← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · il ragno
Thread ID: 13933 | Posts: 6 | Started: 2004-05-28
2004-05-28 12:51 | User Profile
[COLOR=Navy]Nicholas Stix reminds me of that old vaudeville routine.
"Nicholas Stix doesn't like Negroes." "That's [I]good[/I]." "He's also an ardent Zionist Jew." "That's [I]bad[/I]." "But he appears to be one of those rarities, a powerless Jew with no real media juice who angers other Jews by writing about the reality of black crime and the unimprovability of the black underclass." "That's [I]good![/I]" "Yeah, well, he's still a Jew." "That's [I]bad[/I]." And so on and so on......
(No URL, but this up on VNN's May 27th Reader Mail.)[/COLOR]
[QUOTE][B]"Disappearing" Urban Crime [/B] By Nicholas Stix
"The news for New York City is spectacular," New York's Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg told a City Hall press conference on Monday. He and New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly [Email him] were claiming credit for new FBI crime stats showing major crimes÷murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, car theft, larceny and arson÷dropping 5.8% in the city in 2003. New York's crime rate now ranks it 211th of the 230 U.S. cities with 100,000-plus population÷behind Omaha, Nebraska and Wichita, Kansas.
Unfortunately, there must have been at least one skeptic at the press conference. Hizzoner reportedly "bristled" at suggestions that the city's crime stats are being driven down artificially by numbers-fudging police commanders.
"C'mon," Bloomberg snapped. "It is just not the case." [Our incredible shrinking crime rate, by David Saltonstall, New York Daily News, May 25, 2004]
Well, I am a skeptic. I say: sure, it's the case! Because I've seen it.
Some reporters - most notably Leonard Levitt of Newsday - have intermittently written on crimes that have been "disappeared" in New York by creative police reporting. But to my knowledge, I am the only journalist actually to have been at the scene of one.
It occurred on December 8, 1995; when New York's crime decline had been supposedly underway for some five years. At about 10:30 p.m., on a Queens-bound A train, a man ended an argument with two brothers by shooting one of them. Then he exited at Kingston-Throop station, in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
Riding two cars away, I neither saw nor heard the shooting. However, I interviewed a witness, saw the 20-something black victim on a gurney doing a convincing impression of a corpse, his inconsolable, raging (and apparently twin) brother accompanying him, and two emergency medical technicians wheeling away the gurney.
Since the train was a crime scene, we passengers had to exit it and the station, walk through "Bed-Stuy" to the Manhattan-bound local station, take a train three stops, and then turn around on a Queens-bound train that skipped the crime scene station.
It took me over three hours to get home that night.
In the subway below and on the street above, I counted no less than 39 police officers of every rank÷an extraordinary response.
The huge response was because, approximately 12 hours earlier, a black supremacist named Roland Smith Jr. a.k.a. Abubunde Mulocko, had entered Jewish-owned Freddie's Fashion Mart in Harlem, which was besieged by a racist "boycott," yelled "It's on!," and ordered all customers to leave. In what became known as the Harlem Massacre, Smith proceeded to shoot four people, set the store ablaze, murder seven (non-white) store employees, and commit suicide.
That made for at least five shootings on December 8.
A few weeks later, I asked NYPD press rep Officer Kathie Kelly if there had been any shootings on December 8. She told me she'd get back to me.
Later, she informed me: "There were no shootings on the eighth."
Since 1991, I have fought off at least eight racial attacks, including two attempted muggings. All were "disappeared" by police or prosecutors, even when I had bloody wounds; when the police had been called to the scene by a subway motorman or (unbeknownst to me) an anonymous witness who corroborated my depiction of events; or when the attack took place on camera, in front of a black postal police officer. (In 1994, a black New Jersey bus driver who had recently fled Brooklyn, suggested that in New York, crime victims require legal representation no less than defendants, if they wish their cases prosecuted.)
And the fudging of crime statistics is not just a story in the Naked City.
On October 23, 2003, five New Orleans police officers - including First District captain, Norvel Orazio, a 29-year veteran, who had won awards for reducing crime - were fired, and a sixth was demoted, for improperly downgrading crime complaints so that they would not show up in crime statistics.
On February 20, an audit of Atlanta's police records showed that the suppression and loss of crime records was endemic for many years, with 22,000 police reports of 911 calls disappearing in 2002 alone.
Similar mini-scandals have also occurred in recent years in Philadelphia and Boca Raton, Florida.
Urban police departments have for years been under intense pressure to reduce violent crime. But blacks and Hispanics have a virtual monopoly over urban violent crime. (In New York City in 1998, 89.2 percent of suspects in violent crimes were black or Hispanic.) And police officials dare not offend outraged black and Hispanic criminals, or their supporters in the media and in politics who constantly invent "racial profiling" hoaxes.
The police's job is impossible. And so, instead of policing hoodlums, today's modern, urban police managers aggressively police ... impressions. The "disappearing" of crime is one of their leading impression management methods.
Critics may counter: "So what are you saying, they're hiding bodies?!"
Not at all. Keep in mind: most crime reporters do not ride late at night in subway cars to observe crime firsthand, drive through city streets listening to police scanners and racing to crime scenes, or take inventory at city morgues. They are more likely to ride through the city in taxicabs. Many seem to know, or want to know, only what police officials deign to tell them. And these officials simply refuse to report many violent felonies.
Detectives engage in the wholesale "unfounding" of crimes i.e. determine that allegation were "unfounded." And murders are reclassified as non-criminal deaths. But in most cases, crime is "disappeared" by the street officer who engages in "creative writing," turning felonies into misdemeanors or non-crimes. (An additional crime statistic reduction strategy, "de-policing," withdrawing police from embarrassing confrontation with criminals, is beyond the scope of this essay.)
