Month: June 2022
Bloody Gina and Her Team of Torturers
Last week, at a pretrial hearing at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi who is charged with being the mastermind of an attack on the USS Cole in 2000 at which 17 American sailors were killed, the psychologist in charge of interrogating Nashiri described in vivid detail both the modern and the medieval techniques of torture used upon him.
The psychologist was called as a defense witness in order to demonstrate to the court that a good deal of the evidence that prosecutors plan to introduce against Nashiri was obtained directly or indirectly through, or was tainted by, his torture and thus cannot lawfully be used at his trial.
Torture committed by government officials and their collaborators upon a person restrained by the government is a felony punishable by up to 20 years in a federal prison, and its fruits are inadmissible in all courts. For many years, the CIA documented torture through video tapes of its disguised agents and contractors torturing its captives so it would have a record of the events without the need for revealing a participant’s identity.
But the tapes of Nashiri’s torture were destroyed by either the chief CIA official in the United States in charge of all torture or his then-chief of staff. Hence the live testimony last week. That chief of staff would go on to become the director of the CIA, Gina Haspel, nicknamed by her colleagues “Bloody Gina.”
This column will spare the reader the gruesome and stomach-churning details of Nashiri’s torture, but for the one medieval procedure. What caught the eyes of those of us who monitor these events was the mention of the name of the CIA official under whose watch the torture occurred and who wrote detailed, graphic descriptions of it to her bosses in Langley, Virginia. That official is the same Gina Haspel. She was the head of the CIA station at Thailand in 2002, at which Nashiri was tortured, and she was the senior member of the torture team.
Nashiri’s torture went on for four months, at the end of which the interrogation team concluded that Nashiri was being truthful and essentially said the same things under torture as he told interrogators prior to torture. But Bloody Gina does not trust testimony unless it comes with great fear and pain.
In 2006, Nashiri was shipped from Thailand to Gitmo, where he was charged with capital murder. His trial has not yet commenced. The testimony last week was one of many pretrial hearings ordered by military trial judges.
Nashiri, who has the same speedy trial rights as anyone being prosecuted by the U.S. government, has been waiting for his trial for 14 years. He is on his second team of military and civilian defense lawyers. His first team quit when they discovered that their communications with their client had been secretly listened to and recorded by federal agents.
Most judges would have dismissed the charges against the defendant for such criminal behavior by the government. But at Gitmo, where the judge and the prosecutors have the same boss — the Secretary of Defense — the niceties of due process are sometimes watered down.
The significance of Bloody Gina’s personal supervision of this torture cannot be gainsaid. It is the first time we have learned from a witness under oath that CIA torture was approved and supervised at the highest CIA levels. It is also the first time we have learned that a CIA director, earlier in her career, committed federal crimes, as each torture session is a separate felony.
We also learned that Bloody Gina may be an amateur historian. In the late 1400s, when the Medici in Florence had been deposed by a mad monk named Girolamo Savonarola, he instituted aggressive torture for those accused secretly of sins of the flesh, looking for their public confessions and the identities of their sexual partners.
He, like Bloody Gina, refused to accept testimony from a detained person unless it was obtained under torture. And he, like Bloody Gina, instituted a novel torture technique of hanging a victim by his arms secured behind his back so as to induce excruciating shoulder dislocation.
Those of us who believe that the Constitution means what it says have argued that attackers of U.S. military personnel who are not in combat pursuant to a congressional declaration of war should be tried in federal court and accorded constitutional protection from the government’s torturers. Had that been done, Nashiri’s case and all others at Gitmo would have been completed years ago, and the government would not be spending $500 million a year there while it continues to trash the Constitution.
I was surprised to learn that one of the torturers admitted to these crimes and implicated Bloody Gina. Torture by government officials — no matter their goal — is the most tyrannical government overreach imaginable. It presumes that there are no natural rights or moral standards; it utterly negates the personhood of the victim; it reveals that there are no limits to what the government can do and get away with. It is expressly prohibited by the Constitution and federal law.
Bloody Gina and her team of torturers may feel safe from American prosecutors, as the Nashiri tortures took place well outside of the statute of limitations — but not from all prosecutors. The International Criminal Court in The Hague claims jurisdiction over the entire globe, and Thailand — the place of Nashiri’s torture — is a signatory to the treaty that established the court. The ICC characterizes torture as a war crime that has no statute of limitations and recognizes no executive pardons.
When the Medici returned to power after a popular uprising deposed Savonarola, he was tortured by his own torturers before he was hanged for heresy. Torture is government without limits. Only limited government respects persons.
We live in a curiously black and white world. The Information Age has given us unprecedented insight into people’s private lives. If something is ever published on the Internet it is there forever. This allows those who don’t actually accomplish a great deal to sit back in a position of comfort and pick apart the actions of those who do.
Cancel culture is the woke term. Like texting, sexting, dope, Gucci, sick, lit, or the term woke itself, these are words that meant something totally different a generation ago. This deep into the Information Age all it takes is a single errant comment online to disqualify a person from a position of prestige or responsibility. This is based on the flawed assumption that folks are all either innately good or innately bad.
