Summer Peace Camp versus a Colombian Caribbean Vacation?

Medellin
As usual, with summer coming up, my little girl wanted to know just how mad at her about her …uh… behaviors over the Winter I really was? She knows that if I had got really upset at her, I would be planning on sending her off to Vacation Bible School, otherwise known in our weird circles as the Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission Summer Peace Camp. There she could learn about the cleansing effects of ‘non-violence’ as taught to her by some PPJPC version of ‘Mother Angelica’.

Too, she was really getting worried about being bored this summer and was not looking to going off to the family farm located right next to the Zetas’ paintball playground at Presa Marte Gomez, Tamaulipas and staring at the adobe (plaster) walls. So one night, as she watched Johnny Depp pirate around, I suggested maybe we too could go to Pirate Land- Cartagena, Colombia this summer, and fight crocodiles or something? So I said to her,

‘How about a vacation in Colombia this summer? There’s lots of family things to do down there!’

Her response to me was,

‘Sure, why not?’

That’s what I love about kids these days, they simply are open to anything. I told her then that if we do go to Colombia and live with the Caribbean Pirates that she would have to live off fried ants and guinea pig (cuy), since that’s all those poor people have to eat. That and aguardiente.

It just so happens that she has a boyfriend from Colombia who is a Pastuzo (Texas Aggie of Colombia) and that he has eaten cuy and says it is muy rico! The fried ants she kind of balks at though, but still, she was sufficiently excited at the thought of leaving the USA, that she had me rush off and buy us both one way tickets to Bogota! America, love it or leave it!

And that’s how it is that at long last, I will get to go on my Caribbean Vacation, that’s if we don’t spend too much time in the beautiful city of Eternal Spring, Medellin? I’m definitely looking forward to staying on for the Flower Festival there in early August!… Plus, you can simply just get lost in sightseeing in this under-appreciated city!

That’s Medellin in the picture above. It’s a Colombia emerald, a Colombia orchid, and a Colombian museo de oro… all rolled up into one! Honestly, it really does look like a nice place to spend some time on a family vacation. I’ll let you know how it works out! And then, there is always Mompox!

“As they sailed down to the coast the river had grown more vast and solemn, like a swamp with no beginning or end, and the heat was so dense you could touch it with your hands.”

from Gabriel Garcia Marquez – The General in His Labyrinth

General Simon Bolivar was headed to Mompox… As for us, when I have told people that we are headed for a vacation in Colombia this year, they look at me as if I had just told them I’m flying for Alpha Centauri instead. Oh well… But Mompox does sound like a rather relaxing place o me, though maybe the climate’s not quite right?

Insurgents, prairie dogs and Laser Tag

I remember discovering the difference between target shooting and Laser Tag. At a firing range you could look calmly down your gun sight and concentrate without distraction. Same with hunting. But Laser Tag, Paintball, or the doubtlessly misnomered Airsoft, let you experience what it’s like to be shot at. Who would believe aiming a gun is so different under fire?

In Laser Tag, you had to wear an infrared sensor to make yourself a target to your opponent’s fire. We used to wrap the sensor belt around our heads because it seemed the most fair vulnerability. Otherwise it was too easy to obscure your sensor between you and the ground or against whatever you were hiding behind. On your forehead, the sensor would become visible whenever you yourself attempted to poke up your head to take a shot.

I learned to cheat by crawling under cars to obscure my forehead in the undercarriage while my line of sight remained unimpeded. Of course I was a sitting duck when spotted. But from no matter what covered position, I found it much harder to take aim when adversaries were directing their fire at me.

If you’d succeeded in concealing your vantage point, you were free to concentrate on your aim. But now you were challenged with a further trembling sensation in your fingers. Now there was a heightened hesitation to pull the trigger, because the moment you did, your position would be revealed and you’d attract fire.

This is the predicament we discount when we think of military snipers. Though it seems quite plainly cowardly to shoot unsuspecting opponents from a concealed position, often snipers have to operate from hiding places deep in enemy territory. When they finally take their shot, snipers become prey themselves.

I think about this immediate blowback consequence when I think of Iraqis or Afghans who contemplate taking aim at the US military machine. Insurgents face technology and firepower to obliterate the very hill from which they might be shooting. It would seem that anyone who would dare to stand armed against US forces would be a suicide bomber. It’s near certain death to fire a Kalashnikov knowing that US electronics can very quickly extrapolate your location and bring ordinance against you like a fly-swatter against a fly.

