Product Reviews: Coke C2

Meryl Yourish, evaluating Coke’s new low carb product, C2, says “It sucked.” She offers an identical evaluation of Caffeine Free Coke and Diet Coke. As an alternative, Kevin Aylward notes that “Diet Lime Coke is surprisingly good.”

I saw C2 in the stores yesterday but, frankly, it’s overpriced and the 8-pack gimmick annoys me. I go out of my way to avoid products intentionally put into irregular package sizes to make price comparison difficult for the innumerate. (Of course, when the store has Pepsi products, including Diet Dr Pepper and Diet Mountain Dew, on sale for 5 for $10 whereas the 8-packs of C2 are 2 for $6, one’s math skills don’t have to be all that good.)

And, really, the variants of Diet Coke—with zero carbs, too—are pretty good. I concur with Kevin on Diet Lime Coke, which I found on sale at the local Wegman’s weeks ago for $2 a 12-pack. I don’t like it as well as Diet Cherry Coke or Diet Vanilla Coke, but it’s better than Diet Lemon Coke, plain Diet Coke, or Caffeine Free Diet Coke.

For those looking for a warmer beverage, Steven Taylor points us to an innovative new decaffeinated coffee, a concept that makes me shudder. Also, apparently TiVo has finally made it to Alabama. He likes it.

Military End Strength

Phil Carter explains why nobody really knows how many soldiers we need in the military.

During the Cold War, U.S. planners could look at Warsaw Pact strength, do some fuzzy math to adjust for technology and skill differentials, and predict how many troops the United States needed to block a Soviet march through West Germany’s Fulda Gap. *** But now the military has to prepare for myriad threats, from aggressive states like Saddam’s Iraq to failed states like Somalia to non-state terrorist groups like al-Qaida. In the early 1990s, the Pentagon developed the “2 Major Regional Conflict” doctrine, which held that the United States should be capable of fighting two major regional wars at once. Elaborate war games were conducted to figure out how many forces would be necessary to meet this paradigm, and the results drove subsequent requests for personnel, equipment, and force structure. The 2MRC model quickly proved insufficient for real life. In the ’90s, smaller deployments to Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo stripped the Army’s capability to fight two wars at once. These deployments also highlighted the disconnect between the wars the Army planned to fight and those missions it was actually given.

He’s got quite a bit more analysis at Intel Dump as well.

In a related piece, Fred Kaplan explains why a draft won’t solve anything. The short answer: we don’t need more stupid soldiers.

[T]he aptitude of U.S. military personnel now exceeds that for American civilians.

Scores are divided into five categories. Categories I and II score in the 65th to 99th percentiles. Category IIIs score in the 31st to 64th percentiles, Category IVs in the 10th to 30th percentiles, Category Vs in the bottom 10th percentile. Here’s how the scores break down, for recent recruits and for civilians:

On balance, by this measure, those who volunteer for the military are smarter than those who don’t.

Other indicators confirm this impression. The average recruit has an 11th-grade reading level; the average civilian can read at a 10th-grade level. Nearly all recruits—97 percent of female, 94 percent of male—graduated from high school; 79 percent of civilians have high-school diplomas. Officers are better-educated still: All are now required to have college degrees.

In short, today’s armed forces are not the downtrodden, ethnically lopsided social rejects that they tended to be after the Vietnam War, when the all-volunteer military came into being.

Bringing back the draft would lasso the social dregs along with the society elite. Would the net effect be a “more equitable representation of people making sacrifices,” as Rangel put it? Maybe, maybe not. Even with a draft, not everyone would serve. About 11 million Americans are 20 to 26 years old. The military doesn’t need 11 million people. A draft would have to involve some sort of lottery. If that’s the way it goes, there should be no exemptions (except for the physically disabled, the mentally incompetent, convicted felons, and perhaps conscientious objectors). Still, unless a military draft was one component of a compulsory national-service program (the subject of another essay), only some would be called. It’s a matter of chance whether the kids from the suburbs would be called more than the kids from the projects.

