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

Category: Terror War

  • VoteVets and a “diminished” Taliban

    As usual, dicksmith misses the entire point that the Taliban accepted responsibility for the failed Times Square bombing in an attempt to credit the Obama Administration for declawing the Taliban. He writes;

    My question is, how diminished must the capacity of the Taliban be that they feel a failed plot that could be arranged by anyone with $100 and access to a convenience store deserves their brand?

    Diminished? Really? A band of former goat ropers who have only been able to influence the portion of the world that they can see from their manger sleeping accomodations for the first time in their history reach halfway around the globe to the world’s financial center and throw that city into chaos for two days? And that’s a diminished capacity?

    Yeah, luckily the bomb failed, but the NYPD admits that the device was seconds from detonation. The Taliban’s victories lies in the fact that they actually planted a bomb in the most secure city in the world.

    Dicksmith should stick to subjects like Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell – subjects for which he has some measure of experience and credibility.

  • Hutarees released

    There’s another reason for Mark Potok to be angry this morning – a judge released the Hutarees while they await trial;

    “The United States is correct that it need not wait until people are killed before it arrests conspirators,” US District Judge Victoria Roberts said in her ruling.

    “But, the defendants are also correct: Their right to engage in hate-filled, venomous speech, is a right that deserves First Amendment protection.”

    She said federal prosecutors failed to persuade her that the defendants must be jailed until trial, the Detroit Free News reports.

    Despite the media’s best attempt to frame these doofuses as dangerous criminal terrorists on par with al Qaeda just to give them boogiemen to shake infront of the camera, the fact remains that they are doofuses. I mean, look at them. They look like victims of a lifetime of wedgies and indian burns.

    We all watched their “training videos” – they didn’t have a clue between the nine of ’em. Not that they weren’t a danger – anyone who was not in their line of fire was in danger of being hit.

  • “White man” Shahzad arrested

    Despite their best attempts to will the perpetrator of the attempted bombimg in New York City this weekend into a “white man”, authorities instead arrested a Pakistani man according to the Washington Times;

    The suspect, Faisal Shahzad, was identified by customs agents at John F. Kennedy International Airport and was stopped, according to officials who spoke to The Associated Press early Tuesday on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation. He had recently returned from a five-month trip to Pakistan, where he had a wife, but was not apparently headed back there, the officials said.

    After denying for two days that there was evidence of terror in the incident, Eric Holder, out attorney general finally conceded that Shahzad’s motivations were terror-related;

    Attorney General Eric Holder said today there is no question that the person or persons behind the failed bombing attempt in Times Square intended to spread terror across New York.

    Next thing you know, he’ll admit that we are actually fighting a war against terror. Wouldn’t that be a joyous moment?

    ADDED: I almost forgot Republican Peter King’s buffoonery;

    That view was echoed by the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Peter King of New York. “(T)here does not appear to be any foreign connection, there was no intelligence chatter before, there was no conversation since indicating that this was coordinated from overseas…

    That’s the measure of foreign terror; whether or not terrorists are able to shut up about it.

  • Legionnaire warns cops of bomb in Times Square

    TSO sends this video of a Fox News interview with the Legionnaire who warned NYPD about the failed bomb attempt in Times Square Saturday night;

    So Army Sergeant was right. The Stopped Clock Theorem. 🙂

  • Sniper hits record not once, but twice

    l115a1

    Rurick sent me a link to this Times Online article about a British sniper who made an astounding 8,120 foot shot – twice – taking out a Taliban machine gun team;

    “The first round hit a machinegunner in the stomach and killed him outright,” said Harrison, a Corporal of Horse. “He went straight down and didn’t move.

    “The second insurgent grabbed the weapon and turned as my second shot hit him in the side. He went down, too. They were both dead.”

    The shooting — which took place while Harrison’s colleagues came under attack — was at such extreme range that the 8.59mm bullets took almost three seconds to reach their target after leaving the barrel of the rifle at almost three times the speed of sound.

    The distance to Harrison’s two targets was measured by a GPS system at 8,120ft, or 1.54 miles. The previous record for a sniper kill is 7,972ft, set by a Canadian soldier who shot dead an Al-Qaeda gunman in March 2002.

    According to the article it was 3000 feet beyond the maximum effect range of his weapon. Those were probably the longest 3 seconds in his life. Other sources say it was the Brits’ new L115A3 sniper rifle that did the job. But, ya know, if it had been just one shot, I’d concede that it was the weapon, but two shots, two kills – it was the sniper.

