UnFairWitness

Farris Hassan - somebody is lying

Anyone who believes this Farris Hassan story has never had to put a teenager on an international flight.  Go ahead, try to book one.  It can't be done because a 16 year old is either a "child" or a "youth" fare on an international flight and is not allowed to fly unaccompanied.  For an extra 150 bucks, some airlines will assign a flight attendant babysitter to your international traveler youth, but these arrangements must be made by the parent.  Another rule for your flying youth is that the person who picks them up at the destination airport must be specified by the parent at the initial airport, complete with phone numbers, etc. and the airline will not turn your precious little bundle of teenaged joy over to anyone else, not even to get rid of them.  They'll put them on a plane right back to the originating airport if their designated pickup person doesn't show or can't provide enough ID to convince the flight attendants that they're the right person.  Trust me on this - I've been through it many, many times.

So, either Hassan was put on a plane to Kuwait by his parents or he flew on fake ID.  I doubt he would have been able to pull off fake ID because he had to have a Kuwaiti visa.  Acquiring a Kuwaiti visa would have required either a Kuwaiti sponsoring him for a visitor's visa or a business requesting the visa for him for a business visa.  The only other type of visa one can get for Kuwait is a transit visa for which you have to declare a destination, so if Hassan had one of those, he lied to the Kuwaitis about his destination.

Anyway, if I know my US CBP enforcers, and believe me, I do, Hassan's parents are in some deep shit.

Let's look at some other unbelievable factoids.  Hassan disappeared on December 11, a week before his school let out for holiday break.  He allegedly bought a ticket to Kuwait (he claims he paid $900 which is also bullshit - try to find a ticket for that price.  Not even an adult can do it.)  Then, while his parents are allegedly agonizing over his disappearance, he finally calls ffrom Kuwait and they have him fly to BEIRUT.  Think about that one for a minute.  OK, so he goes to Beirut (what does that cost?) instead of straight home to be grounded for the rest of his life, which would be my first impulse.  How the hell you fly a teenager illegally in Kuwait to yet another foreign country for which he has no papers is another mystery.  And if his parents were so desperate to get him to stay away from Iraq, why the hell fly him from one side of Iraq to the other? 

So then our party boy hangs out in Beirut for ten days with "friends of the family" who then put him on a flight TO BAGHDAD.  (What does that COST??? we ask again.)  Not home.  Into a war zone.  Check the availability of tickets from Beirut to Baghdad for adults, let alone a minor.  At this point, the bullshit meter pegs totally out and explodes.  There is no freaking way to put a visa-less 16 year old American on a plane to Baghdad.

I can't wait to hear the real story.  The really interesting part will be finding out who went with him and how the parents arranged it.

UPDATE:  Looking at the blog posts and news stories generated by this story is pretty amusing.  Almost no one seems to doubt Hassan's story.  I haven't seen anything but US reporting and posting and it's all totally naive about the realities of post-9/11 travel, especially international travel. 

Farris' story is flat impossible, OK?  He'd never have made it on the plane (in Miami, apparently) without either his parents approval (and that would have been extremely difficult to arrange, even if they lied and got him a Kuwaiti visitor's visa somehow) or fake ID (in which case both Farris and his parents are in seriously deep shit with the US authorities.)

You don't just hop on a plane anymore and if you're 16, you don't hop on an international flight without an accompanying adult.  Period.  You have to go through Customs.  You have to have multiple forms of ID and visas.  There is no such thing as impulse travelling internationally without scads of paperwork. 

Somebody knows how Farris got to the ME and subsequently got around.  He didn't do it alone.

Blogs Foil Censorship of UK-Uzbek Torture Documents

See lenin at the Tomb on the British Foreign Office's Cheney-esque  tactics in the attempted silencing of  former  UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray.  Particularly revolting are the Yoo-like legal contortions of one Michael Wood as he justifies the use of "intelligence" obtained via Karimov's torture chambers. 

And lest any Americans feel smug about a torture scandal of which they aren't the central stars, the Brits receive the Uzbeki torture product through the CIA, who, as we all know, deal in only the highest quality intelligence.

See the documents stashed for safekeeping below the jump.  Download and distribute freely.

Moving House Hiatus

Sorry about the dearth of posting, but I'm moving.  Looks like I missed the typepad meltdown, at least.

I hope to be back in a week or so.