Reality is rarely that clear cut. Not all nuns are angels, and not all Nazis were bloodthirsty psychopaths. We are all of us broken. It is simply that some strive for the light, while others embrace the darkness. However, there does yet remain some weird intangible that attracts certain personalities to certain camps. That ethereal stuff tends to drive some of the most extraordinary behavior.
In some rare quarters you can indeed find a few moral absolutes. I think we can all agree that ISIS, al Qaeda, and the Taliban are reliably bad people. Their sick oppressive ideology attracts aberrant abusive personalities and then cultivates the worst in them. In the West, an errant online comment can be an unforgivable sin. Meanwhile in Afghanistan people have been executed for listening to music. If anybody cares about my opinion, I think we could use a little perspective over on this side of the pond.
Regardless, in the aftermath of 9-11 the free countries of the world banded together to battle the forces of darkness. This was an old school righteous fight. The egregious behavior of our radical Islamist enemies served as the catalyst to unite free peoples in a common cause against tyranny, oppression, and rank terrorism. That single shared mission brought out the very best in some. One of the finest examples extant was that of a young British paratrooper named Joshua Leakey.
Origin Story
Joshua Leakey was born in 1988 in England. His father is a retired RAF officer, while his mom is an Occupational Therapist. He has one younger brother. Leakey attended school in Horsham, West Sussex, before starting a military history program at the University of Kent. Dissatisfied with his studies, Leakey dropped out of school to join the British Army.
There is a certain brotherhood among those of us soldiers stupid enough to jump out of perfectly good airplanes. We are typically somewhat full of ourselves and more than a wee bit arrogant. Joshua Leakey was cut from similar stuff. He ended up with the 1st Battalion of the British Parachute Regiment.
Joshua Leakey did three combat tours with the Paras in Afghanistan and was promoted to Lance Corporal. In August of 2013, Leakey was part of a joint multinational operation in Helmand Province. Fighting alongside US Marines as well as Afghan soldiers, Leakey and his mates were moving into a village to search for illegal weapons. Leakey’s team inserted via CH47 Chinook helicopters and immediately found themselves deep in the suck.
The Fight
Leakey’s element was tasked to provide fire support for the troops assaulting into the village. As such, they set up on the reverse slope of a nearby hill protected from the bulk of the enemy fire. Despite their position of relative safety, they soon found themselves subject to withering automatic weapons and RPG fire.
The command group was pinned down on the exposed front slope of the hill by around 20 heavily-armed Taliban fighters. American Marine Captain Brandon Bocian was subsequently hit and badly wounded. The Taliban insurgents were so close and so ferocious as to negate the effectiveness of the two friendly machineguns as well as the organic mortar section that was collocated with the command group.
Despite being the most junior NCO present, LCPL Leakey rightly assessed the situation as dire and took action. He ran some 100 meters down the hill under heavy enemy fire to get to the command group and render aid to the downed US Marine officer. LCPL Leakey then took charge of the chaotic situation and initiated casualty evacuation procedures.
All the while Taliban forces were suppressing the two automatic weapons in overwatch positions at the top of the hill. LCPL Leakey then ran back up the hill across rugged terrain and under heavy fire to retrieve one of the guns and get it back in action. In the process, the machinegun he was carrying was itself struck by enemy fire though not disabled. LCPL Leakey got the gun working and began pouring fire back onto the attacking insurgents.
While this helped it still did not tip the balance of the engagement in the favor of friendly forces. As such LCPL ran the gauntlet a third time, this time carrying more than 60 pounds’ worth of ammunition and equipment. He retrieved a second machinegun from the pinned down command group and sprinted to a more advantageous position with it, siting it against the enemy before turning its operation over to a subordinate.
With two belt-fed MGs finally working on the enemy, LCPL Leakey returned to the downed Marine and coordinated his evacuation under fire. Along the way, friendly forces killed eleven insurgents and wounded another four. The entire battle lasted some 45 interminable minutes. The fighting did not stop until friendly close air support rolled hot to teach the Taliban a stark lesson in the salient aspects of tactical overmatch.
The Guns
British forces in action in Southwest Asia most frequently carried the SA80 bullpup assault rifle. The SA80 was a thoroughly inspired but badly flawed design when introduced in 1985. Since then the SA80 has undergone several product improvements. In 2000 HK redesigned the weapon into the SA80A2, rectifying many to most of the rifle’s documented deficits. The subsequent SA80A3 first saw issue in 2016 and focused primarily on making the weapon more modular and adaptable. Today the SA80A3 enjoys reliability rates comparable to other modern assault rifles.
I could not find a specific reference to the machineguns LCPL Leakey humped up and down that godforsaken hill in Afghanistan. However, balance of probability these were L7A2 GPMGs (General Purpose Machineguns). The British soldiers I have known all referred to the L7 guns as “Gimpy’s.”
