rap song

This year’s anniversary of 9/11 was commemorated by the state of Arizona with the dedication of its own memorial. The Arizona Republic reports the event:

You won’t find any names carved in granite at this memorial.

Arizona’s 9/11 memorial wasn’t meant to be a headstone. Instead, “Moving Memories,” as it is called, uses sunlight to illuminate timelines and phrases that capture the true experience of Arizonans on and around the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

It is designed to make sure future generations of children know not just about that moment but about the shock and the fear and the way the nation came together afterward as well.

“My personal hope is that in some way we can get across to people that September 11 and the events that unfolded were this terrible, horrible, tragic time, and also a time when this country came together like I have never seen before,” said Phoenix Fire Capt. Billy Shields, who served as chair of the governor’s 9/11 Memorial Commission. “There were no differences. . . . We were all just Americans, and we wanted to help.”..

Shields talked to The Arizona Republic about what makes it special.

• The memorial incorporates actual relics from the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the field in Shanksville, Pa., where Flight 93 crashed. A 2 1/2-foot-long steel beam from the 44th floor of Tower One of the World Trade Center sits on a concrete pedestal. Rubble from the Pentagon and a scoop of dirt from the Pennsylvania field are mixed into the concrete. Memorial designers did sun mapping and carved an aperture into the steel above the beam. Once a year, at noon on Sept. 11, the beam will be fully illuminated in sunlight.

• The primary motivation in the design of the memorial was educational. There are timelines not only of Sept. 11, 2001, but of the months and years that followed. Interspersed are phrases to help people understand the emotion of the time. The memorial commission also created curriculums for students in kindergarten through 12th grade that schools can use as learning modules.

• More than 30,000 people were involved in creating Arizona’s memorial. That includes people who participated in a historical study of the time and people who donated cellphones and bought specially made commemorative pins to fund the memorial.

• The memorial is moving and changing as a metaphor to what has happened to the world since the attacks. The memorial is circular with a concrete base. Above it is a steel visor with words cut in the metal. As the sun shines down, light projects the words onto the concrete. At different times of the day and year, different sections of phrases will come into focus.

“We didn’t want a graveyard,” Shields said. “(This) reflects the true experience of Arizonans in and around September 11.”

And here are some sample phrases intended to help Americans understand 9/11.

Presumably the crescent shape has some sort of educational purpose, too.

stikNstein offers some take-offs applied to other American memorials.

The news of this travesty is just starting to receive national attention.

Lady Thompson in horse trough

In 1999, the (no longer young) members of the Rylstone Women’s Institute in North Yorkshire posed for a nude calendar as a fund-raising device to benefit a leukemia charity, producing an unexpected hit which raised more than a £1 million. The calendar was talked about around the world, and subsequently became the basis for a feature film, Calendar Girls (2003), starring Helen Mirren and Julie Walters. Not altogether surprisingly, nude calendars, featuring femmes d’un certain âge, their assets artistically concealed, have become a charity staple in Britain and elsewhere.

The Telegraph reports that the latest beneficiary is to be the hound pack of Britain’s Oakley Hunt, whose country lies in Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire and Cambridgeshire.

They must basically like doing it, and are just looking for excuses, don’t you think?

Jim Dunnigan’s Strategy Page reports the Judge Advocate General Corps’ military lawyers have grown far more numerous and influential, and that far too many of its members are on the wrong side:

Big brawl going on in the Pentagon between the JAGs (Judge Advocate General, the lawyers) and the operators (combat and intelligence types.) JAGs have become more important, decade by decade, over the last sixty years. This has happened in parallel with the growing influence of lawyers in civilian society. However, lawyers doing what they do has brought them into conflict with the operators. For example, the war on terror has created a murky legal area for captured terrorists. Many JAGs want to give the captured terrorists most of the privileges of civilians, or even soldiers, accused of criminal acts. This creates a conflict with the combat and intel officers, who do not want to give the terrorists access to the identity of informants within terrorist organizations, or other information they have on the terrorists, and how they got it. In the civilian world, the prosecution has to let the defense know all this stuff. That’s why there’s a witness protection program, or cases where the government will not prosecute in order to preserve valuable intel. But such procedures don’t work when most of your witnesses are living in a combat zone, and many of your intelligence collection techniques will be worthless if the enemy knows what they are, putting your own troops at greater risk.

On top of all this, the size of the JAG force has grown some ten percent since the end of the Cold War, while everyone else has shrunk by about a third. As a result, the senior JAGs in each service wants to be three star generals, instead of the current two star.