There’s quite a bit more; it’s worth reading.

The bottom line is that—as everyone who studies the matter has known for over a decade—we need to radically re-align the force. There have been some impressive changes made in the last three or four years, but the change has come too slowly. The force is considerably better than it was even a few years ago at fighting jointly—the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines working together as a cohesive team. But today’s force still looks far too much like a downsized version of its Cold War era predecessor. We’ve got far too much heavy maneuver capability on active duty, far too much of our precious peace and stability operations capability (MPs, civil affairs, psyops, engineers, etc.) in reserve, and too much of the former and not enough of the latter, period.

UPDATE: Looking again at Kaplan’s numbers, I’m slightly confused by the civilian distribution. Presumably, it’s based on a static baseline based on a past year. Otherwise, one would expect the percentiles to line up exactly.

Fahrenheit 9/11 Ban

The Hill — ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ ban? Ads for Moore’s movie could be stopped on July 30

Michael Moore may be prevented from advertising his controversial new movie, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” on television or radio after July 30 if the Federal Election Commission (FEC) today accepts the legal advice of its general counsel.

At the same time, a Republican-allied 527 soft-money group is preparing to file a complaint against Moore’s film with the FEC for violating campaign-finance law.

In a draft advisory opinion placed on the FEC’s agenda for today’s meeting, the agency’s general counsel states that political documentary filmmakers may not air television or radio ads referring to federal candidates within 30 days of a primary election or 60 days of a general election.

The opinion is generated under the new McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law, which prohibits corporate-funded ads that identify a federal candidate before a primary or general election.

(HT: Memeorandum)

There is a good case to be made that Moore’s film does indeed fall under the purview of the type of speech limited by McCain-Feingold, although it’s not a slam dunk. While I would be amused to see the ban enforced, it is just another sign of the outrageous idiocy of the McCain-Feingold approach. With very few exceptions, speech is supposed to be unlimited in the United States. Moore is a contemptable boob but he should be allowed to spew his venom as he pleases.

In the meantime, the movie is creating a buzz on both sides of the spectrum.

WaPo — ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ Is a Red-Hot Ticket

The White House preemptively gave the movie two thumbs down: “Outrageously false,” said communications director Dan Bartlett, when he was asked about some of its allegations. Sizzling! countered Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.), who plans a teach-in at a Seattle theater to tap into the “anger brewing against this administration.” The director, Michael Moore, predicted that those on the fence regarding his new documentary will be off it and on his side when the last credits roll. A group called Move America Forward has begun a letter-writing campaign asking theaters not to show “Michael Moore’s horrible anti-American movie.”

All this before “Fahrenheit 9/11” has even officially opened. “I can’t think of any precedent for it in a presidential campaign,” says Frances Lee, a political science professor at Case Western Reserve University. “As a marketing phenomenon it seems to echo ‘The Passion [of the Christ]’: intense enthusiasm, organized groups buying tickets with proselytizing zeal, the sense that one is getting something that corporate America wanted to stifle.”

I hereby predict the movie will do far less box office than did ‘The Passion.’ There are far more evangelical Christians than incredibly fat moonbats.

AP — Democrats Screen ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ in D.C.

Cheered by supporters, Michael Moore previewed his Bush-bashing documentary, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” before a mostly Democratic audience in the nation’s capital Wednesday night.

Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe said he thought the film would play an important role in this election year. “This movie raises a lot of the issues that Americans are talking about, that George Bush has been asleep at the switch since he’s been president,” McAuliffe said as he walked the red carpet into the premiere.

Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa implored all Americans to see the film: “It’s important for the American people to understand what has gone on before, what led us to this point, and to see it sort of in this unvarnished presentation by Michael Moore.”

The two-hour film depicts President Bush as lazy and oblivious to warnings in the summer of 2001 that al-Qaida was poised to strike. It also accuses the administration of manipulating the Sept. 11 attacks and fanning terrorism fears to win support for the Iraq war.

