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

Category: Terror War

  • Recruiting office shooting

    Laughing Wolf at Blackfive writes that one recruiter was killed and another seriously wounded in Little Rock. Fox reports that the gunman was apprehended along with his “assault rifle” – whatever that means anymore.

    Notice how, unlike some bloggers on the Left jumped to conclusions over yesterday’s shooting, I’m not speculating on the motivations of this shooter or his relationship to any other group of recruiter-haters until the facts are in – I caution commenters here to do the same.

    Added: From Associated Press;

    Recruiting commander Lt. Col Thomas F. Artis says the victims had just completed basic training and were spending two weeks in Little Rock to recruit in their home area, showing the difference that less than two months of training made in their lives.

    From Star Tribune;

    Hastings said he did not know whether the recruiting office was specifically targeted or was randomly chosen.

    Hastings said shortly after noon that investigators had not yet questioned the suspect and that police were still processing evidence from the crime scene.

    From Navy Times;

    Neither the victims nor suspects were named by authorities.

    A photo of the suspect from KATV (Thanks to GI Jane);

    Eyewitness interview;

    The scene;

    UPDATE: The soldier that was killed was 23-year-old William Long of Conway, AR.

    FOX16 has also learned detectives served a search warrant at the Bristol Park apartments on Mara Lynn. Police say they’ve seized some evidence related to today’s shooting.

    Updated again: Eagle-eyed readers (1stCavRVN11B, John H and mtngrandpa) in the comments section noticed that the shooter is a Muslim convert;

    A Muslim convert who said he was opposed to the U.S. military shot two soldiers outside an Arkansas recruiting station, killing one of the soldiers, police said Monday.

    “This individual appears to have been upset with the military, the Army in particular, and that’s why he did what he did,” Little Rock Police Lt. Terry Hastings said in a phone interview.

    “He has converted to Muslim here in the past few years,” Hastings said. “To be honest we’re not completely clear on what he was upset about. He had never been in the military.”

    Hastings identified the man in custody as Carlos Bledsoe, 24, of Little Rock, who was going by the name of Abdul Hakim Mujahid Muhammad. He did not have further details. The names of the soldiers were not released, nor was the condition of the wounded soldier.

    See how we did that without jumping to conclusions, Andrew Sullivan? That’s how civilized people act.

  • Obama’s North Korea/Iran test

    This morning, North Korea decided that, since the world hasn’t made an active response to their missile launches and nuclear tests, they’d abrogate the 1953 armistice that ended the hot war on the intra-Korean frontier (CNN link).

    “Our revolutionary armed forces … will regard” South Korea’s participation “in the [the 6-year-old Proliferation Security Initiative] as a declaration of war …” the North’s official news agency said.

    Pyongyang also announced it was no longer bound by the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War.

    “The Korean Peninsula is bound to immediately return to a state of war from a legal point of view, and so our revolutionary armed forces will go over to corresponding military actions,” North Korea said through its news agency.

    Sweet. It’s the 1950s all over again. But that’s not the extent of the dangers we now face because the Obama Administration wouldn’t take the lead in shutting down North Korea’s nuclear program. Israel has discovered that Bolivia and Venezuela are supplying Iran with uranium (CBS News link);

    “There are reports that Venezuela supplies Iran with uranium for its nuclear program,” the Foreign Ministry document states, referring to previous Israeli intelligence conclusions. It added, “Bolivia also supplies uranium to Iran.”

    The report concludes that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is trying to undermine the United States by supporting Iran.

    So hugging Hugo Chavez did Obama a lot of good, didn’t it? Of course, if you read this blog in December 2007, you’d have got a whiff of the uranium connections, when a suitcase full of cash was discovered on an airstrip in Bolivia’s uranium-mining region.

    Since there was supposedly collusion between the North Koreans and Syrians on Syria’s own nuclear program, we can probably assume that the North Koreans lent aid to the Iranians – so it’s come full circle.

  • Bush policies unassailable

    We, the Americans firmly rooted in reality, as opposed to those other Americans who live in a fantasy world where bombers magically stop bombing when you build them a road or school, are slowly being vindicated by current events. The Wall Street Journal notices in “Bush’s Gitmo Vindication“;

    Yet for all of his attacks on the Bush Administration, which he accused of making “decisions based upon fear rather than foresight,” Mr. Obama stuck with his predecessor’s support for military commissions, adding some procedural bells and whistles as political cover to justify his past opposition. For the record: Both the left and right, from the ACLU to Dick Cheney, now agree that the President has all but embraced the Bush policy.

