Archive for September, 2011

Eerie Photos and a New Report from Michael Yon

One Night in Zhari

12 September 2011

Note: This rough dispatch was written over many days during slivers of time between prepping gear and going on missions. Different sentences were written at different times.  Many operations unfolded and there were more injuries and fatalities in the brigade, and more progress against the enemy in this area.  On the 10th Anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, 4-4 Cav was again in combat, as they are every day.

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Pentagon Confirms: U.S. Boots on the Ground in Libya

“Despite repeated assurances from President Obama and military leaders that the U.S. would not send uniformed military personnel into Libya, four U.S. service members arrived on the ground in Tripoli over the weekend.”

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/09/12/us-boots-on-ground-in-libya-pentagon-confirms/?test=latestnews

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9/11 Completely Changed Surveillance in U.S.

From: Wired

Former AT&T engineer Mark Klein handed a sheaf of papers in January 2006 to lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, providing smoking-gun evidence that the National Security Agency, with the cooperation of AT&T, was illegally sucking up American citizens’ internet usage and funneling it into a database.

The documents became the heart of civil liberties lawsuits against the government and AT&T. But Congress, including then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Illinois), voted in July 2008 to override the rights of American citizens to petition for a redress of grievances.

Congress passed a law that absolved AT&T of any legal liability for cooperating with the warrantless spying. The bill, signed quickly into law by President George W. Bush, also largely legalized the government’s secret domestic-wiretapping program.

Obama pledged to revisit and roll back those increased powers if he became president. But, he did not.

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Swedish police arrest four terror-plot suspects

STOCKHOLM // Swedish police arrested four people on suspicion of preparing a terror attack and evacuated an arts centre in Sweden’s second-largest city on Saturday, officials said yesterday.

Sweden raised its terror threat alert level from low to elevated in October last year. In December, a suicide bomber, Taimour Abdulwahab, blew himself up in central Stockholm among panicked Christmas shoppers, injuring two people, causing shock in a country that had largely been insulated from terrorism.

http://www.thenational.ae/news/worldwide/europe/swedish-police-arrest-four-terror-plot-suspects

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Truck bomb wounds scores of Americans in Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan — A suicide bomber detonated a truck loaded with explosives at a U.S. military outpost Saturday, on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, NATO announced Sunday.

Two Afghan civilians were killed in the blast, which also wounded 77 NATO soldiers and about two dozen Afghan civilians.

http://www.thestate.com/2011/09/11/1967258/truck-bomb-wounds-scores-of-americans.html

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9/11 and the Successful War

9/11 and the Successful War is republished with permission of STRATFOR.

By George Friedman

It has been 10 years since 9/11, and all of us who write about such things for a living are writing about it. That causes me to be wary. I prefer being the lonely voice, but the fact is that 9/11 was a defining moment in American history. On Sept. 12, 2001, few would have anticipated the course the resulting war would take — but then, few knew what to think. The nation was in shock. In retrospect, many speak with great wisdom about what should have been thought about 9/11 at the time and what should have been done in its aftermath. I am always interested in looking at what people actually said and did at the time.

The country was in shock, and shock was a reasonable response. The country was afraid, and fear was a reasonable response. Ten years later, we are all much wiser and sure that our wisdom was there from the beginning. But the truth is that, in retrospect, we know we would have done things superbly had we the authority. Few of us are being honest with ourselves. We were all shocked and frightened. Our wisdom came much later, when it had little impact. Yes, if we knew then what we know now we would have all bought Google stock. But we didn’t know things then that we know now, so it is all rather pointless to lecture those who had decisions to make in the midst of chaos.

Some wars are carefully planned, but even those wars rarely take place as expected. Think of the Germans in World War I, having planned the invasion of France for decades and with meticulous care. Nothing went as planned for either side, and the war did not take a course that was anticipated by anyone. Wars occur at unpredictable times, take unpredictable courses and have unexpected consequences. Who expected the American Civil War to take the course it did? We have been second-guessing Lincoln and Davis, Grant and Lee and all the rest for more than a century.

This particular war — the one that began on 9/11 and swept into Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries — is hard to second-guess because there are those who do not think it is a war. Some people, including President George W. Bush, seem to regard it as a criminal conspiracy. When Bush started talking about bringing al Qaeda to justice, he was talking about bringing them before the bar of justice. Imagine trying to arrest British sailors for burning Washington. War is not about bringing people to justice. It is about destroying their ability to wage war. The contemporary confusion between warfare and criminality creates profound confusion about the rules under which you operate. There are the rules of war as set forth in the Geneva Conventions, and there are criminal actions. The former are designed to facilitate the defense of national interests and involve killing people because of the uniform they wear. The latter is about punishing people for prior action. I have never sorted through what it was that the Bush administration thought it was doing.

