Never home are the heroes: A tough-talking Marine who loved boxes of candy from home; a war orphan from Guatemala who joined the Marines "to pay back a little of what he'd gotten from the U.S.;" a drill sergeant who fixed flat tires for people he didn't know; a Bible student who married his high-school sweetheart two months ago -- these are the faces of the young Americans who have died by enemy fire in the midst of the current conflict.

Current listing of soldiers killed in action, as of Saturday, March 29, 2003 (compiled from DoD and news sources):

Sgt. Bradley S. Korthaus, 28, of Scott, Iowa. (Engineering Company C, 6th Engineer Support Battalion, 4th Force Service Support Group)
Cpl. Evan T. James, 20, LaHarpe, Illinois. (Engineering Company C, 6th Engineer Support Battalion, 4th Force Service Support Group)

Cpl. James and Sgt. Korthaus drowned Monday, March 24 while swimming across the Saddam Canal in southeastern Iraq in order to secure a water-purification facility.

Hospital Corpsman Third Class (Fleet Marine Force) Michael Vann Johnson, Jr., 25, of Little Rock, Ark. (Naval Medical Center San Diego, First Marine Division Detachment)

Corpsman Johnson was killed Tuesday, March 25 by a grenade while tending to a wounded soldier.

Spc. Jamaal R. Addison, 22, of Roswell, Ga. (507th Ordnance Maintenance Company)
Pfc. Howard Johnson II, 21, of Mobile, Ala. (507th Ordnance Maintenance Company)

Members of the 507th Maintenance Company encountered Iraqi forces after accidentally entering enemy-held territory. Several members have ben taken POW, and most of the Company is still listed as Duty Status Whereabouts Unknown (DUSTWUN).

Army Spc. Gregory P. Sanders, 19, of Indiana (3rd Battalion, 69th Armor)

Spc. Sanders was killed by sniper fire on Monday, March 24.

Lance Cpl. Brian Rory Buesing, 20, Cedar Key, Fla. (1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade)
Cpl. Randal Kent Rosacker, 21, San Diego, Calif. (1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade)
Sgt. Michael E. Bitz, 31, Ventura, Calif. (2nd Assault Amphibious Battalion, 2nd Marine Division)
Lance Cpl. David K. Fribley, 26, Lee, Fla. (1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade)
Cpl. Jose A. Garibay, 21, Orange, Calif. (1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade)
Cpl. Jorge A. Gonzalez, 20, Los Angeles, Calif. (1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade)
Staff Sgt. Phillip A. Jordan, 42, Brazoria, Texas. (1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade)
2nd Lt. Frederick E. Pokorney Jr., 31, Nye, Nev. (Headquarters Battery, 1st Battalion, 10th Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade)
Lance Cpl. Thomas J. Slocum, 22, Adams, Colo. (1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade)

Several Marines were killed Sunday, March 23, near An Nasiriyah, Iraq, in an ambush by Iraqis pretending to surrender.

Major Gregory Stone, 40, Boise, Idaho. (1-101st Airborne Division)
Capt. Christopher Scott Seifert, 27. (1-101st Airborne Division)

Major Stone and Captain Seifert were killed on Sunday, March 23 when Sgt. Asan Akbar, a disgruntled member of the 101st Airborne, attacked numerous soldiers with grenades and automatic weapons fire.

2nd Lt. Therrel ("Steve") Childers, 30 ,Harrison County, Miss. (1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division)

Lt. Childers was shot Friday, March 21, while leading an assault on an oil terminal in southern Iraq.

Lance Cpl. Jose Gutierrez, 22, Los Angeles, Calif. (2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division)

Lance Cpl. Gutierrez was shot by Iraqi forces Friday, March 21, during the fighting near Umm Qasr.

 
Instant analysis, just add readers: We're adding ever-more information to the Blogora, currently concentrating on blogs, sites, reports, articles, and briefings from the war in Iraq.

