Flit

SCORECARD, PART V Looks like

SCORECARD, PART V

Looks like 3rd Armoured Combat Regiment may be in Kuwait and ready to go ahead of 1st Cavalry. ACRs are designed to provide heavy armour augmentation to an infantry division, like in this case, the 3rd Infantry in Kuwait, to bring their tank numbers up closer to what an armoured division would have. It would therefore make sense 3 ACR is next in the queue for transport.

(Yes, I know, it's a small town newspaper, but that's what even the best commentators are forced to rely on now... hey, I'm no worse than John Pike, who had this classic quote in his analysis on globalsecurity.org today:

According to the Associated Press on March 7, roughly 300 hundred soldiers from the 1-179th Infantry Regiment are currently in Kuwait. (One arrives at the number of three hundred based on the number of boxes of cookies sent to the region...

Pike, ever a source of precision, adds, deadpan:

(It is possible that the number is smaller, say by half).

Note to the American forces: if I can contribute in any way to your deception plan by consuming cookies and thereby deceiving the press, feel free to send them my way. Oatmeal raisin or chocolate chip preferred...

PS: Don't make the mistake of overrating the rumours of a new Turkish deployment, at least not yet. Even if there was exactly zero chance of one American soldier crossing the line when the war starts, for operational deception reasons the Americans would still have to be leaking exactly the kind of stuff they're leaking now. I'm staying put with my idea of the North being a special ops zone for now.

TIDBITS --I'm not at all

TIDBITS

--I'm not at all surprised or bothered by the American courts' declining to get involved in Guantanamo. No matter what country we're talking about, their written/unwritten constitutions almost surely were never meant to extend around adversaries caught in arms by one's own army. The decision on what the U.S. or any other country's armies do with prisoners should never be appeallable to a national or even an international judiciary... this is a political decision, regulated by treaty, and nothing else (the obvious exception being any form of abuse of prisoners that is contrary to orders). The fact the U.S. has effectively repudiated large swathes of a historic treaty (Third Geneva) in its prosecution of terrorists is a matter to be taken up between nations.

--Credit where credit is due: this was a good update story on the Kandahar bombing tribunal from the National Post. It should go without saying that the USAF's "theory of the crime" and the one on this blog are almost identical.

--I think Josh Marshall is right... senior U.S. war promoter Richard Perle showed his teeth the other night. This was certainly a darkly ad hominem mother of a non-denial denial... indicating, of course, that everything Sy Hersh has written about Perle and his questionable personal investments in homeland security is almost certainly true. (Bill Quick, showing his usual unique judgment, called it "intemperate but understandable.")