Democratic leaders need to walk a very line here, lest they be too closely associated with Moore’s extremism. What plays well in DC may not play so well in Peoria.

James Pinkerton thinks the movie might ultimately be harmful to Democrats.

But maybe Bush doesn’t really need to worry about this movie. And here’s why: If Bush and the Iraq war are this bad, why vote for John Kerry? After all, in 2002, Kerry voted with Bush and the Republicans - and against a majority of congressional Democrats - to support the war.

Try as he might, Moore will not get his R-rated film before the mass of American moviegoers. Instead, it will play heavily in liberal areas - places that are already likely to go strongly for Kerry. Bush voters will be few and far between.

Here’s the rub: The more left-leaning the locale, the more likely that third-party candidate Ralph Nader will be a force there, too. Indeed, as public opinion has turned against the war, support for Kerry has increased, but so has support for Nader. The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll shows Kerry besting Bush by four points. But Nader, who strongly opposed the war all along and proposes an immediate American pullout, is gaining, too. In recent months he has surged from asterisk levels to 6 percent. Almost all of those votes come out of Kerry’s hide. And as Democrats learned to their sorrow in 2000, it’s possible for the Democratic candidate to win the popular vote nationwide and yet lose the Electoral College, and thus the presidency.

So if Moore’s film is a hit at the box office, it’s more likely to turn Kerry voters into Nader voters than it is to turn Bush voters into Kerry voters. That probably isn’t Moore’s intention, but the problem with zealous prosecutors is that once they get their blood up for the big confrontation, it’s hard to get them to cool down, even if that would have been best for their case.

An interesting thesis. My gut tells me that most leftists hate Bush enough that they’ll vote strategically, working to elect Kerry even though they’re not enthusiastic. But my gut told me that in 2000, too.

Scores Killed Wave of Iraqi Attacks

Reuters — About 75 Die in Wave of Iraqi Attacks

Rebels bent on disrupting a handover to Iraqi rule bloodied five cities Thursday with coordinated assaults on local security forces in which about 75 people, including three U.S. soldiers, were killed. The violence in Baquba, Falluja, Ramadi, Mosul and Baghdad intensified a sustained campaign by Iraqi insurgents and foreign militants to sabotage Iraq’s formal transition from U.S.-led occupation to an interim government in six days’ time.

***

Scores of black-clad gunmen, some claiming loyalty to Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, attacked a police station and other government buildings in Baquba, 60 km (40 miles) northwest of Baghdad, in a dawn assault.

A U.S. military spokesman said two American soldiers had been killed in an ambush. U.S. forces had responded with air strikes after gunmen captured the civic center and attacked another government building. Two insurgents were killed.

Many of the fighters wore yellow headbands bearing the name of a Muslim militant group “Saraya al-Tawhid and Jihad” (Battalions of Unification and Holy War). They handed out leaflets warning Iraqis not to “collaborate” with Americans. “The flesh of collaborators is tastier than that of Americans,” the leaflets said. Arabic television channel Al Jazeera showed hooded fighters brandishing their weapons in Baquba and saying they were followers of Zarqawi. Bodies lay in the streets nearby. Zarqawi’s Jama’at al-Tawhid and Jihad group has claimed responsibility for many attacks in Iraq, including this week’s beheading of a South Korean hostage.

WaPo — Scores Killed As Insurgents Launch Attacks Across Iraq

Iraqi insurgents launched an apparently coordinated offensive against U.S. occupation forces and Iraqi security posts in a number of locations Thursday, setting off continuing battles that killed at least 69 people, including more than 20 Iraqi police and three U.S. soldiers. The attacks, an unusual display of ability to stage simultaneous assaults, were the broadest and largest-scale so far in an insurgent campaign of bombings and assassinations in the weeks leading up to the June 30 transfer of a limited form of sovereignty to the Iraqi Interim government.

