Dad’s car — and to see relatives I haven’t seen in about 13 years. I’m looking forward to it, but it’s not like I’m being a spendthrift being here. Dad’s paying for the gas. (bud also thought I was engaging in riotous living when I drove my daughter to Pennsylvania and drove back the next day; then repeated the process to bring her back two weeks later. I enjoyed it, but I wasn’t at Club Med; I was more like Dean Moriartydriving, maniacally driving through the ever-loving heart of America, you understand, ahem, yes…)
My Dad had wanted to spend even less and stay at the BOQ, but there was no room. And he fully understood why it can be hard to get a room there, and at the Lodge (where rates are more like a civilian motel) — because military families come here to visit their wounded loved ones back from the war. At least, we assume that’s the reason. Consequently, if one of those families needs the room we’re in, we’ll vacate it in a skinny minute.
The president visited wounded over at Walter Reed yesterday, as we were driving up here. As it happens, a new Walter Reed — or an extension, or something — is being built on the grounds of Bethesda Naval. I think this is because of the terrible conditions we heard so much about a year or two ago over at Reed. Good. There was a time when the main tower of Bethesda Naval was about all there was, and there was a 9-hole golf course on the grounds around it. But that was long, long ago, and a far more important use has been found for the space.
I’m in awe, and deeply grateful, to be so close to men and women who have given so much for their country. I thought the image I shot just after sunset, showing the main tower of the hospital, sort of captured that feeling.
Of course, Bethesda and Reed have long also been used for less awe-inspiring purposes, such as medical care for members of Congress. But that’s not what was on my mind when I took that picture.
Home is the sailor, home from the sea/And the hunter home from the hill. But not in the sense that Stevenson meant, thank God, but home and alive. May God speed them to recovery, and a full life back among their loved ones.
As I mentioned before in one of my last columns for the paper, Rep. Barrett didn’t seem to have a reason for running for governor. He could clearly state what he wanted to do, or anything special that he brought to the job (which is probably why he dodged talking to me for a couple of weeks, until I got really insufferable with one of his staffers — avoiding free media is just bizarre behavior in a gubernatorial candidate, and it really stood out), which was not good.
Now, he’s apparently decided he wants to grab attention and break out of the pack in the worst way — which is exactly what he’s done.
In the playbook of the kind of politician who has a very low opinion of the electorate, he’s doing everything right: He’s appealing to xenophobia, to the Not In My Backyard mentality, to insecurity, and sticking it to the administration that happens to be of the other party. He accomplishes all that by griping loudly and obnoxiously about the idea of the Obama administration bringing “detainees” from Guantanamo to the Navy Brig in Charleston.
Folks, I’d just as soon they stay in Gitmo, because I’ve always thought that was an excellent place to keep them, practically speaking. First, it’s off our soil, which keeps them in limbo as far as our legal system is concerned. You’ll say, “But that’s just what’s WRONG with Gitmo,” but the fact is that prisoners who are taken in such unconventional warfare, many of whom are sworn to do anything to harm Americans if given the chance, are different either from people arrested in this country under civil laws or captured in a conventional conflict.
And it’s secure as all get-out.
But… and this is a big “but”… as convenient as it might be for us to keep people whom we believe to be terrorists on a sort of Devil’s Island, as practical as it might be — it hasn’t been good for our country. Why? Because we’re not the 19th century French. We aren’t governed by a Napoleonic Code. We’re all about innocence until proven guilty. And while we may sound like damnable fools for extending such niceties to people who thought 9/11 was really cool and would like to see another, we do stand for certain things, and Gitmo has given this country a huge black eye that it can’t afford. We have to be better than that.
For that reason, even if John McCain had been elected instead of Obama, we’d be closing Guantanamo. (As Lindsey Graham says, we might have done it in a more organized manner, but we’d still be doing it.) And finding a secure place to put those people is part of that process. Guess what? Our allies don’t want them. So we’re stuck with them.
And that makes the brig down in Charleston as good a place as any. Hey, I don’t want them there, but sometimes, somebody besides our men and women in uniform has to put up with something they don’t like in our nation’s greater interest in this War on Terror.
And does anyone truly doubt the ability of the United States Navy to keep those people secure there? I don’t. I suspect we could always transfer up a few more Marines from Guantanamo if we think we don’t have enough security there. It certainly fits the brig’s mission, which is officially stated as follows:
The mission of the Naval Consolidated Brig Charleston is to ensure the security, good order, discipline, and safety of prisoners and detained personnel; to retrain and restore the maximum number of personnel to honorable service; to prepare prisoners for return to civilian life as productive citizens; to prepare long term prisoners for transfer to the Federal Bureau of Prisons or the United States Army Disciplinary Barracks; and when directed by superior authority, detain enemy combatants under laws of war.
So basically, Rep. Barrett’s attempt to score points on this issue is ugly, petty, and insulting.
Just for the sake of argument, does anyone agree with him?
At Rotary yesterday, at the beginning of the Q-and-A session with our speaker, I got a look from blog regular KBFenner (on this blog, we’ve definitely got anything that happens at the Columbia Rotary covered) that seemed to say “Are you going to ask a question, or what?”
But I don’t ask questions in those settings. One reason is habit. As a longtime newspaperman, I always felt like I could ask this or any other source any question I might have at some other time. I felt like Q-and-A periods should be left to the laypeople who didn’t have such opportunities.
Maybe I should change that habit now that I no longer have such opportunities — or no longer have them without trying, anyway. But I still feel like if I really WANT to ask a newsmaker a question, I can get it answered without taking up precious Rotary time.
