November 18, 2009

Broken Minds

This observation from Tom Maguire has haunted me since last night.


As he told us last Friday, Eric Holder wants to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in civilian courts because he (mostly) attacked civilians, while the attackers of the USS Cole will be sent to a military tribunal. The Dallas Morning News explained:


There is no contradiction here: military courts for attacks on the military, civilian courts for attacks on civilians.

OMG. And if the next batch of terrorists are clever enough to attack an elementary school will they be tried in juvenile court?

How bizarre is Holder's logic? First, why give more rights and more protections to a terrorists who targets civilians? Secondly, the court ought to be determined by the nature of the defendant, not the nature of the victims - if KSM is an enemy combatant he deserves a military tribunal regardless of who he was crafty enough to target.

I've long disagreed with the underlying ideology of the Obama Administration, which is based upon the philosophies of those men who replaced his father in his life. Radical left-wing ideologies like those the President learned from his mentors—Frank Marshall Davis (communist), Bill Ayers (Marxist), Jeremiah Wright (racist black liberation theology, Marxism), etc—have never led to anything other than misery for the wretches that survive it.

But Obama and his subordinates compound the errors of these diseased ideologies by adopting another failed ideology, one that acts as if the open warfare of Islamic fascism is a civilian law enforcement problem. That flawed thinking already led to horrors of 9/11. Why are our President and Attorney General so dimwitted that they desire to repeat those mistakes and put the lives of Americans at greater risk?

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November 12, 2009

The Convictions of a Coward: Obama Fails to Choose and Chooses to Fail on Afghanistan

Barack Obama knows nothing of military strategy or tactics, doesn't understand counterinsurgency, and holds a barely-disguised contempt for the military. I guess it shouldn't be surprising, then, that the President has rejected all options for winning the war in Afghanistan presented to him:


After months of deliberating, President Obama opted not to accept any of the Afghanistan war options presented by his national security team, pushing instead for revisions to clarify how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government, a senior administration official said Wednesday.

That stance comes in the midst of forceful reservations about a possible troop buildup from the U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, according to a second top administration official.

In strongly worded classified cables to Washington, Eikenberry said he had misgivings about sending in new troops while there are still so many questions about the leadership of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

The Obama Administration sat silently by and enabled what most believe to be a fraudulent reelection of Karzai, and now wants to use his reelection as an excuse? That's like watching an arsonist douse a house in gasoline, only to complain later about the smoldering rubble being a blight on the neighborhood.

Karzai is a starwman, and a pathetic one at that. On two separate occasions in recent we've noted a remarkable counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan that bypasses Karzai's corrupt central government altogether, and works with the real arbiters of power in Afghani society, the tribes. One Tribe at a Time (PDF) is a blueprint for winning the Afghan war, and with a smaller footprint to boot.

The Administration could easily adopt this plan, but refuses to consider it an an option. Considering it removes their self-inflicted strawman of an ineffectual and corrupt central government that largely doesn't exist outside of Kabul.

Jim Hanson, retired SF operator and Director of the Warrior Legacy Institute, notes:


He has already had the advice of his entire military chain of command with a near unanimous call for for reinforcements to move to the strategy that won in Iraq. We have watched as he has heard from the deep wisdom of Joe Biden and Rahm Emanuel. We have seen him dither and quibble and show a completely ineffectual and uncommitted face to our enemies and the rest of the world. Now months after his hand-picked commander has told him the situation is bad and getting worse, our troops in the field fight and die without the support of their Commander in Chief. He sent 21,000 more brave men and women there and now they are flappin' in the breeze. How can a squad leader look his men in the eyes and tell them to saddle up and head out on a patrol, perhaps to be the last to die for a cause their President no longer believes in?

Quite clearly, Barack Obama has decided against winning the war in Afghanistan, showing his long history of claiming that the Afghan war is the right war, and the war we must win, to be a bald-faced lie he repeated to get into office.

He is steeling himself for surrender, hunting for excuses to fail. And the rubes that believed he was anything other than a self-loathing defeatist have nobody but themselves to blame for electing him.

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November 05, 2009

Fort Hood Shooter ID'd

With the release of two other possible suspects, it is now starting to look like the shooting at Fort Hood today was the work of a single man, armed with two handguns. He was named as Major Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist who ironically specialized in treating traumatic stress, and who was angry about having to deploy to Iraq at the end of November.

Like another mass murder who targeted young adults, Hasan went to Virginia Tech.

Figures.

Update: Breaking news as of 10:00 PM is that Hasan did not die, and is in custody in stable condition.

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Terrorist Attack on Fort Hood

There is breaking news of what sounds like a terrorist attack on Fort Hood.

Early reports are citing 7 dead, 12 wounded, and one shooter taken into custody and another still possibly on base. Some accounts claim there is a third suspect.

While there is no word yet on who is responsible, this sounds very similar to various plots by homegrown Islamic terrorist cells, such as the Willow Springs cell arrested in North Carolina in July.

One gunman may have been killed

Updates as they come in:

Number of wounded revised to 15, and perhaps as many as 20.

Fort Worth Star-Telegram says suspects were armed with M-16s. that could just as easily mean civilian AR-15s, as well.

The shooters are possibly soldiers?

Two suspects captured, four SWAT team members wounded.

FBI rules out terrorism. I think what they meant to claim is that this wasn't the work of an Islamic terrorist cell or an attack by domestic extremists. By any measure, this was a terror attack, no matter who the shooters or victims were.

