Monday, 21 January 2008
Danny Glover takes money from dictator Chavez
Mood:
incredulous
Topic: Unintentional truths
The man on the right of the picture (courtesy of the Weekly Standard) is Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.
Mr. Chavez doesn't like America or Americans. He has boasted that his control over the oil under Venezuela gives him power over us. Indeed, if you buy your gasoline from a Citgo filling station, the deal is ultimately with Chavez.
Chavez is also tight with Fidel Castro and the leader of Iran, the one who has talked about "sharing" nuclear technology with Chavez.
Mr. Chavez has also been spending immense amounts of his country's oil money supporting violent guerilla fighters in Latin America and buying weapons from Iran and Russia. Under his leadership, Venezuela has begun the process of joining a military and political alliance with China, Russia, some of the former Soviet states around the Caspian Sea and Iran. The common motive of this alliance is anti-Americanism.
__
The other guy in the picture is Larry Glover. While he's done movies on his own, he is mainly famous as Mel Gibson's sidekick in the "Lethal Weapon" movies, and more recently, the "Saw" series of movies. To be fair, he did put in a decent job of acting in "Flight of the Intruder," but that's about it.
Mr. Chavez has given Mr. Glover twenty million dollars to make some movies. One will be about famous South American revolutionist Simon Bolivar, arguably a great man; the other will be about Haitian rebel Toussaint L'Overture, arguably a butcher and a the man who cost Haiti a chance to be a reasonably prosperous, reasonably well-governed nation.
Given Chavez's own willingness to spill the blood of those incautious enough to disagree with him in public and to buy the votes of his countrymen with other people's money taken at gunpoint, it's a good bet that Glover's film about Toussaint L'Overture will give us a side of that man that has not only not been seen before but may never have existed at all.
Glover has telegraphed his leftist sympathies in the past by political messages left in the kitchen fridge of his character Murtagh's house in the Lethal Weapon movies, and voiced them more explicitly among friends in the Hollywood left.
Since Danny Glover has a job as a propagandist for a declared enemy of the United States, he doesn't need our business any longer.
Those of you who are not looking forward to losing relatives, sons, daughters and spouses in the war that Mr. Chavez has announced he will someday welcome with our country should think very, very hard about whether Glover needs any more of OUR money, now that he has so much from the dictator of Venezuela.
Posted by V.P. Frickey
at 3:25 AM MST
Updated: Monday, 11 February 2008 8:19 AM MST
Tuesday, 15 January 2008
In Memory of Sgt. Armand Luke Frickey and Task Force Wolfhound
Mood:
sad
Topic: Martyred for Freedom
Posted by V.P. Frickey
at 8:26 PM MST
Updated: Tuesday, 15 January 2008 8:31 PM MST
A Minority Group Which Truly Deserves our Help, Assistance and Prayers!
There's a minority group out there which really needs us to reach out to them and give them every sort of help we can!
We need to show more sympathy for these people.
* They travel miles in the heat.
* They risk their lives crossing a border.
* They don't get paid enough by a long shot.
* They do jobs that others won't do or are afraid to do.
* They live in crowded conditions among a people who speak a different language.
* They rarely see their families, and they face adversity all day, every day.
I'm not talking about illegal immigrants;
I'm talking about our troops in combat zones all over the world!
Strange, isn't it, that so many Congressmen and Senators from both major parties AND our President are willing to lavish all kinds of social benefits on illegals, but don't support our troops - and what's more, the leaders of Congress in both houses are now threatening to defund them?
Could this just maybe have something to do with the millions of dollars being spread around Capitol Hill by 1,700 members of CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations)?
So much money spent by so few people... where's it all coming from? Are the people gouging us for oil using the money they take from us at the gas pump to control our political process?
____________________________
This November we need to remember this problem - and FIX IT by pulling the right levers in the voting booth. We need to be honest enough to admit we screwed up in 2006 and undo the damage - send the slick-talking politicians who take oil money to destroy our country back where they came from and elect people who care about our country! We have a war to win and a country to save - let's get on the stick!!!
Please pass this on; this is worth more than the short time it takes to read it
Posted by V.P. Frickey
at 11:39 AM MST
Updated: Tuesday, 15 January 2008 10:39 PM MST
"Unity" - as long as we unite behind The Self-Appointed Leader.
Topic: Dumb Bipartisan Tricks
I just read an essay by Dennis Prager which comes very close to saying what I have thought for a long, long time.
Perhaps it doesn't go far enough - Barack Obama by no means has a monopoly on the sort of mealy-mouthed arrogance that allows him to assume that we should naturally unite behind HIM. Pat Robertson had an even larger dose of "I love Me-ism" during HIS Presidential campaign, and Huckabee's self-love is both strong and apparently sincere, as is John McCain's, Al Gore's, Rudy Giuliani's and (of course) Hillary Clinton's.
It's been said half jokingly before, but I am strongly of the opinion that the only person fit to be President of the United States is someone who has to be dragged kicking and screaming into the office, and who will demand as part of the deal that he gets to only serve one term for good behavior.
When you consider the crap that someone has to go through to be elected President of the United States of America, the natural assumption is that anyone who WILLINGLY goes through enough of it to actually be elected is either a crook or one of those unfortunates who pays women lots of money to tie him up and beat him with whips during his off time.
But the scary, scary thing is that the process of running for President is such a nail-pulling pain that the winner of a Presidential election logically must be a control freak of such immense and frightening proportions that he or she NEEDS to have the country all thinking his or her thoughts, surrendering their will to him or her, abdicating what is supposed to be the sovereign status of the American citizen to their newly elected Chief Executive.
It actually makes sense that after a full Presidential campaign, the winner of the election becomes the kind of self-infatuated psycho which Martin Sheen played so adroitly for two "terms" of the TV series "The West Wing." After all the talking out of both sides of one's mouth, the surrender of one's integrity to the siren call of the smoky back room, the immolation of one's family life on the altar of political primacy, perhaps Presidents feel as though we should all line up and smooch their fat behinds.
