#1
Interesting website Besoeker. This college student certainly puts the budget cuts in perspective. Just past the short video is another one about small houses. There's got to be some message in that one about subprime loans--just can't think of it now.
What and when did US Army brass know about Maj. Nidal Hassan's extremist views and his ties to a key jihadist cleric and why didn't they act before he gunned down 13 soldiers at Fort Hood six months ago? It's a simple question and a very significant one, to boot. But neither the Pentagon nor the Justice Department wants that information made public.
Which is why the two top senators on the Homeland Security Committee Joe Lieberman (I/D-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) have subpoenaed stonewalling Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Attorney General Eric Holder. We have repeatedly sought your departments' cooperation,' they wrote. Our efforts have been met with delay, the production of little that was not already public and shifting reasons for why the departments are withholding [information] that we have requested.'
Before he went on his terrorist rampage, Hasan was in regular e-mail contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, the US-born imam who ministered to at least three 9/11 hijackers as well as the would-be Christmas Day underwear bomber. Indeed, FBI and Army investigators reportedly intercepted those e-mails, and also knew that he'd been heard making statements justifying suicide bombing. Given the warning signals about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan's extremist radicalism,' ask Lieberman and Collins, why was he not stopped before he took 13 American lives?'
The Pentagon conducted an internal investigation, and in January released an 86-page report that blamed what Gates called 20th-century processes and attitudes mostly rooted in the Cold War.' Whatever the hell that means.
Astonishingly, there was not a word, as Lieberman noted, about the specific threat posed by violent Islamist extremism to our military.' Or maybe not so astonishing. After all, just hours after Hasan's rampage, Army Chief of Staff George Casey said it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here.'
Both agencies have rebuffed the subpoena as they have all other committee requests by claiming that releasing the info would jeopardize Hasan's criminal prosecution. That's nonsense: As the senators note, they are not investigating the massacre but rather whether the government agents responsible for protecting our homeland . . . correctly did their jobs.'
Here's hoping the committee keeps pressing this until Holder and Gates are forced to make the information available no matter how embarrassing it may prove to be.
#1
No one died at Tailhook. It took Congress to suspend the usual rubber stamping of any further approval of officer promotions to get the Navy to budge. We really don't want have to go there, but the idiots are doing the same stupid bureaucrat tricks.
#2
They're far too busy disinviting Franklin Graham from a Pentagon prayer breakfast. You can bet this order came from the top!
FACE SAVING DAMAGE CONTROL FOLLOWS:
Billy Graham in poor health President Obama scheduled to visit with evangelist today
April 25, 2010 10:27 AM EDT
I didnt know Billy Graham was ailing, but according to the Associated Press, President Obama is "fitting in a visit" today with the 91-year-old evangelist which seems to suggest that Graham's condition is worsening. A spokesman for Graham called the elders health "unpredictable."
Graham has visited with 11 presidents over his lifetime. His son, Franklin Graham, was recently in the news after being disinvited to a Pentagon prayer breakfast over concerns about some of his statements about Islam.
Syria, according to recent reports, is supplying Hezbollah with Scuds and other missiles that possess a range covering all of Israel - prompting the question as to the implications of such military hardware during wartime. The missiles have the capacity to carry a ton of explosives or another warhead, and they don't require great sophistication to operate. The use of solid fuel might also make it possible to launch these missiles more quickly than the smaller missiles that were directed at Israel during the Second Lebanon War. Though the larger weapons are launched from mobile launch pads, they are more easily identified and destroyed than the smaller missiles.
The accuracy of the current Scuds is a matter of hundreds of meters, a higher level of precision than that of the missiles which landed in Israel during the Second Lebanon War. At the same time, a missile that strikes an urban area does not require great accuracy. If Hezbollah arms itself with several hundred Scuds, over the course of a two-week war it could fire several dozen large missiles a day, causing physical damage or injury as well as affecting morale. And a strike at the commercial heart of the country could deter foreigners from doing business with Israel.