Casualty figures have grown to 9 dead and 30 wounded.

12 KIA, 31 WIA, shooters confirmed as soldiers, at least one of which had a "Arabic-sounding name".

Briefing:


Twelve people were killed and 31 wounded in a shooting at Fort Hood on Thursday, officials confirmed.

Ford Hood spokesman Sgt. Tim Volkert said the shooting occurred at 1:30 p.m. A military briefing at 4 p.m. said three assailants, all soldiers, fired shots at the Soldiers Readiness Processing Center and the Howze Theater next to it.

The facts of the story have solidified. Thee was one shooter, an American Major who used two handguns. Details here.

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October 29, 2009

Ghosts of Campaigns Past

Earlier this week I read and commented upon Special Forces Major Jim Gant's proposal for winning the Afghan war, One Tribe At a Time (PDF). Gan't proposla was based upon his highly successful engagement as the leader of a Special Forces A-team that won the confidence of and became regarded as part of a Pushtun tribe.

Gant's approach suggests using smaller teams of highly-trained and highly-supported soldiers and have them assimilate into Afghanistan's Pashtun tribes to combat the Taliban with minimal but immediate assistance, both monetary and military, as needed.

David Adams and Ann Marlowe reach a similar conclusion in the Wall Street Journal today, noting that more troops applied improperly actually seems to make attempts at providing security counterproductive:


We saw how this could work in the Tani district of Khost starting in 2007. By assisting an ANA company—with a platoon of American paratroopers, a civil affairs team from the U.S.-led Provincial Reconstruction Team, the local Afghan National Police, and a determined Afghan subgovernor named Badi Zaman Sabari—we secured the district despite its long border with Pakistan.

Raids by the paratroopers under the leadership of Lt. Col. Scott Custer were extremely rare because the team had such good relations with the tribes that they would generally turn over any suspect. These good tribal relations were strengthened further by meeting the communities' demands for a new paved road, five schools, and a spring water system that supplies 12,000 villagers.

Yet security has deteriorated in Khost, despite increases of U.S. troops in mid-2008. American strategy began to focus more on chasing the insurgents in the mountains instead of securing the towns and villages where most Khostis live.

The insurgents didn't stick around to get shot when they saw the American helicopters coming. But the villagers noticed when the roads weren't built on time and the commanders never visited.

It doesn't take much more more than a scan of the current headlines to know that the application of the current strategy is not working. We also have multiple sources with boots-on-the-ground experience suggesting what certainly sounds like the same approach to a much more intimate, smaller-scale engagement, with real-world results supporting their positions.

No doubt General McCrystal has his reasons for wanting 40,000 troops, just as Joe Biden has his own (quite daft) reasons for wanting to fight a drone war.

But generals and politicians have historically had problems correctly fighting the war in front of them, haunted by ghosts of campaigns past.

Let's hope our current commanders are capable of avoiding that trap.

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October 27, 2009

The Generals Trap

Memeorandum is abuzz over this article in the Washington Post. It seems that a former Marine Captain with combat experience in Iraq who had joined the State Department in the Zabul province of Afghanistan resigned in September becuase of waht he viewed as a pointless war.

The official, Matthew Hoh, wrote in his letter of resignation:


"I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan,"' he wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter to the department's head of personnel. "I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end."

Mr. Hoh is far from being the only American with questions about how we are executing strategy in Afghanistan, and for that matter, in Pakistan. As Michael Yon has been warning for over a year, things in Afghanistan are not going as well as they have in Iraq. We're not winning. We may be losing. All that seems certain is that whatever we are doing now isn't working.

There are more opinions that I can cite on what people want us to do in Afghanistan.

There are know-nothing defeatists on the left that desire an American defeat as a mark against President Bush's legacy. Such a view is perverse, but not unexpected from those that became enslaved to a singular hatred over eight years that have turned them into little more than Gollum, trapped in what one fevered progressive blogger described as "one long, sustained scream."

Opposing them are those with more rational reasons for advocating for policies of withdrawal or various strategies that refocus on continuing the effort.

U.S. General Stanley McCrystal wants to commit a much larger American force of 40,000 to attack the Taliban in what some are referring to as the Afghan Surge, likening it to the military operation in Iraq that did much to bring the country to a relative level of stability and enabled U.S. forces to mostly withdraw to supporting roles.

Others such as Vice President Joe Biden, want to reduce the U.S. footprint within Afghanistan and snipe at Taliban and al Qaeda terrorists with Hellfire missiles fired from the ever-present Predator UAVs circling overhead in some area.

And of course, all of our engagement strategies hinge on collaborating with an Afghan government that means almost nothing outside of Kabul.

But there is no guarantee that either increasing our conventional ground forces nor reeling them back in and remotely targeted suspect foes will affect any sort of meaningful change in the remote regions of Afghanistan. The tribes have defeated and outlasted armies that have fought with much greater ferocity and less regard for human life for longer periods of time. The enemy knows that they do not have to defeat us in battle. They can simply afford to watch us burn ourselves out.

That is not to say that the war is unwinnable. We just need to take a fresh look at how the human terrain is different in Afghanistan, and rededicate ourselves to fighting the current war, and not fall into the ever-present generals trap of fighting the last war.

