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There has some speculation recently that the Stars & Stripes have been intentionally covering up, not reporting, ignoring, or whatever other phrase you want to use to describe not publishing stories about GI misbehavior in Korea which is giving the appearance of a drop in GI incidents. I don’t believe it, but I decided to e-mail the Stars & Stripes and get a response to such claims anyway.

As I expected there was a logical explanation for the spike in incidents earlier this year along with the drop off this summer and it has nothing to do with the Stars & Stripes intentionally not reporting incidents. Many people working in the JAG office were PCSing in May and front loaded the cases to get them completed before they left. This contributed to the apparent spike in incidents earlier this year. With so many cases tried before the summer started this caused the apparent drop in incidents this summer.

For those that are wondering even if the USFK command wanted to censor the Stars & Stripes they can’t due to DOD Directive 5122.11:

Stars and Stripes is a Department of Defense-authorized daily newspaper distributed overseas for the U.S. military community. Editorially independent of interference from outside its editorial chain-of-command, it provides commercially available U.S. and world news and objective staff-produced stories relevant to the military community in a balanced, fair, and accurate manner. By keeping its audience informed, Stars and Stripes enhances military readiness and better enables U.S. military personnel and their families stationed overseas to exercise their responsibilities of citizenship.

Now I know many of you reading this are wondering why the Stars & Stripes are not reporting on developments in some of the USFK corruption cases or the killing of SPC Vang Her by a Korean taxi driver. I would like to know more as well, but just because the Stars & Stripes hasn’t published any more follow up articles doesn’t mean they are covering anything up. A legitimate newspaper like the Stars & Stripes needs facts to report something not innuendo and rumor. Innuendo and rumor is what my comments section is for. 🙂

I think the Stars & Stripes has done a very good job of publishing incidents along with other articles of interest for USFK, especially in the last two years. I have said before that the perception of the increase in GI crimes is because the Stars & Stripes along with the Korean media does a much better job of reporting incidents compared to in the past and then these reports are picked up on blogs like this one thus making people more aware of them. When I first came to Korea eight years ago the villes were much more crazy and filled with many more incidents than now. It was just that the media and people in general did not pay as much attention to it as they do now in this post June 13, 2002 period.

I for one am glad the court martial and civilian court results are published because it creates better awareness of the penalties in store for those who violate either Korean Law or the UCMJ. I used to take the newspaper clippings and hang them on the barracks bulletin board for the soldiers walking out to read. I have always been a big believer that informed soldiers make better decisions and the Stars & Stripes in my opinion has done a good job of this.

I guess this is one way to promote your nation:

A friend has sent me an internet video clip, featuring some extremely attractive Israeli women on the beach.

Two young men are struggling with their emotions watching them. "Holy Jesus," they say, as one bikini-clad woman parades in front of them.

"Holy Mother of God" as another bends over to pick up a ball at their feet.  The payoff at the end of the clip? "Israel: No wonder they call it the Holy Land."

What do you think of when you think of Israel? Bombs and bullets or babes and bikinis? You may not have noticed but recently there’s been a concerted effort to sway you towards the latter.

The video is a viral ad. Not for television, but for people to pass round the internet – like my friend did to me. 

Keta Keta, a viral ad agency based in Tel Aviv made it for free. They say they wanted to beautify their country’s image. [Dominic Waghorn, SKY News]

You can view the video below:

What is especially interesting about this is that all of these girls recently completed their mandatory military service for the Israeli Defense Force. 

This video may not have been produced by the Israeli government but the government has learned that sex sells and has allowed former Israeli Defence Force women to appear in a Maxim magazine photo shoot:

It may be controversial but I’m willing to bet it will work. 

Last week an Israeli strike on Syria that destroyed nuclear material acquired from North Korea were first reported.  Now the likelihood of this story has grown substantially with more details of the strike becoming known:

IT was just after midnight when the 69th Squadron of Israeli F15Is crossed the Syrian coast-line. On the ground, Syria’s formidable air defences went dead. An audacious raid on a Syrian target 50 miles from the Iraqi border was under way.

At a rendezvous point on the ground, a Shaldag air force commando team was waiting to direct their laser beams at the target for the approaching jets. The team had arrived a day earlier, taking up position near a large underground depot. Soon the bunkers were in flames.