And nothing convinces me more that perhaps it's time we ditched our two-party, directly-elected Presidential system in favor of Parliamentary rule as Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand know it. They're not perfect by any means, either, but the illusion that one party has all the answers and it makes sense to directly elect a leader based on the amount of crap he or she can throw against the wall and make stick under which we presently suffer is just no good.
No one man or woman has a vision that is valid for three hundred-plus million people. It's time we tried to create a system in which the leader rises to the top from LISTENING to the voters, not by TALKING to them incessantly - and often saying contradictory things from one day to the next. In Britain, no one party has a firm enough lock on power to be able to effectively ignore the voters, the way both major parties are able to here in America (as long as they keep the extremist party faithful happy at convention time).
But let's read what Prager has to say:
________________________________________
"Obama's calls for unity are not what they seem
Dennis Prager
We are repeatedly told by the news media that there is a deep, almost
palpable, yearning among Americans for unity. And Sen. Barack Obama's
repeated and eloquent claims to being able to unite Americans are a major
reason for his present, and very possibly eventual, success in his quest for
his party's nomination for president of the United States.
I do not doubt Mr. Obama's sincerity. The wish that all people be united is
an elemental human desire. But there are two major problems with it. First,
it is not truly honest. Second, it is childish.
First is its dishonesty. Virtually all calls for unity - whether national,
international or religious (as in calls for Christian unity) - do not tell
the whole truth.
If those who call for unity told the whole truth, this is what they would
say: "I want everyone to unite - behind my values. I want everyone who
disagrees with me to change the way they think so that we can all be united.
I myself have no plans to change my positions on any important issues in
order to achieve this unity. So in order to achieve it, I assume that all of
you who differ with me will change your views and values and embrace mine."
Take any important issue that divides Americans and explain exactly how
unity can be achieved without one of the two sides giving up its values and
embracing the other side's values.
Barack Obama wants American troops out of Iraq now. About half of America believes that American troops abandoning Iraq will lead to making that country the world's center of terror and to the greatest victory thus far
for the greatest organized evil in the world today. How, then, will Mr.
Obama achieve unity on Iraq?
Mr. Obama believes in repealing the tax cuts enacted by the Bush
administration. How will he achieve unity on that? Many of us believe that
re-raising taxes will bring on a recession.
And what is the "unity" position on same-sex marriage? Either one supports it or one supports keeping marriage defined as the legal union of a man and a woman. The only way to unite Americans on this issue - and I don't know what is more seminal to civilization than its definition of marriage - is to convince all, or at least most, Americans to embrace one of the two positions.
It is fascinating how little introspection Sen. Obama's "unity" supporters
engage in - they are usually the very people who most forcefully advocate
multiculturalism, who scoff at the idea of an American melting pot and who
oppose something as basic to American unity as declaring English the
country's national language.
Their advocacy of multiculturalism and opposition to declaring English the
national language are proof that the calls of the left-wing supporters of
Barack Obama for American unity are one or more of three things: 1. A call
for all Americans to agree with them and become fellow leftists. 2. A
nice-sounding cover for their left-wing policies. 3. A way to further their
demonizing of the Bush administration as "divisive."
In case the reader should dismiss these observations about calls for unity
as political partisanship, let me make clear that they are equally
applicable to calls for religious unity. For example, one regularly hears
calls by many Christians for Christian unity. But how exactly will this be
achieved? Will Catholics stop believing in their catechism and embrace
Protestant theology, or will Protestants begin to regard the pope Christ's
vicar on earth?
Ironically, one reason America became the freest country in the world was
thanks to its being founded by disunited Christians - all those Protestant
denominations had to figure out a way to live together and make a nation.
Given what Sen. Obama's calls for unity really mean - let's all go left - it
is no wonder he and his calls for unity are enthusiastically embraced by the
liberal media.
For nearly eight years the media and Democrats have labeled President Bush's policies "divisive" simply because they don't agree with them. They are not one whit more divisive than Sen. Obama's positions. A question for
Democrats, the media and other Obama supporters: How exactly are Mr. Obama's left-wing political positions any less "divisive" than President Bush's right-wing positions?
Second, the craving for unity is frequently childish. As we mature we
understand that decent people will differ politically and theologically. The
mature yearn for unity only on a handful of fundamental values, such as: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Beyond such basics, we yearn for civil discourse and tolerance, not unity.
The next time Sen. Obama speaks with his usual passion and eloquence about his desire to unite Americans, someone must ask him two questions: Why are your left-wing positions any less divisive than President Bush's right-wing positions? And if you are so committed to uniting Americans, why did you vote against declaring English our national, i.e., our unifying, language? Without compelling answers, Sen. Obama's calls for American unity are no more than calls to unite around his politics and him."
__________________
The only point where I disagree with Mr. Prager is, as I said earlier, that Barack Obama isn't the only man in the Presidential race playing this game - they all do to some extent or another. Huckabee may actually be worse about it than Obama is.
And if our choice boils down to a self-infatuated left-wing pseudointellectual populist or a self-infatuated right-wing chiliast back room deal cutter who turns dope pushers and rapists loose if they thump their Bibles convincingly enough, that's a dismal choice indeed.
I first threatened to emigrate to another country if Jimmy Carter were elected, and of course, I didn't put my walking shoes where my mouth was when it came down to hard cases. But I'm actually practicing ending my sentences with "eh?" now and sampling Molsons (the alcohol-free kind because my liver won't put up with the real thing anymore). All it'll take is for either of those yo-yo's, or Clinton (please, God, no, not her!) to be elected President.
I guess that I support Fred Dalton Thompson above all the others because he's already demonstrated in the US Senate when he served there between stints in Hollywood that he knows how to listen and how to seek compromises. If any of the current crop of candidates knows how to listen more than he talks, it's probably Fred Thompson. He certainly seems to view the office of the Presidency as more of a job and less of a personal entitlement.
Besides, the last time we went with a movie actor as President, it didn't turn out very badly at all. Won the Cold War, cured the national case of mullygrubs we contracted from Mr. Peanut - yep, going over to the Screen Actors Guild for a President (again) isn't the worst thing we could do by a long shot.