Some of the better sites added: well-known and well-respected milblog Sgt. Stryker, the excellent Intel Dump, and the inexplicable Aeronautics.ru (which came courtesy of Max Sawicky).

 
Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa: Last week, we mentioned fears of analysts that Saddam might use suicide tactics similar to those used by an OPFOR commander in last year's "INTERNAL LOOK" wargame. Slate today has a story along the same lines that correctly identifies the wargame:Millennium Challenge 02 (MC02), and the commander, Lt. Gen. Paul van Riper (USMC, Ret.).

 
The best of all possible wars: The media works for Baghdad, the Democrats are cheering the deaths of American soldiers -- it's just another day inside the fevered imagination of Ann Coulter.

There's a brittleness to many hawks' words this week: even as the facts on the ground show that we underestimated the willingness of the Iraqi military to fight and overestimated our ability to manage one of the longest and most fragile logistical lines in the history of warfare, many pundits continue to insist that there's nothing to worry about, everything's fine, nothing to see here.

The problem for the pundits is that the military's off the reservation on this issue. Senior officers candidly acknowlege that "The enemy we're fighting is different from the one we'd war-gamed against." Another Pentagon official told the NYT on background, "It's clear that Saddam went to school on Desert Storm. It is clear Saddam went to school on Kosovo. He has learned how America attacks."

It's tempting to believe that for the hawks, for whom both Vietnam and the first Gulf War are opposing touchstones, are as casualty-averse as Saddam Hussein believes all Americans to be; for Coulter and other pundits, to simply admit that the war isn't going as well as planned is tantamount to saying that the war is lost, or perhaps wasn't even justifiable in the first place. Perhaps to them, the only justifiable war is a costless war, in which the only dead are enemy soldiers and civilians. As long as they refuse to accept that the cost of this war -- and any war -- includes the lives of American soldiers and foreign civilians killed by enemy action as well as fratricidal error, then they're playing the old body-count game, which the anti-war side will inevitably win as casualties mount. Many of us thought that military pressure on Iraq would cause Saddam Hussein's government to fold in the first few weeks; instead, it looks like the first place regime change may happen is on the op-ed pages.

Fact-checking is for doves: Even though Coulter asserts "American forces have suffered less than two dozen deaths," her numbers are not only misleading (since they ignore casualties taken by other Coalition partners as well as American MIAs and POW), but simply wrong by over 25%. The WaPo today says, "About 30 U.S. servicemen have been publicly reported killed in a week of combat, along with 20 British soldiers and marines. ... [T]hat total could be considerably higher, because news from the battlefront has been slow to be tallied. The number of wounded appears to be soaring."

The mother of all slogans: So, who's playing politics during wartime? Coulter launches a pre-emptive strike against possible Democratic candidate Wesley Clark: "His competence to judge American generals is questionable since his command was limited to working for NATO. We prefer to hear from American generals." (Note: Clark is former CINCUSSOUTHCOM and CINCUSEUCOM as well as NATO SACEUR; for his military bio, see here.)

 
NC, IC, we all see: The FBI has exempted the National Crime Information Center from 1974 Privacy Act requirements under 5 U.S.C. 552a(e)(5), which requires a "reasonable effort to assure fairness" to individuals who are referenced in a database.

The NCIC system preserves information on millions of individuals and vehicles, and acts as a clearinghouse between law enforcement organizations in such areas as arrests, open warrants, stolen vehicles, missing persons, street gangs, and international terrorism. However, the system has been historically plagued by incorrect or misleading information, leading to mistaken arrests. A 1982 study by the Office of Technology Assessment determined that only 25% of verifiable arrest records in an NCIC sample were "complete, accurate [and] unambiguous," noting that "The wide dissemination of criminal history records with known record quality problems, especially missing or inaccurate disposition information, raises legitimate questions about ... the protection of constitutional rights (especially due process and equal protection of the laws) where such records are used in criminal justice decisionmaking." The NCIC system processes up to 3.2 million "hits" per day, mostly from local law enforcement.

