Target Centermass

Author: Gunner

  • Calling All Israeli Video Gamers

    The IDF has a new job for you, as mentioned in this interesting look at the planned Gaza Strip border securities needed for the withdrawal already in motion.

    Israel is increasing security at its border with the Gaza Strip in anticipation of next month’s withdrawal, the army said Thursday, disclosing details of a high-tech complex to ring the coastal strip with what it hopes will be the world’s most impenetrable barrier.

    The barrier system will surround Gaza with fences, electronic sensors, watchtowers mounted with remote-control machine guns, and hundreds of video and night vision cameras, the military said.

    […]

    If they pass this barrier, they would have to traverse a 130-yard swath of land — codenamed Hoover — filled with motion sensors and scanned by an array of day and night optical devices, before reaching the third and newest electronic fence.

    Watchtowers armed with remote-controlled machine guns are to be built every 1.2 miles and within a year, remote-controlled, unmanned vehicles will begin patrolling the area.

    It’s an interesting look at the planned border defenses of a nation that continuously only gets one shot at getting it right — lose and they’re gone, much to the joy of all of their neighbors. Add to that little pressure the threat of Palestinian terrorism and these border defenses must stay as many steps ahead of potential dangers as possible.

  • Man Gets 22-year Term in Bomb Plot

    Sentencing for the would-be millennium bomber has been handed down, and it isn’t enough for a man whose hopes and intentions were to kill thousands.

    Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian man who sought to explode a bomb at Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Eve 1999, was sentenced Wednesday to 22 years in prison.

    Some considered that date the eve of the millennium.

    Ressam, 38, became a key U.S. government informant on the Al Qaeda network in the months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but he later ended his cooperation.

    He was arrested by U.S. authorities in December 1999 as he tried to pass through U.S. Customs at Port Angeles, Wash., in a car with bomb-making materials.

    In April 2001, he was convicted of trying to plant a bomb at Los Angeles International Airport, but his sentencing was delayed as Ressam agreed to aid the Justice Department.

    Ressam recounted a saga that took him from Algeria, to Montreal, through Europe to an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, then back to Montreal to prepare the Los Angeles bombing attempt.

    He offered full or partial identities of more than 120 people he met as he embraced a jihad against the West.

    […]

    But Ressam has refused to help the Justice Department move forward with prosecutions of two men suspected of being Al Qaeda operatives.

    Ressam will be eligible for parole in fourteen years. I hope he doesn’t live to see it.

    Left out of this version of the sentencing story was a little political play by the judge.

    The sentence itself was fairly straightforward: An Algerian man received 22 years for plotting to bomb the Los Angeles airport on the eve of the millennium. It was what the judge said in imposing the term that raised eyebrows.

    U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour said the successful prosecution of Ahmed Ressam should serve not only as a warning to terrorists, but as a statement to the Bush administration about its terrorism-fighting tactics.

    “We did not need to use a secret military tribunal, detain the defendant indefinitely as an enemy combatant or deny the defendant the right to counsel,” he said. “The message to the world from today’s sentencing is that our courts have not abandoned our commitment to the ideals that set our nation apart.”

    He added that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks have made Americans realize they are vulnerable to terrorism and that some believe “this threat renders our Constitution obsolete … If that view is allowed to prevail, the terrorists will have won.”

    First, there was absolutely no reason for this little bit of ankle-biting by Coughenour other than a personal need to inject his own political view. Second, while the judge is right that our court system could be used to handle the likes of the scum we currently are holding at Gitmo, that does not mean that they must be used or that military tribunals should not be used. Third and quite key in this matter, there is a major difference between Ressam and the Gitmo detainees — Ressam was snagged within our borders in the process of committing criminal, though admittedly terrorist, acts and the Gitmo folks were captured in a foreign combat theater acting not as part of a uniformed enemy force. These detainees are not even eligible to be guaranteed the protections of the Geneva conventions, much less the American legal system. That they have been subjected to military tribunals is not a threat to the Constitution of the United States of America. The same cannot be necessarily said of judges who wander from only tangentially related rulings to offer criticisms of executive-branch policies.

