Al Qaeda Stuns US Command With Advanced Weaponry
Bradley K. Sherman
| KABUL, Afghanistan -- A horse-drawn cart carrying explosives
| blew up Thursday night in Kandahar, killing eight people and
| shattering the city's still-tentative efforts to recover from
| a devastating bombing earlier this year.
| ...
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/25/world/asia/25afghan.html?_r=1&ref=world>
|
| On Afghanistan's rough dirt roads, however, the new $500,000 to
| $1 million Mine Resistant Ambush Protected All Terrain Vehicle
| is a major improvement over the massive Mine Resistant Ambush
| Protected (MRAP) vehicle it's replacing, soldiers say. The M-ATV
| is tailored to Afghanistan, at least parts of it, and the
| Pentagon is sending about 5,000 of them to the battlefield.
| ...
<http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2009/1224/Early-Christmas-gift-US-Army-off-road-vehicle-built-for-Afghanistan>
What's wrong with this picture?
--bks
GOP Altered History
"Bradley K. Sherman" <b...@panix.com> wrote in message
news:hh2lmc$ka0$1...@panix2.panix.com...
Investigate the BushCo family.
Ian B MacLure
news:hh2lmc$ka0$1...@panix2.panix.com:
Odd. No mention at all that the horse cart attack on civilians is
a war crime full stop. No iffs, ands, or buts.
IBM
Bill Bonde {Colourless green ideas don't sleep furiously)
You are a bat without sonar?
--
Tiger tells eleven mistresses, "I will leave my wife for you."
snakehawk
> b...@panix.com (Bradley K. Sherman) wrote innews:hh2lmc$ka0$1...@panix2.panix.com:
What war crime? Attacking the enemy during a war is not a war crime.
If we are at war in Afghanistan, if US troops are stationed in
Kandahar, if holding Kandahar is considered important to US forces, an
attack on Kandahar is a perfectly legitimate tactic.
Now don't try to hand us that crap about not killing civilians. The
US has been killing civilians by the hundreds of thousands in both
Iraq and Afghanistan. Civilian deaths are a necessary consequence of
war--just ask any American armchair general.
W Spilman
"snakehawk" <snak...@MailAndNews.com> wrote in message
news:050945bb-37aa-470e...@s31g2000yqs.googlegroups.com...
If you are holding a city then an attack on that city would
be an attack on your own forces. You make no sense.
>Now don't try to hand us that crap about not killing civilians. The
>US has been killing civilians by the hundreds of thousands in both
>Iraq and Afghanistan. Civilian deaths are a necessary consequence of
>war--just ask any American armchair general.
I think we just heard from one.
WS
cop welfare
> b...@panix.com (Bradley K. Sherman) wrote innews:hh2lmc$ka0$1...@panix2.panix.com:
>
> - Show quoted text -
"Odd. No mention at all that the horse cart attack on civilians is
a war crime full stop. No iffs, ands, or buts." - while
scratching his chinny chin chin
IBM
HEAH, HEAH...
jolly well time to put a stop to all this raghead insurrection.
Suppurating Tool
By Michael Leahy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 27, 2009; 2:47 PM
The Obama administration found itself on Sunday not basking in a major
domestic political victory, as it had good reason to expect just 60
hours earlier, but instead under stern criticism accompanied by stiff
questions about its preparedness against airplane terrorists.
On Fox News Sunday, Michigan's Peter Hoekstra, the Republican's
ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, declared that the
Obama administration ought to be held accountable for the near
catastrophe aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253. Hoekstra asserted
that 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's presence on the flight
was part of a troubling pattern of administration neglect on
preparedness questions, stemming from a failure to recognize essential
dangers.
"Connecting the dots here is not necessarily on this particular case;
it's connecting the dots we've seen over the last years," Hoekstra
said. "What do we have here? This is an international movement of
radicalization, all right? The Obama Administration came in and said,
We're not going to use the word terrorist anymore. We're going to call
it man-made disasters.... Radicalization is alive; it is well. They
want to attack the United States.... The threat to the United States
is real. I think this administration has downplayed it."
