From The Daily Mail:
Leaked guidelines from the Bedfordshire force say that when officers raid Muslim homes they should remove their shoes, not use dogs and not mount pre-dawn raids because at that hour people might by ’spiritually busy’.
Are these people kidding us?
American astronauts are undertaking repairs to the Space Shuttle Discovery’s heat resistant tiles.
They need to remove some ‘gap fillers’ that have come loose from their positions between tiles and now protrude somewhat. The danger is that, during re-entry, these protruding items will direct heat disproportionately onto a few tiles and may cause serious danger to the shuttle.
We get used to space travel and, despite occasional disasters, see it pretty much as a workaday thing for NASA. I think now might be a good point to remember that these people, in their daring, their innovation and their courage, epitomise the very best of the human spirit. America should be proud of them.
We wish them the best of luck.
US soldier demoted for blogging
An American soldier has been punished for posting classified information on his web log.
Leonard Clark, 40, was demoted from specialist to private first class and fined $1,640, said Col. Bill Buckner, a spokesman for the Multi-National Corps-Iraq.
Soldiers in Iraq are allowed to maintain blogs or Web sites but cannot post information about Army operations or movements. They also are barred from posting information about the death of a soldier whose family hasn’t yet been notified.
You can see his blog here.
US says no more global war on terror
It’s over. No more G.W.O.T. Instead we have the new, improved G.S.A.V.E - which is, of course, the ‘global struggle against violent extremism’.
According to The New York Times:
In recent speeches and news conferences, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the nation’s senior military officer have spoken of “a global struggle against violent extremism” rather than “the global war on terror,” which had been the catchphrase of choice. Administration officials say that phrase may have outlived its usefulness, because it focused attention solely, and incorrectly, on the military campaign.
The newer approach, designed, perhaps, to comfort an increasingly sceptical American public, takes on a broader approach, defining extemism specifically as the target:
Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the National Press Club on Monday that he had “objected to the use of the term ‘war on terrorism’ before, because if you call it a war, then you think of people in uniform as being the solution.” He said the threat instead should be defined as violent extremists, with the recognition that “terror is the method they use.”
“It is more than just a military war on terror,” Steven J. Hadley, the national security adviser, said in a telephone interview. “It’s broader than that. It’s a global struggle against extremism. We need to dispute both the gloomy vision and offer a positive alternative.”
The idea of rebranding the war had been posited earlier by our very own Boris Johnson in July 14th’s The Spectator (back issues require subscription)
…if we use the vocabulary of war, it gives the maniacs all the more excuse to wage war on us. When Bush said, ‘If you are not with us, you are against us,’ and then invaded Iraq on charges that were frankly trumped-up, he co-opted tens of millions of Muslims into the camp of his enemies, even though they might loathe Saddam. They had nowhere else to go.
To keep talking of war plays on militant Muslim paranoia, and, incidentally, since it is a key point of Islamic theology that the suicide bomber may not be called a martyr, and therefore entitled to his ration of virgins/raisins, unless he dies in ‘war’, we are by our own vocabulary offering these people an incitement to murder and a laissez-passer to paradise.
What brought about this change of heart? The easiest guess is that the Americans realise that they can’t kill terrorists as fast as the madrassas can produce them and so face being in Iraq for a very long - and very expensive - time. Iraq is proving that when one side doesn’t care at all who dies and the other side does care at least a bit the side that doesn’t care has a much better kill-to-killed ratio.
If the future of the middle-east lies in the hands of moderate Muslims those moderates should not feel they are on the receiving end of a war they didn’t start. Good that the Americans are seeing this.