For all intents and purposes, the American war in Iraq is over, and we won. We deposed a dictator, foundered in a bloody insurgency and near civil war over a number of years, before alighting on a strategy that fit the war. Once those tactics were discovered and put into widespread use, the bulk of the insurgency collapsed or was coerced into giving up, leading us to a current state where American forces spend their time on base or in training roles, and the Iraqi government has become a more or less functional state. Terrorist attacks like the double vehicle bombings of several days ago still spread terror and mayhem, but no overtly longer threaten the stability of the state. There is now hope from politicians and generals of using the lessons learned in Iraq to fight the Afghan war.

But the commanders and politicians have learned the wrong lessons.

They focus on the strategy and tactics of military conflict and diplomacy between governments because that is how they are comfortable thinking. They seek to apply what they think they learned in Iraq, while forgetting how they learned.

They learned from "boots on the ground" who found out what worked by living with the population and learning that mastering the human terrain is far more important than building firebases.

One man who seems to understand the human terrain in Afghanistan better than most is U.S. Army Special Forces operator Major Jim Gant, who was deeply and personally embedded with his team in Mangwel, Konar Province.

Based upon his experiences in Afghanistan, Major Gant wrote about the concept of winning the war through tribal engagement in One Tribe at a Time (PDF).

Regular readers of Confederate Yankee know that I commented frequently about the conflict in Iraq during it's most trying times, but that I've been almost silent on Afghanistan. The reason is simple: I had few contacts there, and little understanding of the nature of the people or the conflict. I wasn't going to opine on a war that I simply don't understand in the slightest.

Thanks to One Tribe at a Time I have a far greater understanding of at least Major Gant's view of how to conduct the war. While I'm open to hear other opinions, his experience and the course he advocates sounds like an approach at least worth studying.

I have a suspicion that if we continue to listen to just the politicians and generals, we may once again stagger on with the wrong strategy, creating a war that we cannot win because our greatest adversary is ourselves.

(h/t Instapundit)

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July 28, 2009

The Guns of the Terrorists Next Door

As you may know, seven men in Willow Springs, NC have been detained on terrorism charges, and an eighth man is still at large.

It's a bit shocking that Islamic terrorists could be hiding in plain sight in a small Southerner town, but that appears to be exactly the case.

And for such a small cell of just eight men, they seemed to be working on a sizable cache of weaponry according to the indictment, including 8 intermediate-caliber semi-automatic rifles, 2 battle rifles, a bolt-action rifle, and a revolver.

I've categorized them by name, type, and date purchased below:


WeaponTypeDate Purchased
Bushmaster M4A3AR-type semi-automatic rifleNov. 9 2006
Ruger Mini-14Semi-automatic rifleMar. 13, 2007
Mossberg 100 ATRBolt-action rifleNov. 3, 2008
Llama Comanche III.357 RevolverNov. 3, 2008
Century Arms AK SporterAK-type semi-automatic rifleNov. 6, 2008
Ruger Mini-30Semi-automatic rifleNov. 11, 2008
Saiga .308Battle Rifle, Semi-automaticFeb. 11, 2009
Century Arms Polish TantalAK-type semi-automatic rifleMar. 2, 2009
Century Arms C91Battle Rifle, Semi-automaticMar. 31, 2009
Century Arms M70B1AK-type semi-automatic rifleApr. 3, 2009
Ruger Mini-14Semi-automatic rifleApr. 3, 2009
S&W M&P15AR-type semi-automatic rifleApr. 3, 2009

The M70B1, which was not linked, is just another run-of-the-mill fixed-stock AK-style rifle.

You may note that the AR- and AK style rifles are what our politicians have labeled "assault weapons," even though they are not assault rifles by any military definition. Prohibitionists may be quick to point out that the AK- and AR- rifles were some of those banned under the Joe Biden-authored abortion known as the 1994 Assault Weapons ban. This is the same ineffective law that our President and Attorney General would like to have reinstated.

The Saiga 308 purchased by Boyd is built upon the exact same AK action, fires a cartridge with the same rate of fire and having both far more range and power.

The two Ruger Mini-14s and Ruger Mini-30 in this arsenal use the same cartridges and have the same range and rate of fire as the AK- and AR- pattern rifles, and they were never subject in any way to restrictions of the so-called "ban."

Nearly identical relatives of the Bushmaster M4 A3 rifle were available during the entire life of the so-called ban, and that if the Smith & Wesson M&P had been around at the time, a variant of it, too, would have likely been legal for civilian sale.

If Boyd had been interested in the other AK-pattern rifles that he amassed he could have purchased those during the ban as well, though he would have paid a premium for them. While illegal to import, the thousands already in circulation were entirely legal to buy and sell.

Tell me again how gun control "works"...

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June 02, 2009

An Ideologue's World

The flash was blinding and disorienting, and Hassan dropped to his knees as a roar like the end of the world shook the ground under him. The sky over Jericho dimmed and he turned west to see a mushroom cloud rising above Tel Aviv... or where Tel Aviv once was.

A song began to rise in his heart at the death of the Jews, but it hung as he saw the contrails of high-flying Israeli jets streaking overhead toward Damascus and Tehran.

"The Shia have killed us all," he whispered, and he sat down to die.

For now, this vision of the end of the Cradle of Civilization— the realization of the so-called Samson option by a dying Israel in response to an Iranian nuclear strike —is fiction.

Our President, however, seems unwilling to take repeated Iranian threats to destroy Israel at face value, just as he ignores that nation's continued development of long-range missiles and nuclear warheads.

