This article, Troops Disregard Rules of War, was recently on the front page of CNN and is a total hit piece against the US military in Iraq:

Newly released documents regarding crimes committed by U.S. troops against civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan detail a pattern of troops failing to understand and follow the rules that govern interrogations and deadly actions.

The documents, released Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union ahead of a lawsuit, total nearly 10,000 pages of courts-martial summaries, transcripts and military investigative reports about 22 incidents. They show repeated examples of troops believing they were within the law when they killed local citizens.

This article leads the reader to believe that these incidents are some how new incidents that have not been reported before and only because of the ACLU have they been uncovered.  The truth is that these incidents the ACLU has supposedly uncovered have been well documented before and to top it off are extremely old. 

Take this incident for example:

The killings include the drowning of a man soldiers pushed from a bridge into the Tigris River as punishment for breaking curfew, and the suffocation during interrogation of a former Iraqi general believed to be helping insurgents.

I know about this incident because I worked with this battalion before while I was in Iraq and know many of the people involved in what happened.  These were good people who used some bad judgment and were held accountable for it by the US military.  However, this incident is not anything knew the details about what happened are widely available.  The New York Times for example has a 12 page article on it entitled, The Fall of the Warrior King.  The other examples in the article are also all old and well documented. 

This is what the ACLU had the nerve to claim in the article:

Nasrina Bargzie, an attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, said the documents also show that there is information being withheld from public scrutiny.

"Withheld from public scrutiny?"  There is a 12 page article in the New York Times on the very first incident they list as being supposedly "withheld from public scrutiny". 

The article also brings up the Haditha case and makes no mention of the acquittal of the Marines involved in it. 

Why is CNN considering this news worthy enough of being on the front page of their website?  There is absolutely nothing new in this article other then recycling old stories and trying to make them out as if they have been uncovered by the ACLU and that the military is covering up even more civilian deaths in Iraq. 

This is clearly another hit piece by the media right before General Petraeus’ report to Congress that perpetuates the continuing theme by the liberal media to portray US soldiers as uneducated low lives that are committing war crimes all over Iraq and thus not worthy of the nation’s respect.  Yes I question their patriotism; CNN and the ACLU do not support the troops and they never did. 

UPDATE: As suspected the KBS2 special will have an angle about how the “low quality foreign English teachers” are taking advantage of poor innocent Korean women.  Of course the Marmot has the scoop on this.

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With the fake degree scandal rocking Korea’s elite what better way to change the subject than to once again go after foreigners.

Recently the UN announced that a 26,000 member peacekeeping force had been agreed upon to be deployed to Darfur.  Sounds like good news right?  Well, not if you start reading the fine print.  First of all the force won’t even be on the ground until next year and the ability fill a 26,000 member force is dependent on UN countries volunteering forces to participate in the UN operation.  For those not familiar with UN peacekeeping, many of the soldiers involved in UN peacekeeping are not there to actually help the country they are deployed too.  They are actually there to collect a paycheck because UN peacekeeping pays better than what they would make in their home country’s military.  Thus soldiers from third world nation’s make up the vast majority of UN peacekeepers:

Top Countries Who Provide UN Peacekeepers
Pakistan – 10,173
Bangladesh – 9,675
India – 9,471
Nepal – 3,626
Jordan – 3,564
Uruguay – 2,583

Additionally, countries that are host to UN peacekeepers prefer having soldiers from third world nations because they are ineffective.  So it is a win-win for everyone involved because the peacekeepers are making a bunch of money while the country they are supposedly providing peacekeeping for is not impacted by their presence, and the UN gets to claim they are doing something and request more funding.  UN peacekeeping is often nothing more than a self licking ice cream cone.  A self licking ice cream cone is not something that will do anything to help the people in Darfur. 

If you haven’t already make sure you watch this photo essay from Michael Gordon.  What is interesting about the essay is that Gordon embedded with the unit of the infamous Beauchamp.  No pictures of melted women, dogs being run over, or soldiers running around with skulls.  Just soldiers doing a dangerous and difficult mission and getting slow, but steady results.

That is what this man claims:

He claims that his mother’s beauty shop in Toko-ri outside of Camp Hovey was burned down by a US soldier and the Korean police are covering it up. They have no money and are living out on the street and want the Korean government and police to do something about it. His video is currently the second most popular video on Daum.

This story was actually reported back in May by the Stars & Stripes and subsequently posted here as well. This case I seriously doubt it is a cover up by the Korean police and more likely not being pursued due to a lack of evidence.

A US soldier was picked up near the scene and was out past curfew, which is not a good thing and a sign of trouble. The local police brought him in for questioning and took his clothes for forensic testing. There was video tape of the supposed arsonist as well. There was plenty of evidence available, but I assuming none of it could link the soldier they picked up to the crime in question and possibly someone else did it.

Korean police do not cover up big GI crimes like this. I have seen Korean police turn over GIs to the MPs for small incidents like pissing of buildings, stealing a laptop from a bar, or a fight in the ville but never for something serious as this. If anything Korean police arrest and convict soldiers with dubious evidence as we have seen time and again.

The guy in the video claims he saw the soldier standing outside the building watching the fire. How does that confirm he started the fire? He could have just been walking by and saw the fire. If a GI did it I’m sure the Korean police would be doing everything possible to find out who it is and if it is a GI that burned the place down I hoped he is caught and quickly sent to Choenan where he belongs.

However with the claim that the police aren’t investigating a GI criminal anymore by this man leads me to believe the police have ruled out a GI criminal and have instead focused on another cause for the fire.