Ronald Schulz killed by The Islamic Army in Iraq

According to a web posting, Ronald Schulz, an ex-Marine working as a security consultant in Iraq has been killed.

The Islamic Army in Iraq insurgent group said on Thursday it had killed an abducted U.S. security consultant, according to an Internet statement.

The group said the man was killed because the U.S. government did not fulfil its demands, which included freeing all Iraqi prisoners and compensation to Iraqis affected by U.S. attacks.

"War criminal (U.S. President George W.) Bush continues with his arrogance and no one has any value unless they serve his criminal interests, therefore the American security adviser pig at the Housing Ministry has been killed," the statement said.

The statement's authenticity could not be verified and no pictures or video accompanied the statement. It was posted on a Web site often used by insurgents and the group said it would soon provide photographs of the killing.

On Tuesday, the group had vowed to kill the man, identified as Ronald Schulz, in 48 hour unless its demands were met. The man was the seventh Westerner taken hostage by Iraqi gunmen in just over 10 days after a lull in such abductions in recent months following tight security measures by most Westerners.

The Islamic Army in Iraq has claimed a number of kidnappings and attacks on foreign and Iraqi government forces.

The kidnapping of Schultz had come just days after gunmen seized four Christian peace activists -- two Canadians, a Briton and an American -- as well as a German archaeologist and a French engineer in Iraq.

RAF Hercules crash - shootdown confirmed

Remember the mystery surrounding the crash of the British RAF Hercules on Purple Finger Day in Iraq? It was widely reported as a shootdown, but of course, we've had to wait for the "facts" to be determined by the state. Here, nearly a year later, is the official pronouncement:

The RAF Hercules plane which crashed in Iraq killing 10 British servicemen in January had come under "hostile fire", Defence Secretary John Reid has said.

Mr Reid said the investigation board had concluded "the aircraft crashed because it became uncontrollable after hostile ground to air fire."

Other British reports give more details, though they are apparently not going to be confirmed by the official report.

IRAQI rebels used a heavy machinegun to down a British C-130 transport, killing all 10 servicemen on board, a newspaper reported today, quoting the results of a 10-month probe.
[...]
A ministry of defence spokesman said he could not confirm the accuracy of the report in The Sun, but added there would be a briefing tomorrow on the findings of the investigation into the January 30 crash near Baghdad.

At least one round, probably from a Soviet-made Dshke heavy calibre machine-gun, penetrated the fuel tank in the plane's right wing during the incident, according to investigators quoted by the newspaper.

The "very lucky shot" caused a massive explosion that sent the four-engined Hercules plummeting to the ground in a fireball, it said.

The plane was "hedge-hopping" - flying fast and low in a combat zone, usually a highly effective means of avoiding enemy ground fire, the newspaper said.

The downed aircraft was on a 70km flight north from Baghdad to the major coalition special forces base at Balad. The Sun said it belonged to the RAF's elite 47 squadron, who move elite forces soldiers covertly all over the world.

The defence ministry has declined to comment on reports that members of Britain's elite Special Air Service were aboard the flight.

Marines killed in booby-trapped outpost

It seems I was right when I thought that the story put out by the military to account for the death of ten Marines and the wounding of eleven more was fishy. Still, the new account doesn't seem all that forthcoming, either. CNN reports:

An insurgent homemade bomb that killed 10 Marines and wounded 11 others last week in Iraq was triggered as troops were leaving a promotion ceremony, Marine Corps officials said Tuesday.

Military officials originally said the Marines died December 1 while on foot patrol near the restive city of Falluja in western Iraq.

Misreporting up the chain of command led to the incorrect reporting of the location to the media, Marine officials said

Officials determined the blast went off at an abandoned flour factory used by the Marines as an outpost. It's believed one of the Marines stepped on a pressure plate, setting off the explosion, officials said. (Marines identified)

Two of the Marines killed -- from the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, I Marine Expeditionary Force -- had been promoted at the ceremony. The area around the abandoned factory had been swept for explosives before the company commander's arrival.

The bomb was believed to have been made up of at least four artillery shells.

I still don't understand why a promotion ceremony was held in an abandoned flour factory, even if it was used as an "outpost", whatever that means. Maybe eventually the whole story will come out, Tillman-style.

You've got to wonder how insurgents got into the flour factory and booby trapped it with four wired together artillery shells while it was in service as an outpost. An inside job?

