Let me preface this remark first.

I, speaking as an individual, strongly support this administration's fundamental shift in our strategic foreign policy within the Middle East (See other essays on HSPIG Forums Site).

I still have confidence in Sec Rumsfield. He's got a big plate which is very full. He's also been tasked with unifying the military commands and will encounter major foot dragging and political hits from special interests groups.

There is one thing that Sec Rumsfield could do immediately that would greatly increase the mission readiness of Air Guard units and probably other reserve units as well. Some guard wings have lost over 50% of their qualified pilots because of issues with the anthrax vaccine. In fighter wings, reserve and guard pilots are 80% or more of the qualified pilots.

This is the current controversy over the mandatory administration of the DOD's anthrax vaccine. I don't mean to beat a dead horse here but this is an extremely serious problem. The risk/consequences of suffering life long adverse reactions from taking this vaccine, greatly outweigh the risk of being exposed in a bioterror attack and resulting adverse effects. Anthrax can be successfully treated with antibiotics if initiated promptly. The current push to require all personnel to be vaccinated is not warranted. This policy is interfering/impeding mission readiness.

See this letter I recently wrote to CBS:

Date: Mon Jan 03, 2005 08:16:51 PM PST
Subject: RE UR STORY ON TCAS AND LT. COL LACKLEN

Re Lt. Col. Lacklen and previous story on TCAS

ANTHRAX VACCINE CAUSAL LINK FOR GULF WAR SYNDROME?

Dear Mr. Hartman, CBS 60 Minutes:

There is a major story now emerging in the Blogosphere (Blogos) that will dwarf Rathergate. Run Google search with the keywords "Lacklen +anthrax." Col. Lacklen in your previous story segment may be a victim of the military's covert experimental anthrax vaccine program.

This story has been percolating along on many fronts for several years. It is now about to reach critical mass. The MSM is sitting on the sidelines for fear of another Rathergate. Unfortunately the MSM and Rather don't understand the Blogos well. This is not about partisan politics but a newly emerging medium to convey info and the news of the day. Imagine a vast neuro net of dendritic/synapses forging connections at an exponential rate with massive parallel processing power to bring to bare on research questions.

HSPIG has no hidden agenda other than protecting the interests of our men and women in uniform either now or in the past. As Bill O'Reilly says, "Who's looking out for you?" Our svs personnel have enough to do fighting this war without having to worry about, "covering their backs." Senior military commanders may have been mislead as to the actual level of risk. A serious complication rate of 25 to 30% exists. These reactions occur at the molecular level. Further there may be a genetic predisposition.

The nexus-unifying link is Gary Matsumoto's new book Vaccine-A. If true and we believe the science is sound, demonstrates a casual link between the DOD's anthrax vaccine program and Gulf War Syndrome. The story gets bigger because the DOD's "Lil Shoppe of Horror's" should be fully aware of this now, but insists on continuing with this program. The DOD may have conducted experimental clinical trials using this vaccine on svs personnel without their informed consent and or knowledge. The military can do this and svs personnel have no recourse per Feres Doctrine. This faulty research may now expand into civilian vaccines that are critical to our survival. The people involved are literally playing with fire they don't understand. There is an abundance of independent research available to show that the DOD's research is flawed.

[...]

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Ron Wright, Moderator
HSPIG Forums Site
www.hspig.org

Sorry I neglected to say what item I was responding to:

A US commander warned Army chief of staff Peter Schoomaker that the Army Reserve is degenerating into a broken force due dysfunctional policies.

Ron Wright

Hey, Ron - we have a post up on the Vaccine-A issue.

It feels a bit like you're hijacking all the other threads in that direction, which probably does less to attract attention to the issue than to annoy the readers and cause them to start filtering you (and the issue out).

A.L.

"A U.S. commander in Afghanistan said his soldiers are taking as few prisoners as possible these days to convince Afghans of the U.S. military's good intentions."

Woo hoo! (genuinely)

I regard that as very good news, better still if it heralds a new general policy . It should have happened years ago, but better late than never.

(1) It is completely unacceptable and impractical to treat Al Qaeda combatants as though they were soldiers in good standing with the conventions of war. The codes that apply to honourable warriors must exclude our present enemies, or honour is meaningless. Jihadis given the protections that ought not apply to them will use our laws as weapons against us, and with every prospect of causing us unacceptable vexation. You cannot fight a counter-jihad where the jihadis are presumptively immune from all penalties except those that may be imposed by a court after proving beyond any reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty of some specific crime. (You couldn't even fight a normal war that way.) It would take away a crucial part of the laws of war (the incentive for others to subscribe to them in good faith) to make them non-reciprocal, and merely another self-imposed weakness of the civilised nations. There is certainly no prospect of reciprocal good treatment. And there is no adequate reason to think that jihadis may be safely paroled, ever. (Nor do I think they should be if they could be. I think we have gotten to the point where it's reasonable to use the word "malecide", referring to the killing of evil, for what we are about.) So picking up a useless, impossible and endless burden is just not a real option (except if we're fighting to lose), and it never was.