There’s another reason I don’t ask questions: I tend to ask quirky questions that in such a setting might not be taken the right way. In an hour-long conversation, you can give a quirky question context (although I certainly embarrassed Cindi a few times, I’m sure), but when you raise your hand in a big group and stand to ask it, there’s no way to make it come out right.
For instance… Monday, our speaker was Brig. Gen. Bradley W. May, commanding officer of Fort Jackson. He was, as all such officers have been in my experience, a really impressive guy. Good command presence, cool, calm and collected even in the adverse circumstances of being subjected to civilians’ questions. The kind of guy whom you meet and think, “Why can’t this guy be our congressman?” Or something like that. (And the answer is, because guys like this don’t run.) Not everyone who is or has been an officer in the U.S. military is like this (ex-Marine Rob Miller, for instance, lacks that presence, as does reservist Joe Wilson), but people who rise to this level generally (no pun intended) are.
Anyway, people were asking all sorts of questions, none of which was anything I would have asked. They were either things I felt I already knew the answer to, or things that I wasn’t wondering about. What I WAS wondering about was this: How come soldiers come to Rotary in their BDUs?
Now you see, there’s no way that would have been taken right. It would have been seen as disrespectful. And I would never want to communicate disrespect, because I deeply respect and admire Gen. May and the soldiers who accompanied him, and am as grateful as all get-out for their service.
But I DO wonder about the fatigues. I mean, fewer and fewer Rotarians are wearing suits, but for the most part, it’s a business dress kind of thing. Now I know Gen. May meant no disrespect to us whatsoever; I’ve grown accustomed to soldiers dressing this way — as though they’re going into combat, or about to police the area for cigarette butts, rather than sitting behind a desk all day or going to business meetings. It’s official; it’s accepted. This is the way they dress.
What I wonder about is WHY they dress that way when they’re not in the field. They didn’t used to. I grew up in the military, so I grew up with dress codes. I know that within my lifetime, a soldier couldn’t leave the post without being in his Class As. It was all about spit and polish. Can’t let those civilian pukes see you looking sloppy, and so forth.
And while I was never in the military myself (the general on Monday referred to the fact that only 3 out of 10 Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 are qualified to serve in the military; I was one of the 7), it touched me. Here’s an anecdote from my youth that I related in a column back in 2001:
One balmy night in Hawaii 30 years ago, I drove up to the sub base gate of Pearl Harbor Navy base.
I was in high school and still an inexperienced driver, and I forgot something: I didn’t click off my headlights so the guard could see the sticker that would assure him this ’58 Oldsmobile was cleared to enter. Not realizing this, I failed to understand the guard’s gesture that I douse the lights, at which point he proceeded to get my attention as only a Marine sergeant could do.
Fully understanding his command to halt, I did so and started rolling down the window. He leaned in to demand some ID, but then stopped, and gave me a stare that made me feel like a boot who had called his rifle a “gun.” In a voice like Doomsday, he demanded to know, “Are you out of uniform, sailor?”
In an instant, all of the following ran through my mind:
I was wearing a Navy-issue denim work shirt, the kind sailors wore to swab decks (not what they wore on liberty). It was in my closet, and I had put it on without thinking.
I had recently gotten my hair cut — not to Marine standards, but short enough to look to Marine eyes like a particularly sloppy sailor.
Over the shirt, I was wearing a maroon jacket that was, to say the least, decidedly non-regulation.
I had no right to wear that shirt. The sergeant had instantaneously enlightened me on this point. Though I had grown up in the Navy, I was still a member of that lowest of all categories of humanity — a civilian.
Could they throw you in the brig for just looking like a sailor out of uniform? The sergeant sure looked like he had that authority — and the inclination.
Despite appearances, there was nothing routine about entering a U.S. Navy installation. This facility was guarded by the U.S. Marine Corps, and I had to be prepared at all times to give an account of myself.
“But … but … I’m a dependent, Sarge,” I finally managed to explain as I dug my ID out of my wallet. After examining the card carefully, the gyrene waved me in, still eyeing me like the worm that I was.
A dependent. Some excuse. I drove away wishing I had been a sailor out of uniform. He would have put me on report, but I would have been less embarrassed…
Sometime between 1971 and the present — maybe about the same time that Army officers started addressing sergeants as “sar’unt” (which, as near as I can tell, they picked up from Dale Dye), all that went away. You could still see Marines dressed like that sentry — impossibly crisp shortsleeved khaki shirt with the collar open to reveal a T-shirt, dress blues pants, etc. — on recruiting duty. But soldiers, right up to commanding generals, dressed like they were on the front.
I’m not sure when it changed. The 80s, or earlier.
The funny thing is, they still HAVE the Class As. In fact, a soldier who spoke to Rotary two years ago wore his. I don’t know why the regulations would require him to wear his while speaking to Rotary, but not other soldiers under similar circumstances (I’m assuming there’s a regulation involved, of course). Not only that, but they have those blue dress uniforms that look like they’re in the Union Army circa 1863, which are pretty sharp.
But enough about the Army. Let’s talk about something I theoretically understand — appropriate civilian attire. Recently, I’ve had it impressed upon me that I am among the few, the proud, who still wear a coat and tie every day. I do this even though I’m unemployed. In fact, I do it particularly because I’m unemployed. People with secure (they think) jobs can afford to look like slobs; I have to look like I’m constantly being interviewed. That’s the way I think of it, anyway.
Friday, I had lunch with Jim Foster (of the state Department of Ed, formerly of The State) at Longhorn Steakhouse (that’s what I was doing while some of y’all were freaking out over the multiple e-mails). As we sat down, he said, “Why are you dressed like that?” I brushed off the question, because there was nothing remarkable about the way I was dressed: starched shirt, bow tie, jacket. But he persisted: No really, why are you dressed like that?
