Blackwater Facts
A group of trial lawyers that includes a representative of an al Qaeda front group and a longtime advocate of terrorists has filed suit against Blackwater in US district court. The suit claims to be on behalf of victims of the September 16 shooting incident at Nisoor Square. But why the lawyers’ terrorist connections? And why didn’t AP and other news organizations report those connections, which are on the public record? The Associated Press and other news organizations don’t report it that way, of course, citing only the lead attorney who is not known to be tied to terrorists. But as this blog has reported several times, the cooperating attorneys are well known for their terrorist connections.
Defense Tech
Moderate temperatures, nearly perpetual sunshine, flat landing areas and subterranean resources make the rim of the Shackleton Crater — situated within the solar system’s largest impact crater — an ideal location for a lunar homestead, down near the moon’s south pole. NASA hopes to send the first pioneers there by 2020.
FrontPage Magazine
Moral inversion was well manifested in the Israeli-Palestinian “joint statement”—pursued like a sacred elixir for months by Secretary of State Rice and finally read out by Bush at the start of the conference—in which the sides “express our determination to . . . confront terrorism and incitement, whether committed by Palestinians or Israelis.” With those words Israel—a democracy struggling against sixty years of violent aggression that does not engage in terrorism or incitement any more than Finland or Iceland—trashed its achievements, its identity, its Jewish heritage, and equated itself with one of the most terroristic and incitement-ridden societies of all time.
The Associated Press
A former security guard at Andrews Air Force Base who failed to put his Muslim name on a job application was trying to conceal his ties to a controversial Washington imam, federal prosecutors said Tuesday.
Michelle Malkin
I told you earlier today about the NAACP’s war on the high school students who wanted to perform Agatha Christie’s “Ten Little Indians” at their school. One of the high school students, Lakota East High School senior Alicia Frost, e-mailed me an update. The students are trying to put the show on outside of school and they could use the public’s help.
NewsBusters
Mark Twain, famously warning against getting into a spat with newspapers, said “never pick a fight with someone who buys their ink by the barrel.” To his chagrin, Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s chief campaign strategist, is learning a modern corollary: never pick a fight with someone with three hours of national airtime. And for gosh sakes, don’t use arguments in picking the fight so false as to be child’s play to disprove.
Noah Shachtman
For the first three years of the Iraq insurgency, American troops largely retreated to their fortified bases, pushed out woefully undertrained local units to do the fighting, and watched the results on feeds from spy drones flying overhead. Retired major general Robert Scales summed up the problem to Congress by way of a complaint from one division commander: “If I know where the enemy is, I can kill it. My problem is I can’t connect with the local population.” How could he? For far too many units, the war had been turned into a telecommute. Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon were the first conflicts planned, launched, and executed with networked technologies and a networked ideology. They were supposed to be the wars of the future. And the future lost.