***

According to the Associated Press, a statement quoted by a Saudi Web site Thursday claimed responsibility for the Baqubah attacks in the name of Zarqawi and warned the city’s residents to “comply with the instructions of the resistance.” The statement also told people to stay home “because these days are going to witness campaigns and attacks against the occupation troops and those who stand beside them.”

One hopes this will help the counter-insurgency. At some point, it has to become painfully clear that these people are mainly killing Iraqis, not outsiders. If ordinary citizens stop harboring the insurgents and begin feeding intelligence to the authorities, there is a good chance of beating it. Until that happens, there will be a lot more killing.

Selective Press Squeamishness

Deborah Orin argues that the press’ reluctance to show or even describe the agony of the victims of our enemies plays into their hands.

After terrorists beheaded Korean hostage Kim Sun-il, The New York Times kept the photo showing the horror of his final moments off yesterday’s front page. Instead, the Times’ front page bizarrely describes Kim as “sitting or kneeling quietly” as he waited to die — in reality the photo, back on Page A-11, shows Kim with his mouth open wide in terror, and the video shows him shaking with fear.
It’s just the latest instance of how the press often hesitates to show the true savagery of America’s enemies in the War on Terror, whether al Qaeda or Saddam Hussein’s thugs, precisely because the images are so awful. Last week, The Post revealed that reporters were ignoring a gruesome video of torture by Saddam’s thugs while obsessing over prisoner mistreatment by a small group of U.S. troops at Abu Ghraib jail where the photos are less upsetting.

Calls from readers prompted the American Enterprise Institute to post the Saddam torture video on its Web site (with warnings about the graphic content). Fox News Channel’s “Hannity and Colmes” did a report — in fact, last fall Fox exclusively revealed the existence of Saddam torture videos and aired sections.
National Review Online ran a detailed account of the video. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough plans to air it tonight. Otherwise, silence.

***

That prompted Laura Daniel to write New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent to complain, to no avail. “I don’t think the NYT needs to cover the video — but I do think it should make periodic mention of Saddam’s torture — which, in fact, I believe it has, and does,” Okrent emailed back. “That’s intellectually dishonest, and he knows it,” retorts Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), who co-hosted an airing of the Saddam torture video on Capitol Hill with Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman (Conn.). “There’s no question if we had pictures of American soldiers chopping off hands, they would air it. It’s just a double standard . . . The idea that if you mention [Saddam’s torture] you have somehow checked your box of being fair is ridiculous,” he adds. By contrast he points to “front-page, eye-catching, big headlines that say, ‘America bad, America fails.’ What is the overall message that’s getting out? It’s not what’s mentioned in paragraph 13 — ‘Oh, by the way, Saddam was bad, too.’ ”

I understand the press’ reluctance to air video of people being beheaded. Frankly, that’s not something most Americans want delivered to their living rooms. (As opposed to their computer monitors, apparently.) Still, the obsessive coverage of American abuses in Iraq—with daily front page reports of every single document saying essentially the same thing—with simultaneous downplaying of the atrocities of our enemies is a huge propaganda coup for the other side.

I don’t argue that the mainstream press is doing it for that reason. In addition to genuine sensitivity issues—although, certainly, the press is extremely selective in caring about the impact of their reportage on victims’ families—there is something of a “man bites dog” element to the editorial judgment. We don’t report planes that land safely, cars that don’t crash, or buildings not on fire. Islamist terrorists acting brutally isn’t “news” in the same way as American soldiers acting badly. But the emphasis on the unusual, in this case as in general, distorts the public’s perceptions of reality. When we’re fighting a war and that distortion helps the enemy, it’s particularly unfortunate.

Beltway Traffic Jam

The midweek linkfest:

• Michael J. Totten wonders if we shouldn’t go after terrorists instead of cuss words.
  
• Spoons points to an invention that might lead to true equality between the sexes.
  
• Eric Rasmussen and Steve Bainbridge explain why student evals are poor indicators of teaching performance.
  
• Steve Verdon is confused by a strange new gun law.
  
