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Recent Comments
- In The Mailbox: 02.28.23 (Afternoon Edition) : The Other McCain on Hey, longtime pw readers…
- In The Mailbox: 12.23.22 : The Other McCain on Patrick J. Carroll truly IS a sad, embittered psychopath
- Danger on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
- Danger on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
- In The Mailbox: 07.18.22 : The Other McCain on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
I’m so tired of liberals. Just once, can’t someone from the so-called objective media call them on their bullshit?
No, the objective media is part of their plantation.
Well but I mean you just know somewhere some civilians got massacred sometime so just because the video isn’t exactly true doesn’t mean it isn’t accurate.
tw: sales-> are up
Whatever you say, countless innocents in Falluja were killed by indiscriminate US fire.
Does it really matter if those innocents were actually gunmen and terrorists? Or if that indiscriminate US fire was actually very deliberate? BABIES DIED SOMEWHERE FOR SOME REASON. Let’s not even pretend that you care, you’ll just call those gunmen and terrorists “collateral damage,” but the rest of the world is watching. We see through your LIES, Scott McClellan.
You see where this is heading, of course. If they try hard enough, perhaps they can discourage more Americans from signing up for the armed services–just the way they discourage the smart and talented from running for office.
As it is, it’s tough enough risking your life every day without having to worry about some lefty shitheel trying to get you brought up on charges for doing your job. Fuck ‘em hard. Especially, that big, gassy, cloaca, Moore.
How do you say “rat bastard” in Italian?
And how about some perspective, plucked by the wayside of Memory Lane?
Turing = charge, as in Hell, yeah!
Please, Mark Kraft, tell us how wrong we are!
Ahem, good word, cloaca. Thanks
Honestly. How friggin bad would fascism actually be if this unfettered Orwellian “freedom” to spew bad faith, bald-faced lies is the alternative?
It would be bad. Remember P. J. O’Rourke trip to Sandinista-ruled Nicaragua, and the statement from Danny Ortega he reported: “They (La Prensa) said that there was no freedom of the press in Nicaragua. This was a lie and we could not let them print it.”
So the truck had a “grain drill” in it? Would that be the armor piercing grain drill, or the anti-personnel grain drill?
Because, well, you know……there is a difference.
Start a new thread. Change up the game. Smoke and mirrors…
Idiot.
Unfortuantely it’s the same game, warfare against the United States conducted through dishonest media in support of Islamo-facism.
Same circus. Different clowns.
And Russ, apparenlty the truck had contained an RPG and a road side bomb. You know the roadsine bomb one of the men planted while the toher held the RPG.
Hmmm.
Congress passed a law not all that long ago that allows the US Government to hold copyrights. I think the US Government should hold the copyright to all videos, transcripts and information coming out of Iraq. Allow the dissemination of copyrighted materials with a contractual proviso that they may not be edited without prior US Government approval.
And if anybody does’nt follow the law, hammer them with a $50 million copyright violation lawsuit or a contract violation lawsuit.
apparently, road side and other…one day I swear I will learn to type.
Hmmm.
Someone at my office tried to pass that “white phosporous” nonsense. Frankly I haven’t laughed that hard in years.
Hey T – we got the bastard that killed the Aussies in Bali
Havn’t seen that you have done anything effective about Osama (other than making the career of the Zakawi)
You know, I tried really hard to write a comment that was calm and well thought out.
Screw that, I don’t do “calm” anymore.
Exactly one year ago today we buried a friend. He lost his life to a sniper while on RELIEF mission. Attending his funeral was another soldier who was injured in the same attack, and who signed out of the hospital and was driven 14 hours through the night so he could attend the funeral of his fallen brother. Another soldier had also returned to the states after that ambush was unable to attend, he was in Walter Reed missing an arm.
On a fucking relief mission.
Tommorrow I’ll attend a Veterans Day Ceremony with the parents of the first soldier. They’ll be dedicating a plaque at the high school he attended a few years ago.
Amazing people his parents, some of the strongest and most supportive people I’ve ever met. At the funeral a year ago, they were more worried about what they could do for us, the families of the soldiers still overseas, than what we could do for them. They were there for us through the remainder of the deployment, and he led the motorcycle escort the day that our soldiers returned home.
By the way? Their other son won’t be at the dedication, he’s currently in Iraq.
They were there a couple of weeks ago at our FRG meeting – more of our soldiers have since deployed, and they wanted to be there for those families.
A few weeks ago he was also at group session for our entire company. You see, the guard had brought in counselors for our guys, just to make sure that they were settling back into civilian life, and to lend a hand to any who needed some additional help. Smart people those counselors. They were combat vets and retired police officers – those who have been there done that. They knew what questions to ask, and man did they get a response.
