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

Category: Terror War

  • John McCain, Vietnam veteran

    Remember the 2004 election? Remember how the words “John Kerry, who served in Vietnam,…” were tied together so often that we began to believe he’d changed his name to include the brief biography. He saluted the Democrat convention to wild cheers (a recruit-style salute that would have been corrected by a drill sergeant with memorable adjectives the first day of basic training). We were treated to endless broadcasts of his carefully-scripted recreation of his heroics for which he had carried a movie camera to Vietnam specifically to film.

    Well, we all know that was to contrast Kerry’s service to National Guard pilot George W. Bush – to make it seem as if John Kerry had some special gift for defending our country. It turns out that he only had a gift for gaming the military’s system and got out of a 12-month tour in three months so he could rush into his political career. So his three months in Vietnam were worthy of mentioning every time his name was mentioned. In fact, his ultimate downfall came around because he depended so heavily on his three-month stint. And he refused to sign his Form 180.
    John McCain, according to his website lists his awards;

    His naval honors include the Silver Star, Bronze Star, Legion of Merit, Purple Heart, and the Distinguished Flying Cross..

    He also has a world-famous career as a POW for nearly six years, which gets mentioned very little. A Yahoo search turned up more anti-McCain links discrediting his service than honoring it. The only news stories mentioning the link of McCain to the Vietnam war are in relation to his argument with Castro’s corpse.

    So why isn’t the media harping on McCain’s service, which certainly trumps Kerry’s three months Barack Obama’s lack of service and Hillary’s attempt to join the Marines (in a totally fictional account) when she was rejected for being a girl.

    And then on top of it, Cuffy Meigs (h/t American Pundit) finds that McCain’s sons are currently serving in the war against terror, his youngest a grunt Lance Corporal just returned from Iraq. And that John McCain makes unpublicized visits to the homes of military families. Neptunus Lex gives up updates on another McCain progeny racking up demerits at Annapolis. If John Kerry had sired similar siblings, we’d have been treated to “film at 11” every night.

    So how can the media continue to inflict this facade of neutrality in politics on the American public without violent retribution?

  • Nancy Pelosi’s “Failure” Mantra

    Pelosi echoes Harry (”the war is lost”) Reid:

    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said twice Sunday that Iraq “is a failure,” adding that President Bush’s troop surge has “not produced the desired effect.”

    “The purpose of the surge was to create a secure time for the government of Iraq to make the political change to bring reconciliation to Iraq,” Pelosi said on CNN’s “Late Edition.” “They have not done that.”

    Yeah, the ‘desired effect’ was total victory for Islamofascism and defeat of U.S. forces.

    The speaker hastened to add: “The troops have succeeded, God bless them.”

    Much to your dismay, Pelosi.

    ……Anchor Wolf Blitzer asked: “Are you not worried, though, that all the gains that have been achieved over the past year might be lost?”

    “There haven’t been gains, Wolf,” the speaker replied. “The gains have not produced the desired effect, which is the reconciliation of Iraq. This is a failure. This is a failure. The troops have succeeded, God bless them. We owe them the greatest debt of gratitude for their sacrifice, their patriotism, and for their courage and to their families as well.

    Didja get that? “Blinky” Pelosi can’t even get her defeatest story straight. She claims ‘failure’, yet in the same fetid breath she thanks us for our success.

    “But they deserve better than the policy of a war without end, a war that could be 20 years or longer. And Secretary Gates just testified in the last 24 hours to Congress that this next year in Iraq and Afghanistan are going to cost $170 billion.

    It would’ve been cheaper to use a couple of neutron bombs, but hey, they wouldn’t listen to me.

    We deserved better leadership than what we were saddled with between 1992 and 2000. FIVE terrorist attacks happened under Bubba’s watch; Khobar Towers, USS Cole, the U.S. Embassy attacks in Kenya and Tanzania, and the first  World Trade center attack in 1993. His response? He wagged the dog in Mogadishu and Bosnia. He was too busy getting re-election cash from Bejiing and blow jobs from Monica to care about national security.

    We also deserve better than mealy-mouthed leftwing democrats calling us “mercenaries” and “Nazi’s”, and telling us that they don’t think the sacrifice of the fallen in this war was “worth it”. We know more than anyone about how sacrificing for democracy works, having defended it for over 230 years.