He pretends to believe that Iran has a need or desire for peaceful nuclear energy instead of the beginning of Armageddon. His is a childish belief of a man who has never been a leader but has always been an ideologue in a political movement cowed by an irrational and suicidal belief of moral equivalence between good and evil when it admits that they even exist at all. He says we cannot impose our values—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—on nations with murderous histories and hate-consumed cultures.

Better to let them live out their fantasies of genocide, no matter how many millions die, than be a man who has to make difficult decisions.

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June 01, 2009

African-American Muslim Convert Guns Down Two Soldiers at Little Rock Recruiting Station

The political apparatus behind Homeland Security is obviously not tracking the right extremists:


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.


It seems like it was just within the past few weeks—because it was—that another group of African-American Muslim converts attempted to carry out terrorist attacks against American citizens.

Has anyone heard of Homeland Security or the Justice Department issuing warnings to law enforcement agencies to be looking for signs of suspicious activity from this very specific pool of potential terrorists? Before they struck twice in the past two weeks, I mean.

I'd love to hear from those of you in law enforcement if such a warning had been issued.

I'd hate to think that our current Presidential Administration would rather ignore the uncomfortable realities of real terrorist threats in favor of playing to the comforting silence of identity politics... but considering President Obama's ties to certain terrorists/authors and the 20 years he spent in the congregation of a racial separatist church, I wouldn't put it past Dear Leader, either.

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May 29, 2009

Obama Holds Israeli Helicopters and Weapons Integration Hostage, Benefiting Hamas and Putting Civilians at Risk

In a move that a cynic might note may be designed to save their $900 million investment in Hamas, the Obama Administration has stepped in to block the sale of six Apache helicopters to Israel and also stopped the integration of the Spike missile system with the Apache's millimeter wave radar.


The Obama administration has blocked Israel's request for advanced U.S.-origin attack helicopters.

Government sources said the administration has held up Israel's request for the AH-64D Apache Longbow attack helicopter. The sources said the request was undergoing an interagency review to determine whether additional Longbow helicopters would threaten Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip.

"During the recent war, Israel made considerable use of the Longbow, and there were high civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip," a source close to the administration said.

What a naked, ideologically-driven crock.

Obama's Administration, which apparently has little knowledge of or use for military systems, does not seem to grasp that the use of the Longbow's mast-mounted sensor suite enables it to more carefully select targets that other variants of the Apache, which in and of themselves are a better targeting, surveillance, and attack system than most alternatives.

Nor do they seem to grasp that the close air support function of helicopters with lighter weapons loads is less likely to cause the collateral deaths of civilians than other weapons systems that would have to step into the suppression role that helicopters typically occupy.

Artillery units (in Israel, typically 155mm self-propelled howitzers) fire salvos of "dumb" high explosive or incendiary shells that either burst above the target (spraying shrapnel over a wide area), point detonate on impact, or less frequently, on a time delay that lets them penetrate structures before exploding. But artillery is not designed to be a precision weapon, and Obama's decision could force the Israeli's to use this area weapon, directly putting civilian lives at risk.

The other option for the Israeli's if these Apache's are out of the picture are "fast movers" such as the F-15i and and F16i, fighter-bombers armed with bombs weighing hundreds or thousands of pounds. While they can be armed with precision weapons, the warheads on these munitions are typically larger than those of helicopter mounted weapons. Once again, this creates a situation where the Israeli's are boxed into a less-than-optimal weapons system and put civilians at greater risk of death because of an ignorant decision made by a neophyte's Administration trying to play hardball not with an enemy, but an ally.

The net result is that Obama's short-sightedness and inexperience is potentially leading to a situation that will increase the collateral damage of Israeli strikes, even if the strikes are carried out with the utmost care, because Obama has blocked the sale and integration of the most precise and surgical weapons system available to handle the threat.

Instead of being able to target a Hamas rocket team that has retreated into the garage of an apartment building with a Longbow's precision gunfire or a pinpoint missile strike, Obama's decisions may lead to Israel being boxed into a position where their options are to respond with artillery strikes that run the risk of bringing down the building and spraying everyone nearby with shrapnel, or bombing the building with fighter aircraft armed with bombs large enough to flatten the building and kill everyone inside it.

Obama stupidly thinks that by denying Israel precision-strike capable aircraft and precisions munitions integration that Israel might not fire on the Palestinian terrorists he's provided more money to than anyone but Iran. He thinks he's protecting his investment. Israel, however, does not suffer terrorist rocket attacks on it's neighborhoods and schools, nor should they.

Those innocent Palestinians that may die as a result of this shortsightedness need look no further for a culprit that then man who hides behind the fence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

(h/t Bookworm)

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May 22, 2009

Shocker: NY Muslim Terrorists Were Losers, "Intellectually Challenged"

More is coming out about the four Newburgh men who were arrested in a plot to carry out attacks on synagogues in New York City and shoot down C5 Galaxy transport aircraft at Stewart ANG base in Newburgh.

You'll hardly find it surprising that the terror team is bunch of dead-end convicts who converted to Islam in prison, and that none are a threat to join Mensa:


One is a petty criminal who spent a day in 2002 snatching purses and shooting at people with a BB gun from an SUV. His lawyer calls him "intellectually challenged."

Three have histories of drug convictions, one of them for selling narcotics in a school zone. The man prosecutors portrayed as the instigator of the scheme said he smoked pot the day he planned to blow up the temples.