The L7A2 is an evolved version of the original Belgian MAG (Miltrailleuse d’Appui General) gun. Designed in the early 1950s by Ernest Vervier, the MAG gun has subsequently seen service with more than 80 nations and has been license-produced in ten countries to include Argentina, Canada, Egypt, India, Singapore, Turkey, the US, and the UK. The Chinese naturally make an unlicensed copy of the gun they call the CS/LM1. In US service the MAG gun is designated the M240.
The US military first adopted the M240 in 1977 as a coaxial machinegun for main battle tanks. With the well-documented shortcomings of the M60 being made ever more painfully manifest as the guns began to age, some legit rocket scientist realized that we had perfectly good M240’s in storage. Uncle Sam bought the buttstocks and fire controls to convert those early coax guns into ground weapons and fell in love with them. The M240B weighed 28 pounds while the lightened M240G tipped the scales at 24.2 pounds. The more recent M240L dropped the weight to 22.3 pounds by using titanium in certain critical components along with a short barrel, polymer fire control unit, and collapsible stock.
The Rest of the Story
Though LCPL Leakey likely did not know CPT Bocian well, he risked his life multiple times to save the man. LCPL Leakey fully appreciated the desperate nature of the engagement. He selflessly took action to get the injured American to safety and ultimately defeat the Taliban fighters who were so intent upon killing them all. His courageous actions under fire are a study in combat leadership and reflect that weird secret sauce that separates heroes from normal folk on the modern battlefield.
In February 2015, LCPL Joshua Leakey received the Victoria Cross directly from the hand of Queen Elizabeth II. The Victoria Cross is Great Britain’s highest award for bravery in combat. Like most true heroes, LCPL Leakey was humbled by the honor. He had this to say to the BBC, “In that particular incident I was in the best position to do that. If it had been any of my mates they would be in this position now…I don’t look at it about being about me in particular, I look at this as representing everyone from my unit, from my battalion, who was involved in the campaign in Afghanistan.”
LCPL Leakey comes by it honestly. His second cousin, Sergeant Nigel Gray Leakey, earned the Victoria Cross himself in 1941. The elder SGT Leakey was awarded the decoration posthumously for valor while fighting the Italians in North Africa. LCPL Leakey is only the third British soldier to be awarded the Victoria Cross for combat action in Afghanistan. He is the only one of the three who lived to tell the tale.
The Victoria Cross was introduced by Queen Victoria in 1856 to recognize acts of exceptional valor during the Crimean war. Since then it has been awarded 1,356 times. LCPL Leakey is only the fifteenth soldier so recognized since the end of WW2. Each physical medal is formed from the bronze of Russian guns captured at the Siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War. In military circles, it’s quite the big deal.
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Black Bear – HD Hunting
Last night, news broke that the Biden Administration is taking behind-the-scenes steps to further strangle the already constricted market for ammunition in the United States. The move could result in a reduction of the commercial production of 5.56 caliber ammunition by over thirty percent.
The move, if completed, would dramatically reduce availability of ammunition for America’s most popular rifle (and, not coincidentally, the one most targeted by gun prohibitionists).
Supplies would undoubtedly plummet and prices would undoubtedly skyrocket, putting the availability of ammunition for self-defense, training, and competition out of reach to many Americans.
News of the move was broken by Larry Keane, the general counsel and senior vice president at the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the leading trade association for America’s firearms and ammunition industries. Keane on Wednesday night published a tweet, which stated: “The U.S. Military is actively considering shutting down the sale [of] M855/SS109 ammo from Lake City to the commercial market.”
The cartridges mentioned in Keane’s post are very popular forms of 5.56 caliber ammunition, the most common caliber for the AR-15.
Close followers of Second Amendment issues will remember that these same rounds were targeted by the Obama/Biden administration under the guise of relabeling them “armor piercing ammunition,” which is banned from commercial sale by federal law. The resulting (and righteous) furor from the Second Amendment community was so intense that it culminated in Obama’s ATF director, B. Todd Jones, quitting his job. Jones had been the first and only confirmed ATF director since Senate approval became required for that post.
Lake City is a sprawling ammunition plant in Independence, Missouri, originally established by Remington in 1941 to manufacture and test Ammunition for the U.S. Army. It is currently owned by the government and operated by private contractors and produces well over a billion rounds of ammunition per year.
Ammunition in excess of the government’s requirements has long been made available to the private commercial market. Lake City’s output, according to some estimates, accounts for one-third of the 5.56 caliber ammunition available to U.S. consumers.
Of course, gun prohibition advocates have a long-standing desire to ban the AR-15 and other types of semiautomatic long guns outright. Joe Biden in particular loves to brag of authoring the so-called “assault weapons” ban that Bill Clinton signed into law in 1994. Congress, however, allowed the ban to expire 10 years later, after a Department of Justice sponsored study was unable to substantiate any significant crime reduction benefit from it.
Needless to say, this attack on America’s ammunition supply is just the most recent in a long line of anti-freedom attacks by the Biden Administration.
NRA will be working to fight this effort to crush America’s ammunition supply, just as we did with the last attack on M855 ammunition, and will provide updates as more information becomes available.
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Have a GREAT WEEKEND! Grumpy NSFW