UPDATE:  OK, people are emailing links to this video and asking things like:

But if this new story is true, then why did the insurgents quickly release a video showing themselves detonating a roadside bomb?

Who is telling the truth? Why tape a different event and release it? They seem to like to tape their exploits, so why not tape the factory and release that?

All I can see in that video are 8 soldiers (Marines if this is the video of the 10 killed.) Assuming there are 2 in the humvee, that could account for 10 casualties. But, there were supposed to be 21! Where are the other eleven?

Around the blogs , or Stop the Taunting!

Fun link: A Short Play Starring Christopher Hitchens, by Jonathan Schwarz.

Speaking of troublemakers...

It all began with a recommendation to celebrate Veteran's Day with a donation to AntiWar.com. Well, at least that was the proximate cause of this round.  Be sure and read Brad Spangler's evaluation, which begins, "If there’s one thing Tom Knapp knows how to do well, it’s stir up a bunch of shit. This is, in fact, laudable on his part. If I may explain…"

Clark Stooksbury defends Bush!  OK, Bush may not be the worst President ever yet, but can anyone rival him in chimpiness?

The Cunning Realist has some important points to make about the Egyptian elections and the American response to them, here first, and then here.

Abu Aardvark compares the Bathrobe Bloggers to Global Voices. 

Here's Bob Geiger shining a light on the pro-war "Move America Forward" Cindy-Sheehan stalkers, via MoxieGrrrl, who doesn't bother being diplomatic about her opinion of Melanie Morgan, MAF's lead pitbull.

John Robb on why current US strategy (clear and hold, aka oilspot)in Iraq will fail.  How badly?  Robb says, "If we do it flawlessly (which is going to be very difficult given a thinking enemy), the controlled chaos may hold long enough for the US to get most of its troops out."  How hard will it be for the  US to get the troops out?  According to Martin van Creveld, who should know:

Handing over their bases or demolishing them if necessary, American forces will have to fall back on Baghdad. From Baghdad they will have to make their way to the southern port city of Basra, and from there back to Kuwait, where the whole misguided adventure began. When Prime Minister Ehud Barak pulled Israel out of Lebanon in 2000, the military was able to carry out the operation in a single night without incurring any casualties. That, however, is not how things will happen in Iraq.
Not only are American forces perhaps 30 times larger, but so is the country they have to traverse. A withdrawal probably will require several months and incur a sizable number of casualties. As the pullout proceeds, Iraq almost certainly will sink into an all-out civil war from which it will take the country a long time to emerge — if, indeed, it can do so at all. All this is inevitable...

Shoe(t)ing at Allawi

An astute AntiWar.com reader explains why Allawi would rather claim to have been the victim of gun-wielding assassins than an angry mob throwing tomatoes and shoes:

In Arab culture its more acceptable to a man to be hit by a bullet rather than a shoe -or even worse!-by a sandal.

thats why they tried to cover up that most humilating incident by claiming that it was an assasination attempt !

And from the Department of I-wish-I-had-thought-of-that, The Wege at Norwegianity points at this post with this comment:

They were shoe(t)ing at Allawi the other day. Amazing how that Iraqi press turned shoes and tomatoes into guns and knives.

So, I stole it for the title of this post.

UPDATE: Swopa speculates on Allawi's electoral chances vs. Team Shiite.

The colour of honour

Why do Bush-boosting, pro-war Americans especially seem to find it impossible to imagine walking in another's shoes?  Via Jim Henley and Patrick Nielsen Hayden, you'll recognize the typically American Bushie right-winger attitude in the following Al Jazeera post:

The following exchange took place in between an Anonymous poster and myself in the comments section of this blog:

Anonymous:

Though you broadcast these screeds in detail because it is "news" that you have a "duty" to report, when I search the Al Jazeera site for the phrase "honor killings" I get nada. Not a single hit. Don't you think that the murder of women throughout the Islamic world by their uncles and fathers and husbands because these women have the audacity to date who they want or express what they think is newsworthy?

Me:

You make mention that our website does not mention "Honor Killings" - that is true since we don't use American English - we use English English.

Try your search using "honour" instead - or just click here  for Google results.

You see, sometimes little cultural misunderstands can cause such a big fuss.

Let's keep talking. Enjoy the weekend..!

By Mohammed posting on the Al Jazeera staff's weblog, Don't Bomb Us . 

"Let's keep talking," Mohammed says.  But Mohammed's cheerful optimism causes me to cynically recall this line from an old song:

All lies and jest, still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.

