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

Category: Terror War

  • Punishing the sheepdogs

    I’ve received this article about the Navy Seals being punished by the Navy first reported by Fox News from about ten people;

    Ahmed Hashim Abed, whom the military code-named “Objective Amber,” told investigators he was punched by his captors — and he had the bloody lip to prove it.

    Now, instead of being lauded for bringing to justice a high-value target, three of the SEAL commandos, all enlisted, face assault charges and have retained lawyers.

    The Navy Times reports that Abed got his bloody lip from a punch in the stomach;

    Neal Puckett, a defense attorney who is representing McCabe, said the SEALs are being essentially charged for allegedly giving the detainee “a punch in the gut.”

    They are expected to plead not guilty when they appear at their arraignment. “They are all together and they all maintain that they are innocent of these charges,” said Puckett, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel and judge advocate.

    The SEALs were on the tail-end of their deployment to Iraq when the alleged incident happened, he said.

    Puckett offered no details about the alleged incident, but said that “in a combat environment, the handling of a detainee … these things happen all the time and can easily be justified as maintaining [control of] a detainee.”

    That’s a heck of a punch. I’m guessing that Abed got to watch an episode of “Law and Order” while he was locked up and got the idea to charge his captors. Of course, Matthew Alexander will use this as an “I told you so” moment and we’ll hear that the SEALs are currently encouarging more terrorists instead of ending terrorism.

    The SEALs are;

    [Petty Officer Julio] Huertas, 28, is originally from Blue Island, Ill., and enlisted in 1999. He has served in special warfare units since 2002. He has an Iraq Campaign Medal and was advanced in June 2006, Navy records show.

    [Petty Officer Second Class Matthew] McCabe, 24 is originally from Perrysburg, Ohio, and enlisted in 2003. He served on the Amphibious Assault Ship Belleau Wood before training in special warfare. He was advanced in September 2007, Navy records show.

    [Petty Officer Jonathon] Keefe, 25, is originally from Yorktown, Va., and enlisted in 2006. He began SEAL training the same year, Navy records show. He was last advanced in June 2008.

    Worst. Decision. Ever. The lesson to take away from this is don’t take any prisoners, I guess.

    Uncle Jimbo weighs in and then smacks Allah Pundit around for not sticking with the troops.

    Thanks to everyone who sent the link.

  • Why does he have to say it?

    I guess Axelrod told President Obama that he couldn’t get elected if he didn’t send some troops to Afghanistan and apparently they’ve just been bickering over the number the last few months.

    finish-the-job

    General McCrystal asked for 40,000 troops and Obama is thinking about 34,000. When I was an infantry platoon sergeant and I needed a crucial part to keep my platoon running, or an important piece of equipment, I’d request 3 – that way I made sure I’d get one. I hope that’s what General McChrystal did when he requested troops.

    Either way, Obama has bought his share of the war whatever the outcome. He wasn’t willing to buy the full boat, so every death, every casualty is fully his – from the day McChrystal submitted his report 3 months ago.

    “It is my intention to finish the job,” he said of the war in Afghanistan….

    It damn well better be.

  • Hitchens to “Who Created Hasan”

    This past weekend, I read Robert Wright’s anti-intellectual piece in the New York Times entitled “Who Created Major Hasan?“. Of course, since it’s Robert Wright and the New York Times, you know his conclusion. It was us (or US, if you prefer)

    Both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars were supposed to reduce the number of anti-American terrorists abroad. It’s hardly clear that they’ve succeeded, and they may have had the opposite effect. Meanwhile, on the other side of the ledger, they’ve inspired homegrown terrorism — a small-scale incident in June, a larger-scale incident this month. That’s only two data points, but I don’t like the slope of the line connecting them.

    So, clearly Wright is a proponent of sitting on our collective hands. Well, Christopher Hitchens took it upon himself to knock down Wright’s straw house;

    For a start, did Hasan or [Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad — Carlos Bledsoe, the Arkansas murderer] ever say what “killing” of which “Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan” they had in mind? There isn’t a day goes by without the brutal slaughter of Muslims in both countries by al-Qaida or the Taliban. And that’s not just because most (though not all) civilians in both countries happen to be of the Islamic faith. The terrorists do not pause before deliberately blowing up the mosques and religious processions of those whose Muslim beliefs they deem insufficiently devout. Most of those now being tortured and raped and executed by the Islamic Republic of Iran are Muslim. All the women being scarred with acid and threatened with murder for the crime of going to school in Pakistan are Muslim. Many of those killed in London, Madrid, and New York were Muslim, and almost all the victims callously destroyed in similar atrocities in Istanbul, Cairo, Casablanca, and Algiers in the recent past were Muslim, too. It takes a true intellectual to survey this appalling picture and to say, as Wright does, that we invite attacks on our off-duty soldiers because “the hawkish war-on-terrorism strategy—a global anti-jihad that creates nonstop imagery of Americans killing Muslims—is so dubious.” Dubious? The only thing dubious here is his command of language. When did the U.S. Army ever do what the jihadists do every day: deliberately murder Muslim civilians and brag on video about the fact? For shame. The slippery slope—actually the slimy slope—is the one down which Wright is skidding.

