It seems the work of CDR Hesham Islam, USN (Ret), has been undone. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is good news.

The Congresswoman has been investigating the reported firing (see here, here, here) of Major Stephen Coughlin (USAR) by the Department of Defense (DOD) Joint Staff.

First and foremost, Rep. Myrick confirms that Major Coughlin will now be retained by the DOD, and “…associated with another office program within the Office of the Secretary of Defense where he will continue to spread his message.”

The Congresswoman, one of the handful of stalwart individuals on jihadism in either the House or Senate, also highlights in her statement, the seriousness of what she terms, “…the nature of the radical Islamist enemy that we face today and how they are seeking to infiltrate all elements of our society.”

Rep. Myrick further lavishes deserving praise upon Major Coughlin’s thesis, “Major Coughlin’s thesis must be read by everyone responsible for ensuring the safety of America,” for which we now learn he has been retained, and arguably even promoted, within the DOD.
[…]

Score one for common sense and BZ to Representative Myrick for keeping DoD’s feet to the fire on this issue.

One of the interesting stories of the complete lack of understanding of how we get the ability to have free speech run amok has been the Berkeley City Council making an ordinance requiring US military recruiting offices to be dealt with like they do with porn shops, and not like a regular business establishment.

One Nicholas Provenzo, a Marine Vet, has put up an online petition to let the “leadership” (and I use the word loosely) of Berkeley that you think this is over the top. Part of the petition deals with a measure from Congress to withhold Federal funds from Berkeley until they reverse this zoning restriction.

Pass it along, spread the word, email it out, post it on your blogs and the bulletin boards at work. Lend a signature to the list if you feel so inclined.Sleeping with the Enemy psp

In a war long ago and far away, a “terrorist” was caught and executed. 40 years ago today, as a matter of historical fact.General Loan was murdered that day, and the man who took the photo came to realize it. Eddie Adams spent a lifetime trying to apologize:

[…]
Adams caught the instant of death in a photo that made front pages around the world. It would became one of the Vietnam’s War’s most indelible images, shocking the American public and used by critics to dispute official claims that the war was being won.

In later years Adams found himself so defined — and haunted — by the picture that he would not display it at his studio. He also felt it unfairly maligned Loan, who lived in Virginia after the war and died in 1998.

“The guy was a hero,” Adams said, recalling Loan’s explanation that the man he executed was a Viet Cong captain, responsible for murdering the family of Loan’s closest aide a few hours earlier.

“Sometimes a picture can be misleading because it does not tell the whole story,” Adams said in an interview for a 1972 AP photo book. “I don’t say what he did was right, but he was fighting a war and he was up against some pretty bad people.”
[…]

It’s about context. In context, in the heat of battle, a combatant not dressed in a uniform…well, the Geneva Conventions allow this.

On the other hand, another Vietnam War photographer (still living), denies it was right, questioned if the man killed had been killing and that gives an entirely different spin on the story, the exact opposite of the “justice” being protrayed:

[…]
Sadly Adams is dead, so the programme featured a different, but also distinguished, war photographer Philip Jones Griffiths. And Jones Griffiths described his feelings about the photo and his own decision to track down and photograph the executed man’s widow.

Jones Griffiths had strong views on the photo and gave them to us.

He dismissed the idea that the executed man had been a killer saying both that the idea that the man had just killed others was “kind of propaganda” and that “he wouldn’t have been much of a Vietcong soldier” if he hadn’t tried to kill people. He clearly viewed the photo’s power as being its revelation of the evil of the war and America’s involvement.
[…]

Nice to put your spin on the situation your professional peer, now passed away, witnessed, in context.

Anyhow, there’s context with the picture taken 40 years ago this day, and when it was, the shooting killed many things, including the reputation of a fighting man.Rosemary’s Baby dvd

Nasser Rabbat, a Syrian professor of Islamic architecture at MIT, told the Park Service not to worry about the giant Mecca oriented crescent at the center of the Flight 93 Memorial. He said that since it does not point quite exactly to Mecca (it is off by 1.8°) it can’t be considered a proper mihrab (the central feature around which every mosque is built).

Liar. Many of the most famous mihrabs face as much as 20 or 30 degrees off of Mecca.