    Craig Harrison, a member of the Household Cavalry also cheated the Taliban out of killing him twice in the ensuing weeks, when his helmet deflected a round and later he was injured in an IED explosion.

  • Times Square bombing attempt

    times-square

    The Wall Street Journal , along with the rest of the media, is unconvinced that the attempted attack in Times Square was the result of an Al Qaeda plot;

    It is unclear whether the Times Square plot had links to Islamic or domestic extremism. A Pakistani-based Taliban group claimed credit for the aborted attack in an Internet video, although New York police said Sunday they had no evidence to support that claim. Police were searching for a white man in his 40s in connection with the attempt.

    Investigators have said that the crude explosives—three tanks of propane, two jerrycans of gasoline, and commercially available fireworks linked to a simple timing device—didn’t suggest much explosives expertise.

    However, the construction of the car bomb was similar to that used in an attempted attack on a British nightclub in 2007 and also bears resemblance to plans for further al Qaeda-linked attacks using vehicles packed with gas cylinders, counterterrorism investigators said.

    The media seems fixated on the “white man” in the video. personally, I don’t know how anyone arrived at that conclusion – he looks like he could be of Mediterranean or Semitic extraction. So I guess it depends on your definition of white man. So, I guess any minute, Mark Potok will be on cable news declaring that he’s been right all along about white terrorists based on this photo.

    Fox News reports the motivations of the Taliban group accepting responsibility;

    The militant group said the attack was revenge for the death of its leader, Baitullah Mehsud, and the recent slaying of al-Qaida in Iraq leaders Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayyub al-Masri, who were killed by U.S. and Iraqi troops last month north of Baghdad. The video also mentioned Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani scientist who was convicted in a U.S. court in New York in February of trying to kill American service personnel after her arrest in Afghanistan in 2008.

    But rest assured, says the Washington Post, Obama is on this thing like ugly on an ape;

    As the investigation unfolded, the White House said President Obama was closely monitoring its progress as he toured the Gulf Coast to assess the threat posed by the widening oil spill.

    Yeah, the first few hours after find the bomb, DHS was saying that they weren’t sure if the incident was related to terrorism. That’s probably the most disingenuous thing that this administration has said since they told us Nidal Hassan was dead.

    The Wall Street Journal claims that this is the latest in a series of attempted plots;

    Over the past year, on at least eight occasions, people linked to radical Islamic thought attempted or carried out attacks on targets in the U.S. The list includes the failed Christmas Day bombing on a Detroit-bound airliner, the shooting rampage at Ft. Hood in Texas, three bomb plots foiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation last September, and a handful of earlier plots broken up last spring and summer.

    Yet, this administration does it’s level best to ignore the fact that we’re at war. Wish us luck.

  • Not enough troops in Afghanistan

    Running up to the 2008 election, we read about how Bush had neglected Afghanistan and how the war there was under-resourced. Critics, of course, rightly blamed the Bush Administration, consistently and loudly every time a report emerged which bolstered their pre-conceived notions. So what should we do with this report;

    Despite the addition of more than 50,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan over the past year, there still aren’t enough forces to conduct operations in the majority of key areas, according to a congressionally mandated report released Wednesday on progress in Afghanistan.

    Coalition forces have decided to focus their efforts on 121 key districts in Afghanistan, but right now, NATO has enough forces to operate in only 48 of those districts, the report said.

    So where is that consistent and loud criticism these days? I guess it’s better used to beat down enforcement of our immigration laws, or to complain about the folks who invest our money in a market we don’t understand. Or to complain about banks which foreclose on our houses when we don’t pay the mortgage for months or years.

    I guess it really doesn’t matter anymore that General McChrystal asked for more troops than he got;

    “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible,” U.S. and NATO commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal said in the document, according to the Post.

    The President and Congress sought a political compromise in a no-compromise situation. Political decisions made by amateurs have no place in the all-too-real world of fighting wars. When our foreign policy is written in the front room of the Code Pink House, we really can’t expect a different outcome than we have now.

  • 60th Engineers return from Afghanistan

    I have been wanting to post about this all week. The 60th Engineer Company is a sister company in my last unit that left for Afghanistan in April of last year. One of the medics that went with them was with me at Basic and Ait. If I remember correctly he is the last original person from when I first got to the 11th Engineer Battalion that has not left.

    I did not want to write about it too soon because of the delay in Kuwait and the million of things that could go wrong.

    So in short welcome home.