From http://usgrandjury.org/
ATTENTION ALL PATRIOTS- TIME TO CALL ON ALL OFFICIALS IN MONROE COUNTY TENNESSEE!
There have been a lot of things happen in Monroe County Tennessee in the last week. This is a short recap of the events that have taken place. Lt Cmdr Walt Fitzpatrick is once again displaying his patriotism in an heroic effort to lead patriot’s in our struggle against the tyrannical oppressive actions our government is engaged in against the citizen’s of the United States of America. On Thursday of last week, Lt Cmdr Fitzpatrick attempted to exercise his right as a citizen, NO, his DUTY as a citizen and effect a citizen’s arrest against known criminals named in Monroe County Tennessee. He was met with opposition from the local law enforcement to include the Madisonville Police Department and the Monroe County Sheriff Department taking orders from one of the named criminals in his arrest complaint, Judge Carroll Ross. The unconstitutional acts that were committed that day and since, should be recorded and prosecuted by the judicial system AFTER the citizens have once again taken control of the corrupt system and arrested the criminals that now control the courts of Monroe County. This is nothing less than a travesty of justice an MUST be corrected if we are to ever take back control of the government and restore our constitutional republic to the great nation we once were. As of the publishing of this article, Lt Cmdr Fitzpatrick is still being held a political prisoner in the Monroe County jail and as far as we have been able to determine, there is no plan for his release. He has not even been charged with any crimes, yet he has been ILLEGALLY detained and held against his will by a few corrupt individuals that believe they can usurp the laws of the land and the will of the people. I urge everyone to make phone calls and email the people listed below and speak out against this injustice, demanding for Lt Cmdr Fitzpatrick’s release and the arrest of the criminals that have held him there for the past 96 hours and counting. This is a true turning point in our struggle, and if allowed to continue, we simply can not complain when these criminals take further rights and liberty from us. Although you may not live in Monroe County or even in Tennessee, make no mistake, this does affect you. If this action is not met with swift and certain justice, we will see similar scenes unfold all across this country. I have listed a few of the websites that should be reviewed and in my humble opinion, this will explain the legality of Lt Cmdr Fitzpatrick’s actions and the illegal actions of those who would try to silence him. Please take the time to read for yourself and if you agree, make the calls and emails flood the contacts below. Let’s start reclaiming our nation right here, RIGHT NOW!
Monroe County Sheriff Dept.
email info@monroetnsheriff.com
phone number 423-442-3911
Monroe County Courthouse
CIRCUIT COURT CLERK
Martha “Marty” Cook
105 College Street, Suite 3
Madisonville, TN 37354
Phone (423) 442-2396 (423) 442-2396
Fax (423) 442-9538
DISTRICT ATTORNEY GENERAL
Steve Bebb
P.O. Box 1351
Cleveland, TN 37364
Phone (423) 744-2830 (423) 744-2830
Fax (423) 479-4434
COUNTY MAYOR
J. Allan Watson
105 College Street, Suite 1 Madisonville, TN 37354
Phone (423) 442-3981 Fax (423) 442-7279
mayor@monroegovernment.org
Madisonville Chief of Police
Greg Breeden
423-442-2268
Representative John Duncan Jr.
423-745-4671
Judge Carrol Ross
423-744-2835
Here are some of the articles that were researched by Sgt. Tim Harrington to determine how we get legal precedence for Lt Cmdr Fitzpatrick to initiate a citizen’s arrest and the illegal activities of the legal system as it is continuing to hold Lt Cmdr Fitzpatrick as a political prisoner.
RULE 5. INITIAL APPEARANCE BEFORE MAGISTRATE
(a) In General.
(1) Appearance Upon an Arrest. Any person arrested–except upon a capias pursuant to an indictment or presentment–shall be taken without unnecessary delay before the nearest appropriate magistrate of:
(A) the county from which the arrest warrant issued; or
(B) the county in which the alleged offense occurred if the arrest was made without a warrant, unless a citation is issued pursuant to Rule 3.5.
(2) Affidavit of Complaint When No Arrest Warrant. An affidavit of complaint shall be filed promptly when a person, arrested without a warrant, is brought before a magistrate.
(3) Governing Rules. The magistrate shall proceed in accordance with this rule when an arrested person initially appears before the magistrate.
(b) Small Offenses Triable by Magistrate.
(1) Advice and Plea Entry for Small Offense. When the offense charged is a small offense triable by the magistrate, without regard to the plea, the magistrate shall advise the defendant of the charge, and determine defendant’s plea.
(2) Judgment and Sentence Upon Plea. When the defendant pleads guilty to a small offense, the magistrate may hear relevant evidence and sentence the defendant to pay a fine.
(3) Trial. When the defendant pleads not guilty to a small offense, the case shall be set for trial at some future day and the defendant’s pretrial release dealt with under the provisions of applicable law, unless the defendant agrees to an immediate trial.
(4) Appeal. A defendant who is convicted of a small offense may appeal as a matter of right to the Circuit or Criminal Court for a trial de novo without a jury.
(c) Other Misdemeanors.
(1) Upon Plea of Guilty. If the offense charged is a misdemeanor, but of greater magnitude than a small offense, the magistrate shall inquire how the defendant pleads to the charge. If the plea is guilty, the plea shall be reduced to writing. The following rules shall then apply:
(A) Advice to Defendant. The magistrate shall advise the defendant of the right to a jury trial and to be prosecuted only on an indictment or presentment.
(B) Set Preliminary Examination Unless Not Required. The magistrate shall schedule a preliminary examination to be held within ten days if the defendant remains in custody and within thirty days if released from custody, unless:
(i) the defendant expressly waives the right to a jury trial and to a prosecution based only on an indictment or presentment; or
(ii) a preliminary examination is not required under Rule 5(e) below.
(C) Waiver.
(i) Of Preliminary Examination. The magistrate may bind the defendant over to the grand jury if the defendant waives a preliminary examination on a misdemeanor.
(ii) Of Preliminary Examination and Grand Jury. If the defendant offers to waive the right to a grand jury investigation and a trial by jury, the court may permit it if the district attorney general or the district attorney general’s representative does not then object. In the event of such waiver, the magistrate shall hear the misdemeanor case on the guilty plea and determine the sentence. The defendant may appeal judgment on a plea of guilty to a misdemeanor after waiver of a grand jury investigation and jury trial, but only as to the sentence imposed.
(2) Upon Plea of Not Guilty.
(A) Set Preliminary Examination. Unless the defendant expressly waives the right to a preliminary examination, when the defendant pleads not guilty the magistrate shall schedule a preliminary examination to be held within ten days if the defendant remains in custody and within thirty days if released.
(B) When Preliminary Examination Waived. The magistrate may bind the case over to the grand jury if the defendant waives in writing the preliminary examination.
(C) When Preliminary Examination, Grand Jury, and Jury Trial Waived; Appeal. If the defendant offers to waive in writing the right to a grand jury investigation and a trial by jury, and to submit the case to the general sessions court–and the district attorney general or the district attorney general’s representative does not object–the magistrate may accept the defendant’s written waiver and hear the misdemeanor case on the not guilty plea. The magistrate may enter judgment, including any fine or jail sentence prescribed by law for the misdemeanor. The state may not appeal from a judgment of acquittal. The defendant may appeal a guilty judgment or the sentence imposed, or both, to the circuit or criminal court for a trial de novo as provided by law.
(d) Felonies.
(1) Advice to Defendant. If the offense charged is a felony, the defendant shall not be called on to plead. The magistrate shall inform the defendant of:
(A) the charge and the contents of the affidavit of complaint;
(B) the right to counsel;
(C) the right to appointed counsel if indigent;
(D) the right to remain silent and give no statement;
(E) the fact that any statement given voluntarily may be used against the defendant;
(F) the general circumstances under which the defendant may obtain pretrial release; and
(G) the right to a preliminary examination.
(2) Preliminary Examination Waived. When the defendant waives preliminary examination, the magistrate shall promptly bind the defendant over to the grand jury.
(3) Schedule Preliminary Examination. When the defendant does not waive preliminary examination and when a preliminary examination is not rendered unnecessary under Rule 5(e), the magistrate shall schedule a preliminary examination within ten days if the defendant remains in custody and within thirty days if released.
(e) Indictment Before Preliminary Examination.-Any defendant arrested prior to indictment or presentment for a misdemeanor or felony, except small offenses, is entitled to a preliminary hearing on request, whether or not the grand jury is in session. If the defendant is indicted or charged by presentment while the preliminary hearing is being continued (whether at the defendant’s or the prosecutor’s request) or at any time before he or she has been afforded a preliminary hearing on a warrant, the defendant may dismiss the indictment or presentment on motion filed not more than thirty days from the arraignment on the indictment or presentment. The dismissal shall be without prejudice to a subsequent indictment or presentment.
(f) Defendant’s Presence. The defendant’s presence at the initial appearance is governed by Rule 43.
Advisory Commission Comment. As far as the actions before a magistrate exercising the jurisdiction of a general sessions court are concerned, Rule 5 substantially embodies existing law as to jurisdiction and procedure. This rule is intended to provide comprehensive guidance for those exercising this jurisdiction. Small offenses are those which carry a maximum fine of fifty dollars and for which no imprisonment may be inflicted. T.C.A. § 40-408 [now repealed]. It should be noted in connection with subdivision (b), dealing with small offenses triable by a magistrate, that there is no appeal from the judgment in a case in which a guilty plea is entered. Where trial is held for a small offense upon a plea of not guilty and a conviction results, there is a right to a trial de novo upon appeal, but there is no right to a jury upon the new trial (there being no such right as to small offenses in the first instance). Further, where the defendant in serious misdemeanor cases waives the right to a jury trial, that waiver before the magistrate carries over into the criminal or circuit court and attaches to the trial de novo on appeal unless the defendant demands a jury as part of the appeal notice as required by § 27-5-108. See State v. Jarnigan, 958 S.W.2d 135 (Tenn. 1998). The rights in all (except small) offenses to be proceeded against only by indictment or presentment and to a trial by jury are grounded upon the provisions of Art. 1, Secs. 6 and 14, Constitution of Tennessee.
The preliminary examination referred to in this rule is the proceeding formerly called a preliminary hearing. It must be scheduled within ten days if the accused is in custody, and within thirty days if the accused is on bond. See Rule 45(a), dealing with the computation of time.
It is important to note that while the Constitution and the Rules vest the right to trial by jury in the accused, this right cannot be waived under this rule in the face of an objection by the district attorney general or his or her representative. This provision acts as a safeguard against the possibility that an accused might be permitted to enter a guilty plea to a lesser included offense and effectively bar prosecution for a more serious crime. Price v. Georgia, 398 U.S. 323 (1970); Waller v. Florida, 397 U.S. 387 (1970). Hence, in effect the state now has a right to a trial by jury, if the district attorney general or his or her representative asserts the right by objecting to the waiver by the defendant. Note that the rule does not require an affirmative act on behalf of the state before an accused can effectively waive the right, but simply provides that it cannot be done in the face of an objection. This wording by the commission was deliberate, because it is recognized that many general sessions courts must sometimes operate without the presence of the district attorney general or his or her representative. Nevertheless, in order to exercise an objection and thus protect the state’s position, the district attorney general personally or by representative will need to know of the proceeding and to enter an objection. The court should construe the words “or the district attorney general’s representative” to include anyone connected with law enforcement who reports to the court that the district attorney general or one of his or her assistants has requested that the objection be made.
Under Rule 5(d), covering a felony charge, it is extremely important that the magistrate inform the accused in substantial compliance with this rule.
Rule 5(e) simply carries over into the Rules the same conditional right to a preliminary hearing now embodied in T.C.A. § 40-1131 [repealed]. It was not the intention of the commission to enlarge or diminish that conditional right; therefore, the body of case law which has been developed in connection with the statute retains its precedential value. Waugh v. State, 564 S.W.2d 654 (Tenn. 1978).
The commission’s rationale, which was presented to the Supreme Court prior to the approval of these rules, is that the court has jurisdiction to enter a judgment calling for a fine in excess of fifty dollars, where provided by law and set by a jury. If the accused waives the right to have a jury set the fine and agrees that the judge set it, this act confers upon the court jurisdiction to set such a fine. An analogous situation arises each time a defendant waives a jury and permits a trial before a judge. In either instance the judge can exercise the full jurisdiction of the court because there has been a valid waiver of the right to have jury participation. Thus, under these rules, a judge can set a fine to the full limit of the appropriate penal statute, when a jury has been waived.
Rule 5(c)(1) and (2) conform the rule to T.C.A. § 40-4-112, which allows an appeal of the sentence even upon a plea of guilty.
This rule allows a de novo appeal “as provided by law” which contemplates a jury trial as provided by T.C.A. Section 27-3-131(a). Attorneys should be aware, however, that T.C.A. § 27-3-131(b) requires that the demand for a jury must be made at the time of filing an appeal.
These rules permit general sessions courts to use audio-visual technology to conduct initial appearances where a plea of not guilty is entered by the defendant. Nothing in paragraph (d) prohibits the prosecutor or defense counsel from being present and heard. In addition, paragraph (d) does not apply to preliminary examinations pursuant to Rule 5.1 nor misdemeanor trials. These amendments are substantially similar to Rule 5-303 of the New Mexico Rules of Criminal Procedure and Rule 10 of Hawaii Rules of Penal Procedure and reflect the growing need for the use of technology to expedite the processing of initial criminal proceedings and reduce the cost of such processing. The purposes for the Rules, which these amendments are intended to achieve, are set forth in Rule 2: “…to secure simplicity in procedure, fairness in administration and the elimination of unjustifiable expense and delay.”
Advisory Commission Comments [2007]. Tenn. Code Ann. §40-1-109 requires a written guilty plea for misdemeanors. The amendment to subsection (c) conforms the rule to the statute.
Advisory Commission Comments [2009]. The former rule prohibited the government from indicting a defendant while a preliminary hearing was pending. To preserve the right of a preliminary hearing in all instances the rule has been amended to include presentments. The remedy of the dismissal without prejudice is to afford the defendant the right to a preliminary hearing. Finally, to have a uniform time for filing a motion to dismiss, the rule requires that the motion be filed no more than thirty days from the arraignment.
RULE 5.1. PRELIMINARY EXAMINATION
(a) Procedures. The following rules apply to a preliminary examination:
(1) Evidence. The finding that an offense has been committed and that there is probable cause to believe that the defendant committed it shall be based on evidence which may not be inadmissible hearsay except documentary proof of ownership and written reports of expert witnesses. Rules excluding evidence acquired by unlawful means are applicable.
(2) Defendant’s Right to Present Evidence and Cross-Examine. The defendant may cross-examine witnesses against him or her and may introduce evidence.
(3) Content and Access to Record of Proceeding. The evidence of the witnesses does not have to be reduced to writing by the magistrate, or under the magistrate’s direction, and signed by the respective witnesses; but the proceedings shall be preserved by electronic recording or its equivalent. If the defendant is subsequently indicted, such recording shall be made available to the defendant or defense counsel so they may listen to the recording in order to be apprised of the evidence introduced in the preliminary examination. Where the recording is no longer available or is substantially inaudible, the trial court shall order a new preliminary hearing upon motion of the defendant filed not more than 60 days following arraignment. The indictment shall not be dismissed while the new preliminary hearing is pending. If the magistrate conducting the new preliminary hearing determines that probable cause does not exist, the magistrate shall certify such finding to the trial court and the trial court shall then dismiss the indictment. The discharge of the defendant by the dismissal of the indictment in such circumstances does not preclude the state from instituting a subsequent prosecution for the same offense.
(b) When Probable Cause Found. When the magistrate at a preliminary examination determines from the evidence that an offense has been committed and there is probable cause to believe that the defendant committed it, the magistrate shall bind the defendant over to the grand jury and either release the defendant pursuant to applicable law or commit the defendant to jail by a written order.
(c) When Probable Cause Not Found. When the magistrate determines from the evidence that there is not sufficient proof to establish that an offense has been committed or probable cause that the defendant committed it, the magistrate shall discharge the defendant. The discharge of the defendant does not preclude the state from instituting a subsequent prosecution for the same offense. The recording of the preliminary hearing shall be made available to the defendant in the event the defendant is subsequently prosecuted for the same offense by indictment or presentment. The remedy for the failure to preserve the recording in this circumstance shall be as set forth in subsection (a)(3).