In other words, if they hadn't decided to become terrorists, they would have fit perfectly in ACORN.

As it is, one of the uncles of the suspects feels that he knows where to place the blame:


"The Onta I know wouldn't do something like this, but the new Onta, yeah," said Richard Williams, an uncle. "He wasn't raised this way. All this happened when he became a Muslim in prison."

It's interesting how people who convert to just about any other religion in prison—say, Christianity as a popular choice—come out of prison and often use their newfound zeal as a convert to make something out of their lives.

A blogger friend of mine recently remarked in a private email (hence no name) about how her brother turned his life around after going to prison and finding God there. The one-time petty criminal and recreational drug user is now clean and sober and found a work ethic that has amazed his sister. He now owns a commercial landscaping company. He recently purchased ten acres of land with a pond, and just started building a dream home with his new bride. All of this occurred just six years after he walked out of the prison gates with nothing but his faith and support form his family. He gives all the credit for his phenomenal success in such a short amount of time to God.

If James Cromitie, David Williams, Onta Williams and Laguerre Payen has been successful in their quest to carry out murderous synagogue bombings in Riverdale and managed to bring down a C5 Galaxy carrying even part of its full fuel load of 332,500 pounds—enough to fill more than six railcars—and managed to burn a massive swath of their hometown to the ground—perhaps the massive jet veering into the 2,700 student Newburgh Free Academy (which is very near a landing jet's flight path) in the worst, worst case scenario—they would no doubt give all the "glory" of their massacres to Allah.

It is interesting, and sometimes insane what adherents of different religions think brings glory to their God, and worth noting that what these converts would have lauded as the will of their God parallels what we would expect from the will of Satan himself.

As for Masjid al-Ikhlas, the mosque these men shared on Washington Terrace in Newburgh, I'd like to hope that they were not involved in the plot in any way, or were working with the authorities in bringing down this band of murder-minded misfits. If they were encouraging jihad, however, I hope the authorities shut them down.

There is a freedom of religion in this country, but that stops when the individual practitioners or promoters of the religion use it to destroy the lives of others.

Update: And radicals they are. Phyllis Chesler does some digging and reveals the radical Islamist roots fo Masjid al-Ikhlas.

Perhaps Peter King or another New York politician should consider finding a way to close such radical centers that seem to do little more than condone and organize criminals to become indoctrinated mass murderers.

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May 21, 2009

These Are the Terrorists In you Neighborhood

When I lived in Newburgh, New York I had a paper route that took me down Washington Terrace, an utterly forgettable section of road in an ugly part of worn-out town.

It's beena few years, but the mosque one source calls Masjid Al Jihad Al Akbar (the local paper calls it Masjid al-Ikhlas, but puts it at the same address) was a worn-looking Islamic Center on Washington Terrace that never seemed to have anyone around when I drove past. If news accounts are correct, the two-story building that may be the only mosque in Newburgh was most likely a link between four Muslim terrorists that were attempting to bomb synagogues in Brooklyn and try to shoot down aircraft with Stinger missiles at Stewart ANG base.


The FBI busted a homegrown terror cell late Wednesday night as the men sneaked around a Jewish temple in Riverdale planting what they thought was packages of C-4 explosives, sources told the Daily News.

The four African American men, three of whom were said to be jailhouse converts to Islam, also allegedly had what they believed was a working Stinger missile in their car.

Officials said they hoped to shoot down a plane at Stewart Air National Guard Base in Newburgh in Orange County.

Sources said the four men were arrested after a year-long investigation that began when an informant connected to a mosque in Newburgh said he knew men who wanted to buy explosives.

FBI agents posing as militants sold them what they thought was 30 pounds of C-4 and a plane-downing Stinger missile.

The weaponry was all phony.

The ANG plane most often flown out of Stewart is the massive C5 Galaxy, on a predictable flight path that would make the plane a relatively easy target as it came in for landings from any of a hundred possible launch sites along Route 17K or Route 300, with easy escape routes to nearby interstates just minutes away.

I remember that after 9/11 some locals grumbled about wanting to burn down Masjid Al Jihad Al Akbar. In retrospect, if it is the mosque where terrorists came to plot, then finding some way to shut the mosque down certainly seems like an idea worth considering.

Update: Confirmed. The mosque's imam is an ex-con who di d a 12-year stretch for robbery and is the protegee of another Imam who was fired for praising the terror attacks of 9/11.

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March 08, 2009

Hustled: How Obama Deceived America About a Drawdown in Iraq and a "Surge" In Afghanistan By Playing With The Lives Of American Soldiers

This post from milblogger Greyhawk is a must-read.

It is relatively rare when we see a situation where people from both ends of the political spectrum and all points in between can unite for any reason, but using the lives of soldiers as political props is certainly one of them.

Here's the summary:

President Obama, apparently seeking to keep the anti-war left firmly under his spell, announced that he was drawing down American forces in Iraq, and was instead diverting forces who had trained specifically for an Iraqi deployment to Afghanistan.

Less than a month later, another unit's scheduled deployment to Iraq is sped up, in order to keep the same number of Stryker brigades in Iraq as there would have been if he hadn't shipped the other unit to Afghanistan.

The President ordered a unit that had trained for ten months specifically for the Iraqi mission to another part of the world that speaks a different language and has entirely different cultures. There is no easy way to determine on a Sunday night how many tens of millions of training dollars and man-hours Obama wasted by shifting this Stryker brigade, but if the Iraqi theater really didn't need them, it at least could have been understandable.