It's been going on for years:
On October 11, 1995, reporter William K. Rashbaum, then of the New York Daily News, published a memo he'd obtained from the 50th Precinct in The Bronx. The memo, by precinct commander, Capt. Anthony Kissik, instructed officers in the art of defining down crimes from felonies to misdemeanors or even non-crimes (e.g., a felony assault would be changed to a misdemeanor case of "harassment.")
On January 29, 1996, Newsday's Leonard Levitt reported on two rapes, one murder, and one fatal shooting of a car thief by a police officer (which was eventually counted as a homicide) from the previous December, none of which had been reported by the NYPD. The NYPD brass insisted (get this!) that a mysterious, unnamed reporter had stolen the crime reports. Levitt found out about the incidents from relatives of the victims.
On October 29, 1996, Captain Louis Vega, commander of the 41st Precinct in the South Bronx, was suspended without pay in a crime statistic fraud scandal. The Daily News quoted a stationhouse source as saying, "in any precinct you could go in and come up with complaints where the charges should be higher. There is tremendous pressure on precinct commanders to produce lower numbers." Captain Vega's mistake was apparently in violating the first law of lying: Plausibility. Crime was allegedly down 14% in the South Bronx overall from Jan. 1 to October 20, 1996 compared to the same period in 1995. But Vega reported a 40% crime reduction in his precinct.
On January 1998, the NYPD's Transit Bureau was caught fudging violent crime stats. Bureau Chief William Donoghue was forced to resign. NYPD Commissioner Howard Safir, apparently a master of fuzzy math, insisted that the fraudulent underreporting of subway crime by 20 percent did not affect the NYPD's overall crime statistics: "While a true portrait of citywide crime was being painted, a somewhat skewed picture of crime in the subway was being put forth."
There's been a distinct political pattern to news stories on the underreporting of crime. In the 1990s, these stories were almost always published in the far-left Newsday or centrist Democrat Daily News. Apparently, the neoconservative New York Post so closely identified with Rudolph Giuliani's mayoralty (1994-2001) that it could not stomach such reporting. Conversely, the left-Democrat New York Times had a consuming hatred of Giuliani, but was too lazy for the gumshoe work.
But on February 4, 1999 Amadou Diallo, an illegal immigrant from Guinea, Africa, was tragically gunned down in the Soundview section of The Bronx by four white NYPD officers from the city's (since disbanded) elite Street Crimes Unit. The detectives were searching for Isaac Jones, the worst serial rapist in the city's history, who lived in the same neighborhood, and whose predations had caused hysteria in The Bronx. Diallo resembled the description of Jones. But once Diallo lay dead, the frenzied demands to bring in the rapist were forgotten.
As were the stories on fraudulent NYPD record-keeping.
Immediately following the Diallo shooting, socialist journalists and minority leaders joined to invent the "racial profiling" hoax. They charged (and still charge) that urban police round up and even murder innocent, minority men, based solely on the latter's race and ethnicity. This hoax was a continuation of the war on urban white police begun in the 1960s, which had gained new momentum with the 1991 Rodney King case in Los Angeles, and again with the 1993 New York mayoral campaign of the Rev. Al Sharpton. The goal of the journalists, who were essentially Democrat Party propagandists, was to discredit Giuliani and, ultimately, to frustrate his planned bid for the U.S. Senate against then-First Lady Hillary Clinton. Crime-fighting was central to Giuliani's appeal: during his two terms, violent crime allegedly dropped 54.3 percent, while property crime allegedly dropped 54.7 percent per 100,000 residents.
These journalists obviously sensed that publishing stories showing that police were underreporting crime would contradict the "racial profiling" hoax. I would not see another story on "disappeared" crime in a New York daily until after Giuliani had stepped down from office in January, 2002.
But two months into the administration of liberal Democrat-turned-Republican Michael Bloomberg, reporter Larry Celona wrote in the March 14, 2002 New York Post, that a rape that had been committed in the 50th Precinct
"was logged as a lesser crime÷thus giving a rare look into what some beat cops say is a statistical sleight of hand used by their commanders.
"According to many patrol officers, commanders sometimes reclassify major crimes like murder, assault, robbery and rape as lesser offenses to make it appear they are winning the war on crime....
"÷ the March 8 rape of a woman at a Bailey Avenue hotel was recorded as an 'inconclusive' incident. Only on Tuesday, after The Post started asking questions, was the crime properly classified as rape."
(This redefining of a rape as an "inconclusive incident" is a speciality of the Philadelphia PD which for years, according to the FBI, has conquered crime through the simple expedient of finding victim complaints "unfounded." The Philadelphia PD also pioneered the method of disappearing burglaries through redefining them as the non-crime of "lost/stolen property." According to a 1998 Philadelphia Inquirer report, "Among police, the practice is called 'going down with crime.'")
On June 30, 2003, in "Crime Statistics Doubts Adding Up," Newsday's Leonard Levitt detailed the reality behind the "reduction in crime":
The punishment-by-transfer of an officer in The Bronx (again from the 50th Precinct!) who refused to downgrade a felony to a misdemeanor;
A former police official having to intercede on a victim's behalf, to get detectives who had refused to help the victim to take down a crime report;
A Brooklyn precinct commander discouraging robbery victims from reporting crimes, by refusing to permit the uniformed officer at the scene from taking down a report;
A multiple-officer tag team talking victims out of filing crime reports;
Reusing the complaint number of a disappeared crime for a new case, in order to eliminate the first crime's paper trail;
Keeping two sets of books for a precinct's crime statistics.
