Ghost Wars: The Maps

Throughout the book there are maps placed that each show a different place and a different thing on them. There are 4 main important ones that have to do with information the United States got and did not act on. The first map is labeled as “The Birth of Modern Saudi Arabia” which shows Saudi Arabia at the close of World War 2. It gives you the 1945 boundaries which gave Saudi Arabia more land and room over all of the neighboring countries. But it also gives the modern boundaries which close down on some of the land that they got back in 1945. It makes the whole country itself smaller which gave them less power. The second map they have is labeled “Massoud at War 1983-1985” which shows Afghanistan and the land around it and where Massoud and his men were. It shows the hills that Massoud and his men went down to attack convoys of Soviet troops that were there. They would come out of the shadows and attack the convoys then disappear until they were alone and took the scrap metal, weapons, and pieces of tanks and other weapons and then bring them back on horseback to Panjshir where they would have mechanics that would put them back together for future rebel use. The third map that they have labeled in this book is called “Bin Laden’s Tarnak Farm” which is a bird’s eye view shot of Osama’s farm from satellites. It shows how close his training facility was to the airport and how it had a direct road to the airport leading from it. There was a 10 foot wall surrounding the entire farm, a six story office building that ended up being bombed out in 2001, and about 80 living structures were inside of these walls. They went back and forth on whether they should raid the place or not because they did not know which building he was in or if they went into the wrong building if he was in the one next to that one. They also did not know what to do with all of the collateral damage that would occur. How they would explain this whole situation to people and other countries and governments that would be wondering what is going on. The final map that they have labeled as “The CIA in the Panjshir, 1997-2000” which shows the routes of flights and driving paths that many of them took to complete these special missions they had to do. They give you arrows from where the journey started which was sometimes up to 770 miles away but also sometimes as close as 230 miles away from the target place. All they were trying to do was to establish a renewed counterterrorism liaison by giving Massoud more cash, more secure communications, listening devices, and other nonlethal spy gear.

Ghost Wars: Intro

This book is definitely for the reader who likes conspiracy. It’s written by a Pulitzer Prize winning author Steven Coll who along with writing this book wrote the book the Bin Laden’s. This book covers topics from a vast variety of time from the CIA back in 1979 to present day issues. Anything from the soviet invasion to the attacks on the world trade centers. It talks about who was actually responsible for the attacks and who knew about them before they happened and didn’t act on the threat. It also gives the people some sort of an idea of what has been happening over the past couple of years and it shows them how much our government actually knows and doesn’t act on. It made me as a reader question a lot of information I get from the news and any other media source because it makes me think what they are failing to tell us. How bad the situation actually is over in the Middle East and what is going on. Why we are chasing Osama bin laden around the deserts of his home country to try and kill him and fail at that which caused us to waste millions upon millions of dollars on trying to kill a single man. Reading this book makes me think about and makes me angry at our government because of the things that they think they can do to other places and people and think that they can get away with it without consequence. The whole war in Afghanistan and in Iraq is an outcome to something they thought would not get this bad.  It shows that there are consequences to actions that you take in places you have no right to be. The reason I think this book got an award is because the author does a great job at giving an entire overview of the whole situation that was and is going on and writes it in a way that people can understand.

Death Penalty #3

The stages in a case about this starts with a crime that qualifies for capital punishment. These crimes usually are never walked up upon by police and always relies on evidence and pictures to solve the case. the next step in the case is to make an arrest. This is the part of the process that can mess the whole life up for an innocent person. The police are usually pressured to arrest someone as fast as they can to settle the neighborhood and everyone around the case. After this the person is brought in front of a court to gets the plea and the charges that are being brought against them. They than have to be proven guilty or "Death Qualified". After they are proven guilty they get the burden of trying to show how bad a mistake they made to sentence them to death. They also get the chance to get a clemency hearing. However if they fail to prove their innocence they have to wait until they get served their warrant for death.

The most humane way is through lethal injection which is when certain chemicals are injected into their body. It first puts them to sleep, than they get a chemical that stops all muscle movement. Eventually they get a shot that stops their heart and that is the end of the process. I think that hanging and firing squad are the two most inhumane ways to kill someone. These can both be considered "cruel and unusual" because there are way to many things that can go wrong, which could make the situation turn into torture. These both can cause very slow painful deaths also.