Well, I said… I always dress like this. Doesn’t everybody? Well, obviously HE didn’t. Neither did anyone at the surrounding tables. Finally, when someone walked in wearing a suit, I almost pointed him out.
Then yesterday, I dropped in on Bob McAlister over at the offices of his consulting business. You know, the former chief of staff to the late Gov. Carroll Campbell. A guy with pictures of himself with George W. Bush, Lindsey Graham, John McCain, Jack Kemp and other GOP luminaries all over the office. He was wearing a rumpled blue sport shirt (untucked, I believe) that looked like he’d gotten if from L.L. Bean about 15 years ago. He had taken off his shoes — no, excuse me, his bedroom slippers, which had also seen better days.
He said he didn’t wear a tie except under the most exceptional circumstances. It was easier, and he saved a lot on dry cleaning. He said when he was about to go to a business meeting in D.C. recently, he was told to ditch the coat and tie so he wouldn’t stand out. With some trepidation he did, only to be relieved that he had. We discussed it for awhile, and agreed that in other parts of the country, the phenomenon is more advanced than here. We’re slower to change. I mentioned to him how offended I’d get when Knight Ridder executives would come visit the paper in the years after the corporate move to California — here would be these guys who make a million dollars a year meeting with us, and we’d all be in coats and ties (the men, anyway; the women wearing some distaff equivalent), and they’d be wearing unbuttoned shirts with no ties. Yeah, right, like you guys are all Bill Gates or something just because your office is close to Silicon Valley. I hated it.
At the advertising agency where I’m hanging out (and where I’m typing this), no one but me wears a tie most days. Not exactly Mad Men.
At the Capital City Club, the rules were relaxed over the summer to allow gentlemen to have lunch in the main dining room without jackets. Ties haven’t been required for some time. These must be the end days. Next thing you know, we’ll have dogs and cats living together…
So today, I succumbed to the pressure. For the first time this season I donned my black camel-hair jacket, with white dress shirt and hounds-tooth slacks — but didn’t put on a tie. I felt like I was going skinny-dipping in public or something, but hey, if this is the style.
Then, as soon as I got downtown, I stepped onto an elevator, three other guys got on with me — and they were all dressed in suits and ties. They would have put Don Draper to shame. And I looked at my reflection in the mirrored door, and I looked like I’d just gotten out of bed or something. I wanted to ask myself, “Mister, are you out of uniform?…”
That’s it. Soon as I get home, I’m putting on a tie. I might sleep in it.
Something Burl wrote in a comment reminded me of this story the other day:
WASHINGTON — In the chaos of an early morning assault on a remote U.S. outpost in eastern Afghanistan, Staff Sgt. Erich Phillips’ M4 carbine quit firing as militant forces surrounded the base. The machine gun he grabbed after tossing the rifle aside didn’t work either.
When the battle in the small village of Wanat ended, nine U.S. soldiers lay dead and 27 more were wounded. A detailed study of the attack by a military historian found that weapons failed repeatedly at a “critical moment” during the firefight on July 13, 2008, putting the outnumbered American troops at risk of being overrun by nearly 200 insurgents.
Which raises the question: Eight years into the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, do U.S. armed forces have the best guns money can buy?…
I’ve sort of wondered for years why this country couldn’t simply produce a weapon as simple, as effective, as cheap, and most of all as RELIABLE as the AK-47.
I read part of the recent book by Larry Kahaner about that remarkable weapon (one of the many books I’ve read “part of” while drinking coffee but not buying anything at Barnes & Noble, my favorite leisuretime activity), and it reads like pretty much an indictment of the free enterprise system. The way it developed was this: A soldier in the Red Army, dissatisfied with what guys like him had to rely on in battle, decided to design a multi-purpose infantry weapon that would get the job done, and always work. So he did, the Soviets mass-produced it, and it became the number-one weapon in the world, the favorite of rebels, terrorists, thugs, and child soldiers everywhere.
It’s cheap; it’s ubiquitous. It puts a LOT of high-impact bullets on a target in a big hurry, so you definitely don’t want to go up against one if you can help it. It’s simple, and easy to maintain. It requires so little skill — and upper-body strength — to operate that it makes a child soldier into a particularly dangerous person.
In other words, it’s pretty horrible. But it’s a way better weapon, in lots of ways, than anything we’ve mass-produced.
We’ve heard about the troubles with the M16 since Vietnam, and the M4 is its descendant. The M16 fires a lower-weight slug at a high velocity, so it rips up whatever it enters — although it doesn’t have much knockdown power. (In Black Hawk Down — the book, not the film — a Delta team member gripes about the M16 because when he shoots somebody who’s shooting at him, he wants to see the guy go down.)
Meanwhile, nothing ever seems to go wrong with Kalashnikovs, no matter what you do to them. The story Burl told matches one I’ve heard before:
A friend (now deceased) who was part of the Army test team for the M-16 told me this anecdote.
He thought the M-16 was delicate and undependable, told the Army so, he was told to shut up and buy stock in Colt.
A few years later, he’s in command of a firebase in Vietnam, and they’re clearing a kill zone. The bulldozer uncovers a dead Viet cong who has buried for a year or so, along with his AK-47. Dave jumped down in the hole, said “now here’s a REAL weapon,” and cocked the muddy, rusty AK, pointed it at the sky and pulled the trigger.
It fired.
So — are our soldiers taking unnecessary risks because of inadequate weapons? I’d be interested in particular to hear from Capt. James Smith and others who have actually taken the M4 into battle (that’s him below getting his ACOG zeroed in on arriving in Afghanistan — at least, I think that’s an M4).
