Considering all the fammine that is going on in places like Somalia why has there not been aid set there by Code Pink similar to the two failed ‘missions’ to the Gaza Strip. The anwer to that question is this. Real life threating personal risk. Consider the case below.
Residents of Mogadishu’s largest famine refugee camp accused government soldiers of starting the chaos by trying to steal some of the 290 tons of dry rations that aid workers were trying to distribute there. Then refugees joined in the scramble, prompting soldiers to open fire, the witnesses said.
“They fired on us as if we were their enemy,” said refugee Abidyo Geddi. “When people started to take the food then the gunfire started and everyone was being shot. We cannot stay here much longer. We don’t get much food and the rare food they bring causes death and torture.”
You see all that gunpower would just ruin thier stylish outfits and seriously reduce the odd of liveing longer. Plus it was not done by US, NATO or IDF troops so does it really matter.
Somali soldiers control just part of the capital and are poorly trained.
“It was carnage. They ruthlessly shot everyone,” said Abdi Awale Nor, who has been living at the camp. “Even dead bodies were left on the ground and other wounded bled to death.”
Oh and Code Pink continues to ignore how to deal with this problem that many aid groups face.
Aid workers are puzzling over how to help the starving without helping gunmen who either prey on the refugees, compete for security contracts to guard the food, or steal it and take a share of the profits when it’s sold at market.
Or how to protect the aid workers without contradicting themselves about the use of weapons for defence.
Since the era of Black Hawk Down, aid groups say they have tried to tighten up their procedures by screening contractors, having independent checks on their operations and requiring truckers to pay a cash bond to ensure the food is delivered. Some say that Somalia is still too volatile to work in: WFP alone has had 14 employees killed in the past three years. Most foreign aid workers pulled out two years ago after a spate of killings and kidnappings
So what is it going to be Code Pink? Another useless poltically motivated trip to Gaza or are you going to do something meaningful rather then just talk about it.
UPDATED: Here is a link to the list of groups that are activly working in that area right now. Guess who is not on the list.
Old Trooper sends us a link about a company in Salinas, California that sucked more than a half-million dollars from the town seducing them into believing that they had a plan to build “green cars” that would solve all of the world’s problem. But as it turns out, a half-million samolians weren’t quite enough and the company went tits-up before the first car rolled off the assembly line;
The start-up company promised city leaders that it would create 70 new jobs and pay $700,000 in taxes a year to Salinas.
Green Vehicles was supposed to be up and running by March 2010 inside their 80,000 square-foot space at Firestone Business Park off of Abbot Street.
Ryan had lofty goals, listing his company’s mission as: “To make the best clean commuter vehicles in the world; To manufacture with a radical sense of responsibility; To engage in deep transparency as an inspiration for new ways of doing business.”
Green Vehicles designed two vehicles, the TRIAC 2.0 and the MOOSE, which it planned to manufacture.
On July 12, Ryan wrote a blog post announcing that his company was closing.
That’s classy, writing a blog post to let everyone know you burned up all of their cash. I’m sure my employer would be impressed if I resigned from the paying job on this blog instead of face-to-face.
Ryan outlined three mistakes he made while steering his company into a brick wall. All three reasons boiled down failing to generate enough capital.
Funny how fast you can burn through other people’s money so quickly. Just like the city that gave away hundreds of thousands of dollars they were given by the tax payers. Twice. After the company didn’t produce last year, they dumped a few hundred thousand more into the unicorn-fart powered cars. Oh, and they claim they collapsed because a grant from the state never materialized – i guess the state isn’t all that stupid after all.
I guess that’s what the hippies mean when they say that we only need to invest more money into these schemes to make “green energy” possible.
You probably remember Ann Wright whom I’ve written about before. She’s a major drama queen and member of Code Pink, Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans For Peace. She also sat on the board of OpTruth, the precursor of Paul Rieckoff’s Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. Well today she’s in Greece awaiting her personal invasion of the Gaza Strip.
Luckily for her, the Israelis warned Grecian authorities that the boats the hippies were about to sail were unsafe. Earlier today, Medea Benjamin said it was a trick to delay them. Now it turns out that the Israelis were right;
“It was pure luck that the damage to the Irish boat was discovered,” said Ann Wright, a spokesman from “The Audacity of Hope”, an American activists’ boat also docked near Athens.
“The damage to the propeller could have caused the ship to sink and those on board to drown. Quite simply it was act of terrorism.”
Of course, the whole point of terrorism is to kill or injure people, ask those Palestinians you’re going to rescue, Ann. What would be the point of Israel’s sabotaging and then warning you about the damage? I’m no naval genius but, I’m still trying figure out how a propeller could sink the boat.