More recently, in March 22, Levitt and Rocco Parascandola reported on the case of former 50th Precinct commander Thomas DiRusso. From 2000-2003, when Deputy Inspector DiRusso was on the job, crime allegedly fell 26%, but in the first 10 weeks after he left the precinct in January, 2004, to head up Brooklyn South Narcotics, crime in the "5-0" allegedly increased by 11.2%.
Deputy Inspector DiRusso was reportedly aggressive at reducing crime reports. Officers told Levitt and Parascandola, that, when restaurant deliverymen were robbed and sought help from the precinct, DiRusso ran them off, threatening to ticket them for riding their bicycles on the sidewalk. His officers were also in the habit of refusing to take down crime reports from victims.
Rather than investigate DiRusso, the NYPD has stood by their man.
The reality of "disappeared" crime contradicts the managed impression that a revolution in police methods has saved New York over the past ten or so. The revolution has credited to two new policies: "broken windows" policing and "COMPSTAT" (computer statistics).
Broken windows theory, developed by George Kelling, Catherine M. Coles, and James Q. Wilson, argues that a crackdown on petty, "quality of life" crime (public urination, public drinking, fare beating, etc.) will lead to a reduction in major crime. "Broken windows" was offered as an alternative to the socialist propaganda model of "community policing," in which police were supposed to become one with those whom they were to police, becoming live-in social workers who just happened to carry guns.
COMPSTAT (computer statistics - the brainchild of late NYPD detective, crime-guru, and TV producer, Jack Maple), compiles statistics on concentrations of crime by place, day, and time of day. Increased deployments of officers can then rout the malefactors.
Militating against such an anti-crime offensive, are minority leaders and counter-police, who cry "Racism!" at the drop of a pair of handcuffs.
COMPSTAT is a "GIGO" ("garbage in, garbage out") proposition. But, as police have for years been handcuffed by race-baiters, COMPSTAT has routinely been compromised by false data and lack of political will.
But police commanders are not only handcuffed in implementing COMPSTAT by the pro-crime lobby. They are shot in the back by their own chiefs.
COMPSTAT was initially implemented under NYPD Commissioner William Bratton, who had previously run New York's independent Transit PD (which he then merged into the NYPD), the Boston PD. Since October, 2002, Bratton has run the Los Angeles PD. Bratton instituted COMPSTAT meetings at police headquarters. These became a form of public theater in which he routinely humiliated precinct commanders who had failed to produce the desired "numbers." "Bad" (read: honest) numbers were career suicide.
Commanders quickly learned what Bratton wanted. And they communicated that knowledge through the ranks.
William Bratton left the NYPD in January 1996, but his model stayed. He and his associates have since spread it across the country. (Bratton's number two man, John Timoney, was Philadelphia's police commissioner from 1998-2001.) The result is a police and street culture, in which no one÷save perhaps for livery drivers and restaurant deliverymen in poor neighborhoods÷has any idea what the true face of crime looks like. But COMPSTAT/broken windows makes for great public relations.
Or at least it did, until the police unions stopped playing ball. In late March, as part of their tactic of negotiating a new labor contract through the media, the New York Police Department's Patrolmen's Benevolent Association (PBA) and the Sergeants' Benevolent Association (SBA) attacked the NYPD brass, charging that the city's miraculously low crime rate has been achieved through÷fraudulent arrest statistics.
On March 23, PBA president Patrick J. Lynch maintained:
"We've reached a point where some local N.Y.P.D. commanders are forced to falsify stats in order to maintain the appearance of a continued reduction in crime ÷ "Some precinct commanders are cooking the books to make themselves look good. We're hearing from our members across the city that these things are happening."
SBA president Ed Mullins had made the same charges on March 3 against Capt. Sheldon Howard, the commander of Police Service Area 9, and on the 23rd, in a joint press release and press conference with the PBA, "calling upon police commissioner Ray Kelly to conduct a comprehensive citywide audit of crime and to develop procedures that will prevent police managers from downgrading or ignoring reported crimes."
The unions charged the NYPD with fudging crime reporting citywide. But they emphasized fraud in Manhattan's 10th Precinct, The Bronx' 50th Precinct, and Police Service Area 10, which serves housing projects in six Queens precincts. The NYPD admitted only to misreporting in the 10th Precinct, dismissing the other charges out of hand. (Last June, the brass admitted that 203 felonies had been improperly downgraded to misdemeanors in the 10th Precinct during 2002.)
Hopefully more police unions will take the initiative to counter the PR job done across the country by the likes of William Bratton and his media mouthpieces.
Unlike the usual negotiating hype, and in spite of the union bosses being in the delicate position of saying that their members haven't been doing the great job for which they had long taken credit, these charges have the virtue of being true.
[I]Nicholas Stix [email him] lives in New York City, which he views from the perspective of its public transport system, experienced in his career as an educator. His weekly column appears at Men's News Daily and many other Web sites. He has also written for Middle American News, the New York Daily News, New York Post, Newsday, Chronicles, Ideas on Liberty and the Weekly Standard. [/I] [/QUOTE]
2004-05-28 13:23 | User Profile
[COLOR=Navy]Just to prove I wasn't kidding about Stix......here's a heaveworthy double-helping of his op-edding when the subject [I]isn't [/I] the blacks who menace him on the A train. Once he's got Jamaal off his plate, he can dig into the main course, the eternal blood-enemy of his race: [B]you[/B].[/COLOR]
[QUOTE][url]http://www.opinionet.com/article.php?id=2135&PHPSESSID=30b3304f6bcf8b39a52917781464d7ed[/url]
[B]Are Americans European?[/B]April 3, 2004 by Nicholas Stix
[FONT=Times New Roman]Is America a “European” nation? Is she “Western”? Is there a difference?
