War and Peace
tqa | December 15, 2008
President Bush has been widely reported as referring to yesterday's shoe-throwing incident as the kind of thing that happens in a free society. It's not clear whether the President was referring to the act of the shoes being thrown, the thrower being promptly beaten to a pulp by local security, having him held without charges in the Prime Minister's residence, or the potential two-year jail term that goes along with the crime of "insulting a visiting head of state."
tqa | August 6, 2008
Sometimes the only thing that separates comedy from tragedy is the involvement of an actual living human being.
That certainly seems to be the case where today's military commission verdict in the trial of Salim Hamdan. Despite having the advantages of what we must, for the lack of a better word, call a legal system that was set up to give the prosecution the edge, despite the admission of hearsay evidence, despite the use of material taken from interviews that didn't come within a light year of the Miranda guidelines, and despite the use of secret prosecution testimony, the prosecution…
tqa | February 12, 2008
It's easy to think of Lincoln as being a left-wing sort of guy, what with that whole emancipation thing, but it's sometimes worth remembering that he was also a wartime Republican President. With that - and current events - in mind, here's something from a letter Lincoln wrote to a friend of his while he was a Congressman. The letter details the reasons for his opposition to the Mexican-American war:
Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for…
tqa | January 30, 2008
It's safe to say that 2007 wasn't the best year of US Army 1st Lt. Elizabeth Whiteside's life. She started off the year with a bullet wound to her torso that damaged, among other things, one lung, her liver, and her spleen. She ended her year as an outpatient at Walter Reed, waiting for her superiors to decide whether or not she would have to stand court-martial for inflicting that wound upon herself. In between, she had to recover from her physical wounds, learn to deal with the inner demons that led to them, she had to deal with superior officers who believed that she would be more…
tqa | November 6, 2007
In all of the fuss about the imminent confirmation of a man who says he can't judge whether or not strapping someone down and pouring water over them until they think they're drowning is torture, there's an important question that I think we've lost sight of: how on earth did we wind up in this position in the first place?
How is it even possible that we are having discussions about what is and is not technically torture? How is it possible that we are listening to Senators ask a nominee for Attorney General to take a position on whether or not certain "interrogation techniques" are…
tqa | October 30, 2007
President Bush announced today that he has (finally) named a nominee to replace Jim Nicholson as head of the Veterans administration. His choice, retired Lt. General James Peake, is probably one of the more qualified people that this President has ever nominated to do anything. That's the good news. The bad news is that's not a very high bar to clear.
Seriously, though, Peake certainly has the qualifications to run the VA. He's a West Pointer, he is a combat veteran who served in the infantry and was wounded twice in Vietnam, he's a medical doctor, and he was the Surgeon General of the…
tqa | October 16, 2007
I am certainly no fan of the Iraq war, but I found it difficult to read the media reports about retired Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez's recent comments on the war without getting angry. Reading the full text of his remarks took me from anger to outrage. As good as it is to hear an unvarnished, blunt assessment of the situation from someone who, as a former commander of the forces in Iraq, is very familiar with what happens there, I'm left wondering where the hell he was before he gave his little talk.
Let's look at some of what the little pissant had to say:
Since 2003, the politics…
tqa | October 9, 2007
A little after 7 am on 27 November, 2004, Lt. Colonel Michael McMahon and Chief Warrant Officer Travis Grogan boarded a small twin-engine airplane in Bagram, Afghanistan. The plane, which also had a cargo of 400 pounds of mortar illumination rounds, was operated by Presidential Airways, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Blackwater USA. Grogan was an experienced pilot assigned to the 3rd Squadron of the 4th Cavalry Regiment (the 3/4 Cav). McMahon was the 3/4ths commanding officer. At around 7:30, the plane stopped on the taxiway and a third passenger, 21-year old Specialist Harley Miller…
tqa | October 8, 2007
According to the LA Times, the family of an Iraqi guard killed by a Blackwater employee on Christmas Eve has not yet received any compensation for the man's death. The reason? The office of Iraq's Vice President, which employed the dead guard, doesn't think that Blackwater is offering enough compensation. They're right.
For those of you who aren't familiar with the incident, here's a quick review: off-duty and apparently intoxicated Blackwater employee gets into "confrontation" with on-duty security guard for Iraq's vice president. Blackwater employee shoots guard 3 times, killing him.…
tqa | September 19, 2007
Every time I read articles (like this one, this one, this one or this one) that talk about how the Democrats are having problems getting the 60 votes in the Senate that they need to move Iraq legislation forward, or how they won't be able to get the 2/3rds of both houses that they need to beat a veto, I get angrier. And not with the Republicans who are standing in the way.
The Democrats don't need more than a majority. The President can't spend money unless Congress lets him spend money. If Congress passes a spending bill and he vetoes it, he can't spend money. If Congress fails to pass a…
tqa | September 17, 2007
Once again, John "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" McCain went and said something stupid at a campaign stop. And, once again, he got caught on video doing it. This time, he went just slightly overboard in his criticism of the now-infamous MoveOn.org "General Betray-us" ad. Holding a blown-up, laminated copy of the ad, McCain said:
"It's disgraceful, it's got to be retracted and condemned by the Democrats and MoveOn.org ought to be thrown out of this country, my friends."
(And if you don't believe Time Magazine, CBS has the video footage.)
Unlike the "Bomb Iran" incident, this wasn't…
tqa | September 12, 2007
Staff Sergeant Yance T. Gray and Sergeant Omar Mora died on Monday in a vehicle crash in Baghdad on Monday, along with six other American soldiers and two "detainees." During their time in Iraq, both Gray and Mora displayed more than just the courage needed to face the enemy. They also displayed the courage needed to stand up, to face the country, and to say that the strategy in Iraq isn't working, and never will. They had the courage to say this, knowing that their opinion would not be well received by many of their superiors. And, ultimately, they had the courage and civic responsibility…
tqa | September 12, 2007
The New York Times/CBS News poll that was released on Monday got a fair bit of media attention. Most of the attention focused on the revelation that Americans, by an overwhelming margin, trust the military leadership to resolve the war in Iraq (68%), rather than Congress (21%) or the White House (5%). The remainder of the attention went to the poll's finding that most Americans don't think the surge has made a heck of a lot of progress.
There's one question buried way in the middle of the poll - 15 pages into the pdf - that I think deserves a lot more attention. Respondents were asked the…