The fact that Syria is arming Hezbollah with Scuds reinforces the assessment that the Syrians are not interested in direct confrontation with Israel, preferring instead to use a proxy to exert military pressure without exposing itself to an Israeli response which, it is thought, could topple Bashar Assad and the Alawites from power. The Syrians' fear of such a prospect should be the primary leverage used against them, and in response to their arming Hezbollah with Scuds.
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Israel should be conscious of several factors in the face of the threat from the north. First, on the margins, one should bear in mind Justice Richard Goldstone's ruling in his report to the United Nations on Operation Cast Lead - that hitting a country's infrastructure is a war crime as it constitutes collective punishment, which is banned under international law. I am not saying that Goldstone must be obeyed, but his ruling must be taken into consideration.
On a tactical level, Israel must develop the intelligence capability necessary to destroy the maximum number of Scuds possible and especially the missile launchers, either at the beginning of a war or even beforehand. Israel should also try to shorten the duration of any fighting as much as possible by hitting Lebanese infrastructure, but only in response to Israel's being hit first.
In the event of war, Israel's strategic goal should be the overthrow of the Alawite regime in Syria, and with that aim should continue developing its mobile ground forces along with massive aerial firepower. Within the Israel Defense Forces' mobile units, the infantry forces and the special forces - particularly those that have the capacity to reach any location in the theater of battle - must be strengthened.
Israel must prepare the international diplomatic community for a war of this kind and will have to make it clear from the beginning that we have no alternative. Israel will be tasked with explaining that, because the enemy is protecting terrorists during a time of war, we have no choice but to hit the enemy's home front and infrastructure. The very fact of an international debate on this issue is liable to deter the Syrians on the one hand, though it might also put Israel under international diplomatic pressure to restrain itself on the other - but that is a risk worth taking.
Above all, Israel must make it clear right now that, in the event of a missile attack from the north, it will act on the goal of immediately deposing the Alawite regime in Syria even before turning its attention to the missile threat. Such a statement could deter the Syrians from arming Hezbollah with Scuds, out of concern that the Muslim organization might fire the missiles without first coordinating with Syria.
The writer is a reserve brigadier general and former head of the IDF artillery corps.
Posted by: Steve White ||
04/25/2010 00:00 ||
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#1
Israel should respond missile for missile against Syrian targets, starting with presidential palaces.
#2
Israel should put this in the context of "restoring majority rule" to Syria, whose majority Sunni are ruled over by a tiny minority of Alawite Shiite.
While many Sunni are loyal to the government, the other Sunni powers in the area would raise their eyebrows with this, in the hope that the Shiite proxies in their region could be booted out.
They have felt unbalanced since minority Sunni ruled Iraq was replaced with majority Shiite Iraq. So having Syria, and by extension, Hezbollah, declawed, it would do much to restore their equanimity.
#3
Assad isn't a Shiite, he's an Alawite, as is his family and closest thug-advisors.
Alawites are considered heretics by Sunnis and used to be considered that way by the Shi'a. Recently the Mad Mullahs managed to get some sort of dispensation in Qom that made the Alawites a 'branch' of Shi'a belief.
If I were president and had a CIA that could keep its mouth shut, there's a flame to be fanned in Syria ...
Posted by: Steve White ||
04/25/2010 17:04 Comments ||
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#2
The first nation that needs to be challenged is Saudi Arabia because this nation is funding radical Islam in many nations and since the time of Mohammed it is clear that all non-Muslims in Arabia have suffered and been religiously cleansed.
We need to find alternatives to oil from the mideast. It is oil that pays for Saudi Arabia to fund this 7th century barbarism.
#6
Those supporting "causes" like the environmentalists, human rights activists, and libs in general protest the logical alternatives such as new nuclear plants, exploration, and new drilling for both oil and gas yet they don't seem to make the connection that they are actually supporting such violent offenders of women's and human rights to life, limb, and head. Maybe the artiste community of cartoonists and documentary filmmakers should do one of their expose's? Sounds like a project for Michael Moore--he could even do research in the Dark Kingdom and hopefully get a fatwa issued against him for criticizing the Prophet Mo and their Saudi's outrageous profits!
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
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Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
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Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
