This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Breaking News

  • RIP Vernon J. Baker

    The Washington Post reports that the sole liveing African American MOH recipient of WWII has left us.

    First Lt. Vernon J. Baker, 90, an Army infantryman who, more than 50 years after the end of World War II, became the only surviving African American to receive the Medal of Honor for his heroic actions during the war, died July 13 at his home near St. Maries, Idaho.

    The article goes on to describe Lt. baker’s actions agaionst the Germans in Italy.  It reads like something out of a movie:

    Two hours after starting their mission on April 5, Lt. Baker and his men came within 300 yards of the castle. While attempting to find a suitable place for a machine gun, Lt. Baker observed two rifle barrels hanging out of a concealed slit in some rocky earth.

    After stealthily crawling to the opening, he popped up and emptied the clip of his M-1 rifle into the observation post, killing two sentries.

    While searching for more camouflaged emplacements, Lt. Baker spotted a machine-gun nest occupied by two soldiers distracted by their breakfast. He shot and killed them both.

    A German soldier then hurled a grenade that landed at Lt. Baker’s feet. Undeterred, he fired two fatal rounds at the fleeing German, while the grenade by Lt. Baker’s boots failed to explode.

    He found the door to another bunker and blasted it open with a grenade. A wounded German soldier stumbled out in confusion, and Lt. Baker shot him. After tossing in a second grenade, he raided the bunker with a submachine gun blazing, killing two more Germans.

    Apparently, Baker spent 23 years in the Army and retired in 1968.  My favorite part of the article was the end:

    He spent much of his later life hunting big game in Idaho. During one expedition, he discovered a mountain lion lurking behind him. After receiving his Medal of Honor, Lt. Baker was asked by Clinton what happened to the cougar.

    “Why, it’s in my freezer,” Lt. Baker said. “I’m going to eat him.”

    BZ Lt.  Rest In Peace

  • Shooting at Fort Gillem. One Soldier dead.

    A very recent story coming from the US Army Times reports that a reserve soldier died after being shot by another reserve soldier.

    An Army reservist was shot to death and another was in custody Thursday at a post south of Atlanta that is a gathering place for area reserve units.

    Army spokesman Col. Dan Baggio said the victim died at the Army Reserve Center located on Fort Gillem. He could not offer specifics about the shooting that happened between 4:30 and 5 p.m.

    Authorities said they were withholding the names of the soldiers until they can notify family members, but did say both were men.

    There does not seem to be any known motive at this time.

  • FBI raids related to Times Square bombing attempt nab 2

    Fox News is reporting that the FBI have arrested two people in Boston. The arrests are somehow related to the Times Square bombing;

    FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on Thursday morning executed search warrants in “several locations in the Northeast,” a statement from ICE said.

    At least one of the federal raids was in Watertown, Mass., a Boston suburb. Two search warrants related to the case were also executed on Long Island in New York.

    Authorities are looking into whether the Boston-area men or others may have had any role in the Times Square plot or any prior knowledge of it.

    The Wall Street Journal reports that the raids were attempts to follow Shahzad’s financing;

    The raids are part of the FBI effort to track down the sources of cash suspect Faisal Shahzad used to finance the bombing attempt, U.S. officials said. Investigators have focused on money couriers, commonly used in immigrant communities, as a possible way Mr. Shahzad got the cash, though there’s no indication anyone handling the money knew Mr. Shahzad’s intention to use it to build a bomb, officials said.

    So apparently Shahzad is talking which has prompted the Obama Administration to consider tweaking the Miranda warning for terrorist according to the Washington Post;

    The announcement marked a potentially significant change by the administration as it tries to manage the politics of national security after repeatedly coming under fire, mainly from conservatives, for being too willing to read Miranda rights to terrorism suspects. The administration is trying to thread a difficult needle: of taking a harder line on terrorism while staying within the confines of the criminal justice system.

    Yeah, the problem isn’t conservatives – the problem is terrorists who are too willing to use our system and sense of justice against us. It looks like they may be lucking out with this particular drama queen (like they have with the whole Shahzad incident from the beginning since it appears that he’s a chickenshit, incompetent boob – the Mr. Bean of our homegrown terrorists, if you will). I think we’ve about used up all of our luck. The next guy probably won’t leave the keys to his get away car inside his bomb.

    UODATE: It’s up to three arrests now.

  • Pakistani held in Chile for traces of explosives in US embassy

    So this Pakistani guy walks into the US Embassy in Santiago and sets off explosives detectors, but I’m sure that’s pretty common. It’s probably not-at-all related to terrorism;

    Embassy detectors were set off by traces of bomb-making substances when Mohammed Saif Ur Rehman went in for an interview, said Mario Schilling, a spokesman for the prosecutor in the case.