(d) Transfer of Records. At the conclusion of a proceeding where probable cause is found, the magistrate shall promptly transmit to the criminal court clerk all papers and records in the proceedings. When probable cause is not found, the magistrate shall return the records and papers to the general sessions court clerk.
Advisory Commission Comment. The subject of the preliminary examination, or preliminary hearing, has been the focus of a considerable amount of litigation in recent years. The purpose, scope, and quality of evidence to be admitted upon a preliminary hearing have likewise been the subjects of intense debate. Despite the language in McKeldin v. State, 516 S.W.2d 82 (Tenn. 1974), suggesting that this stage of the proceeding is a discovery procedure for the accused, it is the commission’s position, to the contrary, that McKeldin does not convert the preliminary hearing into a “fishing expedition,” with unlimited potential for discovery. The case holds that the preliminary hearing is a probable cause hearing, which can result in providing discovery to the defendant, an important byproduct of its probable cause function.
Discovery is specifically addressed elsewhere in these rules, and the rights of the accused and of the state clearly spelled out. As stated above, the preliminary examination is a probable cause hearing, and the scope of the proceeding is under the control of the magistrate in the exercise of a sound discretion. It is unnecessary for the magistrate to hear more of the state’s proof than is necessary to establish probable cause, and the magistrate may terminate the hearing at any time that probable cause has been established and the accused has been afforded the opportunity to cross-examine the witnesses called by the state and to present defense proof reasonably tending to rebut probable cause. There is no right of the accused to call as witnesses all of the state’s witnesses and question them. The magistrate may permit the accused to call witnesses summoned by the state, if in the exercise of a sound discretion the magistrate determines such testimony to be of use to the magistrate in determining probable cause, or the absence thereof. To repeat, the scope of the hearing is under the control of the magistrate, in the exercise of a sound discretion and governed by principles of fundamental fairness. The purpose of the hearing is to adjudicate the existence or absence of probable cause, and not to discover the state’s case.
The quality of the evidence required is clear; it may not be inadmissible hearsay, except in those two instances deemed by the commission to be sufficient to warrant their being exceptions, i.e., documentary proof of ownership and written reports of expert witnesses.
Rule 5.1(a)(3) is drafted to make it clear that the constitutional right of the defendant to have access to a recording of the proceedings must be honored. See Britt v. North Carolina, 404 U.S. 226 (1971). There is no requirement that a written transcript of the proceedings be made; and certainly the requirement for an electronic recording can be waived, if knowingly and voluntarily done.
Advisory Commission Comments [2008]. The amendments provide remedies when the recording of a preliminary hearing is lost or damaged.
110 F3d 64 Sisk v. Shelby County Tennessee
110 F.3d 64
Jerry SISK, Plaintiff-Appellant,
v.
SHELBY COUNTY, TENNESSEE; Shelby County Sheriff’s
Department; and Steven Toarmina, Individually and
in his official capacity as agent for
Shelby County, Tennessee,
Defendants-Appellees.
No. 96-5379.
United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit.
April 1, 1997.
NOTICE: Sixth Circuit Rule 24(c) states that citation of unpublished dispositions is disfavored except for establishing res judicata, estoppel, or the law of the case and requires service of copies of cited unpublished dispositions of the Sixth Circuit.
Before: JONES, SUHRHEINRICH, and SILER, Circuit Judges.
SILER, Circuit Judge.
1
Plaintiff, Jerry Sisk, appeals the district court’s dismissal of this action to recover for civil rights violations pursuant to 42 U.S.C. §§ 1983 and 1985. Specifically, Sisk argues that the defendants, Shelby County, Tennessee, Shelby County Sheriff’s Department, Sheriff A.C. Gilless, and Stephen Toarmina (collectively, the “Defendants”), violated and conspired to violate his Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.1 For the following reasons, the court AFFIRMS the decision of the district court.
I. BACKGROUND
2
At approximately 1:00 a.m. on January 23, 1994, Sisk, returning home from a social engagement, was driving east on Knight Arnold Road in Memphis, Tennessee. Near the intersection of Knight Arnold and Hickory Hill, Sisk observed a carexiting a private driveway and attempting to cross Knight Arnold Road by driving south across all lanes of traffic. The car narrowly missed colliding with Sisk’s vehicle. Believing that he had the right-of-way and that the driver of the approaching car was operating his vehicle in a dangerous and erratic manner, Sisk flashed his bright lights at the driver, Toarmina.
3
Sisk subsequently proceeded to his home, which was a few blocks away from the near collision. As he turned onto his street, he noticed what he believed to be “a legitimate law enforcement vehicle with its emergency lights operating” quickly approaching him. Sisk assumed that the vehicle was pursuing someone else and continued driving down his street. Directly in front of Sisk’s house, Toarmina, the driver of the vehicle, forced Sisk to pull his car to the side of the road.
4
Toarmina exited the police car and, drawing and aiming his pistol at Sisk, ordered Sisk to step out of his car. Sisk complied. Toarmina handcuffed and “verbally abused” Sisk and informed him that he was going “downtown” for driving under the influence. Toarmina also called other “legitimate” law enforcement deputies to Sisk’s house. During the arrest, Sisk was twice sprayed with pepper spray and struck on the side of his head with a blunt instrument. Sisk does not allege in his complaint who committed these acts.
5
Sisk went to trial on the driving under the influence charge. Toarmina testified at the trial, holding himself out as a duly authorized law enforcement officer. On September 28, 1994, a jury found Sisk innocent of the charge.
6
During the first half of 1995, The Commercial Appeal, a Memphis newspaper, reported that Toarmina had been acting as a renegade police officer by exceeding the scope of his duties as a Special Deputy. Upon reading the article, Sisk began to suspect that something had been amiss with respect to his arrest. He subsequently learned that Toarmina was only a Special Deputy to Sheriff Gilless and that the purpose of the Special Deputy program was to assist and advise the Sheriff’s Department in a non-law enforcement capacity. Special Deputies were not duly commissioned law enforcement officers and did not have the authority to engage in actual law enforcement activities such as making arrests. Toarmina, however, had for several years been performing law enforcement duties as a Special Deputy and, on numerous occasions, had stopped and arrested persons whom he suspected of breaking the law. Sisk also learned that Toarmina had conducted these law enforcement activities with the knowledge, consent, and encouragement of his superiors, including Sheriff Gilless and Shelby County.
7
On September 28, 1995, Sisk filed the instant action, alleging his Fourth Amendment claim and state law claims of negligent or intentional infliction of emotional distress and assault and battery. The Defendants moved to dismiss Sisk’s claims under sections 1983 and 1985, arguing that the one-year statute of limitations expired on the anniversary of the challenged arrest, eight months prior to the filing of the complaint. The district court found that Sisk’s excessive force claim accrued on the date of his arrest and, thus, was untimely filed.2The court found that Sisk’s false arrest and conspiracy claims were timely because the statute of limitations on those claims did not begin to run until early 1995, when Sisk first discovered Toarmina’s status as a Special Deputy. The court, however, dismissed the suit, finding that Tennessee law authorized arrests made by private persons.
II. DISCUSSION
8
Assuming, without deciding, that Sisk has a right not to be arrested by a Special Deputy and accepting as true his allegations that he was unaware of Toarmina’s status as a Special Deputy until early 1995, the complaint alleges facts from which one could infer that Sisk was unaware of his injury until he read the article in The Commercial Appeal. However, we also assume, without deciding, that the Fourth Amendment and conspiracy claims were timely filed, as we can resolve this case on the claims made.
9
Tennessee law authorizes arrests by private persons. T.C.A. § 40-7-101(3). A private person may arrest another:
10
(1) For a public offense committed in his presence;
11
(2) When the person arrested has committed a felony, although not in his presence; or
12
(3) When a felony has been committed, and he has reasonable cause to believe that the person arrested committed it.
13
T.C.A. § 40-7-109(a)(1)-(3). When a private person makes an arrest, he or she must “inform the person arrested of the cause thereof, except when he is in the actual commission of the offense, or when arrested on pursuit.” T.C.A. § 40-7-111. The arresting citizen must also take the arrestee, without unnecessary delay, before a magistrate or deliver the arrestee to a police officer. T.C.A. § 40-7-113.
14
A police officer acting beyond his or her authority may use the citizen’s arrest statute to validate an otherwise unlawful arrest. In State of Tennessee v. Johnson, 661 S.W.2d 854 (Tenn.1983), cert. denied, 476 U.S. 1130 (1986), the Tennessee Supreme Court applied T.C.A. § 40-7-109 to the actions of a sheriff’s deputy who effected a warrantless arrest of a defendant outside his jurisdiction. Using the citizen’s arrest statute as a savings provision, the court upheld the arrest. Id. at 859. It found that, even if the deputy was limited to the authority of a private person, he was authorized to arrest the defendant under T.C.A. § 40-7-109(a). Id. In United States v. Layne, 6 F.3d 396, 398-99 (6th Cir.1993), cert. denied, 114 S.Ct. 1374 (1994), the court followed Johnson and held that an arrest made by Tennessee police officers outside their jurisdiction, when predicated on probable cause, did not violate the Fourth Amendment because the officer’s actions were authorized as a citizen’s arrest.
15
In the case at hand, Toarmina’s actions were authorized as a citizen’s arrest. First, driving under the influence is a public offense. See, e.g., State of Tennessee v. Durham, 1995 WL 678811, at * 2 (Tenn.Crim.App. Nov. 16, 1995) (unpublished opinion) (finding that citizen’s arrest statute authorized police officer to arrest defendant for DUI outside of officer’s jurisdiction).3Second, the incident occurred in Toarmina’s presence.4Third, Toarmina informed Sisk of the cause of the arrest when he told Sisk that he was “going ‘downtown’ for DUI.” Fourth, Toarmina delivered Sisk to sheriff’s deputies without unnecessary delay.
16
Although Sisk argues that Toarmina cannot use the citizen’s arrest provisions because he held himself out as an authorized deputy, Layne and Johnson allowed police officers acting under color of their police authority to later use the citizen’s arrest statute to validate otherwise unauthorized arrests. Moreover, the court in Durham expressly rejected this argument: “The Defendant also argues that the officer in the case sub judice was on duty and stated that he was acting as a police officer at the time. Again, we do not believe the distinction is meaningful.” 1995 WL 678811, at * 1.
17
The district court properly dismissed Sisk’s section 1983 claim because Toarmina’s actions did not violate the Fourth Amendment. Additionally, because Sisk cannot articulate a cognizable Fourth Amendment claim, the district court properly dismissed his section 1985 and respondeat superior claims and properly dismissed Sisk’s state law claims for lack of subject matter jurisdiction.5Because the court finds that Toarmina arrested Sisk under the citizen’s arrest statute, the court declines to address Sisk’s claim that he has a constitutional right to be arrested only by an authorized police officer.
18
AFFIRMED.
1
The complaint incorrectly lists Stephen Toarmina as “Steven” Toarmina
2
Sisk does not appeal the district court’s dismissal of his excessive force claim
3
Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals Rule 19(4) allows for citation of unpublished opinions
4
Sisk does not allege that he was arrested without probable cause. To the extent that he does so allege, he was aware of any lack of probable cause on the date of his arrest. Consequently, any probable cause claim is untimely
5
Sisk’s § 1985 claim alleged that the Defendants conspired to violate his Fourth Amendment rights. An allegation of conspiracy without a proven constitutional deprivation is insufficient to support a § 1985 claim. See Johnson v. Hills & Dales Gen. Hosp., 40 F.3d 837, 839 (6th Cir.1994) (stating that to prove a violation of § 1985 plaintiff must show deprivation of constitutional right or privilege), cert. denied, 115 S.Ct. 1698 (1995)
110 F.3d
http://www.tennesseecriminallawyerblog.com/2009/08/inciting_a_riot_in_tennessee.html
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Tuesday, April 06, 2010
Looting Main Street from Rolling Stone
The enemy in action...
Starve them. Exit their system and join the underground economy.
Look up my articles It's Time, and Recall Election: Obstacles to Overcome and take a town back. Loot the investments listed in the town's consolidated annual financial report to return to the People.
Read the Rolling Stone article:
URL: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/32906678/looting_main_street
Back to Looting Main Street
Looting Main Street
How the nation's biggest banks are ripping off American cities with the same predatory deals that brought down Greece
MATT TAIBBI
Posted Mar 31, 2010 8:15 AM
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If you want to know what life in the Third World is like, just ask Lisa Pack, an administrative assistant who works in the roads and transportation department in Jefferson County, Alabama. Pack got rudely introduced to life in post-crisis America last August, when word came down that she and 1,000 of her fellow public employees would have to take a little unpaid vacation for a while. The county, it turned out, was more than $5 billion in debt — meaning that courthouses, jails and sheriff's precincts had to be closed so that Wall Street banks could be paid.
As public services in and around Birmingham were stripped to the bone, Pack struggled to support her family on a weekly unemployment check of $260. Nearly a fourth of that went to pay for her health insurance, which the county no longer covered. She also fielded calls from laid-off co-workers who had it even tougher. "I'd be on the phone sometimes until two in the morning," she says. "I had to talk more than one person out of suicide. For some of the men supporting families, it was so hard — foreclosure, bankruptcy. I'd go to bed at night, and I'd be in tears."
Homes stood empty, businesses were boarded up, and parts of already-blighted Birmingham began to take on the feel of a ghost town. There were also a few bills that were unique to the area — like the $64 sewer bill that Pack and her family paid each month. "Yeah, it went up about 400 percent just over the past few years," she says.
The sewer bill, in fact, is what cost Pack and her co-workers their jobs. In 1996, the average monthly sewer bill for a family of four in Birmingham was only $14.71 — but that was before the county decided to build an elaborate new sewer system with the help of out-of-state financial wizards with names like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. The result was a monstrous pile of borrowed money that the county used to build, in essence, the world's grandest toilet — "the Taj Mahal of sewer-treatment plants" is how one county worker put it. What happened here in Jefferson County would turn out to be the perfect metaphor for the peculiar alchemy of modern oligarchical capitalism: A mob of corrupt local officials and morally absent financiers got together to build a giant device that converted human shit into billions of dollars of profit for Wall Street — and misery for people like Lisa Pack.
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And once the giant shit machine was built and the note on all that fancy construction started to come due, Wall Street came back to the local politicians and doubled down on the scam. They showed up in droves to help the poor, broke citizens of Jefferson County cut their toilet finance charges using a blizzard of incomprehensible swaps and refinance schemes — schemes that only served to postpone the repayment date a year or two while sinking the county deeper into debt. In the end, every time Jefferson County so much as breathed near one of the banks, it got charged millions in fees. There was so much money to be made bilking these dizzy Southerners that banks like JP Morgan spent millions paying middlemen who bribed — yes, that's right, bribed, criminally bribed — the county commissioners and their buddies just to keep their business. Hell, the money was so good, JP Morgan at one point even paid Goldman Sachs $3 million just to back the fuck off, so they could have the rubes of Jefferson County to fleece all for themselves.
Birmingham became the poster child for a new kind of giant-scale financial fraud, one that would threaten the financial stability not only of cities and counties all across America, but even those of entire countries like Greece. While for many Americans the financial crisis remains an abstraction, a confusing mess of complex transactions that took place on a cloud high above Manhattan sometime in the mid-2000s, in Jefferson County you can actually see the rank criminality of the crisis economy with your own eyes; the monster sticks his head all the way out of the water. Here you can see a trail that leads directly from a billion-dollar predatory swap deal cooked up at the highest levels of America's biggest banks, across a vast fruited plain of bribes and felonies — "the price of doing business," as one JP Morgan banker says on tape — all the way down to Lisa Pack's sewer bill and the mass layoffs in Birmingham.
Once you follow that trail and understand what took place in Jefferson County, there's really no room left for illusions. We live in a gangster state, and our days of laughing at other countries are over. It's our turn to get laughed at. In Birmingham, lots of people have gone to jail for the crime: More than 20 local officials and businessmen have been convicted of corruption in federal court. Last October, right around the time that Lisa Pack went back to work at reduced hours, Birmingham's mayor was convicted of fraud and money-laundering for taking bribes funneled to him by Wall Street bankers — everything from Rolex watches to Ferragamo suits to cash. But those who greenlighted the bribes and profited most from the scam remain largely untouched. "It never gets back to JP Morgan," says Pack.