Here is another Rabbat deception:

Mosques are never in the shape of a crescent or a circle. This defeats the purpose of lining up the worshipers parallel to the Qibla wall (Mecca orientation), which usually translates into a rectangular shape, or sometimes a square. [From the White Paper released by the Memorial Project in August 2007.]

It is true that most mosques are rectangular, the more clearly to mark the direction to Mecca, but this is certainly not a requirement, given that the two most religiously significant sites in Islam are round mosques. Significant site #1 is the Sacred Mosque in Mecca:

Second most significant is the Mosque of Omar, also called the Dome of the Rock, on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, from which point Muhammad supposedly ascended into heaven:

Perhaps because of the prominence of these precedents, a small but significant number of mosques around the world follow the round model.

There is the Tun Abdul Aziz mosque built in Malaysia in 1975, referred to colloquially as the “Masjid Bulat,” or “round mosque.”

There is the new 5,000 person Arafat Mosque in Nigeria, which the architect claims is “the only round mosque in Africa,” but he is wrong. Another round mosque, Al Nileen, sits at the confluence of Blue and White Nile rivers in Khartoum:

[From Google Earth. Look up “alnileen mosque”.]Africa is also home to some older round mosques. Here is a round mosque from the Ivory coast. Similar mosques have also been found in Sierra Leone.

Here is a modern Russian mosque, laid out in shape of an eight point star.

There is even a famous round mosque right in the heart of the EU, at the northwest corner of the Parc du Cinquantenaire in Brussels.

There is a round mosque in Kuwait, a round mosque in Kadavu India, and probably many more.

At the Islamic architecture website Archnet, a Muslim architect (not a native English writer) explains the problem with round mosques:

… a circular mosque can not function well because a mousqe should have an oriantation to kibla and as we all know that a circle does not have an orientation, How can we know the kibla wall if it is a circle ?

This problem does not afflict Paul Murdoch’s mosque design for the Flight 93 memorial because Murdoch’s giant crescent does create an orientation. Face into the crescent to face Mecca, just as with a smaller size mihrab.

Geometrically, Murdoch’s Crescent of Embrace is just a gigantic Islamic prayer rug:

A Muslim prayer rug is a two dimensional mihrab, laid out to face Mecca, just as the Crescent of Embrace is.

Notice that to a person looking into the Flight 93 crescent, the irregularity of the outer arc of the crescent is not visible. The radial arbors are all behind the double row of red maples that line the walkway. The ends of the crescent are also well defined by the end of the walkway of red maples at the bottom and the end of the thousand foot long, fifty foot tall Entry Portal Wall on top. This is a perfectly comprehensible and recognizable Mecca direction indicator.

Rabbat’s comments to the Park Service do not even pretend to be objective. He lists “talking points” in defense of the crescent design without ever even pretending to weigh the merits of the case against the design.

Most obviously, Rabbat never considers the almost exact Mecca orientation of the giant crescent as a grounds for concern, but limits his remarks to possible excuses for not worrying about this obviously worrisome fact. The same for all of his other talking points. He only even considers ways to absolve the crescent design.

In short, Rabbat is as overtly biased as he could possibly be, yet the Park Service has no qualms about this overt bias. Rabbat gives them the excuses for unconcern that they want and they eagerly embrace him. The Park Service investigation into warnings of an enemy plot was a total fraud.

1389 Blog – Antijihadist Tech
A Defending Crusader
A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever
And Rightly So
Big Dog’s Weblog
Big Sibling
Cao2’s Weblog
Cao’s Blog
Chaotic Synaptic Activity
Dr. Bulldog and Ronin
Error Theory
Faultline USA
Flanders Fields
Flopping Aces
Four Pointer
Freedom’s Enemies
Ft. Hard Knox
GM’s Corner
Hoosier Army Mom
Ironic Surrealism II
Jack Lewis
Kender’s Musings
My Own Thoughts
Nice Deb
Ogre’s Politics and Views
Part-Time Pundit
Right on the Right
Right Truth
Stix Blog
Stop the ACLU
The Renaissance Biologist
The View From the Turret
The Wide Awakes
Thunder Run

Listen to this podcast

Ah, the rise of the “lawyers” caste of society. Stuck on a dead language (IMHO so that we will “need” them), they are also a “tool” of war

Big Game dvdrip

and the enemy is skillfully using them. The linked article is but one example. There are many.