Looks like we’ve found an old favorite bad guy upon whom to blame the recent incident that led to a large number of civilian deaths in Afghanistan:
BERLIN — A U.S.-German rift over a deadly airstrike in Afghanistan on Friday escalated, as U.S. commanders accused the German military of undermining guidelines that seek to avoid civilian casualties.
U.S. military officials questioned why the German army had called in an airstrike when German troops weren’t under fire from insurgents, as well as German forces’ intelligence that led them to think civilians wouldn’t be hurt.
German defense officials said Monday that the airstrike on two hijacked fuel trucks in Kunduz Province was necessary to avert a threat to a German army base, and stood by their assessment that the strike killed 56 Taliban insurgents. Afghan and Western officials have said between 70 and 130 people died, including many civilians….
An investigation needs to go where it goes, and place the blame accurately. But it occurs to me that it’s hard enough to get the Germans to come out an fight at all these days, so the more heat we put on them, the more likely the Germans are to just go home — particularly with the trouble Chancellor Merkel is having these days…
And when he came into office, it looked like he was going to follow through. Not only that, it appeared that he was going to be sensible about our Iraq commitments, which was very reassuring.
On Monday, McChrystal sent his assessment of the situation in Afghanistan to the Pentagon, the U.S. Central Command, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and NATO. Although the assessment didn’t include any request for more troops, senior military officials said they expect McChrystal later in September to seek between 21,000 and 45,000 more troops. There currently are 62,000 American troops in Afghanistan.
However, administration officials said that amid rising violence and casualties, polls that show a majority of Americans now think the war in Afghanistan isn’t worth fighting. With tough battles ahead on health care, the budget and other issues, Vice President Joe Biden and other officials are increasingly anxious about how the American public would respond to sending additional troops…
Say what? We’ve got our finger in the wind on Afghanistan now? We’re checking the polls to see if we’re going to fight the freaking Taliban, the guys who coddled Osama while he was dreaming up the Big One?
What is wrong with this country? And does a country that would let things come to this pass deserve to survive, in evolutionary terms? Apart from standing up and fighting for what is right and against what is demonstrably not only wrong but horrifically so, are we truly not willing to fight against those who would like to see us dead? What sort of organism, or social structure, gives up to that extent?
Someone mentioned recently all the personal heroes he’d had the chance to interview in his career in journalism. I’ve had some of those — such as my friend Jack Van Loan. But on this day I think of one I DIDN’T interview, because I wouldn’t let myself bother him. I didn’t feel I had the right to.
Over the last few years I had occasion to visit central Pennsylvania multiple times, while my daughter was attending a ballet school up there. Almost every time I went there, I thought about going over to Hershey to try to talk to Dick Winters, the legendary commander of Easy Company of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment in the 101st Airborne Division during World War II. He was the leader — one of several leaders, but the one everyone remembers as the best — of the company immortalized in Stephen Ambrose’s book Band of Brothers, and the HBO series of the same name (the best series ever made for television).
But I never did. As much as I wanted just to meet him, to shake his hand once, I never did. And there’s a reason for that. A little while ago, I was reminded of that reason. The History Channel showed a special about D-Day, and one of the narrators was Winters, speaking on camera about 60 years after the events. He spoke in that calm, understated way he’s always had about his heroics that day — he should have received the Medal of Honor for taking out those 105mm pieces aimed at Utah Beach, but an arbitrary cap of one per division had been place on them, so he “only” received the Distinguished Service Cross.
Then, he got a little choked up about what he did that night, having been up for two days, and fighting since midnight. He got down on his knees and thanked God for getting him through that day. Then he promised that, if only he could get home again, he would find a quiet place to live, and live out the rest of his life in peace.
I figure a guy who’s done what he did — that day and during the months after, through the fighting around Bastogne and beyond into Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest itself — deserved to get his wish. He should be left in peace, and not bothered by me or anyone else.
So I’ve never tried to interview him.
(The video above and below is the televised dramatization of the action at Brecourt Manor for which Winters received the DSC. I was struck by how well the actor Damien Lewis captured a quality that Ambrose had described in his book. Winters had the rare ability to stay cool under fire, and more importantly to analyze the situation instantaneously and know exactly what to do in the given situation, and convey it to his men. Nobody who hasn’t been in those circumstances knows how he would react — neither did Winters, before this day — but everyone hopes he would perform exactly the way then-Lt. Winters did.)
Just now, having recently stumbled across Burl Burlingame from my high school class, I wondered to him what happened to the rest of us. There were 600 of us, after all — a whole battalion (being military brats, many of us, we think in those terms). A whole battalion doesn’t just disappear like that. Not normally.
Burl stoically, philosophically, just said, “Military kids — they scatter to the winds.”
But I wasn’t satisfied, so I said:
It’s like we all went through some sort of Special Forces training so we know how to go to ground, blend, and disappear.
We could make a fortune marketing this skill to terrorists. Not that we would, of course. That would be wrong. I’m almost certain of that. Of course, if you got laid off a couple of months back, could people really blame you if… No, it would be wrong.
Anyway, it’s a rare skill, and one that Napoleon Dynamite would probably envy.
I’ve often wondered at this. Once or twice, I’ve run across people. Back in the mid-70s, Jeff Boyle popped up in Middle Tennessee, and we saw each other a few times. Then Steve Clark emerged running for one of those new gerrymandered GOP congressional seats in Texas that caused such a stir awhile back — then, after dropping out, disappeared like magic.
The thing is, if I found these people, we wouldn’t have much to talk about. Our lives have taken very different paths (Burl’s comes closer than most, his being a newspaperman). And we didn’t know each other that long. If we were suddenly brought face-to-face, the conversation would probably get pretty awkward after about five minutes, and we’d be looking for excuses to get away — and fade into the landscape again. I’m sure I would; I’m not the most sociable creature anyway.
