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

Category: Terror War

  • Gates: Timelines can be extended

    If I were one of those idiot Leftists who believed that the Obama posse would withdraw from our current wars, I’d be pretty pissed right about now. Now the Secretary of Defense is getting the American public ready for the eventuality that time line withdrawals of our forces probably won’t happen. Secretary Robert Gates, in his final weeks in office warns that the Obama Administration needs more time in Iraq and Afghanistan. On Iraq;

    U.S. and Iraqi officials have said for months that they expect Iraqi leaders to eventually ask for an extension of the military agreement with the U.S., but the political impasse has put the idea on hold.

    A spike in violence in Iraq over the past two weeks has underscored the continued potency of al-Qaida and other Sunni extremists.

    On Afghanistan;

    Afghanistan will be ready to defend itself by 2014, top Pentagon officials said Monday.

    Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen both back Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai’s proposal to turn over security responsibilities to Afghans in four years.

    “As a target at this point that makes sense,” Mullen told reporters during a trip to Australia. Mullen, however, added, “we’re clearly not there yet.”

    As it’s been said about Obama in the past, it’s a lot easier to campaign than it is to govern. He promised to withdraw troops from Iraq within 16 months of taking office and here we are nearly two years later with more than 50,000 troops still there. His promise to withdraw from Afghanistan this summer seems to have hit snags. So I wonder when Obama, Pelosi and Reid will admit that time line withdrawals won’t work? Or are Gates’ announcements over the last few days really their admissions?

  • More on the ritard wars

    I guess no one in Greece was reading my little rant this morning (from Associated Press);

    The two Greek men, aged 22 and 24, were arrested in central Athens after a parcel bomb addressed to the Mexican embassy in Athens exploded at a mail delivery service, leaving one employee injured with burns.

    Three other parcels seized at another delivery company while being carried by the two men were addressed to Sarkozy and to the embassies in Athens of Belgium and The Netherlands.

    The suspects were both carrying handguns, and one was wearing a wig and baseball cap and a bulletproof vest, police said.

    Wearing a wig, a baseball cap and a bullet-proof vest can lead to profiling. Especially if the letter you’re carrying starts smoking. It’s hardly a war when your enemies’ weapons blow up before they can get the bombs to the delivery company.

    This is the big threat they’ve been on about for a few months? Were they warning us because their fellow goat ropers were going to start exploding around us? Must be more of that masterful work of the Master Bomb Maker.

    Thanks to Old Trooper for the link.

  • The war of the ritards

    Let’s review some of the events of the last year in the war against actual terrorists, shall we, beginning with the Christmas Day bomber who put a bomb in his Underoos that misfired and the only thing destroyed on that flight into Detroit was the possibility that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab would be able to father more little bombers.

    Jumping forward to May, in New York’s Times Square, Faisal Shahzad detonated fireworks in his recently purchased SUV and fled the scene, only to realize moments later that he’d locked the keys to his getaway car inside the bomb. The bomb fizzled, Faisal Shahzad missed his flight and he stayed in the country just long enough to foil his own escape. Meanwhile, federal agents discovered Faisal Shahzad’s identity, put out an alert to brother agencies and yet Faisal Shahzad was able to make it all the way to his seat through layers of security that were established to prevent such a possibility. During which time there was probably a 90-year-old lady being strip searched at that very moment a few yards from Faisal Shahzad’s arrest scene.

    Last week, federal agents were able to arrest Farooque Ahmed, who federal agents were able to convince to do some terrorist-type work for them so they could have a reason to arrest him. Was Farooque Ahmed a danger? Yes, probably. The fact that he was willing to recon Metro stations around the Pentagon is probably a pretty good indicator that he was a potential danger to the people who lived around him. But it was no mean feat to get an arrest on Farooque Ahmed when it was probably federal agents, or someone who was working for the feds, who approached Farooque Ahmed with the plan in the first place. I’m just judging from the reports, not any special knowledge on the case.

    And then on Friday, the Saudis called the US government and warned them about the mostly phony bombs that were on flights to Philadelphia and Chicago. The UPS employees on the first flight found the first phony bomb while the plane was still in the air and yet we get to hear Janet Napolitano tell us how she personally was responsible for no one being injured by the phony bombs…phony bombs that would not have killed anyone because they were phony bombs. Yes, yes, I know that they stopped some real bombs from reaching us, but wouldn’t that be reasonable after find the phony ones?