Ten days after the jets reached home, their mission was the focus of intense speculation this weekend amid claims that Israel believed it had destroyed a cache of nuclear materials from North Korea. [Uzi Mahnaimi, Sarah Baxter, and Michael Sheridan, Times of London]

You have to read this entire article because it offers fascinating details about the Israeli strike and the Syrian acquisition of North Korean nuclear technology.  The article claims the strike happened 50 miles up the Euphrates River from Iraq.  I went ahead and scouted 50 miles up the Euphrates River using Google Earth.  The line below represents exactly 50 miles up the Euphrates River from the Syrian-Iraqi border:

Here is a close up of the area:

If you look around the area you can find a few structures along the hill sides such as this that is similar to nuclear sites found in Iran that the North Koreans have been working on:

Google Earth has detailed imagery of the Iranian nuclear sites but since I can’t get the same level of clarity over Syria it makes it difficult to narrow down possible nuclear sites.  Fellow amateur imagery analysts out there feel free to look around and see if you can locate the Syrian nuclear site.  

Anyway beside the details of the strike, here is what I found most interesting in the Times article:

An expert on the Middle East, who has spoken to Israeli participants in the raid, told yesterday’s Washington Post that the timing of the raid on September 6 appeared to be linked to the arrival three days earlier of a ship carrying North Korean material labelled as cement but suspected of concealing nuclear equipment.

Why do I find this interesting?  Well because back in August look what South Korea sent to North Korea:

"North Korea is having difficulties recovering from the floods because of the shortage of construction equipment and materials," he said at a briefing.

Ministers had decided to send cement, iron bars, trucks, fuel and road restoration equipment to North Korea at the earliest possible time, he said.

On Thursday, South Korea delivered its first consignment of emergency relief aid to its northern neighbour. [BBC]

North Korea so desperately needs cement for reconstruction from the floods yet they send a ship loaded with concrete to Syria?  Was the cement sent to North Korea in August by South Korea the same cement popping up in Syria in September?  Also was this cement intended to make the same type of tunnels and bunker systems that the North Koreans have been making for the Iranians?  I maintained last month that the North Koreans were playing up the flood damage for increased aid for a reason and now we may have found what that reason is. 

I just have to wonder if that boat loaded with cement disguising North Korean nuclear materials was in fact South Korean cement does that make Seoul complicit in nuclear proliferation?  This is the result that unconditional and unmonitored aid to North Korea has resulted in for the South Korean government, being accomplices to nuclear proliferation. 

This story is gaining enough traction that even the US State Department has come out on the record claiming it is possible that Syria acquired nuclear material:

Andrew Semmel, a senior US State Department official, said Syria might have obtained nuclear equipment from “secret suppliers”, and added that there were a “number of foreign technicians” in the country.

Asked if they could be North Korean, he replied: “There are North Korean people there. There’s no question about that.” He said a network run by AQ Khan, the disgraced creator of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, could be involved.

This is a huge admission considering the State Department tends to not want to offend anyone in the name of diplomacy.  The audacity of the Syrians and the North Koreans to pull off such a proliferation stunt just goes to show that these two countries think that President Bush is so politically weak that he would take no action against them if found out.  Such arrogance may end up being the down fall of these two nations. 

If it is proven that North Korea has proliferated nuclear technology severe consequences should be enacted.  Hasn’t the US given Kim Jong-il enough rope to hang himself with?  If this doesn’t justify a naval blockade of North Korea and inspections of all cargo than I don’t know what will.   

Via Coming Anarchy comes news that a US military C-130 has been attacked in the country of Mali of all places:

Gunmen hit a United States military cargo plane flying food to Malian troops fighting rebels in the far north of the country, say officials. No one was injured in the attack and the plane, which had minor damage, landed safely.

US Major Pam Cook, a spokesperson for the American military command in Stuttgart, Germany, that covered Africa, said the C-130 plane was shot at late on Tuesday or early Wednesday over Tin-Zawatine, a desert village on Mali’s border with Algeria.

The US had provided military training and support to Mali and other African nations for years as part of its counterterrorism campaign.

Cook said the Malian troops were "pinned down" in Tin-Zawatine – but it was not clear if their movements were restricted by rebel fire or because the area was heavily mined.

She said the aircraft was struck by gunfire and suffered "minor damage", but landed safely. It did not return fire.