But the Iraqi theater clearly did need a Stryker brigade, and he planned on sending one all along.

We know this because just as soon as the Obama White House sold the drawdown story to the media and the anti-war left, he immediately and quietly ordered that another Stryker brigade—one that is no doubt capable, but one that didn't have the specific, intensive training of the unit diverted to Afghanistan— rushed to Iraq months ahead of schedule in order to keep the same number of Stryker brigades (two) as there has been the entire time.

There is no drawdown of Stryker brigades in Iraq.

President Obama lied to the American people.

He tried to con those who are against the Iraq war into thinking we were actually drawing down our capabilities there, when all he actually did was use a street-hustler's sleight-of-hand, having us watch one hand moving a unit out of Iraq, while using his other hand to deftly slide in another.

To borrow a phrase: you been lied to. Bamboozled. Run amok.

By a hustler who's been playing you the entire time.

And for those of us who know people in the military, be they friends or family, you should be absolutely livid at the callous disregard with which our punk of a President used the lives of two entire brigades of soldiers and their families as pawns.

The military life is never easy. Not ever. Our troops and spouses know that, and the kids, well, they learn to cope as best they can. There is always pride, but always uncertainty, and little things can make a difference for both the morale of the soldiers and those who carry on in their absence.

Knowing that our soldiers are highly trained for a specific mission makes them feel more confident of success, and more confident they'll have a better chance to come home. Having nearly a year's training wasted—and then finding out several weeks later that all that training was wasted because of political theater orchestrated to benefit your selfish Commander-in-Chief—well, I can only assume that hurts morale. Not just the morale of the troops, mind you, but that of their families, to see how little he cares about those he commands. And that's just the 5th Stryker Brigade.

The 4th Stryker Brigade's soldiers are being rushed to Iraq to keep two Stryker Brigades there. Did they get in all the specialized training they needed? They'll no doubt rush to get it done. But are those soldiers and their families being cheated of time together because Barack Obama is using them to play a cynical political game where he tries to lie to America about the wars we're fighting?

Absolutely.

Anyone who has done any research into who Barack Obama is, instead of who he likes to claim who he is, can't be very surprised that he would so cynically manipulate others for personal political gain.

What is surprising is how brazen his abuses are, and how quickly they've come.

Update: "It looks as if the Obama administration is so self involved, the only game itÂ’s playing is a shell game with itself and the American people."

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:17 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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February 24, 2009

Obama Administration Supports Hamas Rebuilding, While Shorting Anti-Terrorism Funding in Pakistan

We're still fighting a war against radical Islamic terrorism, and it already appears that our inept President has forgotten which side he's supposed to be on.


The Department of Defense's Security Development Plan for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, like the administration's $900 million Gaza aid plan, is directed at the heart of a terrorist haven. But the DoD initiative is directed at curtailing and/or cutting off terrorists from narcotics funding and undermining their stranglehold on and, to the degree that it exists, popular support of the local populations there. An alternative.

The Administration's Gaza reconstruction gift contains none of these counterterrorism dynamics. Not a one. There is but one ultimate distributor in Gaza: Hamas. The Obama administration can claim that "the aid would not go to Hamas but that it would be funneled through nongovernmental organizations," but the fact of the matter remains that the Hamas terrorist organization that dominates Gaza stands to gain from every penny. It most certainly will not be hindered. That equation is nowhere in the calculus.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:20 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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January 20, 2009

The Testing Begins

One thing America's enemies expect in Barack Obama is weakness, and they aren't wasting any time testing him:


Right now, man, lately, we've been under some INSANE level of incomingÂ… like compared to 2004, not so much, but considering that when I got here, it'd been over 9-10 months since any, mind you, ANY rounds hit, and for like 3 days/nights in a row we've had between 2 to 4 incoming rounds.

Expect an uptick in attacks on American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and perhaps elsewhere as terrorists and tyrants probe the incoming Obama Administration to see what the 44th President is made of.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:37 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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Hope. Change. Explosives.

I'm hoping this is a hoax:


A Massachusetts man stopped by police along the New Jersey Turnpike amid a suspicion that he was taking explosives to Washington, D.C., prompted a 25-mile closure of the highway east of Philadelphia on Tuesday evening.

At about 6:30 p.m., New Jersey State Police closed the turnpike at exit 1 through exit 4 as a precaution. State troopers, FBI agents and turnpike officials continued to investigate along the highway that leads south to Washington.

New Jersey State Police spokesman Sgt. Stephen Jones said troopers took a 27-year-old man into custody following a car stop in the southbound lanes of the turnpike near Exit 3 in Woodbury Heights.

Know who this benefits?

Mitt Romney.

Update: false alarm.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:28 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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January 07, 2009

Another Leftist/Islamist Lie Up In Smoke

It doesn't seem that we can have a conflict in the Middle East without pro-terrorist Islamists and Leftists in the world declaring that white phosphorus (WP) is a chemical weapon, and that the military force using WP is guilty of a "war crime" or "atrocity" for firing white phosphorus shells—never mind that that Islamist force targets civilians, uses their own population as human shields, and commits rape and torture with barbaric impunity to those they suppress.

Such apologist claims, almost without exception, based upon either radical politics, gross ignorance, or a combination of the two. In either event, these shrill claims are decidedly false.

A typical case of ignorance is the one I cited several days ago in the Pacific Free Press where the headline called the use of White Phosphorus by Israeli forces in Gaza the " War Crime du Jour."

