Category: Terror War

Yeah, I’m a fanboy. The Washington Post reports that the A-10 has been formally introduced to ISIS;

The A-10 Thunderbolt II attack jet has been carrying out airstrikes against the Islamic State since late November on a near-daily basis, a U.S. military official said Tuesday. It marks the first time the use of the pugnacious plane against the militant group has been confirmed, although U.S. military officials disclosed last month that they had deployed the A-10 in support of the mission in Iraq and Syria.

The jet is beloved by U.S. ground troops for its ability to strikes enemy fighters from the air, but it remains in a fierce budget battle in Washington. Air Force officials and some fiscal conservatives have advocated retiring the aircraft to save money and using other planes for close-air support missions. A compromise in the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act will keep it flying at least one more year, but it’s future afterward is still uncertain.

It has no equal and it makes it’s own case.

The Australian Courier tells the story of the two folks who lost their lives in the Lindt Cafe in Sydney today;

Both died while doing extremely brave acts.

Lindt cafe manager Tori Johnson was wrestling a gun from hostage taker Man Haron Monis when he was killed.

Mother-of-three Katrina Dawson, who had stopped at the cafe for a morning coffee, died while trying to defend her pregnant friend.

From The News;

LINDT Cafe manager Tori Johnson has been hailed a hero after he died trying to knock the gun from Man Haron Monis’ hand in Martin Place about 2am.

Police entered the cafe after Tori was shot dead and the ensuing gunfight resulted in the deaths of the gunman as well as mother-of-three Katrina Dawson.

The Washington Times reports that the President, that Obama fellow, plans on taking a victory lap for the end of the war in Afghanistan, despite the lessons that he should have learned from the Bush “Mission Accomplished” thing and his own touting of the not-so-end of the war in Iraq. I guess it’s more of a wishful thinking thing, or that popular “Hope & Change” thing we hear about these days.

The president is traveling Monday to Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey, where he’ll join Republican Gov. Chris Christie in thanking troops for their service in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

“Our war in Afghanistan is coming to a responsible end,” Mr. Obama said in his weekly address.

But Mr. Obama also said the end of combat in Afghanistan “doesn’t mean the end of challenges to our security.”

It also doesn’t mean that the commitment to the war in Afghanistan has ended either – more than 10,000 troops will remain there. In fact, two of them, Sgt. 1st Class Ramon S. Morris, 37, of New York, New York; and Spc. Wyatt J. Martin, 22, of Mesa, Arizona of the 3rd Engineer Battalion, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, Fort Hood, Texas were killed just this weekend in the wave of violence that swept across Afghanistan in the wake of our withdrawing troops.

I posted the story last night that a jihadist had taken over a cafe in Sydney. I did that last night because I thought it would have been over by now, I was wrong, I guess. In an update; five hostages self-rescued, and it looks like they escaped. The fellow who is holding the hostages has demanded that he provided with a proper ISIS flag to replace the one that some people have said that is no proof that he’s a proper jihadist. More from Fox News;

A series of explosions rang out early Tuesday morning as police stormed the Sydney cafe where a jihadist and murder suspect has been holding hostages for 16 hours.

The explosions, which local media said were caused by flash grenades just before 2:30 a.m. local time, came as several more hostages fled Lindt Chocolat Cafe, where a man identified as Man Haron Monis, an Iranian also known for sending hate mail to the families of fallen soldiers, was holed up with an unknown number of captives. The drama, which began early Monday, appeared to be coming to a dramatic resolution, as frenzied activity enveloped the scene that Australians had been watching on television for hours.

On their broadcast channel, Fox News reports that the Australian government says that the siege has ended. He has been charged with being an accessory to his wife’s death and some lewd conduct with a young female teen. I guess he’s was so screwed up, Iran tossed him out of their country.

Liberal Civvy sends us news that there’s a seige situation in Sydney, Australia. From The Australian;

11.11am: WHAT WE KNOW SO FAR:

– An unconfirmed number of hostages are being held inside the Lindt Chocolat Café in Martin Place in Sydney’s CBD.

– Hostages have been forced to hold an Islamic flag with white writing on it against the window of the cafe.

– Workers in nearby buildings, including the Seven Network and the NSW government building, have been ordered to evacuate the area.

– Police have cordoned off the area to about 150m.

They say that the flag hung in the window of the cafe has the Shahadah written on it – The Shahadah is the first pillar of Islam – there is no God but Allah. So, I’m guessing that this is a jihadist attack. But other people think it doesn’t mean anything;

Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott issued this statement;

New South Wales Police and the Australian Federal Police are currently responding to a reported hostage-taking incident in Martin Place in Sydney.

I have spoken with NSW Premier Mike Baird and offered him all possible Commonwealth support and assistance.

The National Security Committee of Cabinet has also convened for briefings on the situation.

This is obviously a deeply concerning incident but all Australians should be reassured that our law enforcement and security agencies are well trained and equipped and are responding in a thorough and professional manner.

We will provide regular updates as further information becomes available.

SkyNews says that there are fewer than 20 hostages in the cafe.

Here’s a live feed from Australia TV;

Richard sends us a link to the UK’s Telegraph which reports that the release of the US Senate’s fictitious report on interrogation has created a measure of fall out on the British military; they can’t yell at their subjects or bang their fists on tables startling the jihadists;

Col Tim Collins, who made a celebrated eve-of-battle speech during the Iraq war and now runs a private security company with expertise in intelligence gathering, said: “Since I was serving, the rules on interrogations have been tightened up because of the lawyers. We [the military] are no longer able to carry out tactical questioning.

