Eideard

Directing traffic in Baghdad

A US government watchdog has criticised a programme to train Iraqi police, saying it could become a “bottomless pit” for American money.

The report said only some 12% of the money spent in 2011 would be spent directly helping Iraq’s police. It also pointed out that the programme had yet to gain the support of the Iraqi government…

The programme for police training is run by the Department of State, which took over the role from the Department of Defense this month.

The report by the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) said the Department of State had failed to put a plan in place for assessing the current and future capabilities of the Iraqi police…

“What tangible benefit will Iraqis see from this police training program? With most of the money spent on lodging, security, support, all the MOI [Iraqi Ministry of the Interior] gets is a little expertise, and that is if the program materialises,” Iraqi Deputy Interior Minister Adnan al-Assadi was cited as telling the report’s authors…

SIGIR’s inspector general said the state department did not fully co-operate with the report… Har!

According to the SIGIR report [.pdf], the US has spent about $8 billion on training Iraq’s police force since the US-led invasion in 2003, which by 2010 included 412,000 officers.

There was a great quote on Tom Keene’s mid-day TV show, today, when an economics professor was asked [in a different context] about changes in governance between George W. Bush and Barack Obama: “We were promised change and what we got was continuity.”

The incompetence and inefficiencies of outsourcing military tasks to mercenaries is consistent throughout post-invasion responsibilities in Iraq. Crap building of infrastructure is matched by crap governance, crap security and policing.

Did you think you live in the Free World?

An Oxford University student claims he was mistaken for a suicide bomber by police as he jogged around the city’s streets.

The suspect was ordered to stop running, put his hands in the air and drop everything in his hands as sub-machine guns were trained on his body. The officers carefully took off the heavily padded vest and searched it, looking for explosives and a detonator.

However, they found the Oxford University PhD student was wearing a training vest loaded with weights for added resistance when running…

Goudarz Karimi said: “They told me ‘Stop! Stop! Put your hands in the air. Drop everything you have…’

“They said they had a report of someone walking in a bomb suit. There were police cars and the street was blocked…”

He said that when they realised it was an exercise vest they advised him to remove it to prevent any another call from a terrified member of the public…

He said he feared his ethnic origin had sparked the concerns. “I am 100 per cent sure that if I was blond with Caucasian skin type, nobody would have noticed and said anything about it…

Superintendent Amanda Pearson, of Thames Valley Police, said: “Police received a call from a member of the public who was concerned about a man walking in Southfield Road, with what he thought was a vest which may have contained explosives…

“In order to stop any further calls from members of the public, the gentleman was asked to put his coat on, which he agreed to do.

“There was no legal requirement for the gentleman to put on his jacket and he did not have to do so.”

Yes, can you imagine how this would have gone, say, in Dallas or Chicago? Har.

That’s Sherlock on the right

Police in Lower Saxony, Germany, who decided to teach a vulture to sniff out corpses of missing people have run into difficulty two months into training.

Reasoning that it could fly over miles of wasteland, then descend where it found a missing person, they had wanted to fit it with a transmitter. But it transpires that Sherlock, as the bird is known, is not very interested.

On top of that, it is shy, confuses human with animal remains and actually prefers to walk, Spiegel magazine says.

Sherlock has been in training in the Walsrode bird park on Lueneburg Heath near Hanover, along with two vulture side-kicks also named after famous fictional detectives, Columbo and Miss Marple…

But according to Spiegel: “Sherlock’s success has been limited. While he can locate a stinking burial shroud which the police gave the bird park to use for training purposes and which is clearly marked with a yellow plastic cup, Sherlock doesn’t approach the shroud by air.

“He prefers to travel by foot…”

The vulture also finds it hard to distinguish between dead people and dead animals, which is a problem in the vast heathland of that part of Germany…

I’ve known police dogs who seemed as bright as their trainers. Vultures aren’t exactly capable of establishing the level of companionship to enable real communications.

Officials in Toyama, a city 186 miles northwest of Tokyo, have launched the nation’s first scheme in which hairdressers are used as mediators between suicidal customers and professional counsellors.

The move taps into the renowned universal skill of hairdressers to lend a sympathetic ear to customers who often feel comfortable confiding in them about their problems.

More than 650 hairdressers in the city are involved in the new project, which involves taking part in training lectures with clinical psychologists to help them identify those in need of specialist help.

