Manual clearance technique

Dear Mr. Nephew,

We are pleased to inform you that your contribution of $__ was pooled with others and applied to mine clearance efforts in Afghanistan, supporting Mine Clearance Team DAFA-03-04 for a period of two months. We recently received reports from our partners at the United Nations outlining the team's activities during the period covered by your funds and have attached the official Team Clearance report to provide you with additional information...

6. NAME OF CLEARED AREA:

Shafa khana Mulki, Center, Kandahar
Haji Bashar, Dand, Kandahar
(Village, District, Province) [...]

9. Quantity and types of mines and UXO located:

0AT [anti-tank]

38 PMN AP [anti-personnel mines]

4 UXO [unexploded ordnance]

10. Methods & technologies used: MCT - Manual Clearance Technique

11. Quantity and types of mines and UXO destroyed:

0AT

38 PMN AP

4 UXO

12. Square Meters Cleared: 5,125

13. Is area now mine free? Yes
[...]

Sincerely,

William H. Luers
President
UNA-USA

Yes, there may be a legitimate debate about land mines. Skip it. Donate some bucks so some kids won't get their legs blown off.

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UPDATE, 7/25: Actually, don't necessarily skip the debate, just don't let it affect your decision to support land mine removal. posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:36:00 AM -- |    

 
Nice
NOTE: Don't know quite how this happened, but this post from yesterday got deleted. This is more or less what I wrote.

Brett Marston, watching CSPAN-3, witnessed the following exchange in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing to vote on William Pryor's nomination:

Leahy: "No, I want. . ."

Hatch: "I don't care what you want, this is the way it's gonna be."

Which really is simpler and easier for everyone, after all.

Via Marston, blogger/attorney Howard Bashman explains what happened: Leahy wanted to invoke his right, under committee "Rule IV," to call for a vote requiring at least one Democrat's assent to pass. Hatch turned him down with the Senatorial Words you see above.

The committee then narrowly approved William Pryor to consideration by the full Senate, despite concerns raised by a recent Washington Post article about the fundraising methods of the "Republican Attorneys General Association," which Pryor founded. The Washington Post's Helen Dewar reports that the Democrats voted under protest.

Looks like it's filibuster time! posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:21:00 AM -- |    

 
Ways and Means Committee Chairman Not Reptile Alien, Fellow Member Confirms
Looks like I wasn't the only one who was worried: regarding Representative Bill Thomas's apology for last week's fracas, columnist Robert Novak reports that another Republican member of the Ways and Means Committee noted:

He acted like a human being, which confirmed the opinion of those of us who believe he really is a human being.

Whew.

There's a serious pattern of abuse going on in Congress, which Thomas' tearful apology does nothing to reverse. In an article for the New Republic, Michael Crowley documents that Democrats are being forced to meet in hallways, vote on virtually unread and undebated legislation, forego offering even doomed amendments, and are sometimes even prevented from participating in committee deliberations.

Regardless of your party, if you believe in Congress being a place of open, democratic debate, this can't be all right with you. Republicans in Congress say it's payback for old times, but longtime political observer Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution says, "It's worse. It's been carried to a new extreme." It's time to fight back, and I'm glad the Democrats did. posted by Thomas Nephew at 9:34:00 AM -- |    

 
One in three Germans under 30 believes U.S. possibly ordered 9/11

UPDATE, EDIT, 7/24: I've added the crucial word "possibly" in the title and text. And I've resolved to return to my usual process of waiting and re-reading things before blogging about them. It's still not a thrilling result, but it's not quite the "are they absolutely nuts?" statement I thought it was.

Der Spiegel reports that roughly one in five Germans believes the U.S. government was possibly responsible for ordering -- not negligently permitting, ordering -- the 9/11 attacks.

The numbers are higher among those under 30 (about one in three) and those living in the former East Germany (29 percent).

The words used were "im Auftrag geben", which translates to "to order" or "to commission."

The 1000 men and women respondents were surveyed by Forsa, a well-known German opinion research institute. The survey was done for Die Zeit, but hasn't been discussed yet* in that periodical.

It's possible some of the younger respondents treated the question as some kind of joke, I suppose, and I suppose there's some negligible but non-zero percentage of Americans who believe the same thing.

Still.