“The effect of the ambulance-chasing lawyers and the play-it-safe judges is that we have got to the point where we have lost our operational capability to do tactical questioning. That in itself brings risks to the lives of the people we deploy.

“These insurgents are not nice people. These are criminals. They behead people; they keep sex slaves. They are not normal people.”

It’s all a part of that “we’re better than them” mentality. Yes, we are better than them, but the interrogation room isn’t the place to prove that point. War is an ugly thing, it brings out the worst in even the most civilized and urbane people usually in response to our enemies. So, we’ve limited ourselves in this war to yelling at prisoners, playing crappy 80’s Hair Band music very loud, keeping them awake and washing their face with a damp wash cloth. And that’s called torture. I guess I was tortured when my room mate in Germany played Rick James’ “She’s a Brickhouse” over and over every night while I was trying to sleep.

NPR wrote that the entertainment business has convinced us that torture works and we fell for it;

From Kiefer Sutherland as hard-nosed government agent Jack Bauer on Fox’s 24, growling this threat to a bad guy: “You probably don’t think that I can force this towel down your throat. Trust me, I can.”

To Liam Neeson’s ex-CIA operative Bryan Mills, shocking a man for information in the movie Taken: “You either give me what I need, or this switch stays on until they turn the power off for lack of payment on the bill.”

Of course, NPR is fond of telling us what Hollywood thinks of this country and passing it off as valid opinions – until it’s inconvenient.

Personally, I’m not convinced that making a jihadist feel uncomfortable while he is being kept in better living conditions than he lived in during his entire childhood is really torture. I’m not advocating blasting kneecaps with a puny 9mm handgun, but what the liberals and lawyers are calling torture really isn’t torture at all. It’s the same thing that we military veterans endured during our initial military training. It’s the same thing my privates experienced at Zero-Five-Hundred every morning when they were a little slow getting out of their racks.

By the way, I watched stank-ass hippies waterboard each other in front of the White House (while I called loudly for them to behead their subjects) – do you really think it’s torture when stank-ass hippies do it to each other? Well, other than the part where they get their faces clean for a change. If it was really torture, the Park Police who were standing around probably would have stopped them for their own safety – but they didn’t.

In a link sent to us by Ex-PH2 from MSN, violent attacks against Afghans is on the rise this week as we get closer to the much anticipated withdrawal date for US troops. 21 people were killed in separate attacks, the count included two US troops.

The Americans were killed Friday in a bombing of a convoy near the Bagram military base, north of Kabul, the capital. The fatalities were initially reported as two NATO soldiers, but a U.S. defense official in Washington confirmed the two were Americans, according to Reuters.

On Saturday, Atiqullah Raufi, the head of the Supreme Court’s secretariat, died after gunmen on a motorcycle opened fire as he left his house in the Afghan capital for work Saturday morning, killing him instantly, said Kabul police spokesman Hashmat Stanikzai.

[…]

Late Saturday afternoon, gunmen — again on motorbikes — fatally shot 12 workers clearing unexploded mines in the volatile southern province of Helmand.

[…]

By nightfall, the death toll rose again when a suicide bomber blew himself up next to a bus carrying Afghan soldiers in Kabul, killing six people and wounding more than 10, including a young girl, Stanikzai, the police spokesman, said.

The Associated Press reports that the new Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, condemned the attacks and pledged to remain resilient in the face of the increasing assaults;

In his speech Sunday, Ghani offered no specifics about his plans to combat the surging insurgents. His administration has embarked on a top-to-bottom review of the country’s military and security strategy, promising to remove provincial governors and other security officials.

The uptick in Taliban attacks come after Ghani signed a bilateral security agreement with Washington and a status of forces agreement with NATO that his predecessor Hamid Karzai declined to sign. U.S. President Barack Obama also has approved an expanded combat mission authorizing American troops to engage Taliban insurgents — not just al-Qaida — and to provide air support when needed.

Well, at least, for a change, the Afghan government isn’t blaming the US for deaths of Afghans as with the previous administration there. According to Iranian propaganda machine, Press TV, more than 8,000 Afghan civilians have been murdered by Taliban there, this year.

UPDATED: From the Department of Defense; the two US soldiers who were killed yesterday were with the 3rd Engineer Battalion, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, Fort Hood, Texas. They were: Sgt. 1st Class Ramon S. Morris, 37, of New York, New York; and Spc. Wyatt J. Martin, 22, of Mesa, Arizona.

Senators on the Foreign Relations Committee decided that half-assing wars is what they do best, so they voted to limit the use of ground forces in operations against ISIS in Iraq and Syria according to Stars & Stripes;

The bill would prohibit President Barack Obama from deploying large-scale ground forces for combat but makes some exceptions. The troops could be sent in to rescue Americans, collect intelligence, direct airstrikes and conduct operations planning.

“The massive deployment of ground forces in the Middle East ends up creating more enemies than it ends up killing,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn. “I think that is an air-tight, take-it-to-the-bank lesson from over the past 10 years.”

The authority of the president to wage war would also expire after three years, meaning the Congress would be required to revisit the conflict following the election of the next president.

Someone tell Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut that what creates “more enemies” is when you tell them right from the get-go that you’re not serious about winning a war against them. I’m definitely not saying that we need a massive deployment of troops to face ISIS, but what I am saying is that the armchair quarterbacks in Congress shouldn’t be telegraphing to the enemy that we don’t intend to defeat them.