    It’s clear to me who created Major Hasan – the cowardly imams and terror sponsors who are afraid of dying themselves, but have no aversion to sending their own children into the flames. Hasan handed out Korans to his neighbors – what if one of us handed out the Bible to our neighbors in the Middle East? Tell me we’re the violent ones in this fight.

    Yeah, just once I’d like to see someone on the Left, the non-racist, defenders of human rights Left, someone besides Hitchens, admit that the war is worthy of our commitment. The only reason these cretins think that they have any chance at all of winning this war is because they have pathetically ignorant pea-wits like Wright defending them and the New York Times to give the pathetically ignorant pea-wits a forum.

  • Diddling intensifies

    The Washington Post reports this morning that after President Obama’s latest meeting (tenth in 86 days) with advisers over whether to properly staff our war in Afghanistan or not, he’ll continue to dawdle at a furious pace;

    For much of the fall, Obama has been meeting with his war council to determine a new strategy in Afghanistan, where 68,000 U.S. troops are currently deployed. Now he has 18 weekdays left to announce his decision — not counting Thanksgiving break — before he leaves for his Christmas-holiday vacation in Hawaii.

    But his schedule for the rest of November and December is filling up with other events and appearances, some of which could create public relations challenges if they happen too close to the presentation of an expanded war effort.

    Administration officials have said Obama will not outline his decision until after Thanksgiving, and it appears increasingly probable he will do so early next week. In addition to McChrystal and Eikenberry, senior administration officials whose support for the strategy is essential are preparing to be in town for possible appearances before Congress.

    So here we sit 87 days (thanks, for keeping count, Claymore) since General McCrystal requested more troops, but Obama’s schedule is filling up with events to which Republicans aren’t invited. It’s really a shame that this war keeps intruding on Obama’s social schedule – I mean he’s dedicated 30 whole hours to the thing in the last 87 days – what else do you guys want?

  • Surrender sounds so easy

    I read this at ThreatsWatch earlier today, but it just sounded so incredible that I didn’t want to believe it, let alone write about it;

    It comes to our attention that the MEMRI Blog highlights an article from the Saudi al-Watan in Arabic that – according to an Afghan source – the United States is talking to the Taliban seeking to trade control of 5 provinces in exchange for the cessation of attacks on US bases. MEMRI summarizes:

    An Afghan source in Kabul reports that U.S. Ambassador in Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry is holding secret talks with Taliban elements headed by the movement’s foreign minister, Ahmad Mutawakil, at a secret location in Kabul. According to the source, the U.S. has offered the Taliban control of the Kandahar, Helmand, Oruzgan, Kunar and Nuristan provinces in return for a halt to the Taliban missile attacks on U.S. bases.

    Kunar province borders the Khyber Pass region where the majority of US and NATO supplies pass enroute from Pakistan. And the remaining four provinces constitute fully the southern 25% of Afghanistan’s territory.

    But the more I thought about it, the more credible it sounded. From Uncle Jimbo at Blackfive;

    Like I said this is a sole source so far, but sadly it fits in with Eikenberry’s strategically leaked messages stabbing Gen. McChrystal in the back by calling for no reinforcements. It also offers President Obama the opportunity to start the exfil from the country and avoid having to attempt to win.

    From Greyhawk;

    The story defies logic and belief, but unfortunately if the US State Department (or the White House) hasn’t responded clearly and forcefully to unequivocally deny the allegations yet, now would be a good time to do that, too. The current administration has elected to conduct its Afghanistan business via leaks and rumors.

    From Cassandra;

    Can you imagine the reaction if George Bush were still in office? Would any sane person give a story like this the time of day? Sadly, Obama’s hands off (to put it mildly) leadership style and ineffectual waffling inspire confidence in neither his grasp of the situation nor his resolve:

    I still don’t want to believe the article, but Obama has put his foreign policy on cruise control while he focuses on taking over the economy. He has Karl Eikenberry providing guidance and I’ve been warning you that Eikenberry was a dickhead, a dangerous dickhead, when he was my PL, and apparently he hasn’t changed in 35 years.

