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Friday, May 07, 2004 |
 If we win the global war on terrorism, it will be through a moral victory. How did abu Ghraib impact that war (from the perspective of those watching from the sidelines, mostly outside the US)?
- It demonstrated a lack of respect for Arabs, Muslims, and Iraqis.
- It belied the American claim it was in Iraq for the betterment of Iraq's people.
- It demonstrated that American values -- process of law and human rights -- are false.
How do you recover from this? Are we even making any progress in this war?
NOTE: Beyond the humiliation captured in the famous photos, I have read of rape (including using implements), murder, and severe beatings. It's been implied that Rumsfeld's unreleased video/pictures depict these crimes. Given this, the conservative pundit spin on this is non-sensical.
UPDATE: Senator Lindsey Graham R-SC warned: "The American public needs to understand, we're talking about rape and murder here. We're not just talking about giving people a humiliating experience. We're talking about rape and murder and some very serious charges,'' Graham said to reporters.
6:45:06 PM 
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Oil hits $40 a barrel.
"Forty-dollar oil might be here for a while," said Bill O'Grady, analyst at A.G. Edwards. "As long as there is the possibility of a terrorist attack against Saudi oil facilities, oil will have its fear-premium."
"All you need is one person with a block of explosive in their lunchbox in a Saudi oil facility and we'd be in uncharted territory," said Adam Seminski of Deutsche Bank in London.
6:18:51 PM
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Al Qaeda's Grand Strategy: Superpower Baiting. This dives into one view of al Qaeda's grand strategy. Is the US acting as al Qaeda's PR firm? Are we acting in a reckless fashion that will result in our eventual failure? You decide.
12:45:42 PM
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Guardian. The statement below is more than true. I spent some time checking this out and most positions, from analyst to senior analyst positions, require only a high school diploma and an active security clearance. The security clearance is the only gating factor. If a bachelors is required, the experience required is minimal. This is absolutely unnacceptable and very, very disturbing. If we lose the war on terrorism, and there are strong indicators that we will, the low quality of the people we have fighting it is going to be a major factor. What is even more disturbing is that there are dozens of companies that are making buckets of money on this farce.
Torin Nelson, who served as a military intelligence officer at Guantánamo Bay before moving to Abu Ghraib as a private contractor last year, blamed the abuses on a failure of command in US military intelligence and an over-reliance on private firms.
He alleged those companies were so anxious to meet the demand for their services, they sent "cooks and truck drivers" to work as interrogators.
"Military intelligence operations need to drastically change in order for something like this not to happen again," Mr Nelson told the Guardian.
7:25:20 AM
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al-Qaeda puts bounties on the heads of senior US and UN personnel. First, this is another sign of mercenary activity in al-Qaeda (which demonstrates an increasing level of sophistication). Second, this is another calculated provocation in al-Qaeda's "superpower baiting" strategy.
5:40:31 AM
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The deep thinker (mastermind is a pejorative and useless term) that formulated al-Qaeda's strategy, al-Zawahiri:
5:23:40 AM
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© Copyright 2004 John Robb.
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