Don Walters: the unknown hero of the Private Lynch story

The New York Times > Opinion > Kristof: Unbearable Emptiness

SALEM, Ore. — Ever since a group of Iraqis told me last year about seeing a redheaded American soldier who was captured, held naked and then executed, I've been haunted by the question of his identity.

The first clues were in Nasiriya, Iraq, where in the aftermath of the war I interviewed the doctors and hospital staff who had cared for Pfc. Jessica Lynch. They said that the Pentagon had exaggerated the drama of her rescue, but what I could never put out of my mind was their tale of another American, whose name they never knew.

Abdul Hadi, an ambulance driver, tried to pick up a male American P.O.W. being held by Saddam Fedayeen. The American, he said, had been stripped naked and handcuffed, but he was allowed to smoke a cigarette while under guard....

The hospital staff said the guards refused to give up the American and threatened the ambulance crew with guns and grenades. So the ambulance retreated - and several hours later, the same P.O.W. was brought to the hospital as a corpse, shot dead.

.... I heard about Sgt. Donald Walters. He was a cook who vanished in the same firefight in which Jessica Lynch was captured, and his body was later recovered in Nasiriya....

It also seems that the heroism originally attributed to Private Lynch may actually have been Sergeant Walters's. Iraqi radio intercepts had described a blond U.S. soldier fighting tenaciously, and the Army this year awarded him a posthumous Silver Star in implicit acknowledgment that he was probably that soldier.

The citation reads: "His actions and selfless courage under fire resulted in saving lives of several other members of the convoy" - perhaps including Private Lynch. His cover fire allowed fellow soldiers to escape, while he remained alone in a hostile city; when he ran out of ammunition, he ran but was captured....

Sergeant Walters left three children, then 9 months, 6 years and 8 years old. A veteran of the first gulf war, he had re-enlisted out of patriotism after 9/11...

...When hawks say that the Iraq war was worth the price, they should remember that that price is measured in the lives of people like Don Walters, forever young, forever heroes, forever gone.

Why the French are skinnier ...

BBC NEWS | Health | How the French manage to stay slim

American researchers from Pennsylvania University recently spent some time researching why the French remain so much slimmer than Americans. After intensive study, they came to a remarkable conclusion.

It was because the French ate less.

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The lazy reaction would be to mock a study that produced a seemingly obvious conclusion, yet the rest of this pop article makes clear that the conclusion was not necessarily obvious. The French diet is not noteably low fat, nor is it an Atkins diet -- if anything it's carbohydrate heavy. Meals seem large enough at first sight. It turns out that the individual meal components may be high calorie, but portion sizes are often quite small. Snack intake is also relatively limited. The net effect is limited caloric intake.

I suspect a study of New Yorkers, who are quite a bit slimmer than we midwesterners, would produce a similar result.

This does not explain French lifespans, which are relatively long considering their tobacco use. That's still an interesting research topic. Is it genetic drift, or consumption of anti-aging ingredients in red wine? Noone knows.

The primary lessons is that obesity is NOT an inevitable consequence of prosperity. It is possible that we will develop cultural adaptations to abundance, as the French have, that will lessen obesity. It would also help if cities and suburbs were to facilitate physical activity through light rail, walking and bicycling paths, parks, sidewalks, etc.

Electoral fraud in America -- it works just like buying elections

The New York Times > Opinion > Krugman: Fear of Fraud

This year, Florida again hired a private company - Accenture, which recently got a homeland security contract worth up to $10 billion - to prepare a felon list. Remembering 2000, journalists sought copies. State officials stonewalled, but a judge eventually ordered the list released.

The Miami Herald quickly discovered that 2,100 citizens who had been granted clemency, restoring their voting rights, were nonetheless on the banned-voter list. Then The Sarasota Herald-Tribune discovered that only 61 of more than 47,000 supposed felons were Hispanic. So the list would have wrongly disenfranchised many legitimate African-American voters, while wrongly enfranchising many Hispanic felons. It escaped nobody's attention that in Florida, Hispanic voters tend to support Republicans.

After first denying any systematic problem, state officials declared it an innocent mistake. They told Accenture to match a list of registered voters to a list of felons, flagging anyone whose name, date of birth and race was the same on both lists. They didn't realize, they said, that this would automatically miss felons who identified themselves as Hispanic because that category exists on voter rolls but not in state criminal records.

