| Tuesday, September
23, 2003
Feeling safer already: A 20 year old
girl has been sentenced to 2 years in Federal Prison. Her family had taken
her on a cruise. She was pregnant, and wanted to be with her boyfriend.
She wrote some threatening notes in hopes of getting the cruise cancelled
so she could go home. Not smart. So we are all now safer:
she's going to Federal prison for two years. That ought to make a better
citizen of her and keep us all safer from those Iraqi terrorists. It
will cost about $200,000 to keep her in prison. Query: if she had been
sentenced to a year of house arrest, and the money paid to the cruise
line, would we be less safe? But of course the prison guards need
prisoners or they can't be paid. And we are all so much
safer how. Hurrah for the Federal security people. They can all be proud
of themselves.
It's pretty pointless to try to do anything that requires
Internet connections on a continuous basis what with the DOS attacks
interrupting service. On-line games get blown off periodically. Intermittent
things work. Continuous doesn't.
We need the Godfather Corporation to deal with spammers.
Normal government either can't or won't. They're too busy jailing silly
girls who write notes and confess when confronted to bother with spammers
and virus writers. Meanwhile, Adelphia is intermittent and
has been all afternoon. Just now I have no connection at all. That will I
presume change. Ten minutes ago I had about 2400 bps connection.
Whee.
Journalism and Iraq: A Certainly Biased
Story. I have no way of knowing if all or any of this is
true:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international
/story/0,6903,1037081,00.html
For while the media are encouraged to count
each US death, the Iraqi civilians who have died at American hands since
the fall of Saddam's regime have been as uncounted as their names have
been unacknowledged.
The death of two innocent Iraqis was thought
so unremarkable the US military did not even report it, but Peter Beaumont
says it reflects an increasingly callous disregard of civilian lives in
coalition operations
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
Peter Beaumont
Farah Fadhil was only 18 when she was killed.
An American soldier threw a grenade through the window of her apartment.
Her death, early last Monday, was slow and agonising. Her legs had been
shredded, her hands burnt and punctured by splinters of metal, suggesting
that the bright high-school student had covered her face to shield it from
the explosion.
She had been walking to the window to try to
calm an escalating situation; to use her smattering of English to plead
with the soldiers who were spraying her apartment building with bullets.
But then a grenade was thrown and Farah died. So did Marwan Hassan who,
according to neighbours, was caught in the crossfire as he went looking
for his brother when the shooting began.
What is perhaps most shocking about their
deaths is that the coalition troops who killed them did not even bother to
record details of the raid with the coalition military press office. The
killings were that unremarkable.
<snip>
I know the bias of the newspaper, and the writer's views
are easily inferred from his choices of words; but the question remains,
is it true? The account is substantial and names many people including
some Red Cross officials. Do those people exist? Is this whole cloth or
substantially true? The chilling thought is that it could
be true. Combat troops are not police, and do not conduct raids to
minimize civilian casualties. Grenading rooms before you enter is pretty
standard practice: certainly I was taught that in basic training a long
time ago. The article is long, and if it is true, then does
it matter if the source is biassed? And for that matter, how many
"good stories" does it take to make up for something like this?
If this is part of progress, and the price of progress, perhaps we should
be very afraid; because I suspect that a free election held in that
neighborhood just now would not produce results very favorable to the
United States.
Adelphia has been off since about 5 PM. I have connected
the satellite system up. With luck Adelphia will be back tomorrow. It's
certainly dead today. Meanwhile, so is my web site. I
cannot ftp to it or see it. And mail to jerryp@jerrrypournelle.com
is not getting through. So all told things are not good on the net, and in
fact this is history since if you can see this something must have been
fixed..
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