Likewise, "Cernig," posting at Crooks & Liars, posted an equally inflammatory, fact-free and generally unhinged rant on the subject:


And there are good reasons to believe that the IDF is simply lying as part of a propaganda war it admits has been eight months in the planning: the use of indiscriminate white phosphorus airbursts, in contravention of international law as it is understood everywhere except the US and Israel (the 1980 Protocol III to the Convention on Conventional Weapons containsa blanket restriction on dropping incendiary weapons from the air against military objectives "located within a concentration of civilians" ; the way in which the IDF is throwing explosives around so freely that almost as many of its people have been killed by its own "errant' tank shells as by enemy action.

Like most Leftists, Cernig is quick to pick and choose his atrocities of choice, completely ignoring that Hamas purposefully targeted Israeli civilians with thousands of rockets and mortar shells, in order for him to attack Israel by purposefully (and ignorantly) misconstruing what the laws of land warfare are, and what white phosphorus munitions are being used, and how.

The Israelis are not firing White Phosphorus incendiary weapons into Gaza.

This photo from Gil Cohen Magen two days ago shows Israeli 155mm M825A1 white phosphorus shells, with "M825A1" written clearly on the sides. I've cropping the image to focus on the M825A1 shells.



Update: A higher-resolution crop showing the shell markings more clearly.



Likewise, this photo posted today shows more Israeli 155mm M825A1 shells near a self-propelled gun.



Clearly, Israeli forces are using 155mm M825A1 white phosphorus shells in Gaza. But the white phosphorus shells they are using in Gaza are not incendiaries, and they are not being used in any way that can possibly be misconstrued as illegal.

Why?

Because the M825A1 is a smoke round.

From Global Security:


The M825 is a 155mm Smoke projectile used to provide screening or marking smoke. It is a separate loading munition using a hollow forged steel shell. The shape is ogival with a boat tail for aerodynamic efficiency and a welded steel baseplate. Close to the base is a gilding metal drive band protected by a grommet until just before loading.

The M825 White Phosphorus (Felt-Wedge) is a 155mm base ejection projectile designed to produce a smoke screen on the ground for a duration of 5 to 15 minutes. It consists of two major components, the projectile carrier, and the payload. The projectile carrier delivers the payload to the target. The payload consists of 116 WP-saturated felt wedges.After ejection, the WP felt wedges fall to ground in a elliptical pattern. Each wedge will then becomes a source of smoke. The projectile is ballistically similar to the M483A1 DPICM family of projectiles.

Smoke ammunition is a limited asset. Since ammunition requirements vary with each mission, observers should know the amount and types of smoke ammunition available and how many minutes of coverage it can provide. Extensive, planned smoke employment should be coordinated early with firing units to allow for redistribution or requisition of ammunition.

That's the short version.

The full article goes into far more detail about the nuance about the difference between the use of "quick smoke" and "immediate smoke" for battlefield missions, but one thing is painfully obvious—these are artillery shells and they contain white phosphorus, but they are not incendiary weapons, and they are not, by any remote measure, illegal to use in Gaza or anywhere else. They are smoke shells, used to create smoke screens.

The kind of white phosphorus artillery shells used as incendiary munitions are those called burster-type white phosphorus, and Global Security explains the difference between the incendiary and smoke rounds in sufficient detail .

The airburst Cernig and other terrorist apologists laments as an illegal attack is instead how a smokescreen is created to protect advancing soldiers. It is decidedly not an incendiary weapon, is decidedly not illegal, violating no laws or conventions.

Make no mistake—these apologists, Islamists and Leftists alike, are lying, pro-terror shills.


* * *

Few nations on Earth exercise as much care in waging a "humane" war as does Israel and the United States.

In this present conflict in particular the IDF has gone to extreme lengths to reduce collateral damage, from the careful selection of targets, to using precision-guided state-of-the-art weaponry to maximize the accuracy of their strikes, to using distinct weapons systems designed with different capabilities to use the absolute minimum of force to destroy terrorist targets, to even going to the extreme of phoning civilians near terrorist targets in order to evacuate them prior to attacks.

As Victor David Hansen notes, Israel has gone to historical lengths to protect a hostile civilian population, even as those hostiles openly back and publicly cheer terrorist attacks—more than 6,000 in recent years—that purposefully target Israeli civilians.

There is no moral middle ground here, but one of the most clear-cut battles between good and evil mankind is likely to ever see on this mortal plane.

If you side with Hamas, you side with evil.

Perhaps, then, I shouldn't be so surprised that so many of Hamas' apologists are so willing to lie for them.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:30 PM | Comments (23) | Add Comment
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January 06, 2009

Sacrificial Wolves

It was only a matter of time—Israeli counter-battery radar isolated Hamas mortar shells as they rose, and a computer algorithm quickly did the geometry and isolated the GPS coordinates of the launch location before the terrorist-fired bombs even began their descent.

Israeli counter-fire aimed at the launch site was likely in the air before the Hamas-fired shells impacted near their target of Israeli civilians.

When the Israeli shells impacted the Hamas launch site—a school—the terrorists got just what they wanted.


Israeli forces fighting Hamas in the Gaza Strip struck a school run by the United Nations, killing at least 30 Palestinians hiding in the compound, a UN official said. Israel said it was returning fire from the school.