    “Afghanistan is not settled because the president took his eye off the ball and took the full attention that should have been in Afghanistan, and shifted some of that to Iraq, a war without end, without a plan, without a reason to go in, without a plan to win, without a strategy to leave. This is a disaster … we cannot perpetuate.”

    http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0208/8422.html

    Well let’s see now, al Qadea and the Taliban have gotten their asses royally kicked in Iraq and Afghanistan. There were 3000  reasons to go in and kill them. The plan is working. We’ve won. When Baghdad and Kabul are ready to take the reins, we’ll be through.

    The Democratic wing of Al Qaeda just can’t let go of their defeatist ambitions. On the other hand, the Al Qaeda in Iraq already know they’re beaten to a pulp:

    Al-Qaeda in Iraq faces an “extraordinary crisis”. Last year’s mass defection of ordinary Sunnis from al-Qaeda to the US military “created panic, fear and the unwillingness to fight”. The terrorist group’s security structure suffered “total collapse”.

    These are the words not of al-Qaeda’s enemies but of one of its own leaders in Anbar province — once the group’s stronghold. They were set down last summer in a 39-page letter seized during a US raid on an al-Qaeda base near Samarra in November.

    The US military released extracts from that letter yesterday along with a second seized in another November raid that is almost as startling.

    That second document is a bitter 16-page testament written last October by a local al-Qaeda leader near Balad, north of Baghdad. “I am Abu-Tariq, emir of the al-Layin and al-Mashahdah sector,” the author begins. He goes on to describe how his force of 600 shrank to fewer than 20.

    “We were mistreated, cheated and betrayed by some of our brothers,” he says. “Those people were nothing but hypocrites, liars and traitors and were waiting for the right moment to switch sides with whoever pays them most.”

    Assuming the two documents are authentic — and the US military insists that they are — they provide a rare insight into an organisation thrown into turmoil by the rise of the Awakening movement. More than 80,000 Sunnis have joined the tribal groups of “concerned local citizens” [CLCs] that have helped to eject al-Qaeda from swaths of western and northern Iraq, including much of Baghdad.

    US intelligence officials cautioned, however, that the documents were snapshots of two small areas and that al-Qaeda was far from a spent force.

    ……The Anbar letter conceded that the “crusaders” — Americans — had gained the upper hand by persuading ordinary Sunnis that al-Qaeda was responsible for their suffering and by exploiting their poverty to entice them into the security forces.
    Al-Qaeda’s “Islamic State of Iraq is faced with an extraordinary crisis, especially in al-Anbar”, the unnamed emir admitted.

    In an apparent reference to al-Qaeda’s brutal tactics, he said of the Americans and their Sunni allies: “We helped them to unite against us . . . The Americans and the apostates launched their campaigns against us and we found ourselves in a circle not being able to move, organise or conduct our operations.”

    He said of the loss of Anbar province: “This created weakness and psychological defeat. This also created panic, fear and the unwillingness to fight.

    The morale of the fighters went down . . . There was a total collapse in the security structure of the organisation.” The emir complained that the supply of foreign fighters had dwindled and that they found it increasingly hard to operate inside Iraq because they could not blend in. Foreign suicide bombers determined to kill “not less than 20 or 30 infidels” grew disillusioned because they were kept hanging about and only given small operations. Some gave up and went home.

    Finally the emir recommended rewards for killing apostates, using doctors to kill infidels and offering gifts to tribal leaders. He said al-Qaeda’s fighters should be sent to more promising areas such as Diyala province or Baghdad — which is exactly what happened.

    Rear-Admiral Gregory Smith, the US military spokesman in Baghdad, called Abu-Tariq’s testament a “woe-is-me kind of document”. It calls the Sunnis who switched sides a “cancer in the body of al-Jihad movement”, and declares: “We should have no mercy on them.”

    The author lists those who have made off with al-Qaeda weapons or money, describes the group’s arsenal, including C5 rockets, which are used against helicopters, and records the fate of the battalions under his command.

