Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (62521)	6/7/2005 4:54:06 PM
From: Orcastraiter	Respond to of 81568

A U.S. military official said last month that only about 350 of the more than 10,000 detainees in U.S. custody were from outside Iraq. The Iraqi insurgency: Who fights, why? By LARRY KAPLOW Cox News Service Tuesday, May 17, 2005 The Iraqi insurgency started about two years ago. In that time, nearly 1,500 U.S. troops have been killed or died in accidents. Insurgents have also killed more than 1,500 Iraqi police and troops and perhaps even more Iraqi civilians. They have kidnapped more than 200 foreigners, according to the Associated Press, killed at least 30 of them and still hold about 16. Q. Who are the insurgents? A. Their numbers are estimated to be in the thousands. Most are Sunni Muslim Iraqis. A U.S. military official said last month that only about 350 of the more than 10,000 detainees in U.S. custody were from outside Iraq. Sunnis made up the heart of Saddam Hussein's ruling and military class. Arabs from other countries, including affiliates of al-Qaida, have also come to Iraq to fight. Last year also saw an uprising by a radical Shiite Muslim militia, but that died out after the fighters sustained heavy losses and their leader, cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, agreed to work through the political process, at least for now. Q. What do they want? A. The only common goal is to oust U.S. and other foreign troops from their land and topple the American-backed government. Some Sunnis also want to restore the power that they enjoyed under Saddam. Others fear rule by Shiites and ethnic Kurds and still others want to see a religious Sunni government installed. Q. What weapons do they use, and where do they come from? A. Insurgents are armed with rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and bombs made of common explosives or old artillery shells. After the government of Saddam Hussein was ousted, U.S. troops left unsecured most of the sprawling Iraqi army stores of artillery, missiles and explosives. Kalashnikov rifles were already common in most households. One of the most common tactics against U.S. and Iraqi forces is the roadside bomb. There have been hundreds of car bomb explosions, as well – about 70 in the last two weeks. U.S. officials believe the insurgents also get money for weapons from Iraqis or supporters in neighboring countries. Q. Where is most of the violence? A. The bulk of the violence has been in the large cities of Baghdad and Mosul, and in the western Anbar province, the central Saladin province and other areas north of Baghdad. These are largely Sunni areas and have been given the name "Sunni Triangle." But there has also been heavy insurgent activity south of the capital and nearly every region has seen bombings or other attacks. Q. Why are they so hard to stop? A. U.S. officials used to dismiss the insurgents as fading remnants of the old regime. But now they acknowledge the fighting could go on for many years. The insurgents seem to find new recruits among dissatisfied Iraqis, enjoy the protection of others around them and have been adept at military tactics. Larry Kaplow is a Cox correspondent. E-mail: lkaplow@coxnews.com

To: Sully- who wrote (62521)	6/8/2005 1:35:51 PM
From: Proud_Infidel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

Gitmo Grovel: Enough Already Charles Krauthammer (archive) June 3, 2005 \| Print \| Send The self-flagellation over reports of abuse at Guantanamo Bay has turned into a full-scale panic. There are calls for the United States, with all this worldwide publicity, to simply shut the place down. A terrible idea. One does not run and hide simply because allegations have been made. If the charges are unverified, as they overwhelmingly are in this case, then they need to be challenged. The United States ought to say what it has and has not done, and not simply surrender to rumor. Moreover, shutting down Guantanamo will solve nothing. We will capture more terrorists, and we will have to interrogate them, if not at Guantanamo then somewhere else. There will then be reports from that somewhere else that will precisely mirror the charges coming out of Guantanamo. What will we do then? Keep shutting down one detention center after another? The self-flagellation has gone far enough. We know that al Qaeda operatives are trained to charge torture when they are in detention, and specifically to charge abuse of the Koran to inflame fellow prisoners on the inside and potential sympathizers on the outside. In March the Navy inspector general reported that, out of about 24,000 interrogations at Guantanamo, there were seven confirmed cases of abuse, "all of which were relatively minor." In the eyes of history, compared to any other camp in any other war, this is an astonishingly small number. Two of the documented offenses involved "female interrogators who, on their own initiative, touched and spoke to detainees in a sexually suggestive manner." Not exactly the gulag. The most inflammatory allegations have been not about people but about mishandling the Koran. What do we know here? The Pentagon reports (Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, May 26) -- all these breathless "scoops" come from the U.S. government's own investigations of itself -- that of 13 allegations of Koran abuse, five were substantiated, of which two were most likely accidental. Let's understand what mishandling means. Under the rules the Pentagon later instituted at Guantanamo, proper handling of the Koran means using two hands and wearing gloves when touching it. Which means that if any guard held the Koran with one hand or had neglected to put on gloves, this would be considered mishandling. On the scale of human crimes, where, say, 10 is the killing of 2,973 innocent people in one day and 0 is jaywalking, this ranks as perhaps a 0.01. Moreover, what were the Korans doing there in the first place? The very possibility of mishandling Korans arose because we gave them to each prisoner. What kind of crazy tolerance is this? Is there any other country that would give a prisoner precisely the religious text that that prisoner and those affiliated with him invoke to justify the slaughter of innocents? If the prisoners had to have reading material, I would have given them the book "Portraits 9/11/01" -- vignettes of the lives of those massacred on Sept. 11. Why this abjectness on our part? On the very day the braying mob in Pakistan demonstrated over the false Koran report in Newsweek, a suicide bomber blew up an Islamic shrine in Islamabad, destroying not just innocent men, women and children, but undoubtedly many Korans as well. Not a word of condemnation. No demonstrations. Even greater hypocrisy is to be found here at home. Civil libertarians, who have been dogged in making sure that FBI-collected Guantanamo allegations are released to the world, seem exquisitely sensitive to mistreatment of the Koran. A rather selective scrupulousness. When an American puts a crucifix in a jar of urine and places it in a museum, civil libertarians rise immediately to defend it as free speech. And when someone makes a painting of the Virgin Mary, smears it with elephant dung and adorns it with porn, not only is that free speech, it is art -- deserving of taxpayer funding and an ACLU brief supporting the Brooklyn Museum when the mayor freezes its taxpayer subsidy. Does the Koran deserve special respect? Of course it does. As do the Bibles destroyed by the religious police in Saudi Arabia and the Torahs blown up in various synagogues from Tunisia to Turkey. Should the United States apologize? If there were mishandlings of the Koran, we should say so and express regret. And that should be in the context of our remarkably humane and tolerant treatment of the Guantanamo prisoners, and in the context of a global war on terrorism (for example, the campaign in Afghanistan) conducted with a discrimination and a concern for civilian safety rarely seen in the annals of warfare. Then we should get over it, stop whimpering and start defending ourselves. dallasnews.com