    Mr. Obama also pledged to release at least 50 detainees to other countries — about one-tenth the number released under President Bush — and added that the Administration was in “ongoing discussions” to transfer them. Good luck with that: The Europeans who were so robustly against Gitmo in the Bush years have suddenly discovered its detainees are dangerous. Meanwhile, the countries that might take them, such as Yemen, can’t be trusted to prevent them from returning to the battlefield, where they can kill Americans again.

    In the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer writes “Obama In Bush Clothing” ;

    The latest flip-flop is the restoration of military tribunals. During the 2008 campaign, Obama denounced them repeatedly, calling them an “enormous failure.” Obama suspended them upon his swearing-in. Now they’re back.

    Of course, Obama will never admit in word what he’s doing in deed. As in his rhetorically brilliant national-security speech yesterday claiming to have undone Bush’s moral travesties, the military commissions flip-flop is accompanied by the usual Obama three-step: (a) excoriate the Bush policy, (b) ostentatiously unveil cosmetic changes, (c) adopt the Bush policy.

    Krauthammer recounts some of the flip-flops of the Change Administration which changed into the Bush Administration on national security;

    Observers of all political stripes are stunned by how much of the Bush national security agenda is being adopted by this new Democratic government. Victor Davis Hanson (National Review) offers a partial list: “The Patriot Act, wiretaps, e-mail intercepts, military tribunals, Predator drone attacks, Iraq (i.e., slowing the withdrawal), Afghanistan (i.e., the surge) — and now Guantanamo.”

    Jack Goldsmith (The New Republic) adds: rendition — turning over terrorists seized abroad to foreign countries; state secrets — claiming them in court to quash legal proceedings on rendition and other erstwhile barbarisms; and the denial of habeas corpus — to detainees in Afghanistan’s Bagram prison, indistinguishable logically and morally from Guantanamo.

    Harry Reid declared yesterday that there will be no detainees on American soil. Where then? Europe doesn’t want them, the countries in the Gulf region who are willing to take them are less than trustworthy in keeping terrorists from returning to their former lives and their former fights. Dick Cheney reminded the Obama Administration yesterday;

    The administration seems to pride itself on searching for some kind of middle ground in policies addressing terrorism. They may take comfort in hearing disagreement from opposite ends of the spectrum. If liberals are unhappy about some decisions, and conservatives are unhappy about other decisions, then it may seem to them that the president is on the path of sensible compromise. But in the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground, and half-measures keep you half exposed. You cannot keep just some nuclear-armed terrorists out of the United States, you must keep every nuclear-armed terrorist out of the United States.

    Triangulation is a political strategy, not a national security strategy.

    While Obama declared yesterday that the Bush Administration’s policies “created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained” and “has weakened American security” without examining the fact that there have been no successful attacks on American soil since the event that was the catalyst for those Bush policies. The Democrats are real good at campaigning, but they’re not real successful at actually accomplishing things. So their strategy has been to campaign as Democrats and fight for our national security like Republicans. We’ve recounted some of the reactions from the Left on the Obama policies here on this blog – but it’s not like the hateful rhetoric we heard against the Bush Administration for the same policies. That makes them kind of disingenuous, doesn’t it?

  • Vietnam Vet killed in Iraq

    Sad, sad news;

    Maj. Steven Hutchison, of Scottsdale, Ariz., decided to re-enlist after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the death of his wife, his brother said.

    Richard Hutchison told The Associated Press on Thursday that his older brother wanted to re-enlist immediately after the 9/11 terror attacks, but that his wife was against it.

    He signed up again in July 2007 after she died, according to his brother and the Army.

    “He was very devoted to the service and to his country,” Richard Hutchison said. “I didn’t want him to do it, but he had a mind of his own and that’s what he wanted to do.”

    The Pentagon said Steven Hutchison was killed in Iraq on Sunday.

    From the Army Times;

    Steven Hutchison served in Afghanistan for a year after he re-enlisted and went to Iraq in October as a team leader of about a dozen soldiers who would train Iraqi soldiers how to fight. But, he said his brother’s mission changed and that he was working to secure Iraq’s southern border instead.

    Now you know why I named that whole generation of servicemen as my heroes – they keep giving until there’s nothing more to give.