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* UPDATE, 7/24: Here it is: "Black Box White House: The more complicated the world, the more Germans believe conspiracy theories." It looks like Die Zeit writer Jochen Bittner is just about as perturbed as I was; more on the article tonight, maybe. (Media note: Bittner was one of the two reporters who wrote about interviewing the UN inspectors way, way back in April.) Meanwhile, Jeff Jarvis picks up the story, too, and Brett Marston points out the questionable value of the question itself. Still. posted by Thomas Nephew at 5:45:00 PM -- |    

 
There's no need to fear...
...Underblog is here! Thanks, whoever mentioned me to Darren of "Living Room >> A Space for Life", and thanks to Darren, too, of course. Darren had the nice idea of soliciting nominations for "Underblogs," which are simply "blogs that you wish more people knew about."

Looking around at my immediate fellow Underbloggers, I rather liked "Ex-Gay Watch" which monitors the world of evangelical attempts to "convert" gay people to the straight life. If I got the blog wrong, let me know. A manifesto of some kind might help... me pigeonhole the blog more quickly. Never mind.

I happened to already know about "all facts and opinions," because author Natalie Davis drops in here now and then to discuss "Liberty's Kids" etc. Natalie writes a smart political blog that's a good deal to the "left" of mine. Somehow, we have managed to not hold it against eachother so far. "all facts and opinions" looks like it takes a lot of work: nice layout, lots and lots and lots of posts, links, and photos. So drop by Natalie's place, OK?

The "Living Room>> A Space for Life" blog is itself a Christian-oriented blog out of Melbourne, Australia, and the great majority of the "Underblogger" nominees are demonstratively Christian, in a nice way. I mention this mainly because I'm one of the odd ones out in those respects (Christian, nice).

If I were to nominate a couple of blogs, I'd suggest "Cronaca," a blog devoted to historical and archaeological news tidbits, nicely written up in succinct little posts. There's also "Ideofact," whose author engages in long, learned posts about Middle Eastern history, the Ottomans, and so on. If you read German, there's "le sofa blogger," a multi-author blog, but until recently mainly the work of Peter Praschl of Hamburg. It's a kind of "Style" section: photos, commentary, quick links, occasional stories. A lot of fun. Finally, and this will be another post, there's the "Daily Howler" whose author, Bob Somerby, has some of the best commentary around on UraniumGate etcetera. posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:27:00 AM -- |    

 
Twelve words
Q: Who said this, and when?

Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent.

A: President Bush, in his 2003 State of the Union address, approximately 400 words -- about 2 or 3 minutes, I'd say -- after the sixteen words wrongly* claimed to be a lie. As Charles Krauthammer reminds us, the twelve words above show that it's also wrong to claim that Bush was asserting there was an imminent threat of Iraqi nuclear weapons.

Before those twelve words, Bush said this:

Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But chemical agents, lethal viruses and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained. Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans -- this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known. We will do everything in our power to make sure that that day never comes.

After the twelve words, Bush said this:

...Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.

Bush was arguing -- rightly or wrongly -- that the rationale for war was not an imminent threat, but a terrible threat. That threat was plausible. Coupled with the unraveling of containment and the arguable -- but not by Blix or the Security Council -- Iraqi violations of Security Council resolutions, Bush asserted it was a sufficient threat. The case for war laid out above may not have been persuasive to you, but it was clear and undeceptive.

The current "UraniumGate" is not really a scandal. We could have revisited the question of what constitutes the necessary and sufficient grounds for war, and that is always a question worth revisiting. But the "sixteen words" question is being recast by some bloggers and journalists as "you wuz lied to." You wuzn't. Even if it turns out the British were wrong, at the time the British government learned what it learned, on different evidence than what the CIA distrusted.

Based on what I know, I can not sign on to what I see as the "2+2=5" notion, however widely accepted, that the famous "sixteen words" were a lie. Nor do I agree that the grounds for the Iraq war -- particularly including the matter of WMD, nuclear or otherwise -- were misrepresented or insufficient.

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* As I wrote last week, the sixteen words becomes a knowing lie if and only if the Bush administration knew beyond a reasonable doubt that the British finding was based on the same evidence Americans had discounted, or on other evidence the Americans had discounted. To my knowledge, this has not been established.

Blair's supposed July 17 stumble -- "not beyond the bounds" -- was an attempt to establish plausibility of the (alleged) true, undisclosable finding, not the finding itself. It's true that the British reluctance to divulge their source is convenient, if they are lying. It's also true that it is honorable if they are not.

Another popular retort is that the Bush administration has admitted it was wrong to include the sixteen words in the SOTU speech. That does not equate to admitting those words were wrong; it equates to admitting they did not meet the (brand new) standard that only statements confirmable by American agencies should be in State of the Union addresses. posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:43:00 PM -- |