Today, the terms “the West” and “Western” can refer to America alone, to America and her former European allies, or even simply to white folks. The terms are successors to the terms “Europe” and “European.”
Most Americans under the age of 40 know little about Europe, and have only the most tenuous relation to the Old World. What they do know, however, is that we bailed the Western Europeans out of two world wars, and then saved them from communism.
And yet, today our relationship to Europe, even the concept of “Europe,” is typically exaggerated here at home. American socialist writers speak still of our “European allies,” when referring to countries (France and Germany) that can only honestly be referred to as rivals or outright enemies. And multiculturalists, black racists, and white nationalists alike refer to white Americans via the euphemism, “European Americans.”
The socialist writers’ practice is not hard to understand. They are writing not of America’s allies, but of their own. They see themselves as domestic enemies of America, and consider America’s foreign enemies their friends. (Hence, I disagree with Lee Harris’ thesis that American “liberals” have no concept of an “enemy.” Sure they do – the term refers to their own country, and its patriotic defenders.) You can find these traitors all over the world, sucking up to America’s foreign enemies, the latter of whom hold the traitors in contempt, but who find them useful idiots. Sound familiar?
And so, when the Spaniards turned on us, the New York Times’ March 16 house editorial engaged in double-talk: “It is possible to support the battle against terrorism wholeheartedly and still oppose a political party that embraces the same cause.”
No, it isn’t.
In theory, one could “support the battle against terrorism wholeheartedly” while voting against a political party embracing the same cause, if say, that party had botched every other aspect of statecraft, particularly the economy. But before 311, the vast majority of Spaniards had never even halfheartedly supported the battle against Islamic terrorism, and the Popular Party’s stewardship of the economy had been excellent. But at the Times, anyone who screws over America is their friend, and must be defended.
Such traitorous anti-Americanism is nothing new. In Oliver Stone’s anti-American movie, Platoon (1986), set during the War in Vietnam, the “good” American sergeant, “Elias” (Willem Dafoe), says “We've been kicking other people’s asses for so long, I figure it's time we got ours kicked.” The character was a hero to anti-Americans across the land, who saw his murder by the evil sergeant, “Barnes” (Tom Berenger), in terms of the crucifixion of Jesus. That reaction was odd, coming as it did from a group of atheists.
The use of the term “European-American,” has had an even odder trajectory. As far as I can determine, it comes from the Nation of Islam, when it was known as the Black Muslims, under the leadership of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad (aka convicted felon and traitor, Elijah Poole; 1897-1975) and Elijah’s momentary favorite son, Malcolm X (aka convicted felon, Malcolm Little; 1926-1965). The Black Muslims identified the races with continents. Well, sort of. Early on, they referred to blacks as “Asiatics,” so their geography was as nutty as everything else they said.
I think white multiculturalists are simply imitating black racists, as they do whenever they discuss race relations.
The white nationalists are the oddest bunch. The typical white nationalist knows as much about Europe as he does about Timbuktu, and the brilliant ones, most notably Sam Francis, should know better than to join the words “European” and “American.” Perhaps this is some sort of parody of the way blacks think they are turning a negative into a positive, by obsessively using the “n”-word.
America does have a very close cultural and historical relationship to England, but if there’s one thing I learned in over five years of living in Europe, it is that England ain’t in Europe. (I also learned that I am no “European.”)
The Brits may now be members of the European Union, but when I lived in the former West Germany, the Brits were part of the EU-forerunner, the Common Market, yet I never heard any Continentals speak of the British as “Europeans.” There was a palpable tension between the Brits and the Europeans, and there still is.
We got our language, our Common Law traditions, our notions of representative government, and our empiricist philosophical tradition from the Brits. (But we went beyond them in limiting government, with our Bill of Rights, and have no hereditary -- if merely symbolic -- monarchy, and no state church.) The European tradition, conversely, is one of centralized absolutism and obscurantist, metaphysical speculation. Since FDR, unfortunately, we have been moving toward the Old World, as the American people have acquiesced to creeping socialism, centralization, absolutism and anti-scientific thinking.
Europe is for us less an ideal, than a cautionary example.
And yet, I was once in love with Europe. The idea of Europe, at any rate. I got over that love, by living there. And yet, I shall never forget, and never regret, the five years I spent in West Germany, reading old editions of old books; studying philosophy with the world’s greatest living classicist, Hans Joachim Kraemer (not that I’m a classicist!); working on the assembly-line, producing the world’s greatest production car (at Daimler-Benz -- “Mercedes” to you civilians); falling in love with the German language and one of its speakers; and traveling on both sides of the Berlin Wall.
By the early 20th century, Europeans tended to speak synonymously of “Europe,” “Christianity,” and “the West.” But Christianity was born in the same place as Judaism – the Middle East. Christianity may have achieved its greatest political power in Europe, but by the mid-19th century, at the height of European power, Christianity was a decadent, empty shell. And the ideas associated with “the West” were already moving … west.
Until the past generation, the notion of being a “European,” as opposed to the national of a particular country, was an oddity. There were no “Europeans,” there were only Frenchmen, Germans, etc. Today, since “Europeans” do not identify themselves in opposition to Asia and Africa (and South America isn’t a part of their consciousness), the only reason I can see for their identification with the Continent, is in unified opposition to America. (No, not “North America”; Europeans are indifferent to Mexico and Canada. The term “North America” functions merely as a petty insult to Americans.)