Iraqi Puppets on the take or real journalists?

Abu Aardvark points out an aspect of the Bush Administration's corruption of the Iraqi press that's pretty clearly never occurred to the American-centric defenders-of-propaganda that I've seen:

A lot of defenders of the Iraqi payola adopt a seemingly pragmatic line - we do what has to be done to fight the media war.  But this short-term vision is a textbook case of tunnel vision, winning a small battle while losing the war.  The payola scheme has immensely corrosive longer-term implications for media institutions, for American credibility, for building the institutions of pluralism and democracy. Most immediately it has devastaging implications for the credibility of pro-American voices in the region (hence Alhomayed's dismay).  Every pro-American voice in Iraq and in the region now comes under greater suspicion of having been on the take.  Those voices already - often unfairly - risked being tarred as American puppets. Now their burden has become that much heavier.  What's pragmatic about that?

Tony Pierce tried to point out in a humorous way that the same implications attach to pro-war, pro-Bush propaganda supporters in the blogosphere, though the point seems to have flown right over most of their heads, just as Matt Welch's argument did.

Why is this so difficult to see?   

Fun with Chimps

Catch.com was looking for the chimpy version of this :

So, here's my suggestion:

Najaf mob tries to assassinate Allawi with shoes?

Who to believe?  Here's Allawi's account:

Iraq's former prime minister Iyad Allawi said gunmen tried to assassinate him in Shi'ite Islam's holiest shrine on Sunday, forcing him to cut short an election campaign visit pursued by an angry mob.

"It appeared to be an assassination attempt," the secular Shi'ite said on his return to Baghdad from the holy city of Najaf.

He said 60-70 men in black, armed with guns and knives, set upon his party as he prayed at the Imam Ali mosque.

Here's an Iraqi police captain's account:

A crowd hurling shoes, rocks and tomatoes forced former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi to cut short a visit on Sunday to Iraq's holiest Shi'ite shrine during a campaign trip to the city of Najaf, police officers said.

A spokeswoman for Allawi, a secular Shi'ite, said she had no information on the incident but confirmed that Allawi, who is challenging the ruling Shi'ite Islamist Alliance bloc at next week's parliamentary election, had been in Najaf during the day.

A police captain, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a large crowd of worshippers at the Imam Ali mosque hurled sandals and shoes at Allawi -- a grave insult in Iraqi culture.

A second police officer said some of Allawi's bodyguards fired in the air to disperse the crowd and that also threw rocks, sticks, tomatoes and other projectiles. Police also intervened to break up the disturbance, he said.

Both policemen said they believed supporters of militant cleric Moqtada al-Sadr were responsible for the disturbances, though evidence for this was unclear.

"When Allawi entered the shrine, a few people, believed to be Sadrists picked up batons and threatened to attack him," the police captain said at the scene after the incident.

"His American and Iraqi guards fired in the air when everyone started throwing shoes and sandals at him."

I like the shoe story better.

Propagandists in Pajamas?

Hey, I'm not saying Tony's necessarily completely right about this,

now im not saying that Charles Johnson and Roger L. Simon are in bed with the Bush Administration, or the Instapundit. those guys are fair and balanced. any time the Republicans make horrible mistakes, the first people to point them out are Little Green Footballs and Professor Reynolds.

but i am saying that in light of the latest example of Propaganda from Above - Pajamas Media is starting to look fishier and fishier.

But what if he's on the right track?  It's worth speculating about, surely - after all, they did it in Iraq.  It would explain the Pajamistas' fake ads, and why they aren't even trying to fix their crappy website.    Anyway, check out his argument - why im so glad im not a Right Wing Blogger in 2005-2006 or a member of Pajamas Media

Later, from tony's comments - -Uh-oh, looks like Tony hit a nerve.  Pajamaman Jeff Goldstein comes out brandishing rhetorical sledgehammers.

UPDATE:  I just went over to osm.org while checking the links in this post and look what they have on their front page up at the top:

Have traditional American journalists really not yet discovered the independent media in Iraq: local bloggers who risk their lives to offer real-time reports, led by people like dentist-brothers Mohammed and Omar at Iraq the Model? Today, Iraq the Model offers an update on the mid-December national elections that you won't see in the independent U.S. media.