But employees of a company that prepared earlier felon lists say that they repeatedly warned state election officials about that very problem.

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In my industry (health care IT) we work with matching problems all the time. Accenture's matching rule was incompetent; they probably spent about 30 minutes designing and testing it. I suspect the work was a bit of a "freebie", done in gratitude for that 10 billion dollar contract. They wouldn't even have had to deliberately bias their work, all they would have to do is not pay attention and then bias the testing towards their employer's primary concerns. Mistakes that favored Democrats would get caught, mistakes that favored their Republican employers would be missed.

It's the same way political donations corrupt the political process. Direct quid-pro-quo bribes happen quite often, but the big effect is ensuring the "right" person gets the money to buy voters. The "right" person will, by virtue of the beliefs for which they were selected, vote the "right" way.

Now I'm worried. I can see why Kerry is assembling an outstanding legal team to supervise our elections. Too bad the Supremes have already demonstrated the power of assembling the "right" people.

Thank you, Miami Herald and Sarasota Herald-Tribune!

The FBI running amok ...

Boing Boing: Stargate fan-site operator busted under anti-terrorism law

The creator of an SG-1 fansite has been charged by the FBI with criminal copyright infringment, the result of an investigation that involved a USA PATRIOT Act warrant against the site's ISP to gather intelligence. The Feebs confiscated and then destroyed his personal computers, returning their remains months later.

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It's not impossible that this guy broke one of our new and monstrous copyright laws. It's even possible that he knew he was crossing the line. Possible, but not interesting.

What's interesting is that the FBI used a sledgehammer on a fly, then, in an astounding display of incompetence or malevolence, trashed his property.

This is the agency we're depending on?

The prison nation -- one nation under bars.

MSNBC - U.S. prison, parole population sets record

... about 3.2 percent of the adult U.S. population, or 1 in 32 adults, were incarcerated or on probation or parole at the end of last year.

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This number doesn't include those who've been previously convicted for a felony. The article also didn't provide percentages by ethnicity; based on past reports it's likely that the percentage of incarcerated black men is substantially higher than 3.2%.

I'd wager that one of the best measures of the psychic health of an industrialized nation is the incarceration rate multiplied by the murder rate. It would be interesting to plot that number for a range of industrialized nations. I'm pretty sure the US would rank dead last. It would also be interesting to plot that number for American states; the result would be a good guide on the best places to live.

Is there any number that will spark outrage? 5%? 10%? 40%!?

When do we say enough?

Who will be the Dickens for 21st century America?

Playing the hand you've been dealt - the story of a cancer experimentalist

The New York Times > National > Heeding a Call to Test Breast Cancer Treatments

My father used to say, 'You play the hand you've been dealt,' ' Sister Mary Andrew said. 'I would like to have lived longer, worked longer. I'd like to still be president of the university. But it's not the hand I've been dealt'

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This is an excellent NYT article about experimental therapies. It's not the usual tabloid "miracle cure" story -- it's the story of a brave, curious, and wise woman (an academic and a catholic nun) who chose to join clinical trials primarily as a way to make her death meaningful. Some of them may have helped her, some probably hurt. She may no longer be a candidate for further experiments; she seems a bit wistful about that.

One could do much worse than a family motto of "You play the hand you've been dealt." It covers a lot of ground. One may argue that changing the game or cheating are alternative options, but I think that reflects a misunderstanding of the game. As was once said of thermodynamics, "you can't win, you can't break even, and you can't quit the game". In life one doesn't change the game, but one may realize that the rules are less restrictive than commonly thought.

BBC Tour de France tactics guide

BBC Sport Academy | Other Sport | Cycling | Read our Tour de France tactics guide

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Hey! I only just found this! Would have bene nice a few weeks ago. I hope it's still there for next year.

Richard Clarke: what we should do to stop the next set of attacks

The New York Times > Opinion > Richard Clarke: Honorable Commission, Toothless Report

Americans owe the 9/11 commission a deep debt for its extensive exposition of the facts surrounding the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. Yet, because the commission had a goal of creating a unanimous report from a bipartisan group, it softened the edges and left it to the public to draw many conclusions.

Among the obvious truths that were documented but unarticulated were the facts that the Bush administration did little on terrorism before 9/11 ...