The official story today, is that nationalism destroyed Europe. As is so often the case, the official story is nonsense. Nineteenth century European history is largely split between wars pitting nation-states and alliances against each other, and the rise of revolutionary, transnational movements (communism, pan-Germanism). Those two trajectories converged and exploded, in the first half of the 20th century. In each case, a transnational movement (communism, national socialism) bonded with a national base and nationalistic passion (Russia, Germany, Austria). The irony, is that one of the reasons that Europe failed to stop Nazism, was due to the interwar influence of a bureaucratic, pacifist humanitarianism. After the war, that pacifist humanitarianism was left standing, unchallenged, in Western Europe, where it still saps the Continent’s strength. Today, corrupt, supranational bureaucracies (the UN, EU) are manipulated by nationalist interests (France, Germany, Russia) in the name of “internationalism.”
And as Europeans permit their nations to be swamped with their Muslim enemies, one wonders if the nations of the Old World will go down with a bang or a whimper. Thank goodness, no American president would be so foolish, as to let the U.S. be overwhelmed by hostile foreigners!
Europe functions today as a grand museum. It is home to much of the world’s great art, literature, philosophy, architecture, libraries, churches, and museums in the traditional sense … and oh, the food! Unfortunately, this treasure is largely lost on the Europeans, who have been culturally bankrupt and politically socialist since at least the end of The War. Given their embrace of the inferior fare at McDonald’s, Europeans’ appreciation of even their own food is suspect.
Rather than studying the masterpieces of the past, in order to create new ones, Europeans today often are simply satisfied to know that previous Europeans created great works, to patronize cultures that have not, and to smugly believe that their neglect of one legacy, and frivolous elevation of the other, makes them superior to the rest of the world.
Thus should Americans study Europe’s triumphs … and its decline. For if we are not careful, in the not-so-distant future, Europe’s fate will be our own.[/FONT][/QUOTE]
[QUOTE][url]http://www.opinionet.com/article.php?id=2186&PHPSESSID=30b3304f6bcf8b39a52917781464d7ed[/url]
[B]Abu Ghraib: To Hell With Apologies[/B] May 12, 2004 by Nicholas Stix
[FONT=Times New Roman]Sorry, Sorry, Sorry!
On Thursday, May 6, Pres. Bush publicly apologized to Jordan’s King Abdullah II for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. I wasn’t aware that Abdullah was the king of Iraq. Apparently, when America screws up, our leader must apologize to any and every Moslem in the world. I must have missed King Abdullah II’s apology for the butchering of four American civilians in Falluja. King Abdullah is a “moderate, pro-U.S.” Arab, which means that his statements on behalf of genocidal terrorists are couched in restrained tones, and with an aristocratic, Oxbridge accent.
And while being abused by Congress during his testimony last Friday, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld offered his “deepest apology” to the abused prisoners.
The Arab Moslem world is obsessed with humiliating people, especially non-Moslems. All I have to say to President Bush is, You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din. (For some pictures of our Falluja dead, see News Designer and Free Republic. Oddly enough, none of the 262 photographs of Falluja that I found archived at google images, was of the American victims. On the other hand, google also has no pictures of the abuse at Abu Ghraib. So much for its claim to be “the most comprehensive image search on the web.” Pictures from the Abu Ghraib scandal are available at the New Yorker.
Sy Hersh Relives His Ben Bradlee Moment
Investigative reporter Sy Hersh broke the Abu Ghraib story, based on a 53-page, confidential report on the matter that was written by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, based on the latter’s investigation. While Gen. Taguba recommended discipline short of courts martial for the officers implicated in the scandal, assuming Hersh accurately quoted from the Taguba report, it would be a miscarriage of justice, if only the current seven enlisted men and women suspects were to be prosecuted. (The seven suspects are: Staff Sergeant Ivan L. “Chip” Frederick II; Specialist Charles A. Graner; Sgt. Javal Davis; Spec. Megan Ambuhl; Spec. Sabrina Harman; Spec. Jeremy Sivits; and Pvt. Lynndie England.)
Hersh’s reporting, if true, suggests the need for reorganizing the military prison system in Iraq. And yet, the hyperbolic editorializing that he tries to piggyback onto his alleged reporting of the Taguba report, undermines his credibility: Hersh seeks, dishonestly, to erase any distinction between our camps in Guantanamo Bay (“Gitmo”), Cuba and Abu Ghraib, respectively, and between the seven suspects and all our detention personnel, and in a case of political correctness run amok, implies that Islam, a religion that teaches its followers to murder everyone of a different faith, is morally superior to American norms: “Such dehumanization is unacceptable in any culture, but it is especially so in the Arab world.” Hersh then quotes college professor Bernard Haykel of NYU, who says that because of the sensitive nature of Arab culture, and Islam’s outlawing of homosexuality, the degradation at Abu Ghraib was “all a form of torture.” “Being put on top of each other and forced to masturbate, being naked in front of each other—it’s all a form of torture.” Somehow, I doubt the good professor spends much time publicly defending the outlawing of homosexuality in Greenwich Village.
Had the jailers been the products of sensitive, Arab culture and the prisoners American, we wouldn’t need a college professor’s mental masturbation to turn humiliation into “torture”; you’d have real torture and a huge, anonymous grave somewhere, and instead of an investigation and prosecutions, the Arab jailers would receive promotions.