Currently, 36 DoJ computer systems are exempted from one part or another of the Privacy Act under 28 C.F.R. 16. Only a select few are exempted from the (e)(5) requirements, in large part because the burdens are not onerous: for example, an ATF database containing unsubstantiated allegations provided by a third party was found to be within (e)(5) bounds, a parole system that contained inaccurate information was found in conformance although the validity of the data was never investigated, and databases containing hearsay and rumors are acceptable if they are marked as such. Great deference is given to the agencies, especially when the data in question is used as only part of a process of determination, and where affected individuals can challenge the validity of the data.

The Fibbies argue that "in the collection of information for law enforcement purposes it is impossible to determine in advance what information is accurate, relevant, timely and complete ... In addition, because many of these records come from other federal, state, local, joint, foreign, tribal, and international agencies, it is administratively impossible to ensure compliance with this provision." This also suggests -- but it has not been confirmed -- that the NCIC records retention policy will be changed so that records currently cleared out of the system if not "hit" every few years will remain indefinitely for investigatory purposes.

Essentially, the DoJ's argument boils down to, "We don't know what we'll need, and we don't know for whom we'll need it, and we don't even trust the organizations giving us the data -- so it's too much trouble for us to worry about 'correctness.'" This raises the spectre of a national database of rumor, innuendo, and allegations attached to at least tens of millions of people -- information that will be noted every time you get stopped for running a stop sign. William Safire, call your office ....

 
Sandswarm: "The only time I saw a storm like this was in the American movie 'Twister' and in the words of the holy Koran," an Iraqi told a reporter as the storms howled down upon Iraq today. And, indeed, the eerie photos coming of out Iraq are otherworldly, like Mars in turmoil: ghostly lights floating in the midst of a red darkness, soldiers pockmarked by sand trudging along shrouded roads. But even as Iraqis speak of divine intervention, Coalition forces found an unexpected boon in weather that grounded their gunships and slowed movement to a crawl. Even as forward forces hunkered down and sparred intermittently with equally-frozen Iraqi forces, Coalition logistics, safe from the sort of ambush that hit the 507th Maintenance convoy, moved up to bring fuel, water, ammunition and other supplies to the soldiers who were no longer outpacing them.

The Coalition forces have adopted "swarm" tactics: seeking to decapitate the regime without grinding the nation into potentially-explosive human dust, they leapfrog from point to point, bringing decisive force upon enemy force aggregations, then moving on. Unfortunately, this renders obsolete the concept of a "front line" as such, and means that force protection in the rear is perhaps more necessary than ever before.

The counter-revolution will not be televised: Coalition forces struck at the Iraqi television station, taking satellite and land links down (today's award for most impressive display of futility goes to this piece in Slate).

One has to wonder, will the Iraqis suddenly decide that embedded journalists are part of the Coalition propaganda machine? The news-takers might well find themselves in the uncomfortable position of being news-makers.

 
Nice to see they're taking a stand: An article in today's NYT predicts that "War in Iraq Could Bring U.S. Recession, or Economic Growth."

 
Ch-ch-ch-changes: We've done away with the links section on the sidebar -- I've never been convinced that they're useful for anything beyond blogrolling, so we're taking them down and replacing them with a Yahoo-like links engine, Blogora, which will give you some context to each site we've linked to. There's not much in there right now, so if you have any blogs you'd like to see added, please let us know!

 
Everybody's talking: Okay, what's going on here? If the burgeoning similarities between the far right and the anti-war left aren't confusing enough, try this one on for size: Paul Krugman writes a column excoriating the Bush tax cuts, arguing that "the revenue that will be sacrificed because of those tax cuts ... would have been more than enough to 'top up' Social Security and Medicare, allowing them to operate without benefit cuts for the next 75 years."

An economic commentator then arrives on the scene, questioning the methodology in the study used by Krugman, and citing competing projections to refute his conclusions. All well and good; expect to read materially similar stuff on the op-ed page of the WSJ in the next few days. But -- lefty labor economist (not, ahem, "Marxian," as he was quick to point out) Max Sawicky?