In political time, it already feels like long ago. It was just
Christmas Eve when the Obama administration appeared certain to have
put a lock on the primary nature of political discourse for the next
several weeks, by winning a historic vote on health care legislation
in the Senate. A beaming President Obama, casting the moment in terms
of epochal social legislation, drew comparisons to the enactment of
Social Security and Medicare. It was a heady moment for his young
administration and, within hours, a triumphant president left for
sunny Hawaii, his childhood home.
There, on Christmas Day, Obama learned how dicey the fates of
governance, and the preoccupations of politicians and reporters, can
be. The alleged attempt of a Nigerian man to blow up Northwest
Airlines flight on its descent into Detroit sparked the familiar cycle
of reactions within Washington's political and journalistic
communities: shock, revulsion, immediate questions about the safety of
Americans elsewhere around the world and, next, swiftly and
inevitably, questions about whether the young administration had taken
all reasonable steps to stop someone like Abdulmutallab from being
able to get on a flight bound to America in the first place.
From the outset of his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama has tried
rebuffing Republicans who've raised doubts about his foreign policy
experience and acumen. Flight 253 seems to have embolden the skeptics,
who are already seizing the opportunity to charge that he is afflicted
by misplaced priorities. The disclosure that the suspect had earlier
been listed in a broad terrorism database begged the question, critics
said, about how he could ever have been permitted to board a plane.
Hoekstra's charges were just part of a spree of Republican criticism
on the Sunday talk shows that included South Carolina senator Jim
DeMint's claim that the Obama administration was seeking to "unionize"
airport security at a cost to Americans' security.
On Fox, Independent Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman joined GOP
critics in posing tough questions about the State Department's failure
to focus intently on Abdulmutallab after the suspect's father, a
Nigerian banker, contacted the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria to report
concerns about his son's radicalization and associations.
"So there are a lot of questions to ask...," said Lieberman, who by
then had already expressed his displeasure in a statement with the
State Department and other administration departments, asking how the
suspect had been able to retain a U.S. visa after being listed in a
terrorism database.
"What happened after this man's father called our embassy in Nigeria?
What happened to that information? Was there follow-up to try to
determine where this suspect was?" Referring to Abdulmutallab's
presence in the database, Lieberman elaborated on his criticism of the
administration: "Why wasn't that database activated? Why isn't it
activated every time somebody gets on a plane aboard to come to the
United States?"
The administration's chief spokesperson Sunday was Homeland Security
Secretary Janet Napolitano, who found herself on the defensive in the
face of tough queries on ABC and NBC. On ABC's This Week, Napolitano
was asked to respond to Lieberman's criticism. She said that not
enough information had been previously gathered to keep Abdulmutallab
off a plane: "There was simply, throughout law enforcement, never
information that would put this individual on a no-fly list..."
Pressed about how the government dealt with the warning from the
suspect's father and whether the embassy in Nigeria even shared the
information with other government officials, Napolitano was
circumspect. "Well, again, we are going to go back and really do a
minute-by-minute, day-by-day scrub of that sort of thing."
Talk of a "scrub" simply served to illuminate the administration's new
political perils on this day, and how the bloom of the victory on the
Senate health care vote had faded somewhat from view -- at least for
the moment. On ABC, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs spent
most of his appearance forced to talk about Northwest Flight 253 and
the new concerns it had spawned. He and Napolitano indicated that the
president had ordered a review of the "listing protocol," as
Napolitano put it, the administration's new parlance for describing
potential overhaul of terrorist watchlists that would prevent a future
Abdulmutallab from boarding a plane.
On NBC's Meet the Press, Napolitano conceded that changes to standards
for placing someone on a no-fly list were worth considering: "Well,
maybe -- in this day and age with -- the kind of -- environment we
have, we should change some of these protocols."
But Napolitano said on CNN's State of the Union that "the traveling
public is very, very safe in this air environment. And while we
continue to investigate the source of this incident, I think the
traveling public should be confident in what we are doing now."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/27/AR2009122700279.html?hpid=topnews