Sy Hersh made his name with an expose on My Lai, and as powelinelineblog.com noted last Thursday, “… Hersh is back, trying to relive the glory days when he earned his chops on William Calley.” The My Lai story was to Hersh what the Watergate story was to Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee. Ever since, each man looked for Nixons or My Lais under his bed.
The Gang on 43rd Street
Like Democrats and Arabs, America’s most corrupt newspaper is also demanding that the President prostrate himself before it. In its lead house editorial, “The New Iraq Crisis: Donald Rumsfeld Should Go,” Friday’s New York Times called for Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s head. Surprise, surprise. The Times, which due to its compulsive dishonesty, is disgraced on a regular basis -- if its owners, editors, and staffers have any sense of disgrace -- claimed that Rumsfeld should be fired, due to the abuses uncovered at Abu Ghraib. Never mind that a general was in charge of Abu Ghraib – the general was a woman, Brig. Gen. Janice Karpinski. The Times, which has long supported the integration and promotion of women in the armed services, physical and leadership abilities be damned, won’t tolerate punishing incompetent or insubordinate female officers. The Times’ poster girl for the military is Claudia Kennedy, the retired Army lieutenant general who owed her rise to feminist politicking, and whose greatest “military” accomplishment was in pulling an Anita Hill on Maj. Gen. Larry Smith, thus ending his career. In 1999, when Smith was up for a promotion, Kennedy claimed he had groped and attempted to kiss her three years earlier.
In fact, the newspaper had sought to get Rumsfeld fired long before Sy Hersh broke the Abu Ghraib story. Abu Ghraib is a mere pretext for the Times, which always hated Rumsfeld for pursuing the Administration’s policies with assertiveness, magnetism, and wit. The newspaper apparently hopes that if it can engineer the Secretary’s ouster, it would send Pres. Bush and Rumsfeld’s successor a message to be more solicitous of the Times’ opinions, to engage in political self-castration, to surrender in Iraq and to give up any chance of being re-elected, come November. In other words, Pres. Bush should be a figurehead, and Times publisher Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr. should run the country.
(Although even the establishment media’s own polls show Rumsfeld as more popular than the President, with only 20% of respondents seeking the Secretary’s ouster, while 69% support him, establishment media figures continue to lie, and claim that the American people are upset with Rumsfeld. William F. Buckley, of all people, claimed that “The American people are so dumbfounded by what happened, they are listening attentively to a cry for the dismissal of Donald Rumsfeld.” That would be the American people at the cocktail parties Buckley attends. Buckley isn’t lying; it’s just that he is closer to the people of Azerbaijan than he is to the American people. In the face of such a media lynching, it is a good thing that the The Federalist has started a petition in support of Rumsfeld, which at this writing has over 99,000 signatures. Since the John Kerry campaign started a petition demanding Rumsfeld’s dismissal, which Kerry’s people claim has over 250,000 signatures, it would be good if patriotic Americans could gather up 300,000 signatures for the Secretary, and even better, if we could get 1,000,000. I’m not usually one for petitions, but I’ve made an exception, and signed this one. The President has given Rumsfeld public votes of confidence, which are often the last thing a condemned man hears before the guillotine comes down on his neck. A successful petition would help remind the President of just how much he supports Rumsfeld, while helping to counteract whatever Karl Rove is whispering in his other ear. So please sign the petition, and get everyone you know to sign it. If you have kept compromising photos of your boss in safekeeping, now is the time to use them. If you’re on reasonably good terms with your ex, have a get-together and during a tender moment whisper in his/her/its ear, “You have to sign the petition to save Rummy!!!”)
Note that as a young man, during the War in Vietnam, Pinch Sulzberger supported the North Vietnamese communists killing as many American G.I.s as possible; he is now every bit the enemy of America that he was then. Sulzberger has done everything in his power to undermine the war effort, since before we even went to war with al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Just after 911, Sulzberger’s lackeys wrote constantly of the “quagmire” awaiting us in Afghanistan, and while they failed to harm our boys and girls there, they did everything to ensure that theirs was a self-fulfilling prophecy in Iraq. (By the way, could someone please explain to me, what female military personnel have been doing in forward areas the past two-and-a-half years?) Indeed, many of our problems in Iraq have been due to the Administration handcuffing American soldiers (e.g., not permitting American troops to impose martial law following the fall of Baghdad, and more recently in keeping them from leveling the mosques which are used by terrorists as ammunition dumps, gathering points, and sniper posts), so as not to enrage the Times and the socialist/communist street. (Or is it sensitive, suburban soccer moms about whom the Administration is so concerned?)
Had FDR had to endure such a hostile press during WWII, the western half of America would now be speaking Japanese, and the eastern half German. Then again, if Abe Lincoln had had to endure such a seditious press, he would have been forced to let the Confederate states go, and with them, the Union. Lincoln’s solution was to have all Northern newspapers critical of him shut down for the duration of the war.
(Heck, some Timesmen -- and lefty scribes elsewhere -- hate the President so much, that they appeared to wish him dead, on the occasion of last year’s secret Thanksgiving Day trip to visit our troops in Iraq.)
Abu Ghraib: America’s Jenin Massacre?
In case you think that by my defiant tone I seek to diminish the significance of Abu Ghraib … you’re right. While the abuses at Abu Ghraib are unacceptable, the notion that America owes the Arab world an apology is ludicrous. Abu Ghraib was not Auschwitz, it was not German soldiers shooting allied POWs in the Ardennes during the Battle of the Bulge, it was not My Lai, it certainly wasn’t people being shredded alive, and it wasn’t Hussein’s Abu Ghraib. And it wasn’t Nick Berg getting his head sawed off, in the slowest, most painful manner possible, for the benefit of a worldwide audience. Abu Ghraib was regrettable, and those who engaged in misconduct should be court-martialed and punished under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but that is it. Compared to Arab prisons, Abu Ghraib was the Waldorf Astoria. No one should lose a moment’s sleep over the matter.