[…]
We are in a difficult war against an unprecedented enemy. Its members deliberately disguise themselves as civilians and carry out surprise attacks on innocent civilian targets. They do not have a territory, city or population. They are trained to claim abuse when captured and to appeal to the legal system to tie up democracies in knots.

It is a difficult job for our government and armed forces to adapt the rules for war to such an unconventional, non-state opponent.
[…]

And: Just in case you want to buy into the “torture doesn’t work” philosophy, it appears “being nice” doesn’t work, either:

[…]
Jabarah, 26, initially worked as a government informant after he was brought to the U.S. from Canada in 2002 after his capture in Jordan. He pleaded guilty to the terror charges that summer in a secret proceeding, without mounting a defense, and briefly lived in an FBI-arranged housing facility rather than a prison while he worked as a collaborator.

“Jabarah was extensively debriefed by the FBI and prosecutors and provided a considerable amount of valuable intelligence,” prosecutors said in court papers.

That changed, authorities said, when agents searched his quarters and found weapons, bomb-making instructions and materials suggesting he intended to murder some of the agents with whom he was dealing.
[…]

Then factor in the Kelo decision and there you have it!

Update: and it’s not just an issue within our borders, either.

Kingdom of Heaven movies

Send ’em if you got ’em…trackbacks that is.

As far as “sea Stories,” I’m suffering from a little bit of bloggers block, so….the best I feel in the mood for today is saying there is an update to the story of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals elevating the “quality of life” of marine mammals above that of the need for humans (of the US citizen persuasion) to protect ourselves.

Original “tipper” here.

download Naked Lunch

Today’s news, where the Prez tosses “the” flag on that play is here: Kill Kill Faster Faster dvd

LA Times “Bush sides with Navy in sonar battle.”

(make slapping your forehead motion for a fuller multimedia, distributed experience) and utter “DUH!”

Have fun reading the article and see how some people (Peter Douglas of the California Coastal Commission) thing this is something that shouldn’t be done thinking a 1972 law gives states oversight and review rights on what the Federal Government does in their coastal areas.

Also check out what Joel Reynolds, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council thinks about this, too.

So much for citizens who understand “to provide for the common defense.”

Extra reading: And what is a skyhook?” From Eagle1 and Fred Fry International Maritime Monday 93!
——————————————
Here is the new course of Monday Maritime Matters I promised, brought on by non-coincidental coincidence. That led me to a story about sea going vessels that, like the well done “Six Frigates” by Ian Toll, is far more than a story of the Navy; It’s a story of business, shipbuilding, pre-WWII political and economic history, with seamanship on linland waterways tossed in.

“Fresh Water Submarines” by RADM William T. Nelson. It came to me when the widow of Capt William J Godfrey, USNR (Ret) (Plankowner on USS POGY (SS-266)), loaned me some of his files to look through for some first person history for the blog. The book was in the first set of papers she left for me.First off, having now finished the book, it is a story that begins in 1836 with the establishment of shipbuilding on the shores of Lake Michigan by Captain J.V. Edwards, tracing the lineage of the establishment of the Manitowoc Shipbuilding Company in 1902 (originally named the Manitowoc Drydock Company). From there, the history describes the business strategies of the owners, primarily Mr. Charles West and his continual work to look to the future and keep the business viable.The result? The company remained alive through the Depression, with a skilled workforce, and, when President Roosevelt decided to begin building the Navy up (in FY 1937) from the post-Washington Treaty demise, Mr. West lobbied to build destroyer escorts, figuring they would be small enough to get from the Great Lakes to sea. Recall, at the time, the St Lawrence Seaway was not developed. He kept connected to the Department of the Navy, letting them know he was ready to work and his staff had been busy making the initial plans.So what do you do, when the Navy summons you to DC in early 1941 to give you a contract for building 10 GATO Class submarines? The book tells you.Besides the fact you have never considered building a combat submersible hull, how do you get a vessel that draws more than 9′ of draft from Lake Michigan to the Gulf of Mexico with 21 locks to transit? Oh, yes: You have always launched hulls sideways and no one is sure if a sub hull will be able to be put in the water that way successfully in the narrow water ways around the shipyard.Well, you build it, commission it, train the crew in Lake Michigan, decommission it, load it on a drydock, hook up the tug and send it on it’s way south, around bends, under bridges, stopping on the river banks when necessary (sometimes not intentionally), deliver the boat to New Orleans, reinstall the periscopes and their shears, recommission it, load food, fuel and torpedoes and send the sub to war. That’s the executive summary.