If you want to get all Glenn Beck about it, you could lay the blame for this entire mess at the feet of weepy, tree-hugging environmentalists. It all started with the Cahaba River, the longest free-flowing river in the state of Alabama. The tributary, which winds its way through Birmingham before turning diagonally to empty out near Selma, is home to more types of fish per mile than any other river in America and shelters 64 rare and imperiled species of plants and animals. It's also the source of one of the worst municipal financial disasters in American history.
Back in the early 1990s, the county's sewer system was so antiquated that it was leaking raw sewage directly into the Cahaba, which also supplies the area with its drinking water. Joined by well — intentioned citizens from the Cahaba River Society, the EPA sued the county to force it to comply with the Clean Water Act. In 1996, county commissioners signed a now-infamous consent decree agreeing not just to fix the leaky pipes but to eliminate all sewer overflows — a near-impossible standard that required the county to build the most elaborate, ecofriendly, expensive sewer system in the history of the universe. It was like ordering a small town in Florida that gets a snowstorm once every five years to build a billion-dollar fleet of snowplows.
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The original cost estimates for the new sewer system were as low as $250 million. But in a wondrous demonstration of the possibilities of small-town graft and contract-padding, the price tag quickly swelled to more than $3 billion. County commissioners were literally pocketing wads of cash from builders and engineers and other contractors eager to get in on the project, while the county was forced to borrow obscene sums to pay for the rapidly spiraling costs. Jefferson County, in effect, became one giant, TV-stealing, unemployed drug addict who borrowed a million dollars to buy the mother of all McMansions — and just as it did during the housing bubble, Wall Street made a business of keeping the crook in his house. As one county commissioner put it, "We're like a guy making $50,000 a year with a million-dollar mortgage."
To reassure lenders that the county would pay its mortgage, commissioners gave the finance director — an unelected official appointed by the president of the commission — the power to automatically raise sewer rates to meet payments on the debt. The move brought in billions in financing, but it also painted commissioners into a corner. If costs continued to rise — and with practically every contractor in Alabama sticking his fingers on the scale, they were rising fast — officials would be faced with automatic rate increases that would piss off their voters. (By 2003, annual interest on the sewer deal had reached $90 million.) So the commission reached out to Wall Street, looking for creative financing tools that would allow it to reduce the county's staggering debt payments.
Wall Street was happy to help. First, it employed the same trick it used to fuel the housing crisis: It switched the county from a fixed rate on the bonds it had issued to finance the sewer deal to an adjustable rate. The refinancing meant lower interest payments for a couple of years — followed by the risk of even larger payments down the road. The move enabled county commissioners to postpone the problem for an election season or two, kicking it to a group of future commissioners who would inevitably have to pay the real freight.
But then Wall Street got really creative. Having switched the county to a variable interest rate, it offered commissioners a crazy deal: For an extra fee, the banks said, we'll allow you to keep paying a fixed rate on your debt to us. In return, we'll give you a variable amount each month that you can use to pay off all that variable-rate interest you owe to bondholders.
In financial terms, this is known as a synthetic rate swap — the spidery creature you might have read about playing a role in bringing down places like Greece and Milan. On paper, it made sense: The county got the stability of a fixed rate, while paying Wall Street to assume the risk of the variable rates on its bonds. That's the synthetic part. The trouble lies in the rate swap. The deal only works if the two variable rates — the one you get from the bank, and the one you owe to bondholders — actually match. It's like gambling on the weather. If your bondholders are expecting you to pay an interest rate based on the average temperature in Alabama, you don't do a rate swap with a bank that gives you back a rate pegged to the temperature in Nome, Alaska.
Not unless you're a fucking moron. Or your banker is JP Morgan.
In a small office in a federal building in downtown Birmingham, just blocks from where civil rights demonstrators shut down the city in 1963, Assistant U.S. Attorney George Martin points out the window. He's pointing in the direction of the Tutwiler Hotel, once home to one of the grandest ballrooms in the South but now part of the Hampton Inn chain.
"It was right around the corner here, at the hotel," Martin says. "That's where they met — that's where this all started."
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They means Charles LeCroy and Bill Blount, the two principals in what would become the most important of all the corruption cases in Jefferson County. LeCroy was a banker for JP Morgan, serving as managing director of the bank's southeast regional office. Blount was an Alabama wheeler-dealer with close friends on the county commission. For years, when Wall Street banks wanted to do business with municipalities, whether for bond issues or rate swaps, it was standard practice to reach out to a local sleazeball like Blount and pay him a shitload of money to help seal the deal. "Banks would pay some local consultant, and the consultant would then funnel money to the politician making the decision," says Christopher Taylor, the former head of the board that regulates municipal borrowing. Back in the 1990s, Taylor pushed through a ban on such backdoor bribery. He also passed a ban on bankers contributing directly to politicians they do business with — a move that sparked a lawsuit by one aggrieved sleazeball, who argued that halting such legalized graft violated his First Amendment rights. The name of that pissed-off banker? "It was the one and only Bill Blount," Taylor says with a laugh.
Blount is a stocky, stubby-fingered Southerner with glasses and a pale, pinched face — if Norman Rockwell had ever done a painting titled "Small-Town Accountant Taking Enormous Dump," it would look just like Blount. LeCroy, his sugar daddy at JP Morgan, is a tall, bloodless, crisply dressed corporate operator with a shiny bald head and silver side patches — a cross between Skeletor and Michael Stipe.
The scheme they operated went something like this: LeCroy paid Blount millions of dollars, and Blount turned around and used the money to buy lavish gifts for his close friend Larry Langford, the now-convicted Birmingham mayor who at the time had just been elected president of the county commission. (At one point Blount took Langford on a shopping spree in New York, putting $3,290 worth of clothes from Zegna on his credit card.) Langford then signed off on one after another of the deadly swap deals being pushed by LeCroy. Every time the county refinanced its sewer debt, JP Morgan made millions of dollars in fees. Even more lucrative, each of the swap contracts contained clauses that mandated all sorts of penalties and payments in the event that something went wrong with the deal. In the mortgage business, this process is known as churning: You keep coming back over and over to refinance, and they keep "churning" you for more and more fees. "The transactions were complex, but the scheme was simple," said Robert Khuzami, director of enforcement for the SEC. "Senior JP Morgan bankers made unlawful payments to win business and earn fees."
Given the shitload of money to be made on the refinancing deals, JP Morgan was prepared to pay whatever it took to buy off officials in Jefferson County. In 2002, during a conversation recorded in Nixonian fashion by JP Morgan itself, LeCroy bragged that he had agreed to funnel payoff money to a pair of local companies to secure the votes of two county commissioners. "Look," the commissioners told him, "if we support the synthetic refunding, you guys have to take care of our two firms." LeCroy didn't blink. "Whatever you want," he told them. "If that's what you need, that's what you get. Just tell us how much."
Just tell us how much. That sums up the approach that JP Morgan took a few months later, when Langford announced that his good buddy Bill Blount would henceforth be involved with every financing transaction for Jefferson County. From JP Morgan's point of view, the decision to pay off Blount was a no-brainer. But the bank had one small problem: Goldman Sachs had already crawled up Blount's trouser leg, and the broker was advising Langford to pick them as Jefferson County's investment bank.
The solution they came up with was an extraordinary one: JP Morgan cut a separate deal with Goldman, paying the bank $3 million to fuck off, with Blount taking a $300,000 cut of the side deal. Suddenly Goldman was out and JP Morgan was sitting in Langford's lap. In another conversation caught on tape, LeCroy joked that the deal was his "philanthropic work," since the payoff amounted to a "charitable donation to Goldman Sachs" in return for "taking no risk."
That such a blatant violation of anti-trust laws took place and neither JP Morgan nor Goldman have been prosecuted for it is yet another mystery of the current financial crisis. "This is an open-and-shut case of anti-competitive behavior," says Taylor, the former regulator.
With Goldman out of the way, JP Morgan won the right to do a $1.1 billion bond offering — switching Jefferson County out of fixed-rate debt into variable-rate debt — and also did a corresponding $1.1 billion deal for a synthetic rate swap. The very same day the transaction was concluded, in May 2003, LeCroy had dinner with Langford and struck a deal to do yet another bond-and-swap transaction of roughly the same size. This time, the terms of the payoff were spelled out more explicitly. In a hilarious phone call between LeCroy and Douglas MacFaddin, another JP Morgan official, the two bankers groaned aloud about how much it was going to cost to satisfy Blount:
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LeCroy: I said, "Commissioner Langford, I'll do that because that's your suggestion, but you gotta help us keep him under control. Because when you give that guy a hand, he takes your arm." You know?
MacFaddin: [Laughing] Yeah, you end up in the wood-chipper.
All told, JP Morgan ended up paying Blount nearly $3 million for "performing no known services," in the words of the SEC. In at least one of the deals, Blount made upward of 15 percent of JP Morgan's entire fee. When I ask Taylor what a legitimate consultant might earn in such a circumstance, he laughs. "What's a 'legitimate consultant' in a case like this? He made this money for doing jack shit."
As the tapes of LeCroy's calls show, even officials at JP Morgan were incredulous at the money being funneled to Blount. "How does he get 15 percent?" one associate at the bank asks LeCroy. "For doing what? For not messing with us?"
"Not messing with us," LeCroy agrees. "It's a lot of money, but in the end, it's worth it on a billion-dollar deal."
That's putting it mildly: The deals wound up being the largest swap agreements in JP Morgan's history. Making matters worse, the payoffs didn't even wind up costing the bank a dime. As the SEC explained in a statement on the scam, JP Morgan "passed on the cost of the unlawful payments by charging the county higher interest rates on the swap transactions." In other words, not only did the bank bribe local politicians to take the sucky deal, they got local taxpayers to pay for the bribes. And because Jefferson County had no idea what kind of deal it was getting on the swaps, JP Morgan could basically charge whatever it wanted. According to an analysis of the swap deals commissioned by the county in 2007, taxpayers had been overcharged at least $93 million on the transactions.
JP Morgan was far from alone in the scam: Virtually everyone doing business in Jefferson County was on the take. Four of the nation's top investment banks, the very cream of American finance, were involved in one way or another with payoffs to Blount in their scramble to do business with the county. In addition to JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns paid Langford's bagman $2.4 million, while Lehman Brothers got off cheap with a $35,000 "arranger's fee." At least a dozen of the county's contractors were also cashing in, along with many of the county commissioners. "If you go into the county courthouse," says Michael Morrison, a planner who works for the county, "there's a gallery of past commissioners on the wall. On the top row, every single one of 'em but two has been investigated, indicted or convicted. It's a joke."
The crazy thing is that such arrangements — where some local scoundrel gets a massive fee for doing nothing but greasing the wheels with elected officials — have been taking place all over the country. In Illinois, during the Upper Volta-esque era of Rod Blagojevich, a Republican political consultant named Robert Kjellander got 10 percent of the entire fee Bear Stearns earned doing a bond sale for the state pension fund. At the start of Obama's term, Bill Richardson's Cabinet appointment was derailed for a similar scheme when he was governor of New Mexico. Indeed, one reason that officials in Jefferson County didn't know that the swaps they were signing off on were shitty was because their adviser on the deals was a firm called CDR Financial Products, which is now accused of conspiring to overcharge dozens of cities in swap transactions. According to a federal antitrust lawsuit, CDR is basically a big-league version of Bill Blount — banks tossed money at the firm, which in turn advised local politicians that they were getting a good deal. "It was basically, you pay CDR, and CDR helps push the deal through," says Taylor.
In the end, though, all this bribery and graft was just the table-setter for the real disaster. In taking all those bribes and signing on to all those swaps, the commissioners in Jefferson County had basically started the clock on a financial time bomb that, sooner or later, had to explode. By continually refinancing to keep the county in its giant McMansion, the commission had managed to push into the future that inevitable day when the real bill would arrive in the mail. But that's where the mortgage analogy ends — because in one key area, a swap deal differs from a home mortgage. Imagine a mortgage that you have to keep on paying even after you sell your house. That's basically how a swap deal works. And Jefferson County had done 23 of them. At one point, they had more outstanding swaps than New York City.
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Judgment Day was coming — just like it was for the Delaware River Port Authority, the Pennsylvania school system, the cities of Detroit, Chicago, Oakland and Los Angeles, the states of Connecticut and Mississippi, the city of Milan and nearly 500 other municipalities in Italy, the country of Greece, and God knows who else. All of these places are now reeling under the weight of similarly elaborate and ill-advised swaps — and if what happened in Jefferson County is any guide, hoo boy. Because when the shit hit the fan in Birmingham, it really hit the fan.
For Jefferson County, the deal blew up in early 2008, when a dizzying array of penalties and other fine-print poison worked into the swap contracts started to kick in. The trouble began with the housing crash, which took down the insurance companies that had underwritten the county's bonds. That rendered the county's insurance worthless, triggering clauses in its swap contracts that required it to pay off more than $800 million of its debt in only four years, rather than 40. That, in turn, scared off private lenders, who were no longer interested in bidding on the county's bonds. The banks were forced to make up the difference — a service for which they charged enormous penalties. It was as if the county had missed a payment on its credit card and woke up the next morning to find its annual percentage rate jacked up to a million percent. Between 2008 and 2009, the annual payment on Jefferson County's debt jumped from $53 million to a whopping $636 million.
It gets worse. Remember the swap deal that Jefferson County did with JP Morgan, how the variable rates it got from the bank were supposed to match those it owed its bondholders? Well, they didn't. Most of the payments the county was receiving from JP Morgan were based on one set of interest rates (the London Interbank Exchange Rate), while the payments it owed to its bondholders followed a different set of rates (a municipal-bond index). Jefferson County was suddenly getting far less from JP Morgan, and owing tons more to bondholders. In other words, the bank and Bill Blount made tens of millions of dollars selling deals to local politicians that were not only completely defective, but blew the entire county to smithereens.
And here's the kicker. Last year, when Jefferson County, staggered by the weight of its penalties, was unable to make its swap payments to JP Morgan, the bank canceled the deal. That triggered one-time "termination fees" of — yes, you read this right — $647 million. That was money the county would owe no matter what happened with the rest of its debt, even if bondholders decided to forgive and forget every dime the county had borrowed. It was like the herpes simplex of loans — debt that does not go away, ever, for as long as you live. On a sewer project that was originally supposed to cost $250 million, the county now owed a total of $1.28 billion just in interest and fees on the debt. Imagine paying $250,000 a year on a car you purchased for $50,000, and that's roughly where Jefferson County stood at the end of last year.
Last November, the SEC charged JP Morgan with fraud and canceled the $647 million in termination fees. The bank agreed to pay a $25 million fine and fork over $50 million to assist displaced workers in Jefferson County. So far, the county has managed to avoid bankruptcy, but the sewer fiasco had downgraded its credit rating, triggering payments on other outstanding loans and pushing Birmingham toward the status of an African debtor state. For the next generation, the county will be in a constant fight to collect enough taxes just to pay off its debt, which now totals $4,800 per resident.
The city of Birmingham was founded in 1871, at the dawn of the Southern industrial boom, for the express purpose of attracting Northern capital — it was even named after a famous British steel town to burnish its entrepreneurial cred. There's a gruesome irony in it now lying sacked and looted by financial vandals from the North. The destruction of Jefferson County reveals the basic battle plan of these modern barbarians, the way that banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs have systematically set out to pillage towns and cities from Pittsburgh to Athens. These guys aren't number-crunching whizzes making smart investments; what they do is find suckers in some municipal-finance department, corner them in complex lose-lose deals and flay them alive. In a complete subversion of free-market principles, they take no risk, score deals based on political influence rather than competition, keep consumers in the dark — and walk away with big money. "It's not high finance," says Taylor, the former bond regulator. "It's low finance." And even if the regulators manage to catch up with them billions of dollars later, the banks just pay a small fine and move on to the next scam. This isn't capitalism. It's nomadic thievery.
[From Issue 1102 — April 15, 2010]
Starve them. Exit their system and join the underground economy.
Look up my articles It's Time, and Recall Election: Obstacles to Overcome and take a town back. Loot the investments listed in the town's consolidated annual financial report to return to the People.
Read the Rolling Stone article:
URL: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/32906678/looting_main_street
Back to Looting Main Street
Looting Main Street
How the nation's biggest banks are ripping off American cities with the same predatory deals that brought down Greece
MATT TAIBBI
Posted Mar 31, 2010 8:15 AM
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If you want to know what life in the Third World is like, just ask Lisa Pack, an administrative assistant who works in the roads and transportation department in Jefferson County, Alabama. Pack got rudely introduced to life in post-crisis America last August, when word came down that she and 1,000 of her fellow public employees would have to take a little unpaid vacation for a while. The county, it turned out, was more than $5 billion in debt — meaning that courthouses, jails and sheriff's precincts had to be closed so that Wall Street banks could be paid.