Posted by V.P. Frickey
at 3:10 AM MST
Updated: Sunday, 10 February 2008 11:30 AM MST
Sunday, 30 December 2007
Bill and Hillary - Tag team hypocrisy! (or, "Who Farted?" strikes again!)
Mood:
incredulous
Topic: Hypocrites In The NEWS!!!
Quoting from "Clintons Dual Jab at Obama on Experience"
by Stephen Collinson Sun Dec 30, 1:32 PM ET
"DES MOINES, Iowa (AFP) - Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton are raising new questions over her White House rival Barack Obama's experience, warning perilous national security decisions loom for the next US leader. The Clintons' one-two punch comes four days before Iowa's closely fought caucuses open the US presidential nominating season, and are the latest bid to paint Obama as too green to serve as US commander-in-chief.
"I think that my experience is unique, having been eight years in the White House, having, yes, been part of making history," Clinton told ABC News, four days before Iowa's caucuses open the 2008 presidential nominating season.
Clinton said she had unsuccessfully urged her husband to intervene militarily to halt Rwanda's genocide in 1994, and then traveled to Uganda to say sorry to the victims of the atrocity. "I personally apologized to women whose arms had been hacked off, who had seen their husbands and their children murdered before their very eyes and were at the bottom of piles of bodies," she told ABC.
Last week, a New York Times report said Clinton had not attended National Security Council briefings or had access to classified intelligence while as first lady.
"I had direct access to all of the decision-makers, I was briefed on a range of issues, often provided classified information," she said, adding she was accompanied by top US security officials on the road.
On Saturday, former president Bill Clinton made a pointed reference to the September 11 attacks in 2001, arguing that the next president had to be ready for sudden, national security challenges.
"You have to have a leader who is strong and commanding and convincing enough ... to deal with the unexpected," he was quoted as saying by the Washington Post in New Hampshire. "There is a better than 50 percent chance that sometime in the first year or 18 months of the next presidency, something will happen that is not being discussed in this campaign.
"President Bush never talked about Osama bin Laden and didn't foresee Hurricane Katrina. And if you're not ready for that, then everything else you do can be undermined."
Clinton's comments were reminiscent of the Bush administration's successful gambit of framing the 2004 campaign against John Kerry as a question of who was most fit to lead a global war on terror. The issue of experience has taken on even stronger importance in recent days, as candidates brandished foreign policy credentials after the assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto.
The former first lady also said that the ex-president would not have a formal role in her White House -- despite his eight years behind the Oval Office desk -- but would act as an close personal advisor.
But John Edwards, pushing Clinton and Obama hard in the Democratic race laughed that it was "complete fantasy" that the former president would keep out of White House policy. "You watch him out on the campaign trail and he spends an awful lot of time talking about his views and not as much time talking about Senator Clinton's," he said.
Hillary Clinton has contrasted her years traveling the world and Obama's single term in the Senate, saying America needs someone ready to lead from "day one."
But Obama, locked in a dead heat with her and John Edwards in Iowa polls, argued Sunday he had more experience in global affairs than Bill Clinton did when elected in 1992. "When Washington gets challenged with respect to change, then their immediate response is you haven't been in Washington long enough," Obama told NBC News on Sunday. "I would simply point out that the same arguments that are being made about me were made about him back in 1991 and 1992."
Clinton's comments on Rwanda appeared to be a new jab at Obama, who last week said his multi-ethnic background and childhood years abroad meant he was more in touch with the world than someone who had taken tea with US diplomats. Shortly afterwards, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright recalled how Clinton had traveled to scores of remote villages and refugee camps."
What does all this tell us?
First, that the BS emanating from Hillary Clinton's Presidential campaign is so deep that even the New York Times is calling them out on their lies.
Let's look at the news article again:
"Last week, a New York Times report said Clinton had not attended National Security Council briefings or had access to classified intelligence while as first lady.
"I had direct access to all of the decision-makers, I was briefed on a range of issues, often provided classified information," she said, adding she was accompanied by top US security officials on the road."
Hillary's also trying to scrape her hubby's foreign policy screwups off of HER shoes - remember that little thing about Rwanda?"
Second, Bill Clinton is falling back on the "who farted?" strategy (where you immediately start yammering about the other man's lack of preparation and experience where you screwed up worse than he did):
"Clinton said she had unsuccessfully urged her husband to intervene militarily to halt Rwanda's genocide in 1994, and then traveled to Uganda to say sorry to the victims of the atrocity. "I personally apologized to women whose arms had been hacked off, who had seen their husbands and their children murdered before their very eyes and were at the bottom of piles of bodies," she told ABC."
Apologized why? Either she and her hubby screwed up in Rwanda or they didn't.
"On Saturday, former president Bill Clinton made a pointed reference to the September 11 attacks in 2001, arguing that the next president had to be ready for sudden, national security challenges.
"You have to have a leader who is strong and commanding and convincing enough ... to deal with the unexpected," he was quoted as saying by the Washington Post in New Hampshire.
"There is a better than 50 percent chance that sometime in the first year or 18 months of the next presidency, something will happen that is not being discussed in this campaign.
"President Bush never talked about Osama bin Laden and didn't foresee Hurricane Katrina. And if you're not ready for that, then everything else you do can be undermined."
Yeah, right. This was the same Bill Clinton who couldn't be bothered to take any of several frantic phone calls from his national security adviser pleading for permission to have our advanced covert operations teams kill bin Laden - they knew where he was, had their sights on him
But, nooooo... Mr. Bill couldn't be bothered to pick up a cell phone or walk over from the VIP tent at Augusta (where he was watching a golf tournament) to his limo to pick up a phone call and have bin Laden killed before he could have 3,000 American citizens murdered on September 11th, 2001.
And as far as Hurricane Katrina goes, the mayor of New Orleans, who let dozens of school buses be destroyed by water damage rather than use them to evacuate his people away from the city before the hurricane touched land was... a member of Bill Clinton's own party.
Why, one asks, are the Clintons fixating on Bush regarding Katrina when their own man on the scene, the decision-maker who had all of the authority to order evacuations and commandeer school buses and mass transit to save his people's lives just sat there and showered obscenities on the President instead.