You know what one of the biggest stressors has been in our guys lives since their return home? The utter bullshit that is reported as “news”. The lies, the distortions, the total lack of perspective, the non reporting of what has been accomplished.
Our guys KNOW what they’ve accomplished. They did their jobs and they did it well.
Then they come home to this bullshit. They get called torturers, baby killers you name it – by those who claim “they support the troops, they just don’t agree with war”… It makes me sick, and it makes me angrier than I have ever been in my life. Gawd, go read the comments in some of the milblogs – You name it, they get called it. All by people who seem to think they know better than they do what takes place in combat, what military policies are ..they’re just trying to help them you know.
Help them my ass.
Our guys do their job and half this country shits on them for it. Media, politicians, the protestors who claim they “support the troops” but spread every freaking lie and distortion that passes by. It used to make me giggle when I’d hear one of these types tell a soldier “what really happens over there” Now I just want to explode – arrogant asses..
It’s the same crap my brother in law went through when he came home from Vietnam, and they’re doing the same thing to the troops now.
Moore makes me sick, but even more than Moore, it’s those like Kos and that lying POS Massey who disgust me. They KNOW better yet they still twist and distort and flat out lie – all to promote their agenda – they don’t give a flying fuck how their bullshit affects those in the military, all they give a shit about is screwing Bush – our soldiers are their collateral damage. But hey, it makes Bush look bad, that’s all that counts..eh?
Congratulations assholes, once again Soldiers go off to fight a war – and then come home and fight for their reputations. Happy now?
Jeff, I’m sorry for the rant – I’ve just had it with this kind of crap, – our soldiers deserve so much better.
And rest well Jamie, we think of you every single day.
Wadard wrote: “Havn’t seen that you have done anything effective about Osama (other than making the career of the Zakawi)”
1)Taliban destroyed
2)Afghan elections
3)Osama’s hiding in a cave somewhere, not ensconced in a palace
4)No AQ attacks in the US since 9/11
Is that enough for you?
I didn’t think so.
Wow, Wadard, perhaps that guy will get more than the 30 months that Bali radical cleric Abu Bakar Bashir received for inciting/conspiring the bombing.
Well, actually, he just got an extra month sliced off his sentence.
For 202 deaths, woohoo law enforcement.
Tink wrote: “ it’s those like Kos and that lying POS Massey who disgust me.”
No comment on Massey, but Kos was a fuckin’ peacetime pogue. He (thankfully) doesn’t trade on his veteran status that much. He’s still a worthless shitbag, though…no arguement there.
tink,
You have every right to rant. While the left continues to play their little pre 9/11 political games, based on a bullshit propoganda program that has been going on for over 40 years, we are busy trying to educate ourselves and maybe, just maybe a couple of others about what the real world is really like now.
If they don’t wake up, they will pay the price, one way or another. I will never forget this or ever forgive the Democratic party. I hate them and I hate the MSM. Our patience has been tried, but there comes a point when you begin to realize that it is a waste of time trying to change their childish ways. They will pay for this, one way or another. I’m fed up, we should all be fed up.
I am both nervous and, yet, strangely curious to see what happens when these lunatics get back to the White House. I keep hoping a calming influence – even Goddamn Hillary Clinton – will prevail, but seriously, how can someone like that get through the primaries?
I mean, there are already groups protesting her for her support in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as her non-militant rhetoric on abortion.
I’m really not kidding here. It will be fascinating to see what kind of agenda gets set if a Howard Dean tyoe gets to the White House; it almost happened with John Kerry. I suppose the operative phrase here is “Bring it on”.
I’m in obviously in Texas, so I’m not too worried about any real repercussions. We do, after all, pretty much control the spigot down here. But I wonder about places like California and Minnesota and Massachussets. Lawsuits and impeachment attempts will be flying around like (moon)bats.
Am I being paranoid? Probably. But no more so than the looney lefties are about neo-con cabals and Gitmo rape rooms and shit. Of course, all that seems to me to be a case of projection than fear.
TW: income, which Goddamn Hillary Clinton has publicly stated she wants to take from the “rich” to give to the “poor”.
I don’t have a good feeling at all about a Democratic president. I see the Democrats running on the promise of removing the troops from Iraq (really scary idea) and trying another 20 years of appeasing the terrorists. The first time got us 9/11, the thought of what could very well happen next, makes me nauseous. Like an idiot (for alot of reasons) I just moved to VA (I hate it here), which is just downwind from DC.
Strangely enough, I just saw the entire (apparently unedited) video the other day at work. A co-worker was using my computer to show it to another. I can corroborate that the event took a long time to culminate, and the military certainly made sure they had the right target before engaging them.
And holy crap, were those 20mm shells? I almost felt sorry for those assholes.
