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

Category: Terror War

  • Worthy of note.

    Well I am back from EFMB, I got a no go on the land nav so I plan on going again in 2011 when it comes to Fort Richardson. But before I start talking about someone before anything else.

    I would like to introduce to you then PV2 Philip Canafax a medic for the 1st Armored Division 1st Infantry Division. I found out about him from his Sgt Romano(sp?) his immediate supervisor.

    I would talk about the fact that when Canafax arrived at the unit there was not enough time to train him as he would have liked. So he gave him three medical books to study in the two weeks before they where going to Iraq. Every time he saw Canafax he would demand him to show the books and prove that he was actually reading them.

    Also he drove a point to never let anyone go without medical treatment. The results of his actions should be proof enough that he took it to heart. Another medic that was there said that they had to restrain him because he wanted to drive the injured to the base even though he was also wounded.

    EDIT
    Philip Canafax : “I’d say restrain was a strong word, strongly convince maybe.”

    So after December 2008, he was at a WTB unit for about six months recovering, during that time Sgt Romano said that he was getting worried about him getting too thin. He even thought about breaking him out of WTU. But he found out that he was working at the hospital and was being well fed. He said that Canafax was loving life and just recently purchased a Harley-Davidson bike.

    So I promised Sgt Romano that I would write about him when I got a chance.

    I will write about how the EFMB went shortly.

    EDIT

    I wrote to him and got a reply

    Cool, I haven’t talked to Sgt Romano for a bit. I ended up being in the WTU at BAMC for a year unfortunately but now I have returned to full duty and work at the hospital full time. No Harley for me though, people drive too crazy in San Antonio, rather not temp fate another time.

  • Religion of Peace

    I just came across this little gem in the Daily Mail via Drudge. Seems that the 1st Battalion Royal Anglian Regiment came home from a tour in Afghanistan and the home town had a welcome home parade for them…pretty standard stuff until protestors from MAC (Muslims Against the Crusaders) showed up.

    Around 40 members of a group called Muslims Against the Crusades (MAC) arrived with inflammatory banners featuring slogans such as ‘Butchers return’ and ‘What are you dying for? £18k’.

    As you can imagine, this went over like a fart in church.

    They were soon confronted by 100 people, some wearing English Defence League T-shirts, who shouted ‘scum’ and ‘Muslim bombers off our streets’.

    …like a REALLY rancid, foul, lingering fart in church…

    But violence flared after 200 soldiers from 1st Battalion Royal Anglian Regiment – who lost five men in a recent tour of Afghanistan and had been granted freedom of the borough – marched past thousands of well-wishers.
    MAC supporters shouted slogans such as ‘murderers, murderers’ and ‘British troops go to hell’, while the mainly white crowd opposite, some of whom are believed to have been BNP supporters, threw frozen pork sausages and chanted ‘scum’ and ‘Allah, Allah, who the f*** is Allah?’

    Maybe if we just tried to understand….
    RoP

  • Explosives found on Fort Gordon, GA

    Yesterday, I wrote that MacDill AFB captured some folks trying to bring weapons on to the base, well today Fort Gordon, GA is reporting that they arrested a civilian with some explosives in his car last night.

    Explosives were found in a vehicle parked inside Fort Gordon Tuesday evening, and a civilian has been arrested, spokesman Buz Yarnell confirmed.

    Yarnell stressed that the alert level at the base has not been heightened and added “we’re not using the word terrorist, either.”

    Yarnell said that military police are always on the lookout for unusual vehicles and this particular vehicle caught their attention. He did not go into more detail.

    Of course they’re not using the word terrorism. It takes a team of wild horses to drag that word from an Army PAO these days.

    Thanks to Mr. Wolf for the tip.

    Added: Just A Grunt sends local reportage that claims the guy was just there to steal military equipment. I’m not sure how explosives fit into burglary, however.

  • Armed duo stopped at MacDill gate

    Two people without authorization were stopped along with their trunk full of weapons at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida last night, according to Fox News;

    Base public affairs officer Senior Airman Katherine B. Holt reports a man and woman were unable to show proper identification Monday evening, and their vehicle was searched. Security found military-style gear and weapons in the sport utility vehicle but no explosives. Holt says she didn’t know how many weapons were removed but they were rifle-type.

    The suspects names were not released.

    Meanwhile, halfway around the world, Pakistanis picked up an American who was scouring the country side with NVGs, a sword and a pistol looking for bin Laden;

    The man was identified as 52-year-old Californian construction worker Gary Brooks Faulkner, said officer Mumtaz Ahmad Khan.

    He was picked up in a forest in the Chitral region late on Sunday, he said.

    “We initially laughed when he told us that he wanted to kill Usama bin Laden,” said Khan. But he said when officers seized the pistol, the sword and night-vision equipment, “our suspicion grew.”