-----
Wasn't it Bill Clinton who during his first campaign kept saying that "The definition of irrationality is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?" And yet, the Clintons seem to be running on... their foreign policy experience - in Rwanda, in Haiti, in the Balkans.
God help us, the foreign policy experience they're saying makes them so special includes the disaster in Somalia.
Somalia, where the Clintons sent our troops into the terrorist-infested slums of Mogadishu to be shot out of the sky and chopped to pieces, and they didn't send the tanks or armored personnel carriers which our people needed to rescue their wounded comrades. Our Army forces there had to borrow armored personnel carriers from Pakistani forces in the area to pull wounded American troops out of captivity!
It never fails - the Clintons take the offensive and accuse their opponents or political opposition of screwing the pooch when they're there with Hartz Mountain shampoo trying to get dog hair and fleas off of their privates.
Posted by V.P. Frickey
at 9:26 PM MST
Updated: Sunday, 30 December 2007 10:02 PM MST
Are you a Democrat, a Republican or a Cajun?
Mood:
mischievious
Topic: minor chuckles....
Here is a little test that will help you decide.
The answer can be found by posing the following question:
You're walking down a deserted street with your wife and two small children.
Suddenly, an Islamic Terrorist with a huge knife comes around the corner,
locks eyes with you, screams obscenities, praises Allah,
raises the knife, and charges at you.
You are carrying a Glock 45 ACP, and you are an expert shot. You have mere
seconds before he reaches you and your family.
What do you do?
THINK CAREFULLY AND THEN SCROLL DOWN:
Democrat's Answer:
Well, that's not enough information to answer the question!
Does the man look poor or oppressed?
Have I ever done anything to him that would inspire him to attack?
Could we run away?
What does my wife think?
What about the kids?
Could I possibly swing the gun like a club and knock the knife out
of his hand?
What does the law say about this situation?
Does the Glock have appropriate safety built into it?
Why am I carrying a loaded gun anyway, and what kind of message
does this send to society and to my children?
Is it possible he'd be happy with just killing me?
Does he definitely want to kill me, or would he be content just to wound me?
If I were to grab his knees and hold on, could my family get away while he
was stabbing me?
Should I call 9-1-1?
Why is this street so deserted?
We need to raise taxes, have paint and weed day and make this a happier,
healthier street that would discourage such behavior.
This is all so confusing! I need to debate this with some friends for few
days and try to come to a consensus.
............
...................
Republican's Answer :
BANG!
............................................
Cajun's Answer:
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
BANG! Click..... (Sounds of empty magazine hitting ground, spare clip being slammed in pistol, and slide slamming down on a live round... )
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
BANG! Click....
Dad: "What d' y'all think - Wal-Mart or the gunsmith for more ammo?"
Daughter: "That's some nice grouping, yeah, Dad! Were those Winchester Silvertips or Speer jacketed hollow points?"
Son: "Can I shoot the next one! Can I? Please? Please?"
Wife: "You ain't taking that to the taxidermist, non!"
Posted by V.P. Frickey
at 8:53 PM MST
Wednesday, 19 December 2007
CAIR : 1,700 people + $3 million = Congressional Democrats' influence
Mood:
incredulous
Topic: ...Those Who Will Not See
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) consists of 1,700 people. Thanks to the open wallets of terrorist-supporting organizations such as the Holyland Institute, they have over $3,000,000 to spend, and they spend it in the halls of Congress, where since the Democratic victory in the last Congressional elections, they have increasing amounts of influence.
They are also in the business of threatening critics of terrorism and trying to influence advertisers who support journalists who oppose terrorism.
They got to Office Max when talk show host Michael Savage came out against CAIR's sleazy tactics. Office Max pulled their ads from Savage's show. I asked them why they did that, on the "contact us" page of their website:
"Why did you withdraw sponsorship from the Michael Savage show at the insistence of radical Muslim organizations?
The Council for American Islamic Relations only has 1,700 members. Its primary funding appears to be from such terrorist financiers as "the Holyland Foundation" and from terrorist organizations such as HAMAS,
By acceding to demands from CAIR and their front organizations, Office Max is taking the side of terrorism against an independent critic of terrorism.whose only offense was to call attention to this tiny group of terrorist abetters.
Should Office Max be in this particular line of business? If I had to choose between a firm that supported Michael Savage's right to comment against terror and the people who support terrorism and a firm which withdrew that support, I know I'd have to give my business to people who oppose terror.
My son died fighting the people who CAIR supports in Iraq when his Bradley drove over a bomb they buried in the side of a road north of Baghdad."
When Office Max gets back to me, I'll pass on their explanation.
Posted by V.P. Frickey
at 12:34 PM MST
Sunday, 16 December 2007
Iran's Nuclear capable missiles
Topic: No Truce with Terror!
Posted on Yahoo.com's Open Source Intelligence group by: "Beowulf" Beowulf@thedurendal.com brucetefft
Thu Dec 13, 2007 5:24 am (PST)
www.iranwatch.org/privateviews/memonitor/perspex-memonitor-flightkent-022805.htm
THE FLIGHT OF THE "KENT"
BY UZI RUBIN
THE MIDDLE EAST MISSILE MONITOR
February 28, 2005
Recent reports from Kiev and Moscow indicate that Iran may have secretly
acquired a quantity of Soviet origin, nuclear capable cruise missiles. The
question is whether the missiles will be introduced into the arsenal of
Iran's strategic forces, or used as models for an indigenous cruise missile
design. Be it as it may, the eventual appearance an Iranian force of
strategic cruise missiles seems imminent. This force would further threaten
Israel and other US allies in the Middle East.
The smuggling of the ex Soviet missiles to Iran is a blatant violation of
the Missile Technology Control Regime, on which both Russian and Ukraine are officially subscribed.
The Kh - 55 cruise missile, NATO designation AS- 15 "Kent", was the Soviet
Union's response to the first generation of modern US cruise missiles - the
General Dynamic (now Lockheed Martin) "Tomahawk" and the Boeing ALCM.