  • Who Will Guard the Guards?

    Specifically, I’m talking about soldiers of the California National Guard. Once again, their back in the news and, once again, not in a good way.

    At least 23 members of a California National Guard battalion serving in Iraq are under investigation for the alleged abuse of Iraqi detainees and for a $30,000 extortion scheme involving promises to protect shopkeepers from insurgents, the Los Angeles Times reported on Wednesday.

    Citing military officials and unnamed members of the unit, the newspaper said the abuse allegations focused on an incident in which a stun gun was apparently used to torture Iraqi detainees after an insurgent attack in June on a Baghdad area power plant. At least 17 soldiers are under investigation.

    […]

    The extortion scheme under investigation is said to have involved at least six soldiers on night patrols in the Baghdad areas who demanded more than $30,000 from shopkeepers in exchange for protection from insurgents.

    Add these investigations from abroad to the California Guard’s recent difficulties at home and you’re well on your way to a very ugly black eye for the reserve components.

  • “Over There”

    I’ll admit, I went into tonight’s premier of FX’s Over There with much trepidation. Simply put, I generally don’t trust Hollywood.

    More thoughts later, but I’d like to throw out a few initial observations.

    • It just wouldn’t be Hollywood if we didn’t quickly show drug use and racial tension in the ranks
    • “Keep quiet” and “keep down” apparently means little to soldiers
    • One very realistic line from the sergeant during a lull in the action: “Do something useful … eat!”
    • Soldier stereotypes? Check, we got’em
    • Surprisingly questionable portrayal of women in combat. I doubt this will last many episodes
    • Six soldiers loudly sound off down the line and relay back, even though they appear to be less than twenty meters apart (nice spacing tactics, Hollywood, repeatedly)
    • Nice mention of my alma mater Texas A&M
    • Overall, visually good but is air support for a lengthy mosque siege beyond the series budget?
    • Flags on an IED (or mine) on the side of the road?!
    • What’s up with the guy without a kevlar in the IED aftermath?!!

    My overall impression: negative. Well, at least Battlestar Galactica‘s position as the best show currently on the tube is safe.

    Charmaine Yoest at Reasoned Audacity live-blogged it, as did elgato at the Swanky Conservative.

    UPDATE: Well, I’m having a little connectivity issue so, while I’m waiting to actually publish this post, I wanted to point out something. I thought I saw an issue with a tank shown silhouetted on the horizon. During the immediate rebroadcast, the problem was obvious and more clear in another shot where an “M1” was in the background — obvious mock-up. While pretty good on the turret and body outline (that is, without the ability to pause and really nitpick), apparently there was nothing they could do about the position of the bore evacuator on the gun tube. Gunner no likey! If anybody can nab some screen captures of these few scenes, I’d love to take a further peek.

    UPDATE 2: Well, I linked two who live-blogged the show. How about two MilBloggers who intentionally avoided it? For your reading entertainment, Eric explains his avoidance at Eric’s Grumbles Before the Grave and Blackfive‘s commenters weigh in heavily.

  • Soaring Again

    Shuttle returns to space

    Discovery roared into orbit Tuesday in NASA’s first shuttle flight since the 2003 Columbia disaster, and afterward engineers began evaluating pictures of falling debris to determine the chances of another mishap.

    A new battery of cameras trained on the shuttle during launch showed a small piece of debris falling from the underside of the orbiter, which NASA officials say could have come from a tile near a door covering the nose landing gear.

    But NASA’s flight operations manager, John Shannon, said it was too soon to determine the source of the debris, how large any possible defect might be and whether it poses any safety threat for the spacecraft.

    “We did not come into this flight expecting to eliminate” all falling debris, he said at an evening news briefing at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. “But we knew that we had the tools available to us to characterize it.”

    Best wishes and best speed to the crew of Discovery.

    Blogs of War‘s John Little, a former NASA employee, has the best collection of links I’ve seen of the launch and the mission.

  • Poll: Fewer People Link Islam, Violence

    This little tidbit should not come as a surprise to anyone.

