Another Broken Record

via Think Progress

Another record was broken this year - the number of serious international terrorist attacks in a single year more than tripled, from a record of 175 in 2003 to 655 last year, according to recently released U.S. government figures.

This data, however, will no longer be in the annual report on international terrorism submitted to Congress by the State Department. Just over ten days ago the State Department decided to eliminate the report, “Patterns of Global Terrorism,” entirely.

All this comes not even a year after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell had to publicly apologize for the first edition of the 2003 report - which severely undercounted the number of terrorist attacks. “The numbers were off,” Powell said, and “we have identified how we have to do this in the future.”

Apparently Condoleezza Rice doesn’t agree - her office had suggested an alternative method for counting attacks, and when the National Counterterrorism Center decided not to use this new method, the State Department eliminated the terrorism statistics in the congressionally mandated report altogether.

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Bill O'Reilly led off his show by trying to denounce left wingers like all of us for blaming him for Dr. Tiller's death. He says he knew he would be the target because we hate him and FOX. How did you know we would call you out on Dr. Tiller? Maybe because of all your whacked out rants against him? What he said was true and that's that. He read off statistics from the Moonie Times and had on two Kansas law dudes (Khris Kobach, a law professor at Missouri and Brian Russell, teacher at Kansas) to help defend his cause. Usually, Bill has on an opposing--if somewhat ineffectual--view in his panel, but not this time. He couldn't risk his older audience getting hit with any of the truths surrounding BillO's outrageous behavior towards Dr. Tiller. He called him "The Baby Killer," again, the term he said originated with pro-life groups, but it's a name he used frequently against Dr. Tiller.

O'Reilly: When I heard about Tiller's murder, I knew pro-abortion zealots and FOX News haters would attempt to blame us for the crime and that is exactly what happened.

Later, Brian Russell disagreed with President Obama and said this:

Russell: Ideologically-driven killers rarely are influenced by anything other than their ideology. Obama got this wrong a few days ago when said that people become terrorists because they hear what's going on with Gitmo. No, they don't. They become terrorists because of ideology and just like this guy (Tiller's killer) almost certainly and exclusively because of ideology shot Tiller. These people who are saying that this drivel to you are as far off on their side of the issue as this shooter is on his.

Professor Russell thinks that since we point out O'Reilly's vitriol we're as bad as a freaking murderer. I called Russell on the phone and we had a heated exchange. I identified myself as a liberal blogger and he said he had to go in 5 minutes. I'll blog more about this later, but I told him that I was troubled by his last statement. A man who kills somebody does not have the equivalent ideology that I do on the left. That's insane. He tried to say that Bill O'Reilly had no influence on the killer and actually he took it a step further and said that no killer could ever be influenced by what he heard. I brought up the case of Jim David Adkisson and told him that Adkisson purchased Bernard Goldberg's book and listened to Bill O'Reilly and that was proof that these right wingers do influence people. He didn't believe me. I told him that I wanted BillO and his kind to take some responsibility for what they say and he disagreed. He kept saying he was an expert and I kept saying that his expertise didn't make him correct. He wouldn't admit that his last statement was meant as a blanket to cover Bill O'Reilly's vitriolic behavior with a defense and to also smear us by the hoisting on the values of a killer.

BillO targeted Kos and Huffington as usual. Hate is hate, Bill, and what we've argued for is not a silencing of your views, but to take ownership and responsibility for the hateful rhetoric that you and your right wing extremist buddies use that trigger violence in America against people with whom you disagree.

Later on, Bill's chief FOX News apologist, Juan Williams, came on to lick his boots and defend him even though he's pro-choice. Juan said he knew the left would use it against him and said that Bill O'Reilly never, never called for violence towards Dr. Tiller.

Here's Bill on the radio wishing he could kill Dr. Tiller.

OK. So, I'm the fascist, I'm the bad guy, I'm the problem. Not Tiller. No, he -- no, no, no. He's a good guy. Now, Tiller's pumping all kinds of money into obviously the attorney general race. He wants the guy that's gonna let him off the hook to win. Those of you listening in Kansas, you ought to know that. You know, I don't -- I'm not gonna tell you who to vote for. You guys know these guys better than I do, but I tell you what, anything Tiller wants, I'm voting the other way. And if I could get my hands on Tiller -- well, you know. Can't be vigilantes. Can't do that. It's just a figure of speech.

No, really. It is. Seriously.