Like its American counterparts, the Kent was designed to carry nuclear and
conventional warheads at subsonic speeds to targets 2000 to 3000 Km from its launch point, with high precision. Like other Soviet emulations of key Western weapons, the Kent's layout (Fig 1) resembled that of its US
counterparts, featuring folding wings and a rear mounted small turbofans
(Fig. 2).
Nevertheless rather than a slavish copy of a US missile the Kent
is an original design, as is evident from the arrangement of its jet engine.
The engine is stowed in its dormant phase inside the rear fuselage, and is
"popped out" or lowered into the slipstream immediately after launch. The
comparable American solution is a hinged air scoop that is closed flush with
the fuselage skin in transit and dropped open into the slipstream once the
missile is launched. The Soviet design seems to be more elegant: it reduces
asymmetric flow losses across the engine's compressor and may yield better intake efficiencies and specific fuel consumption. This however could be negated to some extent by the weight penalty of the engine extension
mechanism.
Like most Soviet weapons, the Kent was produced in prodigious numbers and in numerous configurations. It had air launched; sea launched and ground launched versions. Following the 1987 INF treaty between the US and the USSR, the ground launched version of the Kent was proscribed and all existing missiles were destroyed with other intermediate range missiles such as the US GLCM, the land based version of the Tomahawk. Since the
destruction process has been witnessed and verified by the two superpowers, it is reasonable to assume no land-based Kents exists today outside of museums displays. The air launched version, however, continued to serve as a mainstay of the Soviet Union's strategic air forces. When the Soviet Union was dissolved, its constituent republics, now proclaimed independent states, assumed the ownership of such chunks of former Red Air Force arsenal that happened to be stationed on their soil at the instant of the Soviet Union's demise. Ukraine, the second largest successor state was one of the major winners of this windfall.
According to a recent press, that windfall included 578 air launched,
nuclear tipped Kents, together with their launch preparation equipment. The nuclear warheads were subsequently removed from the missiles and handed over to Russia. The missiles themselves were later "Sold" back to Russia in exchange for the write off of Ukraine's debts on the delivery of Russian gas. The missiles' shipment was handled by the Russian air force, and the export permit was made out on the name of Rosvooruzhenia, Russia's arms export organization at the time. The returned Kents were destined for conversion into the non-nuclear Kh -555 configuration, for service with Russia's Air Force. On paper, all the ex-Ukrainian nuclear Kents were thus disposed of. Or were they?
On February 2nd 2005, the Financial Times reported from Kiev on a Ukrainian parliamentarian disclosure that 12 Kents had been illegally exported between 1999 and 2001. Six were shipped to China, while the other six were sold to Iran. The sale was attributed to a former official of the Ukrainian secret police, one V.V.Yevdokimov, who had been arrested last April for this sale and for an attempted sale of further 14 Kents to unspecified customers (Financial Times, Feb. 4th 2005). Ten days later, the Moscow magazine "Novaya Gazetta" further elaborated on this story: The number of diverted Kents was 20 rather than 12, the missiles "disappeared" together with their preflight preparation equipment, which ended up in Iran accompanied by Russian specialists that trained the Iranians in its use. Moreover, the magazine hinted that the total number of "diverted" missiles could have been even higher, that a third undisclosed customer might have been involved, and that Russian officials may have colluded in this illegal deal, the missiles being diverted after reaching Russia rather than en route.
Assuming that those dovetailing reports from Kiev and Moscow are factual, we must conclude that Iran is presently holding a quantity of modern, strategic range cruise missiles, and possesses the know how and equipment needed to program their flight paths and their target coordinates. The question is whether the Kents were purchased for operation or for emulation - in other words, did the Iranian intend to introduce smuggled Kents into their own strategic forces, or did they buy them as models for studying and copying?
There are two major arguments against the operational use hypothesis. First, the numbers reported are too small. Six cruise missiles do not make a viable arsenal when the overhead of maintenance and attrition is factored in. If the entire second lot of smuggled missiles would have reached Iran, the resultant arsenal of 18 to 22 missiles might have been marginally
sufficient, but this did not happen, and anyway there may have been other
customers were waiting in line for those undelivered missiles.
Second and more significant, the air launched version of the Kent is
designed for deployment from rotary launchers inside the bomb bays of two
kinds of large Soviet era bombers: the subsonic Tu - 95 turboprop "Bear",
and the supersonic Tu -160 "Blackjack" (For pictures of Kents on a rotary
launcher, and an air launch of a Kent from a "Blackjack" see Figs 3 and 4).
Neither China nor Iran is known to operate any of those bombers. In fact,
there has never been a report of the Soviets exporting those bombers to any other country, even within the Eastern Block. Thus, introduction of the Kent into Iran's air force would require its conversion into an external store
configuration, slung under the wing of an attack aircraft, of which Iran has
respectable variety of models, from the old US supplied Phantom II's to the
newer, Russian supplied Sukhoi 24's.
An alternative is suggested in the Novaya Gazetta report: conversion into a palletized cargo configuration, ejected from the hold of a military transport aircraft. While such conversions are feasible, the effort seems hardly worthwhile for a small number of missiles. Conversion into land based or submarine based configuration, again theoretically feasible, makes even less sense in such small numbers.
On the other hand, the disclosure that Iran also acquired launch preparation equipment and appropriate training in its use indicate an intention to operate the smuggled Kents. Perhaps Iran did mange to secretly acquire a more substantial number of missiles, the disclosed figures revealing only part of the picture. A larger stockpile of Kents might have justified a conversion program. The Iranians have demonstrated in the past a respectable proficiency in converting adapting foreign acquired weapons to their own needs [1]. Thus, the possibility that the smuggled Kents will surface up in Iranian colors cannot be dismissed.
That Iran is building a strategic ballistic missile force and a military
space program is hardly a secret - in fact, the Iranian authorities are
advertising it full blast. Less advertised, though, are their aspirations in
the field of cruise missiles. In an October 9 2004 interview by the Teheran
Hemayat, the deputy head of the Iranian Aerospace Organization Mr. Naser
Maleki extolled Iran's growing capabilities in the field of anti ship cruise
missiles, citing the Noor class with a range of 120 Km and the Ra'ad class
with the range of 350 Km.