• Dan Drezner knows just a little too much about show tunes.
  
• McQ notes the anti-democratic actions of the Democratic party.
  
• Bill at INDC has a photo essay of “Moonbats in the Mist.”

To join in, link and send a TrackBack to this post. If your blog doesn’t automatically generate one, use the Send TrackBack feature below. For more information, see this post.

Korean Appeasement

The South Korean government apparently is resisting appeasement in the face of terrorism:

AP— Beheading stirs debate in South Korea

The beheading of a South Korean hostage set off demands, including from the president’s own party, for the country to stop sending troops to Iraq.

The stunned nation awoke Wednesday to television images of a blindfolded Kim Sun-il kneeling in an orange jumpsuit before his masked captors and news that he was later decapitated.

President Roh Moo-hyun denounced the killing and stood by his government’s plan to send 3,000 additional troops to Iraq beginning in August. But the slaying underlined divisions on the domestic front.

“This incident was shocking and tragic, but it mustn’t shake our decision and principle to send troops to Iraq,” the country’s biggest newspaper, Chosun Ilbo, said in an editorial. “In times like this, the president and the government must focus and not allow the deployment issue to once again divide the public.”

Sadly, not so much the U.S. government:

CSM — Negotiation or appeasement?

As South Korea collectively mourns the beheading of one of its citizens in Iraq, its nuclear neighbor to the north will have to consider a fresh offer from the United States.

At six-nation talks in Beijing, the US proposed giving North Korea energy aid and a security guarantee in exchange for ending its nuclear program, reports the Associated Press.

***

The Christian Science Monitor reports that “the White House initiative seems to suggest a tactically kinder and gentler approach to the hard-core Stalinist regime,” which “came about partly from a sense among US officials that Washington was wrongly being framed as the hostile or intractable actor in the talks.”

The New York Times reported Tuesday that President Bush authorized US negotiators to offer North Korea the “new but highly conditional set of incentives.” The Times points out that this process would be similar to what Libya committed to in December 2003, and “the first significant, detailed overture to North Korea since Mr. Bush took office three years ago.”

It worked so well when the Clinton Administration tried this a decade ago.

McCain Without the Personality Disorder

Veteran political analyst Charlie Cook on possible replacements for Dick Cheney:

As for John McCain, Cook said, “The Navy did not put McCain in a single-seat fighter for nothing.” He is not a team player. . . . Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel is another possibility; Cook described Hagel as “McCain without the personality disorder.”

“McCain without the personality disorder” is rather like dehydrated water.

Straczynski on Trek

Steven Taylor passes on word that Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski is pitching a new Star Trek series to “restore the series in a big way.”

At least we could be sure that the show wouldn’t have a folksy theme song.

The Moral Equivalence of Beheading

Rodger [sic] Jacobs has had an epiphany:

“Beheading and stoning are acceptable forms of execution in Arabic cultures,” I explained. “It pisses me off when the media pundits in this country start calling the perpetrators ‘savage’ and ‘barbaric.’ It’s just a different culture.”

I asked Oscar if he remembered the controversy over Old Sparky, the infamous Florida electric chair that, until discontinued, was subject to frequent malfunctions that often sent sparks and flames shooting through the skull of the condemned prisoner.

“Anyone watching that,” I said emphatically, “watching the executioner pull the switch on that, could just as easily scream savages and barbarians.”

Kathy Kinsley notes that the mere fact that something is considered acceptable in another culture doesn’t exlude it from being barbaric. And, whatever one might think of Old Sparky, at least the people executed in it have been found guilty of henous crimes through a legitimate judicial process.

The mind marvels at the logic of moral equivalency. Certainly, we should take into account the cultural norms of a time in place in judging the actions of given people. I don’t believe, for example, the mere fact that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves makes him, retroactively, a bad human being. That doesn’t mean that slavery wasn’t a barbaric practice. Indeed, the first step away from barbarism is to question the moral legitimacy of extant practices. That’s why Old Sparky was replaced by a comparatively humane lethal injection system, for example. (Either way, it’s less savage than sawing people’s head off slowly with a knife. ) Perhaps, in the not-too-distant future, we’ll decide that executing murderers is barbaric and stop doing it altogether.