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Today's testimony before the House was not quite as riveting as yesterday's Senate session for Petraeus, but I did catch this little tidbit that had me wondering. Rep. Buck McKeon asks Gen. Petraeus to speak to troop morale and this is what he had to say:

Congressman, first of all, let me just say that …I don’t want to start off by generalizing about morale…I want to start off by explaining morale is an individual event. And morale depends from soldier to soldier, and for me as well, on the kind of day that you’re having out there in the theatre. And it’s a roller coaster existence. Now, having said that, as there is actually something called “The Mental Health Assessment” which is done every year, the last one in the late fall, I believe it was. And after several years of a generalization of morale as going down, morale actually went up.

Really? Up??? Five years in, a backdoor draft of stoploss and 3, 4, and 5 tours of duty and the troops are feeling better now? Well, that didn't compute for me, so I had to go find this "Mental Health Assessment" (.pdf) and sure enough, on page 24, there's the statistics Petraeus quoted:

Soldiers ratings of unit morale were significantly higher in 2007 than in 2006 after controlling for sample differences of (1) gender, (2) rank, and (3) months in theater. Figure 2 shows the raw percentages (top graph) and adjusted percents (bottom graph). Notice in the bottom graph that the adjusted percent of Soldiers who rate unit morale high or very high in 2007 is close to double the estimate from 2006.

Ah, there's the rub. If you factor out the women, the NCOs and those who have done multiple tours of duty over several years, things are looking great! By the way, I admit I was never a math major, but that last sentence about the morale being close to double this year...well, that's true if 7.4% was half of 13.1%. Either way, that's only 1 out of every 7 troop members who consider their morale high. Is that something to celebrate?

Or maybe Petraeus wanted to get out in front of this NY Times article:

Army leaders are expressing increased alarm about the mental health of soldiers who would be sent back to the front again and again under plans that call for troop numbers to be sustained at high levels in Iraq for this year and beyond.
Among combat troops sent to Iraq for the third or fourth time, more than one in four show signs of anxiety, depression or acute stress, according to an official Army survey of soldiers' mental health.[..]

Among the 513,000 active-duty soldiers who have served in Iraq since the invasion of 2003, more than 197,000 have deployed more than once, and more than 53,000 have deployed three or more times, according to a separate set of statistics provided this week by Army personnel officers. The percentage of troops sent back to Iraq for repeat deployments would have to increase in the months ahead.

The Army study of mental health showed that 27 percent of noncommissioned officers - a critically important group - on their third or fourth tour exhibited symptoms commonly referred to as post-traumatic stress disorders. That figure is far higher than the roughly 12 percent who exhibit those symptoms after one tour and the 18.5 percent who develop the disorders after a second deployment, according to the study, which was conducted by the Army surgeon general's Mental Health Advisory Team.

And that doesn't even begin to talk about happens when they finally do return home. That's why it's so important for us to support Sen. Jim Webb's Dwell Time Amendment. Hear that, McCain? You want them to stay until the job is done, you have to take care of them to do so.

When it comes to kicking Americans out of the military because they’re gay, the occasional defense — offered by conservatives who know the policy is absurd — is that the Pentagon is merely following the law. If Congress wants able-bodied, patriotic, American volunteers to join the Armed Forces, regardless of sexual orientation, lawmakers should change the policy. If not, the Defense Department doesn’t have a lot of choice.

Except, that’s wrong. Gay soldiers discharged under the DADT policy have dropped from 1,200 a year in 2001 to less than half of that now -- and it's probably not a coincidence.

The U.S. military says it is enforcing the ban on open homosexuals in the ranks, as it has for decades, in the face of statistics that show a sharp drop in the number of discharged homosexuals as wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continue.

Homosexual rights advocates cite the plunge as evidence that the military is losing interest in enforcement and lets openly homosexual men and women serve because commanders need every able-bodied troop.

"Truth be told, I don't think the Pentagon is a big fan of the law anymore," said Steve Ralls, spokesman for Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, which is pushing for the ban's demise.

Then maybe it's time to end the ban?

You've got to see Chris Jordan's work.

Image above shows detail of blocks made of blocks indicating the number of US children without health insurance.

From Running the Numbers, an American Self-Portrait:

This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. My underlying desire is to affirm and sanctify the crucial role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

Chris promises to add pieces as they are completed; well worth the bookmark.