All of the statistics about other states and the death penalty really surprised me. I think it was the amount of people on death row in some of the states. For example in California there has been 669 death row inmates and only 13 executions, in Texas there has been 370 inmates and 405 total executions. The stats could keep going on and on. These numbers are really surprising because that is so many people to have waiting on when they are going to die or even if they will ever get off death row. All this info shows me is more reasons why the death penalty should not be put in because there is way to many flaws in the system to where it is not fair enough for everyone that comes through the process.

This info just supported my reason to abolish the death penalty because there are simply way to many people on death row. For example there are 3261 death row inmates throughout the whole country. The system is also very racist. With most of the inmates being black with white victims. I think that everyone should take a look at these statistics and realize that this is doing more bad than good and is costing the people as taxpayers so much extra money that is not needed to be spent.

Boggess

While watching the Front line video about Clifford Boggess I knew what decision I would have made. On one side he was clearly a cold blooded killer who had no remorse for what he did until after he committed the crimes. On the other side he said he was a changed man and that his stay on death row changed him for the better. In my opinion only certain people change for the good while they go to jail, prison, death row, whatever it may be. Only the certain people who really want forgiveness for what they have done and actually want to change their life for the better. I believed this about Boggess until the interview with his Girlfriend when she said that she knew he was a threat to society and that she wanted him dead because he had been threatening her to. I think that the death penalty is pointless. We are trying to show how killing people for crimes is supposed to deter it, but in reality it is not even doing that. Criminals will keep killing and committing capital crimes no matter what their sentence is and a life sentence would be way worse than dieing. It gives them so much time to think about what they have done and to be bothered by it for the rest of their life.

Drug Testing in schools

I think that student drug testing should not be allowed unless the student themselves were caught in the act or with a drug. It is not fair to make kids test when some of them join extra curricular activities to simply get away from all of the drugs and bad things on the streets. "There is growing recognition that extracurricular involvement plays a role in protecting students from substance abuse and other dangerous health behaviors." (National Education Association) If someone wants to spend enough money to test every kid that goes through an activity, why don't they just spend the money on things to improve the activities so more kids join and maybe get out of the bad activity. No matter how successful drug testing is, kids are still going to be doing drugs all through out high school and there are plenty of ways to pass drug tests even if you shouldn't. The success of the drug test will not out weigh the psychological affect it will have on all of the kids if they can't even get the trust of their coaches/sponsors to not test them. Students should be building trust with the adults in the school and with the administrators not building a mistrust. The test also do not discover the drugs that most people are worried about in high school teens. "The risk that testing students for illicit drugs "will be understood to signal that alcohol and tobacco are of lesser danger is not an idle concern." (National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence) On student privacy I think that students should have the right to have all of their privacy protected outside of school. For example if someone gets arrested the police department should not be able to tell the high school that the specific person was arrested for whatever reason. However if the student is on school property there is every right for them to be searched if it is reasonable. They should have to prove the reason and give evidence for the search and the students parents,lawyer and a police officer should all be present during the time of the search.

Religion

In the article that I read it talked about 6th grade classes in Texas to remove the words Christmas and Rosh Hashanah from their curriculum and put in Hindu religious words. I think that they should keep all the old names and add the new ones so all of the young kids get more knowledge about the world around them. The more educated we are about other religions and things the more we can be compatible with all of those other people in the world. But if we limit what we teach to our kids and learn about religion our ideas might get skewed to the wrong place. Many people do not even know that there are other religions other than the one that they are. There are so many things that separate us in the world that I think the more we learn about other religions the less that will separate us and the more we can realize how close we are to each other. I think that it would be a terrible idea for the state of Texas to do this because it will just cause unwanted violence and arguments that could have been prevented before hand.

Reactions to 9/11 movie

This video that we watched the past two class periods in my opinion sent a very strong message to me. I never really realized how much people came together in that time of horror or even just fear. I kind of remember what I was doing that day and what I was thinking but I can say it was not even close to what those two kids that were saying at the end of the video. When the people were saying things back and forth to each other I was really paying attention to if their arugements made sense and I was trying to figure out why they were arguing rather than embracing each other. It was almost like all of the pent up rage and saddness that came down on New York came out in those arugements and then at the end everyone was hugging. No one really knew where to funnel the emotions they were feeling. Many of the people who were there at ground zero cleaning up saw things that they have never seen before. That one guy said he has never seen  body parts seperate from the body like that. He said that there were heads, arms, legs, feet, etc... getting pulled out of the debris. This video really changed my mind about how I thought about 9/11 and how I think about what people should have or could have been saying that day. Although it was hard on the whole country many people came together and got through it with the hope and compassion of the men and women that fought to clean everything up.