    Richard Hutchison said his brother will be buried next to [his wife] Candy in Scottsdale, and that a funeral is tentatively planned for Tuesday.

    Hutchison was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 34th Armor Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, at Fort Riley, Kan.

    He’ll be glad to be with the woman he loved again.

  • DHS pulls extremist report

    The Washington Times confronted DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano on her department’s report IDing veterans as dangerous extremists with terrorist potential;

    “The wheels came off the wagon because the vetting process was not followed,” Ms. Napolitano told the House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday.

    “The report is no longer out there,” she said. “An employee sent it out without authorization.”

    There ya go – it’s not her fault. Someone sabotaged her. The American Legion national commander weighs in;

    David K. Rehbein, commander of the American Legion, said the withdrawal of the report “validates our objections.”

    “It did not contain any evidence,” Mr. Rehbein said. “It was an unfair and unsubstantiated stereotype based on Timothy McVeigh.”

    The report also said “rightwing extremism” may include groups opposed to abortion and immigration, among several other threat assessments.

    Some have called it a strictly partisan attack on the Obama Administration, but that’s not exactly true;

    Rep. Christopher Carney, Pennsylvania Democrat, said that as a veteran he “took offense personally,” and his constituents were offended by the report as well.

    “It really hit home hard to me and in our district,” Mr. Carney said. “It’s not a good start when I go to town hall meetings and I hear people calling for your resignation.”

    Of course some low-level GS employee is going to take the heat;

    Asked whether the person who wrote the report is still employed, Ms. Napolitano said, “Appropriate personnel action is being taken.”

    Is there room under that bus for every general schedule federal employee in DC?

  • Revisiting the Camp Liberty slayings

    As more facts roll out of Iraq, a clearer picture emerges. The Washington Times is the only media source that warns against jumping to conclusions;

    No reason for the shooting has been determined, officials said, but soldiers in the field cautioned against jumping to a conclusion of “combat stress” until an investigation has been completed.

    But then, later in their story they start talking about a rise in suicide rates (and compare US civilians in 2006 to armed forces statistics from 2008) for some reason since we can all be pretty sure that this wasn’t a suicide attempt.

    The Washington Post adds that their had been concerns about SGT Russell by his leadership;

    A few days before the shooting at Camp Liberty, a military installation near the Baghdad airport, Russell’s commanders grew concerned about his state of mind and confiscated his weapon as a precautionary measure, according to Maj. Gen. David Perkins, the top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq.

    “He had been referred to counseling the week before,” Perkins said Tuesday. “His commander had determined it’d be best for him not to have a weapon.”

    The Post also reports that Russell’s father is making excuses for him;

    Russell’s father, Wilburn Russell, 73, told the Associated Press on Tuesday that counselors at the clinic “broke” his son, by putting him through stressful mental tests but not clarifying that they were merely tests. The elder Russell said his son had e-mailed his wife sometime before the shooting and told her he had had two of the worst days in his life. He told her that “his life was over as far as he was concerned,” the father said. Wilburn Russell said his son was not a violent man.

    Well, obviously, he is a violent man. AP also uncovered some domestic violence in his past. Apparently the Army is partly blaming the peace in Iraq for the stress, according to the Times;

    With combat in Iraq now at a low point and U.S. forces taking a secondary, supporting role to Iraqi forces, boredom could become a morale issue for some soldiers when not in the field.

    “Obviously you have to concern yourself with boredom, but we keep them very busy here – spiritually, mentally and physically – and not just on operations,” said Col. Burt Thompson….

    The Stars and Stripes hints at family problems as the reason Russell snapped;

    “Now that they’re not in life-threatening situations on a regular basis and the tempo’s calmer, the threat is lower, they do stay focused on those [family] issues,” Brown said. “And yet, the fact that they are so powerless to do anything to influence them probably has a major impact on folks.”

    And you can always count on the moonbat readers of the Washington Post to miss the whole point;
    (more…)

  • What Fragging? Where?

    When the media and the Left learn a term, they apply it to everything. Today’s word is “fragging”. The first place I saw in relation to the incident at Camp Liberty was on a VFP blog of sorts called “Imagine” (recalling the John Lennon song) in which the author, James Starowicz, one of the chief crackpots of the Geezers For Peace writes;

    Yeah, just like Vietnam – well, not really. There were 230 deaths from the practice we now call fragging (some Leftist sites say 730 – but that’s including attempts) over the 10 years we were in Vietnam. Since the 2003 invasion of Hussein’s Iraq, there have been three, this one being the third. The second one is unsolved and the motives are unclear. That doesn’t stop the Associated Press from falsely claiming;

    There have been several previous fragging incidents in the Iraq war.