Now the JAGs are aware of the circumstances under which U.S. troops are fighting, and the importance of OPSEC (Operational Security, keeping info about your activities from the enemy). Even so, many JAGs seem to lose their perspective, and advocate strongly for giving the terrorists the information. Operators believe the JAGs are grandstanding, especially by saying one thing to uniformed people, and something else to the media and Congress. The situation has divided the JAG community as well, and it’s getting ugly.

The Iranians are supplying insurgents in Iraq with much more deadly ordinance, some of Chinese origin, General John Abizaid told reporters today.

The Turkish Press reports:

A new armor-busting rocket-propelled grenade believed to be of Iranian origin has shown up in Iraq in what may be “a hint about things to come,” the commander of US forces in the Middle East said Tuesday.

General John Abizaid said the weapon, an RPG-29, has a dual warhead and has proved effective against most types of armored vehicles.

“The first time we saw it was not in Iraq. We saw it in Lebanon. So to me it indicates, number one, an Iranian connection,” he told defense reporters here.

“It`s hard to say in our part of the world that we operate in as to whether or not people have given us a hint about things to come,” he said.

He said only a single RPG-29 has turned up in Iraq so far, and it was unclear how it was smuggled into the country.

But he said it was the latest in a number of new and more sophisticated weapons that appear to be moving onto the region`s battlefields from Iran.

He said longer-range Chinese rockets that looked new also have been found in Iraq.

Abizaid said he believed the Chinese rockets ca
me from Iran although they may have been taken from the arms inventories of the former Iraqi regime and cleaned up.

“It looked brand new to us,” he said.

The new weapons are in addition to more sophisticated roadside bombs with explosively shaped charges that the US military has long charged are being manufactured in Iran and brought into the country by Iran`s Revolutionary Guards-Quds Force.

Andre Pachter does not believe these are old inventory weapons:

Military experts tell China Confidential that Iran supplied the rockets and that they are in fact brand new, Chinese-made weapons.
Energy-starved China and oil-rich, Islamist Iran have deepening economic, political, and military ties. Beijing, as we have reported for months, is firmly committed to blocking meaningful sanctions against America’s arch-enemy. And Chinese arms have been instrumental in Iran’s military modernization.

Abizaid also said that a new, armor-piercing rocket-propelled grenade has turned up in Iraq. The weapon, which was first used in Lebanon by Iran’s Shiite proxy, Hezbollah, in its month-long war with Israel, has a dual warhead and has proved effective against most types of armored vehicles.

Citing links between Hezbollah and Shiite militias in Iraq, the US commander said the RPG could be “a hint of things to come.”

An important skill for Gen Y software implementers, one gathers.

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Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has got to be an idiot. AP reports that Graham said:

If it‘s seen that our country is trying to redefine the Geneva Convention to meet the needs of the CIA, why can‘t every other country redefine the Geneva Convention to meet the needs of their secret police?” Graham asked.

The entire point of the Geneva Conventions is reciprocity. A signatory only promises to take prisoners, treat them decently, not use germ warfare or poison gas, not because they are trying to prove who is more humanitarian than whom, but merely so that their own troops will enjoy the decent treatment and the enemy’s restraint.
But our enemies, in recent years, have rarely been civilized European states, like Germany, who are signatories. Our enemies lately have been terrorists and illegal combatants, who simply torture, murder, and mutilate the remains of any Americans so unfortunate as to fall alive into their hands.

It is the misapplication of the Geneva Convention, and the unwarranted extension of its privileges to latrunculi (pirates and brigands), which jeopardizes US troops, by preventing just punishment for violation of the customs and usages of war. Obviously, the way you protect your own troops is to deny Geneva Convention protections to those who do not live up to its prescriptions, not by giving away Geneva Convention status to to our adversaries, however they choose to behave.

“Oh, I say, old boy, go right ahead and kill every prisoner out of hand. Use poison gas and germ warfare, if you like. Butcher all the non-combatants you please. But we Americans are simply too good, and fine, and pure to stoop to mistreating you. Keep the secret of the location of the diabolical device which will blow up one of our major cities, and kill a hundred thousand Americans. We certainly won’t beat it out of you.”

Nathan Sharansky discusses the current covert form of warfare in the LA Times:

IN THE SUMMER of 2000, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin told me a story that I have been unable to get out of my mind. We were meeting in the Kremlin, and I raised the grave danger facing the world from the transfer of missile technology and nuclear material to the Iranians. In Putin’s view, however, the real danger came not from an Iranian nuclear-tipped missile or, for that matter, from the lethal arsenal of any nation-state.

“Imagine a sunny and beautiful day in a suburb of Manhattan,” he said. “An elderly man is tending to the roses in his small garden with his nephew visiting from Europe. Life seems perfectly normal. The following day, the nephew, carrying a suitcase, takes a train to Manhattan. Inside the suitcase is a nuclear bomb.”