According to a senior Malian military official, the gunmen used Kalashnikov automatic rifles during the attack, which he said occurred just after the plane finished its final food drop early Wednesday. [News24]

Some of you reading this may be surprised that the US has military forces forward deployed in Mali, but the US has actually had forces engaged in the area since 2003 and is currently participating in a major training exercise with the countries in the region:

U.S. military officials are conducting an anti-terrorism training exercise called Flintlock in the Saharan desert with hundreds of military officers from mostly Africa. Some analysts say the U.S. Trans-Saharan Counter-terrorism Initiative is misguided and a waste of millions of dollars. Phuong Tran brings us this report from VOA’s Central and West Africa Bureau in Dakar.

American Colonel Mark Rosenguard has been leading what he calls military theatre exercises in Mali’s capital, Bamako. The participants decide on common problems they face, like drugs and weapons smuggling.

They then work out how they would deal with a regional blowup of those problems.

Colonel Rosenguard says it does not matter who the enemy is. What matters, he says, is that they learn how to work together to solve regional problems

The colonel has been with the counter-terrorism program since it began as the Pan Sahel Initiative in 2003 to prevent terrorism in West Africa’s desert regions, working first with Chad, Mali, Niger and Mauritania.

Two years ago, the program added Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Senegal, and Nigeria. [Phuong Tran, VOA]

Guess who isn’t happy about US involvement in the area?  Can you believe it, the French:

But French criminologist Xavier Raufer with the University of Paris says the program’s biggest problem is that Americans do not understand criminality in the Sahel desert stretching from Senegal to Sudan.

"You have guys arriving in an office and they have pages with questions and answers. They want answers that can fit into a computer," he said. "Such a thing as a 100-percent pure unadulterated bandit or terrorist does not exist in Africa."

Raufer says American attempts to single out potential terrorists from drug and weapons smugglers is ineffective, and potentially dangerous if it builds up to the point of retaliatory U.S. strikes.

"When a cousin is killed fighting for whatever reason, you have got two other cousins replacing him because the basis of a tribal society are the notions of honor and vengeance," he said.  [Phuong Tran, VOA]

No 100 percent terrorists in Africa?  I guess all those terrorists in Morrocco are just misunderstood "smugglers" then?  I guess the Algerian terrorist group which Al Qaida #2 man, Ayman al Zawahiri claimed has allied with Al Qaida are just misunderstood as well?

Other critics claim US involvment in the Sahara is of course all about the oil:

Washington appears to have based its notion on some unpublished sources and Algerian press reports on the banditry and smuggling activities of the outlaw Mokhtar ben Mokhtar. It also misconstrued the Tablighi Jama`at movement, whose 200 or so members in Mali are nicknamed “the Pakistanis” because the sect’s headquarters are in Pakistan. Finally, local government agents told U.S. officials what they wanted to hear.

Notwithstanding the lack of evidence, Washington saw a Saharan Front as the linchpin for the militarization of Africa, greater access to its oil resources (Africa will supply 25% of U.S. hydrocarbons by 2015), and the sustained involvement of Europe in America’s counterterrorism program. More significantly, a Saharan front reinforced the intelligence cherry-picked by top Pentagon brass to justify the invasion of Iraq by demonstrating that al-Qaida’s influence had spread to North Africa. [Jeremy Keenan, Malaysia Today] F

Just like Afghanistan was all about oil as well.  I’m still waiting for Michael Moore’s pipeline there.  The threat of terrorism in the Sahara is probably overstated but to suggest it doesn’t exist and it is all about the oil is ridiculous. 

Two NCOs who signed an opinion article in the NY Times last month have unfortunately died in a tragic vehicle accident:

Two U.S. soldiers whose signatures appeared on an op-ed piece in The New York Times critical of the war in Iraq were among seven Americans killed in a truck accident outside of Baghdad, family members said Wednesday.

Staff Sgt. Yance Gray and Sgt. Omar Mora were members of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Gray, Mora and five other soldiers died Monday when their truck overturned near the Iraqi capital, U.S. officials said.

Gray and Mora were among seven soldiers, mostly sergeants, who wrote the op-ed piece that appeared in the Times on August 19. It called the prospects of U.S. success "far-fetched" and said the progress being reported was being "offset by failures elsewhere." [CNN]

Though I fully debunked their article that was used as a hit piece to discredit General Petraeus before he testified, I am saddened that such men who had sacrificed much by serving for an extended period of time and in difficult circumstances in Iraq, would die in a senseless traffic accident.  My thoughts go out to their friends and family along with the friends and family of the other soldiers who died in the accident.  