[Israel] is offering to allow the flotilla to dock at the Israeli port of Ashdod and to escort the aid on board to Gaza by land.
Damn sneaky Jooos, being all nice and everything letting the hippies have their way.
The Turkish Mavi Marmara, which was due to be the flagship once again, pulled out at the last minute, under what appeared to be pressure from the government in Ankara.
It must’ve been the Joos in Turkey thatpulled the boat out of the flotilla…oh, wait…
“The delay has been orchestrated by the Israeli state and we urge the Greek government to exert itself as a sovereign country,” Mrs Wright, 64, a former colonel in the US army, said.
“The Israeli state is doing everything within its capability to stop us from making this journey, from sabotage to tying us up in bureaucracy. Well it won’t work. We are determined.” She hinted that the flotilla might depart without the necessary paperwork.
Delaying them by offering to escort them to port and distributing their cargo?
Our buddy Zombie sends us a link to the latest at Pajama Media and Zombie wants justice justice;
I demand justice justice.
No, I don’t have a stutter. What I want is justice for the word “justice” itself.
Because, you see, “justice” has been hijacked by the American left and is now their exclusive weapon. It is no longer a politically neutral word; whenever you see the word “justice” — especially preceded by another noun — it invariably is meant to convey some far-left position.
So some shithole in Oregon, apparently being governed by empty-headed ingrates, has decided that the Pledge of Allegiance is too divisive to recite twenty-four times a year at their Eugene, Oregon bimonthly city council meetings so they limit the recitation to just four times every year (Fox News link).
Clark says all he wanted to do was unite the council and show his more conservative constituents that in this city where diversity is celebrated, their more traditional values also are important.
“It’s a little ironic to see those who have championed the idea of tolerance be less tolerant on this question,” Clark Said. Mayor Kitty Piercy called the Pledge of Allegiance divisive. “If there’s one thing the flag stands for,” Piercy says, “it’s that people don’t have to be compelled to say the Pledge of Allegiance or anything else.”
Kitty Piercy also signs her name to every Code Pink resolution that comes down the pike – I guess Code Pink isn’t divisive at all.
I have an old drinking buddy in Eugene from back in the Cottonbaler days and I suggest to him that he recommend the following resolution to the city council – since they can only summon the patriotism four times a year to say the Pledge of Allegiance before their meetings, they should only have their meetings four times a year, as well. And take a corresponding pay cut.
How can the residents of Eugene trust their city council to legislate in their interests if they can’t even pledge their obedience to the people? So the city council should only meet when they are moved enough by the Pledge to actually say it out loud.
In the past two years Rethink Afghanistan has been actively seeming to go after any General that seeks to combat the Taliban and al qaeda in Afghanistan. They have called for the firing of General McChrystal for complaining about not getting the support that was requested.
McChrystal should have been fired for any number of reasons: his disrespect for the civilian leadership of the U.S., his working of the media to limit President Obama’s political space to adopt strategies in Afghanistan that didn’t include major troop surges, for his role in the Pat Tillman cover-up, etc.
Remember that part because they sure do not remember it. Enter a nameless Colonel that does the exact same thing, except that the Officer sent in a letter directly to the Media. But surely that such a act would have the same reaction from Rethink Afghanistan by such comments. Right?
TIME Magazine’s Battleland blog features an email from an active duty colonel ripping the war wonks at D.C. insider think tanks for pushing more militarism as the answer in Afghanistan. For those that aren’t familiar: there’s a whole cottage industry of think tanks and non-profits pushing for more war, often funded by those with deep ties to the war industry.
Yea I am sure that they are more then willing keep this mystery Officer nameless considering how the last Officer that was used to attempt to get another General fired turned out to be a bust. But that has not stopped them from going after General Petraeus.
The once-seemingly untouchable General David Petraeus is seeing his brainchild roundly rejected in Afghanistan. Counterinsurgency, the doctrine pushed by Petraeus and his protege, General Stanley McChrystal, as the “new” strategy for Afghanistan, has suddenly become the target of fierce criticism within the administration and without. And it’s about time, too: thanks to this failed strategy, U.S. taxpayers are being charged $2 billion a week for a war that’s not making us safer.
Yea and we are the ones that are being accused of yellow journalism.
We got a link from Zombie on the exclusive coverage of the World Naked Bike Ride in San Francisco. The only links I provide are the “Safe for Work” versions. Zombie quotes the sponsoring organization which says the World Naked Bike Ride is “To celebrate cycling and the human body. The ride demonstrates the vulnerability of cyclists on the road and is a protest against oil dependency.”