The threat, Putin explained to me a year before 9/11, was not from this or that country but from their terrorist proxies — aided and supported quietly by a sovereign state that doesn’t want to get its hands dirty — who will perpetrate their attacks without a return address. This scenario became real when Al Qaeda plotted its 9/11 attacks from within Afghanistan and received support from the Taliban government. Then it happened again this summer, when Iran was allowed to wage a proxy war through Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and northern Israel. But this time, the international community’s weak response dealt the global war on terror a severe blow.

Five years ago, after 9/11, such a lack of culpability seemed inconceivable. That was when President Bush abandoned the conventional approach to fighting terror by vowing that the United States would henceforth make no distinction between terrorists and regimes that support them. You are either with us or you are with the terrorists.

The problem is that Bush has not fulfilled that promise.

In the case of Hezbollah, the Palestinians are surrogates for Iran, which is something of a surrogate for China. The US really does not want to confront on the basis of both military and economic consideration.

But, for whom is Al Qaeda a surrogate? It is just not possible for a band of guerillas to wage warfare, to recruit, train, transport, arm, and supply themselves. War is expensive. Al Qaeda’s operations, and the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, must be being funded by Islamic sources. It would economically disruptive to go after those sources, but there is no realistic other option. Until all the Near Eastern sources of funding are forced to stop waging proxy way, the war will continue.

——————
Hat tip to Scott Drum.

Canada Free Press has already taken back an earlier story identifying Adnan al-Shukrijumah aka El Shukrijumah as a 1998 Engineer and Physics graduate of McMaster University named Ciro Vitolo.

Hat tip to Riehl World View.

James H. Billington, in the Wall Street Journal, contrasts two famous churches of the Eastern Schism, identifying in the architecture of St. Basil’s, in Moscow (above) the centralizing impulse of the Muscovite despotism, and finding -—by contrast—- in the design of the Church of the Transfiguration at Kizhi in Karelia the echo of the very different individualistic culture of Hanseatic Novgorod.

AP confirmed what bloggers learned via tips from military sources last April, AP photographer Bilal Hussein was detained, after being captured by American forces in a building in Ramadi, Iraq, with a cache of weapons.

The U.S. military in Iraq has imprisoned an Associated Press photographer for five months, accusing him of being a security threat but never filing charges or permitting a public hearing.

Military officials said Bilal Hussein, an Iraqi citizen, was being held for “imperative reasons of security” under United Nations resolutions. AP executives said the news cooperative’s review of Hussein’s work did not find anything to indicate inappropriate contact with insurgents, and any evidence against him should be brought to the Iraqi criminal justice system.

Hussein, 35, is a native of Fallujah who began work for the AP in September 2004. He photographed events in Fallujah and Ramadi until he was detained on April 12 of this year.

“We want the rule of law to prevail. He either needs to be charged or released. Indefinite detention is not acceptable,” said Tom Curley, AP’s president and chief executive officer. “We’ve come to the conclusion that this is unacceptable under Iraqi law, or Geneva Conventions, or any military procedure.”…
In Hussein’s case, the military has not provided any concrete evidence to back up the vague allegations they have raised about him, Curley and other AP executives said.
The military said Hussein was captured with two insurgents, including Hamid Hamad Motib, an alleged leader of al-Qaida in Iraq. “He has close relationships with persons known to be responsible for kidnappings, smuggling, improvised explosive device (IED) attacks and other attacks on coalition forces,” according to a May 7 e-mail from U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Jack Gardner, who oversees all coalition detainees in Iraq.

“The information available establishes that he has relationships with insurgents and is afforded access to insurgent activities outside the normal scope afforded to journalists conducting legitimate activities,” Gardner wrote to AP International Editor John Daniszewski.

Hussein proclaims his innocence, according to his Iraqi lawyer, Badie Arief Izzat, and believes he has been unfairly targeted because his photos from Ramadi and Fallujah were deemed unwelcome by the coalition forces.

That Hussein was captured at the same time as insurgents doesn’t make him one of them, said Kathleen Carroll, AP’s executive editor.

No?

Well, how about looking at these photos? or these? AP’s Tom Curley finds nothing inappropriate? Ridiculous. US forces should detain him.

LGF provides a bit more detail on Hussein’s capture.

The military said Hussein was captured with two insurgents, including Hamid Hamad Motib, an alleged leader of al-Qaida in Iraq. “He has close relationships with persons known to be responsible for kidnappings, smuggling, improvised explosive device (IED) attacks and other attacks on coalition forces,” according to a May 7 e-mail from U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Jack Gardner, who oversees all coalition detainees in Iraq.