So what now? News coverage of the commission's recommendations has focused on the organizational improvements: a new cabinet-level national intelligence director and a new National Counterterrorism Center to ensure that our 15 or so intelligence agencies play well together. Both are good ideas, but they are purely incremental. Had these changes been made six years ago, they would not have significantly altered the way we dealt with Al Qaeda; they certainly would not have prevented 9/11...

First, we need not only a more powerful person at the top of the intelligence community, but also more capable people throughout the agencies - especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency. In other branches of the government, employees can and do join on as mid- and senior-level managers after beginning their careers and gaining experience elsewhere. But at the F.B.I. and C.I.A., the key posts are held almost exclusively by those who joined young and worked their way up. This has created uniformity, insularity, risk-aversion, torpidity and often mediocrity...

Second, in addition to separating the job of C.I.A. director from the overall head of American intelligence, we must also place the C.I.A.'s analysts in an agency that is independent from the one that collects the intelligence. This is the only way to avoid the "groupthink" that hampered the agency's ability to report accurately on Iraq. It is no accident that the only intelligence agency that got it right on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department - a small, elite group of analysts encouraged to be independent thinkers rather than spies or policy makers.

... Either the C.I.A. or the military must create a larger and more capable commando force for covert antiterrorism work, along with a network of agents and front companies working under "nonofficial cover'' - that is, without diplomatic protection - to support the commandos.

Even more important than any bureaucratic suggestions is the report's cogent discussion of who the enemy is and what strategies we need in the fight. The commission properly identified the threat not as terrorism (which is a tactic, not an enemy), but as Islamic jihadism, which must be defeated in a battle of ideas as well as in armed conflict.

We need to expose the Islamic world to values that are more attractive than those of the jihadists. This means aiding economic development and political openness in Muslim countries, and efforts to stabilize places like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Restarting the Israel-Palestinian peace process is also vital.

Also, we can't do this alone. In addition to "hearts and minds" television and radio programming by the American government, we would be greatly helped by a pan-Islamic council of respected spiritual and secular leaders to coordinate (without United States involvement) the Islamic world's own ideological effort against the new Al Qaeda.

Unfortunately, because of America's low standing in the Islamic world [jf: One of GWB's gifts to America], we are now at a great disadvantage in the battle of ideas...

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The CIA and FBI would never hire me. If they did hire me, I'd last about 2 days.

Problem is, the fight against evil needs a few (maybe not a huge number!) of people like me. They need nerds intellectuals and geeks who question authority and established thinking; people who don't fit military and paramilitary structures. The Manhattan project and the WW II crypto projects had "my people" (ok, 10 times smarter than me); but we've been shut out of this effort. It doesn't help that most us think GWB is incompetent!

The FBI had people who spotted parts of the 9/11 story, but they were shut out and shutdown. They didn't fit the established culture.

Changing hiring practices is a necessary but not sufficient component of reforming our security apparatus. We need to change cultures as well as adding new capabilities to the best of the old.

Clarke's treatise reads very much like Kerry's foreign policy plans.

Enhanced luggage

alibi . may 20 - 26, 2004

Dateline: Canada—A routine test of airport security turned into a Marx Brothers routine after security officers mistakenly sent a passenger home with a suitcase full of TNT. The TNT was supposed to be planted in the bags of a Montreal security agent. Instead, it somehow ended up stuffed into the luggage of an unsuspecting overseas passenger who arrived at Pierre Elliot Trudeau International Airport last Friday. The unnamed passenger went to a friend's house where he found the explosives concealed in a jam jar and placed inside his suitcase. The man immediately called Quebec provincial police. The TNT, which officials say had no detonator attached, was meant as part of a weekly test for bomb-sniffing dogs at the airport. Ironically, the dogs failed to detect the explosives. The passenger and his baggage were able to pass though airport security unchecked. “Our investigation is going to reveal exactly what happened,” airport security spokesman Pierre Goupil told TV network TVA.

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About once a year or so we hear stories like this. Imagine if the explosives HAD been detected by security; this would have made international news. Since they weren't detected it's an obscure local story.

Faughnan defends Bush

The New York Times > Opinion > Maureen Dowd: Spinning Our Safety

He explained to the commissioners that he had stayed in his seat making little fish faces at second graders for seven minutes after learning about the second plane hitting the towers because, as the report says, 'The president felt he should project strength and calm until he could better understand what was happening.'

