BREAKING: ThinkProgress pig-ignorant about military.

Legal Insurrection tipped me to this one: apparently, ThinkProgress (link available via Legal Insurrection) got itself in a bit of a tizzy over a story in the Mexican press that one of the Navy SEALs that killed Osama bin Laden was the son of Mexican immigrants, which apparently means (according to TP) that we need to pass the DREAM Act* and that the military is by the way keeping Latinos down.  Now, let’s establish something right off of the bat; I don’t know who was on that SEAL team, and it would not surprise me in the slightest to hear that one or more of them were of Latino ancestry.  Or any other ancestry, frankly.  That’s not the point: the point is that when you’re a hardcore partisan ideologue using a story for agitprop, you should probably check the story first to make sure that you don’t get burned.

ThinkProgress did not check the story first.

Quick: read this sentence (from the original Mexican newspaper article that sent TP into a tizzy) and tell me what’s wrong with it.  It’s OK if you don’t speak Spanish: neither do I, really – and I still can pick out the howler, so you should be able to, too.

El soldado Rubén Mejía, nacido en este país y de padres guanajuatenses, ha sido ascendido a sargento por el operativo en que un equipo enfrentó y dio muerte a Bin Laden.

“Sargento.”

Continue reading BREAKING: ThinkProgress pig-ignorant about military.

JSOC analyst arrested in FBI spy sting.

‘JSOC’ being short for the ‘Joint Special [Operations] Command,’ which is known to normal people as a group that coordinates communications and operations among various American Special Forces organizations*.  The alleged would-be spy Bryan Martin allegedly traded secret documents to an FBI operative in exchange for roughly $3,500; there’s no indication as of yet that he was working with anyone else, but between this and the Wikileaks Manning case it looks like the US intelligence community is on heightened alert for potential espionage problems.  Looks like it’s not the end of history, after all.

Moving along, the confusion of Hot Air over how cheap this transaction was is why I’m bringing it up.  You see, this kind of money is the rule, not the exception.  Hollywood aside, foreign governments do not pay out large amounts of cash to would-be spies.  They are, in fact, usually very cheap about it: for every Aldrich Ames there’s there’s a dozen Markus Hess’s.  However, the exception is generally found among American intelligence groups; the CIA in particular supposedly has a policy of paying very well for this kind of information.  It’s not like the Cold War, where we could get highly trained and educated foreign professionals to crawl across broken glass in exchange for a green card and a retail franchise in Terra Haute, Indiana – but if you’re a disaffected member of the repressive and shortsighted regime currently running your country, by all means: give Uncle Sam a call.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Continue reading JSOC analyst arrested in FBI spy sting.

For all your “Laugh at Sy Hersh and his acolytes” needs.

But before you do, watch this video that has audio of Hersh talking about how the JSOC was an assassination squad under the orders of the Executive branch.

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Yes, of course I’m going to harp on it. It’s my blog entry and the uncritical belief in whatever Sy Hersh says has been one of the more pathetic undercurrents in the left blogosphere for years now. Think of this as an intervention. An intervention of ridicule. Continue reading For all your “Laugh at Sy Hersh and his acolytes” needs.

It’s a shame Keith Olbermann’s not more popular.

If he was, my pointing out that this denial by Sy Hersh that he ever claimed that Cheney had a death squad was directly contradicted by audio found at this post:

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“It’s an executive assassination ring, essentially.”

…might have some more oomph. Alas, it’s Keith Olbermann, and it’s Sy Hersh: nobody with a functional brain stem takes either seriously.

Which is not really a shame, I suppose.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.