As public services in and around Birmingham were stripped to the bone, Pack struggled to support her family on a weekly unemployment check of $260. Nearly a fourth of that went to pay for her health insurance, which the county no longer covered. She also fielded calls from laid-off co-workers who had it even tougher. "I'd be on the phone sometimes until two in the morning," she says. "I had to talk more than one person out of suicide. For some of the men supporting families, it was so hard — foreclosure, bankruptcy. I'd go to bed at night, and I'd be in tears."
Homes stood empty, businesses were boarded up, and parts of already-blighted Birmingham began to take on the feel of a ghost town. There were also a few bills that were unique to the area — like the $64 sewer bill that Pack and her family paid each month. "Yeah, it went up about 400 percent just over the past few years," she says.
The sewer bill, in fact, is what cost Pack and her co-workers their jobs. In 1996, the average monthly sewer bill for a family of four in Birmingham was only $14.71 — but that was before the county decided to build an elaborate new sewer system with the help of out-of-state financial wizards with names like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. The result was a monstrous pile of borrowed money that the county used to build, in essence, the world's grandest toilet — "the Taj Mahal of sewer-treatment plants" is how one county worker put it. What happened here in Jefferson County would turn out to be the perfect metaphor for the peculiar alchemy of modern oligarchical capitalism: A mob of corrupt local officials and morally absent financiers got together to build a giant device that converted human shit into billions of dollars of profit for Wall Street — and misery for people like Lisa Pack.
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And once the giant shit machine was built and the note on all that fancy construction started to come due, Wall Street came back to the local politicians and doubled down on the scam. They showed up in droves to help the poor, broke citizens of Jefferson County cut their toilet finance charges using a blizzard of incomprehensible swaps and refinance schemes — schemes that only served to postpone the repayment date a year or two while sinking the county deeper into debt. In the end, every time Jefferson County so much as breathed near one of the banks, it got charged millions in fees. There was so much money to be made bilking these dizzy Southerners that banks like JP Morgan spent millions paying middlemen who bribed — yes, that's right, bribed, criminally bribed — the county commissioners and their buddies just to keep their business. Hell, the money was so good, JP Morgan at one point even paid Goldman Sachs $3 million just to back the fuck off, so they could have the rubes of Jefferson County to fleece all for themselves.
Birmingham became the poster child for a new kind of giant-scale financial fraud, one that would threaten the financial stability not only of cities and counties all across America, but even those of entire countries like Greece. While for many Americans the financial crisis remains an abstraction, a confusing mess of complex transactions that took place on a cloud high above Manhattan sometime in the mid-2000s, in Jefferson County you can actually see the rank criminality of the crisis economy with your own eyes; the monster sticks his head all the way out of the water. Here you can see a trail that leads directly from a billion-dollar predatory swap deal cooked up at the highest levels of America's biggest banks, across a vast fruited plain of bribes and felonies — "the price of doing business," as one JP Morgan banker says on tape — all the way down to Lisa Pack's sewer bill and the mass layoffs in Birmingham.
Once you follow that trail and understand what took place in Jefferson County, there's really no room left for illusions. We live in a gangster state, and our days of laughing at other countries are over. It's our turn to get laughed at. In Birmingham, lots of people have gone to jail for the crime: More than 20 local officials and businessmen have been convicted of corruption in federal court. Last October, right around the time that Lisa Pack went back to work at reduced hours, Birmingham's mayor was convicted of fraud and money-laundering for taking bribes funneled to him by Wall Street bankers — everything from Rolex watches to Ferragamo suits to cash. But those who greenlighted the bribes and profited most from the scam remain largely untouched. "It never gets back to JP Morgan," says Pack.
If you want to get all Glenn Beck about it, you could lay the blame for this entire mess at the feet of weepy, tree-hugging environmentalists. It all started with the Cahaba River, the longest free-flowing river in the state of Alabama. The tributary, which winds its way through Birmingham before turning diagonally to empty out near Selma, is home to more types of fish per mile than any other river in America and shelters 64 rare and imperiled species of plants and animals. It's also the source of one of the worst municipal financial disasters in American history.
Back in the early 1990s, the county's sewer system was so antiquated that it was leaking raw sewage directly into the Cahaba, which also supplies the area with its drinking water. Joined by well — intentioned citizens from the Cahaba River Society, the EPA sued the county to force it to comply with the Clean Water Act. In 1996, county commissioners signed a now-infamous consent decree agreeing not just to fix the leaky pipes but to eliminate all sewer overflows — a near-impossible standard that required the county to build the most elaborate, ecofriendly, expensive sewer system in the history of the universe. It was like ordering a small town in Florida that gets a snowstorm once every five years to build a billion-dollar fleet of snowplows.
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The original cost estimates for the new sewer system were as low as $250 million. But in a wondrous demonstration of the possibilities of small-town graft and contract-padding, the price tag quickly swelled to more than $3 billion. County commissioners were literally pocketing wads of cash from builders and engineers and other contractors eager to get in on the project, while the county was forced to borrow obscene sums to pay for the rapidly spiraling costs. Jefferson County, in effect, became one giant, TV-stealing, unemployed drug addict who borrowed a million dollars to buy the mother of all McMansions — and just as it did during the housing bubble, Wall Street made a business of keeping the crook in his house. As one county commissioner put it, "We're like a guy making $50,000 a year with a million-dollar mortgage."
To reassure lenders that the county would pay its mortgage, commissioners gave the finance director — an unelected official appointed by the president of the commission — the power to automatically raise sewer rates to meet payments on the debt. The move brought in billions in financing, but it also painted commissioners into a corner. If costs continued to rise — and with practically every contractor in Alabama sticking his fingers on the scale, they were rising fast — officials would be faced with automatic rate increases that would piss off their voters. (By 2003, annual interest on the sewer deal had reached $90 million.) So the commission reached out to Wall Street, looking for creative financing tools that would allow it to reduce the county's staggering debt payments.
Wall Street was happy to help. First, it employed the same trick it used to fuel the housing crisis: It switched the county from a fixed rate on the bonds it had issued to finance the sewer deal to an adjustable rate. The refinancing meant lower interest payments for a couple of years — followed by the risk of even larger payments down the road. The move enabled county commissioners to postpone the problem for an election season or two, kicking it to a group of future commissioners who would inevitably have to pay the real freight.
But then Wall Street got really creative. Having switched the county to a variable interest rate, it offered commissioners a crazy deal: For an extra fee, the banks said, we'll allow you to keep paying a fixed rate on your debt to us. In return, we'll give you a variable amount each month that you can use to pay off all that variable-rate interest you owe to bondholders.
In financial terms, this is known as a synthetic rate swap — the spidery creature you might have read about playing a role in bringing down places like Greece and Milan. On paper, it made sense: The county got the stability of a fixed rate, while paying Wall Street to assume the risk of the variable rates on its bonds. That's the synthetic part. The trouble lies in the rate swap. The deal only works if the two variable rates — the one you get from the bank, and the one you owe to bondholders — actually match. It's like gambling on the weather. If your bondholders are expecting you to pay an interest rate based on the average temperature in Alabama, you don't do a rate swap with a bank that gives you back a rate pegged to the temperature in Nome, Alaska.
Not unless you're a fucking moron. Or your banker is JP Morgan.
In a small office in a federal building in downtown Birmingham, just blocks from where civil rights demonstrators shut down the city in 1963, Assistant U.S. Attorney George Martin points out the window. He's pointing in the direction of the Tutwiler Hotel, once home to one of the grandest ballrooms in the South but now part of the Hampton Inn chain.
"It was right around the corner here, at the hotel," Martin says. "That's where they met — that's where this all started."
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They means Charles LeCroy and Bill Blount, the two principals in what would become the most important of all the corruption cases in Jefferson County. LeCroy was a banker for JP Morgan, serving as managing director of the bank's southeast regional office. Blount was an Alabama wheeler-dealer with close friends on the county commission. For years, when Wall Street banks wanted to do business with municipalities, whether for bond issues or rate swaps, it was standard practice to reach out to a local sleazeball like Blount and pay him a shitload of money to help seal the deal. "Banks would pay some local consultant, and the consultant would then funnel money to the politician making the decision," says Christopher Taylor, the former head of the board that regulates municipal borrowing. Back in the 1990s, Taylor pushed through a ban on such backdoor bribery. He also passed a ban on bankers contributing directly to politicians they do business with — a move that sparked a lawsuit by one aggrieved sleazeball, who argued that halting such legalized graft violated his First Amendment rights. The name of that pissed-off banker? "It was the one and only Bill Blount," Taylor says with a laugh.
Blount is a stocky, stubby-fingered Southerner with glasses and a pale, pinched face — if Norman Rockwell had ever done a painting titled "Small-Town Accountant Taking Enormous Dump," it would look just like Blount. LeCroy, his sugar daddy at JP Morgan, is a tall, bloodless, crisply dressed corporate operator with a shiny bald head and silver side patches — a cross between Skeletor and Michael Stipe.
The scheme they operated went something like this: LeCroy paid Blount millions of dollars, and Blount turned around and used the money to buy lavish gifts for his close friend Larry Langford, the now-convicted Birmingham mayor who at the time had just been elected president of the county commission. (At one point Blount took Langford on a shopping spree in New York, putting $3,290 worth of clothes from Zegna on his credit card.) Langford then signed off on one after another of the deadly swap deals being pushed by LeCroy. Every time the county refinanced its sewer debt, JP Morgan made millions of dollars in fees. Even more lucrative, each of the swap contracts contained clauses that mandated all sorts of penalties and payments in the event that something went wrong with the deal. In the mortgage business, this process is known as churning: You keep coming back over and over to refinance, and they keep "churning" you for more and more fees. "The transactions were complex, but the scheme was simple," said Robert Khuzami, director of enforcement for the SEC. "Senior JP Morgan bankers made unlawful payments to win business and earn fees."
Given the shitload of money to be made on the refinancing deals, JP Morgan was prepared to pay whatever it took to buy off officials in Jefferson County. In 2002, during a conversation recorded in Nixonian fashion by JP Morgan itself, LeCroy bragged that he had agreed to funnel payoff money to a pair of local companies to secure the votes of two county commissioners. "Look," the commissioners told him, "if we support the synthetic refunding, you guys have to take care of our two firms." LeCroy didn't blink. "Whatever you want," he told them. "If that's what you need, that's what you get. Just tell us how much."
Just tell us how much. That sums up the approach that JP Morgan took a few months later, when Langford announced that his good buddy Bill Blount would henceforth be involved with every financing transaction for Jefferson County. From JP Morgan's point of view, the decision to pay off Blount was a no-brainer. But the bank had one small problem: Goldman Sachs had already crawled up Blount's trouser leg, and the broker was advising Langford to pick them as Jefferson County's investment bank.
The solution they came up with was an extraordinary one: JP Morgan cut a separate deal with Goldman, paying the bank $3 million to fuck off, with Blount taking a $300,000 cut of the side deal. Suddenly Goldman was out and JP Morgan was sitting in Langford's lap. In another conversation caught on tape, LeCroy joked that the deal was his "philanthropic work," since the payoff amounted to a "charitable donation to Goldman Sachs" in return for "taking no risk."
That such a blatant violation of anti-trust laws took place and neither JP Morgan nor Goldman have been prosecuted for it is yet another mystery of the current financial crisis. "This is an open-and-shut case of anti-competitive behavior," says Taylor, the former regulator.
With Goldman out of the way, JP Morgan won the right to do a $1.1 billion bond offering — switching Jefferson County out of fixed-rate debt into variable-rate debt — and also did a corresponding $1.1 billion deal for a synthetic rate swap. The very same day the transaction was concluded, in May 2003, LeCroy had dinner with Langford and struck a deal to do yet another bond-and-swap transaction of roughly the same size. This time, the terms of the payoff were spelled out more explicitly. In a hilarious phone call between LeCroy and Douglas MacFaddin, another JP Morgan official, the two bankers groaned aloud about how much it was going to cost to satisfy Blount:
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LeCroy: I said, "Commissioner Langford, I'll do that because that's your suggestion, but you gotta help us keep him under control. Because when you give that guy a hand, he takes your arm." You know?
MacFaddin: [Laughing] Yeah, you end up in the wood-chipper.
All told, JP Morgan ended up paying Blount nearly $3 million for "performing no known services," in the words of the SEC. In at least one of the deals, Blount made upward of 15 percent of JP Morgan's entire fee. When I ask Taylor what a legitimate consultant might earn in such a circumstance, he laughs. "What's a 'legitimate consultant' in a case like this? He made this money for doing jack shit."
As the tapes of LeCroy's calls show, even officials at JP Morgan were incredulous at the money being funneled to Blount. "How does he get 15 percent?" one associate at the bank asks LeCroy. "For doing what? For not messing with us?"
"Not messing with us," LeCroy agrees. "It's a lot of money, but in the end, it's worth it on a billion-dollar deal."
That's putting it mildly: The deals wound up being the largest swap agreements in JP Morgan's history. Making matters worse, the payoffs didn't even wind up costing the bank a dime. As the SEC explained in a statement on the scam, JP Morgan "passed on the cost of the unlawful payments by charging the county higher interest rates on the swap transactions." In other words, not only did the bank bribe local politicians to take the sucky deal, they got local taxpayers to pay for the bribes. And because Jefferson County had no idea what kind of deal it was getting on the swaps, JP Morgan could basically charge whatever it wanted. According to an analysis of the swap deals commissioned by the county in 2007, taxpayers had been overcharged at least $93 million on the transactions.
JP Morgan was far from alone in the scam: Virtually everyone doing business in Jefferson County was on the take. Four of the nation's top investment banks, the very cream of American finance, were involved in one way or another with payoffs to Blount in their scramble to do business with the county. In addition to JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns paid Langford's bagman $2.4 million, while Lehman Brothers got off cheap with a $35,000 "arranger's fee." At least a dozen of the county's contractors were also cashing in, along with many of the county commissioners. "If you go into the county courthouse," says Michael Morrison, a planner who works for the county, "there's a gallery of past commissioners on the wall. On the top row, every single one of 'em but two has been investigated, indicted or convicted. It's a joke."
The crazy thing is that such arrangements — where some local scoundrel gets a massive fee for doing nothing but greasing the wheels with elected officials — have been taking place all over the country. In Illinois, during the Upper Volta-esque era of Rod Blagojevich, a Republican political consultant named Robert Kjellander got 10 percent of the entire fee Bear Stearns earned doing a bond sale for the state pension fund. At the start of Obama's term, Bill Richardson's Cabinet appointment was derailed for a similar scheme when he was governor of New Mexico. Indeed, one reason that officials in Jefferson County didn't know that the swaps they were signing off on were shitty was because their adviser on the deals was a firm called CDR Financial Products, which is now accused of conspiring to overcharge dozens of cities in swap transactions. According to a federal antitrust lawsuit, CDR is basically a big-league version of Bill Blount — banks tossed money at the firm, which in turn advised local politicians that they were getting a good deal. "It was basically, you pay CDR, and CDR helps push the deal through," says Taylor.
In the end, though, all this bribery and graft was just the table-setter for the real disaster. In taking all those bribes and signing on to all those swaps, the commissioners in Jefferson County had basically started the clock on a financial time bomb that, sooner or later, had to explode. By continually refinancing to keep the county in its giant McMansion, the commission had managed to push into the future that inevitable day when the real bill would arrive in the mail. But that's where the mortgage analogy ends — because in one key area, a swap deal differs from a home mortgage. Imagine a mortgage that you have to keep on paying even after you sell your house. That's basically how a swap deal works. And Jefferson County had done 23 of them. At one point, they had more outstanding swaps than New York City.
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Judgment Day was coming — just like it was for the Delaware River Port Authority, the Pennsylvania school system, the cities of Detroit, Chicago, Oakland and Los Angeles, the states of Connecticut and Mississippi, the city of Milan and nearly 500 other municipalities in Italy, the country of Greece, and God knows who else. All of these places are now reeling under the weight of similarly elaborate and ill-advised swaps — and if what happened in Jefferson County is any guide, hoo boy. Because when the shit hit the fan in Birmingham, it really hit the fan.
