Category: Terror War

  • Terrorists targeting zombies?

    There’s a report of a suspicious package near a cemetery in New York City (Fox News/AP link);

    Officers responded to Marble Cemetery in Manhattan’s East Village around 10:45 a.m. Monday after a worker called 911 to report a black bag. Streets around the area remained closed on Monday afternoon as officials investigated.

    Fox News has updated the story with the report that police claim they’ve detected C-4 explosive. Someone was taken from the scene in an ambulance on a stretcher.

    Be sure to mention your own crackpot theory. At this point, everything is valid.

    UPDATE: Apparently the explosives were dug up about 18 months ago by a cemetery worker while he planted shrubbery. The black plastic bag, containing eight 1 1/4 pound sticks of C-4 explosive, sat idle until this weekend when a volunteer at the cemetery found it, put it in a trash bin and then called police few days later after asking his friends and other unnoted explosive experts in his neighborhood. Everyone in NYC seems unconcerned. I have lots questions, however.

  • Hunger strike ends in Gitmo

    ROS sends us a link to the MSNBC article about Abdul Rahman Shalabi the Guantanamo detainee who has been on hunger strike for more thasn five years. To the relief of us all, it seems that his starvation, interrupted by forced feeding, is slowly coming to an end;

    Daily medical logs submitted with the government’s motion show that Shalabi has apparently eaten solid food as far back as February, when a guard reported seeing him eat a granola bar behind a newspaper, trying to shield himself from view.

    That same month the military reported he received seven Slim Jims — a dried meat snack — and a pack of gum from a visiting attorney. The next month he reportedly received a sticky bun from night guards at the hospital, where the military says he has his own flat screen television with a satellite connection. An entry in July says he ate grapes, spaghetti with meat sauce, two pieces of baklava and a banana.

    I can’t tell you how often I’ve worried about Shalabi and the thought of him wasting away in front of his flat screen TV with a satellite connection. I’ll probably never get back the hours of sleep I lost, but at least I can go into the Columbus Day weekend with one more burden lifted from my dreams.

  • Brain freeze in MN

    One of our loyal readers sent me a link to his local “progressive” rag from up in Minnesota called “mnpACT” See how it almost makes a word, but then it doesn’t…clever hippies. Anyway, the author Alan Anderson starts right off letting us know that he hasn’t got an original or clear thought in his adled skull;

    Recent revelations about the killing and turmoil in Iraq and the corruption and dysfunction in Afghanistan should reinforce in the minds of most Americans that the wars in both countries have turned into some of the biggest disasters in the history of our nation. Yes, I remember that a group of Saudi radicals attacked the World Trade Center with airplanes. Of course that was a tragic day. No one disputes that.

    That “tragic day” after thought really gets me – it’s the same thing the Left did after Clinton left office – “Oh, I hated him, too” they always said right before they’d tell us how he was a great president. It’s just something you say, ya know, to establish your creds in the discussion. of course he doesn’t think 9-11 was a tragic day…he thinks we deserved it. Besides what we did to Iraq and Afghanistan was much worse, right?

    But, even more tragic is that we responded in dumb ways, declaring war on a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 event (even President Bush acknowledged that), a country that didn’t have weapons of mass destruction (as we were told in order to sway public opinion to back the war), a country that has had to endure 7 years of war, the loss of hundreds of thousands of civilians, a country decimated by the exodus of more than half their doctors and other professionals, a country that has millions of children orphaned by death of parents, and a country in political disarray that can’t even select their own leaders and run their own government.

    Oh, yeah, NONE of that shit happened before we arrived in March, 2003, right? Then why do I remember a few hundred Iraqis in front of the White House in 1999 protesting the US/UN sanctions against Iraq? All of them wearing the finery of this country and their ample stomachs hanging over their Italian made belts? Iraqis have been fleeing Iraq and made orphans for decades. Does that justify any of the unnecessary violence that might have perpetrated against some of them? Nope. But it would have been nice if they’d helped us drag their country into the 19th century.

    It is time to stop this craziness and begin to realize that only through a removal of the war option will any healing be possible.

    Yeah, tell that to those doctors who were murdered in Afghanistan this last summer. They didn’t even have guns…all they brought was help to the locals. And they paid for it with their lives. I’d like to see Alan pry his fat ass out of his La-Z-Boy and do something besides flap his gums (or bang his keys) to bring this war to an end. Nope he’d rather sit in the comfort of his trailer and fan the flames with his uneducated blather.

    Make no mistake, if you are an American you have blood on your hands. It is time to begin to cleanse ourselves of the horrors we have perpetrated on the world and move to a place where we honor life….to become really pro-life, and not just worry about whether fetuses survive, but whether children in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan will ever have a chance at a normal life.

    Feel guilty about “the blood on your hands”? Me neither. That line about children over there having a “normal life” is real killer. Girls are afraid to go to school lest someone throw acid on their faces for the crime of learning.