The hairdressers are also being given guidebooks to hand out to customers who they believe may be suffering from depression or suicidal thoughts and are able to put them in touch with professional psychological counselors…

As part of the new scheme, hairdressers will be taking part in training sessions organised by city officials with professional psychologists focusing on problems relating to suicide.

Japan is home to one of the highest suicide rates among industrialised nations, with more than 30,000 people killing themselves every year.

Hairdressers across the city appeared to welcome the initiative, with a growing number of premises displaying government-provided stickers in their window to show they are taking part in the project.

Hey – marketing is marketing. Increased traffic into a retail business is always welcome.

Canadian combat troops are slated to leave Afghanistan next summer, but RCMP Commissioner William Elliott said Saturday he expects his personnel will have to stay behind to undertake the “huge challenge” of training police officers.

About 50 RCMP and other civilian Canadian police are posted to Afghanistan as part of a mission to train the Afghan National Police. The ANP, as it’s known, has had a reputation for roadside shakedowns and graft that Canadian officials hope mentoring, training and supervision will eradicate.

Elliott, who visited Kandahar this weekend to review the Mounties’ operations there, said he’s seen “indications from the government” that it wants the training to plow on once combat soldiers ship out starting in July 2011…

One question is whether the Tories will seek to send more police to Afghanistan to fill the void left by the withdrawal of the Canadian Forces. The federal government has been pressured by the United States to maintain a large presence in the central Asian country past 2011…

As foreign mentors try to cleanse the Afghan National Police of its venal tendencies — officers have been known to routinely hit up the subjects of their investigations for a payoff and are widely distrusted by the populace — they’ve had to adapt their teaching methods for the different calibre of the force’s cadets.

“Let’s not kid ourselves. We are working not with a modern police force, and not with recruits that would meet the standards of Canadian recruits,” Elliott said. “Many of them are illiterate, and that in and of itself is a huge challenge…”

The Canadian police contingent has also tackled the corruption conundrum systemically by helping implement a new payroll method. ANP officers are now remunerated on par with soldiers in the Afghan National Army, and they receive their wages by direct deposit to their bank account to avoid skimming by bureaucrats. It’s hoped that with more money in the officers’ hands, they will solicit less from the public.

Uh, OK. That’s a heck of an ethic determining education and a job description.

The asymmetric reality of 21st-century warfare has taught the US military much over the last decade.

It has taught them that their enemies are relentless, technologically advanced and often invisible – and that hardware and superior numbers are no longer the guarantees they once were.

Unfortunately, it has also taught them that some of their recruits are too fat and not much good in a fight, and that a lot of their 30-year-old physical training regime is in danger of becoming obsolete.

However, the top brass has listened to Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans and is now switching the fitness focus from five-mile runs and bayonet drills to zigzag sprints and agility exercises. Battlefield sergeants believe recruits should also learn how to dodge across alleys and pull a comrade from a burning vehicle.

The new drills are also designed to educate those whose only experience of combat has been gleaned from playing computer games.

“Most of these soldiers have never been in a fistfight or any kind of a physical confrontation,” said trainer Captain Scott Sewell at the army’s fitness school in Fort Jackson, South Carolina. “They are stunned when they get smacked in the face. We are trying to get them to act, to think like warriors.”

Excepting, of course, the criminals who are offered enlistment as an alternative to jail.

One would hope the refugees from their mom’s basement can do as well.

Two North Carolina State University engineers have figured out the best way to shoot a free throw – a frequently underappreciated skill that gets more important as the game clock winds down.

To get a swish rather than a brick, you need the best possible conditions for releasing the basketball from your hand, say Drs. Chau Tran and Larry Silverberg, mechanical and aerospace engineers at NC State and co-authors of a peer-reviewed study.

The engineers used hundreds of thousands of three-dimensional computer simulations of basketball free-throw trajectories to arrive at their conclusions. After running the simulations, Tran and Silverberg arrived at a number of major recommendations to improve free-throw shooting.

First, the engineers say that shooters should launch the shot with about three hertz of back spin. That translates to the ball making three complete backspinning revolutions before reaching the hoop. Back spin deadens the ball when it bounces off the rim or backboard, the engineers assert, giving the ball a better chance of settling through the net.

Where to aim? Tran and Silverberg say you should aim for the back of the rim, leaving close to 5 centimeters – about 2 inches – between the ball and the back of the rim. According to the simulations, aiming for the center of the basket decreases the probabilities of a successful shot by almost 3 percent.