A nation that would wallow in remorse over an Abu Ghraib, is a nation that is unfit to defend itself. America is in a world war for its very existence, a war Sulzberger and Co. are doing everything in their power to cause us to lose. Abu Ghraib functions for them as just one more of an endless string of “October surprises,” which now occur every month of the year. That is nothing short of treasonous, and that is what we should be concerned about.
The real Abu Ghraib story isn’t how an Abu Ghraib could have happened, but how the sort of one-sided, dishonest reporting and editorializing on Abu Ghraib could have happened. Journalists in America and abroad have distorted Abu Ghraib in much the way that in April, 2002, anti-Semitic journalists and UN officials fabricated out of Israel’s battle for Jenin, a tale of (non-existent) Israeli “atrocities.”
In its second house editorial, “The New Iraq Crisis: The Military Archipelago,” Friday’s Times claimed that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were predetermined by the allegedly illegal, abusive system the Administration erected at its foreign detention camps at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere, beginning in 2002. The Times asserted that interrogation methods such as depriving prisoners of sleep “violate American values, international standards of human dignity and the lawful rules of war.”
The problem with the Times’ criticisms is that they are lies, piggybacked onto lies the newspaper spread last fall, when it claimed that the detention center at Guantanamo Bay (“Gitmo”) violated the Geneva Conventions. The lies originated from Aryeh Neier, the far-left former director of Human Rights Watch and present head of anti-American billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Institute, and from the anti-American, pro-Muslim Red Cross, but were echoed, without attribution, by the Times. Note that in his report on Abu Ghraib, Sy Hersh also echoes, in passing, the lies about Gitmo. The Times has sought, ever since, to bury the federal court system and the War on Terror under an avalanche of politicized terrorism cases.
Heck, the image of Gitmo perpetuated by the Left is so fantastic, that I half expect propagandists to cite abuses by fictional heavies from the movie, A Few Good Men.
Counterfeit Conventions
The Times’ trick last October, in echoing Neier and the Red Cross, was to spread a counterfeit version of the Geneva Conventions, designed to cripple America’s prosecution of the War on Terror, and empower America’s enemies. The counterfeiting starts with the notion that the Conventions are somehow “international law” and universally, unconditionally binding, though when one reads between the lines, one sees that in the Neier/Red Cross counterfeit version, the Conventions are unconditionally binding on the U.S., but not on her enemies. In fact, the Geneva Conventions have the character not of international law, which is a fiction, but of a treaty, even if this particular treaty has 188 signatories. Thus, the actual Geneva Conventions apply only to military conflicts between High Contracting Parties, say America and France; they do not apply to conflicts between a High Contracting Party and “illegal combatants,” of whom terrorists are a classic type. Some of the characteristics of illegal combatants are the lack of a uniform or the equivalent (“insignia”), identifying them as soldiers; the refusal to openly carry arms; the lack of a commanding officer responsible for combatants’ actions; and the refusal to follow the laws and customs of war. Illegal combatants do not receive the status or rights of prisoners of war.
In practice, many nations consider being a signatory to the Geneva Conventions no more binding them to legal norms than their membership in the U.N. Any number of bloody, African kleptocracies are Contracting Parties, including Rwanda, Zimbabwe, and the Sudan. Neier, the Red Cross, and the Times would have, as per their counterfeit Conventions, each foreign terrorist either getting a federal trial, or facing a tribunal controlled not by the U.S., but by the Red Cross. It is no mystery why the likes of Sulzberger, Neier, and the Red Cross seek such a legal charade. They wish variously to free terrorists via the Red Cross, and to use the federal courts to put America on trial, to destroy her legal system, undermine the war effort, and to destroy her.
Confusion at the Top
Regarding leftists’ counterfeit Geneva Conventions, Pres. Bush and his advisors have not helped matters. Secretary Rumsfeld has gone on the record as variously stating that suspected terrorists are not covered by the Geneva Conventions, and saying that all prisoners at American facilities abroad (Gitmo, etc.) are being treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. Does this mean that we are granting all the rights of the Geneva Conventions to illegal combatants who are not entitled to them, or that, as per the Geneva Conventions, we are not granting to illegal combatants rights that are accorded only to regular soldiers? The first option seems unlikely, since in that case, if a prisoner simply repeated some terrorist equivalent of his name, rank, birth date and serial number, we’d have to give up on interrogating him. In sometimes suggesting that we are treating illegal combatants the same as lawful combatants, the Administration has improperly given the high moral ground to America’s domestic and international enemies, who as Cornell University scholar Jeremy Rabkin has noted, continue to make mischief with international law; it has sowed confusion as to what the Geneva Conventions really say; and it has missed out on a “teachable moment.” I doubt anyone at the New York Times, with the possible exception of William Safire, has read the Geneva Conventions, but has anyone in the West Wing bothered reading them?
In speaking of a “military Archipelago,” an allusion to Nobel Laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, the Times seeks to equate the Bush Administration with Soviet totalitarianism. But considering that the Times is published by a communist supporter of totalitarianism, is that really a criticism or a compliment?
Lawless Leftists
In a third editorial piece on Friday, “A President Beyond the Law,” retired Times columnist Anthony Lewis continued the theme of painting the President as a dictator. “Mr. Bush has refused to comply with the Geneva Convention. He decided that all the Guantánamo prisoners were ‘unlawful combatants’ — that is, not regular soldiers but spies, terrorists or the like.” And so, they were. And so, in that respect, the President was complying with the Geneva Conventions.