But I do wonder about it sometimes. Although it’s been this way my whole life, I recognize that, compared to most people, it’s weird.
For some time, I’ve had a sort of axiom I’ve more or less lived by: If John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman are for it, I probably am, too. If I find myself disagreeing with those three guys (not that I ever do, but theoretically), I need to look at the issue a little harder.
Admittedly, getting McCain and Graham to agree is not much of a standard to meet. They’re sort of joined at the hip, policywise. But if Lieberman is on board, you’ve met a higher test. Mind you, if it’s just one or the other, I might not be on board. For instance, I don’t think Joe agreed with McCain about picking Sarah Palin, so bad call there. And I don’t agree with Lieberman on abortion. But if they agree, it’s probably a good call.
And now I’ve got a corollary to that: If Graham and Obama agree, so do I. I sort of indicated that in a column back just after the election (and went into more detail about it on my old blog). And here’s a fresh instance of the phenomenon:
Graham Applauds President Obama’s Decision to Use Military Commissions to Try Terror Suspects
WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) today made this statement on the decision by President Obama to use military commissions to try terror suspects.
“I support President Obama’s decision to seek a further stay of military commission trials. Today’s action will afford us the opportunity to reform the military commission system and produce a comprehensive policy regarding present and future detainees.
“In my first meeting with then President-elect Obama in Chicago in December 2008, we discussed a path forward for Guantanamo detainees. I appreciated the opportunity to meet with him and focus on the types of reforms that would protect our national security interests and help repair the damage done to our nation’s image. I continue to believe it is in our own national security interests to separate ourselves from the past problems of Guantanamo.
“Since that initial meeting I have personally met with the President on two occasions and with his staff numerous times to discuss detention policy. Our meetings have covered a wide range of topics including the various ways we could improve the military commission system to ideas on establishing a proper and appropriate oversight role for the federal courts.
“I have had extensive discussions with military commanders and other Department of Defense officials about the overall benefit to the war effort of reforming our nation’s detainee policies. The commanders believe a reformed system would be beneficial to the war effort as long as such a system is national security-centric.
“Detainee policy is very complex. The President wants to collaborate with Congress to reform detainee policy and we should use this additional time to come up with a sensible national security policy regarding terror suspects.
“I believe a comprehensive plan should be in place before Guantanamo is closed.
“I also believe that no detainees should be released into the United States. Detainees determined by the military or a federal judge to no longer be held as enemy combatants should be transferred to the custody of the Department of Homeland Security pending their transfer to another country.
“I agree with the President and our military commanders that now is the time to start over and strengthen our detention policies. I applaud the President’s actions.”
Good for him. No useful purpose would be served by the propagation of new images of a terrible problem that has been fully explored and addressed and is a problem no longer. But such images, which would add nothing to our useful knowledge, could easily lead to more American deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. We know how inflammatory images, from cartoons to such photos as these, can be in those parts of the world where our country is trying so hard to foster peace and stability, with American lives on the line.
Abu Ghraib was awful, and a tremendous setback to U.S. interests. We know that; and we’ve addressed it. No one in this country could possibly doubt that such treatment of prisoners is inconsistent with our values. Why do the whole thing over again, with the fresh repercussions that would invevitably engender?
This is one of those cases where the public’s “right to know” — which folks in my longtime profession can get really, really self-righteous about (usually, but not always, justifiably) — ring awful hollow against the near-certainty that it would lead to more bloodshed.
It’s things like this that tend to lower my opinion of the ACLU (even as my respect for the president grows). I know they can do some good — and I was really pleased by the very smart, sensible op-ed piece we had from the ACLU’s local honcho Victoria Middleton several months ago; she nailed it on our pound-foolish approach to crime in South Carolina.
But the kind of legalistic pedantry-over-real-life (and death) that I see in this matter of the prisoner photos is really disturbing.
I don’t like ever to speak against openness and disclosure — I prefer to PUSH for those values, and almost always do so. But asserting those laudable values over American lives, in a case where nothing new would be gained, is one of those cases that illustrate the fact that extremism even in the service of a virtue CAN be a vice.
Speaking to the 18 students in Adriana Ahner’s Web page construction class — appropriately, via a 90-minute Webcast from his home in southern California, UCLA computer science professor Leonard Kleinrock spoke of how he overcame humble beginnings to eventually develop the mathematical theory of packet networks that became the foundation of Internet technology.
“I had a background of curiosity, independence and trying to make new things happen,” said Kleinrock, the son of Polish immigrants who was born and raised in New York City. “When I got to (Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a graduate student in the early 1960s), I decided not to follow the pack. I noticed that we were surrounded by computers that were full of information and interesting applications and capabilities and services, but they couldn’t talk to each other, and I figured that sooner or later that’s going to happen.”
Which makes me wonder — if this Kleinrock guy is the father of the Internet, then the Mother of the Internet needs to have a long talk with Al Gore.
Seriously, though, apparently the headline meant A father rather than THE father, because there were a number of guys involved in siring the ARPANet. Apparently, Mr. Kleinrock is actually the father (or a father) of packet switching, which I don’t really understand any more than I do the rest of how the Internet works; I just know it does.
But all this reminds me of the irony of the Internet — the most open, vulnerable (in a security sense) invention in the history of the world — starting as a defense thing. As we learned from the recent intel breach story regarding the Joint Strike Fighter, the LAST thing you want to put on the Internet is defense secrets. And yet, that’s now the whole thing started.
Just now got to looking at this morning’s Wall Street Journal, and I see they have another disturbing report about U.S. counterintelligence fecklessness.