For Jefferson County, the deal blew up in early 2008, when a dizzying array of penalties and other fine-print poison worked into the swap contracts started to kick in. The trouble began with the housing crash, which took down the insurance companies that had underwritten the county's bonds. That rendered the county's insurance worthless, triggering clauses in its swap contracts that required it to pay off more than $800 million of its debt in only four years, rather than 40. That, in turn, scared off private lenders, who were no longer interested in bidding on the county's bonds. The banks were forced to make up the difference — a service for which they charged enormous penalties. It was as if the county had missed a payment on its credit card and woke up the next morning to find its annual percentage rate jacked up to a million percent. Between 2008 and 2009, the annual payment on Jefferson County's debt jumped from $53 million to a whopping $636 million.
It gets worse. Remember the swap deal that Jefferson County did with JP Morgan, how the variable rates it got from the bank were supposed to match those it owed its bondholders? Well, they didn't. Most of the payments the county was receiving from JP Morgan were based on one set of interest rates (the London Interbank Exchange Rate), while the payments it owed to its bondholders followed a different set of rates (a municipal-bond index). Jefferson County was suddenly getting far less from JP Morgan, and owing tons more to bondholders. In other words, the bank and Bill Blount made tens of millions of dollars selling deals to local politicians that were not only completely defective, but blew the entire county to smithereens.
And here's the kicker. Last year, when Jefferson County, staggered by the weight of its penalties, was unable to make its swap payments to JP Morgan, the bank canceled the deal. That triggered one-time "termination fees" of — yes, you read this right — $647 million. That was money the county would owe no matter what happened with the rest of its debt, even if bondholders decided to forgive and forget every dime the county had borrowed. It was like the herpes simplex of loans — debt that does not go away, ever, for as long as you live. On a sewer project that was originally supposed to cost $250 million, the county now owed a total of $1.28 billion just in interest and fees on the debt. Imagine paying $250,000 a year on a car you purchased for $50,000, and that's roughly where Jefferson County stood at the end of last year.
Last November, the SEC charged JP Morgan with fraud and canceled the $647 million in termination fees. The bank agreed to pay a $25 million fine and fork over $50 million to assist displaced workers in Jefferson County. So far, the county has managed to avoid bankruptcy, but the sewer fiasco had downgraded its credit rating, triggering payments on other outstanding loans and pushing Birmingham toward the status of an African debtor state. For the next generation, the county will be in a constant fight to collect enough taxes just to pay off its debt, which now totals $4,800 per resident.
The city of Birmingham was founded in 1871, at the dawn of the Southern industrial boom, for the express purpose of attracting Northern capital — it was even named after a famous British steel town to burnish its entrepreneurial cred. There's a gruesome irony in it now lying sacked and looted by financial vandals from the North. The destruction of Jefferson County reveals the basic battle plan of these modern barbarians, the way that banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs have systematically set out to pillage towns and cities from Pittsburgh to Athens. These guys aren't number-crunching whizzes making smart investments; what they do is find suckers in some municipal-finance department, corner them in complex lose-lose deals and flay them alive. In a complete subversion of free-market principles, they take no risk, score deals based on political influence rather than competition, keep consumers in the dark — and walk away with big money. "It's not high finance," says Taylor, the former bond regulator. "It's low finance." And even if the regulators manage to catch up with them billions of dollars later, the banks just pay a small fine and move on to the next scam. This isn't capitalism. It's nomadic thievery.
[From Issue 1102 — April 15, 2010]
Monday, April 05, 2010
AFGHAN MARKSMEN-FORGET THE FABLES
http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/26/afghan-marksmen-forget-the-fables/
More on Taliban and marksmanship-all those 'Murikans out there thinking they're Daniel Boone but play video games, or can't even hit a deer at 100 yards or just wound it and let it suffer for days in agony... when Barry Sotero and his welfare minions come for your guns in the coming American Gottendammerung scripted by the major shareholders of the fed... you'll regret not taking your rifle marksmanship more seriously.
Quote from the commentary that is most telling:
After reading this article and reading the other posts I feel obligated to add to this post. Having worked with the Afghan Militias and operating in the southern regions on different occassions I found that the new Afghan soldier/ police officers are all notoriously bad shots. This is due to several reasons. First was the introduction to automatic fire and weapons to the battle field. The other is the belief that Allah will guide your bullet. Having recovered many many caches of weapons while in country we always found stores of Mausers and Enfield rifles in the caches but failed to find many AK 47/74 type weapons. This is due to the status symbol the AK brings to the soldier. Because of this the younger soldiers were never taught to really shoot or even maintain their weapons. The old spray and pray marksnmanship now comes to play. Many of todays taliban were born during the Russian or Post-Russian era in Afghanistan. The older veterans are tired of fighting. On one such occassion we had taken some of the mausers and ammunition to the range. One of our hired workers who was approximately 50 yrs old came along to clean up the area and help. He may have also been curious! During the event we were practicing marksmanship with captured weapons and ammunition. The American soldiers were really impressed with the accurracy of the bolt action rifles and their range. I had noticed our Afghan worker had started coaching some of our troops and offered him the chance to shoot. He accepted and proceeded to school the American soldiers on marksmanship. I later found he had been Mujhadeen fighting the Russians. After offering him a position with our militia he proceeded to turn us down. He said he was tired of fighting and just wanted to keep his position supervising the kids we hired for general labor and trach collectors on our base. The older Afghans who learned to shoot with old single shot and bolt action rifles still know how to shoot and shoot well. Fortunately for us, they are tired of fighting and not interested in choosing any side in this conflict. Our worst nightmare would be a couple hundred older soldiers with the old Mausers and the knowledge to use them. Our problems would greatly multiply fast as would our casualty rates.
A quality Mauser in 30.06 or some other common chambering and LOTS of dry fire and airsoft replica practice, and common sense tactics can overcome a LOT of deficiencies of any resistance movement.
Reread that above quote, read the article and comments.
Afghan Marksmen — Forget the Fables
By C.J. CHIVERS
via Nefafoundation.org A screen grab from a propaganda video released by the Taliban, reportedly from a training camp in Afghanistan along the Pakistani border.
The recent Marine operations in and near Marja brought into sharp relief a fact that contradicts much of what people think they know about the Afghan war. It is this: Forget the fables. The current ranks of Afghan fighters are crowded with poor marksmen.
This simple statement is at odds with an oft-repeated legend of modern conflict, in which Afghan men are described, in clichés and accounts from yesteryear, as natural gunmen and accomplished shots. Everyone who has even faintly followed the history of war in Central Asia has heard the tales of Afghan men whose familiarity with firearms is such a part of their life experience that they can pick up most any weapon and immediately put it to effective work. The most exaggerated accounts are cartoonish, including tales of Afghan riflemen whose bullets can strike a lone sapling (I’ve even heard “blade of grass”) a hilltop away.
Without getting into an argument with the ghost of Rudyard Kipling, who was one of the early voices popularizing the wonders of Afghan riflery, an update is in order. This is because the sum of these descriptions does not match what is commonly observed in firefights today. These days, the opposite is more often the case. Poor marksmanship, even abysmally poor marksmanship, is a consistent trait among Afghan men. The description applies to Taliban and Afghan government units alike.
Over the years that Tyler Hicks and I have worked in Afghanistan’s remote and hostile corners, we have been alongside Afghan, American and European infantrymen in many firefights and ambushes. These fights have involved a wide set of tactical circumstances, ranges, elevations, and light and weather conditions. Some skirmishes were brief and simple. Others were long and complex, involving as many as a few hundred fighters on both sides. One result has been consistent. We have almost always observed that a large proportion of Afghan fire, both incoming and outgoing, is undisciplined and errant, often wildly so. Afghans, like most anyone else with a modicum of exposure to infantry weapons, might be able to figure out how to make any firearm fire. But hitting what they are aiming at, assuming they are aiming at all? That’s another matter.
There are exceptions. The Taliban snipers in Marja were one recent example. We will revisit them here soon. Now and then a disciplined Afghan soldier or police officer also bucks the trend. Credible accounts of Northern Alliance fighters in the 1990s and early 2000s chronicled impressive shooting skills among seasoned Panjshiris. But the larger pattern is firmly established and consistent with the experience and observations of countless soldiers and Marines we have passed time with, including many people who have trained and fought beside Afghan security forces during the past decade.
Today At War will share a few observations about inaccurate Taliban rifle fire. Naturally, this will deal with what can be assessed of incoming fire; we do not embed with Taliban units and thus we have no chance of an unfiltered side-by-side look at their marksmanship habits. (Watching videos that the Taliban and their sympathizers post on the Internet or circulate in bazaars has its limits; these are self-selected excerpts chosen in part to show Taliban prowess. Taking them at face value would be much like trying to measure the American Army’s performance in the field by watching a recruiting ad, or like sitting through some of the cheery PowerPoint presentations that officials in capitals serve up for visitors.) The next post in the series will discuss several factors that contribute to poor Taliban marksmanship. A post soon thereafter will address the shooting skills and habits of Afghan soldiers and police officers. That third post will cover more fully what can be seen of outgoing fire, accounts that are possible because Afghan government shooting is readily observable, at least for those who log enough weeks in rural firebases or on patrol.
Let’s start with a few rough numbers. During the month and a half we spent in Helmand Province, Tyler and I combined firsthand observations with queries to officers commanding Marine rifle companies we worked beside. Three of these companies had been engaged in what, by the standards of the Afghan war, was heavy fighting. Here is what their experiences turned up.
Before the full offensive into Marja began, the Marine ground unit engaged in the most regular fighting with the area’s Taliban was Bravo Company, First Battalion, Third Marines. The company served for a little more than two months on what Marines call the “forward line of troops.” In this capacity, it rotated platoons through positions several miles to Marja’s east, a pair of lonely outposts on the steppe overlooking Route Olympia, which was the road leading into Taliban turf. The Taliban had an interest in watching for American movement along this road, and the Marines patrolled constantly near it. Thus the tactical climate was violent and busy. The insurgents harassed the outposts and frequently skirmished with Marine patrols.
In this contest, the Taliban also had the sort of local advantages common in guerrilla war. They knew the network of irrigation canals and used them as trench lines. They littered the fields and small terrain features with hidden bombs rigged to pressure plates. They deployed spotters with radios on motorcycle patrols, which tried to find the Marines and relay word of their movements and activities. They also chose when to fight, and often opened fire on the Marines in the late afternoon, when the sun was low in the sky. Why? Because Marine patrols originated to the Taliban’s east, and as the Marines walked generally westward across the flat steppe toward the area where the Taliban hid, the Marines were walking into the angled sunlight, which illuminated them perfectly for the Taliban, but forced the Marines to look into hard light, and squint. This was an environment in which small-arms clashes were almost inevitable, and in which the Taliban would often get to fire the opening shots. It should have been a place where the Taliban might succeed. What did the numbers show? By early February, when Marine units began massing for the push on Marja, Capt. Thomas Grace, Bravo Company’s commander, estimated that his platoons had been in at least two dozen firefights, often in open terrain. Some of the fights lasted several hours. At least one lasted a full day and into the night. How many of the company’s Marines and the Afghan soldiers who accompanied them had been shot? Zero.
Farther west along Route Olympia is an intersection known as Five Points, so named because several dirt roads meet there. The juncture provides access to northern Marja. Marine Expeditionary Brigade-Afghanistan, the command that planned the attack on Marja, deemed this essential terrain for securing the region. In January, another unit — Charlie Company, First Battalion, Third Marines – was assigned to fly in by helicopter and seize and hold the intersection. This happened in February, a few days before the larger assault began. It prompted a determined Taliban response.
Once the Taliban realized the Marines had leapt by air over their outer defenses, they clustered near Five Points and fought Charlie Company intensely, especially in the first few days. During this time, according to the company commander, Capt. Stephan P. Karabin II, his Marines were in about 15 firefights. Again the Taliban had certain advantages. They knew the ground well enough that their fighters stashed small motorcycles in canals that had been drained. After ambushing the Marines, they sometimes dropped into a dry canal, ran through the maze, jumped on their bikes, started the engines and blasted away at speeds that no one pursuing on foot could hope to match. Smart tactics. But the Taliban did not always run. They often held their ground and fought, perhaps feeling protected by the canals that did contain water, which typically separated them from the Marine patrols they chose to fire upon.
To change the character of the fighting, Captain Karabin ordered his Marines to patrol on foot with their .50-caliber machine guns. These would be lugged along in pieces, and when a firefight began, the Marines assigned to them would put them together, mount the weapons on their tripods, load belts of ammunition and open fire. (A M2 Browning machine gun and tripod weighs nearly 130 pounds; this does not include the weight of the ammunition.) The heavy guns tilted the fighting more fully in the Marines’ favor. But the fact that M2s were used this way said something about how the Taliban fought; some of this fighting was pitched. How many of Charlie Company’s Marines were struck by Taliban bullets in these engagements? Once again, none.
Neither of these companies was spared casualties. Four separate bomb blasts killed two Marines from Bravo Company and wounded nine Marines from Charlie Company. But the Taliban’s rifles were another story. Together the two companies were in about 40 firefights against the main guerrilla force in a nation that is considered, by the conventional wisdom, to be a land of born marksmen. And not a single bullet fired by the Taliban found its mark.
Obviously, American and Afghan soldiers do get shot, which brings us to the third Marine company, which suffered the effects of more accurate fire. As Charlie Company was fighting at Five Points, Kilo Company, Third Battalion, Sixth Marines, was inserted at night by helicopter into three landing zones in northern Marja, where it was soon met by what may have been the stiffest Taliban resistance of the offensive. For nearly 10 days, Kilo Company was engaged in small-arms fighting. In the first four or five days, the fighting was widespread, often with several firefights occurring simultaneously as different patrols and different platoons on different missions were locked up in skirmishes at once. On the second day of fighting, one skirmish alone, between two platoons and large groups of Taliban fighters, lasted off and on from early morning until night.
Within a week or 10 days, eight of the company’s Marines had been shot, two fatally, and two Afghan soldiers had been shot as well, including one who died. This is a large number compared with the experiences of the other two companies, but it is a small number when set against Kilo Company’s size, and when considered in the context and the volume of Taliban fire.
First, about the size. In all, Kilo Company had on the order of 300 men assigned to it, including engineers, dog handlers, bomb disposal and intelligence specialists, interpreters and an Afghan infantry platoon. (Note: Embed rules forbid precise descriptions of unit and team sizes, so the numbers of the various units that made up Kilo Company on this mission are mashed together here and rounded.)
Now the context. On many days, Kilo Company’s patrols would be ambushed while crossing flat, open ground, with no vegetation concealing the Marines’ movements and no place to take cover without running a couple of hundred yards or more. Often many Taliban gunmen would open fire simultaneously, and a large number of rounds would fly into the area where the patrol walked. Rounds would snap and buzz past helmets. Rounds would thump all around in the dirt. But usually no one would be struck. It happened again and again.
When Marines did get hit, it often appeared that the fire came from PK machine guns or the local contingent of snipers – not the riflemen who make the Taliban’s rank-and-file. One day, after a few hours of fighting in which the Taliban had not yet hit any Marines, a corporal from Second Platoon stood upright, exposing himself above the waist and looking over a wall as bullets flew high overhead. He didn’t flinch. “What’s everybody ducking for?” he said. He cupped his hand to his mouth and shouted an expletive-laden taunt at the Taliban gunmen shooting from concealment on the opposite side of a field. The editors would never allow the corporal’s words to be printed here. But they amounted to this: You guys can’t shoot.
Yes, some of this was probably adrenaline and undiluted cockiness, the kind of behavior that Marines can thrive on. But this cockiness was not just attitude. It reflected a discernible truth. Much of the incoming fire was not coming close. (Later in that same fight, some of the fire did come close, as at least one sniper arrived on the Taliban side; we’ll show video of that soon). But at this point in the battle, any number of adjectives might be applied to the Taliban fighters on the far side of the open ground. They were resourceful, organized, clever, brave. In the main, however, they could not shoot.
For those of you who have served in Afghanistan, or been exposed to gunfighting there via other jobs, your input would be welcome. One of the company commanders shared his insights in an interview soon after the fighting at Marja tapered off. In the annals of the Afghan war, Afghans are supposedly crack shots, some of the best marksmen on earth. Captain Karabin, a veteran of the war in Iraq, summed up neatly a rifle company’s experience that pointed otherwise. “I used to say in Iraq that I’m only alive because Iraqis are such bad shots,” he said. “And now I’ll say it in Afghanistan. I’m only alive because the Afghans are also such bad shots.”