The engineers say that the ball should be launched at 52 degrees to the horizontal. If you don’t have a protractor in your jersey, that means that the shot should, at the highest point in its arc to the basket, be less than 2 inches below the top of the backboard.

Free-throw shooters should also release the ball as high above the ground as possible, without adversely affecting the consistency of the shot; release the ball so it follows the imaginary line joining the player and the basket; and release the ball with a smooth body motion to get a consistent release speed.

“Our recommendations might make even the worst free-throw shooters – you know who you are, Shaquille O’Neal and Ben Wallace – break 60 percent from the free-throw line,” Silverberg says with tongue firmly in cheek.

Just in case you wish to improve your game.

The police officer who ended the Fort Hood massacre by shooting the suspect is known as the enforcer on her street, a “tough woman” who patrolled her neighborhood and once stopped burglars at her house.

“If you come in, I’m going to shoot,” Kimberly Munley told the would-be intruders last year.

It was Munley who arrived quickly Thursday at the scene of the worst massacre at an Army base in U.S. history, where 13 people were killed. She confronted the alleged gunman, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, and shot him four times. Munley was wounded in the exchange.

That’s just like her, friends and family say…

Munley, the mother of a 3-year-old girl, lives on a street where a lot of homes are vacant because so many residents are deployed at war in Iraq and Afghanistan…

“We sleep a lot safer knowing she’s on the block,” said Sgt. William Barbrow, another neighbor…

Her bio on Twitter makes the point: “I live a good life….a hard one, but I go to sleep peacefully @ night knowing that I may have made a difference in someone’s life.”

You surely made a difference, this time.

Vice Admiral John Currier

Someone this morning was scanner-snooping the DC area. They locked onto channel 81, a discrete Coast Guard channel – not encrypted except during actual emergencies – so they hear someone say, “Bang – bang – I’ve fired 10 rounds!”

If they had been listening earlier they could have heard the start of the 10-minute exercise, “This is a test – this is a drill” – because 4 river patrol boats of the U.S. Coast Guard were practicing halting an intruder in a secure zone on the river. This is a routine exercise that happens 4 times a week. And has been forever.

Probably because it’s 9/11, everyone at CNN went batshit crazy. First, they have the jump on everyone else. Second, maybe Washington, DC is being invaded by, uh, one pleasure boat.

I watched it right from the beginning and it was clear enough the Coast Guard patrol boats were parked, back in a stand easy position, within a few minutes of their exercise. CNN kept on yipping in fear for another half-hour.

It’s now a couple hours later and CNN and 72 other radio and TV media outlets are trying to weasel an apology out of the Coast Guard for the panic that CNN and their media buddies created among themselves.

Vice Admiral John Currier handled the press conference for the Coast Guard and the man has the patience of Job.

The blathering herd came up with the same few questions – 20 different ways – all premised upon demanding to know why they weren’t informed in advance of the exercise. If it was important enough, they could have checked with the regional command center in Baltimore and they would have known about these four small patrol boats dashing around in pretend circles in between 2 bridges on the Potomac.

I have no idea how this military dude maintained his calm in the face of a pack of ignorant hyenas trying to justify their existence by demanding to know “who’s responsible?” They’re the people responsible for the whole fracking incident.

Again, I have to say I’m impressed with Admiral Currier. Halfway through the absurdity of these questions [and excuses] I would have told our Fourth Estate where to stick it and work it.

Whatever happened to tradition?

Scots medics urgently need donations, but in this case they’re not talking about cash, blood or even organs. From students of medicine to the most experienced surgeons, they need whole, dead bodies.

The number of people donating their mortal remains to medical science needs to double “with immediate effect”, according to the man with the imposing title Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Anatomy for Scotland. Professor Bertie Wood needs 300 bodies a year to keep pace with developments in training that offer new hope to the living.

One of the key new demands is from surgeons who specialise in operating on the joints to help arthritis sufferers and other patients with debilitating conditions related to their limbs. These already highly-trained doctors need a steady supply of bodies on which to hone their skills.

Around a dozen body parts recently had to be imported from the United States because there were not sufficient numbers available for use in training surgeons in complex shoulder surgery techniques.

Perish the thought that Scots medics-in-training should have to cut through those extra layers of fat.