    Schilling did not elaborate on what kind of explosives were involved or say whether Rehman, 28, was suspected of any criminal activity.

    U.S. Ambassador Paul Simon told Chile’s radio Cooperativa that it doesn’t seem to have been an attack.

    “It was just traces and they were detected during the interview,” Simon said, referring further questions to police.

    In Washington, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said the suspect already held a U.S. visa, and had been invited to the Embassy “to clarify the information we had on him.” Crowley declined to say more about that information.

    “Just traces”. See, nothing to worry about. “Just traces” have never been tied to any real explosions. He was probably just building bombs to blow up something not American and forgot to wash his grubby paws. That’s why he was in the Embassy-they have great plumbing.

  • Tragedy for Poland

    Some of you may have already read that a plane heading for Russia crashed with no survivors. What makes this different from other tragic plane crashes is that it held the senior leadership of Poland to include the President Lech Kaczynski.

    The crash devastated the upper echelons of Poland’s political and military establishments. On board were the army chief of staff, the navy chief commander, and heads of the air and land forces. Also killed were the national bank president, deputy foreign minister, army chaplain, head of the National Security Office, deputy parliament speaker, Olympic Committee head, civil rights commissioner and at least two presidential aides and three lawmakers, the Polish foreign ministry said.

    So this is going to be complicated in how Poland will react will to the sudden loss of these people.

    Rossiya-24 showed hundreds of people around the Katyn monument, many holding Polish flags, some weeping.

    Poland’s parliament speaker, the acting president, declared a week of national mourning. Tusk called for two minutes of silence at noon (1000GMT) Sunday.

    “The contemporary world has not seen such a tragedy,” he said.

  • Militia Raids by Feds in three states

    Fox News reports that the FBI raided several enclaves of militia groups in three states this weekend, resulting in several arrests;

    Federal warrants were sealed, but FBI spokeswoman Sandra Berchtold said there had been activity in two southwest Michigan counties near the Ohio state line. She wouldn’t say whether they were tied to the raids in the other states.

    FBI spokesman Scott Wilson in Cleveland said agents arrested two people Saturday after raids in two towns in Ohio. A third arrest was made in northeast Illinois on Sunday, a day after a raid took place just over the border in northwest Indiana.

    A U.S. official told the Associated Press on the condition of anonymity that some of the people arrested face gun charges.

    While Fox mentions only three arrests, the Detroit News says there were seven in Michigan alone;

    On Sunday, a source close to the investigation in Washington, D.C. confirmed that FBI agents were conducting activities in Washtenaw and Lenawee counties over the weekend in connection to Hutaree, a Christian militia group. Detroit FBI Special Agent Sandra Berchtold told The Detroit News the federal warrants in the case are under court seal and declined further comment.

    It is difficult to tell what beef the Feds had with the militia groups from the reportage, but nonetheless, the Left (most noticeably, Little Green Footballs) is using the raids to prove that there are terrorists on the Right who are a bigger threat to our security than the others. Another Left Winger, at The Reaction, says it’s about time;

    For all the focus of Islamic jihadism, which indeed deserves such focus, it’s about time Americans woke up and realized that one of the truly gravest threats to their country comes from within, from far-right militia groups, usually linked either to Nazism or to Christianity (or to both).

    I thought Nazism IS Christianity. That’s what I get from trolling the depths of Leftist *ahem* thought.

    Of course, on Friday, when the militia groups actually helped police in Michigan, Mark Potok, Southern Poverty Law Center’s chief bomb-thrower was quick to disparage the groups helping police search for lost people;

    One militia watchdog group said the township supervisor crossed a line by enlisting help from the local militia.

    “When officials welcome people like this in their capacity as militias, they help mainstream these ideas and these ideas can become dangerous,” said Mark Potok with the Southern Poverty Law Center.

    I guess Potok wants to outlaw “ideas”.

    UPDATE: According to Fox News, the arrestees had been planning to kill cops.

    Nine suspects tied to a militia in the Midwest are charged with conspiring to kill police officers, then attack a funeral in the hopes of killing more law enforcement people, federal prosecutors said Monday.

    No one I know does that – and it’s pretty likely that other militia groups aided police.

    ADDED: Some guy named MOTHAX at The Burn Pit wrote some familiar-sounding stuff today in relation to the SPLC.

  • When truthers go wild

    A gunman by the name of John Patrick Bedell, 36, of Hollister, Calif. pulled out a hand gun last night at the Pentagon Metro Station in Virginia last night. Pentagon police returned fire and sent the little coward to the hospital where he died from his injuries. Good!