COMMENTS
I met an American sniper who trained Afghans in the Eighties. He said it took him ages to convince them to shoot from a prone position, which they felt was cowardly. Guess not much has changed.
Yes, the skills of Afghani marksmen are greatly exaggerated. Here is what is not greatly exaggerated:
a. Their fear of dying
b. Their tendency to bully the weak with extreme prejudice (average Afghans are more afraid of Afghan police than they are of Americans)
c. Their refusal to surrender
Perhaps a, b & c trumps being a poor shot.
Fascinating post. Thank you. I hope that you will attempt to explain why the Taliban fighters are not able to improve their marksmanship (training, discipline, etc.). I will now, sadly, return to my desk-bound work day.
This isn't the first time I have seen this reported. A year or two ago an interview with Canadian soldiers in Kandahar said the same thing. That is that Taliban are generally poor shots. They also said they tended to use repetitive tactics and if on the same ground even the same locations. The Talibans advantages are low investment in fighters, knowing the ground, being use to harsh conditions and there requiring little in the way of supply and not needing to hold ground. When they hold a position generally this should be described as a poor tactical decision
A substantial percentage of individuals world wide suffer from myopia, which probably is the case amongst the Taliban as well; in general, the developing world has a limited or nonexistent prescription eye ware use, and I think it's generous to consider Afghanistan "developing". I doubt the Taliban's health care coverage, such as it is, has a very generous prescription policy. Additionally, the high altitude of Afghanistan increases the likelihood of cataracts due to increased ultraviolet exposure and again, there are probably limited cataract extractions, Ray-ban or Oakley options as well. Lacking extant shopping malls replete with optical shops and sun glass kiosks, and often squinting, half-blind, and sun burned, it's amazing that the Taliban do as well as they do. And I'm fairly certain that they don't get their daily multivitamin - thus their night vision, in the absence of vitamin A, is not going to be too good. Certainly nothing to compete with a night vision scope common to the Marines.
However, this does emphasize the generally wretched health options available to the Afghani.
After reading this article and reading the other posts I feel obligated to add to this post. Having worked with the Afghan Militias and operating in the southern regions on different occassions I found that the new Afghan soldier/ police officers are all notoriously bad shots. This is due to several reasons. First was the introduction to automatic fire and weapons to the battle field. The other is the belief that Allah will guide your bullet. Having recovered many many caches of weapons while in country we always found stores of Mausers and Enfield rifles in the caches but failed to find many AK 47/74 type weapons. This is due to the status symbol the AK brings to the soldier. Because of this the younger soldiers were never taught to really shoot or even maintain their weapons. The old spray and pray marksnmanship now comes to play. Many of todays taliban were born during the Russian or Post-Russian era in Afghanistan. The older veterans are tired of fighting. On one such occassion we had taken some of the mausers and ammunition to the range. One of our hired workers who was approximately 50 yrs old came along to clean up the area and help. He may have also been curious! During the event we were practicing marksmanship with captured weapons and ammunition. The American soldiers were really impressed with the accurracy of the bolt action rifles and their range. I had noticed our Afghan worker had started coaching some of our troops and offered him the chance to shoot. He accepted and proceeded to school the American soldiers on marksmanship. I later found he had been Mujhadeen fighting the Russians. After offering him a position with our militia he proceeded to turn us down. He said he was tired of fighting and just wanted to keep his position supervising the kids we hired for general labor and trach collectors on our base. The older Afghans who learned to shoot with old single shot and bolt action rifles still know how to shoot and shoot well. Fortunately for us, they are tired of fighting and not interested in choosing any side in this conflict. Our worst nightmare would be a couple hundred older soldiers with the old Mausers and the knowledge to use them. Our problems would greatly multiply fast as would our casualty rates.
I'm not sure what the point of this article is... The only time I was under the impression that Afghans were good marksmen was when I was much younger, reading the books of Rudyard Kipling (mentioned in this post). At no point in the 5 years that I've been in the Army have I heard anything suggesting that basic, "rank-and-file" insurgents were anything other than extraordinarily poor marksmen (not to take away from their savvy as insurgents, or their courage). It is also common knowledge that the insurgents are capable of fielding veteran snipers. The snipers--usually foreign fighters--were and are universally respected--but are not accorded reputed skill due to their nationality, but to their training.
This common knowledge extends to indirect capabilities. Based on stories and extensive experience, the insurgents are mostly untrained at firing rockets or mortar systems; those exceptional crews who can employ those systems effectively are usually targeted and neutralized pretty quickly.
The insurgents are, for the most part, inaccurate riflemen for the following reasons (I'm drawing on 2-year-old firsthand experience):
1) their training is inadequate. Any rifleman who properly-zeros his weapon, fires it regularly, and keeps it well-maintained should be able to hit a point target at 75% of the rifle's maximum effective range (say, 150m for an AK-47 and 225m for an M4. Rough numbers). The insurgents do not properly zero their weapons, maintain them adequately but not exceptionally, and don't practice taking well-aimed shots.
2) there is a strong strand of fatalism in their philosophy that dictates that all actions are in God's hands, hence the phrase "Inshallah." One can imagine with little difficulty what effect that has on someone firing a weapon system.
3) all insurgent weapons are capable of firing on the full automatic setting, even their rifles (AK-47). The U.S. Army conducted research following Vietnam that established that the extraordinary volume of fire and expenditure of ammunition versus enemy killed or wounded was due to poor fire discipline with a then-fully automatic M16. Since that time, there has been a "burst" setting, which all riflemen are dissuaded from using in favor of taking well-aimed shots.
4)Many of the Afghan insurgents are from agricultural communities where there is no need for a background with firearms (save with tribal disputes). They are not hunters. They are young, so have no military background from the Russian war on which to draw. If you took a farmer from Idaho who'd never fired a weapon, gave him a rifle, let him shoot it for a couple weeks, then threw him into battle against any professional army, he wouldn't do very well.
5) we are well-trained in small-arms tactics, one of the principals of which is to deliver a strong volume of fire at known or suspected enemy positions as quickly as possible to suppress enemy fire. Once enemy fire has been suppressed--not stopped, but suppressed--the accuracy of enemy fire is reduced dramatically, as their primary concern becomes seeking or maintaining cover, rather than inflicting casualties.
This is all common knowledge among soldiers, and has been for years. I guess I'm just wondering what the angle is for this article, who the intended audience is. Civilian fans of Rudyard Kipling who have no friends in the military and have thusly not been over-exposed to returning veterans' combat stories? If so, it probably doesn't require an extended expose, maybe just a couple pages with the salient points highlighted, and summarized as follows: people unaccustomed to using a particular tool are as a general rule not very good at using said tool. With a nod to Kant, who says that Experience without Theory is blind (or a bad shot), while Theory without Experience is mere intellectual play.
It could be that I'm the one who's backwards. What are the "oft-repeated legends" of the Afghan riflemen you reference? I've never heard them--outside ancient history / literature--maybe I'm just out of touch.
Being in a military unit doesn’t mean that one is proficient with a rifle, consider any individual from any unit in our own armed forces. Outside of military / militia activity how much shooting is done by civilians in Afghanistan? How much long range hunting. competitive marksmanship? I’ll guess little. What type of weapons are being used, scoped rifles designed to engage targets at longer ranges, say at least out to 500 meters, or AK47s?
I enjoyed target shooting and use to shoot ‘high power rifle’, the typical ranges were 200, 300 and 600 yards, iron sights, slow and rapid fire in shooting different positions with no rests. I recall people sometimes showing up with SKS/AK47s, and they gave up at the 300 yard line if not earlier. These were people who had the opportunity to practice, may have been proficient otherwise, but were handicapped by a weapon designed for shorter ranges.
Comparing Afghans to Marines regarding marksmanship isn’t really fair, as it would also be unfair to compare soldiers or sailors coming out of basic training from the US forces to Marines coming out of boot camp. I recall spending one week in boot camp ‘dry firing’, just learning how to hold the rifle and sight it, before spending a week qualifying. Then we also had the opportunity to fire during infantry training. All marines were required to qualify with their issue weapons at least once a year, as a basic tenant was that every Marine was a rifleman. We had a lot of expert rifleman as the M16 was easier to qualify with than the M14 or the M1 Garand, something seen currently in high power rifle target shooting as the M16 seems and the civilian versions seem to be favored over the traditional, older rifles mentioned.
An interesting comparison on marksmanship would be to compare the Afghans engaging the Marines with US trained and equipped Afghans.
Had the friendly Afghans who had been working with us when we invaded the country been supplied accurate weapons at the start of the conflict, we may very well have won this by now. The worlds best mountain fighters need the most accurate weapons to bridge the gap to their vaulted historic skills again.
I think we're going to have to face the fact that our military as a whole is being run very poorly. Too much for the guys on top, too little for the common soldier. Instead of dismantling the Afghan forces allied with us and training them anew, all we need have done was supplement their own natural abilities, then have them train our soldiers in the secrets of the the place. It's their country after all.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for Afghans that couldn’t shoot straight, but I seriously doubt that all of them are that bad. Maybe the recent generation of the mujahidin is handicapped, but maybe the previous generation some 25 years ago was real hard core – they managed to kick the Soviets out. And that’s no joke – Russians had some of the most effective paratrooper formations reinforced with spetsnaz. But for all I care, let them stay dumb and blind, and maybe it will save a few American lives who are trying to help these shmucks.
I remember from a British observer of the pre-9/11 Afghan civil wars. The US had just gone into Afghanistan for the first time and there was a lot of speculation about the supposed high fighting qualities of the Mujahadeen/Taliban. He rejected the idea that the Afghans were expert fighters and stated that most Afghan clashes were a lot of firing with very few casualties, followed by mutual disengagement.
A rrifle is a tool, tools have specific uses, and tools require practice. My theory is that culturally Afghans treat a rifle as more of an accessory, like a handbag, something every male is expected to carry but not necessarily become an expert with.
Ben is right. if you look at the various video clips of the Taliban, al Quaeda and any other third world army or liberation front, the weapon is invariably the AK-47. The AK, while a robust and soldier proof weapon, is not designed as a marksman's weapon; unlike previous generations of bolt action and first generation semi-automatice weapons. it is an assault rifle, intended to put out a high volume of fire that will force the other guy to keep his head down until you can get close enough to not miss. It has a fixed 200 meter site and reflects the Red Army doctrine that if you put enough metal in the target area, you will eventually get a hit just by sheer random chance. The net result is the spray and pray approach to marksmentship around the world. Clips of Russian troops and third world militias invariable show them spraying the area with their AK's rather than using controlled, aimed fire.
The AK is emblematic of the trend away from "real" rifles, such as the M-14 and FN FAL, firing large calibre, highpowered rounds over long ranges and associated marksmentship training toward the saturation fire approach. Good shooting requires practice, discipline and lots of ammunition -i.e. money and more importantly time. lots of time, invested in training . The focus today is all too often on quantity, simply pushing people through quickie courses to get the numbers, rather than quality that comes from taking the time to get it right. this has been a reqcurring complaint with regard to the Afghan forces.
An interesting if a a bit over done post. The enemy is not 10 fee tall -- imagine that! I just spent a month in P2K wandering around the 4/25 AOR. The experience there is similar -- Taliban open fire at 300+meters, realizing they have maybe 10 minutes before their world comes to an end. Spray and pray is the operative concept. They fire and run away -- quickly. The objective is to get us to respond w/indiscrimate indirect fire and cause civilian casualties, period. All the soldiers I talked to had little concern with being shot, but getting blown up by an IED -- a different matter altogether. The Taliban have successfully taken this weapon and used it to change the battlefield -- denying us freedom maneuver, forcing us into large, ponderous convoy operations to keep outposts resupplied, and forcing us away from the people we're supposed to be defending as we rumble around in our behemouth MRAPs.
I've never heard legends of Afghan marksmanship. I've been under the impression that it's the difficult terrain and persistance of the afghan militiaman that makes Afghanistan such an imposing place to fight a war.
One thing you might want to pursue is the impact of experience on the accuracy of afghan fighters. I would tend to assume that the innacurate shooters are the ones who are young and have little to no experience/training (which is if you think about it, is all marksmanship is: experience and training). Perhaps some of the older Afghans who have been fighting for 30 + years are much better shots than the 17 year-old farm kid they're fighting alongside.
Couldn't we also assume that many of the expert and veteran fighters have been killed (the war has been going on for 8 years after all, and we have been inflicting substantial casualties on the insurgents) and the core of the rank and file militia replacing them today are inexperienced kids?
I think there are numerous factors at play here and I would be reluctant to say that Afghans, on the whole, are bad shooters. No statement that broad can be true.
I remember my father telling me that automatic weapons from his day(World War II) were not accurate. While the US was way behind Germany and even Britain in deploying automatic weapons among infantry, I doubt that the extreme shuddering and jolting they cause, is helpful, and it makes aiming more than problematic, leaving the gunner to just point and shoot in a general direction. I know this happened among US troops at times in Vietnam , where the enemy was often invisible.
Modern infantry weapons are a pain to carry and all that ammunition is heavy. No one want to die and thus only fools will expose themselves,(no matter what anyone says).
While once, a rifle was a valuable and difficult to obtain treasure. Something passed from father to son like a holy relic, almost.
Powder had to be obtained and shot, and guns got off only one shot at a time in those days. It is possible men cultivated their aiming skills then, and made greater efforts to excel at it even if they were myopic.
With the advent of cheap, automatic machine guns, less value may now be placed on accuracy than on firepower. Battles are faster paced(motorcycles in a ditch-Americans with helicopters). Who has time (or eyes) to take careful aim.
Anyway, I am sure that many of the great stories about the aim of American riflemen on the "frontier" were as overblown and colorful as the stories about Afghan aim.
Besides, how could the Brits explain being beaten by a bunch of myopic farmers who couldn't hit the broad side of a barn? Make them supermen with rifles, of course!
Marines have the best marksmanship and they train hard to make every bullet count since you have to carry every round. No other organization trains average combatants to this level of marksmanship. It is a key element in Marine doctrine that every Marine is a rifleman. Good for our troops that the current Afghan combatant does not get good basic marksmanship training.
The Fable may still be right but in a perspective. Afghans of today and those from the past (Like Rudyard Kiplings') must be different in marksmanship skills keeping in view the arms they have been handling. I remember most tribesmen (age 7 & above) carry rifles and engage in competitive target shooting as part of a wedding ceremony. The same people carry assault rifles (AK 47) now, mainly because of the cost of ammunition. The fashion now is to put more & more stary bullets into the air rather than excelling in target shooting. Thus skills vary with the kind of arms they handle and the culture that evolves with time. Majority of the Afghan army are low paid poor people with a low morale and weak will to fight their own people (especially in the pro & anti Islam psychological paradigm). So the level of their marksmanship is the result of their own circumstances.
Awesome, Mr. Chivers, awesome!
It is scary but to the point. It is not to say that they are sub-standard soldiers but are not well-enough trained in weaponry that would give them the skills that are required for the modern battlefield. The reasons for this are obviously pointed out in the story and comments.
It is nice to see the myths of the Afghan prowess at turfing the multitude of would-be conqueror invaders being exposed for the facile comment that it is. Knowing your adversaries' abilities does much to make the fight easier to work with. There are no bases from which the Taliban/al Qaeda murdering terrorists can muster their troops for target practice which is a good thing. They don't have these bases because they have been deprived of these because the Allied Troops have been chasing them around for years.
For years, much like the 'Killer of Empires', there is the myth of the murdering terrorists being called anything and everything that can be construed as not bestowing their ilk with the reputation of the murdering terrorists that they are.
America, Canada and many other nations could become the same if we did nothing to remove serial killers from our midst. These purported leaders of the war against the infidels are nothing more than serial killers in the disguise of Holy men.
You can call a spade a shovel and still get the concept to be understood.
God Bless the Troops. God Keep them Safe.
It's absurd to believe that an average Afghan is a better shot than an average foreigner. Being a good marksman is not genetic; it takes training and exposure to develop skills.
Most Taliban foot soldiers -- the ones who do the fighting in the trenches -- and Afghan police and army soldiers are uneducated, unemployed and often the least respected members of society. They fight because they have few other prospects. Expecting them to be legendary marksmen is not only a mistake but an unfair expectation.
The US weapons are manufacturered to tighter tolerances, and equiped with the best optical sights. Ordinance specialists who maintain the weapons travel with each large military unit. US Marines in particular will fire several thousand rounds in practice bfore deployment and will fire wepaons at least once per week to insure function and once per month to insure accuracy.