The book is a study in the men, machinery and families who made this happen, covering the excellent foresight of the shipyard owners, who not only built ferries and ore ships, but cranes and specialized shipbuilding machinery to keep the skilled workforce in place, so when this requirement arose, they were up to the challenge, and, as it turned out, were able to deliver the boats faster than Electric Boat! Bonus information includes details of the operations of the river pilots and tow skippers, along with the issues of navigating rivers.

The Navy was so impressed with the early performance, a second contract, for more subs was ordered, before the first sub was built. Toss in the complication that the war had now begun and the strategic imperative took on a entirely new meaning. The story proceeds to tell of the complications of building up a work force, getting skilled labor in place to augment the generational workers already there. Building special jigs to rotate the 9 hull sections to allow welders to work in the best position for the best quality of their beads. Later, a third contract was given to the Manitowoc company, too.

The Navy then tasked, in February 1942, out of the blue, the construction of 450 LCT-5 craft to support amphibious landings. Later, the added requirement came to design and build the LCT-6s. Toss in a contract to build 6000 cranes for the Navy and Army for forward deployment, all as a result of keeping a company positioned and ready to aggressively take on new tasks with great efficiency.

A total of 28 submarines were built, short of the 41 tasked in original contracts, because it became apparent the war was coming to a close. The 28th submarine, the USS MERO (SS-378) wasn’t commissioned in time to reach the war zone and was tasked with conducting a public affairs cruise around the Great Lakes so the people could get a good look at what they had helped to build.

The book discusses, in depth, the specifications of the contracts, the interactions with Electric Boat, the costs and profits, equipment provided, special items and arrangements, and the transit of the USS PETO (SS-265) (the first Manitowoc boat) to the Gulf of Mexico and Panama for combat training. Interaction with the on site SUPSHIP reps and descriptions of the commissioning parties are there, too (complete with commentary reminiscent of my own experience in Pascagoula, MS).

The boats earned a reputation among the crews who took them into combat, and the maintenance units who serviced them as well built hulls, constructed with the understanding sailors lives were at risk.

RADM Nelson completes the story with some excellent analysis of the contract performance, showing specifics of costs, profits and the associated issues in the financial realm.

I highly recommend this book, not because it is a book on submarines, but because it is a wonderful case study of a business that grew and thrived in bad times and good, and when they had to perform, they successfully adapted and exceeded expectations. In the early part of the book, the story of the national mood and decisions regarding the size of the Navy, puts the history of the Navy in context for the time between WWI and II. Some details of the difficulties facing our submariners in the combat theater are also discussed, in the context of how the shipyard managed to re-engineer the dive planes and some other system to allow faster diving times and periscope vibration problems.

The company lives on today, still with it’s hand in the shipbuilding/repair business and building cranes, among other diversified operations, such as a major operation in food service machines. Checking this page, the Manitowoc Company currently has it’s hand in the LCS project, building improved lighterage barges for the Navy and the construction of USCG Great Lakes Icebreakers.

Not only is this book available from Amazon, I also found this site, Submarine Books, that has a lengthy list of books on submarines, old and new!

It appears there’s a call to wear green on the 11th of January to show support for our troops and to show dissenting opinions to the Close GTMO ACLU types….Details here.

Just one more nail in the coffin…

Thank you, environmentalist whack jobs who think it’s better for marine mammals to not get confused with too many man-made acoustic signals in the water…

Defenders of the crescent design for the Flight 93 memorial describe the landform around the crash site as a bowl shape that fairly dictates the use of a crescent design. On the Mike and Juliet Morning Show, Memorial Project Chairman John Reynolds was asked by host Mike Jerrick: “Why couldn’t you just use some other shape?”Reynolds cupped his hands together for the audience and insisted that the design had to be a crescent:

Because, if you do this with you hands, this is the land there. This bowl is America holding its heroes.