    Well, my point about all of this is; so what? If all of those bombs had worked properly, or had they been delivered properly, they would have killed people. So this administration is taking credit for only being attacked by ritards.

    The incompetence of the guy who either made the bombs or trained the bombers to make the bomb themselves, Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, is worshiped in the media. He’s called a “master bomb maker”:

    How can a guy who hasn’t had a bomb explode since the “ass bomber” who only wounded the Saudi prince get to be called a “master bomb maker”? The only thing I can think of is that he’s in a union which awards ranks of proficiency despite the incompetence of the person with the title.

    And luckily for us, their incompetence has allowed our own government to brag about their proficiency at stopping incompetent bombers. That’s probably good that our ritards can stop their ritards from being successful, but I’m pretty sure that sooner or later, Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri’s shop steward is going to influence him to make a working a bomb that actually kills people.

    So instead of counting on the ritards to continue being ritarded, we’d better do something about gearing our security measures towards successful attempts.

  • More shots fired at Marine Corp Museum

    The Stars & Stripes is reporting that more shot were fired at the USMC Museum at Quantico, VA overnight. The FBI has also linked the first three shootings last week at the Pentagon, the museum and a recruiting station in Chantilly, VA.;

    The museum was first shot at on Oct. 17, and investigators later said the incident is linked to subsequent shootings at the Pentagon and a Marine Corps recruiting station in the Washington suburb of Chantilly, Va.

    Museum staff discovered new bullet holes in the building’s glass and steel structure on Friday morning, museum spokeswoman Gwenn Adams said.

    It’s encouraging that no people have been shot to this point. But the Marine Corps Marathon is scheduled this weekend at the Pentagon and it will probably inspire visitors at the relatively close museum.

    Michelle Malkin recalls the Beltway Sniper.

    The Pentagon is changing it’s security preparations for the Marathon. I’ve never run the Marathon, but I’ve run the Army Ten-Miler a few times which used part of the same route, and I think they used to shut down the highway from which law enforcement believes the shots were fired. Of course, I haven’t run it since 2000, so the route may have changed.

  • Recon? (UPDATED)

    Three United Parcel Service planes have been isolated in Philadelphia because of “suspicious packages” found by crew members of the aircraft according to CBS;

    Local and federal authorities are investigating a suspicious package aboard a UPS plane that landed at Philadelphia International Airport at about 9 a.m. from Paris, France. The second plane, from Cologne, Germany, was isolated near the UPS terminal. The plane from Germany landed in Philadelphia at about 8 a.m. and was scheduled to depart at 10:30 a.m. for Louisville, Kentucky. At about the same time, another plane landed safely at Newark International Airport and was isolated, and a fourth plane en route to Chicago was detained in Birmingham, England.

    Sounds to me like someone is testing security. Can’t wait to see dicksmith’s post about how Obama is keeping us safe.

    Thanks to Old Trooper for keeping us updated.

    UPDATE: Old Trooper updates us again;

    Federal officials say two packages from Yemen were found on planes that were rigged in some way. One was a UPS plane stopped in the U.K. The other was a FedEx plane stopped in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

    A U.S. official told CBS News both planes were searched in response to a specific warning that they were carrying suspicious packages addressed to synagogues or Jewish centers in Chicago.

    The Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago was notified of the situation at 10:30 a.m. Friday, and officials there are “taking proper precautions,” said associate vice president Linda Haase.

    The organization is also advising local synagogues to take precautions, Haase said.

    The article goes on to say that synagogues have been warned to not accept packages from “east of New York”. What does that mean exactly? Are Long Island and Boston on our list of terrorist-supporting state entities?

    And notice that it wasn’t federal officials who caught the packages – it was alert UPS employees.

    UPDATE II; I just heard Sheppard Smith (on my satellite radio) read an AP wire that one of the planes did indeed have explosives in it.

  • Is this what you were talking about, Juan Williams?

    Another US citizen was arrested for plotting a terrorist attack against the US. The young citizen’s name is Farooque Ahmed – a good Irish name. And he was arrested for plotting to kill people on the Washington, DC metro rail system along with “people he believed were al-Qaida operatives”.