Our enemies are barbarians. Their value system is stuck in the 7th Century and they are willing to use any means necessary to impose the values of that age on the modern world. Likely, future generations of Americans will look back on us and judge many of our current practices to be barbaric. That’s because we live in a society that constantly reassesses its belief systems and adjusts its actions accordingly. I don’t feel particularly uncouth in preferring our system over that of the Islamists.

Terrorists Denied Dessert, Sent to Rooms

John Hinderaker, assessing the thousanth media report on whether President Bush set the stage for abuses at Abu Ghraib by authorizing tough interrogation tactics in special cases, is struck by the following:

[Rumsfeld] approved 24 interrogation techniques, to be used in a manner consistent with the Geneva Conventions, but said that any use of four of those methods would have to be approved by him in advance. Those four were use of rewards or removal of privileges from detainees; attacking or insulting the ego of a detainee; alternating the use of friendly and harsh interrogators, and isolation.

Says John,

I hate to disillusion liberals, but as a trial lawyer, I routinely use two of those four techniques in cross-examining witnesses, and I use at least one of the other two on my children. Frankly, I find it appalling that those in charge of terrorist prisoners may only “reward or remove privileges from detainees” with the permission of the Secretary of Defense. If the Democrats had any sense, they would argue that these documents indict the administration as soft on terrorists.

Hat tip to Michelle Malkin, who has several posts this morning suggesting that Bush and Co. aren’t being aggressive enough.

In related news, Bret Stephens argues that, contrary to assertions by Sid Blumenthal and others, President Bush is actually much better than Hitler and the treatment of prisoners at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib is not as bad as the Soviet Gulag. I found it persuasive.

Clinton on Lewinsky

Political Wire’s Quote of the Day:

“I hope that she will not allow her whole life to be defined by her Andy Warhol-like 15 minutes of fame.”

— Bill Clinton on “his former paramour” Monica Lewinsky.

I always presumed Warhol was gay but didn’t realize he blew a president.

And you have to love the sense of humor of the New York Daily News headline writers: “He hopes Monica’s life isn’t stained by scandal.”

Olsen Twin Anorexic

AP — Olsen Treated for Eating Disorder

Mary-Kate Olsen, the brunette half of the Olsen twins entertainment empire, has entered a treatment facility “to seek professional help for a health-related issue,” her publicist said Tuesday.

Us Weekly and People magazines reported that Olsen has an eating disorder and entered the unidentified treatment center during the past few days. Olsen’s publicist, Michael Pagnotta, would not comment on those reports. Us Weekly said Olsen is anorexic.

Mary-Kate and her sister, Ashley, turned 18 on June 13. They recently graduated from high school and plan to attend New York University in the fall. They’ve been acting together since they were 9 months old, most notably on the sitcom “Full House” and in a series of direct-to-video movies. They’ve also attached their names to a line of products ranging from clothing to beauty items to home decorating merchandise.

I’m truly shocked.

Hat tip: TAM

Site Tweaks

The blogroll wasn’t loading properly this morning and, even though it’s in the right sidebar and supposed to load after the main posts, was causing disruption to the site. This is an all-too-frequent occurence. I’ve decided to move it off the front page to forestall this. It’s now conveniently located atop the page, along with my RSS feeds and other information that had gotten difficult to locate in the clutter of ads on my sidebars.

Low Carb Potatoes

USA Today — Diet: Potato growers say they’ll pitch a ‘low-carb’ spud

For dieters, potatoes have been scorned, rejected and castigated — the Rodney Dangerfield of vegetables, they get no respect. Many weight-loss programs, including the Atkins and the South Beach diets, advocate meat and cheese over high-carbohydrate potatoes, pasta and bread.