WASHINGTON — Computer spies have broken into the Pentagon’s $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter project — the Defense Department’s costliest weapons program ever — according to current and former government officials familiar with the attacks.
Similar incidents have also breached the Air Force’s air-traffic-control system in recent months, these people say. In the case of the fighter-jet program, the intruders were able to copy and siphon off several terabytes of data related to design and electronics systems, officials say, potentially making it easier to defend against the craft.
The latest intrusions provide new evidence that a battle is heating up between the U.S. and potential adversaries over the data networks that tie the world together. The revelations follow a recent Wall Street Journal report that computers used to control the U.S. electrical-distribution system, as well as other infrastructure, have also been infiltrated by spies abroad…
The good news, to the extent that there was any, was that “while the spies were able to download sizable amounts of data related to the jet-fighter, they weren’t able to access the most sensitive material, which is stored on computers not connected to the Internet.”
Well, duh. So we actually took steps to defend SOME of our most sensitive national security data. Yay for our side.
It's about how the U.S. Marine Corps dealt with its own culpability in a tragic plane crash that killed civilians on the ground back in December.
Ms. Noonan's point was to contrast the way the Corps owned up and held its own folks accountable, contrasted to the finger-pointing and blame-shifting that we are used to seeing inside the Beltway, and in the corporate world.
I read it shortly after finishing my Sunday column, in which I decried the tawdry Beltway obsession with the partisan spin-cycle topic of the day, so the contrast was particularly marked in my mind.
Hope you can read the whole thing. At the very least, though, here's an excerpt:
This wasn't damage control, it was taking honest responsibility. And as such, in any modern American institution, it was stunning. The day after the report I heard from a young Naval aviator in predeployment training north of San Diego. He flies a Super Hornet, sister ship to the plane that went down. He said the Marine investigation "kept me up last night" because of how it contrasted with "the buck-passing we see" in the government and on Wall Street. He and his squadron were in range of San Diego television stations when they carried the report's conclusions live. He'd never seen "our entire wardroom crowded around a television" before. They watched "with bated breath." At the end they were impressed with the public nature of the criticism, and its candor: "There are still elements within the government that take personal responsibility seriously." He found himself wondering if the Marines had been "too hard on themselves." "But they are, after all, Marines."
Ran into James Smith this morning at breakfast, and expressed my surprise that Vincent Sheheen was running for governor and he was not.
He said he just couldn't afford the time away from his family. As you'll recall, he was separated from the wife and four kids for about a year and a half, most of it fighting those folks President Obama calls the Tolly-bon. He said his wife was supportive, but he couldn't stand to miss the time with his kids. He said a Soapbox Derby event over the weekend (or was in Pinewood Derby? I get those mixed up) underlined that for him; if he were to run for gov, he'd miss such events.
On other matters, I mentioned I had thought of him and the other guys of Team Swamp Fox last night, because I've been watching (via Netflix) the HBO series "Generation Kill," based on the book by the same name by a Rolling Stone correspondent embedded with Force Recon Marines on the tip of the spear in the Iraq invasion in '03. The Marines, who were veterans of Afghanistan, talk about that experience a lot, and are sometimes nostalgic because the way they had fought on that front made more sense to them.
Anyway, I need to get together with Rep. Smith sometime and talk at greater length; I haven't had a chance to do that since he got back.
Sorry I haven’t posted today — actually, I DID post something, but it blew up when I hit SAVE, and I’m not about to type it again, so there.
Anyway, I thought I’d put up something that would provide a chance for y’all to discuss Obama’s National Security team. I’ve already expressed my concern about Hillary Clinton, and I don’t have a lot to say about the rest. I like that Robert Gates is staying. I’ve always liked Gates. (See my Nov. 10, 2006, column, "The return of the professional")I thought he was a great pick to rescue our military from the screw-ups of Rumsfeld, and he’s generally lived up to that.
But the Gates choice speaks to a larger issue, which is continuity of policy. Obama spoke of his "pragmatism about the use of power and my sense of purpose about America’s role as a leader in the world." Which speaks to something I like about him, and appreciate. I hoped it would have been like this, and he’s not disappointing me.
Some of y’all who know about my support for our national endeavor in Iraq may have wondered how I could have been so wholehearted about endorsing Obama in the primary last year, given that he stressed so much how he was the one guy who would NOT have gone in there. Well, there’s the issue of whether we should have gone in, and the issue of what to do next. And the next president is about what to do next. And I believe Obama will be sensible and pragmatic about what to do next.
Some of his most ardent supporters are likely to be disappointed by the very things that reassure me about Obama and foreign policy. But personally, I don’t think Obama’s going to blow Iraq just to please them. He’s fortunate that the Surge (which he was wrong to oppose) has produced a situation in which an ordered withdrawal of American troops is actually advisable, and no longer reckless. I think he’ll be careful to do it in a rational manner, according to conditions on the ground. I think he’ll see the things that Tom Friedman sees, and wrote about in his Sunday column:
In the last year, though, the U.S. troop surge and the backlash from
moderate Iraqi Sunnis against al-Qaida and Iraqi Shiites against
pro-Iranian extremists have brought a new measure of stability to Iraq.
There is now, for the first time, a chance — still only a chance — that
a reasonably stable democratizing government, though no doubt corrupt
in places, can take root in the Iraqi political space.
That is
the Iraq that Obama is inheriting. It is an Iraq where we have to begin
drawing down our troops — because the occupation has gone on too long
and because we have now committed to do so by treaty — but it is also
an Iraq that has the potential to eventually tilt the Arab-Muslim world
in a different direction.