Nobody told me there'd be days like these. Strange days, indeed.

 
I feel safer already, part two: WaPo columnist Courtland Milloy learns not to ask questions of the National Park Service, while Edward Ordman of the Christian Science Monitor reminds us that the United States government has always taken a cautious approach to investigating possible conspiracies. In the meantime, no word yet on the manhunt for suspected al-Qaeda operative Adman el-Shukrijumah.

 
Cracks in the wall: The tangle between pro-war neocons and anti-war paleocons has caught the WaPo's attention, with Howie Kurtz saying the "impassioned arguments over Iraq are ripping apart the right."

In related news, sources at the Hague report that war crimes prosecutors last week ripped apart Chronicles editor, paleocon speaker and longtime war-crimes tribunal critic Srdja Trifkovic for plagiarism; according to people at the trial, Trifkovic republished verbatim and without attribution four pages of sensitive court documents, allegedly obtained from a member of the defense team. (We're trying to double-source this story. Trifkovic has been an expert witness for the defense in the case of Milomir Stakic, before the ICTY on multiple genocide counts.) If true, it bodes badly for the paleocon movement, whose most credible face is the educated, erudite and European Trifkovic.

Longtime readers may recall that several months ago, David Horowitz published excerpts from an anti-Muslim screed of Trifkovic's, prompting some spirited discussion and a series of parries and ripostes between Trifkovic and neocon Stephen Schwartz (who Trifkovic characterizes as a "self-loating 'Jew-for-Allah' ").

 
Martyrs for the cause: Coalition reports suggest that members of a group called the "Fedayeen Saddam" are operating in the south of Iraq, launching strikes against Coalition convoys, and possibly ambushing troops by pretending to surrender. Who are the Fedayeen?

The Fedayeen Saddam, or "Saddam's Martyrs," were created in 1995 as a paramilitary force by Saddam's eldest son, Uday. After being dispossessed by his father, and following a failed assassination attempt against him, Uday has clawed his way back into power by skillful use of the media (which he owns), criminal organizations, smugglers, and paramilitary groups. Saddam's younger and more reliable son, Qusay, was given command over the Fedayeen in 1996, but Uday regained control over them, and has made them into his own private army, which he uses in the power struggles that characterize Iraqi political life.

The Fedayeen Saddam are unusual in that they are a volunteer force that has pledged to defend Saddam Hussein to the end; although they have been diluted by intensive recruiting efforts in recent years, they still are considered much more loyal than even the Republican Guard. Comprising both suicide and irregular military units, the Fedayeen are more than the simple gang of thugs they began as; they have been intensively trained over the past four years in high-intensity urban combat, in order to have the skills necessary to forestall both internal coups and external invasion, and are today a small but well-equipped, well-trained, and utterly fanatical army. General Mizham al-Sa'b al-Hassan al-Tikriti was placed in command of the Fedayeen, after their first commander, Mukhabarat leader Abu Zeinab al-Qurairy, defected from Iraq following a falling-out with Uday.

The actual numbers of Fedayeen are uncertain, with estimates ranging from 8,000 to 60,000 (though the numbers are probably somewhere between 25,000 - 40,000). They have seen combat in the north, against the Kurds, and are empowered by the state as essentially autonomous paramilitary units with great latitude in issues of war and the quelling of internal dissent. As part of Uday's campaign against domestic corruption, the Fedayeen have extrajudicially murdered women accused of being prostitutes (though many appear to have committed a far more serious crime -- being the wives or mothers of enemies of the Iraqi state), and corrupt bureaucrats, some of whom are rumored to have been members of rival criminal gangs overseen by Qusay Hussein. Uday has reinforced the general fear of the Martyrs by frequently showing them on his television stations; the images have included members of the Fedayeen killing animals with their bare hands and devouring the raw flesh.