Tink- Two weeks ago I was having some tests done, and while waiting my turn I met another woman who’s son had returned from Iraq (so he could be with her during some surgery.) She told me all about him while we waited- and said he was outside in the waiting room (we were in dress gowns in the back). When I got done, I raced out so I could find him and thank him personally. Funny – but in a HUGE room full of waiting people (it was one of those massive hospital imaging centers), I picked the solder out on my first try
Oh, and he was an apache pilot. Third tour (and still happy to be doing it.)
Well I don’t know if the Apache has 20mm as I’m a previous Cobra guy, however I can attest that a solid hit with one pretty much ruins your day. The first guy they hit didn’t feel a thing as he exploded on contact. The one under the truck definitely had a few moments wonder why Allah wasn’t so Akbar for him.
How does this example of ‘agitprop’ differ in any meaningful way from Secretary of State Powell’s cobbled together PowerPoint presentation to the United Nations?
Besides the helicopters and people getting all blowed-up.
Here are some quick refresher cites:
Debunking of SecState Powell
More Lies
Mister Powell himself said the following on NPR entitled ‘Defending Claims”:
Well, now, that was said OVER TWO YEARS ago.
And, it should be noted, Powell went with only the good, supportable stuff in his presentation – he mentioned that the presentation could have gone on for days.
You’d think that some of the less-supported, but no less important things Powell talks about would have become evident by now.
.
btw – I was being deeply ironic, nearly Silvermanesque, in the above post.
Ooo-rah.
..
BUT BUSH STILL LIED!!!
…sorry about that. It just makes me feel better to scream that out sometimes.
The Apache carries a 30mm chain gun. More ruination than a 20mm, I’m thinking.
Thank you Jeff for the video link.
And for those who serve, a huge thank you.
Let me tell you about Hillary. She’s going to campaign on the basis that the Republicans are not tough enough on terrorism or immigration. (Imagine that!) And, if she’s elected, you can look forward to a world of unconstitutional laws and band-aid solutions that’ll take us 40 years to rectify–if they don’t sink us entirely. Oh, and when she re-introduces some version of social security privatization and claims it as her own, I won’t be surprised at all…
What really disappoints me is the immense please that the anti-war movement takes when parading the casualties of war. There is no discrimination between civilians and military. When we were approaching the 2000th military death, the dirty-hippies had this twinkle in their eyes and grin on their lips. It’s like Christmas morning to drag out the dead and point and rant about how right they are, and how wrong everyone else is. They are insecure because they lack any mental intelligence. That’s why they start name-calling when you present facts. They are dumb and mean spirited. Some are just evil.
Beyond all of the creative editing and distribution of bad information, they are evil. They are legitimately happy when soldiers and civilians die. In their minds, it furthers their point. The death of legitimate terrorists detracts from their point. Hence there are no terrorists, just civilians being randomly killed. More the better.
I can see in my mind the big toothy smile and wild eyes of these perverse humans at the TV photo-op of dead children in a war zone. They are sick.
The truth will be twisted so that at the end of the day, they can feel justified.
The mother of all airborne guns, of course, is the GAU-8 Avenger, which is carried only by the A-10. This gun fires 30mm slugs weighing nearly a pound each at a muzzle velocity of over a kilometer per second. Call it 3500 fps. It does this at 3900 rounds per minute, or 65 rounds per second. Average recoil thrust while firing is, depending on which fire rate you believe, about seven thousand pounds. Carry one of these around, Jesse Ventura.
OTOH you aim it by aiming the aircraft at what you’re firing, which can be less convenient than aiming the Apache gun. Aiming a gun whose barrels are nearly eight feet long can be tricky.
Slart, again my knowledge of the Apache is limited, but I know it is more technically advanced than the Cobra (at least they were when I worked on them).
Aiming in the Cobra was simple. Just look at your target – the gun will follow (the sighting system was in the helmet, attached to rails that determinied head position and adjusted the gun accordingly). Waaay cool.
I’ve got some TOW missle stories that are pretty cool too!
How about a flying 105mm howitzer?
<a href=”http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ac/equip/105mm-ac-130u-990904a.jpg” target=”_blank”>
“Targeting equipment installed in the gunship includes an advanced All-Light Level Television (ALLTV) system with a laser illuminator, laser target designator, laser range finder, infrared detection set, and night vision goggles for the pilots. Navigational devices include the inertial navigation syste (INS) and global positioning syste (GPS). The side-firing weapons array consists of one 25mm GAU-12 Gatling gun (firing 1,800 rounds per minute), one 40mm L60 Bofors cannon (with a selectable firing rate of single shot or 120 rounds per minute) and one 105mm M-102 Howitzer cannon (firing 6 to 10 rounds per minute).”
I know a little about that, MoN; I did a little work on the upgrade to its targeting system. I told them I’d be on board full-time if they let me fire the 105.