In WWII against Japan, we held a sad esteem for the suicide pilots of the last desperate Japanese efforts. The Kamikazes would pilot explosive laden aircraft which had no landing gears in case they changed their minds. It seemed like lunacy, and often they were young, and barely trained.

I wondered if our soldiers accord the Iraqi or Afghan insurgents a similar awed respect. To merely raise your head from the rubble, without Kevlar armor, requires a bravery to defy the gods. What a cost to try to defend your homeland against America’s overwhelming might. I couldn’t do it. You draw almost certain overkill coming from unforeseen points, high in the sky, laser-guided by a team of technicians in climate controlled comfort on the other side of the planet, who are not themselves under fire. We’ve rendered all our adversaries into suicide bombers. How dare our behind-the-lines officers call them cowardly?

US is not sniping indiscriminantly 1-2-3

The good news is that US sniper teams may not be shooting at everyone they come across anymore, as has been alleged though seldom reported. After all, the rules of war apply to snipers just as they would ordinary soldiers or paintballers: don’t shoot at someone who’s not a combatant, who’s unarmed, or who’s otherwise surrendering. But under pressure to up their kills, US snipers are defying the Hague Conventions with such innovations as 1) bait/entrapment, 2) getting go-ahead to assassinate, and 3) using fingerprint identification to confirm eligibility for execution.

1. Bait and switch
The Asymmetric Warfare Group issues to US snipers “drop items,” insurgent-type items which may be planted on Iraqis they’ve shot, but much more productively, to use as bait to lure passing Iraqis, tempting empty-handed civilians to become item-wielding insurgents whom you don’t have to get permission to shoot. The Washington Post reports:

“Baiting is putting an object out there that we know they will use, with the intention of destroying the enemy,” Capt. Matthew P. Didier, the leader of an elite sniper scout platoon attached to the 1st Battalion of the 501st Infantry Regiment, said in a sworn statement. “Basically, we would put an item out there and watch it. If someone found the item, picked it up and attempted to leave with the item, we would engage the individual as I saw this as a sign they would use the item against U.S. Forces.”

2. Under suspicion is as good as being condemned
US snipers are executing targets if they can be confirmed as being suspects. With the cross hairs of your sniper scope aimed at your chosen Iraqi or Afghan, you can await authorization to pull the trigger based on learning the person’s identity, whether by informer or a shouted inquiry. Then according to the US rules of engagement you can terminate him. Here’s an example from the International Herald Tribune.

“From his position about 100 yards away, Master Sergeant Troy Anderson had a clear shot of the Afghan man standing outside a residential compound in a small village near the Pakistan border last October. And when Captain Dave Staffel, the Special Forces officer in charge, gave the order to shoot, Anderson fired a single bullet into the man’s head, killing him instantly.

…the shooting, near the village of Hasan Kheyl last October, was a textbook example of a classified mission completed in accordance with the American rules of engagement. The men said such rules allowed them to kill Buntangyar, whom the American military had designated a terrorist cell leader, once they positively identified him.”

3. Coming soon: fingerprint and biometric matching
In early 2008 US snipers will be given a more efficient system for making split decisions about whether their target may be summarily liquidated. Now with the subject in your sights, you can await instructions from an intelligence database about whether your target has a fingerprint, retina scan, or biometric profile in the records as a suspected insurgent. In which case, be he standing idle, detained or captive, you can shoot him. Read this account from the Washington Post about the JEFF:

“…the Joint Expeditionary Forensics Facilities (JEFF) project or “lab in a box,” analyzes biometrics. It will be delivered to Iraq at the beginning of 2008, the Navy said, to help distinguish insurgents from civilians.

…the military has been scanning the irises and taking the fingerprints of Iraqis, feeding a biometrics data base in West Virginia. To date, a few ad hoc labs have processed about 85,000 pieces of evidence taken from weapons caches or roadside devices.

Each collapsible, sand-colored, 20-by-20-foot unit has its own generator and satellite link. If things go as planned, data will beamed to the Biometric Fusion Center to check against more than a million Iraqi fingerprints.

The next stage is to miniaturize, create “a backpack lab,” so that soldiers who encounter a suspect “could find out within minutes” if he’s on a terrorist watch list, [says the JEFF weapon designer] “A war fighter needs to know one of three things: Do I let him go? Keep him? Or shoot him on the spot?”