Iranian sources had already disclosed in January 2004 that the Ra'ad was in series production, following a series of successful tests in the preceding year. The released images of the Ra'ad revealed a significantly different layout compared to the Kent: Unlike the underbelly pod housing of the jet engine in the latter, the former seems to house its engine inside the fuselage with an diagonally located, fixed air scoop protruding into the slipstream (Fig 5).
In a well-advertised 1998 arms exposition, the Iranian defense industry
displayed a small jet engine, obviously tailored for cruise missiles.
According to Duncan Lennox, editor of the Jane's Strategic Weapons yearbook, that engine was a copy of the 350 Kgs thrust Microturbo TRI-60 turbojet, France's mainstay in cruise missile propulsion. It stands to reason that this engine powers the Ra'ad. Now, in our age of GPS navigation there is no reason why a cruise missile that can fly 350 Km won't fly ten times further, provided it carries enough fuel and is powered by a more efficient engine, for example the Kent's excellent R95 - 300 turbofan.
There is no need for clairvoyance to deduce that Iran is aiming to back up
its emerging ballistic missile capabilities with strategic range cruise
missiles. At least one source, the Iran Focus website journal
(
http://www.iranfocus.com/) has so reported in June 2004 citing a growing US concern about this aspect of Iran's military buildup. We have argued above that 6 Kents don't make an arsenal - but six R95 engines in Iran, plus another half a dozen in China do make adequate sample for a joint program of Chinese copying (no pun intended) of a first class cruise missile turbofan design. We shall not be too surprised if a not too distant future Iranian arms expos would feature a new "Iranian designed" small turbofan engine.
From this perspective the acquisition of a small lot of Kents made perfect
sense: the missiles were purchased not for deployment but as samples for
studying and copying. The smuggled Kents with their priceless turbofan
engines could well be the progenitors of Iran's future arsenal of strategic
cruise missiles that could reach Israel and other choice targets in the
Middle East.
Whether for use as is or for emulation, the flight of the Kent with its
state-of-the-art technologies from Ukraine to Iran was a transgression that
the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) had been designed to prevent. That it did not do so, in the face of Ukraine's solemn commitment to the MTCR since 1998, is troubling. The question is whether the affair reflects a one time piratical act by greedy individuals, or whether it has been sanctioned - even if covertly - by the former government of Ukraine.
According to the "Persian Journal" (
http://www.iranian.ws/), the same
whistle blowing Ukrainian lawmaker who had exposed this affair cited the
state owned Ukspetseksport as well as businessmen in the US, Cyprus and Iran as involved "in illicit defense deals". While the illicit sale of the Kent
missiles was not specifically mentioned in his catchall citation, the hint
of collusion on the lines of the AQ Khan scandal in Pakistan - probably the
most blatant and damaging act of proliferation ever - is definitely there.
The industrialized world should learn carefully from this affair, draw the
proper conclusions and take the necessary steps to protect itself from the
menace of proliferation gone amuck.
My thanks to Mr. Richard Speier for providing source material and useful
comments and critique, and to Mr. Duncan Lennox for his invaluable help and advice
[1] During the 1980's Iran Iraq war, the Iranians performed feats of
improvisation to keep the US supplied arms serviceable and effective. One of their most remarkable achievements was the adaptation of the US Navy
Standard Missile SAM to be fired from the US Army HAWK air defense system. See Cooper and Bishop ""Iran - Iraq War in the Air", Schiffer Military History, 2000.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
Posted by V.P. Frickey
at 10:25 AM MST
Video Tapes of Al-Jazeera in bed with Saddam - Gorbachev Ordering Biological Warfare - Not Newsworthy?
Topic: ...Those Who Will Not See
Video Tapes of Al-Jazeera in bed with Saddam - Gorbachev Ordering Biological Warfare - Not Newsworthy?
Whether we wished it or not, the imagery of Abu Ghraib, photographs of Army Reserve worker bees with moronic grins on their faces pointing to dogpiles of naked Iraqis and, more tragically, what appear to be corpses under thick plastic wrapping were etched into the television viewing public's minds.
When it wants to the news media in this country can be incredibly effective in getting information out to us - heck, in making us see it in our nightmares. It can even create information that doesn't exist. One of many examples was when Peter Arnett started his career of flacking for tyranny by emoting before an ABC News camera about an American officer's supposedly saying of a South Vietnamese town (Ben Tre) "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it."
No American officer was ever identified as the source of the quote - and in the postwar 1970s, he would probably have been lionized, graced with a book deal and much money for the movie rights to his "ordeal" had he stepped forward. No American officer was ever found to even corroborate the truth of the remark, despite a serious and extensive military investigation (it is not the policy of the US military to destroy cities in order to save them, and any US officer who ordered such an action - or falsely alleged to a reporter that such a thing happened under US military control would have been court-martialed).
Despite a lack of supporting evidence for Arnett's famous trope ever having been true (Arnett was the same guy who insisted that downtown Baghdad was firmly under Saddam's control at the same time that a convoy of US Army tanks and armored personnel carriers were driving toward him from the airport without much in the way of armed resistance), it was picked up by the rest of the news media and applied toward the city of Hue, which actually was rebuilt, repopulated and working pretty much as it had been by the end of the year, and Communist troops either killed in place or evicted from Hue a matter of days after large numbers of US and South Vietnamese troops got there.
Those inconvenient truths, and the mass graves, some of them containing as many as 3,000 civilians each, all slaughtered by the Communists, were ignored by most of the news media. Stanley Kubrick's movie "Full Metal Jacket" was most people's first exposure to that ugly fact - 20 years after the fact.
NOT burned into our brains by the news media were the million-plus Southeast Asian civilians who died AFTER the North Vietnamese won their war of expansion - or even that it WAS a war of expansion started by the Communists in violation of a formal peace treaty and numerous truces.