    The percentage of Americans who believe Islam is more likely than other religions to inspire violence has declined in the past two years, according to a poll taken after the London bombings.

    Just over a third, 36 percent, now say the Islamic religion is more likely to inspire violence, while 44 percent said that in July 2003, according to the poll conducted by the Pew Research Center and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

    […]

    Just over half in the poll, 55 percent, said they have a positive view of Muslim-Americans. That’s roughly the same number who felt that way in July 2003 and higher than the number who said they have a positive view of Muslim-Americans in March 2001, before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

    About the same number in the poll, 57 percent, said they have a favorable view of evangelical Christians. Three-fourths had favorable views of Jews and Catholics.

    “The more people know about Islam, the less critical they are,” said Kohut.

    After all, we are talking about the religion of peace.

  • Today in the War against Islamist Terror

    I have to open with my favorite story of the day.

    Hanoi Jane takes on Iraq war with US bus tour

    Hollywood star and activist Jane Fonda is planning to take a bus tour across America to call for an end to US military operations in Iraq in a move that has already drawn sharp reactions from both the pro- and anti-war camps.

    Ms Fonda, who earned the nickname Hanoi Jane after she was photographed sitting on a north Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun at the height of the Vietnam war, said she would be joined by families of Iraq war veterans and her daughter on the tour.

    “I’ve decided I’m coming out,” she told a cheering audience during an appearance in New Mexico to promote her autobiography, explaining that Iraq veterans had encouraged her to break her silence.

    “I have not taken a stand on any war since Vietnam,” she added. “I carry a lot of baggage from that.”

    Ms Fonda said her anti-war tour in March would use a bus that runs on vegetable oil.

    “I can’t go into any detail except to say that it’s going to be pretty exciting,” she said.

    By exciting, I assume she’s talking about more than the vegetable oil. Look, there is enough to dislike about this woman without erroneous hyperbole, so check the facts of her history.

    It is my opinion that this woman cost lives, both American and our allies. It is apparently her intent to do so again by providing support to the hopes of our enemies. In my view, she has previously committed treason. She seems less intent to do so as blatantly today; I extend to her an invitation to fly over for a photo-op with the beheading terrorists. Perhaps she could feature them in a new exercise DVD. Otherwise, I wish her no success in this latest endeavor but would have no regret for any deserved emotional anguish she may have coming. I truly hope that she suffers no physical harm at the hands of private individuals, but I also don’t want her to enjoy a single welcome reception.

    Truce as French sign up for joint action

    Britain and France called a truce in their disputes over Europe’s future and its financing yesterday to announce fresh co-operation in the fight against terrorism, including sharing the names of “jihadists” living in their countries.

    After talks in Downing Street, Dominique de Villepin, the French Prime Minister, and Tony Blair played down recent disagreements and set out a four-point programme of joint action as a result of the London bombings.

    They agreed that France and Britain would exchange the names of persons in each country who had been trying to incite extremism. They would also retain communications data from telephone calls and e-mails for longer, exchange information about how to protect vulnerable targets and work together to combat the “radicalisation” of the Muslim community.

    Their meeting came as Mr Blair told Muslims in Britain that they had a duty to come forward with information about those involved in terrorist attacks. “My message to anybody who may know of any information about those responsible for last Thursday’s attack is to give that information to the police.

    “There will be people who know information about those that have participated in the attack. The photographs [of the suspects] are pretty strong, good quality has been given. There will be people who know something. It is part of our duty, in order to protect our country, that people come forward and give the police the information they can.”

    I don’t doubt the genuine concern of the French about Islamist terror, as they currently have a sufficient threat of it within their own borders. My continued disdain for the French is greatly stirred by their willingness to impair American efforts, meant for the betterment of survival for the U.S. and all of western culture, to squelch the Islamist movement, just for the sake of France’s own short-term geopolitical gain. President Jacques Chirac’s willingness to enable a continued global threat by opposing U.S. international policy, merely for the purpose of setting up a Franco-led European Union as an alternative global power, has been simply disgusting.