    The Washington Times reveals that Bedell was a 9/11 truther;

    Signs emerged that Bedell harbored ill feelings toward the government and the armed forces, and had questioned the circumstances behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

    In an Internet posting, a user by the name JPatrickBedell wrote that he was “determined to see that justice is served” in the death of Marine Col. James Sabow, who was found dead in the backyard of his California home in 1991. The death was ruled a suicide but the case has long been the source of theories of a cover up.

    The user named JPatrickBedell wrote the Sabow case was “a step toward establishing the truth of events such as the September 11 demolitions.”

    That same posting railed against the government’s enforcement of marijuana laws and included links to the author’s 2006 court case in Orange County, Calif., for cultivating marijuana and resisting a police officer. Court records available online show the date of birth on the case mentioned by the user JPatrickBedell matches that of the John Patrick Bedell suspected in the shooting.

    I’d never heard of this James Sabow, so I went looking and found some real nutty shit. Apparently, the story of James Sabow rolls a butt load of conspiracies into one, so the nutters have a single story to which they can point for all of their nutty stories. That “Salem-News” website is the same one that posts all of Gordon Duff’s nutter theories. Oddly enough, this particular article was written merely one day before the shooting at the Pentagon Metro Station.

    It seems to me that Bedell probably had help in that he was from California and certainly didn’t bring two 9mm pistols with him on a flight – someone had to give them to him here.

    Here’s the latest from this morning’s early press conference at about 6am, local time.

    (more…)

  • Murtha dead

    Fox announces John Murtha is dead at 77 years old. Links to be added as available.

    Wikipedia marks death.

    Fox reports Murtha’s death.

    Blast from the past;

    John Murtha, Hero of the War Protesters;

    Gruff, jowly John Murtha wouldn’t seem to be a Code Pink kinda guy, what with his appetite for pork and his pro-gun, antiabortion Marine hero bona fides.

    But there the congressman was, in a Rayburn House Office Building hallway, gallantly protecting some war protesters from the group who had been tossed out of a hearing room and threatened with arrest.

    “He said ‘I know these people,’ he gave me his hand and said we wouldn’t be arrested,” said Medea Benjamin, a San Francisco human rights activist who was doing her earnest best Tuesday to end the war when her lobbying methods provoked the displeasure of the U.S. Capitol Police. Code Pink ladies on one side; uniforms on the other. In the middle, the impressive bulk of 74-year-old Murtha. He called the sergeant at arms and didn’t leave until he was assured the women would be released, Benjamin said.

    Code Pink Praises Murtha, Picketed Military Hospital

    Code Pink’s co-founder, Gael Murphy, and its coordinator for the Washington, D.C., area, Allison Yorra, met with Murtha earlier this month “to thank him for his courageous stand on Iraq.

    “We presented him with our pink badge of courage and pink flowers sent by CODEPINK members nationwide,” a statement on the group’s website indicates. “Rep Murtha was very appreciative of these gestures as he has been receiving many responses to his public denouncement of the war.”

    Photographs on the Code Pink website show Murtha holding the pink flowers and standing arm-in-arm with Murphy and Yorra. There is no mention of the meeting with Code Pink or the award presented to Murtha on his congressional website.

    John Murtha press conference;

    Now, two days after I made my statement, on November 19th, we had an incident in Haditha in Anbar province, where a Marine was killed with an IED. Time magazine reported it, and it’s kind of a puzzling report, because they’re investigating it right now. Let me tell you what the consequences of this have been.

    It’s much worse than reported in Time magazine. There was no fire fight. There was no IED that killed these innocent people. Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood. And that’s what the report is going to tell.

    John Murtha in an interview with Chris Matthews;

    MATTHEWS: Mr. Murtha, let me ask you about this accusation that you have come out with today, that U.S. service people fighting in Iraq killed civilians in cold blood. What evidence do you have on that now?

    MURTHA: Well, “Time Magazine” …

    MATTHEWS: Was this melee? I mean, was this a case of — when you say cold blood, Congressman, a lot of people think you’re basically saying you have got some civilians sitting in a room or out in a field and they’re executed just on purpose…

    MURTHA: That’s exactly what happened.

    John Murtha in an interview with Wolf Blitzer;

    BLITZER: There’s an investigation of what happened at Haditha. …you’ve suggested this week that there in effect was a massacre. …

    MURTHA: Well there was. There’s no question about it…

    BLITZER: The Marines say they’re still investigating. They don’t know what happened yet. The pentagon says the same thing. How do you know what happened?

    MURTHA: Wolf, you read the “Time” magazine articles. There are pictures, there are photos. You don’t have to talk to the military about the proof.

    Article from Washington Post referring to the arrest of four Marines;

    Attention to the case increased earlier this year when Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) alleged after briefings from military officials that the Marines had killed civilians “in cold blood.”