Come January, carb-counters who love potatoes may find cause to rejoice a bit. Florida growers will be pitching a potato they hope will be a hot one — it claims one-third fewer carbs than the ordinary spud. “Consumers are going to love the flavor and appearance of this potato and the fact that it has 30% fewer carbohydrates compared to a standard Russet baking potato,” said Chad Hutchinson, an assistant professor of horticulture at University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.

After five years of testing in the sandy soils near here in the heart of Florida’s potato country, Hutchinson knew it tasted great, had a shorter growing cycle, was disease-resistant and able to handle Florida’s extreme weather. He then learned about its lower-carb properties.

“That was just gravy,” he said.

And, of course, gravy is perfectly acceptable on the Atkins and South Beach diets.

Saddam’s Prison Letter

Newsweek — Saddam’s Prison Letter

Military censors have blacked out nine of the 14 lines. But in what remains of his letter, Saddam Hussein assures his family that “my spirit and my morale, they are high, thanks to greatness of God.” The message—apparently the first and only letter the former Iraqi dictator has sent to his family since his capture last December—is on a standard “family message” form provided by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). It is addressed simply “to my daughter,” and was delivered to the family by the ICRC after they visited Saddam on Feb. 21. The letter, apparently in Saddam’s handwriting, was shown to NEWSWEEK by Muhammed al Rushadan, a Jordanian lawyer retained by Saddam’s family.

Rushadan is currently on a visit to the United States, where he hopes to make the case that his client’s human rights are being violated and that he’s being held in violation of the Geneva Conventions. In addition, says Rushadan, he believes Saddam is being mistreated like some of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib were. “There are fresh wounds on his body,” he said, citing a Red Cross document he claims to have. “I say to the ICRC that you should do your job under Article 10 of the Geneva Conventions, or you should quit your job.”

***

According to the Red Cross’s Doumani, the Geneva Conventions do give the detaining authority the right to censor prisoners’ letters. “I don’t think all the messages that he has written to the family have been delivered,” she says. “I can’t confirm how many others there were, but it’s important to stress that this is clearly because of censorship and is not the fault of the ICRC.”

Certainly, tight censorship of Saddam’s communications with the outside world is to be expected, given that there is an insurgency going on. Given the scrutiny he’s under, I can’t imagine that he’s not being treated quite well in prison. Certainly, that fact that he’s able to write letters indicates that he’s being treated far better than he deserves.

Imperial Hubris IV

The early press coverage of the forthcoming Imperial Hubris continues, with a second NYT mention in as many days, this one a full feature.

NYT — Book By C.I.A. Officer Says U.S. Is Losing Fight Against Terror [RSS]

A new book by the senior Central Intelligence Agency officer who headed a special office to track Osama bin Laden and his followers warns that the United States is losing the war against radical Islam and that the invasion of Iraq has only played into the enemy’s hands. In the book, “Imperial Hubris,” the author is identified only as “Anonymous,” but former intelligence officials identified him as a 22-year veteran of the C.I.A. who is still serving in a senior counterterrorism post at the agency and headed the bin Laden station from 1996 to 1999. The 309-page book, obtained by The New York Times, provides an unusual glimpse into a school of thought inside the C.I.A., and includes harsh criticism of both the Clinton and Bush administrations.

“U.S. leaders refuse to accept the obvious,” the officer writes. “We are fighting a worldwide Islamic insurgency — not criminality or terrorism — and our policy and procedures have failed to make more than a modest dent in enemy forces.” The author says the threat is rooted in opposition not to American values, but to policies and actions, particularly in the Islamic world.

While I agree that we are fighting a worldwide Islamic insurgency, it is one using criminal and terrorist tactics. These are not mutually exclusive phenomena. Much of the insurgency is funded by narcotics, especially heroin, trafficking and the laundering of money through bogus Islamic charities. And, certainly, the intentional targetting of civilians and other targets used by al Qaeda and its allies qualify as terrorism.