I’m sure that Obama, whatever he said
during the campaign, will play this smart. He has to avoid giving Iraqi
leaders the feeling that Bush did — that he’ll wait forever for them to
sort out their politics — while also not suggesting that he is leaving
tomorrow, so they all start stockpiling weapons.
If he can pull
this off, and help that decent Iraq take root, Obama and the Democrats
could not only end the Iraq war but salvage something positive from it.
Nothing would do more to enhance the Democratic Party’s national
security credentials than that.
The really miraculous thing that Friedman notes is a sign that an independent judiciary is emerging in Iraq: The high court came down on a member of parliament for trying to persecute a government official for visiting Israel. This is a startling development, almost miraculous, really. I remember several years back listening to Lindsey Graham talk about how very far Iraq was from developing the institutions that support the rule of law. Graham believed we needed to stay there; I believed we needed to stay there, but contemplating how long it would take for such institutional changes to take hold was extremely discouraging.
Now we’re seeing such encouraging signs as this, which is actually as important as the reduction of violence. As Friedman says, "It’s a reminder of the most important reason for the Iraq war: to try
to collaborate with Iraqis to build progressive politics and rule of
law in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, a region that stands out for
its lack of consensual politics and independent judiciaries." That’s why Friedman was for the Iraq War, and it’s why I was, too. But I didn’t think something like this would happen so fast. As you’ll recall from what I wrote the week we invaded, I really didn’t expect us to be talking realistically about withdrawal this early in the process. But now we can — as long as we don’t screw it up. And keeping Gates at Defense is an important way of maintaining the continuity needed to avoid screwing it up.
I realize that doesn’t fit the hopes of those who thought an Obama administration’s policies would be as different from the Bush administration’s as night and day, and Obama’s going to have to do and say some things to keep those people happy, but I suspect he can do that and still chart a wise course. To them, "continuity" is probably a cuss word. But it’s the wise course, and it will be respected abroad. More than that, it’s what will work.
Over the past year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has delivered a
series of remarkable speeches echoing and advancing Rice’s themes. “In
recent years, the lines separating war, peace, diplomacy and
development have become more blurred and no longer fit the neat
organizational charts of the 20th century,” he said in Washington in July.
Gates does not talk about spreading democracy, at least in the short
run. He talks about using integrated federal agencies to help locals
improve the quality and responsiveness of governments in trouble spots
around the world.
He has developed a way of talking about
security and foreign policy that is now the lingua franca in government
and think-tank circles. It owes a lot to the lessons of
counterinsurgency and uses phrases like “full spectrum operations” to
describe multidisciplinary security and development campaigns….
During the campaign, Barack Obama embraced Gates’s language. During his press conference on Monday, he used all the right code words, speaking of integrating and rebalancing the nation’s foreign policy capacities. He nominated Hillary Clinton and James Jones, who have been champions of this approach, and retained Gates. Their cooperation on an integrated strategy might prevent some of the perennial feuding between the Pentagon, Foggy Bottom and the National Security Council.
Some of you might not be seeing the change you believe in. But I’m already seeing continuity I can believe in.
And here’s the change that we WILL see, and that will matter: I think Obama can sell this policies, and make them work, better than Bush did. He was a lousy salesman. As I wrote about the Surge when I first heard about it, it was the right strategy, but Bush was the wrong guy to have selling it.
Obama’s the right guy. This is going to be interesting, and I hope gratifying, to watch.
Among my e-mails today was one calling my attention to an interview (by someone I’m not familiar with, if you’ll forgive the dangling preposition) with Columbia’s Thomas Smith about the pirates. A sample:
TUSR: Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he was stunned
by the pirates’ reach. I was taken aback by Mullen’s surprise—the reach
has been well-documented in all manner of media, even a lengthy feature
in National Geographic this year that somewhat romanticized the
pirates. So why is an admiral stunned? SMITH: Admiral
Mullen was ‘stunned’ by the pirate attack taking place so far from the
coast, about 450 miles offshore. The attack in fact was a bit
surprising. It was bold, very risky for the attackers, and much farther
out into the so-called ‘blue water’ than previous attacks we’ve seen by
similar bands in recent history.
Now, I’ve since seen a few
bloggers and others criticizing the admiral for his remarks –
suggesting that no true fighting admiral would say such – and perhaps
‘stunned’ was a less-than-stellar word choice. But the admiral is a
professional Naval officer, not a politician. And so I say, it’s easy
for those who have never been to war or to sea—and have no frame of
reference for an appreciation of just how vast and unforgiving the sea
can be—to criticize.
And as long as I’m on the subject, there was a nice piece in the WSJ Saturday drawing some parallels to the Barbary Pirates. I sort of knew the outline of all of that, being a history major who sorta kinda concentrated on that period, but I learned at least one interesting fact from the piece I don’t remember having known before:
By the 1790s, the U.S. was depositing an astonishing 20% of its federal income into North African coffers…
We finally decided maybe it would be better to build a Navy, and deal with the problem. Trying to buy off the pirates just encouraged piracy — which sort of stands to reason, if you think about it.
Anyway, the piece further encouraged a notion I’ve been kicking around, which might turn into a column: The idea that the Somali pirates actually pose an opportunity to President Obama once he’s in office. It’s a chance to show the willingness to use force in the defense of international peace and security, with a ready-made multinational coalition to dramatically demonstrate his unBushness:
Of course, the world is a vastly more complicated place than it was two
centuries ago and America’s role in it, once peripheral, is now
preeminent. Still, in the post-9/11 period, America would be
ill-advised to act unilaterally against the pirates. The good news is:
It does not have to. In contrast to the refusal to unite with America
during the Barbary Wars, or more recently the Iraq War, the European
states today share America’s interest in restoring peace to the seas.