What better way to track the terror in the Northeast skies than by reading 'My Pet Goat' in Sarasota?

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Ok, I've had enough. I've cracked. I have to defend GWB.

One of the few things GWB has done right (deciding to invade Afghanistan doesn't count because that was an inevitable act) was to sit calmly and continue reading to those school kids.

I've got to stop reading Maureen Dowd.

Terror and the fear of swarthy men

Telegraph | News: Was an al-Qaeda plot unfolding on Northwest Airlines flight 327?
By James Langton 7/25/04

As Annie Jacobsen boarded Northwest Airlines flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles, she was starting to feel sick with nerves.

... she was worrying about six Middle Eastern men waiting to board their flight, two of whom were carrying musical instrument cases, while the third was wearing an orthopaedic shoe. None was checked as he boarded the aeroplane.

... By the time the aircraft reached cruising altitude and the seatbelt lights had been switched off, one of the men, wearing a yellow T-shirt and carrying a bulging McDonald's bag, had already disappeared into the lavatory next to first class. When he reappeared, the bag was empty.

... Another man stood up. From an overhead locker, he removed a foot-long object wrapped in cloth, then walked to the back of the plane. Five others from the Middle Eastern party then began using the forward lavatory consecutively. Several others made for the rear bathroom.

... Before he could finish, the flight attendant pulled him aside. "In a quiet voice, she explained that they were all concerned about what was going on," Mrs Jacobsen says. "The captain was aware. The flight attendants were passing notes to each other. She said there were people on board 'higher up than you and me watching the men'


... With the "fasten seatbelts" lights on and the cabin crew strapped in their seats for landing, seven of the men stood up and made for the front and back lavatories. As they waited, speaking in Arabic, one pulled out his mobile telephone. None of the flight crew, Mrs Jacobsen was alarmed to note, intervened to stop the telephone call or to make the men sit down.

... Moments later, the last man came out of the bathroom. As he passed the man in the yellow T-shirt, Mrs Jacobsen saw him draw his finger across his throat and mouth the word "no".

... As the passengers walked into the terminal, Mrs Jacobsen saw men in dark suits gathering. Los Angeles Police Department agents rushed past them. Several other men from the aircraft, believed to be air marshals, pulled the group of 14 Arab men to one side.

... However, she did get a swift telephone call from the Federal Air Marshal Services. Under questioning, a spokesman revealed, the 14 men had said they were musicians travelling to a concert at a Californian desert casino. None showed up on the FBI's most wanted list and since their story checked out they were allowed to go. The band, the spokesman said, "gave their little performance in the casino ...

... Gary Boettcher, a member of the board of directors of the Allied Pilots Association, wrote to Mrs Jacobsen, saying that he and many fellow captains had witnessed similar practice runs. "I am a captain with a major airline," he said. "I was very involved with the Arming Pilots effort. Your reprint of this airborne event is not a singular nor isolated experience. The terrorists are probing us all the time."

Another pilot, Mark Bogosian, with American Airlines, said: "The incident you wrote about, and incidents like it, occur more than you like to think. It is a 'dirty little secret' that all of us, as crew members, have known about for quite some time."

... But what no one knew - not the frightened passengers or the apparently untroubled Syrian band - was that June 29 was far from an ordinary day. Only hours earlier, the Department of Homeland Security had issued an urgent alert at half a dozen airports for a group of six Pakistani men believed to be training for a terrorist attack in the US. Two of those airports were Detroit and Los Angeles.

... Two days after Mrs Jacobsen's trip, the US Transport and Security Administration ordered pilots to stop passengers from congregating around aircraft toilets and told flight crew to check bathrooms every two hours for suspicious packages. Six days after that, customs officers at Minneapolis arrested a Syrian who was carrying a suicide note and DVDs containing what has been described as "anti-American material".

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This is an incoherent article. It took some study to determine that the flight in question took place on 6/27/04. A few comments:

1. I fly a lot, almost weekly. I'm rarely searched. I don't think I look either innocent nor suspicious, so I suspect my search rate is about average. The Bush administration downsized the security force last year; they don't have the staff to search many people.

2. I'd be saddened and surprised if there really were a rule that no more than two men of ethnic arab appearance could be searched per flight. If that were so, a team would simply require that two decoys act so as to draw a search -- thereby ensuring others would not be searched.