    Most of the first battalion’s fighters “betrayed us and joined al-Sahwah [the Awakening]”, he says. The leader of the second ran away and all but two of its 300 fighters joined the Awakening. The activities of the third were “frozen due to their present conditions”. Of the fourth he writes: “Most of its members are scoundrels, sectarians, non-believers”.

    He lists 38 people still working for him but beside five names he has written comments like “We have not seen him for twenty days” or “left us a week ago”. He concludes, wistfully: “And that is the number of fighters left in my sector.”

    Link: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article3346386.ece

    Gee, the beleaguered Abu-Tariq sounds so much like Pelosi, it’s downright scary.

  • Secure our borders! Yesterday!

    In this morning’s Washington Times, Sara Carter (quickly becoming one of my favorite reporters over there) writes that “US Foes target Latin America”

    Iran, Cuba and Venezuela are working together against the U.S. by undermining democracy in Latin America, allowing trafficking of illegal drugs and creating safe havens for extremist groups, intelligence officials said.

    Testifying before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Tuesday, National Intelligence Director Michael McConnell said that influence from the three countries — led respectively by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez — has spilled into Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador, which “are pursuing agendas that undercut checks and balances” of democratic governments.

    She goes on to write;

    “We’ve known for some time that Islamic extremists groups were gaining momentum and exploiting the region,” said one U.S. federal law-enforcement official, on the condition of anonymity, who worked drug operations in Central America. “Iran is no exception — now with Cuba and Venezuela, the door is open.”

    Web sites advocating Hezbollah and other Islamic extremist groups in Central America are used to recruit members and espouse extremist ideology.

    On one Web page — now removed from the Internet — “Hezbollah Latin America” displayed photographs of members, with their faces covered and weapons raised. The Web site contained links to Hezbollah group members in Venezuela, El Salvador, Argentina and as north as Chiapas, Mexico.

    Regular readers of this blog will remember the link to Jungle Mom that I’ve posted several times over the past several months referring to Hezbollah influence among the indigenous people of Venezuela’s interior after Chavez forced Christian missionaries out of the country.

    Unless we build the wall and start enforcing border securing, these Latins influenced by terrorist organizations will have the ability to blend into our own population and strike without a bit of hinderance.

    If that’s not terrifying enough for you, try this;

    In 2005, Venezuela became a major transient route for South American — predominantly Colombian — cocaine destined for the U.S. market and it continues to grow, U.S. intelligence officials said.

    Mr. Chavez’s lack of counterdrug cooperation “undermines efforts by other countries, particularly Colombia, by giving traffickers access to alternative routes and transit points Chavez is likely to remain unengaged on the counternarcotics front unless the drug trade is perceived to damage his international image or threaten his political longevity,” Mr. McConnell said.”Military cooperation between Tehran and Caracas is growing,” Mr. McConnell testified. “There are growing signs of anxiety among Venezuela’s neighbors about this military buildup.”

    Coca-chewing Chavez and crackhead Ahmadinjad supplying our own drug addicts with druga and using the money against us (where are all of those Libertarians who say that drug use is a personal preference and don’t harm society).

    But any war against drugs must be prefaced with secure borders. It’ll be up to the next president since this one has been a bit out-to-lunch on that one. And it’ll take a sturdily-spined Congress to force the next Administration to do what needs to be done.

    As it stands now, the only people willing to stand up to Chavez and his cronies seems to be Exxon-Mobil.

  • The legacy of Tet

    Arthur Herman writes in the Wall Street Journal today a fascinating piece entitled “The Lies of Tet” that rings strangely familiar in relation to the narrative we get from the Democrats and the media in relation to the current war against terror;

    …the desperate fury of the communist attacks including on Saigon, where most reporters lived and worked, caught the press by surprise. (Not the military: It had been expecting an attack and had been on full alert since Jan. 24.) It also put many reporters in physical danger for the first time. Braestrup, a former Marine, calculated that only 40 of 354 print and TV journalists covering the war at the time had seen any real fighting. Their own panic deeply colored their reportage, suggesting that the communist assault had flung Vietnam into chaos.

    Their editors at home, like CBS’s Walter Cronkite, seized on the distorted reporting to discredit the military’s version of events. The Viet Cong insurgency was in its death throes, just as U.S. military officials assured the American people at the time. Yet the press version painted a different picture.

