Hurrahpertif Tuesday: Miller, Osprey, Snipers

By Meteor Blades

A few days ago, my TNH blogmates and I were talking about Judy Miller turning over redacted notes to Patrick Fitzgerald and speculating who it might have been who redacted them. The New York Times reports that it was Judy herself.

Ms. Miller also turned over her notes to Mr. Fitzgerald, but she said she was allowed to redact them herself, removing irrelevant information, rather than having to submit them to a third party to redact.

Whether you believe that or not, Firedoglake has apparently acquired a leaked copy of the redacted notes:

I was hot, wanton, stinking of sex. "Oh Irv," I moaned, quivering at his touch like a woman dying of thirst. The name of Valerie Wilson was never mentioned in our conversations.

My favorite follower of military technology, Defense Tech, sticks a needle in Pennyslvania Republican Curt Weldon over the Osprey. Weldon is …

…one of the biggest defenders of the V-22, which the Pentagon decided to buy last week. Makes sense; he's got a Boeing plant in his district that stands to gain lots of work and jobs building V-22s.

After the Pentagon announced its decision, Weldon had this to say about the program's many detractors: ”This is total vindication from all of the critics who had taken cheap shots at the V-22 project over the years.”

Cheap shots like this?

”If the V-22 was unaffordable in 1989, it is even more unaffordable now”. That was Dick Cheney, in 1992 -- three years after he killed the V-22 as defense secretary. Congress kept it alive.

Mostly missed in all the hoopla over Tom DeLay’s indictments, Judy Miller’s emergence from what I’m sure her book will call a dungeon and Harriet Miers’s emergence from obscurity, Knight-Ridder, which has generated a bevy of solid stories on Iraq since before the war began, gave us another one:

KR Insurgents play cat-and-mouse game with American snipers

"We go out and kill the bad guys one at a time," said [sniper team commander Staff Sgt. Donnie] Hendricks, 32, who speaks with the soft accent of his native Claremore, Okla., where his high school graduating class had 55 students. "But we're just whittling down one group so it's easier for the other groups to kill them."

Maj. Dean Wollan, the top U.S. intelligence officer in Diyala, said his men had made tremendous gains against the insurgency, but he worries that the fight will grind on for years.

"I think it's going to be a while," said Wollan, 38, of Missoula, Mont. "I think the shortest insurgency we've seen was the one the Brits fought in Malaysia. That was seven years."

Commanders for the 3rd Infantry Division in Diyala said the number of attacks there had dropped from about a dozen a day last year to seven. Roadside bombs, they said, have decreased by a third. The latter trend, though, hasn't held up this month. In September 2004 there were 72 roadside bombs detonated or found, but 106 this month.

"They say attacks are down. Well, no s---," Hendricks said. "We're not patrolling where the bad guys are."

U.S. patrols on a parallel road, Route Marie, ended in late May.

Pointing to Route Marie on a map on the wall of his barracks, Hendricks traced a 2-mile stretch of the road with his index finger.

"They kicked our a-- off this road," Hendricks said. "They hit us with so many IEDs we had to stop using it." He used the military's term for homemade bombs, "improvised explosive devices." … The U.S. military in Muqdadiyah has reduced patrols from 24-hour cycles to two daily five-hour rotations. And instead of canvassing the entire area, the patrols now concentrate almost exclusively on Route Vanessa, the main route in and out of the base. The insurgents shifted their attacks and now regularly place bombs along that road.

"The bad guys watch our gates. They know when we're out in sector. They just wait for us to leave and then they plant" the bombs, Hendricks said. "They plant them with impunity." … Hendricks and his men are career military. Four of the seven are sergeants, the backbone of the enlisted ranks.

Hendricks has spent eight of nine years in the military as a sniper, including five with the Army Rangers. Including his first deployment to Iraq in 2003, he's had nine confirmed kills and nine wounded. "It takes nothing," he said with a half-grin. "I don't care about these people."

Why do I get the feeling he’s not just talking about insurgents?

Comments

[Mimikatz]

Thanks for clearing that up. I have always wondered what the "I" in "I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby" stood for but was too lazy to look it up.

[rj]

Eeeuwww, now I'll have that picture in my head all day...

God bless the folks at Knight Ridder; amazing what real journalists can do without the "advantage" of top-level sources.

[DHinMI]

My mom, half-glibly seeking to explain my uncle's strange behavior (before he was finally officially diagnosed as schizophrenic) used to crack wise that it was the Marines that did it to him. She's point out that the second paragraph of about half the stories about some crazed gunman opening up on a crowd of people included the phrase "the former marine."

I wonder how many stories about murders, massacres and depravities over the next few decades will include the phrase "the former army sniper who served in Iraq."

[DemFromCT]

my AM story was on the iraqi vote. And now:

New Rules on Iraqi Vote May Violate Standards, U.N. Says

The United Nations said today that newly adopted rules for the coming Iraqi constitutional referendum appeared to violate accepted international standards for elections.

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[Kagro X]

In that vein, DH, note the number of murderers whose carry the names Wayne and/or Lee. Like naming a daughter Misty or Candi, it's setting yourself up for heartache.

[greyhair]

Are any of you folks following this gem? The conservative movement, particularly the religious right, has got to be stopped:

http://greyhairsblog.blogspot.com/2005/10/mother-may-i.html

[AlphaGeek]

Kagro, in particular beware of giving your male child the middle name 'Wayne'. Can't find the cite at the moment, but a study a few years back revealed that 'Wayne' is the most common middle name among convicted murderers by a significant margin.

[Kir]

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[Kir]

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[Arnie]

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[Arnie]

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