3. Every time someone of a "suspicious" ethnicity and gender is searched, some blond white woman should be searched too. It's the only way to make the bitterness of what is effectively ethnic profiling even barely tolerable. Share the pain.

4. If this journalist thinks throwing out trash in the men's room is suspicious, she doesn't fly enough. Who wants to sit around with trash in one's cramped seat? In first class I'd hand it to an attendant, but in cargo class attendants can be hard to find.

5. It would be interesting to interview a few pilots and learn if this "probing" theory is plausible or paranoid.

I'd guess if there was anything going on, it was a group of Syrian musicians who were playing cruel games with the minds of anxious passengers. Not polite and not wise, but not illegal. Even, given the glares they doubtless receive, almost understandable ...

Anyone remember anthrax?

Our Forgotten Panic (washingtonpost.com)

My point is that we were panicked. Yet that panic never gets mentioned. Last month the New Republic published a 'special issue' in which a bevy of very good writers wondered whether they had been wrong to support the war in Iraq. Most of them admitted to having erred about this or that detail or in failing to appreciate how badly George Bush would administer the war and the occupation. But none confessed to being seized by the zeitgeist. I read the magazine cover to cover and unless I somehow missed it, the word anthrax never appeared. Imagine! Not once! Not a single one of these writers admitted to panicking over anthrax.

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I also remember smallpox. There was a lot of talk about smallpox before we invaded Iraq, and a lot of talk about "Dr. Germ", the evil Iraqi biologists. (Ever wonder where she is now?)

The Bush administration pushed for largescale smallpox immunizations, then scaled back to a smaller group. I thought they were right -- back then I had some trust in GWB. Once the invasion of Iraq began the smallpox threat apparently evaporated. Later we discovered that more Americans are immune to smallpox than we once thought -- so the need for immunization was less than we'd thought. But this was discovered after GWB had lost interest. It's almost as if the immunization program, which did injure some people, had served its true purpose.

Warren Buffett on the Stock Market: The best short summary on the market?

Fortune.com 2002 - Intro - Warren Buffett on the Stock Market

The thoughts that follow come from a second Buffett speech, given last July at the site of the first talk, Allen & Co.'s annual Sun Valley bash for corporate executives. There, the renowned stockpicker returned to the themes he'd discussed before, bringing new data and insights to the subject. Working with FORTUNE's Carol Loomis, Buffett distilled that speech into this essay, a fitting opening for this year's Investor's Guide. Here again is Mr. Buffett on the Stock Market.

Blodgett wrote a fascinating 3 part series for Slate recently. In it he references this piece, calling it the best written in recent times.

JBL - Home Audio - new TOUR travel speakers

JBL - Home Audio

These look very interesting! Compact indeed.

The official site: best guide to the race?

T D F - 2 0 0 4 : canal le Tour - OLN

It was a moment of encouragement for the German’s fans. Ullrich had put time into Armstrong. At last. But it wasn’t much – a minute was the maximum gain – and it didn’t cause any panic in the Postal camp.

“We weren’t very concerned,” said Armstrong. “The climb that he attacked on doesn’t really have a descent. I know it well; we raced a similar stage in the [Criterium] du Dauphine in June… had I been alone,” continued the stage winner, “it would have been a different story.

“But Ivan had some guys and so did I, so it was absolutely not a problem.” Armstrong was nonchalant about this sortie by the rider who is almost seven minutes behind on the general classification after 15 stage. And he can afford to be. Lance seems to have an answer to every move his rivals make. He knows what he wants and with the help of clever tactics, a cool head and phenomenal form The Boss is back in charge of the Tour de France.

Big days are yet to come but Lance continues to dictate the terms while most of his rivals either abandon or resort to seemingly senseless tactics. All but Basso and his CSC colleagues.

The elastic band which had kept Thomas Voeckler within touch with the overall lead for nine days finally snapped. It was only a matter of time before this happened and the French champion can be proud of what he’s done. He has risen from relative obscurity only a month ago and acquired enough anecdotes of new-found fame to last him the rest of his career. With the Tour now in the Alpes, Armstrong back in the yellow jersey, and his rivals slowly running out of opportunity there will be many who will remember this village high in the Isere department by another name. Villard-de-Lance is, after all, likely to be the place where the rider who will win an unprecedented sixth Tour title reclaimed the yellow jersey.

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This official tour site may have the best coverage of the race, better than the newspapers.