This entire matter is made more complex by the fact that al Qaeda doesn’t wear a uniform. Under the Geneva Conventions, there is no protection for those who do not openly carry weapons or wear uniforms or at least armbands. They are regarded as violating the rules of war. If they are not protected by the rules of war then they must fall under criminal law by default. But criminal law is not really focused on preventing acts so much as it is on punishing them. And as satisfying as it is to capture someone who did something, the real point of the U.S. response to 9/11 was to prevent anyone else from doing something — killing and capturing people who have not done anything yet but who might. Read the rest of this entry »

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An Iraq War Veteran Talks to a College Student

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What does WROL look like? The streets of Cairo, January 2, 2011 – Sam Tadros

WROL- Without the Rule of Law

“Saturday was indescribable. Nothing that I write can describe the utter state of lawlessness that prevailed.

Every Egyptian prison was attacked by organized groups trying to free the prisoners inside. In the case of the prisons holding regular criminals this was done by their families and friends. In the case of the prisons with the political prisoners this was done by the Islamists.

Bulldozers were used in those attacks and the weapons available from the looting of police stations were available. Nearly all the prisons fell. The prison forces simply could not deal with such an onslaught and no reinforcements were available. Nearly every terrorist held in the Egyptian prisons from those that bombed the Alexandria Church less than a month ago to the Murderer of Anwar El Sadat was freed, the later reportedly being arrested again tonight.

On the streets of Cairo it was the scene of a jungle. With no law enforcement in town and the army at a loss at how to deal with it, it was the golden opportunity for everyone.

In a city that is surrounded with slums, thousands of thieves fell on their neighboring richer districts. People were robbed in broad daylight, houses were invaded, and stores looted and burned. Egypt had suddenly fallen back to the State of Nature.

Panicking, people started grabbing whatever weapon they could find and forming groups to protect their houses. As the day progressed the street defense committees became more organized.

Every building had its men standing in front of it with everything they could find from personal guns, knives to sticks. Women started preparing Molotov bombs using alcohol bottles.

Street committees started coordinating themselves. Every major crossroad had now groups of citizens stopping all passing cars checking their ID cards and searching the cars for weapons.

Machine guns were in high demand and were sold in the streets.”

 

– Sam Tadros, January 2, 2011, as quoted by The American Thinker.

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“After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it.”

“After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it. I sure as Hell wouldn’t want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.”

– William S. Burroughs

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Asakura Takakage Toshikage: “Do not yearn too much for a sword made by a famous smith.”

“Do not yearn too much for a sword made by a famous smith. This is because even if you give a good man a sword worth ten thousand coppers, he will not be able to beat a hundred men each holding a spear worth a hundred coppers.”

– Asakura Takakage Toshikage, 1462-1482

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Possible al-Qaeda plot against D.C., N.Y. investigated

From: Washinton Post

By Jerry Markon and Greg Miller, Published: September 8

U.S. officials are investigating a possible al-Qaeda plot to detonate a vehicle-borne bomb in Washington or New York City around Sunday’s 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

A handful of individuals may have entered the United States in recent days as part of the plot, which officials said originated from the tribal areas of Pakistan along the Afghan border. One of them may be a U.S. citizen.

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Two men arrested in Berlin terror plot

By BENJAMIN WEINTHAL
BERLIN – “An elite German commando team arrested two men of Middle Eastern origin in Berlin in connection with buying material for a bomb attack, a police spokesman in Berlin said on Thursday.

They were identified as a 24- year-old German-Lebanese man and a 28-year-old from the Gaza Strip and are suspected of buying chemicals to make an explosive device, police said.

The Berlin daily Tagesspiegel quoted an investigator from the counterterrorism operation saying, “there was hardly enough forces of the mobile special commandos for other assignments because all forces were needed for the terror cell.”

Earlier in the week, Germany’s minister of interior, Hans-Peter Friedrich, from the Christian Social Union party, said roughly 1,000 Islamic terrorists live in Germany.

The Federal Republic has long been a hotbed of radical Islam. The terror group Hezbollah remains legal in Germany. According to Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, there are at least 900 active Hezbollah members there.”

http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=237293

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Modern Shoulder-Fired SAMs Missing in Libya

“Here’s some disconcerting news from Libya that confirms something we’ve all been worrying about for a while now — hundreds of shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles have been looted from Gadhafi’s old military stockpiles.

These aren’t just obsolete 1970-vintage Soviet missiles that barely work anymore. According to CNN, dozens of SA-24 “Grinch” shoulder-fired SAMs have been looted from one base alone. The SA-24 is the latest variant of the Soviet-designed Igla SAM that’s been in production since the early 1980s.

http://defensetech.org/2011/09/07/modern-shoulder-fired-sams-missing-in-libya/

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Rocky Mountain 3 Gun Match Coverage

From: Cheaper than Dirt via ChicsWithGuns.com

A new episode of 3-Gun Nation premier’s tomorrow on Versus, part 2 of the Rocky Mountain 3 Gun match coverage. They are focusing on the battle between Jerry Miculek (of revolver fame) and Mike Voight, with a side dish of Maggie Reese who you may remember from Top Shot. There are some wild guns and incredible shooters on display, set your DVRs to 9:30am central time!

 

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How Many Donkeys and Solders to Haul a 300 lb Generator?

From Wired and David Axe

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