    To quote Braestrup, “the media tended to leave the shock and confusion of early February, as then perceived, fixed as the final impression of Tet” and of Vietnam generally. “Drama was perpetuated at the expense of information,” and “the negative trend” of media reporting “added to the distortion of the real situation on the ground in Vietnam.”

    The North Vietnamese were delighted. On the heels of their devastating defeat, Hanoi increasingly shifted its propaganda efforts toward the media and the antiwar movement. Causing American (not South Vietnamese) casualties, even at heavy cost, became a battlefield objective in order to reinforce the American media’s narrative of a failing policy in Vietnam.

    Yet thanks to the success of Tet, the numbers of Americans dying in Vietnam steadily declined — from almost 15,000 in 1968 to 9,414 in 1969 and 4,221 in 1970 — by which time the Viet Cong had ceased to exist as a viable fighting force. One Vietnamese province after another witnessed new peace and stability. By the end of 1969 over 70% of South Vietnam’s population was under government control, compared to 42% at the beginning of 1968. In 1970 and 1971, American ambassador Ellsworth Bunker estimated that 90% of Vietnamese lived in zones under government control.

    Yesterday, I’d read one of the bloggers from our side (forgive me for forgetting whom) who’s plunged into the depths of the world of Leftism and read blog entries that called the homicide bombing attacks in the Baghdad pet market last week an indication that all was indeed not well in Iraq. Every death is seized upon as evidence that the Bush Administration and General Petreaus are liars.

    In fact you can do a Yahoo News search on “mass+graves” and see every news service seize upon the blood and gore being inflicted on the Iraqis by al Qaeda, but do a search on “Iraq+success” and see what you get. Apparently things that don’t fit the narrative are ignored. When’s the last time you read about an American hero in Iraq or Afgahnistan that wasn’t on a right-wing blog or a milblog?

    Democrats are fully invested in our failure and the media is manipulating the market for them.

  • Waterboarding wet dreams crushed

    Every protest event against the war on terror that I’ve attended, the big applause-getter has always been the speaker who can first condemn waterboarding. Countless Leftist discussion boards have had endless debates about whether waterboarding is torture and how the US routinely uses this technique. It’s almost accepted fact that every Muslim the US talks to gets waterboarded a few times.

    Well, it turns out it’s not true. CIA chief Michael Hayden testified to Congress yesterday that’s only happened to three terrorists – three proven and admitted terrorists, who had time-sensitive information. (LA Times link);

    He also testified that only three detainees were ever subjected to the method: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks; Abu Zubaydah, an Al Qaeda operative tied to the Sept. 11 plot; and Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, a Saudi suspected of playing a key role in the bombing of the U.S. Navy destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000.

    Three people – not thousands, or hundeds or even tens – three. And it hasn’t been used on anyone in the last five years. The Wall Street Journal’s Review and Outlook column “Tall Torture Tales” today goes a bit further;

    The waterboarding was conducted by intelligence professionals who understood they were operating not only with the approval of the Justice Department but also the informed consent of key Congressional leaders, including Democrat Jay Rockefeller, then the ranking minority Member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

    So that’s the extent of the whole thing. If waterboarding can be considered torture (which I don’t believe), out of the thousands of terrorists we’ve captured, only three – all admitted murderers and thugs – have had the distinct honor of being waterboarded – and Hayden banned the use of it in 2006.

    It must suck to be on the Left, today. Whatever are they going to do with all of those signs and displays they drag around with them? A recycling nightmare. It maybe true that more people in the US have been voluntarily waterboarded than have been actually tortured by our government extracting information.

    Of course, this news will get buried under the cacophony of the worthless Super-Tuesday news. Nonetheless, it’s here for all of Google Rangers to find.

  • Berkeley waves white flag

    Now that the Berkely City Council has witnessed the fruits of their ill-conceived move against the Marine recruiters in their city (Breitbart video of Marines being forcibly detained from reporting to work) they’re having second thoughts according to SFGate;

    Council members Betty Olds and Laurie Capitelli on Monday proposed that Berkeley rescind its letter to the U.S. Marine Corps that stated that the downtown Berkeley recruiting center “is not welcome in our city,” and publicly declare that Berkeley is against the war but supports the troops.