Moreover, they have expressed a willingness to cooperate with American
military measures against the Somali bandits. Unlike Washington and
Jefferson, George W. Bush and Barack Obama need not stand alone.
NEW DELHI (AP) — An Indian naval vessel sank a suspected pirate
"mother ship" in the Gulf of Aden and chased two attack boats into the
night, officials said Wednesday, as separate bands of brigands seized
Thai and Iranian ships in the lawless seas.
-USA Today
Where’s the U.S. Navy? We spend 3/4 of $trillion a year on the
military and it’s the Indian Navy that sinks these thugs. I know we
have the capability to defend the shipping lanes. So what gives?
And to think, I was going to post something a couple of days ago about the pirates, but thought y’all wouldn’t be interested. Silly me.
As I said to bud (who, if I recall correctly, thought we couldn’t succeed in Iraq, which is neither wet nor moving), you think it’s a snap for even the world’s largest blue-water Navy
to prevent small craft from taking UNarmed merchant ships in a section
of ocean three times the size of Texas? The supertanker was 450 miles
off Mombasa. Look at a map. Think about it.
Folks, the U.S. Navy IS working hard on the piracy problem, along
with the Brits, the French, Italy, Canada, Greece and Denmark. And,
obviously, the Indians.
You know what would have been the best thing we could do to stop
this piracy? Not abandon Somalia to chaos back in 1993 (a retreat on
our part that incidentally persuaded Osama bin Laden that it would be
easy to take down the U.S.; just inflict a few casualties). Piracy works
in the Gulf of Aden because the pirates have a safe place to hide the
prizes, since the "government" of Somalia is useless.
And that will continue to be the case as long as we have failed
states in East Africa. That’s why (ahem) the United States has to
employ a full-range policy of forward engagement in the world. (Remember, we stopped the Barbary pirates NOT by playing defense on the
high seas, but by sending the Marines ashore to take their haven. Diplomacy also played a significant role, but then the Barbary States were states; there was someone in charge to dicker with.)
I’ve been watching the latest piracy problem for awhile (I’m into that stuff, being both a Navy brat and a fan of Patrick O’Brian), and the overall story has been one of the U.S. Navy going after the privateers with increasing aggressiveness. This from the NYT on Oct. 30:
As Somalia’s rulers have struggled with an insurgency and political
instability that culminated in the resignation of the prime minister on Monday,
piracy has flourished off its shores. Experts say that there have been
“many more” than the 26 attacks formally reported to the International Piracy Center this year, and new hijackings are reported with unfortunate frequency.
But the latest hijacking came with news that the United States Navy
has now entered the fray. A distress call from a Japanese-owned
chemical tanker, Golden Mori, found its way to the U.S.S. Porter, an American destroyer, which intercepted and then sank the two skiffs that the pirates used to reach the ship, according to CNN.
Now, the pirates have no obvious exit route, and another American destroyer, the Arleigh Burke
is on their tail in Somali waters, which are usually something of a
pirate refuge. This time, the American navy received permission to
enter from the embattled transitional government….
As you can see, the U.S. and international allies have just started stepping up their response to this growing problem. But to think we’ll just snap our fingers and the problem will go away is unrealistic.
Once you have a failed state as a haven for pirates, the only way to prevent the incidents from happening (unless you think ALL international shipping should be escorted by our Navy at taxpayer expense) is for the merchant ships to be prepared to repel boarders. And yeah, they’ll probably need to hire private contractors for that, much to Capital A’s horror (unless of course you DO think third-nation-flag private ships should be guarded at taxpayer expense). Fighting close battles with small arms at the drop of a hat was a skill the average sailor had 200 years ago, but not today. They’ll likely have to hire some guns.
Once the vessel is taken, and the U.S. or other navies respond, what do you propose we do? We’re fully equipped to sink them (as you saw above we had no trouble sinking the pirate boats, once they were under our guns), but the sailors who specialize in the skills it would take to RETAKE the vessel intact (which I’m guessing that most of us — especially the owners of the ships or their cargos — would prefer), the U.S. Navy Seals, are really, really busy elsewhere these days. (Set Iraq aside; we need all we can train and more in Afghanistan.)
It’s an interesting problem, or rather SET of problems, and one the new president will have on a front-burner, given the escalation in recent days. The supertanker finally grabbed the attention of all of y’all who had NOT been paying attention.
You probably saw that the Supreme Court sided with the U.S. Navy against the whales off Southern California. While I don’t have all that much to say about it, I thought it would be of interest to some of y’all to discuss the ruling here.
Whales are great, but I thought what Chief Justice John Roberts wrote made sense:
“The lower courts failed properly to defer to senior Navy officers’ specific, predictive judgments,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., joined by four other justices, wrote for the court in the first decision of the term.
For the environmental groups that sought to limit the exercises, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “the most serious possible injury would be harm to an unknown number of marine mammals that they study and observe.” By contrast, he continued, “forcing the Navy to deploy an inadequately trained antisubmarine force jeopardizes the safety of the fleet.”
Contrasting with that snappy salute to the brass, Justices Ginsburg and Souter luridly dissented:
“Sonar is linked to mass strandings of marine mammals, hemorrhaging
around the brain and ears” and acute effects on the central nervous
system as well as “lesions in vital organs,” Justice Ginsburg wrote.
And
though the Navy has said it can find no previous documented case of
sonar-related injury to a marine mammal in such exercises, Justice
Ginsburg said the service had predicted that a current set of exercises
off the California coast would cause lasting injuries to hundreds of
beaked whales, along with vast behavioral disturbances to whales,
dolphins and sea lions.
The majority was overturning a ruling by the — you guessed it — Ninth Circuit.