I think the Apache works in a similar way, Sharp, only instead of boresighting the gun to the helmet crosshairs, the gun is boresighted to the FLIR crosshairs. I’d think they’d also be able to loft to correct for droop in the trajectory if they used the laser ranger.
Not sure about that, because I’ve only worked a teeny piece of Apache fire control.
I saw that video over a fookin year ago, seems longer. A LONG time back, not that long after the initial military ops in Iraq. That is totally unrelated to Fallujah – as is pointed out in the link, of course. Hell I remember at that time the lefties were swapping that around talking about how viscious the righty blog comments about it were.
What a buncha lying bags-o. With this a the ridiculous WP BS, I don’t know what to think about liberals, or lefties, or Dems anymore. I figured after ‘04 they’d try to get their act together and come in for some air, maybe get serious again. Obviously not.
Spam word: men. Amazing.
Yesterday, a Lefty friend insisted that I watch this video. I told him I’d enjoy it at my desk during lunch. Here’s part of my response to him after viewing the movie:
“I watched it. Very poor production values. Kinda like a low-rent Michael Moore flick, w/o the humor. What was the point of that closing shot of the night vision view crosshairs taking out targets? Who were they? What did it have to do with WP? What was the whole point of the film…….”
I am happy to see that others honed in on that closing sequence. I knew there had to be more to the story. This is crude propaganda at its worst, using American “soldiers” as props. All bullshit.
A thing that seems to be missing from a lot of discussions about this set of topics is that weapons (at least militarily effective ones) have no inherent moral value. Using a nerve agent to kill evryone in a city is no more immoral than going around and slitting the throats of each and every individual in that city. Similarly, military tactics have no inherent morality – there is just not a more ‘ethical’ way to blow someone’s face off.
What has shaped concepts of ethics in warfare are the concepts of deterrence, effective means of retaliation, and proportionality. We didn’t respond to Afghanistan with nukes due to a lack of proportionality involved in such a response. The US didn’t use nukes in the Vietnam war because of deterrence and the availability of a retaliatory response.
So, in other words, we all play by the same rules because we have all agreed, more or less, that those are the rules that will apply to everyone.
Now in looking at this latest kerfuffle over what amounts to questions of collateral damage, we should look at what the current moral climate on what are mutually acceptable ways of killing each other.
For starters, any deaths that arise from massive tissue trauma thorough the application of kinetic energy (often associated with very high localized pressures and strains) are generally considered to be OK. In other words, shooting, stabbing, and blowing up is OK.
It is also widely agreed that deliberately targeting viable combatants is fair game. There are a few areas of dispute regarding the treatment of wounded or captured soldiers, but I’m not going to get into that here. Deliberately targeting civilians is another similar area – collateral damage is a fact of war, destroying economic targets is generally permissible, but there are gray areas about the deliberate targeting of a humans as an economic or political targets.
The use of combustion as a causative agent of death is altogether a gray area. Fire is a perfectly acceptable means to destroy material targets. It is allowable (although frowned upon somewhat) to use incidiaries against viable combatants. However, doing something like using an incidiary weapon on human soft targets – even if the use of kinetic energy would be acceptable – is not generally considered allowable.
In the case of the current back-and-forth (and stipulating only for the sake of argument that WP was responsbile for the casualties as described) we essentially have collateral damage that looks different from other collateral damage that is more or less recognized as a price of doing business.
But let’s say we go one step further and grant the premise that incindiaries were used against civilian targets. We still have to consider the notion that these weapons have no inherent moral value – all it would mean is that the other guys would be perfectly allowed to use similar tactics in a similar way. So perhaps instead of seeing a suicide bomber with nails, they might carry a dispersing charge to ingite and spray napalm around a pizza parlor, rather than just nails and shrapnel.
TW: defense, As in “Yes, I actually do understand defense policy.”
If they had that capability, I’m sure they would have used it by now.
If they had that capability, I’m sure they would have used it by now.
Exactly right. Arguing that the jihadists possess some inner moral boundaries that they will not cross in trying to kill and terrorize infidels is profoundly ignorant.
I don’t want to give the impression that there is some sort of moral suasion at work here – that’s precisely the thing I’m arguing is not the case.
If you will, think of it in terms of a fight between two amoral street gangs. They may have no moral or ethical to their actions, but that is not to say that they won’t engage in escalation or brinkmanship behaviors.
If you go nuclear out of the gates, it leaves no room for further escalation, so even the most aggressive of planners may not always wish to push things to their maximum at the outset.
And as far as the technical difficulty of assembling a self-propelled barbeque in the form of a napalm suicide bomber, keep in mind that the creation and assembly of crude incindiary weapons is hardly the stuff of high-tech.