“There was a stunning moment in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address when he said that more than 3,000 suspected terrorists ‘have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: They are no longer a problem for the United States.” [Sounded great to me when I heard the SOTU, and it still sounds great to me! – N.S.]
“In all these matters, there is a pervasive attitude: that to follow the law is to be weak in the face of terrorism. But commitment to law is not a weakness.”
Lewis would have us sending soldiers -- no doubt under U.N. control -- around the world carrying handcuffs, instead of guns. Were any terrorists to end up dead, he’d have our soldiers prosecuted via the anti-American International Criminal Court (ICC), which would more accurately be called, the International Kangaroo Court. If any handcuffed American soldiers were to die at the hands of “suspects,” Lewis would say that that was a cost of our international legal system. For Anthony Lewis, the Constitution is a suicide pact, and wars are to be run by judges, and foreign judges, at that. He weeps for terrorists, while turning a cold eye to Americans. I cannot emphasize enough the fictional character of Anthony Lewis’ claims about the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions. (The same thing goes for leftwing propagandists’ claims about “international law.”)
(Note that we have already harmed our soldiers by putting outrageous power in the hands of military lawyers. In one case, during the war in Afghanistan, one of our attack drones had drawn a bead on Taliban leader Mullah Omar, but a military lady lawyer forbade the generals from doing their job. As a result, Mullah Omar is still alive and well somewhere in Afghanistan.)
In treating terrorists as regular soldiers, Lewis, Neier, Sulzberger and Co. would turn the laws (more accurately, Anglo/European/American traditions) of war upside down. Of course, they also support the ICC, which would treat American soldiers as terrorists, and are angry that we have not signed on to it.
Just so you get the context of Lewis’ supposedly universal, transcendent prescriptions, when George H.W. Bush was president, Lewis was a pacifist. For Lewis, there was no good reason for America to enter a war -- any war. That was then. The moment Bill Clinton was elected president, Lewis became a warmonger who couldn’t wait to send American troops into third-world quagmires – all for humanitarian reasons, natch.
Anthony Lewis is married to Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Margaret Marshall, who last November projected a fictitious right to same-sex marriage onto the Massachusetts State Constitution. And so, as much as the members of the Lewis-Marshall household may huff and puff about the law, its members are hypocrites who hold the law in contempt.
The two house editorials and Lewis’ op-ed piece were clearly coordinated. The Times (read Sulzberger Jr.) apparently saw in them the opportunity to kill three birds with one stone: Create synergy among the pieces, in demanding Rumsfeld’s dismissal, in reiterating and psychologically reinforcing the lies the newspaper had previously spread about the Geneva Conventions, and of course, in helping the campaign of confessed war criminal John Kerry.
The true significance of the Abu Ghraib story is not the humiliations that seven American soldiers may have inflicted on Iraqi detainees, with or without the connivance of intelligence officers. It is the story, rather, of a protracted campaign led by the New York Times and the anti-American, pro-Jihadi International Committee of the Red Cross, in misrepresenting the Geneva Conventions, and thus painting all of America’s detention camp personnel as war criminals, and ultimately, our cause as criminal. Thus, when the inevitable Abu Ghraib came along, the Times & Co. could misrepresent humiliations as “atrocities.” The campaign’s goals were and are to give aid and comfort to our enemies, and to demonize, demoralize, discredit and defeat America in the War on Terror.
While all “sage” pc commentators and editorial pages talked last week about what a fatal blow American prestige had suffered in the Arab world as a result of the Abu Ghraib scandal, a lonely voice dissented. Appearing, of all places, on PBS’ Lehrer Report, Johns Hopkins professor Fouad Ajami pointed out that Arab outrage over Abu Ghraib was entirely affected – these people hated us just as much before Abu Ghraib as they do now, and there is nothing we could do to get them to stop hating us.
Ajami could just as well have been talking about Pinch Sulzberger’s New York Times[/FONT].[/QUOTE]
[COLOR=Navy]It might look like a duck, walk like a duck and quack like a duck, and yet be a Duckstein the whole time. This is why we need race laws.[/COLOR]
2004-05-28 17:15 | User Profile
IR,
As I mentioned in another thread, I am beginning to understand why Middle American News pulls its punches WRT Israel, with people like Stix on its writing staff. They run columns by Reese, Sobran and Buchanan, but never any ones critical of Israel or American organized Jewry. They run Francis too, and finally ran one of his critical of the Perle/Fetih/Wolfowitz axis....maybe that slipped through. They even run a page worth of crap every month by Ann Coulter.
I don't think I'l be renewing.
Stix and M.A.N., along with Weiner-Savage, seem to be attempts to give the neocon agenda "populist" cache, caving on immigration and multiculturalism, but preserving the all-important support for Israel.
2004-05-28 17:17 | User Profile
Are these outfits suffering from letting the zhids join? Or are they gaining credibility? :yawn:
2004-05-28 18:27 | User Profile
The mind of people like Stix is very simple. 'Europe' killed many Jews. Therefore we must poison the minds of Americans against Europe, esp. France and Germany.
Middle American News is probably aimed at Christian Zionist nutcases.
2004-05-28 21:01 | User Profile
Nick Stix? That sounds like a porn star or a pseudonym.
Whenever Jews pen stuff like this, I imagine a pudgy little yid huffing and puffing alongside the railroad track as the White Nationalist Express starts gathering steam, hoping to hop on, settle into the club car for a while, then sneak into the engineer's car when the time is right.