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Fallujah

An anonymous person left the following comment in relation to Dick and Jon’s analysis of casualties in Fallujah. Such a lengthy comment has been rewarded with being posted – it adds to the debate at least.

Say you’re on the street in fallujah and a man of about 60 comes out with an AK-47 and begins shooting at you. You shoot him in the chest twice and he dies or is dying. What are you trained to do? You need to secure that corpse if you can get to him. So what do you do? You move up to his position, take the AK-47 and search him for intelligence. You are not trained to leave the weapon with him, at worst you take the ammunition and dispense of it and leave the weapon, but you’re not supposed to leave his weapon. Later on, with this 60 year old corpse laying in the street is hauled to the local hospital where it quickly becomes apparent that he is a civilian because he obviously didn’t have a weapon on him.

Unfortunately these people use kids and other young extremists as well. If you’re a marine and a 15 year old with an AK is firing at you, unfortunately you are in the situation where you must kill the 15 year old. Say you shoot him in the leg and he lives and your marine unit withdraws, the 15 year olds unit leader takes his AK and drops him off at the hospital, he is now one of the children that the big and ugly marines shot at. I’ve heard of this happening to kids even as young as 10 or 11 years old.

My points are this:
First, These people (Iraqi supporters of this battle) are not going to leave weapons and ammunition with the corpses, that would be a waste of very valuable resources and it adds to the illusion that our boys are running around fallujah like rednecks popping off civilians.

Second, Fighting age is entirely subjective in this climate. Just because someone is younger than 18 years of age doesn’t mean that he or she couldn’t pick up a weapon and kill marines. However, it does mean that once the marines terminate that individual, that his weapon will be removed from the corpse and he will be dropped at the hospital where he conviently becomes a mere child thus inflating the number of civilian casualties that observers (who didn’t observe the 15 year old firing the AK)are looking at.

Third, Old Iraqi women do not know what US Marine Snipers are. They don’t know the difference between 7.62 Nato Rounds, 5.56 Nato rounds, and 7.62 x 39 rounds are. They aren’t qualified to say who hit them with what. Iraqis firing off rounds from the hip (as every Operation Iraqi Freedom veteran says they shoot) are more likely to cause civilian and friendly fire casualties than a MARINE INFANTRY unit who are all qualified to 300 meters (barring the snipers who can hit targets as far as a mile depending on weapon).

Fourth, I would venture to say that the Spectre Gunships and bombing causes more civilian casualties than the marines on the ground. Think of the Gunships as a Steak knife and the Marine Infantry Regiment as a scalpel.

I am not a marine but I am in the Army and can tell you these things based off interviews with some of the veterans. I also felt compelled to talk a bit about the Insurgent strategy.

'Einstein' probe heads into space

This is a huge amount of money to spend – but it might well be worth it. I am looking forward to the results – my bet is on Einstein being right.

I do remember on Carl Sagan’s excellent Cosmos series that an experiment was performed on how time slows down as you move. An atomic clock was placed on the ground, and synchronised with another on a 747, which then flew for a certain distance at a speed that planes do. On return it was found that there was a discrepancy – when you fly on planes you are relatively becoming slightly younger.

Hard drive speed limit is reached

The limit of hard drives has apparently been reached. But at least its not likely to affect the production of drives for some time:

The bad news is that this upper limit means that the fastest data can be written using changes in magnetisations is 435,000 million bits every second.

The good news is that this is still one thousand times faster than the best magnetic hard drives in use today.

Blair: a no vote means no

Blair’s remarks are curious to those of us in Ireland who voted No in both identical Nice referenda. He seems to be talking around the issue rather than directly answering the questions posed.

I would imagine that if the UK does vote No to the referendum that Blair will go back to the EU and attempt some kind of renegotiation, followed by a second referendum. This will be just a small bit more than the Irish government tried to do – it simply put the same question a year later.

Could this become a trend in European nations?


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