NOT burned into our brains was the confirmation in 1993 - after the fall of the Soviet Union - that the Soviets had been conducting a billion-dollar biological and biotoxic warfare research program for over twenty years, part of which was undoubtedly the "Yellow Rain" which sickened and killed many Laotian villagers in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Instead, Dr. Matthew Meselson, the architect of Nixon's Biological Warfare Protocol, under which the US and UK got out of the biological warfare business, was trotted out by the news media and the political left to ridicule the very IDEA that the Soviets would violate Dr. Meselson's wonderful treaty. Meselson is the same guy who helped the Soviets whitewash their accidental release of weaponized anthrax in the city of Sverdlovsk - they had a biological weapons plant right in the middle of town - as being from tainted beef.
There are two possible scenarios for Meselson's involvement in the Soviets' cover-up -
- Meselson felt comfortable working with medical records which could have been (and, it turns out, were, according to the deputy director of the biological warfare program, who has since defected to the United States) edited by the KGB to remove any indications of the anthrax having spread through inhalation or contact with the weaponized dust on the streets, walls, curbs, mailboxes, and other surfaces of the city near the plant.
This is itself a gross violation of biomedical research ethics - to write a paper asserting that the people who died in Sverdlovsk in the late 1970s died of anthrax from tainted meat without first-hand observation of the medical evidence supporting that claim is not acceptable research procedure. Meselson's paper, flawed - and flat wrong - as it was, is still out there in the body of medical literature on anthrax.
- the second reason, of course, is that Meselson, who has since accepted the Lasker Prize for "his work in formulating public policy," was not interested in having it known that the Biological Weapons Convention he has reaped so many accolades for pushing through Congress and getting the White House to promote was worse than useless - it was a smoke screen under which grave atrocities may have been perpetrated in Southeast Asia against helpless villagers. The Biological Warfare Convention certainly did not hamper Soviet production of tons of biological weapons in any way.
Even though Boris Yeltsin (mayor of Sverdlovsk at the time of the anthrax release) himself admitted - after his election as President of the Russian Republic - that the release occurred, that it was military anthrax, and that his help in covering up the incident was requested, we have only a quiet retraction of Meselson's loudly-trumpeted announcements and op-ed pieces that the Soviets were not, could not ever be doing research in biological warfare, much less manufacturing BW agents (as we now know they did).
To give the news media credit, there have been documentaries (mainly by PBS, but a few johnny-come-lately pieces by commercial network news divisions) showing the cavernous buildings and vast fermentation vats in which Biopreparat, the secret Soviet biological warfare agency made huge lots of anthrax, plague and smallpox for use on Western Europe, China, and their partners in signing the Biological Weapons Protocol, the USA and UK.
But NOT seared into our brains is this crucial bit of imagery - Gorbachev personally ordering that ICBM warheads be filled with these biological warfare agents in 1986, to be launched on a moment's notice at the cities of the United States and Great Britain. (source - first chapter of Ken Alibek's Biohazard. At the time Dr. Alibek was deputy director of the Soviet biological warfare agency and took part in the secret meetings held to implement Gorbachev's orders)
Good old peaceful Gorby, while he was loudly declaiming that not only did he never envision murdering the populace of the West, but neither had any of his predecessors, had actually personally ordered just that very thing.
This IS a big story - nuclear weapons can be justified by the fact that they can be used to destroy the enemy's nuclear weapons in what is known as "counterforce strikes." The fact that this is an unreliable tactic and unlikely to work on the submarine forces of the major nuclear powers may account for the fact that so far, no one has used a nuclear weapon in anger since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
When the US was the sole nuclear power of Earth, we were too principled to launch nuclear attacks - we even proposed several times that all nuclear weapons be placed in the hands of the UN (we missed a bullet there, huh?) but the Soviets refused to go along with that, every time. They had plans of their own, and a nuclear-armed UN led by the Western allies could have thwarted those plans (remember, this was back when the UN sent troops into South Korea to kill invading Communists).
But biological weapons have no ability at all to do more than blunt another nation's nuclear capability. Bomber bases would probably be affected - as ground crews and pilots left service to care for their dying loved ones or get them out of danger, if nothing else. But the crews of missile silos are just as capable of sitting out biological attacks as nuclear ones, and the bombers and missiles themselves are unaffected by biological weapons at all.
Why did Gorbachev want to use biological weapons on the West? Was there a problem with their nuclear weapons program? Western nuclear scientists who have seen the Russian program close-up haven't seen signs of anything but carelessness in accounting for nuclear material that could be used to make A-bombs, and ICBM silos that might not have been usable to launch their missiles (although, since the Soviets use cold-launch - ejecting the entire ICBM out of the silo with compressed gas like a cork from a champagne bottle, not igniting the rocket motor until the ICBM is out of the silo, allowing a reload if necessary - water in the bottom of their silos might not be the problem it would be in an American missile silo). Why add an additional bit of overkill to the ten thousand missiles held by both sides?
This is a big question mark which, in my opinion, permanently stains Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev's reputation - that he would not only put his signature to orders that broke a treaty which the US and UK had honored for over ten years, but that if the missiles had been launched, might have wiped out half the populations not only of the targeted countries but their neighbors.
Why aren't more people aware of this horror story?
Because the news media, which ordinarily is so dedicated to finding a good story that it hauls secretaries from Texas Air National Guard units who had been retired for twenty years in front of cameras on prime-time TV to make foggy guesses about what President Bush did back in 1972 as a fighter pilot, can't be bothered to open its eyes about real news that might change the public's perception of a man now considered to be a great statesman by people all over the world (I'm talking about Gorbachev, who the Nobel Peace Prize folks saw fit to canonize while ignoring his blatant violation of treaties against biological warfare).
Sounds like a story Seymour Hersh might be interested in, if he wasn't interested primarily in digging up dirt for the political left to use and in propounding his wack-o conspiracy theories on college campuses.
I mean, he was all over My Lai, but not one bit concerned with the 2,900 people murdered by the Communists during the Tet offensive, found in mass graves at Hue, or any of the other murders of civilians by the Viet Cong or the North Vietnamese Army - or in the million-plus people overall who died at the hands of the Communists AFTER the war. This, of course, was a generic failing of the news media.