    Egyptians surround villages said to be harboring Sharm bombers

    Egyptian sources say that security forces surrounded two Bedouin villages next to Sharm El-Sheikh on Monday suspected of harboring terrorists responsible for the bombings that killed 88 people last Friday.

    The two suspects reportedly hiding in the villages of Al-Royasat and Hurum are said to be Pakistani nationals.

    According to earlier reports published in the Arab press, the Egyptian police are looking for nine Pakistani citizens that apparently disappeared after the attacks took place, leaving their passports and possessions in the hotel rooms they were staying in.

    The current leadership in Egypt has as much to fear from Islamist terror as does the West and other authoritarian Arab states. The difference is that the West is working to subvert a radical culture; the Arab states are looking to prolong despotic reigns. That is where Iraq provides the hub — a possibly democratic, econically and culturally free, alternative to the typical Arab state is a severe danger to the Islamist movement, but it is also a threat to the existing governments in the region. Is it any wonder that Arab support has been lukewarm at best, behind-the-scenes hostile at worst?

  • Survivors Gather to Mark WWII Tragedy

    Saturday will mark sixty years since the U.S.S. Indianapolis went under and the ordeal for the survivors began.

    Survivors of one of the final Naval tragedies of World War II gathered this weekend to honor hundreds of crewmates from the USS Indianapolis who were killed when their ship was torpedoed, leaving hundreds of sailors adrift on the Pacific Ocean amid circling sharks.

    Just days after delivering key components of the atomic bomb that would be dropped on Hiroshima, the cruiser was struck by two torpedoes from a Japanese submarine in the Philippine Sea on July 30, 1945.

    More than four days later, barely a quarter of the crew of 1,197 came out of the water with enough strength to survive.

    Go read for the words of those survivors still living, still deserving our honor.

    Also, as to honor, this aspect of the story, tucked away at the end, cannot be stressed enough.

    Reports of the Indianapolis’ sinking were buried behind the news of the Japanese surrender.

    The commander of the Indianapolis, Capt. Charles McVay III, was court-martialed for not sailing a zigzag course to evade submarines. His men believe he was made a scapegoat. In 2000, 32 years after McVay committed suicide, Congress passed an act clearing his name.

    Be at peace, sir.

    Thanks to Hollywood, and justifiably for once, it is difficult to hear this story without thinking of a moment in a movie. Robert Shaw, speaking as the crusty Quint, captain of the fishing vessel Orca and in the role of a survivor of this historical ordeal, did the actual sailors much justice in the classic film Jaws with the following:

    Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into her side, Chief. We was comin’ back from the island of Tinian to Leyte. We’d just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in 12 minutes. Didn’t see the first shark for about a half-hour. Tiger. 13-footer. You know how you know that in the water, Chief? You can tell by lookin’ from the dorsal to the tail. What we didn’t know, was that our bomb mission was so secret, no distress signal had been sent. They didn’t even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, Chief, sharks come cruisin’ by, so we formed ourselves into tight groups. It was sorta like you see in the calendars, you know the infantry squares in the old calendars like the Battle of Waterloo and the idea was the shark come to the nearest man, that man he starts poundin’ and hollerin’ and sometimes that shark he go away… but sometimes he wouldn’t go away. Sometimes that shark looks right at ya. Right into your eyes. And the thing about a shark is he’s got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at ya, he doesn’t even seem to be livin’… ’til he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then… ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin’. The ocean turns red, and despite all your poundin’ and your hollerin’ those sharks come in and… they rip you to pieces. You know by the end of that first dawn, lost a hundred men. I don’t know how many sharks there were, maybe a thousand. I do know how many men, they averaged six an hour. Thursday mornin’, Chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player. Boson’s mate. I thought he was asleep. I reached over to wake him up. He bobbed up, down in the water, he was like a kinda top. Upended. Well, he’d been bitten in half below the waist. At noon on the fifth day, a Lockheed Ventura swung in low and he spotted us, a young pilot, lot younger than Mr. Hooper here, anyway he spotted us and a few hours later a big ol’ fat PBY come down and started to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened. Waitin’ for my turn. I’ll never put on a lifejacket again. So, eleven hundred men went into the water. 316 men come out, the sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb.