Roughly 1,500 members of the Fedayeen were separated in 1995 into an elite force, al-Qare'a, or "the Strikers," (also known as Unit 999) who were trained as terrorists, assassins, and deep-strike forces. Training included live-fire exercises in which Strikers assassinated persons, hijacked vehicles, and destroyed buildings. Strikers who failed were used as targets in subsequent exercises.

At least 30 members of al-Qare'a are believed to be abroad under new identities, having undergone further training for infiltration of other nations. Their whereabouts are believed to be unknown. Unit 999 is also believed to have trained al-Qaeda in the use of chemical weapons.

 
Said what? "[T]he United States, or rather the small handful of Judeo-Christian white men who currently rule its government, is bent on world hegemony," writes cultural critic Edward Said in an article for Egypt's Al-Ahram. Discussing the "amazingly complex society" of America, Said decries "mind-deadening patriotism" wherein "America=good=total loyalty and love," calls Bill Clinton the "whitest of white men" who "confus[ed] the Palestinians with his charm and his manipulation of the system," and claims that Americans implicitly accept a "narratheme of unchallenged moral wisdom as represented in figures with official authority."

Said's work is characteristically muddled; in point of fact, it's not exactly clear what he's trying to say, as he lurches from one theme (America is a complex society that contains many political and cultural cross-currents) to another (rich, white, fundamentalist Christians run America for the benefit of Israel) with only tenuous connections at best. The only conclusion I can draw: if this is how Said defends American culture, I have to wonder what his attacks sound like.

All around the world: Former State Department official John Brown describes why he resigned from the Foreign Service ... A number of intersting stories in Al-Ahram describe Egyptian reactions to the invasion of Iraq and their protest plans ... Russians say that war "could backfire on America in the most destructive way."

Glass houses: North Korea is complaining that a Japanese organization is helping both North Koreans and Japanese escape Kim Jong Il's mountain kingdom:

Members of the fund for relief of North Korean refugees, a non-governmental organization in Japan, made their way to a Korea-China border area and secretly whisked off Japanese spouses residing in the DPRK and Korean returnees, at least 20 in all, to Japan. ...

If this is true, it is not only a crime committed in violation of international law which bans the abduction and kidnapping but an act of disregarding the DPRK's legal system which is guaranteed by the DPRK constitution and nationality law.

It's likely that what the DPRK is really concerned about is that they're losing a bargaining chip: the families of Japanese citizens abducted years ago by the Communist regime, who can be ransomed back to Japan for diplomatic concessions.

Fears of the sun: The continuing violence in Nigeria makes
this backgrounder on possible Nigerian flashpoints a useful primer on one of the most important nations in Africa.

 
Permalinks are working again; apologies for the confusion.

 
The blanket-stackers break through: Today hasn't been the best of days for the Coalition, with a supply convoy falling prey to Iraqi forces (possibly members of the Fedayeen Saddam, or "Saddam's Martyrs," a band of shock troops created by Uday Hussein following his loss of favored-son status to his brother, Qusay) and reports coming out that an American soldier, disgruntled over disciplinary action, was responsible for the grenade attack on the 101st Airborne. The key term for the day has been "force protection," and the problem is protecting logistical lines in a war where "swarm tactics" have disintegrated the convention idea of a military front.

Nonetheless, even with the media focus on casualties, two critical steps have been reached: first, Coalition forces have taken bridges over the Euphrates, ensuring that they can cross without waiting for slow-moving bridgelayers to reach them; and, second, the 101st has established a Forward Arming and Refueling Point, or FARP, within Iraq, tightening the Coalition's logistical lines. In a war that seems destined to end with a circumvallation and siege of Baghdad, the faster the Allies can push their logistical envelope forward, the faster the war will be over.

 
Things we never thought we'd see, part XVII: In a case of strange bedfellows, paleoconservative Chronicles magazine is starting to look suspiciously like The Nation, with its paen to French culture and a link to purchase the Dixie Chicks' latest album. How long, one wonders, before Pat Buchanan addresses a "Not in Our Name" rally?