    Yeah, um, three, including this one doesn’t make “several” unless you call one incident “many”.

    During and after the Vietnam War, the Left used the fragging incidents as evidence that soldiers were unhappy with their leadership in particular and the war in general. I disagree, but for the sake of argument, I’ll continue.

    Since this one seems to have been targeted towards a counseling clinic and the staff and SGT John Russell actually left his unit with the firearm and went to the counseling center kind of disproves that he was unhappy with his leadership and more unhappy with the medical treatment he was getting.

    That doesn’t stop the media from mischaracterizing this one, too;

    An American Army sergeant shot and killed five fellow soldiers following an altercation at a military counseling center in Iraq Monday, officials said. The attack drew attention to the issues of combat stress and morale among soldiers serving multiple combat tours over six years of war.

    Um, Russell was an electronics technician who was transitioning out of the service after 21 years – not someone who was being ordered to do something that would get him injured or killed. So frustration with the war kind of gets tossed out as an indicator, too. He was leaving the war and the Army for the last time.

    He was just one guy who snapped and did terrible things. Are all of those guys going to do what Russell did? Not any more than all Georgia professors are going to do similar things.

  • Venezuela’s economy failing, plan to seize more foreign assets

    Just as an illustration of how twisted and confusing this whole big government concept is, take a look at Venezuela as it’s run by Hugo Chavez. Last year Chavez seized much of the oil and gas industry from foreign investors when oil was selling at $4/gallon here in the US. Now that the price has fallen to half of that, Venezuela is suffering from that decision according to the Washington Times;

    The price of Venezuelan crude has shrunk by 55 percent during the past year, and the debt accumulated by government-run oil enterprise PDVSA has grown by 146 percent.

    “The oil price is very low; about half the price we budgeted. That is hard and difficult for Venezuela,” said Mr. Chavez.

    The National Assembly passed a law Friday allowing the government to take over oil-service contractors, including several American and British firms that are owed up to a year in back fees.

    Last week they seized a Tulsa-based company’s assets in Venezuela;

    Petroleos de Venezuela SA, the state oil company known as PDVSA, said Monday it took over three gas-compression facilities from Tulsa-based Williams Cos. on May 8, one more than Williams had previously announced.

    PDVSA will absorb 163 workers at the facilities, it said Monday in a statement.

    The plants, two of which pump natural gas into the ground to increase oil output, are “associated” with about 500,000 barrels of oil production a day, PDVSA said.

    Also last week, the rubber-stamp legislature authorized Chavez to take over more industries in addition to the sugar, milk and lumber industries he’s nationalized since last year.

    The 39 companies currently providing services to state-run Petroleos de Venezuela SA will be brought under government control under a resolution that took effect Monday after being published in the Official Gazette, the official Bolivarian News Agency reported.

    It said the companies affected include Zulia Towing and Barge Company, Gusteca, Premeca, Seatech, and Terminales Maracaibo. The companies provide transport boats and other oil-related services on Lake Maracaibo in western Venezuela.

    Chavez claims that taking over these companies will allow him to cut energy costs – the government taking over industries doesn’t cut costs for consumers, which Chavez should have learned by taking over the oil industry. Of course he blames Venezuelans for the failure of the oil industry to turn a profit, so he fires them and brings in foreign labor;

    Mr. Chavez ordered his military to seize paralyzed installations, and he brought in oil workers from India, Libya and Iran to restart drilling rigs and refineries as he fired more than 17,000 PDVSA employees.

    While Bloomberg reports that Venezuelan bond prices fall. That should be helpful for the economy – he’ll pay foreigners low wages while Venezuelans sit on unemployment lines. In the meantime, the rhetoric continues. At Flopping Aces, Curt posts a video of Chavez telling a crowd of laborers that “The rich are evil….The rich aren’t human. The rich are animals in human form.”

    The way things are going, the only rich in Venezuela will be Chavez and his inner circle. Oh, and did I mention that Hezbollah has a presence in Venezuela? And that presence includes running some of the drug trade in the area?