Christopher Gunness, a spokesman for the UN Relief and Works Agency in Jerusalem, said in a phone interview he could confirm 30 dead and 55 injured, 15 critically, as the result of three Israel artillery shells hitting the school in northern Gaza.

The Israeli army said in a faxed statement late today that its investigations showed that "among the dead in the school were members of the military wing of the Hamas terror organization and a cell firing rockets and mortars at Israeli forces in the area."

Time and again, Hamas terrorists have fired weapons from schools, residential areas, hospitals, and mosques. Often these same sites have been used to store weaponry as well.

An Isreali drone captured a similar Hamas mortar attack launched from the exact same U.N. school two years ago.



Anti-Israeli hypocrites in the worldÂ’s media and Islamo-fascist states constantly cry that Israel is guilty of "war crimes" for returning fire against the aggression of various state-sponsored Islamic terrorist groups along its borders, and no doubt will rally against todayÂ’s casualties as an example of such.

What they will not admit—and perhaps ideologically, cannot—is that it is Hamas that is clearly guilty of multiple war crimes by any objective measure, as they continually embed militant forces inside civilian structures, population centers, and fire weaponry from within civilian enclaves that they use as human shields.

Perhaps equally as shameful is that the naked hatred of Palestinian culture towards Isreal is so extreme is that even non-combatants are more than willing to have themselves used as human shields, as they view the deaths of their own population as martyrs in a media war as an acceptable cost of attempting genocide against their Jewish neighbors.

Hamas militants did not have to force themselves into this school that recent reports suggest doubled as a weapons depot and firing position, nor in any of the dozens of residential neighborhoods, schools, mosques, and hospitals theyÂ’ve illegally weaponized in decades of terrorism. No, they were accepted willingly by Palestinians equally as bent on the destruction of Israel.

Indoctrinated by terror-loving, Jew-demonizing characters from birth on Palestinian television in a culture that lives to hate, fight, and die, there are no innocents here.

The high number of casualties in this particular incident suggests a similar patterns as in previous conflicts. Adoring Palestinians stood too close for too long after their terrorist heroes fired mortars at Israeli civilians. The Palestinians gathered around the launch site to watch munitions being fired against Israel simply didnÂ’t anticipate the speed and accuracy of the Israeli response, and Israeli counter-battery fire detonating additional Hamas weaponry at the school only made the carnage worse.

There is a simple way out of such constant death and misery in Gaza for the Palestinians, a solution the Israelis had hoped for in 2005 when they pulled out of Gaza, giving the Palestinians a chance to form their own state, with their own government.

Instead of prospering and building a future for their children, they squandered their chance, choosing agony and a futile, constant war against an Israeli state that gave them a clear chance for peace and prosperity.

Hamas responded with violence.

All the dead of this war are on the heads of Hamas and the Palestinians that embrace and support them. There are no innocent lambs being slaughtered in Gaza.

Only the deaths of wolves.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:12 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
Post contains 684 words, total size 5 kb.

December 31, 2008

Ending Gaza

Let's put this bluntly: the Gaza Strip is a failed non-state run by terrorists pledged to genocide and dreaming of a second Holocaust. It has no discernible reason to exist other than to hate; no notable exports greater than the crude rockets and mortars targeting Israeli civilians for merely daring to exist.

Lets end it. It was a mistake. It's time to close Gaza.

Empty the 1.4 million Gazans living in squalor into the surrounding Arab nations who helped make it a modern Hell. Send them to Egypt. Syria. Jordan. Lebanon. Let these nations deal with the extremism they've midwifed by absorbing the bastard Arabs of the Middle East into their own societies.

Granted, such a repatriation will be welcomed by neither the Arabs of Gaza nor the nations who have to host the violent illiteracy and religious extremism they helped create.

But it is the only viable long-term solution for peace.

And an idea long overdue.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:19 AM | Comments (36) | Add Comment
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December 30, 2008

IDF Starts Gaza YouTube Channel; Already Hit With Terms of Use Violations

The Isael Defense forces have started a YouTube channel to show the precision and care they are taking in destroying Hamas terrorist weapons dumps smuggling tunnels, and rocket launching sites located in residential areas by the terrorists. Hamas places the sites among homes and school in hopes that innocent civilians—particularly children—will be killed. Hamas can then use Palestinian and Arab cameramen with sympathies towards their cause to take pictures of the dead and wounded civilians for Hamas' propaganda war, which is typically waged via cameramen from Reuters, AFP, and the Associated Press.

Typically, as in the 2006 war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, these photos are stage managed to varying degrees, while a few are occasionally staged.

Some photos are staged by physically manipulating scenes for news photographers to photograph, though the primary way Hamas manipulates the media is to tightly control their access, limiting photographers to areas where they can take generally only take pictures of dead and wounded civilians and Hamas &qout;police," never allowing them access to photograph bombed weapons smuggling tunnels, missile launching sites, and other legitimate military targets.

The IDF YouTube channel is a vital dissemination tool to counter the propaganda photos staged by Hamas and willingly participated in by the world's media outlets, and so it is perhaps no real surprise that the channel itself is already under attack.

Several of the videos showing the Isreali Air Force hitting Hamas rocket launching sites with GBU-39 precision-guided bombs have been flagged by pro-Hamas (or at least anti-Israeli) users and momentarily removed for terms of use violations before being restored. Some have been removed and have not been restored. Expect this online battle to continue, and perhaps intensify.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:57 AM | Comments (30) | Add Comment
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