Of course the commenters from the left are claiming the military intentionally killed them.  Why am I not surprised.

UPDATE: Al Qaida has taken responsibility for killing Sheik Sattar.   This assassination will hasten the end of Al Qaida in Iraq.  Any Sunni tribe that was on the fence before will assuredly join the awakening movement now.

_______________________________________

Most American have never heard of Sheik Sattar but there is few people more important in Iraq than Sheik Sattar who founded the Anbar Awakening movement. He has been the target of assassination attempts before and today the assassins were successful:

Abu Risha and two of his bodyguards were killed by a roadside bomb planted near the tribal leader’s home in Ramadi, Anbar’s provincial capital, said Col. Tareq Youssef, supervisor of Anbar police …

“It is a major blow to the council, but we are determined to strike back and continue our work,” said Sheik Jubeir Rashid, a senior member of Abu Risha’s group. “Such an attack was expected, but it will not deter us.” He said the bombing took place at 3:30 p.m. as Abu Risha was returning home.

A Ramadi police officer said Abu Risha had received a group of poor people at his home earlier in the day, as a gesture of charity marking the beginning of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The officer, speaking on condition of anonymity out of security concerns, said authorities believed the bomb was planted by one of the visitors.

Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf said that after the first blast that killed Abu Risha, a car bomb exploded nearby. “The car bomb had been rigged just in case the roadside bomb missed his convoy,” Khalaf said. There were no casualties from the car bomb, he added. [Robert Reid, AP]

This is a huge blow and the jury is still out on who ordered the killing. Depending on whether it was Al Qaida or a Shia militia who killed Sattar, will go a long ways to determining if reconciliation between Iraq’s Sunnis and Shias will ever be possible. No one has taken responsibility yet for the killing but the only people that would want Sattar dead more than Al Qaida is Iran. I would not put it past the Iranians sanctioning one of their Mahdi Army surrogates to kill Sheik Sattar. If proven a Shia militia did this, this could turn into the Sunni equivalent of what the Samarra Mosque Bombing was to the Shiites last year. In such a scenario the only winners will be the Iranians.

You can read more over at the The Long War Journal, Captain’s Journal, and On Point.

Via K.U. Studies comes news that President Bush may be considering a summit meeting with Kim Jong-il:

U.S. President George W. Bush would likely meet with North Korean Kim Jong-il if the Stalinist state shows its willingness to dismantle its nuclear weapons program, even if its nuclear program is not fully dismantled, a local report said Monday, quoting an unidentified U.S. diplomat.

The Washington source, quoted by the Kyunghyang Shinmun, said the Bush-Kim summit would be “doable” before the end of the Bush administration if Pyongyang is serious about the denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula.

The source said U.S.-North Korea summit talks could take place in the North Korean capital Pyongyang. [Jung Sung-ki, Korea Times]

First of all this report is coming from the Korea Times, which is not the most reliable of newspapers.  Secondly, it is coming from the State Department which are the same people that brought us Madeline Albright toasting Kim Jong-il and what did that get us?  Thirdly, it would be political suicide for any US president to visit Pyongyang without North Korea completely and verifiably dismantling their nuclear weapons program. 

Finally, I believe no US president should visit Pyongyang if North Korea does pull back troops from the DMZ along with improving human rights conditions.  If such conditions are not met why reward Kim Jong-il with a visit to Pyongyang?  Instead demand he travel to Seoul like he promised Kim Dae-jung in 2000 that he would.  A visit by the US president without significant improvements in North Korean behavior will only serve to fulfill North Korean propaganda.  Sadly in order to keep "the myth of progress" alive, the US State Department appears willing to do this. 

If you haven’t already seen or read General Petraeus’ testimony to Congress already I have his complete testimony and accompanying Powerpoint slides posted at Forward Deployed.  Additionally I have posted the full page ad taken out in the New York Times by Moveon.org smearing General Petraeus. 

I highly recommend that everyone read my posting on this that totally destroys the leftist fantasies dreamed up in the Moveon.org ad.

Report to Congress on the Situation in Iraq
General David H. Petraeus
Commander, Multi-National Force-Iraq
10-11 September 2007

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