And, as noted yesterday, while it’s certainly true that US policies have triggered the latest wave of this jihad, it is clear from reading Anonymous’ first book that they do indeed hate our values. Our non-Muslim, secular, free lifestyle is a major target of the propaganda machine that helps recruit more terrorists for the insurgency.

The piece also confirms my rebuttal of the Guardian piece that initiated the media attention of this book:

It is rare for a C.I.A. officer to publish a book while still serving at the agency and highly unusual for the book to focus on such a politically explosive topic. Under C.I.A. rules, the book had to be cleared by the agency before it could be published. It was approved for release on condition that the author and his internal agency not be identified.

The book itself identifies “Anonymous” only as “a senior U.S. intelligence official with nearly two decades of experience in national security issues related to Afghanistan and South Asia.” It identifies a previous book, “Through Our Enemies’ Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America,” as being written by the same author. Former intelligence officials identified the officer to The Times and noted that he was an overt employee of the C.I.A., but an intelligence official asked that his full name not be published because it could make him a target of Al Qaeda. The senior intelligence official said the book had been vetted to insure that it not include classified information. “We still have freedom of speech,” the official said. “It doesn’t mean that we endorse the book, but employees are free to express their opinions.”

Exactly.

In a report issued in March, the staff of the Sept. 11 commission described the bin Laden unit as a place where a “sense of alarm about bin Laden was not widely shared or understood within the intelligence and policy communities.” Another new book, “Ghost Wars,” by Steve Coll of The Washington Post, was based in part on interviews with the officer, identified by his first name, Mike. Mr. Coll reported that the White House sometimes complained to George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, that the officer was “too myopic” in his approach to manage the bin Laden group.

In the book, the author denounced the American invasion of Iraq as “an avaricious, premeditated unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat,” and said it would fuel the anti-American sentiments on which Mr. bin Laden and his followers draw. “There is nothing that bin Laden could have hoped for more than the American invasion and occupation of Iraq,” he writes.

I would note, too, that the author said that the invasion of Aghanistan was exactly what UBL wanted, too. I’m sure a significant number of Anonymous’ CIA colleagues share his assessment.

There are, however, good reasons that neither intelligence nor military officers are put in direct control of our foreign policy. There is a reflexive reaction on the part of some that we should “leave war to the professionals” and “get politicians out of it.” That’s exactly wrong. War is fought to achieve political objectives. Generals and intelligence officers—like any other bureaucrats—are necessarily myopic. Many of them are brilliant and they’re certainly better educated and more knowledgeable, on the main, than their civilian bosses. But we elect presidents and legislatures to look at the bigger picture and represent the wishes of the people. Doing the thing that makes the most sense from the perspective of the national security apparatus may often not coincide with the best interests of the citizenry.

NYT Corrects Military Numbers

NYT — Corrections

An editorial on June 8 about the Army’s overtaxed combat brigades misstated the number of active-duty combat brigades then in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the total number of such brigades. There were 11 combat brigades in Iraq, not 14, and 1 in Afghanistan, not 2. The Army has 34 combat brigades in all, not 33; 1 was added on May 26. Since the Army can comfortably station no more than about one-third of its combat brigades in front-line positions (including 2 in South Korea), that leaves it roughly 3 brigades short, not 7.

But, other than that, they got the story exactly right.

Electronic Cards Replace Coupons for Food Stamps

Steven Taylor notes that, with the new electronic food stamp program [RSS], the federal government is finally catching up to Alabama.

Beltway Traffic Jam

A very rainy Tuesday linkfest:

• Jon Henke notes that the Electoral College dilutes the white vote.
  
• Bill Hobbs cites South Knox Bubba, who hopes the Democrats replace Kerry.
  
• Mark Hasty tries in vain to achieve an acceptable color scheme.
  
• Steven Taylor assesses the utility of waiting in long lines for bad books.
  
• Radley Balko proposes reviving an old tactic for fighting Muslim terrorists.
  
• Rooftop Report has moved.
  
• Black-5 points us to an interesting music search site.

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