Pentagon Responds to My Request for Definition of "Rejoins Fight"

On Wed, May 20th, the New York Times ran an article, which MSNBC put on its website, about an unreleased Pentagon report that claims about 1 out of every 7 released detainees have "returned to terrorism or militant activity." I had one immediate concern after reading the article and that was that it never defined the term; rejoins fight. I contacted the Pentagon this morning, requesting a definition, and just received this pdf.

Definitions for Confirmed and Suspected Cases

Definition of “Confirmed” — A preponderance of evidence—fingerprints, DNA, conclusive photographic match, or reliable, verified, or well-corroborated intelligence reporting—identifies a specific former Defense Department detainee as directly involved in terrorist activities.

Definition of “Suspected” — Significant reporting indicates a former Defense Department detainee is involved in terrorist activities, and analysis indicates the detainee most likely is associated with a specific former detainee or unverified or single-source, but plausible, reporting indicates a specific former detainee is involved in terrorist activities.

If you are like me, one line stands out, glaringly:

unverified or single-source, but plausible, reporting indicates a specific former detainee is involved in terrorist activities.

So let's take this number for what it is, unverified.

Why Don't Republicans Support Our Service Men and Women?

The prison guards in the United States of America are some of the best prison guards in the world. They take on an extremely difficult job, knowing full well the dangers it brings with it. They are honorable, dedicated, and talented. So why is it that Republicans continue to demonstrate their blatant hatred for out elite force of prison guards? Every time that these Republicans say our prison guards are not capable of holding terrorists, it is an attack on our service men and women.

Is that not what they would say to us? Is that not what they do say to us, about the military? When we say, "There is no military solution in Iraq, pull our troops out." They say, Democrats do not support the troops.

"When members of Congress pursue an anti-war strategy that's been called 'slow bleeding,' they are not supporting the troops, they are undermining them," Cheney said in a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Right. When members of Congress try to end a war, using the only means available to them, they do not support the troops. Hell, Michelle Malkin has an entire "They don't support the troops" category at her website.

What would they say, if we said that every time they claim our prisons cannot hold terrorists, they "slime" our prison guards?

Michelle Malkin Does Not Want Muslims In Jail

Michelle Malkin, in today's column, chastises President Obama for daring to hold Muslim terrorists in US prisons. This comes after the arrests of four homegrown terrorists. A plot that was foiled by a traditional FBI investigation, not by torture or warrentless wiretapping. A plot that was foiled over a year, not on a ticking-time-bomb. She argues that holding these men in US prisons allows the "virus" of terrorism, no wait, Muslim terrorism, to spread like wildfire.

Before I get into the meat of this argument, I would just like to give Malkin a grammar tip. When you have multiple adjectives describing a single noun, as in, "murder-minded black Muslim jailhouse converts..." commas are required in between adjectives. I know, it is so hard to use proper grammar with all that oozy hatred spewing out of your mouth.

I have long argued that the chickenhead warhawks of our nation seem utterly obsessed with Muslims. Where was Malkin when this happened:

Federal Agents arrested a former National Guardsman for allegedly planning to blow up a synagogue and a National Guard armory in Tennessee.

The only difference between this terrorism and the type that Malkin thinks has no place in our jails, is that this terrorist was white and Christian. Malkin misses, however, one major issue.

FBI Special Agent R. Joe Clark said, “Mr. Braden represents the most difficult kind of terrorist - the lone wolf.”

But that kind of terrorism is okay to have in our jails. That kind of terrorist is not a threat to hummanity in our prisons. Only the, black, Muslim, jailhouse converts (see how easy it was to use those commas), not the white, Christian, neo-Nazi, National Guard converts, are dangerous.

Oh, and as to Malkin's criticism about President Obama not talking more about this, where was she all those numerous times the Republicans refused to talk about an ongoing investigation? Is it at all possible that President Obama is waiting for all to be said and done before needlessly commenting on what appears to be a successful investigation?

How Many Innocents Must Pay To Lock Up One Terrorist?

cross-posted at DailyKos

The Pentagon, in an unreleased report, is claiming that one out of every seven Guantanamo detainees have "rejoined" the fight. I wrote about how they neglect to define the term "rejoin fight" and how the Pentagon has grossly embellished this statistic in the past. However, let us, for a moment, assume that this number is completely accurate.

Let us forget that if we released them, we cannot really say they are "rejoining" the fight because we clearly never knew for a fact they were part of the fight to begin with. Let us just accept this number as accurate. That means, that for up to seven years, we kept six innocent people locked away indefinitely, possibly tortured, for every one terrorist. Think about that for a moment, I can wait....

Done? Great. Now think about if we applied that same mentality to any other crime. When our founding fathers created certain rights, like habeas corpus, they knew that we would inevitably let some guilty men go free. And we all know that happens. We all hear stories of criminals going free due to some technicality. That is a hard truth. Yet there was a deep and noble principal that stood behind it. A principal that, we would rather a guilty man go free than an innocent man lose his freedom. It was a courageous principal, based on a notion that we must protect the individual right to freedom by all means.

Our founding fathers were not incompetent. They knew full well the consequences of their actions. Yet today, we treat those principals as naive. They are addorable, quaint notions that do not take into account the harsh realities of the world we live in. Crap. It is always the realpolitiks that claim the realistic high ground. Rather, it is naive to believe you can protect individual rights while throwing them out the window when it gets a little scary. I will conclude with this question my father posed to me:

How many innocents are we willing to lock up in order to put away one terrorist? Is it six? Becuase that is what we have done, at the lowest possible estimation.