But in fact, the site is not a bowl shape at all, as one can tell by looking at the topo lines on the site plan. The land slopes continually from north-northwest to south-southeast:

The Sacred Ground Plaza that marks the crash site sits between the crescent tips (above the 4).

Instead of following the rim of a bowl, the crescent starts on a ridgeline above the crash site and circles around to well below it, passing across the middle of a wetland that sits about 70 vertical feet below the crash site.

Not only is the crash site not a bowl, but the crescent actually does not fit the natural landform at all. Of all the designs entered in the design competition, Paul Murdoch’s Crescent of Embrace is the only one that that fails to meet the Memorial Project’s single stated physical requirement: that design entries should “respect the rural landscape.” (Scroll down to
“purpose.”)

To create the full arc of the crescent, a raised causeway will have to be filled in across the wetlands that collect about half-way out the lower crescent arm:

This filling in of the wetlands would never be allowed in a private project. There are environmental laws against it.

To sneak his design past the requirement to leave the landscape undisturbed, Murdoch played a very clever trick. His preliminary Crescent of Embrace design did not build a causeway across the wetlands. It only showed a quarter circle of red maple walkway, with a natural footpath skirting around the bottom of the wetlands area instead of crossing it:

This original crescent design already had the flight path breaking the circle, turning it into what was called from the start the Crescent of Embrace, so it seems that Murdoch had in mind from the beginning to memorialize the terrorists’ circle-breaking/crescent-creating feat. He could well have had the basic geometry of his full terrorist memorial mosque already worked out, but he knew that he would never make the first cut if he broke the competition’s one rule and violated the wetlands, so he only showed a little bit of crescent, and had his innocuous looking footpath skirt the wetlands.

To turn his preliminary design into a full Islamic crescent, Murdoch needed to build his causeway. How did he justify this violation of the wetlands? With typical brass, declaring that the causeway created a “healing landscape”:

Here visitors will be most aware of continuously connected living systems as the circular path literally bridges the hydrology of the Bowl. [“Wetlands,” p. 5.]

The highway department should hire this guy for P.R.. He could sell the environmentalists on how close a new road will bring them tonature. Why, they will be “literally bridging it!” What could be better? Good pitch. The Memorial Project bought it.

Most remarkable is Patrick White, vice president of Families of Flight 93. In private conversation at the Memorial Project’s July 2007 meeting, White told one of Alec Rawls’s compatriots that an expensive drainage system had been developed for the crescent design and that no other design could work on the site because this elaborate drainage system would only work with the crescent design.

Duh. The crescent design is the only design out of all thousand submitted that needs a drainage system. Every other design left the wetland untouched, as the Memorial Project had asked. Yet these people all really seem to mean it when they insist that this is the only design that fits the land.

Didn’t they notice that not one of the other thousand designs was a crescent? How could that be, if the landform really dictated a crescent? How did they get so wrapped in the emotion of the crescent’s “healing embrace” that they can’t see anything else?

Because Paul Murdoch is an artistic genius who had these grieving people in the palms of his hands. The man is diabolical!

Stop the Memorial Blogburst
1389 Blog – Antijihadist Tech
A Defending Crusader
A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever
And Rightly So
Big Dog’s Weblog
Big Sibling
Cao2’s Weblog
Cao’s Blog
Chaotic Synaptic Activity
Error Theory
Faultline USA
Flanders Fields
Flopping Aces
Four Pointer
Freedom’s Enemies
Ft. Hard Knox
GM’s Corner
Hoosier Army Mom
Ironic Surrealism II
Jack Lewis
Kender’s Musings
My Own Thoughts
Nice Deb
Ogre’s Politics and Views
Part-Time Pundit
Right on the Right
Right Truth
Stix Blog
Stop the ACLU
The Renaissance Biologist
The View From the Turret
The Wide Awakes
Thunder Run

If you want to join the blogroll/blogburst for the Crescent of Betrayal blogburst, email Cao at caoilfhionn1 at gmail dot com, with your blog’s url address. The blogburst will be sent out once a week to the participants, for simultaneous publication on this issue on Wednesdays.