  • Israel-Iran clash approaches

    Old Trooper sends us a link to the latest reports about the threatened deployment of Iranian Navy vessels expected off the coast of the Gaza strip;

    One ship left port on Sunday and another will depart by Friday, loaded with food, construction material and toys, the report said. The boats would be part of international efforts to break Israel’s isolation of the Gaza Strip.

    “Until the end of the Gaza blockade, Iran will continue to ship aid,” said an official at Iran’s Society for the Defence of the Palestinian Nation.

    While Israel has long suspected Iran, which rejects the Jewish state’s right to exist, of supplying weapons to Hamas, Tehran says it only provides moral support to the group.

    In the meantime, Saudi Arabia denies reports that they granted permission to the Israelis to use Saudi airspace to attack Iranian nuclear facilities (Bloomberg link);

    Saudi Arabia rejects “the violation of its sovereignty and the use of its airspace or territory by anyone to attack any country,” the official Saudi Press Agency said late yesterday, citing an unidentified official at the Foreign Affairs Ministry. “It is more appropriate that Saudi Arabia should apply this policy to the authority of the Israeli occupation with which it has no relationship in any way.”

    The Times reported yesterday that Saudi Arabia agreed to allow Israel to use its airspace to make bombing raids on Iran’s nuclear facilities. The newspaper cited unidentified people. Saudi Arabia would ensure that the bombers pass through an area in the north of the country without its missile defense systems being activated, the newspaper said.

    Israel is the last hope of the civilized world while an impotent UN churns out strongly-worded letters and ineffective sanctions against Iran.

  • Afghanistan’s redemption discovered

    A team of Pentagon specialists and geologists have discovered a large undeveloped concentration of minerals that may eventually make Afghanistan an independent mining center for the world according to the New York Times;

    The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

    An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.

    Of course this could also set the tin-foil hat types spinning yarns about the evil Bush Administration sensing these deposits before they invaded Afghanistan. Gordon Duff comes to mind.

    But, since this is the United States we’re talking about, for now the world is talking about how this can benefit Afghanistan and not how we can remain there longer than we need to destroy the Taliban. It can also work in other ways to give the Taliban more reason to fight for the control of resources. For now, I’m just glad that this can give the Afghans some light at the end of their millenniums-long tunnel.

  • Iran reacts to UN sanctions

    The UN hit Iran with a fourth set of sanctions against the rogue nation to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. President Ahmadinejad reacts with stark horror;

    “These resolutions are not worth a dime for the Iranian nation,” he said.

    “I gave one of them (world powers) a message that the resolutions you issue are like a used hanky which should be thrown in the dust bin. They are not capable of hurting Iranians.”

    Of course, who couldn’t predict that reaction? Four sets of sanctions. And the UN continues along a path of impotent measures and empty gestures. The same kind that haven’t worked anywhere in the world and resulted in the first and second invasions of Saddam’s Iraq.

    But the UN has an ace up their sleeve – Bebe Netanyahu. They’re hoping that Israel will deal with Iran and then the UN can stand back in shock at what Israel has done and condemn the Israelis like they’ve done for the last forty years or so.

    And Ahmadinejad is giving the Israelis just the provocation they need by volunteering to escort blockade busters to Gaza with the Iranian Navy in the Mediterranean.

    The Iranian Navy off it’s coast and Hezbollah rockets from Lebanon ought to motivate the Israelis to do the bidding of the UN. Our State Department is probably drawing up a document full of false outrage as I type this.

  • CIA’s drone program under assault

    In this morning’s Washington Post, Mark Theissen warns that the United Nations and the American Civil Liberties Union are joining forces to end the CIA’s successful drone program in Afghanistan;

    The special rapporteur, Philip Alston, was joined in his condemnation by the American Civil Liberties Union, which in an April 28 letter to Obama, accused him of supporting a “program of long-premeditated and bureaucratized killing” and declared that the program “violates international law.” The ACLU wrote that “financiers, and other non-combat ‘supporters’ of hostile groups cannot be lawfully targeted with lethal force.” Yet that is precisely what Obama did in the case of Yazid.
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    On The Post’s op-ed page Sunday, Treasury Undersecretary Stuart Levey called the killing of Yazid a “major blow” to al-Qaeda because “Yazid has essentially served as al-Qaeda’s ‘chief financial officer,’ coordinating the group’s fundraising and overseeing the distribution of money essential to its survival.” By the ACLU’s reasoning, this would make the strike that killed Yazid illegal. Does the ACLU want to see the Predator operator who took out al-Qaeda’s third in command prosecuted for murder? The ACLU has already gone after CIA interrogators — surreptitiously photographing these covert operatives and sharing the images with al-Qaeda terrorists in Guantanamo. CIA drone operators may soon be in for similar treatment.

    Yeah, it frightens me that lawyers are trying to insinuate themselves into the role of war fighters. It’s impossible to hold warriors to a civilian legal standard during day-to-day operations when their crime is just doing their jobs.