This Is Why Young People Don't Read Newspapers

Recently, I wrote about how important the difference between sourcing and linking is to young people. I wrote about how skeptical my generation is, how we are never surprised to find politicians, journalists, teachers, anyone, lying to us. I wrote about how linking to sources provides our skepticism with somewhere to go. This article on MSNBC's website is the perfect example.

This article asserts that "many detainees rejoin fight" without ever taking the time to define the term "rejoin fight." It credits, or sources, the appropriate people, but does not provide a single link to these sources. So the article carries absolutely no weight, whatsoever. If we do not know how the Pentagon determines that an individual has rejoined the fight, well, we really cannot make up our own mind as to whether or not that claim is true.

This is why I feel so passionately about linking to sources. In this case, it appears that this report is unreleased as of yet. Clearly, this is simply a journalist reporting on what the Pentagon says. This journalist did not take the time to ask the Pentagon to clarify what rejoining the fight means. Is this that awesome investigative journalism I keep hearing about? Is this the standard that I am supposed to save? Give me a break. This article is pure propaganda. I am predicting, right now, that this term includes things like; he met someone that might be a terrorist in a bar, he wrote something for a newspaper that was anti-American, he gave a speech chastising the US for torture, and so on, and so on...

They did it before...

three of the former detainees included in one of the 43 reports were described as having "returned to the battlefield" because they were in a documentary about Guantanamo, as well as five who were included because their lawyer wrote a letter to the editor about Guantanamo and two who had never even been in Guantanamo

If You Want Us to Start Snitching, Lead the Way

Warning, this video is not suitable for everyone. Please use caution, it contains extreme violence.



When I am incredibly sick of is that we never, ever, ever, ever hear about police officers arresting one of their own when they commit a crime. Every single cop that was at this scene is guilty of breaking the law, and have failed to live up to their oath; serve and protect. Imagine, for an instance, that those police were just civilians. Imagine civilians had chased a man down, flipped his car, then beat him brutally while he was already unconscious. Every single one of them would be charged with a crime. Those that had not hit the man would be charged as accomplices for helping the others to flee the scene of a crime and for neglecting to inform the appropriate authorities.

The one thing we do know, is that every police officer that was there knew what happened and kept quiet. We all have heard police officers ranting against those "stop snitching" gangsters, especially if you ever watch John Walsh from America's Most Wanted. Their attempts to squash the stop snitching calls have been utterly futile. And it is for one reason only. Police routinely refer to Internal Affairs as the "rat pack." If police officers want civilians to start "snitching" they should lead by fucking example!

The Difference Between Crediting and Linking

As I watched Markos Moulitsas, founder of DailyKos, on MSNBC talking about Maureen Dow's recent plagiarism, it reminding me of something my father and I were talking about recently. I have been itching to write something on the death of newspapers, as I believe they are dying. We are watching them die. They are dying for one reason, and one reason only, the newspaper is an outdated method of bringing information to an individual. To many, this seems as natural as the death of the typewriter after the development of computers. Yet to many others, this is equivalent to the death of investigative journalism.

That is what they tell us. They tell us that only in a newspaper do we receive quality, local, investigative journalism. And somehow, this has become an accepted truth. Maybe it is just the MSM standing up for other MSM, but we should not blindly accept this assumption. We should not assume that it is improbable, let alone impossible, that television, radio, and, gasp, web journalists can provide quality investigative journalism. The acceptance of this assumption is a statement about our society, that we are resigned to a main stream media that brings us gossip instead of news. What I wonder about all these people that feel we need to stand up and save the newspapers to save investigative journalism is; what have you done to demand good journalism from television, radio, and web journalist?

My father and I were talking about this and he related this story to me. 'Me and my golf buddies were talking about the newspapers. They brought up that argument, and I said to them, that's crap. When you read a newspaper you get one source, when I go online for news I have infinite sources.' This topic of sources is so vitally important, and relevant to the Dowd controversy. As Markos stated, bloggers are incredibly stringent on sourcing. When we read blogs with quotes and no links, we immediately take a step back. We demand links. We demand sources.

Something Markos did not talk about, however, is the difference between crediting, or sourcing, and linking. When you read a newspaper, they may quote a United Nations resolution, and credit it appropriately. You can, later, dig up that source to see for yourself. On a blog, on the other hand, you do not just get a source name, you get a link. You can, right then and there, open that source and see it for yourself. What that allows us to do, is find out whether or not the author is taking something out of context.

As a young person, I can tell you that my generation has grown up skeptical of everyone and everything. My father used to tell me how surprised they were to find that they had been lied to about Vietnam. My generation is never surprised when we are lied to. That is status quo for us. My generation, coincidentally, is also reading newspapers less than all older age groups. I do not think our skepticism is why we do not read newspapers. We do not read them because, as I stated previously, a newspaper is an outdated method for receiving information. However, newspapers are not capable of fulfilling what we look for, in some part, because of our skepticism.

Our skepticism, however, makes us perfect for blogs and website journalists. With linking, instead of merely crediting, our skepticism has somewhere to go. And linking, is something that newspapers will never be able to do. When the NYTimes newspaper quotes a source to me, they will never be able to deliver, right then and there, the entire source for me to see myself. Maybe you do not see the importance of linking as I do. Maybe you are more trusting then I am. I find, however, that on both sides of the isle, taking quotes out of context is status quo. Chery picking quotes is status quo. Sourcing does little to help, but linking may be the key. If you know that your readers can instantly see the source you are quoting, you are more likely to take the extra effort to make sure your quote is ethical.