Target Centermass

Day: January 15, 2006

  • Abbas Not to Seek Re-election as Palestinian President

    No more years, no more years.

    Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Sunday that he would not seek re-election after his four-year term ends in 2009.

    Abbas made the remarks after attending a ceremony to mark the first anniversary of his election to succeed the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in the West Bank city of Ramallah.” I have worked and will work to reinforce democracy and implement my program that I presented before I was elected,” Abbas asserted

    It must be exhausting to rule over anarchy, over a barbarity and bloodthirst that was, for decades, engendered into their own children by the Palestinians, resulting in a society of madness and the lawlessness of mob rule.

  • Zawahiri Apparently Lives

    When I blogged about Friday’s missile strike targeting chief al Queda lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri, I hedged that reports of his demise may be premature again. Indeed, that appears to be the case.

    Does that mean the strike was failure of intelligence or a bloody, tragic mistake? Not according to Bob Owens at Confederate Yankee, who points readers to a couple of stories saying the strike was based upon, of all things, a dinner invitation [emphasis in original].

    Terrorists were targeted at these locations by what appears to certainly be human intelligence working in conjunction with aerial surveillance and targeting. Only a human source (or communications monitoring—perhaps by NSA?) would be able to find out that al-Zawahiri was invited to dinner at this home, and it is reasonable for a circling drone or any operators on the ground to surmise that a small ground of armed men arriving at the specified location at the specified time might very well contain their target. This was not a case of an intelligence failure, but a case of one fewer terrorists showing up for dinner.

    There is, in every war, the tragic loss of innocents. At other times, those labeled as innocent sometimes are not as they appear.

  • Quote of the Week, 15 JAN 06

    In war, morale is to material as three is to one.

    —Napolean Bonaparte