    After Desert Storm, my unit went back to Iraq to man a screen to protect the Shi’ites who were fleeing from Saddam’s armies in their own country. If that wasn’t horrible enough, a busload of Shi’ites would pull up to our checkpoint loaded with fleeing women children and men. Some were wounded, others were not.

    One of my men threw a box of oranges we had left over from breakfast down on the ground, because even though we weren’t supposed to, it was part of the American soldiers’ nature to be kind to other people who aren’t shooting at us. Of course, the nimble kids made it to the box first and wolfed down the juicy fruit. As the men caught up, they tossed the kids aside like rag dolls. They tore the fruit from the hungry tiny mouths and smacked the kids brutally.

    Of course, my guys wanted to interfere, but I wouldn’t let them. Our yelling and gesturing brought a bit of calm to the moment. We took the oranges from the men forced them back on the bus and we never handed out any of our food to any more refugees to prevent the abuse we’d just witnessed.

    I think there’s a moral to that story somewhere, but since I’m unable to articulate it…GFY, Alan. When you drag your fat ass out of Minnesota and look at that shit yourself, you might have earned a right to preach to us. Until such time, STFU.

  • Times Square bomber gets life with his new room mate

    Yeah, I know this is old news but I had to operate in the real world today – a scary place. But, any, ROS sent me this link to the story about his sentencing. I’m sure he was defiant in the face of the judge – a woman, by the way. I know that scorched his drawers being judged by a woman. Anyway he started off with a screed about him and his justice league are going to tear us all a new crack. Well, as soon as they get here after watering and feeding their burros all the way across Europe.

    I’m pretty sure ol’ Faisal Shahzad was pretty embarrassed about being in court – especially since everyone in the court room knew he’d locked the keys to his getaway car inside his bomb after he lit the fuse. I think I would have committed suicide with a rusty butter knife rather than face that embarrassment – he’s going to be the butt of a lot of jokes…besides being the butt of a lot of things…in prison.

    “We Muslims don’t abide by human-made laws because they are always corrupt,” he said, denouncing the presence of U.S. and NATO forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and mentioning al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

    “Furthermore, brace yourselves because the war with Muslims has just begun,” he said. “Consider me the first droplet of the flood that will follow.”

    “The defeat of (the) U.S. is imminent and will happen in near future,” he said. “We are only Muslims … but if you call us terrorists, we are proud terrorists and we will keep on terrorizing you.”

    Yeah, they’re so far ahead of us technologically, we’ll never be able to defeat them…well unless we use our guns and knives. The Reuters article called him “defiant”, I’d call him a moron…there’s a thin line dividing the two. But then he wasn’t the brightest bulb in the box to begin with.

    You guys down at the FBI headquarters don’t start chortling (I see your IP address). The only reason you caught his bumbling ass is because he locked those keys in his bomb, otherwise he’d have made his flight on time. Not to mention that all of you were so secretive about his identity that he made all the way to his airplane seat. If you’d stumbled around a few more hours, he’d have been a free man. He’d be shaking his fist at us from the roof of his mud hut right now and planning on plowing his favorite goat tonight – instead of playing the goat’s role.

    I watched the folks at Fox News bragging about how amazing it was that we imprisoned the dork so quickly…like I said, we were lucky and there’s nothing for anyone to be proud about this.

  • Speculation on terrorism plots in Euro-land

    According to news reports, there’s nothing but “chatter” (I swear I’ve had that word defined for me so many times in the past ten years I could scream. I’m sure the American public can hold that word in their head for two consecutive newscasts). But apparently the “chatter” is voluminous. CBS News has some videos of the prospective perps with their mugs scrambled for the camera;

    The French arrested some guy who was calling in bomb threats in Paris according to the Associated Press;

    On Monday, French police arrested a 53-year-old man suspected of links to a bomb threats including one Friday at a Paris railway hub, an official with knowledge of the investigation said on condition of anonymity. The suspect, who was not identified, was detained southwest of the capital for possible links to a phone-in threat at the Saint-Lazare train station.

    French authorities recorded nine bomb alerts in the capital in September, including two at the Eiffel Tower – a threefold increase from a year earlier. No explosives were found.

    Probably to slow the response time of the police when there’s a real bomb. Or to determine the response time to set fuses. When I was in Paris twenty five years ago, the tour guide told us that 10 bombs went off in Paris every day – I don’t know if that was true, but even one bomb every day was too many. I remember metal detectors at department stores. So the French are pretty accustomed to this stuff, I suppose. Probably better than Americans, anyway.

    We have a tendency to forget about stuff that doesn’t happen in our state or our town and enough time has passed.

    When I lived in Aschaffenburg (near Frankfort), as the senior resident in our Army family housing unit, I had to run a guard roster (of course, with no equipment or weapons) around our building (the building was outside the gate of the nearest Kasserne) after Baader Meinhoff killed an airman, drove his car onto the airbase and blew it up in the PX parking lot. Even something that close didn’t affect people enough to be diligent guarding the building.