NOW:

Roughly one in seven of America's active duty military soldiers is a woman, but a NOW investigation found that sexual assault and rape is widespread. One study of National Guard and Reserve forces found that almost one in four women had been assaulted or raped. Last year alone, almost 3,000 soldiers reported sexual assault and rape by other soldiers. On Friday, September 7 (check your local listings), in one of the only national television broadcasts of the issue, NOW features women who speak out for the first time about what happened. One woman recounts her ordeal of rape by her superior officer. Many more don't report the incidents for fear of how it will affect their careers. The shocking phenomenon has a label: military sexual trauma, or MST. NOW meets women courageously battling to overcome their MST, bringing light to an issue that's putting the army in shame. A NOW exclusive investigation.

The NOW website will offer the latest statistics on MST and insight into the challenges of reporting sexual abuse in the military.

Informed Comment: It now appears that the insurgency in Iraq has succeeded in interfering with food delivery to U.S. personnel

AlterNet: Cast your vote for the worst offenders on the Corporate Hall of Shame

Les Enragés: Must see videos from Greg Palast on the prosecutor's purge

ArmsControlWonk: Tech, politics, and perspective on Iran

The Satirical Political Report: A Tale of Two Monicas'--Top Ten comparison

ANNALS OF SCIENCE: Some big flaws in this man's thinking on global warming...We can educate ourselves, or, like this deluded fantacist, believe "aliens cause Global Warming"...Maybe a change in terminology is in order...Wingnuts declare war on Rachel Carson...Here's your Guide to Global Warming Denialists...A quote from Darwin... The World Health Organization's 2007 compendium of statistics have some interesting highlights...

ACLUblog:

The American Civil Liberties Union today made public hundreds of claims for damages by family members of civilians killed or injured by Coalition Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The ACLU received the records in response to a Freedom of Information Act request it filed in June 2006.

The hundreds of files provide a vivid snapshot, in significantly more detail than has previously been compiled and released, of the circumstances surrounding reports of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.[..]

The ACLU pointed out that during both the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Defense Department has instituted numerous policies designed to control information about the human costs of war. These policies include:

• Banning photographers on U.S. military bases from covering the arrival of caskets containing the remains of U.S. soldiers killed overseas;
• Paying Iraqi journalists to write positive accounts of the U.S. war effort;
• Inviting U.S. journalists to "embed" with military units but requiring them to submit their stories for pre-publication review;
• Erasing journalists' footage of civilian deaths in Afghanistan; and
• Refusing to disclose statistics on civilian casualties.

The files made public today are claims submitted to the U.S. Foreign Claims Commissions by surviving Iraqi and Afghan family members of civilians said to have been killed or injured or to have suffered property damages due to actions by Coalition Forces. The ACLU released a total of 496 files: 479 from Iraq and 17 from Afghanistan. The documents released by the ACLU are available online in a searchable database at www.aclu.org/civiliancasualties

ABC's The Blotter :

Respected Russian journalist Ivan Safronov, who reported on military affairs, mysteriously plunged to his death from the 5th floor of his apartment building Friday, making him the 14th journalist to die under questionable circumstances in Putin's Russia, according to statistics compiled by the Committee to Protect Journalists. [..]

Polikovskaya's killing, the 13th since Putin took office, led the Committee to Protect Journalists to declare Russia "the third deadliest country in the world for journalists" after Iraq and Algeria in their recent report, "Deadly News." All of the cases remain unsolved.

According to a report in this morning's Moscow Times, Safronov, who wrote for the Russian business newspaper "Kommersant," fell head first and fully clothed from a 5th floor window although he lived in an apartment on the 3rd floor of the building.

The Times reported the FSB -- the Federal Security Bureau, which is the successor agency to the KGB -- was unhappy with Safronov's reporting on sensitive weapons systems.

Safronov's death adds to the list of critics of the Putin regime and the FSB, who have died or been injured in strange circumstances in just the past six months

Investor's Business Daily thinks Putin couldn't be this thick, but even NewsMax (hardly a liberal publication) finds it hard to believe that all these people connected to critics of Putin's are meeting their end under strange circumstances.

Just when you thought things couldn't get any worse for President Bush, AP comes out with a new poll.

SCARBOROUGH: Now you don't have to have a political doctorate in Political Science to realize it's never a good sign when you're outpolled by Lucifer

Good thing he doesn't follow those pesky polls...

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Colbert: But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in "reality." And reality has a well-known liberal bias.