Of course, anyone who has spent more than a minute on the internet will tell you that people who make political statements with their nudity are the last people that anyone wants to see naked. I still can’t un-see the pictures of Medea Benjamin in the “Breasts Not Bombs” protest whose breasts were only breasts in the strictly academic sense.
So once again Rethink Afghanistan is playing willful ignorance in there newest statement.
In addition, over the past few years, U.S. forces have killed or captured dozens of significant al Qaeda leaders. Then, on May 2, 2011, American Special Forces acting under your direction located and killed Osama bin Laden. The death of the founder of al Qaeda is a major blow that further weakens the terrorist organization.
But wait, this is the organization that decried the operations of Special Forces in Afghanistan not long ago. Even coming out and saying that the Special Operations in Afghanistan were the cause of increased civilian deaths. Also claiming that the missions done by the Special Forces like the one that eliminated Osama were not having any effect what so ever and should be done away with.
Back in March, British Maj. Gen. Richard Barrons, a member of Petraeus’ staff, estimated that there were 900 leaders at all levels and 25-36,000 fighters in the entire Afghan Taliban. Petraeus is claiming that special forces alone have removed from combat 26% of the leadership and roughly 10% of the fighters within just three short months.
That claim begs a bunch of questions – not least of which is: “how can it possibly be true?” If that level of attrition happened to the US military it would likely be disrupted, unable to continue fighting. Yet even Petraeus admits that spec-ops forces have not yet reversed the Taliban’s momentum.
But if it were true, we’d have to ask what the hell Generals McChrystal, McKiernan and McNeill had been doing during their times in command of US forces in Afghanistan in the preceding eight years.
Then we’d have to ask about just how fast the Afghan Taliban can regenerate its leadership and fighting cadre, as well as how large it’s recruiting pool is – i.e. how fast can the Taliban recover its losses.
And we’d have to ask whether the large number of civilian casualties caused by special forces raids – including the likes of shooting pregnant women – contribute to that regeneration to the extent of rendering any figures Petraeus is touting about Taliban attrition meaningless.
But the second they have to acknowledge the success of the of the operation to take down Osama it is a complete change as listed above.
Mr. President, according to our own intelligence officials, al Qaeda no longer has a large presence in Afghanistan, and, as the strike against bin Laden demonstrated, we have the capacity to confront our terrorist enemies with a dramatically smaller footprint. The costs of prolonging the war far outweigh the benefits. It is time for the United States to shift course in Afghanistan.
Yep considering all the previous above the Death of Obama has caused a instant conversion. You know the same people that they posted a video of here.
But wait it gets better. Here is a quick summery of there next statement Because of the corruption in Afghanistan any effort to help rebuild Afghanistan will fail. So it is in the interest that this effort should be done by the same people we view as the reason for the corruption. Don’t believe me read further.
Endemic corruption in Afghanistan diverts resources intended to build roads, schools, and clinics, and some of these funds end up in the hands of the insurgents. Appointments of provincial and local officials on the basis of personal alliances and graft leads to deep mistrust by the Afghan population. While it is a laudable objective to attempt to build new civic institutions in Afghanistan, this goal does not justify the loss of American lives or the investment of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. Instead of continuing to be embroiled in ancient local and regional conflicts in Afghanistan, we must accelerate the transfer of responsibility for Afghanistan’s development to the Afghan people and their government.
Oh and when they say they want all the troops out, they really do not mean that.
We should maintain our capacity to eliminate any new terrorist threats, continue to train the Afghan National Security Forces, and maintain our diplomatic and humanitarian efforts. However, these objectives do not require the presence of over 100,000 American troops engaged in intensive combat operations.
So again all does not really equal all. It is like they are intentionally trying to have the events during the fall of Saigon repeated. Also I would really like to know what numbers game they are playing as far as how many troops are needed to perform all of these jobs. Not to mention that the Taliban and al Qaeda can and has infiltrated the Afghan Police and Army. The same people that would be replacing the use troops that are being used for base defense because of the draw down you are demanding.
Is there anyone here that would you rather trust your safety to a fellow service member or to a local national? Yea thought so, but hey it is easy to go along with that when your not the one that has to stay behind.
We urge you to follow through on the pledge you made to the American people to begin the redeployment of U.S. forces from Afghanistan this summer, and to do so in a manner that is sizable and sustained, and includes combat troops as well as logistical and support forces.
Yea because nothings is impossible to the person(s) that does not have to do it. Then they wonder why they are regularly ignored.