    AP says;

    Security officials say terrorists may be plotting attacks in Europe with assault weapons on public places, similar to the deadly 2008 shooting spree in Mumbai, India. European officials have provided no details about specific targets.

    That’d be flashy, but ABC says that’s not how they think it will go down;

    One scenario authorities fear is a repeat of the 1985 attack on the Rome and Vienna airports, when Palestinian extremists threw grenades and opened fire on travelers waiting at ticket counters injuring 140 and killing 19, including a small child.

    That sounds about like al Qaeda’s speed. A group of people who are most likely unarmed in a confined, enclosed space with no place to go once the shooting starts. High probability of kids getting gunned down. That sounds like those cowards. Of course, it’s unlikely that they’ll hit the US or target Americans so near to the elections. al Qaeda has their man in the White House and Congress is filled with cowards…why would they want to screw that up?

  • Depression strikes White House

    Drudge is running a subheadline about a study that one in ten Americans suffer from depression. So it stands to reason statistically that President Obama would be one of them (Washington Insider link);

    So you state that President Obama is depressed? How did you come by this information? From a direct source still working within the White House on a daily basis. As I had stated previously, tensions at the White House have reached a critical stage. The infighting among staff is off the charts. More recently, the president has increasingly withdrawn emotionally from the day to day demands of his job – he has become what was described to me as “empty”.

    I don’t know if it’s true or not, nor do I care very much, I just thought it was strange that right before the election we discover that our president might be mentally unstable. Given the climate, I suppose we should feel sorry for him and vote for Democrats so he doesn’t collapse.

    The elections shouldn’t be the only thing he’s depressed about, though. It’s things like this which should depress him;

    Syrian President Bashar al-Assad assured his Iranian counterpart Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Saturday that their ties were solid — a view unlikely to please Washington which is working to isolate the Islamic state.

    “We have stood beside Iran in a brotherly way from the very beginning of the (Iranian Islamic) revolution,” Assad said during a one-day visit to Tehran.

    It turns out that for all of that blather about “smart diplomacy” was just so much hooey. That would depress me, too, if I was wrong about about every single policy. That’s what you get with Joe Bite-Me…bad advice and mental illness.

    Thanks to Mr Wolf for the link to the “depression in the White House” link.

  • Levin: Obama shouldn’t be flexible on the withdrawal date

    Armed services chairman Carl Levin, who has never spent a day of his life in the military, is pressuring the president to stand fast on the withdrawal date for Afghanistan set for July irrespective of the conditions on the ground;

    “The president is now under pressure from inside and outside the military to build flexibility into that July 2011 date,” Levin said in prepared remarks he’s set to deliver to the Council on Foreign Relations. “I want to tell you why I believe sticking to that date is essential to success, and why President Obama should not, and I believe will not, modify the July 2011 date.”

    Levin, an opponent of the original surge of troops into Afghanistan that Obama ordered last fall, said that sticking to the date was critical to “strengthen Afghan resolve” to build its own internal military and policing systems to fend off Taliban-led insurgents once the U.S. leaves the country.

    Of course we’ve all seen the deterioration of the relationship we’ve had with the Pakistan government in the last few years – burning of 27 fuel trucks yesterday and another deadly attack today is a good example. The withdrawal won’t happen overnight, so some troops will be left behind and vulnerable if the Afghanis don’t have enough “resolve” as Levin hopes.

    Odds are that Levin’s statement will only strengthen the resolve of the Taliban and improve their recruiting efforts – especially if they institute a delayed entry program. Everything has a political solution to these people. They stopped us from finishing the job in Iraq in 1991, they stopped us from finishing what they started in Somalia, the future of Iraq is in question. Haven’t they learned the lessons of the last generation?

  • Smart diplomacy on the Pakistan border

    Yesterday at Blackfive, Matt wrote about the mistaken attack on a remote Pakistani border crossing with Afghanistan which cost the lives of three pakistani soldiers. As a result, Pakistan has closed access to main border crossings by NATO resupply vehicles.

    As a result, the New York Times reports that 27 fuel trucks were attacked in Pakistan;

    Senior local officials said “extremists” are believed to have carried out the attack on the tankers in the southern town of Shikarpur early on Friday.

    About 12 people, with their faces covered, opened fire with small arms in the air to scare away the drivers and then torched some 30 vehicles.

    I’m sure a large check written on money we don’t have will make Pakistan forget about the cross-border attacks until next time. I don’t know what intelligence led the drone operators to fly a mission against three man-jammied privates on a border outpost (at least it wasn’t the Chinese Embassy, huh, Matt?) but when you fight a war from the air, these mistakes are bound to happen.

    The Obama should make the Pakistani government understand that either they accept the losses from our air campaign or accept US forces on their ground. If the Pakistanis want to be free from the terror inflicted on them from their former allies, those are their only two choices.

    Unfortunately, I suspect that the Obama/Biden team will use some more of that “smart diplomacy” bullshit that we’ve watched work so well on Iran.