In fact, Seymour Hersh never as much as put a toe inside the Republic of Vietnam, relying instead on hearsay for ALL of the "facts" he published about My Lai. I'm not saying that My Lai didn't happen - there's independent corroboration from many of the troopers involved, and a nearby helicopter crew - just that Hersh was never in a position to fully fact-check his story. Hersh was never in a position to do more than relay rumors.
In fact, Hersh has admitted on several occassions using informants who he knew to be habitual liars as sources for allegations such when he said (in his The Samson Option) that Israel had nuclear missiles (at the time that book was published, this was not true, although some sources now indicate that there are several intermediate-range nuclear missiles in the Israeli arsenal).
Case in point - a picture may tell a thousand words, but it sometimes also tells a lie, if only by gross omission.
The famous, Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of some guy getting his brains blown out by a South Vietnamese officer doesn't mention
- that the man being shot was a commander of a North Vietnamese Army infiltration squad
- who had murdered several members of the South Vietnamese government, with their families
- and that just by fighting in civilian clothes behind enemy lines, this man could, in full compliance with the Geneva Convention, legally be shot on the spot for spying in wartime, which he was - (for murder alone, he would have gotten a trial).
The photo doesn't document that it was a picture of a murderer and spy being executed according to international law - just that a man had his brains blown out on a street during an unpopular war.
So much for balance and objectivity.
Where are all the fearless investigative reporters when we need them? Where's the William Shirer who can tear the false face off of Gorbachev's public image and reveal the man who could, like Hitler, order steps to be taken which could result in the deaths of millions. More importantly, where's the news network brave enough to broadcast THAT news - to risk being torn apart by the rest of the mainstream media for speaking the truth (as FoxNews routinely is)?
Each of the companies comprising the mainstream media are in a strange situation - in our capitalist, freedom-loving, largely patriotic society, which protects (among other things) the media's very right to speak freely, they often must, to protect their stockholders, behave like malignant sheep, ruining reputations of honest and brave men while taking the sides of tyrants and murderers against our own society.
Only Fox News - which is still ultimately controlled by one man, Rupert Murdoch - can afford to buck the majority and report the truth - no matter what it is. (Fox News has come under fire for daring to say that the bad guys - terrorists, murderers and tyrants - are bad and that our government, our Armed Forces, and our people are the good guys - which says a lot more about the people abusing Fox's reputation than it does about Fox itself).
The other networks feel that they must report the news in a way that ultimately helps tyranny and is likely ultimately to lead to the loss of the very freedoms that allow them to destroy our society - with sloppy, inaccurate, and sometimes knowingly false reporting that favors tyranny and undermines democracy.
We've seen Newsweek push that tendency to the limit by their erroneous report (we have to give them the benefit of the doubt that Michael Isikoff wasn't pulling a Hersh and simply printing rumors which are not substantiated, although that seems to be what happened - once you scrape off the whitewash) that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay flushed a copy of the Koran down the toilet during an interrogation. The resulting riots and demonstrations have resulted in fifteen deaths - blood that will be on Newsweek's hands forever. Not that they seem to care.
Another big, unreported story is the existence of videotapes of major officials in Al-Jazeera slobbering all over the shoes of Saddam Hussein's psychopathic sons (for those who don't know yet, Al-Jazeera is the Arab satellite news network which has been cheerleading the insurgents who have murdered thousands in Iraq since the fall of Saddam.
In the interest of fairness, I have to include my son, Sgt. Armand Luke Frickey, Louisiana Army National Guard, among those murdered (roadside bomb north of Baghdad) because I can't even pretend to be objective on this - if Al-Jazeera's studios and broadcast facilities suddenly got hit by 2,000 pound bombs during a broadcast, it would not break my heart.
It turns out that not only have important people in Al-Jazeera been taking money from Saddam and his sons, but directions on whom to hire.
In one case, a journalist who has been openly biased in his reporting toward the insurgent murderers (as I have said before, I can't even pretend to be objective - these people are scumbags and some of them killed my youngest son) was apparently hired by Al-Jazeera at the request of Saddam and company, and the videotapes indicate that Saddam and his sons were very happy with the job he was doing at the time - a job he continues to do, indicating that he and his bosses may still be getting encouragement of the kind that fits in a wallet or a bank account to stir up trouble in the Middle East.
Posted by V.P. Frickey
at 8:34 AM MST
Updated: Sunday, 16 December 2007 8:53 AM MST
Sunday, 11 November 2007
In memoriam: Armand Luke Frickey 1984-2005
Topic: Martyred for Freedom
Pictures of my son, Sgt. Armand Luke Frickey, late of the 256th Infantry (Louisiana) Brigade, US Army and Louisiana National Guard, who with his squad mates who died when their Bradley Fighting Vehicle (armored personnel carrier) struck a roadside bomb made of three large Iraqi artillery shells wired to a remote detonator, and his memorials.
My son Luke was a good man, just as my son Eric is a good man, a good and loving father to our grandson Brandon. Just as Eric lives to care for his son and protect him, Luke died to protect all of us. Just as Eric is a generous, hearty, loving person with nothing mean or little about him, Luke was also a good man. Not a day passes that I don't miss him so badly it hurts. And I am prouder of both of my sons than I can say.
In a little while I'll post pictures from the ceremony at which the troopers of the New York National Guard's 69th "Wolfhound" Infantry Brigade did my son Luke and the others of his unit the honor of induction into their unit as honorary members.
The officers and men of the 69th Infantry couldn't have been nicer to us or more gallant in their tribute to our war dead, or more hospitable to us in inviting us to join with them in the induction ceremony. I plan to take enough time to convey the rich history of that unit and its contributions to our nation's military prowess.
Suffice it to say that the fallen Blacksheep of the 256th (Louisiana) were at home next to the honored dead of the Irish Wolfhounds of New York's Fighting 69th.
Posted by V.P. Frickey
at 12:56 PM MST
Updated: Wednesday, 28 November 2007 1:38 PM MST
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