    Like Jimbo pointed out, this is the same kind of deal that the Pakistanis tried to strike with the Taliban last year. Now the Pakistani Army is trying to dislodge the Taliban because they used their territories as a base from which to strike the rest of the country with suicide bombers. Not like they haven’t done that before.

    All of this talk about diplomacy and give-and-take sounds dreamy, but for Pete’s sake, look who we’re talking about here.

  • The politically correct investigation of Major Hasan

    I’ve suspected for quite some time that the feds are planning to cut Major Hasan, the Fort Hood murderer (um, not alleged), some slack. Of course, his lawyer and the Washington Post are complicit in this purveying of slack;

    “He has no sensation from the nipple area down,” Hasan’s civilian attorney, John P. Galligan, said in a telephone interview.

    During a closed-door hearing in Hasan’s hospital room on Saturday that lasted about an hour, a magistrate ruled that Hasan be confined until his military trial, Galligan said.

    “In the middle of this hearing, he started to nod off and go to sleep,” Galligan said. “When I’ve spoken with him, he’s coherent, but your ability to have any meaningful exchange with him is limited in time and subject.”

    But, Reuel Marc Gerecht in the Wall Street Journal today, makes these points about the treatment of Hasan before his shooting rampage on that November afternoon in regards to FBI’s investigations;

    For the FBI, religion remains a much too sensitive subject, much more so than the threatening ideologies of yesteryear. Imagine if Maj. Hasan had been an officer during the Cold War, regularly expressing his sympathy for the Soviet Union and American criminality against the working man. Imagine him writing to a KGB front organization espousing socialist solidarity. The major would have been surrounded by counterintelligence officers.

    A law-enforcement agency par excellence, the FBI reflects American legal ethics. Because the FBI is always thinking about criminal prosecutions and admissible evidence, its intelligence-collecting inevitably gets defined by its judicial procedures. Good counterintelligence curiosity—that must come into play before any crime is committed—is at odds with a G-man’s raison d’être. And much more so than local police departments—which are grounded to the unpleasantness of daily life—it is highly susceptible to politically correct behavior.

    Political correctness since the shooting has been no less politically correct. The reports that Hasan was dead in the early hours of the aftermath, the reports that he had multiple tours in combat and that his rampage was a result of his combat stress. Even the announcement that Hasan’s computer showed no connections to foreign radical entities has been proven false by the large number of email communications Hasan had with a terror-supporting cleric in Yemen. And the FBI knew of those connections before the shooting and didn’t think it was important enough to tell the Army about.

    Oops.

    I shudder to think where the investigating agencies are looking these days for answers, when the answer is right in front of their stupid faces. If it was a snake….

  • Levin; it might have been terrorism

    The Washington Post reports that the lights might be coming on in the Capitol Building finally as Democrat Senator Carl Levin admits that the Fort hood massacre might have been terrorism;

    Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) said Friday that he would investigate the handling of the e-mails — 18 or 19 in all — and why military officials were not aware of them before the deadly attack. Levin told reporters after a briefing from Pentagon staff members that “there are some who are reluctant to call it terrorism, but there is significant evidence that it is.”

    The emails to which Levin refers are the growing number of messages that Hasan sent to Yemeni radical cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi which we were told were few and called innocuous. The opposite is becoming apparent;

    “He [Hasan] clearly became more radicalized toward the end, and was having discussions related to the transfer of money and finances . . .,” said the source, who spoke at length in part because he was concerned the public accounting of the events has been incomplete. “It became very clear toward the end of those e-mails he was interested in taking action.”

    So basically, the FBI, and DoD just ignored the evidence before AND AFTER the shootings;

    The sources said the e-mail correspondence is particularly troubling because Aulaqi, who has been on the law enforcement radar for years, is considered by U.S. officials to be an al-Qaeda supporter who has inspired terrorism suspects in Britain, Canada and the United States. Lawmakers and counterterrorism experts have questioned why no one in the government interceded earlier given Aulaqi’s history and Hasan’s military position.

    The disclosures came as investigators in the FBI and the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division continue to interview witnesses and execute search warrants in and around the Army’s largest post, in Killeen, Tex., and elsewhere.

    Elsewhere, indeed.

  • The two faces of Matthew Alexander

    Matthew Alexander published his book last year entitled “How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq”. The book has it’s roots in a Mark Bowden article in the Atlantic. Alexander parlayed the Atlantic article into a book deal. After he wrote it, with some help from a renowned co-author, he went on a book tour making the rounds of all of the farthest Left news programs that would have him. Alexander didn’t use his real name to author the book or do his book tour. According to Alexander, his name was sealed in a court order for his protection. Of course, a puny DC District court order doesn’t affect the crack research staff of This Ain’t Hell. Here’s his DD214;
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