Here are some pictures for you Navy folks out there, that I received on the e-mail today on the naval exercise Valiant Shield. Very cool pics. The last picture is my favorite.

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The next time you hear a Korean complain about USFK personnel not paying their parking tickets show them this article:

The South Korean diplomatic corps owes the United States nearly 23 times what U.S. diplomats owe officials in Seoul for unpaid parking and traffic fines.

South Korea’s Consulate General owes New York City about $17,000 in parking tickets, including $10,137 for 87 tickets issued before November 2002 and $7,120 for 47 parking tickets since, a spokesman with the city’s Department of Finance stated in an e-mail.

The Washington D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles says the Embassy of South Korea owes $225 for unpaid parking tickets in 2007.

A spokesman with South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade declined to comment on the issue.

The city of Seoul issued 165 tickets, worth 6,600,000 won, or about $7,197, for U.S. embassy vehicles in the last five years.

The U.S. embassy had paid all but 17 of those tickets, worth approximately $742, city officials said.

“The embassy requires its employees to pay any traffic tickets and obey all traffic and other regulations in Korea,” U.S. Embassy spokesman Max Kwak said when questioned about the outstanding tickets.

The Korea Times reported last month that 91 foreign embassies in Seoul had outstanding fines of 526 million won, or roughly $574,000. Ninety-six percent of the fines, issued between January 2002 and 2007, had not been paid. Forty-nine countries had not paid anything, and only the Vatican City State had paid all its tickets, the paper reported.

The U.S., Australian and Norwegian embassies had the lowest rates of non-payment, according to the story. [Stars & Stripes]

Seems a bit ironic the Korean government is willing to pay off Taliban killers, but aren’t willing to pay parking tickets to the city of New York. 

The Taliban can definitely smell weakness:

Afghanistan’s rebel group Taliban on Sunday threatened to attack South Korean facilities, accusing Seoul of not pulling out all its citizens as promised in exchange for the release of South Korean hostages last week.

Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, a purported spokesman for the Taliban, said the Islamic fundamentalist group has obtained information that some South Koreans were still in Afghanistan.

“If South Korea has broken its promise, then we will attack the South Korean embassy in Kabul and education facilities supported by Seoul,” he said. [Yonhap]

An extremely wealthy nation, with a global economy, and one of the largest militaries in the world is left running with its tail between its legs and is now being taunted by a bunch of medieval third world mafiosos. Give it time and the Korean government will find some way to blame all this on America.

The big news today was that North Korea agreed to disclose and disable all their nuclear facilities and for some reason everyone is excited about this.  Why am I not excited and jumping with joy that peace is about to break out on the Korean peninsula?  Well because we have been here before just this past February when North Korea promised the same thing that they are promising now.  They then made new demands which the US met and the North Koreans have yet to meet their side of the agreement anyway. 

Now we are being told that the North Koreans are going to disclose all their nuclear facilities again and what did the US give the North Koreans this time for their promise to do something they had already promised to do?  Well this:

North Korea’s Foreign Ministry said Monday that the United States has decided to remove the communist country from its list of terror-sponsoring nations and make political and economic measures for "compensation," such as lifting a trade ban.

The decision was made at a working-level meeting between the two nations in Geneva over the weekend, a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman was quoted as saying by the North’s Korean Central News Agency.
"As a consequence, a foundation for making progress in the next round of six-party talks (on the North’s nuclear ambitions) was paved, the spokesman said. [Yonhap]

The North Koreans have never atoned for their various terrorist attacks like Libya did and yet the Bush administration is going to reward them with removing them from the state sponsored terrorism list.  They are agreeing to do this as an incentive to do something the North Koreans have been promising to do for the last thirteen years stretching all the way back to 1994 when the first Agreed Framework was signed during the Clinton Administration. 

The US governments desperation to perpetuate the "Myth of Progress" is truly astounding.  I really hope the "Six Party Charade" and the sell out of a sound North Korea policy is worth the setting of conditions to bomb Iran.

Make sure to read OFK’s take on this.

The effort to discredit General Petraeus has continued this past weekend by the New York Times releasing an article by Fred Kaplan titled "Challenging the Generals".  Conveniently right before General Petraeus’ report to Congress Kaplan some how gets access to Gen. Richard Cody, the United States Army’s vice chief of staff’s briefing to officers attending the Captain’s Career Course at Ft. Knox, Kentucky.  Even more conveniently one of the officers asks General Cody about LTC Yingling’s article earlier this year and the supposed poor performance of generals during the war. 

The rest of the article goes on to bash the current of general officer level leadership and actually criticizes generals for not doing more about not crossing the line of civilian control of the military.  At least Kaplan didn’t advocate a military coup like some on the left have been advocating.  Throughout the article Kaplan tries to make it seem that troops are increasingly speaking out against the generals running the war.  Where have we heard this before?  Does Beauchamp, Hutto, Burnett, Jayamaha, and a host of other leftist plants ring a bell?  This is another manufactured attempt to create the perception of a "grassroots" effort among troops to speak out against the war.  Of course nothing is mentioned of the astroturfing campaign led by the largest liberal public relations firm to promote it. 

Kaplan does make a few good points just like LTC Yingling did in his article but the article is being twisted by the usual suspects as you can’t trust Petraeus’ report to Congress even though the article way at the end actually compliments Petraeus just like if you actually read LTC Yingling’s article instead of excerpts on blogs, General Petraeus and the current crop of officers running the war effort are exactly what he recommends.  Now that is something you will not hear anyone on the left say. 

This is just another example of the slow trickle of articles to discredit General Petraeus who has the world’s hardest job already and the left are determined to make even harder.