Aren't those the guys Jarvis had a mental breakdown over when Alex at Martini Republic and Juan Cole blogged about wondering if they  weren't a little CIA-front-like?  Why, yes, I do believe they are.  How ironic that the Pajamahadeen would trot them out to represent REAL journalism in Iraq.

"pajamas media",  Media, Blogging, Internet, Opinion, Weblog, Journalism, Blog

Twenty-one US Marine casualties.

Something bad happened here, something they aren't telling:

Ten U.S. Marines were killed by an Iraqi bomb in one of the bloodiest incidents of the war for Americans...[...]

Thursday's attack on the Marines, two weeks before Iraqis vote for a new parliament, struck a foot patrol near Falluja. Eleven Marines were wounded by an improvised explosive device (IED), the military said on Friday.

"The patrol was attacked with an IED fashioned from several large artillery shells," the Marines said.

At least twenty-one Marines on a foot-patrol were close enough together to be either hurt or killed by one IED?  That doesn't make sense.  It reminds me of the comments by William Lind on the last occasion similar to today's:

In On War #130, I raised the question of why we are doing sweeps in Iraq when the history of counter-insurgency tells us sweeps don’t work. I was motivated to write that column by the death of fourteen Marines in one Amtrack during a sweep conducted by 3/25, Cleveland’s Marine Reserve unit.

The previous day, 3/25 had lost six men, two sniper teams, under circumstances that were unclear. I recently received information on that incident that raises a very important question, a question with strategic, not merely tactical significance. I was told (not by anyone in 3/25) that the six Marines were ambushed and killed by the Iraqi troops they were attached to.

Let me say up front that I cannot confirm this report. Because I cannot confirm it, I am using it not to make a point but to raise some questions. The questions are, did this happen? If it did, why were the American people not told? And – this is the question with strategic importance – how often is this happening in Iraq today?

The reason the question has strategic meaning is that the Bush administration’s strategy, if it can be called that, for avoiding outright defeat in Iraq is to build up the Iraqi armed forces and police until the war can be turned over to them. If those same Iraqi forces are attacking American troops on a fairly frequent basis, that is a significant piece of evidence the strategy is not working.

History suggests that it was never very likely to work. Over and over, invaders have tried to raise proxy armies to do much of the fighting for them. Only a minority of the troops Napoleon used to invade Russia were French; most were coerced from reluctant “allies” the French had previously defeated, like Prussia. Not surprisingly, as soon as it could get away with it, the Prussian corps went over to the Russians.

World War II offers a similar lesson. Hundreds of thousands of Russians taken prisoner by the Wehrmacht changed sides. Many were absorbed into regular German units as Hiwis, “willing helpers.” Others formed a whole separate pro-German Russian Army under a Russian general, Vlasov. As a friend in Washington recently said, compared to “our” Iraqi forces, the Vlasov Army looked pretty good. But like most such forces, when faced with real combat, it and the Hilfswillige melted away.

Of course, there is also our own experience in Vietnam. Remember “Vietnamization?” It reflected the same strategy the Bush administration is now following: build up the armed forces of a friendly local government and let them do the fighting. Some ARVN units did fight. But the Vietnamese on the other side had a whole lot more motivation. As Saigon is now Ho Chi Minh City, will Baghdad one day be Sadr City or, worse, Osama City? I seem to see the Clio nodding “yes.”

If the American public is to assess whether or not we are succeeding in Iraq, it needs to be told when Americans are attacked by the “friendly” Iraqi government forces they are working with. Again, I cannot confirm that this happened to the six snipers from 3/25. But if it did happen and the public was not told, the Bush administration will have been caught in yet another lie. That, too, has strategic significance in a war we were lied into in the first place. If a strategy initially based on lies must rely on more lies for its continuation, it is probably not pointed toward success.

Other evidence already suggests that our attempt to create our own Iraqi armed forces is not working. The police do an excellent job of disappearing whenever the insurgents show up. Most of the latest Iraqi Army recruits are (Kurdish) Pesh Merga or Shiite militiamen who are putting on different uniforms while maintaining their old loyalties. The insurgents have infiltrated everywhere: Recently, U.S. forces have begun disbanding – sometimes forcibly – the Iraqi National Guard we previously created because it has been so thoroughly penetrated.

If, on top of this, our troops in Iraq are being attacked frequently by Iraqi government troops, and this information is deliberately being withheld from the American people, the crystal ball has turned black. So, President Rove, just what did happen to those six snipers from 3/25?

And just what happened to these twenty-one Marines?