Aaron at Belgravia Dispatch said here (link):
"Here's the slippery slope, and all for less than a thousand prisoners.
1. No torture allowed.
2. More humane conditions...maybe Geneva?
3. Legal representation, of course.
4. What crimes did they commit?
5. No proof of crime? Release them.
If we can stop at POINT 1, I'll be happy. But I suspect it will quickly move on to the others."

We can't afford to play games on that slope.

(2) Secretary of State Colin Powell said firmly (during the Afghanistan campaign) that you have to let people surrender if they want to.

(3) And treatment of jihadi captives not according to humane standards and the military codes of our civilised armies is also completely unacceptable. It is inherently wrong. All soldiers who participate directly or indirectly in coercive interrogations are to some extent lowered or degraded by this. That is not (and please God may it never be) what our soldiers sign up for. Also, "pressure" produces scandals that do immense damage to the war effort. Of course, I don't know how much useful information we're getting from these interrogations, but it seems to me that even if we'd caught bin Laden by now with information obtained by "pressure" it wouldn't be enough to compensate for Abu Ghraib. Also, it's infuriating to be on the wrong foot morally in a just war. "Alarm" in Afghanistan about things like numerous deaths in custody is not part of an invented liberal media pseudo-scandal, it is a legitimate response to scandalous things.

There is of course another slippery slope here, and we already know by experience that if you get cute with the basic morality of not coercing captives you will be corrupted and you will do unacceptable things.

We can't have (1), (2) and (3). Something had to give. Unfortunately, our restraints on coercive interrogation gave first, but I hope we'll be mostly on the right foot from now on.

There is no rule that combatants who act contrary to every decent restraint, this means jihadis, have to be allowed to surrender. Unless there's a terrific reason why we need a particular individual alive, it's better to kill them all. It's the only ethical (and practical) solution.

There is no slippery slope in killing inhuman killers. That is exactly what we should do, morally.

I am happy to apply the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If I ever become the sort of person who does what jihadis did at Beslan School #1, please shoot me stone cold dead without preliminaries or compunction. I wouldn't wish to live on as that sort of person. And in all fairness and charity, I don't want anyone else who has been corrupted by Islam into that state of moral horror to go on living either.

(I also think the only thing wrong with the Marine putting a couple of security rounds into a wounded jihadi in Falluja was that he was ever a "prisoner" in the first place.)

There is a practical problem that this makes it hard to obtain surrenders. Jihadis give up because they want to live. ("Of course I pitied the children, I swear to Allah. I have children myself. I didn't shoot. I swear to Allah," he said. "I don't want to die. I swear to Allah, I want to live." - one of the child-raping genocidal sadists at Beslan. I believe him - about his wanting to live.)

Fighting jihadis who would have surrendered if the option had been open to them will get our soldiers killed and maimed. In my view, these are necessary casualties. This will also give our enemies the increased reputation and prestige that goes with great courage, whether spurred by desperation or not. That's a darned shame. We have to pay that price to do the right thing morally and to fight most effectively. We just don't have the sort of system that would lest us continue to weaken the enemy by holding out the prosect of easy surrenders without doing ourselves unacceptable harm in the long run.

On La Razon news:

First of all, if terrorists want to disrupt the energy market in Europe, it is easier to attack the oil fields and pipelines in Algeria, Lybia or the Caucasus, as it happens every day in Iraq. There is even a critical gas pipeline that runs from central Algeria thru Marocco and below the Gibraltar Strait directly into Spain. So, why do you bother attacking a tanker in rough seas? The Atlantic Ocean near the Canary Islands is not a lake, could you imagine sailing miles and miles there, in a small boat trying to hit a moving target? The defence is also uncomplicated: move away from the coast the route the tankers cross.

For me, it is surprising the efforts that make certain officers of the Spanish administration to link the perpetrators of 3/11 to any plot conceivable, especially each time it comes to the light that there are more Spanish citizens involved in the March massacre, that changed the result of the national elections.

Secondly, what I believe was a true AlQaeda plot, disrupted by the Moroccoan Police years ago, consisted in attacking American warships in the Gibraltar Strait in the way USS Cole was hit. The Gibraltar Strait is only 8.5 nautical miles wide in some points, there is heavy traffic through and across, and fishermen and smugglers of inmigrants and hash add a lot of new targets to be checked. Furthermore, a sucesful attack against an American warship is far more profitable for the terrorists and would show that no one is safe.