How can poor tribesman compete against that? Instead of the conslusion that Afghans are lousey shots, the correct conclusion should be that they are smart tacticians in not going muzzle to muzzle with Marines but instead relying on IEDs and intimidation.
At the age of sixty I vividly recall my teenage years, when Vietnam rarely left the evening news reports. At that time I could not comprehend why teenagers of my age were being sent to Asia to fight and die in a foreign war. I and my friends often talked about the daily count of body bags being brought back to air bases around the USA, especially in 1969 when I was eighteen. Years later having read why and how America became involved in the conflict, I came to one conclusion, Politian’s care little for those who they represent, image and prestige for them is the order of the day. It’s apparent that a news blackout has ensured that the repatriation of fallen US soldiers being brought back from Afghanistan is being enacted with orders from those who have never risked their lives for their country and have no intention of doing so. Having watched recently two programmes aired by National Geographic, concerning the Afghan conflict which included the forlorn sight of relatives visiting Arlington cemetery and a shocking insight at a casualty clearing station, my heart goes out to those involved in this unwinnable conflict. As a young boy my late father often told me about the American GIs who came to Walsall in 1943, in the preparation for the D-Day landings, generous and brave men who often bought a round of drinks in the pub, most British working men had little money at that time. The same GIs in their thousands headed south, crossed the English Channel and fought their way into Germany. I don’t forget those brave soldiers, who gave me the chance to live in freedom. Throughout Europe I have often visited cemeteries, where so many American soldiers lie, yet as the years go by those who gained freedom at their expense soon forget the past and its conflicts. I hope the present conflict will soon end, and the dreams of many will not be destroyed by the evilness of the few.
More on Taliban and marksmanship-all those 'Murikans out there thinking they're Daniel Boone but play video games, or can't even hit a deer at 100 yards or just wound it and let it suffer for days in agony... when Barry Sotero and his welfare minions come for your guns in the coming American Gottendammerung scripted by the major shareholders of the fed... you'll regret not taking your rifle marksmanship more seriously.
Quote from the commentary that is most telling:
After reading this article and reading the other posts I feel obligated to add to this post. Having worked with the Afghan Militias and operating in the southern regions on different occassions I found that the new Afghan soldier/ police officers are all notoriously bad shots. This is due to several reasons. First was the introduction to automatic fire and weapons to the battle field. The other is the belief that Allah will guide your bullet. Having recovered many many caches of weapons while in country we always found stores of Mausers and Enfield rifles in the caches but failed to find many AK 47/74 type weapons. This is due to the status symbol the AK brings to the soldier. Because of this the younger soldiers were never taught to really shoot or even maintain their weapons. The old spray and pray marksnmanship now comes to play. Many of todays taliban were born during the Russian or Post-Russian era in Afghanistan. The older veterans are tired of fighting. On one such occassion we had taken some of the mausers and ammunition to the range. One of our hired workers who was approximately 50 yrs old came along to clean up the area and help. He may have also been curious! During the event we were practicing marksmanship with captured weapons and ammunition. The American soldiers were really impressed with the accurracy of the bolt action rifles and their range. I had noticed our Afghan worker had started coaching some of our troops and offered him the chance to shoot. He accepted and proceeded to school the American soldiers on marksmanship. I later found he had been Mujhadeen fighting the Russians. After offering him a position with our militia he proceeded to turn us down. He said he was tired of fighting and just wanted to keep his position supervising the kids we hired for general labor and trach collectors on our base. The older Afghans who learned to shoot with old single shot and bolt action rifles still know how to shoot and shoot well. Fortunately for us, they are tired of fighting and not interested in choosing any side in this conflict. Our worst nightmare would be a couple hundred older soldiers with the old Mausers and the knowledge to use them. Our problems would greatly multiply fast as would our casualty rates.
A quality Mauser in 30.06 or some other common chambering and LOTS of dry fire and airsoft replica practice, and common sense tactics can overcome a LOT of deficiencies of any resistance movement.
Reread that above quote, read the article and comments.
Afghan Marksmen — Forget the Fables
By C.J. CHIVERS
via Nefafoundation.org A screen grab from a propaganda video released by the Taliban, reportedly from a training camp in Afghanistan along the Pakistani border.
The recent Marine operations in and near Marja brought into sharp relief a fact that contradicts much of what people think they know about the Afghan war. It is this: Forget the fables. The current ranks of Afghan fighters are crowded with poor marksmen.
This simple statement is at odds with an oft-repeated legend of modern conflict, in which Afghan men are described, in clichés and accounts from yesteryear, as natural gunmen and accomplished shots. Everyone who has even faintly followed the history of war in Central Asia has heard the tales of Afghan men whose familiarity with firearms is such a part of their life experience that they can pick up most any weapon and immediately put it to effective work. The most exaggerated accounts are cartoonish, including tales of Afghan riflemen whose bullets can strike a lone sapling (I’ve even heard “blade of grass”) a hilltop away.
Without getting into an argument with the ghost of Rudyard Kipling, who was one of the early voices popularizing the wonders of Afghan riflery, an update is in order. This is because the sum of these descriptions does not match what is commonly observed in firefights today. These days, the opposite is more often the case. Poor marksmanship, even abysmally poor marksmanship, is a consistent trait among Afghan men. The description applies to Taliban and Afghan government units alike.
Over the years that Tyler Hicks and I have worked in Afghanistan’s remote and hostile corners, we have been alongside Afghan, American and European infantrymen in many firefights and ambushes. These fights have involved a wide set of tactical circumstances, ranges, elevations, and light and weather conditions. Some skirmishes were brief and simple. Others were long and complex, involving as many as a few hundred fighters on both sides. One result has been consistent. We have almost always observed that a large proportion of Afghan fire, both incoming and outgoing, is undisciplined and errant, often wildly so. Afghans, like most anyone else with a modicum of exposure to infantry weapons, might be able to figure out how to make any firearm fire. But hitting what they are aiming at, assuming they are aiming at all? That’s another matter.
There are exceptions. The Taliban snipers in Marja were one recent example. We will revisit them here soon. Now and then a disciplined Afghan soldier or police officer also bucks the trend. Credible accounts of Northern Alliance fighters in the 1990s and early 2000s chronicled impressive shooting skills among seasoned Panjshiris. But the larger pattern is firmly established and consistent with the experience and observations of countless soldiers and Marines we have passed time with, including many people who have trained and fought beside Afghan security forces during the past decade.
Today At War will share a few observations about inaccurate Taliban rifle fire. Naturally, this will deal with what can be assessed of incoming fire; we do not embed with Taliban units and thus we have no chance of an unfiltered side-by-side look at their marksmanship habits. (Watching videos that the Taliban and their sympathizers post on the Internet or circulate in bazaars has its limits; these are self-selected excerpts chosen in part to show Taliban prowess. Taking them at face value would be much like trying to measure the American Army’s performance in the field by watching a recruiting ad, or like sitting through some of the cheery PowerPoint presentations that officials in capitals serve up for visitors.) The next post in the series will discuss several factors that contribute to poor Taliban marksmanship. A post soon thereafter will address the shooting skills and habits of Afghan soldiers and police officers. That third post will cover more fully what can be seen of outgoing fire, accounts that are possible because Afghan government shooting is readily observable, at least for those who log enough weeks in rural firebases or on patrol.
Let’s start with a few rough numbers. During the month and a half we spent in Helmand Province, Tyler and I combined firsthand observations with queries to officers commanding Marine rifle companies we worked beside. Three of these companies had been engaged in what, by the standards of the Afghan war, was heavy fighting. Here is what their experiences turned up.
Before the full offensive into Marja began, the Marine ground unit engaged in the most regular fighting with the area’s Taliban was Bravo Company, First Battalion, Third Marines. The company served for a little more than two months on what Marines call the “forward line of troops.” In this capacity, it rotated platoons through positions several miles to Marja’s east, a pair of lonely outposts on the steppe overlooking Route Olympia, which was the road leading into Taliban turf. The Taliban had an interest in watching for American movement along this road, and the Marines patrolled constantly near it. Thus the tactical climate was violent and busy. The insurgents harassed the outposts and frequently skirmished with Marine patrols.
In this contest, the Taliban also had the sort of local advantages common in guerrilla war. They knew the network of irrigation canals and used them as trench lines. They littered the fields and small terrain features with hidden bombs rigged to pressure plates. They deployed spotters with radios on motorcycle patrols, which tried to find the Marines and relay word of their movements and activities. They also chose when to fight, and often opened fire on the Marines in the late afternoon, when the sun was low in the sky. Why? Because Marine patrols originated to the Taliban’s east, and as the Marines walked generally westward across the flat steppe toward the area where the Taliban hid, the Marines were walking into the angled sunlight, which illuminated them perfectly for the Taliban, but forced the Marines to look into hard light, and squint. This was an environment in which small-arms clashes were almost inevitable, and in which the Taliban would often get to fire the opening shots. It should have been a place where the Taliban might succeed. What did the numbers show? By early February, when Marine units began massing for the push on Marja, Capt. Thomas Grace, Bravo Company’s commander, estimated that his platoons had been in at least two dozen firefights, often in open terrain. Some of the fights lasted several hours. At least one lasted a full day and into the night. How many of the company’s Marines and the Afghan soldiers who accompanied them had been shot? Zero.
Farther west along Route Olympia is an intersection known as Five Points, so named because several dirt roads meet there. The juncture provides access to northern Marja. Marine Expeditionary Brigade-Afghanistan, the command that planned the attack on Marja, deemed this essential terrain for securing the region. In January, another unit — Charlie Company, First Battalion, Third Marines – was assigned to fly in by helicopter and seize and hold the intersection. This happened in February, a few days before the larger assault began. It prompted a determined Taliban response.
Once the Taliban realized the Marines had leapt by air over their outer defenses, they clustered near Five Points and fought Charlie Company intensely, especially in the first few days. During this time, according to the company commander, Capt. Stephan P. Karabin II, his Marines were in about 15 firefights. Again the Taliban had certain advantages. They knew the ground well enough that their fighters stashed small motorcycles in canals that had been drained. After ambushing the Marines, they sometimes dropped into a dry canal, ran through the maze, jumped on their bikes, started the engines and blasted away at speeds that no one pursuing on foot could hope to match. Smart tactics. But the Taliban did not always run. They often held their ground and fought, perhaps feeling protected by the canals that did contain water, which typically separated them from the Marine patrols they chose to fire upon.
To change the character of the fighting, Captain Karabin ordered his Marines to patrol on foot with their .50-caliber machine guns. These would be lugged along in pieces, and when a firefight began, the Marines assigned to them would put them together, mount the weapons on their tripods, load belts of ammunition and open fire. (A M2 Browning machine gun and tripod weighs nearly 130 pounds; this does not include the weight of the ammunition.) The heavy guns tilted the fighting more fully in the Marines’ favor. But the fact that M2s were used this way said something about how the Taliban fought; some of this fighting was pitched. How many of Charlie Company’s Marines were struck by Taliban bullets in these engagements? Once again, none.
Neither of these companies was spared casualties. Four separate bomb blasts killed two Marines from Bravo Company and wounded nine Marines from Charlie Company. But the Taliban’s rifles were another story. Together the two companies were in about 40 firefights against the main guerrilla force in a nation that is considered, by the conventional wisdom, to be a land of born marksmen. And not a single bullet fired by the Taliban found its mark.
Obviously, American and Afghan soldiers do get shot, which brings us to the third Marine company, which suffered the effects of more accurate fire. As Charlie Company was fighting at Five Points, Kilo Company, Third Battalion, Sixth Marines, was inserted at night by helicopter into three landing zones in northern Marja, where it was soon met by what may have been the stiffest Taliban resistance of the offensive. For nearly 10 days, Kilo Company was engaged in small-arms fighting. In the first four or five days, the fighting was widespread, often with several firefights occurring simultaneously as different patrols and different platoons on different missions were locked up in skirmishes at once. On the second day of fighting, one skirmish alone, between two platoons and large groups of Taliban fighters, lasted off and on from early morning until night.
Within a week or 10 days, eight of the company’s Marines had been shot, two fatally, and two Afghan soldiers had been shot as well, including one who died. This is a large number compared with the experiences of the other two companies, but it is a small number when set against Kilo Company’s size, and when considered in the context and the volume of Taliban fire.
First, about the size. In all, Kilo Company had on the order of 300 men assigned to it, including engineers, dog handlers, bomb disposal and intelligence specialists, interpreters and an Afghan infantry platoon. (Note: Embed rules forbid precise descriptions of unit and team sizes, so the numbers of the various units that made up Kilo Company on this mission are mashed together here and rounded.)
Now the context. On many days, Kilo Company’s patrols would be ambushed while crossing flat, open ground, with no vegetation concealing the Marines’ movements and no place to take cover without running a couple of hundred yards or more. Often many Taliban gunmen would open fire simultaneously, and a large number of rounds would fly into the area where the patrol walked. Rounds would snap and buzz past helmets. Rounds would thump all around in the dirt. But usually no one would be struck. It happened again and again.
When Marines did get hit, it often appeared that the fire came from PK machine guns or the local contingent of snipers – not the riflemen who make the Taliban’s rank-and-file. One day, after a few hours of fighting in which the Taliban had not yet hit any Marines, a corporal from Second Platoon stood upright, exposing himself above the waist and looking over a wall as bullets flew high overhead. He didn’t flinch. “What’s everybody ducking for?” he said. He cupped his hand to his mouth and shouted an expletive-laden taunt at the Taliban gunmen shooting from concealment on the opposite side of a field. The editors would never allow the corporal’s words to be printed here. But they amounted to this: You guys can’t shoot.
Yes, some of this was probably adrenaline and undiluted cockiness, the kind of behavior that Marines can thrive on. But this cockiness was not just attitude. It reflected a discernible truth. Much of the incoming fire was not coming close. (Later in that same fight, some of the fire did come close, as at least one sniper arrived on the Taliban side; we’ll show video of that soon). But at this point in the battle, any number of adjectives might be applied to the Taliban fighters on the far side of the open ground. They were resourceful, organized, clever, brave. In the main, however, they could not shoot.
For those of you who have served in Afghanistan, or been exposed to gunfighting there via other jobs, your input would be welcome. One of the company commanders shared his insights in an interview soon after the fighting at Marja tapered off. In the annals of the Afghan war, Afghans are supposedly crack shots, some of the best marksmen on earth. Captain Karabin, a veteran of the war in Iraq, summed up neatly a rifle company’s experience that pointed otherwise. “I used to say in Iraq that I’m only alive because Iraqis are such bad shots,” he said. “And now I’ll say it in Afghanistan. I’m only alive because the Afghans are also such bad shots.”
COMMENTS
I met an American sniper who trained Afghans in the Eighties. He said it took him ages to convince them to shoot from a prone position, which they felt was cowardly. Guess not much has changed.
Yes, the skills of Afghani marksmen are greatly exaggerated. Here is what is not greatly exaggerated:
a. Their fear of dying
b. Their tendency to bully the weak with extreme prejudice (average Afghans are more afraid of Afghan police than they are of Americans)
c. Their refusal to surrender
Perhaps a, b & c trumps being a poor shot.
Fascinating post. Thank you. I hope that you will attempt to explain why the Taliban fighters are not able to improve their marksmanship (training, discipline, etc.). I will now, sadly, return to my desk-bound work day.
This isn't the first time I have seen this reported. A year or two ago an interview with Canadian soldiers in Kandahar said the same thing. That is that Taliban are generally poor shots. They also said they tended to use repetitive tactics and if on the same ground even the same locations. The Talibans advantages are low investment in fighters, knowing the ground, being use to harsh conditions and there requiring little in the way of supply and not needing to hold ground. When they hold a position generally this should be described as a poor tactical decision
A substantial percentage of individuals world wide suffer from myopia, which probably is the case amongst the Taliban as well; in general, the developing world has a limited or nonexistent prescription eye ware use, and I think it's generous to consider Afghanistan "developing". I doubt the Taliban's health care coverage, such as it is, has a very generous prescription policy. Additionally, the high altitude of Afghanistan increases the likelihood of cataracts due to increased ultraviolet exposure and again, there are probably limited cataract extractions, Ray-ban or Oakley options as well. Lacking extant shopping malls replete with optical shops and sun glass kiosks, and often squinting, half-blind, and sun burned, it's amazing that the Taliban do as well as they do. And I'm fairly certain that they don't get their daily multivitamin - thus their night vision, in the absence of vitamin A, is not going to be too good. Certainly nothing to compete with a night vision scope common to the Marines.