    Investigators said in a Sept. 28 meeting he gave diagrams of Arlington metro stations to a person he thought was part of al-Qaida and gave suggestions about where to put explosives on trains to kill the most people in simultaneous attacks planned for 2011.

    Well, it’s not like the DC Metro Rail system needs much help killing people, but I guess this guy wanted to speed up the process.

    Yeah, when I rode the Metro, I kept my eyes on people who looked like they were Islamic or Middle Eastern and made sure they got off the train with everything they boarded with, and guys with bulky jackets in the heat of summer, got the once- or twice-over.

    I’m guessing that Juan Williams doesn’t ride the Metro or he might have mentioned that, too.

  • WaPo: War against Taliban is unsuccessful

    The Washington Post’s Greg Miller writes this morning that “U.S. military campaign to topple resilient Taliban hasn’t succeeded” of course this is based on a single, unnamed “Defense Department official’s assessment.

    The Obama administration’s plan to conduct a strategic review of the war in December has touched off maneuvering between U.S. military leaders seeking support for extending the American troop buildup and skeptics looking for arguments to wind down the nation’s role.

    Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, has touted the success of recent operations and indicated that the military thinks it will be able to show meaningful progress by the December review. He said last week that progress is occurring “more rapidly than was anticipated” but acknowledged that major obstacles remain.

    Well, if the Washington Post is right, they don’t bother to consider that the Obama Administration neglected to honor the assessment of General McCrystal when they gave him half of the troops he requested in 2009. McCrystal warned at the time that refusing to give him sufficient troops would result in exactly these results.

    Instead, the Washington Post blames solely the Pakistanis;

    A crackdown by Pakistan’s military on those sanctuaries probably would have a greater impact on the war than any option available to Petraeus, officials said. But given the Pakistani government’s long-standing connections to the Haqqani network and the Taliban, a move by Islamabad against those groups is considered unlikely, at least by the administration’s timetable.

    Ah, the precious timetable again. This administration considers the war a distraction from the president’s domestic policy and arriving at politically expedient decision in regards to the war is more attractive than the prospect of victory.

    I agree that Pakistan’s involvement in the war against the Taliban would be helpful, but given the fact that this administration more willing to throw the allies of democracy undr the bus to demonstrate his commitment to “smart diplomacy” why should the Pakistanis help us?

    The current administration’s penchant for a policy of waiting for foreign policy issues to work themselves out has only encouraged our enemies from North Korea to Iran. Our adherence to a timeline rather than total warfare in Afghanistan has done the same for the Taliban.

    Maybe if the media would stop praying at the altar of Obama and stop treating this war like a political issue, maybe things would turn in our direction for a change.

    Thanks to Jerry920 for sending this link.

  • Bush, Obama, Iran and Wikileaks documents

    Eli Lake, in the Washington Times this morning plucks from the Wikileaks documents released on Friday a reminder that the Bush Administration was concerned about Iranian interference in the Iraq war.

    In one case, the military circulated a Dec. 22, 2006, warning that a group known as Jaish al-Mahdi planned to kidnap U.S. soldiers. The man planning the operation, Sheik Azhar al-Dulaimi, was trained by Hezbollah terrorists near the Iranian city of Qom, the document stated. Hezbollah is a Lebanon-based militia that was founded, trained and funded by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

    When John Kyl and Joe Lieberman tried to push a condemnation of Iran’s interference in the war and an attempt to designate the Iranian Republican Guards as a foreign terrorist group, the junior senator from Illinois opposed the resolution;

    Barack Obama, as a Democratic senator from Illinois, opposed the resolution at the time but also used the vote in support of the measure by Hillary Rodham Clinton, then a Democratic senator from New York, to attack her anti-war credentials during public debate in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses.

    In a letter to Iowa voters from October 2007, Mr. Obama said the resolution was dangerous because “George Bush and Dick Cheney could use this language to justify keeping our troops in Iraq as long as they can point to a threat from Iran. And because they could use this language to justify an attack on Iran as a part of the ongoing war in Iraq.”

    More of that “smart diplomacy” at work, no doubt. How could Bush and Cheney “justify keeping our troops in Iraq” when they didn’t really need to justify anything for their year remaining in office? And they kept the troops in Iraq anyway, didn’t they?

    I guess it’s just an example of how well Obama can convince and scare the empty-headed Leftists with any old thing to keep them in line.