    The City Council will vote on Olds’ and Capitelli’s two proposals at its meeting next Tuesday.

    “I think we shouldn’t be seen across the country as hating the Marines,” said Olds, who voted against last week’s proposals. “If you make a mistake, like we did, you should admit it and correct it and move on.”

    Naw, that was no mistake, you flea-bitten old bag, it was intentional. And anyone who thinks that our letters and emails and phonecalls influenced her change of “heart”, don’t bet on it. Those old hippies love the abuse – they think it makes them unique and American originals. It was Jim DeMint’s prposal to shut down the freeflow of taxpayer cash that did it (SF Chronicle link);

    Sen. Jim De Mint, R-S.C., had a tougher take. “If the city can’t show respect for the Marines that have fought, bled and died for their freedom, Berkeley should not be receiving special taxpayer funded handouts,” De Mint wrote on his blog. De Mint has found some choice earmarks – $975,000 for the Cal Matsui Center for Politics and Public Service, $243,000 for the Chez Panisse Foundation – that, while not city projects, made De Mint’s list.

    Some cling dearly to their so-called convictions;

    Councilwoman Dona Spring said the council should not be cowed by the volume of hate mail and threats.

    “I still oppose the Marines recruiting in Berkeley because it’s one way of protesting this wasteful war,” she said. “Our military policy is a shambles. But we’re not in opposition to the Marines; we oppose the policy that directs the Marines.”

    Michele Malkin responds;

    Riiight. When the mayor and the council are railing that the “Marines are the President’s own gangsters… they are trained killers” and that the Marines are known for “death and destruction…and maiming” and give America “horrible karma,” it’s the “policy” they oppose, you see.

    At Wake Up America, Spree says;

    Make no mistake, they meant to word the resolution the way they did and when city council member, Linda Maio claims that “”I don’t think any of us paid enough attention to it, and people want to rewrite it to more accurately portray our sentiments. We really do have a great deal of concern for the people in our military, and we don’t want to be critical of the sacrifices they are making,” she is full of it!!!!!!

    They knew exactly what they were passing, the resolution, as seen above wasn’t very long and it was VERY clear.

    Well, I’m warning the hippies who run Montgomery County, Maryland (in some quarters known as Berkeley East) – I will personally stand guard at my local recruiting station – Hell, I’ll even use my vacation time to “express myself” if you know what I mean. I’ll exercise my freedom of speech with all the volume and force this old infantry sergeant can muster – I’ve taught hippies to fly with the sound of my voice.

    One thing I won’t tolerate is the misinterpretation of the Constitution that will result the loss of freedom of others.

    Of course, Code Pink, the band of wrinkled political whores who got Berkeley into this mess in the first place are stretching their gums in anticipation;

    “I hope they’re not acting out of intimidation,” said Code Pink spokeswoman Medea Benjamin. “Berkeley is a city of peace, and a recruiting station does not fit Berkeley’s values.”

    You better keep that shit in Berkeley, Media. You bring it to my neighborhood, you’ll in for rude awakening – much like any guy who wakes up beside you.

  • March Against FARC (Update)

    Background from the Financial Times;

    During his eight months as a hostage of Colombia’s Farc rebels in 2002, businessman Gustavo Muñoz knew that he would be executed the moment the Colombian military intervened.

    “They used to practise my execution every fortnight,” he said. “I knew exactly who would do it if the military attacked.”

    Mr Muñoz says Colombians are now more concerned about the 4,000 people held illegally by the Farc, other left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries and common criminals.

    Thousands of Colombians are on Monday expected to march in repudiation of the Farc and its practice of kidnapping, in a demonstration organised through Facebook, the social networking site. The organisers claim the protest will be one of Colombia’s biggest, demonstrating a growing indignation with the kidnappings.

    “Some on the left used to argue that it was justifiable . . . that they needed to do it to finance the struggle for social transformation,” says Olga Lucia Gómez, whose País Libre charity helps victims. “You don’t hear those arguments anymore.”

    So I decided to add my voice to the millions worldwide from here in DC.