  • Absolutely Engrossing Dive Tale

    I’ll blog after I finish this fascinating story of a cave dive below 800 feet to recover a body. Hat tip to Florida Cracker, who appropriately calls it a “creepy tale.”

    UPDATE: Whoa! I just thought the story was creepy where I was at the time. Well … it got creepier.

  • Russia sees Global Jihad on Southern Flank

    Think it’s not a global war against an expansionist radical Islamist ideology? Russia disagrees.

    A powerful explosion ripped through a half-empty carriage of a commuter train near the Dagestani town of Khasavyurt Sunday, killing a young woman and wounding several people.

    Police announced the apparent terror bombing as an almost routine event, the latest of nearly 80 deadly attacks by Islamic extremists that have rocked the multiethnic mountain republic of Dagestan so far this year. The Kremlin insists the wave of attacks that threaten to unhinge Russia’s mainly-Muslim Caucasus region is being orchestrated by the same global jihad groups that have struck in London and Sharm-el-Sheikh in recent days.

    […]

    “Our forces have captured or killed citizens of 52 countries operating with the terrorists in the north Caucasus,” says Sergei Markov, a Kremlin adviser. “The enemy brings an ideology of radical Islam that seeks political power through terrorist methods.”

    Recent incidents, including a bath-house bombing that killed 10 Russian soldiers in the Dagestani capital of Makhachkala two weeks ago, suggest the attackers have absorbed sophisticated tactics used by jihadis in Iraq and elsewhere. A report issued last week by Igor Dobayev, an expert with the official Academy of Sciences, found that as many as 2,000 Islamist insurgents, many belonging to the Al Qaeda-linked Sharia Jamaat, are behind the wave of roadside explosions, car bombings, and assassinations.

    I would argue that this is indeed World War IV, with the oft-feared World War III already having been survived with the end of the Cold War and its collection of multiple hot theaters. At stake this time around is no less than western civilization as we know it. Again.

    A secret report by the Kremlin’s special envoy to the north Caucasus, Dmitry Kozak, leaked to a Moscow newspaper earlier this month, warned of the emergence of “Islamic Sharia enclaves” amid the high Caucasus peaks.”Further ignoring the [social, economic, and political] problems and attempts to drive them deep down by force could lead to an uncontrolled chain of events whose logical result will be open social, interethnic, and religious conflict in Dagestan,” Mr. Kozak wrote.

    Sharia law. That is what our opponents want to enforce upon the future generations of the entire world. That is, on those that they allow to live at all.

    Even within this article, there is finger-pointing to Russia’s tactics in separatist Chechnya. Perhaps, at one time, there was some validity to this. That time, however, has passed.

    The first Chechnya war, 1994-96, was effectively won by the nationalist, independence-seeking rebels. But experts say that since rebel president Aslan Maskhadov was killed by Russian security forces earlier this year, the Chechen insurgency is led by Islamic radicals such as Shamil Basayev, architect of a mass hostage-taking in a Moscow theater two years ago and last September’s bloody school siege in Beslan. “We are no longer talking about Chechen secessionists challenging Moscow,” says Mr. Markov. “Now it’s radical religious ideologues who aim to destroy the unbelievers and establish an Islamic caliphate.“

    It seems that the United States is not the only one cursed with a blame-America-first, keep-wearing-blinders crowd. Russia certainly has its own equivalent.

    “In the [north Caucasus crisis] we can see the complete failure of Putin’s policies,” says Andrei Piontkovsky, director of the independent Center for Strategic Studies in Moscow. “It is a fairy tale to explain it as the work of outside factors, Islamic terrorists from the Middle East, or whatever. The truth is that internal problems are generating social unrest, which leads people to turn to Islamic ideas.”

    Internal problems are an issue, but trying to pass it all off as such is ludicrous. The fairy tale is ignoring outside factors with scumbags from at least 52 countries in the fray for the Islamists.

    Sooner or later, we will have to wake up to the fact that Russia is fighting the same opponent that has attacked us, attacked Europe, attacked the Asian Pacific, and attacked their own fellow Moslems in Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.