However, this does emphasize the generally wretched health options available to the Afghani.
After reading this article and reading the other posts I feel obligated to add to this post. Having worked with the Afghan Militias and operating in the southern regions on different occassions I found that the new Afghan soldier/ police officers are all notoriously bad shots. This is due to several reasons. First was the introduction to automatic fire and weapons to the battle field. The other is the belief that Allah will guide your bullet. Having recovered many many caches of weapons while in country we always found stores of Mausers and Enfield rifles in the caches but failed to find many AK 47/74 type weapons. This is due to the status symbol the AK brings to the soldier. Because of this the younger soldiers were never taught to really shoot or even maintain their weapons. The old spray and pray marksnmanship now comes to play. Many of todays taliban were born during the Russian or Post-Russian era in Afghanistan. The older veterans are tired of fighting. On one such occassion we had taken some of the mausers and ammunition to the range. One of our hired workers who was approximately 50 yrs old came along to clean up the area and help. He may have also been curious! During the event we were practicing marksmanship with captured weapons and ammunition. The American soldiers were really impressed with the accurracy of the bolt action rifles and their range. I had noticed our Afghan worker had started coaching some of our troops and offered him the chance to shoot. He accepted and proceeded to school the American soldiers on marksmanship. I later found he had been Mujhadeen fighting the Russians. After offering him a position with our militia he proceeded to turn us down. He said he was tired of fighting and just wanted to keep his position supervising the kids we hired for general labor and trach collectors on our base. The older Afghans who learned to shoot with old single shot and bolt action rifles still know how to shoot and shoot well. Fortunately for us, they are tired of fighting and not interested in choosing any side in this conflict. Our worst nightmare would be a couple hundred older soldiers with the old Mausers and the knowledge to use them. Our problems would greatly multiply fast as would our casualty rates.
I'm not sure what the point of this article is... The only time I was under the impression that Afghans were good marksmen was when I was much younger, reading the books of Rudyard Kipling (mentioned in this post). At no point in the 5 years that I've been in the Army have I heard anything suggesting that basic, "rank-and-file" insurgents were anything other than extraordinarily poor marksmen (not to take away from their savvy as insurgents, or their courage). It is also common knowledge that the insurgents are capable of fielding veteran snipers. The snipers--usually foreign fighters--were and are universally respected--but are not accorded reputed skill due to their nationality, but to their training.
This common knowledge extends to indirect capabilities. Based on stories and extensive experience, the insurgents are mostly untrained at firing rockets or mortar systems; those exceptional crews who can employ those systems effectively are usually targeted and neutralized pretty quickly.
The insurgents are, for the most part, inaccurate riflemen for the following reasons (I'm drawing on 2-year-old firsthand experience):
1) their training is inadequate. Any rifleman who properly-zeros his weapon, fires it regularly, and keeps it well-maintained should be able to hit a point target at 75% of the rifle's maximum effective range (say, 150m for an AK-47 and 225m for an M4. Rough numbers). The insurgents do not properly zero their weapons, maintain them adequately but not exceptionally, and don't practice taking well-aimed shots.
2) there is a strong strand of fatalism in their philosophy that dictates that all actions are in God's hands, hence the phrase "Inshallah." One can imagine with little difficulty what effect that has on someone firing a weapon system.
3) all insurgent weapons are capable of firing on the full automatic setting, even their rifles (AK-47). The U.S. Army conducted research following Vietnam that established that the extraordinary volume of fire and expenditure of ammunition versus enemy killed or wounded was due to poor fire discipline with a then-fully automatic M16. Since that time, there has been a "burst" setting, which all riflemen are dissuaded from using in favor of taking well-aimed shots.
4)Many of the Afghan insurgents are from agricultural communities where there is no need for a background with firearms (save with tribal disputes). They are not hunters. They are young, so have no military background from the Russian war on which to draw. If you took a farmer from Idaho who'd never fired a weapon, gave him a rifle, let him shoot it for a couple weeks, then threw him into battle against any professional army, he wouldn't do very well.
5) we are well-trained in small-arms tactics, one of the principals of which is to deliver a strong volume of fire at known or suspected enemy positions as quickly as possible to suppress enemy fire. Once enemy fire has been suppressed--not stopped, but suppressed--the accuracy of enemy fire is reduced dramatically, as their primary concern becomes seeking or maintaining cover, rather than inflicting casualties.
This is all common knowledge among soldiers, and has been for years. I guess I'm just wondering what the angle is for this article, who the intended audience is. Civilian fans of Rudyard Kipling who have no friends in the military and have thusly not been over-exposed to returning veterans' combat stories? If so, it probably doesn't require an extended expose, maybe just a couple pages with the salient points highlighted, and summarized as follows: people unaccustomed to using a particular tool are as a general rule not very good at using said tool. With a nod to Kant, who says that Experience without Theory is blind (or a bad shot), while Theory without Experience is mere intellectual play.
It could be that I'm the one who's backwards. What are the "oft-repeated legends" of the Afghan riflemen you reference? I've never heard them--outside ancient history / literature--maybe I'm just out of touch.
Being in a military unit doesn’t mean that one is proficient with a rifle, consider any individual from any unit in our own armed forces. Outside of military / militia activity how much shooting is done by civilians in Afghanistan? How much long range hunting. competitive marksmanship? I’ll guess little. What type of weapons are being used, scoped rifles designed to engage targets at longer ranges, say at least out to 500 meters, or AK47s?
I enjoyed target shooting and use to shoot ‘high power rifle’, the typical ranges were 200, 300 and 600 yards, iron sights, slow and rapid fire in shooting different positions with no rests. I recall people sometimes showing up with SKS/AK47s, and they gave up at the 300 yard line if not earlier. These were people who had the opportunity to practice, may have been proficient otherwise, but were handicapped by a weapon designed for shorter ranges.
Comparing Afghans to Marines regarding marksmanship isn’t really fair, as it would also be unfair to compare soldiers or sailors coming out of basic training from the US forces to Marines coming out of boot camp. I recall spending one week in boot camp ‘dry firing’, just learning how to hold the rifle and sight it, before spending a week qualifying. Then we also had the opportunity to fire during infantry training. All marines were required to qualify with their issue weapons at least once a year, as a basic tenant was that every Marine was a rifleman. We had a lot of expert rifleman as the M16 was easier to qualify with than the M14 or the M1 Garand, something seen currently in high power rifle target shooting as the M16 seems and the civilian versions seem to be favored over the traditional, older rifles mentioned.
An interesting comparison on marksmanship would be to compare the Afghans engaging the Marines with US trained and equipped Afghans.
Had the friendly Afghans who had been working with us when we invaded the country been supplied accurate weapons at the start of the conflict, we may very well have won this by now. The worlds best mountain fighters need the most accurate weapons to bridge the gap to their vaulted historic skills again.
I think we're going to have to face the fact that our military as a whole is being run very poorly. Too much for the guys on top, too little for the common soldier. Instead of dismantling the Afghan forces allied with us and training them anew, all we need have done was supplement their own natural abilities, then have them train our soldiers in the secrets of the the place. It's their country after all.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for Afghans that couldn’t shoot straight, but I seriously doubt that all of them are that bad. Maybe the recent generation of the mujahidin is handicapped, but maybe the previous generation some 25 years ago was real hard core – they managed to kick the Soviets out. And that’s no joke – Russians had some of the most effective paratrooper formations reinforced with spetsnaz. But for all I care, let them stay dumb and blind, and maybe it will save a few American lives who are trying to help these shmucks.
I remember from a British observer of the pre-9/11 Afghan civil wars. The US had just gone into Afghanistan for the first time and there was a lot of speculation about the supposed high fighting qualities of the Mujahadeen/Taliban. He rejected the idea that the Afghans were expert fighters and stated that most Afghan clashes were a lot of firing with very few casualties, followed by mutual disengagement.
A rrifle is a tool, tools have specific uses, and tools require practice. My theory is that culturally Afghans treat a rifle as more of an accessory, like a handbag, something every male is expected to carry but not necessarily become an expert with.
Ben is right. if you look at the various video clips of the Taliban, al Quaeda and any other third world army or liberation front, the weapon is invariably the AK-47. The AK, while a robust and soldier proof weapon, is not designed as a marksman's weapon; unlike previous generations of bolt action and first generation semi-automatice weapons. it is an assault rifle, intended to put out a high volume of fire that will force the other guy to keep his head down until you can get close enough to not miss. It has a fixed 200 meter site and reflects the Red Army doctrine that if you put enough metal in the target area, you will eventually get a hit just by sheer random chance. The net result is the spray and pray approach to marksmentship around the world. Clips of Russian troops and third world militias invariable show them spraying the area with their AK's rather than using controlled, aimed fire.
The AK is emblematic of the trend away from "real" rifles, such as the M-14 and FN FAL, firing large calibre, highpowered rounds over long ranges and associated marksmentship training toward the saturation fire approach. Good shooting requires practice, discipline and lots of ammunition -i.e. money and more importantly time. lots of time, invested in training . The focus today is all too often on quantity, simply pushing people through quickie courses to get the numbers, rather than quality that comes from taking the time to get it right. this has been a reqcurring complaint with regard to the Afghan forces.
An interesting if a a bit over done post. The enemy is not 10 fee tall -- imagine that! I just spent a month in P2K wandering around the 4/25 AOR. The experience there is similar -- Taliban open fire at 300+meters, realizing they have maybe 10 minutes before their world comes to an end. Spray and pray is the operative concept. They fire and run away -- quickly. The objective is to get us to respond w/indiscrimate indirect fire and cause civilian casualties, period. All the soldiers I talked to had little concern with being shot, but getting blown up by an IED -- a different matter altogether. The Taliban have successfully taken this weapon and used it to change the battlefield -- denying us freedom maneuver, forcing us into large, ponderous convoy operations to keep outposts resupplied, and forcing us away from the people we're supposed to be defending as we rumble around in our behemouth MRAPs.
I've never heard legends of Afghan marksmanship. I've been under the impression that it's the difficult terrain and persistance of the afghan militiaman that makes Afghanistan such an imposing place to fight a war.
One thing you might want to pursue is the impact of experience on the accuracy of afghan fighters. I would tend to assume that the innacurate shooters are the ones who are young and have little to no experience/training (which is if you think about it, is all marksmanship is: experience and training). Perhaps some of the older Afghans who have been fighting for 30 + years are much better shots than the 17 year-old farm kid they're fighting alongside.
Couldn't we also assume that many of the expert and veteran fighters have been killed (the war has been going on for 8 years after all, and we have been inflicting substantial casualties on the insurgents) and the core of the rank and file militia replacing them today are inexperienced kids?
I think there are numerous factors at play here and I would be reluctant to say that Afghans, on the whole, are bad shooters. No statement that broad can be true.
I remember my father telling me that automatic weapons from his day(World War II) were not accurate. While the US was way behind Germany and even Britain in deploying automatic weapons among infantry, I doubt that the extreme shuddering and jolting they cause, is helpful, and it makes aiming more than problematic, leaving the gunner to just point and shoot in a general direction. I know this happened among US troops at times in Vietnam , where the enemy was often invisible.
Modern infantry weapons are a pain to carry and all that ammunition is heavy. No one want to die and thus only fools will expose themselves,(no matter what anyone says).
While once, a rifle was a valuable and difficult to obtain treasure. Something passed from father to son like a holy relic, almost.
Powder had to be obtained and shot, and guns got off only one shot at a time in those days. It is possible men cultivated their aiming skills then, and made greater efforts to excel at it even if they were myopic.
With the advent of cheap, automatic machine guns, less value may now be placed on accuracy than on firepower. Battles are faster paced(motorcycles in a ditch-Americans with helicopters). Who has time (or eyes) to take careful aim.
Anyway, I am sure that many of the great stories about the aim of American riflemen on the "frontier" were as overblown and colorful as the stories about Afghan aim.
Besides, how could the Brits explain being beaten by a bunch of myopic farmers who couldn't hit the broad side of a barn? Make them supermen with rifles, of course!
Marines have the best marksmanship and they train hard to make every bullet count since you have to carry every round. No other organization trains average combatants to this level of marksmanship. It is a key element in Marine doctrine that every Marine is a rifleman. Good for our troops that the current Afghan combatant does not get good basic marksmanship training.
The Fable may still be right but in a perspective. Afghans of today and those from the past (Like Rudyard Kiplings') must be different in marksmanship skills keeping in view the arms they have been handling. I remember most tribesmen (age 7 & above) carry rifles and engage in competitive target shooting as part of a wedding ceremony. The same people carry assault rifles (AK 47) now, mainly because of the cost of ammunition. The fashion now is to put more & more stary bullets into the air rather than excelling in target shooting. Thus skills vary with the kind of arms they handle and the culture that evolves with time. Majority of the Afghan army are low paid poor people with a low morale and weak will to fight their own people (especially in the pro & anti Islam psychological paradigm). So the level of their marksmanship is the result of their own circumstances.
Awesome, Mr. Chivers, awesome!
It is scary but to the point. It is not to say that they are sub-standard soldiers but are not well-enough trained in weaponry that would give them the skills that are required for the modern battlefield. The reasons for this are obviously pointed out in the story and comments.
It is nice to see the myths of the Afghan prowess at turfing the multitude of would-be conqueror invaders being exposed for the facile comment that it is. Knowing your adversaries' abilities does much to make the fight easier to work with. There are no bases from which the Taliban/al Qaeda murdering terrorists can muster their troops for target practice which is a good thing. They don't have these bases because they have been deprived of these because the Allied Troops have been chasing them around for years.
For years, much like the 'Killer of Empires', there is the myth of the murdering terrorists being called anything and everything that can be construed as not bestowing their ilk with the reputation of the murdering terrorists that they are.
America, Canada and many other nations could become the same if we did nothing to remove serial killers from our midst. These purported leaders of the war against the infidels are nothing more than serial killers in the disguise of Holy men.
You can call a spade a shovel and still get the concept to be understood.
God Bless the Troops. God Keep them Safe.
It's absurd to believe that an average Afghan is a better shot than an average foreigner. Being a good marksman is not genetic; it takes training and exposure to develop skills.
Most Taliban foot soldiers -- the ones who do the fighting in the trenches -- and Afghan police and army soldiers are uneducated, unemployed and often the least respected members of society. They fight because they have few other prospects. Expecting them to be legendary marksmen is not only a mistake but an unfair expectation.
The US weapons are manufacturered to tighter tolerances, and equiped with the best optical sights. Ordinance specialists who maintain the weapons travel with each large military unit. US Marines in particular will fire several thousand rounds in practice bfore deployment and will fire wepaons at least once per week to insure function and once per month to insure accuracy.
How can poor tribesman compete against that? Instead of the conslusion that Afghans are lousey shots, the correct conclusion should be that they are smart tacticians in not going muzzle to muzzle with Marines but instead relying on IEDs and intimidation.
At the age of sixty I vividly recall my teenage years, when Vietnam rarely left the evening news reports. At that time I could not comprehend why teenagers of my age were being sent to Asia to fight and die in a foreign war. I and my friends often talked about the daily count of body bags being brought back to air bases around the USA, especially in 1969 when I was eighteen. Years later having read why and how America became involved in the conflict, I came to one conclusion, Politian’s care little for those who they represent, image and prestige for them is the order of the day. It’s apparent that a news blackout has ensured that the repatriation of fallen US soldiers being brought back from Afghanistan is being enacted with orders from those who have never risked their lives for their country and have no intention of doing so. Having watched recently two programmes aired by National Geographic, concerning the Afghan conflict which included the forlorn sight of relatives visiting Arlington cemetery and a shocking insight at a casualty clearing station, my heart goes out to those involved in this unwinnable conflict. As a young boy my late father often told me about the American GIs who came to Walsall in 1943, in the preparation for the D-Day landings, generous and brave men who often bought a round of drinks in the pub, most British working men had little money at that time. The same GIs in their thousands headed south, crossed the English Channel and fought their way into Germany. I don’t forget those brave soldiers, who gave me the chance to live in freedom. Throughout Europe I have often visited cemeteries, where so many American soldiers lie, yet as the years go by those who gained freedom at their expense soon forget the past and its conflicts. I hope the present conflict will soon end, and the dreams of many will not be destroyed by the evilness of the few.
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