    I was really surprised that an ad hoc organization put together such a large demonstration in such a short period of time. It was just three weeks ago that Kate emailed me about contacts for getting permits for the demonstration. Most of the organization was done on Facebook and crossed generational lines as you can see from the photos. It really was a study in modern organization. My compliments to Laura Busche for herding all of these cats for the media and the participants.
    There were a few thousand people, mostly Colombians from what I could tell, gathered in the chilly drizzle of Freedom Plaza, just a few blocks from the White House;

    The theme of the demonstration was to show opposition to the Armed Revolutionary Front of Colombia, a Marxist terrorist organization that has been murdering innocent Colombians for forty years.

    Many of the people at this rally are refugees of the conflict in their country between a democratic government they elected and the Marxist narco-terrorists of FARC. This is a YouTube of Laura Busche, the main organizer of the event explaining the demonstration in English and Spanish.

    Aside from the hundreds of Colombians being held hostage for ransom (that’s how FARC finances it’s anti-government operations in addition to drug dealings) there are also three Americans being held hostage for propaganda purposes. The Colombians at the rally demonstrated for their release, too.


    Many of the signs the Colombians carried were specific about who are the enemies of democracy in Colombia. For example, this one about Human Rights Watch, which ignores the atrocities of FARC while pressuring the Congress and Bush Administration on supposed Human Rights violations of the Uribe government.

    This one speaks for itself;

    “[Simon] Bolivar dreamed of a great Colombia, not a terrorist Venezuela”

    This turns out to be the author of Padre Hoyos Blog.

    Here’s a YouTube video of the crowd singing the Colombian national anthem. They began their demonstration by singing the US national anthem, though. Another YouTube video of the crowd.

    Try as I might, I couldn’t find any Communists or Socialists on the periphery of the protest like they are at so many others. There were no Code Pink showboats trying to steal the show. There were no Bushitler signs, no signs that called for us to end our war against some nebulous brown people or to release prisoners from invisible camps. It was a genuine outpouring of contempt for FARC and a call for the hostilities to end against the Columbian people.

    Kate at A Colombo-Americana’s Perspective has a worldwide round up of the international demonstrations today. We bumped into each other taking pictures in Freedom Plaza today so I’m sure she’ll have less Anglo-centric view of the event when she gets her pictures posted.

    Gateway Pundit has amazing pictures of the huge crowds in Colombia. Daniel at Venezuela News and Views has pictures of the march in Caracas.

    UPDATE: I was anonimously sent this YouTube link to very well done video record of the event in DC. Pictures and videos of the event in Toronto at Correo Canadiense.

  • Obama’s naivete

    I was a little stunned this morning to read in the Washington Times that Obama is still convinced that he was still right to oppose the war in Iraq;

    Both Mr. Obama of Illinois and Mrs. Clinton of New York agreed that they would carefully withdraw troops from Iraq and rededicate the U.S. military to Afghanistan. But they sparred briefly during the mostly congenial forum on how the nation was led into the war.

    “It is important to be right on Day One,” Mr. Obama said to applause, riffing off Mrs. Clinton’s frequent claim that she’s ready to be president on Day One. “The judgment that I’ve presented on this issue, and some other issues is relevant to how we’re going to make decisions in the future.”

    He said that because “the terrorist threat is real” and because the nation has “finite resources, we don’t have the capacity to just send our troops in anywhere we decide, without good intelligence, without a clear rationale.”

    Of course, when your audience is a pack of Koolaid drinking Democrat sheep, I suppose being opposed to a national security venture that has been the powder keg of American foreign policy for 18 years looks attractive. Especially since Democrats only approve of bombing the living shit out of the Serbian people to punish their leader and putting missiles into the middle of a Sudanese aspirin factory as a foreign policy solution.

    I remember the news footage of Haitians standing on the pier in Port-au-Prince who waved their machetes wildly and actually drove off the US Navy. I remember that my friend, Tim Martin lost his life in Mogadishu when he rode a Hummer back into the city to rescue his fellow Rangers because the administration didn’t have the cojones to give the US Amy the weapons they needed to fight that war because they didn’t want to appear too aggressive.
    Whichever Democrat becomes our President, we can expect to see these scenes played out around the world, especially judging by their constituency’s continued push towards US irrelevance in the world.